just a guy

Up north

2012-01-31T13:08:00.004-07:00

[Click on any photo for a larger image]

Our first stop was Jerome:

On the road out of town:

We stayed overnight in Flagstaff during a cold spell. Here's something I don't
often do in Phoenix:

My favorite Flagstaff road sign:

We paid a visit to the Museum of Northern Arizona:

And drove by the San Francisco Peaks:

The next night was spent in El Tovar at the Grand Canyon:

This was the first time I've seen the Canyon in winter:

From the rim throughout the day:

At the park's east end is the Watchtower:

The interior is decorated with Navajo motifs:

Got into Santa Fe rather late, here's our appropriately furnished room:

If you get over there, here is a great breakfast/lunch joint (El Tecolote):

Eggs Benedict, carne adobada, and French toast (the trip's best meal):

St. Francis Basilica:

A strange (and suspiciously happy) statue of the saint himself:

Museum Hill:

Ruins at Bandalier National Monument:

Sunset on the Turquoise Trail:

The next night was in an old Gallup hotel:

On Navajo route 12:

Canyon de Chelly:

An arty shot:

After a night in downtown Kayenta, we were off to Monument Valley:

And the Goosenecks State Park in southern Utah:

The next night and day were on the Hopi nation. We got there in the late afternoon:

Just in time for the sunset:

And a traditional Hopi dinner (fry-bread, beans, mutton and hominy stew):

We drove back to Phoenix that evening.

In the desert

2012-01-31T12:18:00.006-07:00

Some more Arizona desert-y places we went. (Click on any picture to enlarge)

Deer Valley Rock Art Center:

Piestewa Peak:

Desert Botanical Garden:

Arizona Sonora Desert Museum:

The desert south of Tucson:

Boyce-Thompson Arboretum:

This isn't the desert, it's the U of A campus. For some reason Magdalena thought it
picture-worthy.

Funtime

2011-11-12T06:17:00.006-07:00

Here's a cool visual quiz: professor or hobo?

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James Fallows discovers:

The wonderfully Onionesque U.S. Department of Fear, led by Secretary of Fear Malcolm P. Stag III, is running a poll. What should we re-name the Department of Homeland Security?

WHAT IS DOF?
"Without knowing what they ought to fear, US citizens might otherwise fail to support profitable national security initiatives."- Malcolm P. Stag III, Secretary of Fear

***

From Digby:

Reader Gerald with a history lesson:
From FDR to Reagan--We hire you, you work hard, we prosper, you prosper. From Reagan to present--we hire you, you work hard, we prosper.

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From The Smew:

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou reaffirmed today Greece’s total commitment to the gyro...

Pictures and more

2011-11-02T18:22:00.007-07:00

It's funny because it's true:

It's a bit off-topic but I spoke once with a guy who clubbed baby seals up in Canada; he told me that people don't realize that the baby seals don't have nerve endings in their heads. That's what he told me.

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The odd couple:

The second volume of T.S. Eliot’s letters was recently published by Yale University Press [...]. This is as good a time as any to reflect on Eliot’s most fascinating correspondent. Ezra Pound? Well, no. James Joyce? Hmm. No. Paul Valery. Non! I am referring to Groucho Marx. And no, this isn’t a joke. [...]
As Anthony Julius puts it in his book, “T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form”, Eliot was “able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art. Anti-Semitism supplied part of the material out of which he created poetry.” And not just his poetry. In polemics like “After Strange Gods” and “The Idea of a Christian Society”, Eliot elaborated his belief that Jews had no place in modern life. [...]
Yet one day in 1961 Groucho received in the mail a note from none other than Eliot himself. Expressing his admiration for the comedian, Eliot asked him for an autographed portrait. [...] Eliot wrote to thank Groucho: “This is to let you know that your portrait has arrived and has given me great joy and will soon appear in its frame on my wall with other famous friends such as W.B. Yeats and Paul Valery.”

Three years after their correspondence began Groucho finally visits the Eliots:

Groucho writes that the week before the dinner, “I read ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ twice; ‘The Waste Land’ three times, and just in case of a conversational bottleneck, I brushed up on ‘King Lear’.”

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It's a geyser (Fly Geyser, to be exact), it's in Nevada, and it's freaky:

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Jerusalem isn't the only city with an eponymous syndrome:

And what is Paris Syndrome, exactly? Simply put, it's a collection of physical and psychological symptoms experienced by first-time visitors realizing that Paris isn't, in fact, what they thought it would be. [...]

The shock of coming to grips with a city that is indifferent to their presence and looks nothing like their imagination launches tourists into a psychological tailspin which, in at least six cases this year, necessitated the patient being flown back to his or her country under medical supervision.

It seems to affect the Japanese the hardest.

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Best catalog ever:

republicans amd communism

2011-10-24T19:39:00.005-07:00

A Republican dictionary; some excerpts:

America (United States of): A country located in the N. Western Hemisphere that is #1.
Birth Certificate: An official birth record required of all US Presidents, regardless of race, since 2008.
Christmas: A holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, now rarely celebrated due to persecution by atheists.
Communism: The belief that the government should ever do anything.
Endangered Species: Animals that have it coming.
Forest (National): Trees that have it coming.
Hitler: A man to whom it would be inappropriate to compare President Obama in spite of the many uncanny similarities.
Jesus: Charismatic religious leader and son of God; born in Bethlehem in the year 0; beliefs include love, charity, enhanced interrogation, privatized healthcare, elimination of the estate tax, and the right to carry concealed semiautomatic weapons.
Liberal: A person who should be rounded up and shot but not really.
Mountaintops: Ancient rock formations that have it coming.
Obamacare: A Federally-mandated policy to address the national oversupply of grandparents through euthanasia.
Racism: A form of discrimination that typically happens in reverse.
Ronald Reagan: A fictional character based loosely on President Ronald Reagan.
Torture: A method of interrogation that does not rise to the level of torture.
Welfare: A government program to distribute Cadillacs to unwed mothers.

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A note on that insidious "reverse racism" meme:

A field experiment involving baseball card auctions on eBay:
Photographs showed the cards held by either a dark-skinned/African-American hand or a light-skinned/Caucasian hand.
Cards held by African-American sellers sold for approximately 20% ($0.90) less than cards held by Caucasian sellers, and the race effect was more pronounced in sales of minority player cards.
A new paper by Ayres, Banaji, and Jolls.

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This is over a month old, but it's good to be reminded.

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Matt Yglesias:

... it’s perhaps useful for the sake of context to re-examine the 1929 platform of the Communist Party of Great Britain, titled “Class Against Class” and representing an avowedly class warfare approach to an economic crisis. Here’s what they had to say on tax policy:

(1) Abolition of all indirect taxes.

(2) Exemption from all kinds of taxation for all wage-earners.

(3) Tax exemption for all working farmers.

(4) Graduated income tax starting with the incomes of £500 per annum, increasing gradually so that all personal incomes over £5,000 per year are confiscated.

(5) Abolition of the right of transfer and inheritance by confiscation of all individual fortunes over £1,000.

(6) Repudiation of the National Debt (special consideration to be given to the position of small investors, the Cooperatives, and trade unions).

This is strikingly different from a modern progressive agenda. In the CPGB’s framework, the source of income is all-important. [... A] successful small businessman would see his income capped at about £200,000 in today’s money. [...] In the modern day, we’d worry that punitive taxation of capital income would lead to inadequate levels of business investment. This wasn’t a big concern for the CPGB because they were also proposing to “nationalise the banks, the land, the mines, the railways, land and sea transport, electrical industries, broadcasting stations, engineering and shipbuilding industries, post and telegraph, chemical, cotton and woollen textile industries, flour milling, boot and shoe industries and building materials, all of which are ripe for running as national industries, unitedly owned and controlled by the workers.”

Obama's for that -- I heard him say so last week.

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Mallorca (part 3): towns

2011-10-11T21:47:00.008-07:00

Another day brought us northwest up to Capdepera, where they have an humble hilltop castle. By "humble" I mean that its signs explain that while it now billed as a castle it was really a fortress -- and that modern renovations leave it looking completely different than it did in the Middle Ages. Such transparency, my friends, is not always the case at tourist stops. In spite of its humility it was still worth a stop.

The town below:

After the castle jog we stopped in a square for tapas (my first tapas of the trip). I like tapas, they're the tops! Sorry. The marinated anchovies and the pig's tongue with capers were particularly tasty. I should have taken a photo of their varietal goodness, but it slipped my mind.

Near Capdepera is Arta, where we checked out a 13th century icon in the hilltop monastery:

A look through the bushes down to the church and beyond:

The capital and largest Mallorcan city is Palma. Here is the Cathedral's main portal:

And it's unique tympanum:

The nicest spot in town, arguably, is the medieval Arab Bath (that's "medieval" in a good way):

In the middle of town there is an impressive old olive tree:

A look at the cathedral from the ferry back to Barcelona:

Mallorca (part 2): scenery

2011-09-26T01:30:00.004-07:00

The small inlets, or coves, are called calas; here's Cala Egos, a short walk away from our room:

Wildlife on the road:

There are many ancient archeological sites on the island. We visited two with ceremonial stone structures called a talayots. They can be round:

Or rectangular:

On the back out we passed an old tree; it seems to match up well with the last photo but I'm not quite sure why:

Our resort was on the east coast; twice we drove way out west. The scenic highlight on that side of the island is purported to be the sa Calobra road, which snakes down from the mountains to the sea. Here is where the tourist ferry picks up passengers:

I don't have photos of the ride down (there weren't many places to stop for photos), but Flickr does -- from near the top:

And on the way down:

Yes, tours buses go down (and back up) this path and they, like the small autos, have to get through a rather narrow pass:

The drive through the mountains was pretty good, but billing it the best scenic drive in Spain seems a stretch -- although there was a very impressive section of rock forest that knocked my socks off.

I prefer the more southerly coastal road -- reminiscent of California's Pacific Coast Highway:

To the far northeast is Cap Formentor (the island's northernmost point, actually) with its lighthouse (and a view):

More sights from the road:

So we've gone west and we've gone north, time to go south. The southernmost point on the island is the Ses Salines lighthouse:

On the adjacent shore people build little hoodoo-like rock towers:

Considering how windy it gets there those little devils seem improbably sturdy:

Mallorca (part 1): views

2011-09-26T01:03:00.003-07:00

Arrived in Basel on Thursday (April 21) and spent a pleasant three days with Magdalena before setting out for the uncharted land known as Mallorca.

We set out on Easter Monday and stopped for the night in a nice little place north of Orange (France) where M has stayed before. Our balcony view:

Next day was the rest of the drive to Barcelona and thence ferreting out the well-hidden ticket office and ferry boarding site. The ferry had surprisingly nice sleeping accommodations for the overnight haul.

The next morning we had time to kill before our room would be ready so we had breakfast in Cala Figuera, a quiet fishing village:

On the walk back to the car:

Our room at Parque Mar had its own balcony:

With a view:

And a "tanning station":

A typical balcony breakfast:

Our usual balcony sunset:

On the drive back we stopped overnight at Cap d'Agde, here are a couple of balcony views of the little seaside park just below us:

We stopped in France a second night in Le Barroux, near Mont Ventoux. No balcony this time, but there were views from the windows:

The flight back from Basel had to turn around and make an emergency stop in Amsterdam because of a sick passenger, making me very late into Chicago. The airline provided acommodations, so here's the view from the room near O'Hare:

Fun and games

2011-09-24T21:53:00.004-07:00

Big Baby DougJ at Balloon Juice watches Republicans:

I can’t get enough of this kind of thing. Rick Scott uses a teleprompter to make fun of Obama’s use of the teleprompter [...].

When I was in college, I enjoyed taking arty-farty courses on literary theory. I didn’t understand them at all (is that stuff meant to be understood?) but I loved hearing about things like a narrative that re-narrate its own narration as an act of negation. Nearly everything contemporary Republicans do reminds me of this stuff.

Speaking of college courses, these are my favorites (but no one else's, it seems) from a short list of allegedly funny analogies from students:

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the
grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left
Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at
4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had
also never met.

And then there's the surefire (and easy as hell) Hemingway parody. Here are Ernest's Yelp reviews:

Sun City Asian Bistro and Café
Category: Asian
TWO STARS

When I got to Sun City Bea and Rob were at were at the bar, behind tattooed women and men with guitars. They were sitting in the shade and their beers were half empty. We drank beer and ate pho but Rob was restless and did not talk very much. He said he wanted to go see a band that was playing in a dive bar across town. Bea called him a smug hipster and Rob called her a bitch and I sat and drank my beer and wished I had not come.

Zorba Express Mediterranean Café
Category: Greek
FOUR STARS

It was a cold night and the rain was coming down hard and I did not want to move from my couch. I called Zorba Express and a man came with a gyro in a greasy paper bag. I paid him and he left. The gyro was good and it felt good to eat in front of the television and out of the rain.

Pinkberry
Category: Ice Cream and Frozen Yogurt
ONE STAR

I met a woman who said she had been to Pinkberry. “What the hell is that,” I said, and she laughed but said nothing.

A different kind of geek humor:

The latest report from CERN [about faster-than-light particles] is almost certainly wrong.

Still, imagine if it turned out to be right …

We don’t allow neutrinos in here, said the bartender.

A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar.

Real fun in the academy:

In 1970 three American researchers, John E. Ware, Donald H. Naftulin and Frank A. Donnelly, designed an experiment to find out whether a brilliant delivery technique of a talk could so completely bamboozle a group of experts that they overlooked the fact that the content was nonsense. The result was the hilarious Dr Fox Lecture and the answer was: yes! The experts didn’t notice a thing. [...]

The lecture that Myron L. Fox delivered to the assembled experts had an impressive enough title: ‘Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education’. [...] His polished performance so impressed the audience of psychiatrists, family doctors and general internists that nobody noticed that the man standing at the lectern wasn’t really Myron L. Fox from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine but Michael Fox a movie actor [...].
Fox was trained to give this talk only the day before. He was given an article from Scientific American on game theory and worked up a lecture from it that was intentionally full of imprecise waffle, invented words and contradictory assertions.

Nostradamus, revisited and revised:

Quatrain II.24 has long been thought to refer to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Here is the original quatrain:
Bêtes farouches de faim fleuves tranner;
Plus part du champ encore Hister sera,
En caige de fer le grand sera treisner,
Quand rien enfant de Germain observa.
Which has been commonly interpreted to mean --
Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers,
The greater part of the battle will be against Hitler.
He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron,
When the son of Germany obeys no law.
Yep, Hitler! Wrong! Advanced new translation software has found that the quatrain has been grossly misinterpreted. The good news, however, is that the quatrain provides people of 2011 with a clear warning that we can use today, not just another "warning" about something that has already happened. Here's the new, correct interpretation:
Beasts wild with coffee-cravings will cross the rivers,
The greater part of the belittling will be against the hipsters.
They will cause great men to be dragged into a cage of irony,
When the sons of the germane obey no law.

Pictures and video

2011-09-21T15:09:00.002-07:00

Just discovered Mitchell and Webb:

David Attenborough is old news, but check out the tech mimicry:

Not sure what those birds eat, but it's probably not found on this canned meat site:

"Southern surprise," indeed.

The U.S.A.'s smallest public library:

What's next? Perhaps a swimming pool moat that discourages burglaries:

This, too, is brilliant (and available):

Cloth napkins/placemats on a roll!

The perforated cotton allows user to simply tear a placemat or napkin off the roll as necessary. They can be laundered at least 6 times, and are recyclable and biodegradable.

Bloggers' musings

2011-09-17T21:56:00.002-07:00

Matt Yglesias is intrigued by the whole "rogue trader" concept:

I was always struck in college, watching people head off into the field of finance, by the mismatch between the demographics of the folks who’d go be bankers and the stated desire to manage risk. If I’m conjuring up in my head a vision of a prudent risk manager, I’m thinking maybe a mother of two. Someone smart, of course, but also someone who’s cautious. Someone who sees the whole field. Someone who juggles. I’m not thinking “young smart arrogant dude with limited practical experience and a burning desire to get ahead.” That to me sounds more like a rogue trader!

Jonathon Zasloff notes that:

Texas unemployment rises to 8.5%, the highest in 24 years.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, clearly a basket case due to liberal policies, the unemployment rate has dropped to 7.4%, the lowest in two and a half years.

It should be mentioned that Texas job losses stem from public sector reductions. [...]
There is an important point here: current GOP ideology holds that public goods are nonexistent. Police, fire, education, transportation, public works, etc. etc. have no value and add nothing to productivity. Thus, creating these jobs does not count.

Relatedly, Kay at Balloon Juice:

In Ohio, we’re trying to use a citizen veto to overturn Ohio’s new union-busting law. [...]
I went to another We Are Ohio event last night in a county east of where I live. [...]

Several firemen spoke to us at last night’s event and explained why they have joined the effort to try a citizen veto of Ohio’s law that strips collective bargaining rights from public employees. I suspect one of the fireman-speakers last night is (or was) a GOP voter. [...]

[T]he fireman spoke with what sounded to me like a real sense of betrayal and that’s another common theme I’m hearing. He said he never imagined that teachers, police officers and firefighters would somehow end up as “the problem” because everyone, at one time or another, has relied on a teacher, a police officer or a firefighter. He said “I didn’t know I was next”. At that point, a UAW member in the crowd shouted “I always know I’m next!” and everyone laughed.

Yglesias again:

Firms frequently cut costs by shifting low-skill labor to Asia, but never seem to cut costs by taking advantage of low-wage Asian executive talent.

In video veritas

2011-09-17T08:52:00.004-07:00

Best fake ever?

He doesn't do anything, he just runs past the ball. It's a Zen fake.

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You may have already seen this:

Who needs Ed Sullivan?

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Doth someone protest too much?

Bonus Shatner:

When will the madness end?

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Archeological news

2011-09-16T20:15:00.002-07:00

A brief look at Thomas Morley and his poem "O mistress mine" -- borrowed by Shakespeare in "Twelth Night" -- has this illustration:

I'm posting it only because I love the name of the unknown artist: Master of the Female Half-Lengths. That's a pretty good gig.

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People have always preferred pretty things:

Archaeologists in Saxony-Anhalt have discovered a 2,600-year-old wall painted in bright patterns. It reveals that Iron Age houses were not the drab constructions they were once thought to be.
[...] The dominant colours are red, beige and white. [...] The design shows typical ornamental patterns from the Iron Age such as triangles and S-shaped hooks, but also symbolic characters.

[...] Archaeologists discovered the wall two years ago during an excavation of the site for a new high-speed train line [...].

The wall had been broken up into about 1,500 individual pieces over time. Experts have spent much of the past two years putting the pieces back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The final product is a section of wall two metres long and 1.5 metres tall.

The prehistoric site near Wennungen was spread out, once covering a piece of ground the size of more than 200 football fields.

One piece of the wall will be shown from 2012 as part of a permanent exhibition that also features the famous 3,600-year-old Nebra sky disc, a bronze object about 30 centimetres in diameter depicting celestial bodies in gold on a blue-green background.

More found objects:

Archaeologists [...] in southeastern Turkey have unearthed the remains of a monumental gate complex adorned with stone sculptures, including a magnificently carved lion. The gate complex provided access to the citadel of Kunulua, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 950-725 BCE) [...].

The Tayinat find provides valuable new insight into the innovative character and cultural sophistication of the diminutive Iron Age states that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean following the collapse of the great civilized powers of the Bronze Age at the end of second millennium BCE.

"[...] A second piece found nearby depicts a human figure flanked by lions, which is an iconic Near Eastern cultural motif known as the Master and Animals. It symbolizes the imposition of civilized order over the chaotic forces of the natural world [...], and the role of the king as the divinely appointed guardian, or gatekeeper, of the community," says Harrison. The elaborately decorated gateways served as dynastic parades, legitimizing the power of the ruling elite.
The gate complex appears to have been destroyed [...] in 738 BCE, when the area was paved over and converted into the central courtyard of an Assyrian sacred precinct. [...]

Some books found farther south have become yet another source of tension between Israel and Jordan:

A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007.
[...] One of the few people to see the collection is David Elkington, a scholar of ancient religious archaeology who [...] says the relics feature signs that early Christians would have interpreted as indicating Jesus, shown side-by-side with others they would have regarded as representing the presence of God. [...]

Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies at Sheffield University, says the most powerful evidence for a Christian origin lies in plates cast into a picture map of the holy city of Jerusalem. [...]

"There is a cross in the foreground, and behind it is what has to be the tomb [of Jesus], a small building with an opening, and behind that the walls of the city. There are walls depicted on other pages of these books too and they almost certainly refer to Jerusalem." [...]
Margaret Barker, an authority on New Testament history, points to the location of the reported discovery as evidence of Christian, rather than purely Jewish, origin. [...]
It is by no means certain that all of the artefacts in the collection are from the same period.

But tests by metallurgists on the badly corroded lead suggest that the books were not made recently.

The archaeology of early Christianity is particularly sparse. [...]

Never has there been a discovery of relics on this scale from the early Christian movement, in its homeland and so early in its history.

The books above were allegedly found by a bedouin after a flash flood revealed their hiding place. This guy just uses a metal detector to good effect:

Two years ago, metal detectorist David Booth struck it rich -- seriously rich -- on his very first treasure hunt. He found four ancient torcs made from gold, silver and a touch of copper. The find was estimated at about a million pounds, an amount that, under Scotish law, goes to Mr. Booth, while the treasure itself goes to public museums.
Did David Booth put his humble metal detector away in the closet and start living it up on his reward money? Nope. Mr. Booth is still heading out to likely spots in search of more treasure -- and finding it. Though the items he's since discovered haven't brought him anywhere near another million pounds, they're still treasure, and almost as exciting to the historian as golden necklaces. They include Anglo-Saxon coins, ampulla, a dagger pommel and a 13th-century papal bulla. These intriguing discoveries are opening up an extraordinary window into Scotland's past through which historians can glean a wealth of knowledge. [...]
The Scotsman has a selection of items Mr. Booth has found and the significance they hold for historians.

Just learned a new word there: "detectorist"!

This is cool:

A Dutch historian has used a unique 1,700 year old map of Roman roads to create an online journey planner giving the destinations, distances and timings of routes used by ancient travellers in the days of empire.
Routes are based on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a one of a kind chart, which shows an imperial Roman road network, or curses public's, that stretches from Britain to the river Ganges that flows through India and Bangladesh.
The huge map, last updated in the third or fourth century, shows 2,760 towns with lists of distances and destinations on the Roman roads connecting them, all set out on a scroll of parchment almost 23 feet long.
The original version of the Roman route tables was prepared two thousand years ago under the direction of Marcus Agrippa, the statesman, general and son-in-law of Augustus, the first Roman Emperor.
Placed on the Unesco World Heritage List in 2007, the tabula is kept in the collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna but cannot be viewed by the public.
René Voorburg, a Dutch historian, has used recent research, including by British academics, to bring the tabula back to life on a website, omnesviae.org.

2011-09-09T17:56:00.004-07:00

Got a light?

Air & Space has a gallery of Zippo lighters sold during the Vietnam War at PX stores and customized for US soldiers by village artisans. From Air & Space:
"Snoopy the Flying Ace replaced Bugs Bunny of World War II nose art fame as the most popular cartoon character of the conflict," writes (Sherry Buchanan, author of Vietnam Zippos).

Here's one a commenter linked to:

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Speaking of brain-controlling parasites, check out this slideshow.

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Back to the military (or another brain-controlling parasite for you commies out there). Here's an interesting little article about the official names of military operations -- some snippets:

It’s a relatively new practice, actually—less than a hundred years old. The Germans pioneered it during World War I, and the idea took hold in the interwar period, especially as radio became a predominant means of communication. [...]
Winston Churchill [listed] some guidelines in a 1943 memo:

1. Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment [...].

2. [...] intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names which do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called “Bunnyhug” or “Ballyhoo.”

3. [...] The heroes of antiquity, figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the constellations and stars, famous racehorses, names of British and American war heroes, could be used, provided they fall within the rules above.

[...] The practice bloomed further during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, although the results were sometimes less artful than Churchill would have liked. Several missions that drew attention for the wrong reasons included Operations Killer, Ripper, Masher, and Moolah. [...]

For the next several years, military operations assumed random names (Operation Golden Pheasant, anyone?) as a consequence. It wasn’t until 1989 and the invasion of Panama that a new trend was born. With the rise of cable and the 24-hour news cycle, the military saw operational names as an outlet for public relations work.
After complete success in having the press adopt “Just Cause” as the sobriquet for removing Noriega, a decade of well-intentioned but slightly overwrought moralisms were forced on the public: Operations Restore Hope, Uphold Democracy, Shining Hope [...].
Despite all of these evolutions, it seems impossible to completely escape controversy in naming operations that are, at their core, violent and often messy. [The] invasion of Afghanistan was initially called Operation Infinite Justice (a name Churchill might have taken issue with). Critics cried out that its divine connotation might offend many Muslims whose support America wanted. The name was quickly changed to Operation Enduring Freedom. Then in 2003, the president’s press secretary referred to the Iraq war as Operation Iraqi Liberation, providing fodder for conspiracy theorists everywhere with the acronym O.I.L.

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Another day at the mall:

Taking photos or writing in a notebook can now get you interrogated at the Mall of America. More importantly, the gathered information by mall security has been shared with the Bloomington police, the FBI and, in some cases, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency:

Najam Qureshi, owner of a kiosk that sold items from his native Pakistan, also had his own experience with authorities after his father left a cell phone on a table in the food court. The consequence: An FBI agent showed up at the family’s home, asking if they knew anyone who might want to hurt the United States.

Mall of America officials say their security unit stops and questions on average up to 1,200 people each year. The interviews at the mall are part of a counterterrorism initiative that acts as the private eyes and ears of law enforcement authorities but has often ensnared innocent people...

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Prison-based gerrymandering:

Michelle Alexander, author of, New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [...] explained that in most states census residence rules require that incarcerated people be counted at their place of incarceration as opposed to their home address.

She went on to explain that the overwhelming majority of incarcerated people in the United States hail from the major metropolitan centers of this country while the prisons are typically built in non-urban or rural areas. This counting practice results in a shift in population from urban center to rural community thereby increasing the political clout of rural communities while decreasing the political clout of urban communities.

And, all the while, the incarcerated, almost without exception, cannot vote — which explains the comparison to the 3/5ths Compromise. [...]

When prison-based gerrymandering is employed, district boundaries redrawn to align with census figures results in large portions of what would have been urban population being reapportioned to rural counties. [...]

There are multiple factors that explain the explosion of the prison industrial complex but one factor that is rarely addressed is the political incentive to drive criminal justice policy toward mass incarceration for purposes of shifting disenfranchised urban populations to rural communities.

***

Labor Day opinions

2011-09-06T08:49:00.003-07:00

Matt Yglesias:

Dean Baker’s The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive is available for free download on the CEPR website. I recommend you get your hands on a copy. Until then, let me leave you with this thought:

Finally, the number of patents has exploded in the last three decades, as patent protection has become both easier to obtain and stronger. Patent monopolies allow firms to charge far more than the competitive market price for their products. [...] A recent study of wealthy countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that the number of patents per capita was the most important factor determining the extent to which income was redistributed upward from those at the middle and bottom to those at the top over the last three decades.

The general idea is that we shouldn’t accept the view that a world of parasitic finance, asymmetrical globalization, government-sponsored intellectual property monopolies, and Fed engineered wage-suppression constitutes a “free market” outcome relative to which the left wants redistribution.

And don't forget about copyrights:

***

John Cole shares my thinking opinion about the USPS:

Another day, another piece on the financial troubles of the Post Office.

Folks, it is time for a paradigm shift. We need to stop thinking of those as losses, but the cost of a service. [...] This is a basic service that government can and should provide. And it is an amazing service. For the price of half a soda, you can mail anything you want, and in a day or two it gets there. EVEN ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY. [...] I know we’re all in the age of the internet and expect everything instantly, but that’s still pretty amazing.

If you ask me, if it only costs us 9 billion a year (which is what the estimated losses are this year) to have the mail delivered to everyone in the country, then that is pretty damned good.

***

Mike Luckovich on Labor Day:

E.J. Dionne on Labor Day:

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect. [...]
[We] are now inundated with news (and “news”) about the world of capital. [...] We cheer the markets, learn the obscure language of hedge fund managers and get to know some of the big investors in off-field interviews. Workers are regarded as factors of production. At best, they’re consumers; at worst, they’re “labor costs” cutting into profits and the sacred stock price. [...]
William Deresiewicz [...] observed that we have few novelists such as John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos who take the lives of working people seriously. [...] “First we stopped noticing members of the working class,” Deresiewicz wrote, “and now we’re convinced they don’t exist.”
In his extraordinary book “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class,” Jefferson Cowie spoke of how little we identify working-class people with their labor. “Workers occasionally reappeared in public discourse as ‘Reagan Democrats’ — later as ‘NASCAR Dads,’ [...] or the victims of another plant shutdown [...], but rarely did they appear as workers.”
With the worker disappearing from our media and our consciousness, isn’t it only a matter of time before Labor Day falls off the calendar? As long as it’s there, it should shame us about our cool indifference to the heroism of those who go to work every day.

Anne Laurie comments:

But cheer up, fellow citizens! The non-opinionated part of the WaPo assures us that “Americans… now find comfort in knowing that more than a million security guards — double the number in the nation’s workforce a decade ago — patrol shopping malls and power plants and work through the night to protect public spaces.” [...]

Why do I seem to hear the ghost of Jay Gould whispering “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”?

And last, but not least:

From CNN World:
For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion [...].
That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. [...] It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.
Article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University and author of The Black Swan. Mark Spitznagel is a hedge-fund manager.

***

Okay, another cartoon (by Tom Toles):

More political quotes

2011-08-25T21:23:00.002-07:00

Sullivan points to this from Robert Hughes:

Political correctness is a way of seizing the moral high ground without having to do any of the work.

Gerry Canavan reads another paper about class differences:

We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.

Matt Yglesias:

According to a new Washington Post poll just 21 percent of Americans are satisfied “with the way this country’s political system is working.” 45 percent are very dissatisfied, 33 percent are mostly dissatisfied. [...] Only 26 percent of Americans have confidence “that the problem actually will be solved” when the government decides to solve a problem. [...].

So are Americans prepared to admit that there’s something wrong with the US political system? Nope:

Via Kevin Drum, former Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol:

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, Obama declared war on partisanship in 2008, and partisanship won.

Drum speculates about why Ben Bernanke is reluctant to do anything constructive:

The political environment is so toxic right now that the Fed is afraid that helping the economy — and thereby "interfering" with next year's election — might produce a serious backlash in Congress.

Maha:

A woman was forced to resign as scout master of her son’s Boy Scout troop when other parents learned she was a lesbian. The woman has been in a monogamous relationship with another woman for 19 years [...].

Think, people. Who is the least likely person in the world to sexually abuse your boys?

Political quotes

2011-08-05T21:53:00.003-07:00

One of Andrew Sullivan's QOTD last week:

"America is the only country in the world that that has the luxury of creating an economic crisis when there isn’t one," - Elvin Lim.

Sullivan writes:

Increasingly, the far right government in Israel is the rallying point for the far right Christianist movement in Europe and the US. [...]

I wonder when Israel was founded if its leaders ever dreamed of a day when their most stalwart allies for Greater Israel would be neo-fascist movements in Europe.

And he feels a need to point out that this headline is not from the Onion:

Palin's hairdresser gets a reality show

John Cole requests that

all future references to Friedman include the “Mustache of Understanding” somewhere in the post.

A Missouri high school took Slaughterhouse Five out of the stacks, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library responds:

The KVML will be giving away free copies of Slaughterhouse Five to students from Republic, Missouri’s high school [...]. If you are a student at Republic High School, please e-mail us [...] to request your free copy of the book. [...] We think it’s important for everyone to have their First Amendment rights. We’re not telling you to like the book… we just want you to read it and decide for yourself.

More bad news

2011-08-03T19:42:00.002-07:00

A look at Uncle Tom's Cabin's influence -- worldwide.

Speaking of slavery, modern-day peonage often comes in the form of prison labor:

Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They don’t need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmate workers are full-time and never late or absent because of family problems. If they refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges along with "good time" credit that reduces their sentences. To top it off, the federal government subsidizes the use of inmate labor by private companies through lucrative tax write-offs. [...]

The government is profiting as well, by running prison factories that operate as multibillion-dollar industries in every state, and throughout the federal prison system [...].
Escod Industries [...] in the 1990s abandoned plans to open operations in Mexico and instead moved to South Carolina, because the wages of American prisoners undercut those of de-unionized Mexican sweatshop workers. The move was fueled by the state, which gave a $250,000 "equipment subsidy" to Escod along with industrial space at below-market rent. Other examples include Ohio's Honda supplier, which pays its prison workers $2 an hour for the same work for which the UAW has fought for decades to be paid $20 to $30 an hour; Konica, which has hired prisoners to repair its copiers for less than 50 cents an hour; and Oregon, where private companies can “lease” prisoners at a bargain price of $3 a day. [...]
Those who argue in favor of prison labor claim it is a useful tool for rehabilitation and preparation for post-jail employment. But this has only been shown to be true in cases where prisoners are exposed to meaningful employment, where they learn new skills, not the labor-intensive, menial and often dangerous work they are being tasked with. [...]
The exploitation of any workforce is detrimental to all workers. Cheap and free labor pushes down wages for everyone. Just as American workers cannot compete with sweatshop labor, the same goes for prison labor.

And then there's peonage for the free and the brave:

[Ralph nader] covers a lot of ground in his interview with Amy Goodman, but this quickie from the transcript is enough to chew on all day.
If the truth of what he calls contract peonage could be meaninfully spread to enough people there is a chance something might be done to correct the problem. [...]

...the real issue in Elizabeth Warren is contract peonage. The American people, every day, engage in transactions, with these contract—fine-print contracts wrapped around their necks, strangling them. They have really destroyed the concept of freedom of contract in this country. [...] There’s no time to explain it now, but the point is that corporations have taken over these contracts. They unilaterally change them. They block people from going to the court. They’re constantly penalizing—termination fees, this penalty, that penalty. It’s a total contract peonage. Contract serfs, that’s what they’ve turned the American people into. And they don’t even compete over these contracts. For example, if you don’t like Allstate, State Farm is the same, or if you don’t like Ford, GM contracts are the same. So people are trapped.

Most people don't realize that their right to redress their grievances through the courts is being taken away.

***

New Republican-backed voter ID laws might make things difficult for women:

Abundant evidence demonstrates that although voter ID laws don't do anything to curtail fraudulent voting, they do reduce election participation by ethnic minorities, the poor, and the young. This might seem like an unfortunate side effect to you, but to the Republican activists behind these laws it's a feature, not a bug. Why? Because ethnic minorities, the poor, and the young tend to vote for Democrats, and Republican activists find it remarkably easy to live with the prospect of fewer Democrats voting when election day rolls around. For more, see here, here, here, and here.

But guess which other demographic group tends to vote Democratic? Women. I have to say that this one hadn't occurred to me, but Megan Devlin takes a closer look at the fine print of some recent voter ID laws:

Here's where women get stuck. American women change their names in about 90 percent of marriages and divorces. So newly married and recently divorced women whose legal names do not match those of their current photo ID will face opposition when voting, especially in the seven states with the stricter voter-ID rules. [...]

Since only 66 percent of voting-age women have easy access to proof of citizenship and documentation with their current legal name, a significant number of women could be disenfranchised by the new laws. [...]

I'm sure some enterprising political scientist will examine the evidence after next year's election to see if women really have been disproportionately affected by these new laws. But if they are, I'll bet the Republicans behind them will consider it acceptable collateral damage.

In video veritas

2011-08-02T23:34:00.002-07:00

Great concept:

G.D. Spradlin died last week:

This is the video of the day! It's mesmerizing:

Sundry items

2011-07-27T22:40:00.002-07:00

There's a pinball museum in Alameda:

It now features 90 machines; most are free to play, but a few are for display only.
[...] Mr. Schiess says his personal collection totals 800, and the machines not on display in Alameda reside in an 8,000-square-foot warehouse whose location he keeps secret.

***

German bomb squads are still busy defusing WWII materiel:

Unexploded bombs are still big business in Germany. Almost two million tons were dropped there by the U.S., Russia and Britain during World War II. An estimated 10 percent to 15 percent never exploded [...].
Even though World War II is now 66 years gone, it may never be over for these fire workers. As technology improves, so do methods for detecting bombs. While thousands have been found, thousands more lie in wait. And the longer they wait, the more dangerous they become. TNT never decays, but the stabilizing agent in the explosive does.

Left to their own devices, the bombs eventually explode on their own. It’s happening already. Phosphorous ordnance will ignite spontaneously, causing wildfires. Fire departments won’t go in sometimes for fear of other (bigger) bombs exploding too.

***

Yes, someone really invented a phonograph for your car:

[...] the auto giant’s president wildly drove a car over a torture-track of cobblestone, speed bumps, and washboard test strips. Goldmark, tossed around the backseat, was on the verge of throwing up. But his player performed perfectly [...].

Despite car ads promising “a complete modern record library on wheels,” Columbia Records’ proprietary 162⁄3 rpm format left buyers at the mercy of a perversely scattershot catalog. Chrysler drivers puzzled over titles like Ken Griffin at the Wurlitzer Organ, Irving Berlin tunes, and a dramatic reenactment of the signing of the Magna Carta. Part of the problem, Goldmark admitted, was William Paley himself: “He didn’t think pop music was a market at all.” Even worse, Chrysler brass agreed, imagining the market was full of people like themselves—executives tired of all that damn rock-and-roll noise.

A dramatic reenactment of the signing of the Magna Carta? I'd buy that.

***

Women and computers:

In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.

In fact, for a hot second back in the mid-sixties, computer programming was actually portrayed as women’s work by the mass media. Check out “The Computer Girls” from the April 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. It appeared between pieces called “The Bachelor Girls of Japan” and “A Dog Speaks: Why a Girl Should Own a Pooch.”

***

Islamofascism goes too far:

Somalia's al-Shabaab group has banned samosas after ruling the popular snacks are too Christian, it was reported on Tuesday.

The unexpected move means Somalis could now expect to be punished if caught cooking, buying or eating samosas, known locally as sambusas. [...]

The extremist group has offered no official explanation for the ban on the triangular snacks, which are commonly cooked up and served across the Horn of Africa.

But it is believed the organisation took offence at the three-sided savouries' supposed resemblance to symbol of the Christian Holy Trinity. [...]

The reported ban on samosas is the latest in a string of bizarre rulings from the organisation, which has been likened to the Afghan Taliban.

Earlier this year the group introduced a blanket ban on the playing or watching of football.

***

Everybody plays Monopoly incorrectly. (Except al-Shabaab, of course)

Archeology notes

2011-07-27T22:00:00.003-07:00

I've been neglectful. For instance:

A scrap of twisted silver found a few weeks ago by a metal detector in Lancashire will take its place among masterpieces of medieval art at the British Museum [...].

The badge, the only one of its kind ever found in Britain, provides a link 500 years ago between this corner of rural Lancashire and the great pilgrimage sites of mainland Europe. It shows one of the companions of St Ursula, one of the most popular mystical legends of medieval Europe. She was said to be a British princess who sailed with 11,000 virgin companions to marry a pagan prince in Brittany, but diverted to go on a pilgrimage to Rome – and in some versions of the story, Jerusalem.

***

Another find:

A first-aid kit found on a 2,000-year-old shipwreck has provided a remarkable insight into the medicines concocted by ancient physicians to cure sailors of dysentery and other ailments.

A wooden chest discovered on board the vessel contained pills made of ground-up vegetables, herbs and plants such as celery, onions, carrots, cabbage, alfalfa and chestnuts – all ingredients referred to in classical medical texts.

The tablets, which were so well sealed that they miraculously survived being under water for more than two millennia, also contain extracts of parsley, nasturtium, radish, yarrow and hibiscus.

They were found in 136 tin-lined wooden vials on a 50ft-long trading ship which was wrecked around 130 BC off the coast of Tuscany. Scientists believe they would have been used to treat gastrointestinal complaints suffered by sailors such as dysentery and diarrhoea. [...]

The pills are the oldest known archaeological remains of ancient pharmaceuticals. [...]

The ship was discovered off the port of Piombino in 1974 and the wooden medicine box was found in 1989, but it is only now that scientists have been able to use DNA sequencing technology to analyse the contents of the pills.

***

And another:

In Southern India a story that sounds like the plot line of a Hollywood adventure is unfolding. Over the past week, on orders from the country's Supreme Court, a panel has found a treasure estimated to be worth $22 billion in the underground vaults of a Hindu temple in Trivandrum, India. [...]

This wasn't really a discovery; the hidden treasure was on the public record -- a legal dispute led to the unveiling. It's an interesting story.

***

As new items are found, others are lost:

A priceless 12th-century illustrated manuscript containing what has been described as Europe's first travel guide has been stolen from the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

The Codex Calixtinus, which was kept in a safe at the cathedral's archives, is thought to have been stolen by professional thieves [...].
The 225 parchment pages include a guide to the pilgrimage routes to Santiago, apparently written by a French friar, Aimeric Picaud.
They also tell the story of how St James the Apostle's body was supposedly transported from Judea on a raft without oars or sails, which swiftly crossed the Mediterranean and travelled north through the Atlantic before grounding in north-western Spain. From there it was supposedly dragged inland by two oxen, and the body was buried in a forest.
It was only eight centuries later, however, that locals began to claim the tomb of St James could be found there. Pilgrims eventually began to travel to the site, and an 11th-century pope declared that on certain years pilgrims could obtain plenary indulgence for their sins and so avoid purgatory. [...]
His guidebook also included warnings against eating some local fish which would cause you to "die soon afterwards or fall ill".

News you can use.

***
Another loss:

Reports began to circulate in early June concerning damage to one of a series of four remarkable Neolithic monuments in Somerset, southwest England. However, the scale of the damage to the Priddy Circles is only now being fully appreciated.

The four Circles are listed together as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and as such are under the protection of the State. Somerset County Council confirmed it was working in conjunction with English Heritage to pursue a resolution for this distressing situation, which arose when the landowner, Mr Penny, allegedly used his earth-moving equipment to bulldoze, flatten and reseed the entire southwestern arc of the southern circle.
Damage to ancient monuments can result in large fines – along with requirements to reinstate or repair – and in extreme circumstances, a prison sentence can be handed out to the perpetrator, under the 1979 Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act.

The images below show the extent of the damage, which includes the infilling of the geological sink holes along with the internal ditch and the flattening of the bank. As a result approximately one third of the monument has been completely erased.

***

And then there's this:

A key keeper is being sought to take care of a 12th Century castle in south Wales.

Cadw, the Welsh Government's historic environment service, needs someone to look after Newcastle, near Bridgend.

The post, which comes with a "modest" fee, involves checking the monument on a daily basis and keeping it free of litter.

The key keeper will also report any damage, vandalism or anti-social behaviour at the site. [...]
Established in the early 1100s by Robert FitzHamon, first Norman lord of Glamorgan, Newcastle was initially made of earth and timber.

It was later rebuilt in stone to reinforce the Norman conquest and domination of the local population.

The site appears to have been refortified by Henry II in the 1180s and is notable for its complete Norman doorway.

What a cool gig!

Photos

2011-07-20T22:17:00.011-07:00

Photo of the day:

***

Thirty-six pages of sugar cube wrappers!

He doesn't appear to have found one for the old American Hotel, however.

Hal Monroe's Chicken Ranch in Niles, Michigan:

***

I've never been frightened by ventriloquists' dummies. Until now:

Sometimes the humans are scarier:

***

Awesome slideshow of magnified food:

A pineapple leaf:

Sprinkles:

A raisin:

A fortune cookie:

***

Oreo cameos!

In video veritas

2011-07-17T15:24:00.003-07:00

This might just be the funniest movie clip compilation I've ever seen. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Sean Bean Death Reel:

Best band name ever -- Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations:

Cool times in the Soviet Union (stay with it, the greatness begins at 1:10):

Sundry items

2011-07-17T11:59:00.003-07:00

Joshua Keating:

Vladimir Putin may have been upset that NATO's bombing campaign could prevent him from ever joining Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega as a recipient of the "Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights". But lest he think that his habit of jailing opponents and muzzling the media means he'll never receive recognition for his democracy-promotion efforts, Germany's Quadriga prize is here to help. RFE/RL reports:
The Quadriga prize was established after German unification in 1990 to mark contributions to the spread of freedom and democracy.

The private award is little noticed outside Germany, until it emerged last week this year's prize is to go to Putin, which has drawn criticism from high quarters. [...]

The prize board chose Putin because of his contributions to improving German-Russian relations, which might have been a significant enough achievement to overlook the prime minister's drawbacks if Russia and Germany had been lobbing missiles at each other until 1999.
According to this Wikipedia page, past Quadriga recipients are a pretty eclectic lot. In addition to Gorbachev and Havel, there's Shimon Peres, Helmut Kohl, Hamid Karzai, Internet pioneer Timothy Berners-Lee and, um, Peter Gabriel.

***

Jason Kuznicki calls this "the most important sentence you will read about the Casey Anthony trial":

It comes from Radley Balko:

Even as DNA testing continues to exonerate wrongly convicted people, including people who were nearly executed, it’s this rare case — in which a jury recognized that there was no physical evidence linking Anthony to her daughter’s murder — that has America questioning its justice system.

Speaks volumes.

***

Tyler Cowen digs up some Carmageddon snippets:

JetBlue offered $4 flights between Burbank and Long Beach airports. A local cycling club decided to give JetBlue a run for its money, saying its six best riders could beat the 150-seat Airbus A320′s travel time. As cars stayed off the roads, cyclists rode along the Los Angeles River, beating the Airbus and finishing the race in one and a half hours.

The link is here (also here), and:

Tom White, a helicopter co-pilot, marveled at the emptiness of the 405 as he shuttled passengers from Van Nuys to LAX. The 14-minute trip cost $150.

Photos

2011-07-17T11:00:00.002-07:00

Cool Bastille Day celebration photo:

Sure are a lot of stars in the Milky Way:

The Sambas stream toad (aka Borneo rainbow toad), last seen in 1924, was recently rediscovered:

Truly awesome apartments in El Alto, Bolivia:

The classic furniture of Jean Prouvé:

For those who are into such things, elegant new bathtub boats:

July 14 Artists' Birthdays

2011-07-13T22:49:00.002-07:00

Andrea del Sarto, 1486:
Portrait of a Young Man

Thomas Rowlandson, 1756:
The Rivals

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1834:
Nocturne in Blue and Gold

Gustav Klimt, 1862:
Schloss Kammer am Attersee III

Ossip Zadkine, 1890:
Musician

Ingmar Bergman, 1918

State of the union

2011-07-10T18:36:00.004-07:00

There were a few significant Supreme Court decisions last week. The best wrap-up of the majority's disgraceful sophistry is from (as usual) Dalia Lithwick.

Now that you're in an even greater anti-corporate state snit, here's Digby and Yves Smith.

Legislators' financial conflicts of interest are nothing new, but Eric Cantor's is probably unique (and smells vaguely unpatriotic) -- he's shorting Treasury bonds. Darrell Issa's, on the other hand, is uniquely brazen, but par for his course -- he fought to stop a Goldman Sachs investigation while buying up Goldman bonds.

Meanwhile, we see juxtapositions like this:

For more compare-and-contrast fun, here are Fox headlines paired with sane headlines for the same stories.

And for a look at the latest vote-suppression gambit, Ohio's is a doozy: "The law would permit poll workers to refuse to direct confused voters to their proper voting location." Naturally, "mixing up precincts 'most often occurs' in 'urban and impoverished areas of the state'.”

Links

2011-07-04T17:18:00.002-07:00

How WWII "greatest generation" hero worship softens us up to present-day military adventurism and worse.

Islam and science.

Do we have rights? If so, why?

How propaganda silences its opposition.

The amazing story of a corrupt "expert witness."

Political short takes and quotes

2011-07-02T22:02:00.002-07:00

A few items via Andrew Sullivan:

In his new book, Barry Estabrook exposes the system of "modern-day slavery" that feeds the tomato industry in the US:

In the last 15 years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women who had been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most instances of slavery go unreported. Workers were "sold" to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they didn't work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards. Escapees who got caught were beaten or worse.

***

Is the city making you crazy?
Possibly. According to Jens Pruessner, incidence of "anxiety disorders is 21 percent higher for people from the city," and urbanites "have a 39 percent increase for mood disorders." Also, "schizophrenia is almost doubled for individuals who are born and brought up in cities":

Interestingly, it didn't seem to make much difference whether individuals lived in a concrete jungle or a city with a lot of green space. The implication is that it's population density, rather than any other factor, which causes the changes in the brain. Almost 70 percent of the world population is expected to live in a city by 2050, according to United Nations projections.

***

"The Correct Use Of A Semicolon Is A Big Red Flag"

From a dialogue between "Teach," an adjunct philosophy instructor at a public university in New York, and "Cheat," who has authored over 100 papers for pay. Here's Teach:

My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?” Which indicated to me, along with a number of the other email responses I got from students, that many of them don’t even know what plagiarism is.

***

iPhones Made By Slaves?

Michelle Goldberg highlights the issue:

“Most of what’s in our medicine chests has palm oil, which comes from eastern Cambodia or Sumatra or other places where we know there’s a lot of folks enslaved on those plantations,” says CdeBaca. “There’s an awful lot of slavery on the fishing fleets of Southeast Asia, and a lot of the shrimp that we eat in the United States comes from there.” He points to my iPhone, which is sitting on the table recording our conversation. It, like all smartphones, relies on a mineral called coltan, much of which is mined by forced laborers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “The likelihood that one of these was not touched by a slave is pretty low,” he says.

***
Ezra Klein contemplates genome-based medicine. Matt Steinglass worries about the health insurance implications:

Part of the logic behind insurance is that it's a risk pool; none of us knows when we're gonna go, so we agree to split the costs. But genetic profiling may increasingly give each of us our own set of pre-existing conditions, good or bad. And that may test people's willingness to chip in for the health costs of their fellow-citizens. When "it coulda been me" turns into "nope, it couldn't", we may start seeing...hm, I was about to say "a breakdown in social solidarity", but then I remembered we're talking about America here. How about "even less willingness to do anything for people who aren't as lucky as you are."

***

From elsewhere, Neil Sinhababu writes:

A columnist at wingnut supersite WorldNetDaily writes that the freedoms initiated by the legalization of gay marriage in New York will include "much more than a perpetual pansexual pagan party."

Why is it that Republicans can make the consequences of marriage equality sound so much more awesome than I can?

Sir Charles:

Things I did not know category -- I'm reading a new history on World War II called The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts. He notes in the book that in 1943 the United States was producing 83% of the world's oil. That's kind of hard to imagine now. although it provides an insight into they way the U.S. developed in the post-war period.

Ta Nehisi-Coates:

They are tallying the damage in Illinois:

Wrongful convictions of men and women for violent crimes in Illinois have cost taxpayers $214 million and have imprisoned innocent people for 926 years [...].

The joint investigation, which tracked exonerations from 1989 through 2010, also determined that while 85 people were wrongfully incarcerated, the actual perpetrators were on a collective crime spree that included 14 murders, 11 sexual assaults, 10 kidnappings and at least 62 other felonies...

Moreover, the 97 felonies in that crime spree may be just a fraction of the total number of crimes committed by the actual perpetrators. [...]

It's good that Illinois abolished the death penalty--sending 18 innocent men to death row should sober folks up. But I suspect that part of the problem is that, unless you're going after the Duke lacrosse team, there's no real disincentive, short of a moral conscience, to prosecuting innocent people. [My bold - Karl]

Digby:

[...] it's good to see a well-written, entertaining article discussing the fact that our fetishizing of the military has taken us to a place that we should be very cautious about going:
[...] One of the more pragmatic Republican policy wonks I know let his enthusiasm for Petraeus run so far away with him as to write: “The appointment of David Petraeus as CIA Director amounts to a demotion with honor … his immense stature and strong views were too much for the President to handle.”

So now membership in the president’s cabinet is a “demotion,” and managing your generals’ career paths is a manhood test for the commander in chief?
Petraeus, to his credit, explain to the Republicans in his CIA confirmation hearings that it was his job as a general to execute the decision of the civilian leadership not make it, but I don't think most people, not just Republicans, really understand that anymore. [...]

There's something very wrong with the way Americans look at the military these days. [...] I'm not sure you could even do a TV comedy like Sgt Bilko today, it's so "disrespectful" of the Army. Hell, maybe not even South Pacific or Mr Rogers. It's become more of a religious order rather than a civil organization. Somehow, I doubt that the soldiers agree, but then they are only props in this ritualized military worship anyway.

Thoreau:

Of all the torture cases in the past 10 years, of all the detainee deaths, the DOJ has found a grand total of two torture cases that merit further investigation. Not even a prosecution, at this point. Investigation. And, by all accounts, the investigations will be limited to people who went even further than Jay Bybee and John Yoo could sign off on. [...]

BTW, it’s been a little while since I spewed any hate at John Yoo and Jay Bybee. So, let me just say that they are the lowest forms of life, they are unworthy of any sort of respect or courtesy, and when they walk down the street they should be spit on and shoved and cursed and splashed with mud and pelted with trash and shoes and treated with every other manner of contempt possible. When they walk into the room, every decent person should stand up and say “F*ck you, you sadistic piece of sh!t, and get out of here.” Their mere presence is incompatible with a free society, so they should be put on planes and sent to North Korea or Belarus or some other place where their kind is welcome. And when they eventually die and go to hell, their corpses should be fed to wild jackals.

In video veritas

2011-07-01T22:52:00.007-07:00

For your consideration, the Ray Harryhausen compendium:

Loved it:

If you haven't seen this yet:

Or this, the ultimate "stay on message" interview:

Heck, I even liked this one:

New and improved:

Law and order rondelay

2011-06-29T15:23:00.002-07:00

From the "a rose is... etc." file:

The AP reports that in the last days of his life, Osama bin Laden considered changing the name of al Qaeda to something more religious -- and with fewer connotations of slaughter and wanton destruction and all that:

The problem with the name al-Qaida, bin Laden wrote in a letter recovered from his compound in Pakistan, was that it lacked a religious element, something to convince Muslims worldwide that they are in a holy war with America.

Maybe something like Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, meaning Monotheism and Jihad Group, would do the trick, he wrote. Or Jama'at I'Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida, meaning Restoration of the Caliphate Group.

[...] Lopping off the word "jihad," bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to "claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam." Maybe it was time for al-Qaida to bring back its original name.

Spencer Ackerman's readers are already on the case with such highly-serious suggestions as [...] the "League of Extraordinary Beards" [...].

My colleague Charles Homans suggests on Twitter, "I feel like al Qaeda should go with an Executive Outcomes-style new name, something like "Global Islamic Solutions" or "The AQ Group."Journalist Chris Albon is fond of "Center For New Islamic Security." Several have suggested that "Blackwater" is now available.

And here's how we continue to overreact to 9/11 (with nods to the war on drugs and border security thrown into the mix):

As part of the TSA's request for FY 2012 funding, TSA Administrator John Pistole told Congress last week that the TSA conducts 8,000 unannounced security screenings every year. These screenings, conducted with local law enforcement agencies as well as immigration, can be as simple as checking out cargo at a busy seaport. But more and more, they seem to involve giving airport-style pat-downs and screenings of unsuspecting passengers at bus terminals, ferries, and even subways.

Will these random searches and ID checks eventually be used to find deadbeat dads and mortgage walkaways? Anything to feed our contemporary Moloch -- prisons;

More than a third of all states allow debtors “who can’t or won’t pay their debts” to be jailed. [...] What is behind the increased pressure to incarcerate people with debts? Is it a desire to force debt payment? Or is it part of a new structure where incarceration is becoming increasingly the default tool to address any and all social problems?

Consider a different example that has nothing to do with debts. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania judge was convicted of racketeering, of taking bribes from parties of interest in his cases. It was a fairly routine case of bribery, with one significant exception. The party making the payoffs was a builder and operator of youth prisons, and the judge was rewarding him by sending lots of kids to his prisons.

Welcome to the for-profit prison industry. It’s an industry that wants people in jail, because jail is their product. And they have shareholder expectations to meet. [...]
Once it becomes profitable to put people into steel cages, then it becomes profitable for judges to sell children in some creepy bizarro 21st century version of Oliver Twist. And if you think the housing bubble was bad because it misallocated resources, or foreclosure fraud is bad because it allows powerful actors to seize property based on raw power, then imagine what could happen if the logic of the for-profit prison system met the same type of leveraged financial hurricane.

And, of course, getting the bad guys at the local level means more of this:

Here’s photo of the police APV making appearances around Lancaster County, Pennsylvania this month. The city bought the vehicle in 2009 thanks to a quarter million dollar grant, also from DHS. I always wonder about the cammo. Why do so many SWAT teams wear camouflage? [...] I can’t recall a single story in which a SWAT team needed to sneak up on a drug dealer, fugitive, or hostage taker who was hiding in the trees.

By the way:

The U.S. Department of Justice recently released its first-ever estimate of the number of inmates who are sexually abused in America each year. According to the department’s data, [...] at least 216,600 inmates were victimized in 2008 alone. Contrary to popular belief, most of the perpetrators were not other prisoners but staff members—corrections officials whose job it is to keep inmates safe. On average, each victim was abused between three and five times over the course of the year. The vast majority were too fearful of reprisals to seek help or file a formal complaint.

The emphasis is added, the link is here.

Pictures and video

2011-06-25T21:31:00.002-07:00

A Persian manuscript with miniatures from 1604:

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Ralph Nader shills for kryptonite:

A TV ad for soap circa 1951 -- by Ingmar Bergman!

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Cynical C's "Christian quiz of the day":

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Plants never looked more organic:

Photographs by Ernst Fuhrmann (never heard of him).

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Excellent anonymous (as far as I can tell) photo from Tumblr (whatever that is).

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Some books

2011-06-21T09:13:00.004-07:00

The Guardian recently came out with a list of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. Then the NY Times threw out a list of its own, then a bunch of bloggers felt compelled to put up top tens of their own. So I'll get into the act, too -- here are ten nonfiction books I actually remember having read (but there must ten more I've forgotten that are even better):

A Distant Mirror; Barbara Tuchman
Guns, Germs, and Steel; Jared Diamond
The Black Death; Philip Ziegler
American Visions; Robert Hughes
Longitude; Dava Sobel
The Right Stuff; Tom Wolfe
Niccolo's Smile; Maurizio Viroli
Moliere; Virginia Scott
Into Thin Air; Jon Krackauer
The Period Table; Primo Levi

Might as well get some fiction into the act, too:

The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment; Feodor Dostoevsky
Henderson the Rain King; Saul Bellow
Tom Jones; Henry Fielding
Catch-22; Joseph Heller
Moby Dick; Melville
Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad
Huckleberry Finn; Mark Twain
Complete Short Stories; V.S. Pritchett

Current Events

2011-06-15T22:32:00.002-07:00

What a background in economics gets you -- Matt Yglesias watches Double Indemnity and comes away with this:

It’s a great film and very much worth your time, but cinematic qualities aside watching an old movie like that is a fascinating window into daily life at a time of much lower labor productivity than you have today.

Yglesias also takes a quick look at absurdly complicated hamburger recipes. These people are insane.

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What do these politicians have in common?

I didn't know there were boilerplate facial expressions.

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Our vanishing privacy rights:

The power to watch is the power to attack, embarrass, and destroy reputations. [...] Our lives are starting to become an open book for those powerful or rich enough to demand our profiles. [...]

The asymmetry between state secrecy and individual exposure is another worrisome theme of Solove’s book. As big government and big business learn more about us, they are deflecting inquiries about their own critical practices.

[...] with law enforcement and intelligence agencies persistently peeking at private records, the data stores of a massive internet or telecom company are, for all intents and purposes, government resources as well.

[...] We have a right to freedom of expression in large part because we cannot properly think for ourselves, develop our own personalities, or act as citizens without some guarantees that these activities will not draw undue attention from powerful individuals and institutions who do not share our views.
[...] Solove’s approach here is very promising. We need to think of privacy as being as much a vindication of our First Amendment as our Fourth Amendment rights. Rather than endlessly parsing the precedents that have already led to chilling levels of exposure, judges need to revive privacy law in the face of new realities. [...]
My only concern about Nothing to Hide is that it is so focused on governmental threats that it may not adequately consider the private sector’s means, motive, and opportunity to abuse power. Dana Priest and Will Arkin have shown that profit-driven corporations are pushing more intensive surveillance. The shadowy saga of HB Gary, Bank of America, and the Justice Department suggests just how far a fused state-corporate apparatus could go to smear its enemies and cover its tracks. [...]

Solove gives us a richer concept of privacy, as a right to self-determination, dignity, due process, and a fair hearing in an increasingly automated and alienating world. Even after all the data has been gathered, we should still argue about, and often limit, its use. Nothing to Hide is a consistently fascinating effort to assure that the modern surveillance state respects the citizens it claims to protect.

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In other news:

The U.S. lags behind western Europe in access to civil justice and legal assistance, according to an international survey released Monday that also raised questions over whether U.S. police forces treat all citizens equally.
The results of the survey by the World Justice Project, an advocacy group that promotes the rule of law, also signaled that some Middle Eastern countries continue to rank relatively low in certain areas, a key factor in the region's popular protests.
[...] While the U.S. scored high in many areas — including checks and balances in the legal system, civil liberties, freedom of expression and independence of the judiciary — it trailed western European countries in such areas as legal access for low-income communities and ethnic minorities and also scored low in perceptions of whether police treat people of different backgrounds equally.
"In the United States, rich individuals take their disputes to courts, whereas poor and low-income individuals normally don't use the formal dispute resolution mechanisms. They simply either negotiate, do nothing or resort to violence in the worst case scenario," said Juan Botero, the director of the index.

[...] The report also covered five Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, which scored nearly at the bottom on fundamental rights and limits on government powers. While the five Mideast nations generally scored well when it came to combating crime, the report found that high levels of corruption, lack of freedom of speech and governmental openness were major concerns.

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The Supreme Court reads, sort of:

Every now and then there is a news report that conveys a world of rich detail in one simple sentence. [...] Nina Totenberg spoke one of those sentences in an NPR report on the way that members of the Supreme Court approach the task of writing.

“The only good way to learn about writing is to read good writing,” says Chief Justice John Roberts.
That sentiment is echoed by Breyer, who points to Proust, Stendhal and Montesquieu as his inspirations. Justice Anthony Kennedy loves Hemingway, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Dickens and Trollope.

Justice Thomas says a good legal brief reminds him of the TV show 24. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says one of the great influences on her writing was her European literature professor at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov [...].

Which one of these things doesn't belong?

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Current Events links

2011-06-06T13:36:00.002-07:00

From the annals of entrepreneurism: fort making for grown-ups.

The link to that story came from Tyler Cowen's "markets in everything" series; here's another from him about luxury products for pets.

Andrew Sullivan points to a disconnect between business and ethics in the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. He also takes a quick look at fake designer goods.

First oil, then houses, now food -- speculation bubble edition.

And did you know that the U.S. subsidizes the Brazilian cotton industry? Very clever way to work around competing corporate interests.

Want a "market approach" to medical care? Look no further than dental care.

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Sarah Palin talked some weirdness about Paul Revere's ride; comments here (with a cool photoshop) and here.

Top economist couldn't get a congressional hearing on his appointment to the Federal Reserve because of one Senator's intransigence. Comments here, here, and here.

On the "Asymmetry Of Electoral Conspiracy Theories." Like you don't already know.

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In other news, a homeowner forecloses on his deadbeat bank.

Two stories of insane city ordinances: Orlando and Minneapolis (which takes the cake).

A quick-witted bystander films a police shooting and survives with the evidence intact.

In Berlin, the perils hitting the "send" button too early.

A doctor celebrates what may be feminism's greatest achievement: less rape.

Pictures

2011-06-03T21:09:00.006-07:00

Some fine examples of 20C French bookbinding. Here's one now:

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From 1913:

... "the wheels thereof will be rotated on pedal action by the feet of the user, thereby avoiding the necessity of excessive exertion on the part of the skater." Since the skates required significantly less force, [they would enable], as Nordling writes in his application, "the production of high speed."

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As you can imagine, I dislike gangsta rap, but you may not be aware that I also dislike Doctor Who -- but mash them up together and I like:

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I also like this bookcase:

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"New York Times visual columnist and famed designer Christoph Niemann" visited the Venice Biennale -- and made a wonderful little series of drawings:

9:35 a.m. Piazza San Marco ........ 9:37 a.m. Piazza San Marco

Ponte del Sepolcro

Below are beautiful pieces by Mai-Thu Perret (left) and James Turrell (right). In the history of arts journalism, I may be the first person to pick pieces for review based on how easy they are to draw.

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A few things

2011-06-03T20:23:00.002-07:00

Digby cites the switch (unheard of in those parts) of an Alabama lawmaker from Republican to Democrat and comments:

People aren't liking it much once they realize that they have finally met the enemy and apparently it is them.

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Mark Kleiman on Steve Benen's clever quip:

Mitt Romney is like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re going to get.

This is where the lack of a liberal Fox News-equivalent hurts. Benen’s wisecrack deserves to become it cliche, but it almost certainly won’t.

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You've probably read about this already, but it's too awesome not to mention:

A group of more than 200 Japanese pensioners is volunteering to tackle the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power station.

The "Skilled Veterans Corps", as they call themselves, is made up of retired engineers and other professionals, all over the age of sixty.

One of the group, Yasuteru Yamada, told the BBC's Roland Buerk that they should be facing the dangers of radiation, not the young.

This is a real commitment to the next generation, have we ever seen anything like it here?

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Harold Pollack:

Today’s Times [June 2] includes a nicely-written obituary of the biophysicist Rosalyn Yalow. She was only the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine for her contributions to endocrinology.

Incidentally, she was one of two woman graduates of the same public high school (Walton) in the Bronx to win this prize. That’s 20 percent of all women to win the medicine prize. That pioneering generation of Jewish women was (and is) pretty awesome in breaking down many barriers.
This story is remarkable for many reasons. Not least it illustrates the amazing gender (and religious) discrimination she was able to overcome.

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Photos

2011-06-01T14:34:00.003-07:00

100 shots from airplane windows at the link (that's way too many -- here are 6 of my favorites).

London:

Cargill Salt Ponds in San Francisco Bay

Nebraska

Wisconsin

Lencois Maranhenses, Brazil

Rio de Janeiro

25 abandoned Yugoslavian war memorials (most of them are pretty ugly -- but these few work for me).

Tjentište:

Grmeč:

Ilirska Bistrica:

Niš:

This one, at Makljen, just looks particularly abandoned:

Pictures and more

2011-05-28T21:05:00.002-07:00

Missed it while on vacation, but May 14 was (and still is) Miniature Golf Day!

A partial list of reader's suggestions for an alternate title for the new Sarah Palin movie. My favorite? Mooseferatu.

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There's a site called Awesome People Hanging Out Together with photos of (mostly) celebrities, musicians, movie stars, and the jet-setting *beautiful people*. But this is The One True Awesome:

It's like Jesus, Moses, and Mohamed in the same photo except one of them is missing.

Here's the second best:

Picasso and Bardot isn't just peanuts, either (I think he liked her). And Miles Davis with Steve McQueen took me by surprise (as they always do).

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This photo seems too good not to have been photoshopped, but it's legit:

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It's the language, stupid (via Andrew Sullivan):

David DiSalvo summarizes a new study where researchers asked students to read one of two crime reports. In the first report, crime was described as a "wild beast preying on the city" and "lurking in neighborhoods":

After reading these words, 75% of the students put forward solutions that involved enforcement or punishment, such as building more jails or even calling in the military for help. Only 25% suggested social reforms such as fixing the economy, improving education or providing better health care. The second report was exactly the same, except it described crime as a "virus infecting the city" and "plaguing" communities. After reading this version, only 56% opted for great law enforcement, while 44% suggested social reforms. Interestingly, very few of the participants realized how affected they were by the differing crime metaphors. ... Only 3% identified the metaphors as culprits.

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Political links

2011-05-28T17:30:00.002-07:00

Americans are security wimps, part XXXVIII.

White people are divorced from racial realities, part CXVII.

The brains of liberals and conservatives just don't work quite the same way, part XVI.

The evaporation of the Fourth Amendment, part MCCXXII.

Has a new torture regime (selective feeding) been discovered at Guantanamo?

Voter backlash at Republican *townhalls* will not be televised. (Compare this to the crashing of Democrats' townhalls a few years ago)

Is the Arab Spring a function of increased literacy?

Congressmen's stocks yield a better-than-average return.

Did anti-semitism in interwar Germany track with medieval pogroms? This hypothesis on the lasting effects of age-old events on a land and its people reminds me of an article I read several years ago which attempted to correlate the lingering effects of the slave trade in Africa. The authors offered evidence that the poorest and least stable modern African nations are in the regions which suffered the greatest disruptions in the 17th-19th centuries.

Does France's socialist industries give it a good old-fashioned capitalistic comparative advantage?

Metaphors, semantics, and national security.

The oil spikes of 2007-8 were speculator-driven. I was wrong about that at the time and am far more skeptical of *market explanations* than I used to be.

This and that

2011-05-28T16:59:00.002-07:00

Workplace rights you do not have.

We have affected the planet more than we realize. As a minor for instance, Prozac seems to be killing E. Coli bacteria in the Great Lakes.

Frederick Law Olmsted's 10 tips for design.

Anthropologist "discovers" a 12C Quran -- he's taking a break at a site and an old man offers it for a little noontime reading.

ASU's top 10 new species.

Direct electrical stimulation of the spinal cord allows a paralyzed man to walk. It's a start.

Down south you'll find more than just penguins: "An 'inhospitable lump of rock' several days sailing from the nearest civilisation has been revealed as more valuable to wildlife than the Galapagos Islands."

The case for mystery meat.

Great stuff

2011-05-23T21:15:00.002-07:00

Did the early mammalian brain grow larger to accommodate the sense of smell?

Psychopaths are everywhere (didn't Warren Zevon write a song about that?).

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Billboard renting through blackmail:

If you can't read the caption, it warns "The sooner you advertise here, the better."

Yes, someone advertised there before the next sign went up.

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Here is yet another example of why God created the internet:

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Photos

2011-05-23T07:22:00.002-07:00

A levee protects a home surrounded by floodwater from the Yazoo River on May 18, 2011 near Vicksburg, Mississippi.

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Radley Balko offers these:

There are a number of moving Holocaust memorials around Europe, but I thought this one in Budapest was particularly poignant. When the Nazis learned that Hungary was secretly negotiating peace accords with the U.S. and Britain in 1944, they moved in to occupy Budapest. Almost immediately, they began systematically lining up the city’s Jews along the this stretch of the Danube, shooting them, then dumping their bodies into the river.

Things didn’t get much better for Hungary once it was “liberated” by the Soviets. I didn’t have time to tour it, but Budapest also has a museum called the “House of Terror” that documents life in Hungary under both regimes. A couple people I talked to who visited said there’s a video at the museum in which you can watch Hungarian troops change from Nazi uniforms into Soviet uniforms minutes after the Red Army moves in.

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Most favored status

2011-05-23T06:58:00.002-07:00

Radley Balko looks at the police blotter:

Smoke or deal pot, and the SWAT team will violently break into your home in the middle of the night. But beat a man within an inch of his life, then run from the law, and the SWAT team will come for you in broad daylight, surround your house, make several announcements over a bullhorn, and give you the opportunity to surrender peacefully.

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Perks for bigwigs at the municipal level.

Perks for bigwigs at the state level.

Perks for bigwigs in the private sector.

A good, quick look at the 1994 Republican electoral landslide in the House. This ties in with my longstanding rant about how the "history begins today" ethos of modern Republicans is radical, not conservative.

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Speaking of epochal years, Matt Yglesias notes a

smart take from Mark Schmitt on the implications of a plan that promises to cut the 54-and-under crowd off from Medicare:

If there was ever going to be a generational war in this country, that high school class of ’74 would be its Mason-Dixon line. It’s the moment when Bill Clinton’s promise—“if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll get ahead”—began to lose its value. Today’s seniors and near-seniors spent much of their working lives [...] with their incomes rising, investments gaining, their health increasingly secure, and their retirements predictable. Everyone 55 and younger spent his or her entire working life in an economy where all those trends had stalled or reversed. [...]

The Ryan plan, in other words, delivers to the older generation exactly what they’ve had all their lives—secure and predictable benefits—and to the next generation, more of what they’ve known—insecurity and risk.

Yglesias also opines on our overactive foreign polic y:

Sudarsan Raghavan reports for the Washington Post on the fact that civil wars are ugly business:
[The Libyan] U.S.- and NATO-backed rebels who control much of the east are carrying out what many view as a campaign of retaliation against those once aligned with Gaddafi [...]. Such targeting raises questions about the character of the government taking shape in eastern Libya and whether it will follow basic principles of democracy and human rights. [...]

[... It's] not particularly surprising for a new regime that comes to power in a violent struggle to engage in some violent persecutation of members of the old regime. The real problem here is not with the Libyans, but with the conceit in the West that it’s possible to undertake a purely “humanitarian” intervention into an ongoing political struggle being waged with military violence.

That should be obvious by now.

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Speaking of foreign policy, The Onion gets the last word:

State Department diplomat Nelson Milstrand, who appeared on CNN last week and offered an informed, thoughtful analysis implying that Israel could perhaps exercise more restraint toward Palestinian moderates in disputed territories, was asked to resign Tuesday. “The United States deeply regrets any harm Mr. Milstrand’s careful, even-tempered, and factually accurate remarks may have caused our democratic partner in the Middle East,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in an unequivocal condemnation of the veteran foreign-service officer’s perfectly reasonable statements. “U.S. policy toward Israel continues to be one of unconditional support and fawning sycophancy.” Milstrand, 63, will reportedly appear at an AIPAC conference to offer a full apology as soon as his trial concludes and his divorce is finalized.

Links

2011-05-19T13:59:00.002-07:00

Politics is all in your head.

Confidence in Chinese farming explodes.

Florida outlaws sex. I always thought Kansas would get there first.

More full-body scanner skepticism.

Republicans and torture, 1984-style.

Las Vegas' Sahara hotel is closing. Had I known they were offering $1 rooms I might have spent a wild weekend there. (What happens in Vegas never happens to Karl)

100 works of journalism worth reading from last year. Skim the topics and try some out -- I read a few of these when they came out and they were good.

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Matt Yglesias looks at Republicans and Big Oil:

Welcome to the “Offshore Production and Safety Act of 2011″:
The measure would deem the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, located in New Orleans, the “exclusive venue” for all civil suits dealing with energy projects in the Gulf. That’s a problem because the court is stocked with judges who have financial holdings or other ties to the oil and gas industry. That means lawsuits would be relegated to a particularly sympathetic court, no matter what jurisdiction the company is based in or where the incident that prompted the suit occurred.

Fun stuff

2011-05-19T01:16:00.002-07:00

Mount Rushmore's original design:

There wasn't money raised for the whole thing so only the busts were sculpted.

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Chart of the day:

More in this vein here.

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Who's a climate scientist?

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The Stockholm Syndrome of long novels.

Back aching

2011-05-19T00:28:00.002-07:00

Back from vacation. That's the bad news.

There is no good news as the Supreme Court gets it wrong again.

Greenwald on the bin Laden killing and Nuremburg.

How the federal government's debt and spending isn't like a family's debt and spending. Like Benen and Bernstein, this analogy has been a pet peeve of mine for as long as I've been hearing it.

Lotsa links

2011-04-18T22:13:00.003-07:00

Going away for a while, here are a boatload of links:

A takedown of Thomas Friedman.

Usually, the truth about a cover-up is pretty mundane.

A good look at white liberal racism.

Expose tainted food production, go to jail. Oh, and almost half of our meat has Staph bacteria. And boy are those bacteria tough, clever, and determined.

To whom do we owe all of that national debt, anyway (don't be afraid, it's only a pie chart). Here's another chart showing that federal debt might the least of our worries.

How the innocent get convicted. Another excerpt from the same source (of course, you could read the original report)

A six year-old girl last week, an eight year-old boy this week. And now it's official policy -- you'll go on the list for complaining. Makes sense, we all know what big whiners the terrorists are.

Meta for wonks -- graphing charts! Totally meta.

Samuel Pepys on-line?

Right-wing nutjobs see commies at ASU!

Someone else shares my theory about the Trumptastic campaign.

Getting an abortion in South Dakota. What doesn't get addressed is what the cost in cash and time is for going out of state. BTW, I am a single-issue voter when it comes to abortion -- I will not vote for a seriously anti-abortion candidate under any circumstance.

A 450 year-old *debit card*.

We're taught that the Romans invented concrete. Maybe not.

Brain surgery in the Dark Ages.

Idiosyncratic retelling of Beowulf. And this only part one.

Post Office uses picture of Las Vegas's Satue of Liberty copy for a new stamp.

This view of nature always made sense to me.

Feng shui and juries. Actually, this falls into line with other studies showing that free will isn't as free as we think.

Japanese banks haven't offered interest in a while, so what happens when you keep your money at home... and you get hit by a tsunami?

Not everyone has forgotten about the food riots several years back.

How was this marketing different from all other marketing?

The classic problem for liberalism -- tolerance for those who want to destroy you. It seems to be an old conundrum, William Hazlitt wrote about it almost 200 years ago.

Is drone warfare immoral?

A brief reminder that economic crises generally increase right-wing political influence.

Poppies for real pain relief. Makes too much sense to be implemented.

The three myths of Israel's insecurity.

Well, that takes care of unfinished blog business until mid-May. Sleep well.

Pictures

2011-04-16T20:50:00.003-07:00

Record albums as book covers. Clever:

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Bent Objects:

I get ideas for photographs when everyday objects remind me of something else. Then I try to think about how I can show others the connection I made. The next step – I try really hard to take it one step further- add humor, emotion of some kind, maybe an “aha” moment. For example, with ‘Mail Order Bride,’I came up with the characters, but the little chair against the door really makes that shot for most people.” ~ Terry Border

Though the photos themselves are a delight, what makes the project most charming are Border’s clever captions. For a sneak peek, look no further than his excellent Gel Conference talk, which captures the humor and imagination with which Border approaches his work.

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I generally ignore photos of goofy-looking performers, but cannot be ignored:

My first reaction: Pod People live among us.

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State of the union

2011-04-13T22:54:00.002-07:00

What it's all abou t:

Next year nearly 20 million students will be enrolled at college. With the average private and public annual tuition expected to be $37,000 and $16,100, respectively, a lot of families will be looking for additional funding sources. One company positioned to benefit is SLM Corp. (SLM), also known as Sallie Mae [...].

Like other loans, student loan repayment trends have been improving alongside private sector job growth. [...] At the same time, a tighter lending standard has driven the percentage of co-signed loans higher [...].

Outside of private loan origination and its legacy FFELP portfolio, the company is also looking to expand its management and services segment, which handles $235 billion in education loans and administers $35 billion in 529 plans.

Another compelling reason to own SLM is the likely reinstatement of dividends or buybacks later this year. [...]

Overall, student loan debt remains a growth business. This year, student loan debt surpassed credit card debt for the first time. As costs continue to rise and students and parents continue to look for payment solutions, SLM shareholders will be rewarded.

***

Looks like those students and their peers are more tolerant of torture than us old fogeys:

Daniel Stone reports on a depressing study by the American Red Cross that "found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable":
More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. [...]
And one should never discount the messages sent by our political leadership. One party wanted to embrace torture as a virtue; the other ended it without much fanfare and refused to prosecute war criminals if they were American. Those who have come of age in this era have gotten the message.

Adam Serwer reacts:

I think Americans are still in the midst of a kind of national post-traumatic stress disorder over the 9/11 attacks, and we really still have yet to come to our senses. [...] Treating it like a crime might have changed that, but no one in the U.S. government has any intention of doing so.

A reader is on the same page:

As a "kid" myself (well, college student), another factor to be considered is that for many of us 9/11 happened at a critical time during our childhood. Since middle school we have been bombarded with warnings that we are always at threat and it only is through extraordinary measures we can stay safe. [...] For most of us we cannot remember a time that terrorism was not seen (realistically or not) as a menace waiting to strike at our moment of weakness.

Different times, different enemies: instead of teaching 6 year-olds how to "duck and cover" they pat them down at airports.

***

Jason Kuznicki also looks at our changing enemies:

The Greatest Generation housed four hundred thousand Nazis on American soil during the war. We wet ourselves over housing one hundred seventy-two miscellaneous troglodytes from Afghanistan… many years after the war. It’s just too dangerous!
The comparison isn’t exactly fair. If anything, it’s too kind to the present generation. We’re not keeping our prisoners in Guantanamo out of fear. We’re keeping them there to subvert our own legal system.

Andrew Sullivan on same from a different angle:

Rick Hertzberg compares how the US handled prisoners of war during WWII to Guantanamo today:

[...] Eventually, some five hundred P.O.W. camps, scattered across forty-five of the forty-eight United States, housed some four hundred thousand men. In every one of those camps, the Geneva conventions were adhered to so scrupulously that, after the war, not a few of the inmates decided to stick around and become Americans themselves. That was extraordinary rendition, Greatest Generation style.

And it makes one weep to see what we have now come to. In the Republican policy riders to the budget deal - one of the more jaw-dropping documents I have read in a while - there was an absolute insistence on not funding the closure of Gitmo. It was that important - to retain something that the entire world sees as a black mark on America and the West.

***

Bruce Schneier:

The former CIA general counsel, John A. Rizzo, talks about his agency's assassination program, which has increased dramatically under the Obama administration:
The hub of activity for the targeted killings is the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, where lawyers -- there are roughly 10 of them, says Rizzo -- write a cable asserting that an individual poses a grave threat to the United States. The CIA cables are legalistic and carefully argued, often running up to five pages. [...]
Sometimes, as Rizzo recalls, the evidence against an individual would be thin, and high-level lawyers would tell their subordinates, “You guys did not make a case.” [...] The memo would get kicked back downstairs.

The cables that were “ready for prime time,” as Rizzo puts it, concluded with the following words: “Therefore we request approval for targeting for lethal operation.” There was a space provided for the signature of the general counsel, along with the word “concurred.” Rizzo says he saw about one cable each month, and at any given time there were roughly 30 individuals who were targeted. Many of them ended up dead, but not all: “No. 1 and No. 2 on the hit parade are still out there,” Rizzo says, referring to “you-know-who and [Ayman al-] Zawahiri,” a top Qaeda leader.

And the ACLU Deputy Legal Director on the interview:

What was most remarkable about the interview, though, was not what Rizzo said but that it was Rizzo who said it. For more than six years until his retirement in December 2009, Rizzo was the CIA's acting general counsel -- the agency's chief lawyer. On his watch the CIA had sought to quash a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by arguing that national security would be harmed irreparably if the CIA were to acknowledge any detail about the targeted killing program, even the program's mere existence.
Rizzo's disclosure was long overdue -- the American public surely has a right to know that the assassination of terrorism suspects is now official government policy [...]. Routinely, officials insist to courts that the nation's security will be compromised if certain facts are revealed but then supply those same facts to trusted reporters.

***

In video veritas

2011-04-13T22:42:00.002-07:00

I want to learn how to be a bartender -- just like this guy:

OMG of the day; stick with it, at :23 you won't believe your ears:

Fighting terrorism for the next generation:

That youngster's parents are not happy. Once again:

Lists

2011-04-13T17:48:00.002-07:00

Some surprises behind the movie camera.

A brief chronological slideshow of the world's largest cities, from Jericho through Tokyo.

Five countries with real fashion police.

A Flapper's dictionary from 1922. It's the bee's knees.

Pictures!

2011-04-13T15:52:00.003-07:00

NYC's vanishing storefronts. I link to this not only because IHNY but because the first shop pictured is one I've walked by many times:

Here's another classic from Brooklyn:

Without spaces like this you can't have a real city.

***

Photos by Stanley Kubrick from his pre-film days:

Some of them look like shots from his movies:

Some of the don't:

***

Awesome curtain at the Oslo Opera House:

Los Angeles-based artist Pae White created it by scanning crumpled aluminum foil and translating that data into instructions for a computer-controlled loom that wove the material out of cotton, wool, and polyester.

She calls it "metafoil".

***

Vintage bookends:

***

Woody Woodpecker animator finagled his abstract paintings into cartoons:

“Culhane essentially ‘hid’ his artful excursions in plain sight, letting them rush past too rapidly for the notice of most of his audience,” Mr. Klein writes in the 15-page article, titled “Woody Abstracted: Film Experiments in the Cartoons of Shamus Culhane.”
In the article Mr. Klein describes Mr. Culhane [as] influenced by the writings of Russian theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin [...].
The longest such experimental sequence was in the seven-second steamroller smash-up in “The Loose Nut,” also from 1945. And, later in that cartoon, Woody is blown into an abstract configuration that Mr. Klein, in his article, calls “the convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”

The "action painting" sequence starts at 4:40:

Never liked Woody, but this was cool.

***

More odds and ends

2011-04-12T09:15:00.002-07:00

Just to be a bit more explicit about that Chinese time-travel movie ban:

The New Yorker's Richard Brody suggests that what's making censors uncomfortable, is less what these dramas say about China's history, than what they imply about its present:

What the Chinese time-travel plots, as described above, have in common is the notion of escape: leaving contemporary, Communist-dominated China for the China of another era, one where, despite mores that are, in some ways, odd and outdated, love and happiness can be found. Time travel serves here as a dream of freedom from present-day strictures—or simply as a cry for freedom, from precisely this kind of idiotic and despotic regulation.

Variety reports that several remakes of classic texts and Western-style cop shows have also been put on hold.

***

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is writing a novel set in the antebellum South, reads King Lear and sees a connection:

The writing was quite stunning, and given my present studies, I was drawn to the role of status, masking and the bound society. I'm thinking of the weapons of the weak, and how Kent and Edgar find power in lowering their standing. Or how The Fool is able to speak truths because of his humor and lowly station.
I see this a lot in my research for the current project. There's always been this notion among a certain group of white people that blacks were actually "freer" than whites. Take the longing of some of the beats, for instance. Like most black people, I've had nothing but disdain for such negrophilia. But my current work has really forced me, not so much to discard my disdain, but to move past it and ask, "Why would someone feel like that?" "How could it be that I could come to feel like that?"

There's a kind of rejection of evil in that perspective, or rather the sense that "evil" has little use in the search for "Why?" What you come to see is that power, whatever its advantages, is also binding, that Biggie's "Mo money, mo problems" is not just whining, that tripe like "heavy is the head that weighs the crown" is true in a way.

Slave rebellions were really rare in the South, but the primary documents of slaveholding families are filled with fear of slave violence. One of my favorite episodes involves a slave-woman who, in the words of her master, is "corrected" (read: whipped) for some indiscretion. Members of the master's family, one by one, start to fall sick. He strongly suspects that the woman is poisoning the family. But he can't prove it, and moreover, the enslaved woman is good at her work, and thus valuable to him. This drama goes on for over a year, until he finally sells her. One way of seeing this story is to dwell on the master's power--he ultimately sells her. But looking through the master's eyes you see a man so dependent on slave-labor that he would tolerate--for over a year--the slow poisoning of himself and his family.

He was bound.

***

This looks like nanny-state overload. It fits the "do something, even if it's dumb" stereotype.

***

Stephen Colbert has been having Twitterfun at the expense of the "not intended to be factual" Arizona Senator Jon Kyle.

Sundry items

2011-04-11T23:13:00.002-07:00

Slavoj Zizek:

In the film Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: "A visiting gentleman accidentally opens a bathroom door and discovers a woman completely nude. He quickly takes a step back, closes the door, and says, 'Pardon, Madame!' That is politeness. The same gentleman, pushing the same door, discovering the same completely naked woman, then says, 'Pardon, Monsieur!' That is tact." It is only in the second case, by pretending not to have seen enough even to make out the sex of the person in the shower, that one displays true tact.

***

Apparently, a theater in Nashville intends to present the whole Terminator 2 story--with all of the dialogue replaced with lines from Shakespeare's plays.

Here's one I came up with for the first film. Instead of "I'll be back" use "I shall return before your lordship thence."

Here is a bit of the script. (Or... a right marvel of transcription therein lies.)

***

Speaking of script:

Marks on a clay tablet fragment found in Greece are the oldest known decipherable text in Europe, a new study says. [...]
Found in an olive grove [...], the tablet was created by a Greek-speaking Mycenaean scribe between 1450 and 1350 B.C., archaeologists say. [...]
So far, excavations at Iklaina have yielded evidence of an early Mycenaean palace, giant terrace walls, murals, and a surprisingly advanced drainage system, according to dig director Michael Cosmopoulos. [...]
The markings on the tablet fragment—which is roughly 1 inch tall by 1.5 inches wide—are early examples of a writing system known as Linear B. [...]
The Mycenaeans appear to have used Linear B to record only economic matters of interest to the ruling elite. Fittingly, the markings on the front of the Iklaina tablet appear to form a verb that relates to manufacturing, the researchers say. The back lists names alongside numbers—probably a property list.
Because these records tended to be saved for only a single fiscal year, the clay wasn't made to last, said Cosmopoulos [...].
"[...] Basically someone back then threw the tablet in the pit and then burned their garbage," he said. "This fire hardened and preserved the tablet." [...]
In addition to its sheer age, the artifact could provide insights about how ancient Greek kingdoms were organized and administered, he added. [...]
Found in the ruins of a second-tier town, the Iklaina tablet could indicate that literacy and bureaucracy during the late Mycenaean period were less centralized than previously thought.
Palaima added that the ability to read and write was extremely restricted during the Mycenaean period and was regarded by most people as "magical or mysterious."

Some of my co-workers still regard it as such.

***

People seem to be digging things up all over:

Italian researchers said Tuesday they will dig up bones in a Florence convent to try to identify the remains of a Renaissance woman long believed to be the model for the "Mona Lisa.

***

China is a strange place:

"The time-travel drama is becoming a hot theme for TV and films. But its content and the exaggerated performance style are questionable. Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty. The producers and writers are treating the serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no means be encouraged anymore."

And as you know, if there's anything we hate, it's those "made-up" time-travel stories, as opposed to the completely factual ones.

Cory Doctorow enlightens:

[...] Chinese people travel to ancient China and discover that it's not a bad place to be (this having some counter-revolutionary subtext). They've also prohibited production of "the Four Great Classical Novels", ("the four novels commonly counted by scholars to be the greatest and most influential of classical Chinese fiction"), on the grounds that the widespread adaptations of them take too many liberties with the original texts.
[...] Most of these time-travel dramas are based on real historical stories but with many newly added, and usually exaggerated elements to make it funny and more attractive. Nothing is off limits in this television genre. While some find it hilarious, others think the exaggeration and even ridiculous elements added into the story is a real source of annoyance and is a disrespectful for history.

Oliver Stone's lucky he isn't Chinese.

***

Kottke:

For the fight scenes in The Fighter, the producers hired a film crew that shoots real fights for HBO...and they shot all the fight scenes in three days instead of the industry standard 35 days. Here's Mark Wahlberg, the film's star and producer:
And what I kept telling everybody is that HBO does it in one take and they don't know what's going to happen and they never miss a thing. We have the luxury of showing them what we're going to do in the morning before we shoot it and doing it over and over and over again. So why do you need 20 days? For what? To jerk each other off? To touch up your makeup? To go in the trailer and take a nap?
We're not talking about putting the camera in there and saying, "OK, we're going to do a stunt punch here." No, we're going in there and beat the shit out of each other and we're going to make it real.

***

I'm generally unimpressed with "headlines of the day" but this one is unique:

Swedish flamingoes massacred in frenzied anteater attack

I also like this line within the story:

"The anteater is not a meat-eater, unless you consider ants meat..."

Never really thought about it.

***

Odds and ends

2011-04-11T21:21:00.002-07:00

Andrew Sullivan:

Annalee Newitz summarizes a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

A group of scientists used fMRI scans to study the brains of people dealing with being rejected, and compared them to the brains of people experiencing physical pain. They found that the exact same regions of the brain are involved in processing both experiences. For humans, social rejection is tantamount to literal injury.

And this helps explain why the psychological torture of human beings - their total isolation, threats to their families, mock executions and forced nudity is no less serious than the comic book variety. Which renders the role of psychologists in the Bush torture program all the more despicable.
***
Ronald Bailey reviews Dan Gardner's new book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, And You Can Do Better:

Gardner acknowledges his debt to political scientist Phililp Tetlock, who set up a 20-year experiment in which he enrolled nearly 300 experts in politics. Tetlock then solicited thousands of predictions about the fates of scores of countries and later checked how well they did. Not so well. Tetlock concluded that most of his experts would have been beaten by “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” Tetlock found that the experts wearing rose-tinted glasses “assigned probabilities of 65 percent to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15 percent of the time.” Doomsters did even worse: “They assigned probabilities of 70 percent to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12 percent of the time.”

***
And here's a brilliant improvisational idea from Tunisia for what to do with [Guantanamo] - turn it into an improvised art gallery:

The police station in the Tunis suburb of La Goulette stands deserted at its posh location near the seaside boardwalk, its walls blackened by smoke and fire and windows smashed.

For many Tunisians, this place was a symbol of Ben Ali's repressive regime and the old guard -- a place where bad things happened. [...]

The exhibition is put on by a collective of Tunisian artists and photographers called Artocracy in Tunisia who are aiming to bring the voices of the people back to the streets of the country, breathe new life into places like the police station in La Goulette and shed old images of government repression through a photography project called "Inside Out."

[...] For many years, the majority of portraits many Tunisians saw in the streets were those of ex-President Ben Ali and his predecessor Habib Bourguiba.

So the idea was born to put up portraits of 100 Tunisians from across the sociopolitical spectrum and ask each one of them what they want for the future of their country. According to a press release by Artocracy in Tunisia, portraits will be put on display in four Tunisian cities in public areas and in places that either played an important part in the uprising or are considered symbols of the repression.

***

Matt Yglesias:

Adam Serwer reports from Charles Murray’s “State of White America” address. Long story short, though, folks have gotten kind of soft:

[...] And the basic thing that went wrong was that President Lyndon Johnson’s extension of the American welfare state, undermined the essential virtue of the American people by making them soft, weak and lazy where once they were hard, strong and industrious. America’s decline can be traced to this moment. [...]

This put me in mind of Monica Potts’ review of Kay Hymowitz:

“Before [today], the fact is that primarily, a 20-year-old woman would have been a wife and a mother,” author Kay Hymowitz told the crowd of about 100 at the Manhattan Institute in New York City. Men would have been mowing lawns and changing the oil in their family sedans instead of playing video games and watching television. In previous decades, adults in their 20s and 30s were too busy with real life for such empty entertainment, Hymowitz says. [...]

Hymowitz’s argument, essentially, is that not only has feminism opened up new doors of opportunity to women, but it’s helped contribute to the growth of a society in which young men are less crushed down with family and household obligations and are spending more time enjoying themselves. Except she means this as a bad thing! In both cases the conservative conceit seems to be that a decline in human suffering is a bad thing because it leads to a corresponding decline in admirable anti-suffering effort. John Holbo memorably dubbed this Donner Party Conservatism.

This isn't a new phenomenon; back in high school (early 70s) one of the brainiacs (he really was a brainiac, tons smarter than I was) lamented that the country was going soft -- he yearned for another depression to toughen us up. A 17 year-old is allowed to feel that way but adults really should know better. Fascists.

***

We noted the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire last month. Turns out that it's not ancient history:

It turns out that a sweatshop in Bangladesh that made clothes for The Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, JC Penney, Target, and others, suffered an eerily Triangle-like disaster just a few months ago:

[...] Like in Bangladesh in December 2010 when 29 workers died after a fire swept through the Hameem garment factory. The workers were trapped inside because guards had been ordered to lock the gates in the event of a fire in order to prevent clothes from being stolen during the confusion. The factory made clothes for GAP.

Consumerist links a video interview of Charles Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights, who notes the parallels to Triangle, including the locked exits, low wages, and workers leaping to their deaths:

[...] The workers work twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. They get one day off a month. And they live in abject misery, in miserable hovels that are unimaginable. Bangladesh is now the third-largest exporter in the world of garments to the United States.

[... T]his is hardly an isolated event. One book put the factory-fires death toll at more than 300 from 1990 to 2005. Bangladeshi labor advocates put the toll at 400 just since 2006. But what’s particularly interesting for journalists is how the almost-nonexistent coverage of this story raises serious questions about what we know and how well the press keeps us informed about the consequences of our economy.
[...] The New York Times gave it 500 words and never revisited the story once it emerged which American companies had outsourced production there. [...]
I’ve talked before about how so-called free trade is all about arbitrage: Environmental arbitrage. Labor arbitrage. Regulatory arbitrage. Tax arbitrage.

Press arbitrage is no small factor, either. How disastrous would the PR have been for The Gap, Abercrombie, et al, if the factory with locked exits that killed twenty-nine workers sewing our clothes had been in the U.S. and not in Dhaka?

Think about that the next time you’re walking into The Gap, much less reporting a story on it.

***

This is making the rounds:

It’s an old, old story: the customers of a company renowned for decent treatment of its workers in its prosperous home country are shocked to learn of its ruthless exploitation of workers in a less-prosperous country where the laws make it harder for workers to defend themselves.

All that’s new is that the first-world country is Sweden and the third-world country is rural Virginia.

***

Another old (well, not really so old) story, how corporate ownership of news media affects reporting -- not of the parent corporations but of the government.

***

Symbolic logic is difficult (I can affirm that statement), but it gets pretty simple in at least one situation:

Our brains are specially designed to deal with cheating in social exchanges. The evolutionary psychology explanation is that [once] humans became good at cheating, they then had to become good at detecting cheating -- otherwise, the social group would fall apart.
Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of this can be seen with variations on what's known as the Watson selection task, named after the psychologist who first studied it. Back in the 1960s, it was a test of logical reasoning; today, it's used more as a demonstration of evolutionary psychology. [...]

When Wason first did this study, fewer than 10 percent of his subjects got it right. Others replicated the study and got similar results. The best result I've seen is "fewer than 25 percent." [...]
[But the] one variation of this task that people are surprisingly good at getting right is when the rule has to do with cheating and privilege. [...] Many people -- 65 to 80 percent -- get it right immediately. [...]
Researchers [...] have run this experiment with a variety of wordings and settings and on a variety of subjects: adults in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Hong Kong; Ecuadorian schoolchildren; and Shiriar tribesmen in Ecuador. The results are the same: people are bad at the Watson selection task, except when the wording involves cheating.
In the world of propositional calculus, there's absolutely no difference between a rule about traveling to Boston by plane and a rule about eating vegetables to get dessert. But in our brains, there's an enormous difference: the first is a arbitrary rule about the world, and the second is a rule of social exchange. It's of the form "If you take Benefit B, you must first satisfy Requirement R."
[...] Even as children, we intuitively notice when someone gets a benefit he didn't pay the cost for. [...] As adults, we might have learned that life isn't fair, but we still know who among our friends cheats in social exchanges. [...] At an airport, we might not notice the rule "If a plane is flying internationally, then it boards 15 minutes earlier than domestic flights." But we'll certainly notice who breaks the "If you board first, then you must be a first-class passenger" rule.

***

Joshua Keating:

Curious what the Marginal Revolution folks would make of Mexico's newest plan to encourage citizens to report money-laundering:

Under the new reward plan, those who report crimes of suspected money laundering – by phone, e-mail, or face-to-face – could receive up to 25 percent of the value of whatever is seized, be it money or land or goods. The exact amount would be determined by a special committee.

Some say that it, like the money laundering law, places citizens in charge of functions that the police or prosecutors should be carrying out.

“This moves the burden to the individual,” says Arturo Pueblita Fernandez, a professor of law at the Iberamerican University in Mexico City. “It is not a frontal attack on money launderers.”

So long as authorities aren't entirely crowdsourcing their efforts, I don't really see the problem with rewarding individuals courageous enough to report criminal activity at a level commensurate to the risk they're taking. The Christian Science Monitor's article also raises the possibility that drug gangs might use the program to undercut rivals. But as long as the government is keeping at least 75 percent of the money, it would seem to be in the state's long-term interests if the gangs entered a race to the bottom of ratting each other out.

***

A Must Read Article about a Muslim U.S. citizen arrested (and ultimately accepting a plea bargain) for supporting terrorism. It's a bit long, but here are a few highlights:

The "centerpiece" of that case was the testimony of a cooperating witness, Mohammed Junaid Babar. In the beginning of 2004, Babar, an acquaintance of Hashmi's from New York, asked to stay with him at his London apartment for two weeks. According to the government, the acquaintance had luggage with him, which he, the acquaintance, later delivered to the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda in South Waziristan, in Pakistan. In addition, Hashmi allegedly allowed Babar to use his cellphone to call conspirators in terrorist plots.

[...] FBI Assistant Director Mark J. Mershon publicly claimed, "[...] Syed Hashmi aided the enemy by supplying military gear to Al Qaeda." The government had caught a "quartermaster." Despite the sensationalism, the government had been forced to admit it was not actually accusing Hashmi of supplying military gear himself; "quartermastering" consisted of allowing an acquaintance with luggage to stay in his apartment. "Military gear" in the luggage amounted to raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks.

Babar himself had been arrested in 2004 on five charges of material support. He quickly cooperated with government authorities, who interviewed him in a midtown hotel, and he agreed to serve as a government witness in a number of terrorism cases in exchange for a reduced sentence. Out on bail since 2008, Babar would provide his last testimony at Fahad's trial. [...]
In the first months of detention, family members could visit him together and talk about their visits with friends and family. Fahad had a radio and could receive and read newspapers and magazines. He could shower outside of the view of the camera. His lawyer could talk freely with him and with others.

Five months later, that changed. Fahad was put under Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, which restrict a prisoner's contact with the outside world.

[...] After September 11, the Justice Department began using SAMs pretrial, with wide latitude to wall off terrorism suspects before they had been convicted of anything.

Fahad was allowed no contact with anyone outside his lawyer and, in very limited fashion, his parents—no calls, letters, or talking through the walls, because his cell was electronically monitored. He had to shower and relieve himself within view of the camera. [...] Allowed only one hour out of his cell a day, he had no access to fresh air but was forced to exercise in a solitary cage.

The government cited Hashmi's "proclivity for violence" as the reason for such harsh measures—even though he had no criminal record and was not charged with committing an actual act of violence or having any demonstrated reach outside of prison. Given the number of people convicted of a violent crime behind bars in the United States, "proclivity for violence" seemed an implausible justification for the harsh measures.

While challenging his extradition, Hashmi had been housed at Britain's notorious Belmarsh prison, [... no] complaint was ever made about his behavior there. (The British never charged him with any support to terrorism.) Similarly, there had been no complaint about his behavior in his first five months at the correctional center.

But he was not cooperating with American authorities. The U.S. attorney had made it clear that this could all go away if he would. [...] Much like other forms of torture, his treatment was a coercive punishment for not doing what the government wanted.

Special Administrative Measures come directly from the attorney general. Used pretrial, they seem to be reserved for Muslim defendants. On May 31, 2009, as Hashmi sat in isolation, Scott Roeder, a Christian militant, walked into a Wichita church and shot and killed an abortion doctor—an act of premeditated murder. Some anti-abortion activists celebrated and wrote to Roeder in jail. Some even came to visit. Roeder was not put under SAMs. Meanwhile, Fahad received his first punishment, for "unauthorized gestures" and insubordination, after he practiced martial arts in his cell. He lost his limited family visits for three months.
[...] Attorney General Eric Holder renewed Fahad's SAMs in October 2009. [...]
The use of prolonged solitary confinement is increasingly out of step with world opinion and practice, and is deemed torture by international standards. On July 8, 2010, the European Court of Human Rights kept in place an injunction barring the extradition of four terrorism suspects to the United States, based on the inhumane conditions in so-called Supermax prisons, including the use of postconviction SAMs. Evidence of Hashmi's pretrial treatment formed part of the background for the decision.

Censure is more difficult within the United States. In a particularly troubling twist, detailed criticism of SAMs, in itself, becomes illegal. Everyone in direct contact with a person under SAMs is bound by the SAMs and not allowed to talk about any conversation with the detainee, thus making it illegal to speak out against the precise damage of these measures. [...]
Under material-support bans, all sorts of constitutionally protected activities can be classified as suspect, if not criminal. Material-support charges require no criminal act nor direct contact with terrorists, just the knowing "support" of a foreign terrorist organization. They often focus on small acts and religious and political associations, which take on sinister meaning as ostensible manifestations of forthcoming terrorism.

So-called "jihadist" ideas and membership in radical Islamic political groups thus become indications of "support," rather than constitutionally protected speech and association. While a student, Fahad had drawn the attention of authorities as a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun. (Despite its troubled history in England, the group has not been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, nor has membership in the organization been deemed illegal here.) [...] He drew the attention of Time magazine and CNN for comments he made at a student meeting at Brooklyn College praising John Walker Lindh, and calling America "the biggest terrorist in the world." [...] Though well outside mainstream political opinion, his activities should have fallen squarely within the protections of the U.S. Constitution. [...]
The government had no evidence it was prepared to introduce in court outside of Babar's word that Babar had access to or delivered anything to Al Qaeda. Key to its case, then, were Fahad's controversial political beliefs. The government was prepared to introduce tapes of his political activities at trial, tapes that indicated considerable surveillance of his activism as a college student, years before Babar's visit to his apartment. [...]

Stunned by the rights abuses happening but a few miles away, two colleagues who had also had him as a student and I circulated a Statement of Concern calling attention to "the conditions of his detention, constraints on his right to a fair trial, and the potential threat his case poses to the First Amendment rights of others." Over the coming months, more than 550 scholars and writers signed the statement, which we sent to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District—and dozens of journalists and local officials.

With the exception of The Chronicle and The Village Voice's longtime civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, no journalists widely reported Fahad's treatment. [... T]he major civil-liberties organizations also remained silent. Working hard to get terrorism suspects out of Guantánamo into the federal system, they did not feel they could turn around and highlight how unfair the federal system was. [...]

In the winter of 2009, we sent the statement to President Obama and Attorney General Holder. The only answer we received from a constitutional-scholar-turned-president came addressed to "Ms. Jeanne Theoharis and Friends," thanking us for "taking the time to share your views." For the next 15 months, the Obama administration made no changes in Fahad's conditions, in its commitment to secret evidence, and in its use of political activities as evidence of criminal intent. [...]
We attended Fahad's pretrial hearings [...].

To begin to break the silence, I wrote an article for The Nation. A movement of New Yorkers began to grow. [...]

Progressive and international news media began to take an interest. The Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International USA, and the Council on American Islamic Relations-NY put out an open statement raising concerns about Fahad's conditions. [...]
The organizing campaign 500@500 called on people to attend Fahad's trial at the federal district courthouse. That alarmed the government, which filed a motion citing public interest in the case as questionable and dangerous. A 500@500 poster became the government's Exhibit A. The U.S. attorney explained that "jurors will see in the gallery of the courtroom a significant number of the defendant's supporters, naturally leading to juror speculation that at least some of these spectators might share the defendant's violent radical Islamic leanings." Prosecutors asked for jurors to be granted anonymity and requested extra security for them. Promoting guilt by implication, such measures would have signaled to the jury that Fahad was dangerous before he stepped into the courtroom. [...]

One day later, on April 27, Fahad agreed to a plea bargain of one count of conspiring to provide material support. He made the decision after not seeing anyone but his lawyers in more than five months, not having access to the religious support of an imam, and after nearly three years of solitary confinement.
A day before trial, the government dropped the other three charges. That it did so suggests that it had applied draconian pretrial measures, not because it considered Fahad a high-level terrorist, but to induce his cooperation or conviction.

Six weeks later, Judge Preska sentenced him to 15 years in prison. At the sentencing, it became clear that Fahad posed a threat not only because of luggage brought to his apartment, but because of his ideology. Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan McGuire called it "an ideology of violence and intolerance," noting that "not every person who supports Al Qaeda is going to pull a trigger or throw a bomb or launch an attack." Citing Fahad's "anti-American jihadist ideology," the judge echoed that McCarthyesque logic of deterrence. [...]
In August, Fahad was transferred to the federal high-security prison in Florence, Colo., and in March moved into its Supermax ADX facility, the most draconian prison in the federal system, criticized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for its inhumane conditions. He remains in solitary confinement, still under SAMs, which was renewed again by Attorney General Holder in October.

Meanwhile, in December, Babar was sentenced to "time served" (four and a half years out of a possible 70). The judge cited his "exceptional" service and noted that he "began co-operating even before his arrest"—raising questions internationally as to whether he had worked for the American government before his apprehension. [...]
Over the past three years, I have done many interviews about Fahad's case. Journalists ask, How do you know he is innocent? Rights do not require known innocence, I point out. What do you say after the plea? To one who teaches about civil rights, I explain, it is humbling to see those rights shredded a few miles from my classroom. Among the hardest things to teach as a historian are the outsized fears, political motivations, and economic interests that rendered good people silent in the face of government repression, civil-rights violations, internment, and redbaiting.

We have freedom of speech and build bridges of dialogue and debate, I teach my students, and what makes that hard is that we have to hear things we do not like and be confronted with truths and opinions far removed from our own.

But those lessons are not upheld in our public culture, which has drawn arbitrary, silencing constrictions around the speech and association of Muslim-Americans. While Christian and Jewish political dissents regularly enter American public debate (militant Christian anti-abortion rhetoric, for instance, may be censured but is not criminalized), Islamic political dissent condemning U.S. practices becomes "subject to ferocious penalties," as Randolph Bourne decried long ago, and Fahad had quoted in his paper.

***

Political quotes and links

2011-04-11T20:28:00.002-07:00

Ilya Somin:

[...] extensive evidence shows that most voters both know very little about public policy and do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know. Elsewhere, I have argued that such ignorance and bias is actually rational. [...] But not every form of rational behavior is morally defensible. Sometimes, rational individual behavior leads to terrible collective outcomes. Consider the case of air pollution, where individuals might rationally choose not to limit their emission of dangerous pollutants because any one person’s behavior has only a tiny effect on overall air quality in the area. Widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political system. [...]

***

Mark Kleiman listens to my senator:

John Kyl said on the floor of the United States Senate – the world’s greatest deliberative body, we’re told – that “abortion is well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.” In fact, it’s under 3%.

Challenged on the lie, Kyl later said that his claim “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

Well, that sums it up, doesn’t it? One of our two great political parties is made up of people whose statements are not intended to be factual.

The 3% is disputable, depending on what one measures; but even the highest estimate put forward by PP's critics is 33%. And don't forget that Kyl has a reputation in D.C. as one of the most "policy wonkish* Republicans. Sheesh.

***

Allegedly moderate conservative pundit Ross Douthat criticizes the crazier wing of his party and keeps expecting old-fashioned, sane Republicans to save the day. Jon Chait takes him to task:

Douthat's ideal is very pleasant. I would very much like it to come true. But it's sort of like supporting la Cosa Nostra because you like the concept of a group dedicated to helping down-on-their-luck Italian-Americans.

***

Mark Thompson on the blurred distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor.

Joseph Stiglitz's look at extreme wealth concentration. An important essay. It's pretty much summed up in this easy chart.

Unbelievable good news in Texas! Houston's D.A. is pursuing real justice. (The Dallas D.A. started doing something similar a few years ago)

As if Japan doesn't have enough to worry about, they now have to deal with something called "liquefaction."

Now that that top of an airplane came off during a flight we can read about the safety inspections our planes get overseas. Somehow, I feel a little better knowing that I'll be on a European carrier next week (but I probably shouldn't).

As long as flying is topic, here's another scanner rant.

"Over 250" (why can't reporters ever give us an exact number?) legal scholars formally protest the treatment (torture) of Bradley Manning as he awaits trial. Glenn Greenwald is all over this case.

John Thompson, the exonerated death-row inmate whose $14m jury judgment was overturned by SCOTUS as they voted to give dishonest prosecutors even greater immunity from their crimes, writes on the NYT op-ed page. Scott Lemieux comments.

Chairs and stuff

2011-04-07T21:44:00.002-07:00

Folding steel grocery bags!

Although the design structurally supports steel, other rigid materials like brass, cardboard, etc. could work just as well. This is definitely going to help the shipping companies, as cardboard boxes can be stored easily now, without having to open the bottom side.

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Rubber bands with hooks! They're like mini bungee cords.

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A cutting board for the obsessive/compulsive cook:

If you are one of those folks for whom things must be “just so”, then this cutting board is for you!

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Collapsible chair!

Flux Chair goes from flat to chair in only ten seconds. Weighing in at only 10.6 pounds, Flux Chairs are light enough to carry around and strong enough to support up to 352 pounds. When folded, the Flux built-in handle makes it easy to transport the chair from the patio to the park and everywhere in between.

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Watch the iconic Eames Lounge Chair come to life!

The approachable aesthetic came from the chair’s inspirational source: Charles’s vision was “for a chair with the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt.”

**

Here's an older (1934) do-it-yourself chair:

This furniture-in-a-box concept predated Ikea by almost a decade. It didn't sell.

Here's a new take on that old idea:

Arts and sciences

2011-04-05T22:20:00.002-07:00

If I were properly retired or had a healthier financial future then I would do lots of crap like this.

Why do CDs hold only about 80 minutes of music?

A matrix of the world's worst jobs -- ever! Hard to choose between Alewife, Leech Gatherer, or Wool Fuller.

Record jacket of the day:

KFC's food in Thailand looks pretty darn good.

Paean to a literary hoaxster and pornographer.

Peter Paul Rubens, man of mystery.

I generally ignore scientific breakthroughs, they rarely pan out in real time -- but I think this could be big.

Bats appear to be rather important to the ecosystem and (surprise, surprise) in danger.

Sentence of the day: "Schwing and Putzmeister once had a legal battle over something called the Bastardring."

Wow, more science: "In a symbiotic union more complete than any previously found in vertebrates, the common spotted salamander lives with algae inside its cells."

Current Events links

2011-04-04T20:27:00.002-07:00

A federal budget quiz.

A good report on media piracy (and its hype).

Last look at the latest SCOTUS atrocity and Scalia's part in it.

If this is true, Obama really is Bush II (or III, not sure how that works in this context).

Greenwald muses on the recent unpleasantness of Koran burning and its aftermath.

State of the union

2011-04-03T22:57:00.002-07:00

Steve Benen:

Rutgers University paid Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi" $32,000 to deliver a speech. Rutgers paid Toni Morrison $30,000 to deliver a commencement address. Snooki has a reality show; Morrison has a Nobel prize in literature. And civilization suffers another painful setback.

***

DougJ:

Southern Beale has a good summary of what this means:
[O]ne Nashville-based lobbyist says paid “grassroots” movements are becoming a part of every major civic project.
Southern Beale counts the ways:
• It’s been revealed that many of the “real people” who phone in to talk radio programs are actually paid actors reading from scripts.
• Candidates for office have hired temp workers from staffing agencies to hold campaign signs and look like supporters.

• Corporate sockpuppets working for D.C. lobbyists are given phony titles at made-up front groups, then write op-eds, letters, and even make personal appearances to promote their clients’ viewpoint.

• Political campaigns pay thousands of dollars to promote certain candidates and positions via paid professional blog commenters.

• Campaigns routinely hire ghost writers to pen Letters To The Editor as “real citizens.”
The next step, of course, is fake threats from your opponents.

They've already gone there.

***

Zaid Jilani:

During the height of the Iraq war, the U.S. media paid close attention to troop deaths and fatalities, often making casualties among American soldiers leading stories in newspapers and on the airwaves. As ThinkProgress previously noted, the American press has essentially withdrawn from covering the war in Afghanistan, with the Pew Center finding that the media only devoted four percent of its coverage to the war during 2010.
[...] As ThinkProgress previously reported, the FY2011 cost of the Afghan war is $113 billion, approximately 40,000 times the cost of NPR’s federal grant money that Republicans have sought to defund and enough money to fund the employment of 1.9 million firefighters for a year.

Yet it is the toll among human beings that is the most incalculable. As troops deaths fail to be reported in the major media, icasualties.org continues to track the deaths among American and coalition forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. According to its well-sourced data, 592 American soldiers have fallen in battle in Afghanistan since President Obama announced the surge of American troops in that country on December 1, 2009. [...]
These deaths do not account for the casualties among Afghan civilians and combatants, which are of course far greater but are difficult to estimate.

***

Digby:

Transocean Ltd. gave its top executives bonuses for achieving the "best year in safety performance in our company's history" – despite the explosion of its oil rig that killed 11 people and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
No biggie. And anyway, where are you going to find good people if you don't pay them?
Safety accounts for a quarter of the executives' total cash bonuses. The total bonus for CEO Steve Newman last year was $374,062.
According to calculations by The Associated Press, the total value the company assigned to Newman's compensation package was $5.8 million.

That figure includes an $850,000 base salary – a 34 percent increase from the prior year; perquisites of $622,057, which includes housing and vacation allowances, among other things; and the $374,062 bonus. Also included in the figure are stock options valued at $1.9 million and deferred shares valued at $2 million when those awards were granted in March 2010.
I'm sure he deserved every penny. [...] I don't think we want to live in a world where CEOs are afraid of what might happen if they fail to do their jobs or their risks don't pay off do you?

There's also this:

BP is seeking permission to continue drilling at 10 existing deepwater production and development wells in the [Gulf] region in July in exchange for adhering to stricter safety and supervisory rules, said one of the officials. An agreement covering existing wells could be reached within the next month...

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Political cartoon of the week:

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Andrew Sullivan:

Harry Reid's comment that "we'll look into" the despicable Christianism of Terry Jones unnerved me. Butters unnerved me some more:

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Congress might need to explore the need to limit some forms of freedom of speech, in light of Tennessee pastor Terry Jones’ Quran burning, and how such actions result in enabling U.S. enemies.

"I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war," Graham told CBS' Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” Sunday.

And there you have a classic example of how warfare abroad can curtail liberties at home. Koran burning is obviously a disgusting act of disrespect and incivility. But that very kind of act is what the First Amendment is designed to protect. And we should also remember that this war has no end, and that therefore the liberties taken away by wartime are permanently taken away.

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Odds and ends

2011-04-02T21:52:00.002-07:00

Clever convertible chair/bench:

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I didn't know that bicycles advanced the feminist cause:

National Geographic‘s Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way) tells the riveting story of how the two-wheel wonder pedaled forward the emancipation of women in late-nineteenth-century America and radically redefined the normative conventions of femininity.
To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.” ~ Munsey’s Magazine, 1896
From allowing young people to socialize without the chaperoning of clergymen and other merchants of morality to finally liberating women from the constraints of corsets and giant skirts (the “rational dress” pioneered by bike-riding women cut the weight of their undergarments to a “mere” 7 pounds), the velocipede made possible previously unthinkable actions and interactions that we now for granted...
Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” ~ Susan B. Anthony, 1896

***

Australia is going all out (or is it all under) to forestall the Tasmanian devil's extinction.

Scientists across Australia are working to untangle the genetic puzzle behind a fatal disease decimating the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. [...]

The disease had all the characteristics of a virus. But last year geneticists made a sobering discovery. Devil facial tumor disease, or DFTD, was no virus, but a highly infectious cancer — one of only three communicable cancers known to medicine. [...]

Australians are rallying around this nasty, screeching beast that once was the most reviled animal in the country. There are foods and wines branded with the devil's likeness; bars and coffee shop signs feature caricatures of a snarling devil, as does the official logo of the Tasmania Parks & Wildlife Service. [...]

[...] Australians [...] are getting the message: It may be a devil, but it's our devil. [...]

There's also this. Wildlife stewards in Australia's island state of Tasmania have at least one biological crime to atone for: Conservationists worldwide haven't forgiven officials here for allowing the world's last remaining thylacine — the Tasmanian tiger — to die in a concrete cell in Hobart Zoo in 1936. [...]

"No one, politicians to scientists, wants to lose the devil on their watch," Belov said. "Everyone is really desperate to make sure it doesn't happen."

***

I always found escalators more fun than elevators, now it turns out that they are also more virtuous:

Building on research showing the power of metaphors to shape our thinking, Sanna and his colleagues noted that height is often used as a metaphor for virtue: moral high ground, God on high, looking up to good people, etc. If people were primed to think about height, they wondered, might people be more virtuous?
In a series of four different studies, the authors found consistent support for their predictions. [...]
Overall these studies show remarkable consistency, linking height and different prosocial behaviors -- i.e., donations, volunteering, compassion, and cooperation. While we may be inclined to think that our behaviors are the product of comprehensive thought processes, carefully weighing the pros and cons of alternatives, these results clearly show that this is not always the case.

[...] What the present research adds is that unconscious processes may also be important in determining whether we will act to help others. Sanna’s work expands a multilevel perspective of prosocial behavior by recognizing that even the most subtle of situational cues (e.g., metaphorical devices that arouse relevant unconscious thought) may make people more helpful.

***

A post about... airport carpeting?

Those travellers who turn their eyes away from the skies [...] and look down at the ground of their immediate present, will be richly rewarded. For unbeknownst to many beneath each traveller's feet is a knotted kaleidoscope of shapes and colours, a flat-weaved cornucopia of scintillating signs and sigils, a polypropylene sea awash with dark and hidden beauty.

I speak, of course, of the airport carpet.

[...] In their geometric precision, sensitivity to colour, and ability to absorb and hide stains, airport carpets are aesthetically unique. These aren't carpets but canvases upon which we walk. [...]

The fact is that carpets are never incidental, yet despite their importance they face an uncertain future. Many airport authorities are tearing up carpet and replacing it with linoleum, terrazzo and wood. [...]

In the wake of 9/11, security became such an issue in airports around the world that carpet manufacturers found it increasingly difficult not just to install carpets but to maintain them. [...]

When it comes to airport carpeting the terrorists won. There is a grim irony in this, for if airports can be seen as temples to travel, gateways to other worlds, then airport carpets are the vast prayer mats upon which we all genuflect.

The post also has some samples -- including Sky Harbor!

The treacherous vertical wind vortices that once made PHX one of the most inhospitable airports in the world are here celebrated upon its carpet. Approximately 60 aircraft have been lost since the airport opened in 1935. Planes keep coming though, drawn both by the challenge of trying to land in one piece and by Phoenix's excellent Mexican food.

I have no idea what this is about; if there have been accidents they must have occurred before my memory. There have been no fatal accidents at or near Sky Harbor that I can find on the web.

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Classic record jacket of the day:

Obituaries

2011-04-01T22:08:00.002-07:00

George Tooker:

One of the most acclaimed painters of his generation, George Tooker (1920-2011) possessed an originality and depth of vision that is unsurpassed in modern American art. For over sixty years, he has been highly regarded for his luminous and often enigmatic work. [...]

Tooker died at his home in Hartland, Vermont, on Sunday, March 27 at the age of ninety. [...]

His beautifully haunting works are done in egg tempera, a traditional Renaissance medium that produces a rich, lustrous quality yet requires meticulous application. Over the course of his long career, he created fewer than 155 paintings.

Tooker first came to prominence for imaginative visions that expressed the uncertainty of the Cold War era. [...] He was very involved with the Civil Rights Movement as well, in one instance marching in Selma, Alabama, with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1965, and frequently addressed issues of race and oppression in his work.

In addition to his engagement with social commentary, Tooker also created strikingly beautiful paintings of a more personal nature, many of which are concerned with states of consciousness, mysterious meditative realms between sleep and wakefulness. [...] “I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy,” he once said.

The Subway, Tooker's best known painting.

***

Harry Coover:

Harry Coover, creator of Super Glue, died on Saturday at age 94. Coover stumbled upon the chemical, called cyanoacrylate, in 1942 while developing gun sights for Eastman Kodak. From the Washington Post:

“The damn problem was everything was sticking to everything else,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2005. “We had a hard time using it in molds.” [...]
When a colleague permanently bonded the lenses of an expensive optical instrument with a droplet of the liquid, Dr. Coover had an epiphany. [...]
“It suddenly struck me that what we had was not a casting material but a super glue,” he said in 2005.

***

Ralph Mooney:

Mr. Ralph Mooney, master of the steel guitar, died on Sunday at the age of 82. [...]
Mooney was go-to guy for pedal steel guitar during the mid-20th century. He was one of those quiet professional session musicians who help to create the sound behind big name singers. You've probably heard his work before, and just not realized it. During the 50s, 60s and 70s, he recorded and played with probably every country singer of consequence, from Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, to Wanda Jackson [...].

Recorded with a fellow session musician, guitarist James Burton, Corn Pickin really shows off Mooney's skills.

Bonus: This 2003 interview with Ralph Mooney is short, but also pretty damn adorable. Mooney, apparently, had a good sense of humor. Scroll down to where they start talking about his hair loss for a great, sassy one-liner.

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Pictures and more

2011-04-01T20:45:00.002-07:00

Coming up at auction -- sex, drugs, but no rock 'n roll:

It is amongst the rarest of all items of drug literature, virtually unknown to scholars and collectors until now. It is Kokain Eine Moderne Revue, a literary journal published in Vienna 1915-1925. Only five issues were published.

Kokain featured many contributions by women, and was highlighted by the cover art, graphic design and erotic lithography of Stefan Eggeler.

The producers of Assassin of Youth, the classic 1937 anti-marijuana exploitation film directed by Elmer Clifton, didn't miss a trick to ballyhoo the movie. Here, they provided an ingenious, if not diabolical, way to promote it with every strike of a match to light legal cigarettes, customized for local theaters.

Per usual, the anti-drug message is contradicted by a powerfully overt erotic charge. Sex sells. And sex sells illegal drugs.

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Pictogram movie posters:

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A bunch of aerial photographs:

Ivory Coast; A worker takes a break on top of bales of cotton.

Rheris Valley, Morocco

Borneo, Indonesia

“Tree of Life”, Kenya

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park

Resolute Bay, Canada

Ogooué-Maritime Province, Gabon

Chuquicamata Mine, Chile

Taponas, France

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Now, something for the ladies:

Designer Ryan Novelline has created a smashing gown out of Golden Books: "The skirt is comprised entirely of the illustrations from the books sewn together with metallic gold thread, and the bodice is made from the books' foil spines. Both the bodice and skirt have tape backing for reinforcement."

And something for the guys -- a very cheap Wolverine costume:

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Get saved:

Over at Collectors Weekly, Jim Linderman gives us an inspirational taste of his amazing collection of old timey religious tracts. His new book, Old-Time-Religion, presents his collection of religious ephemera. While some of the fearmongering and artwork is a delight, "most of these now dated screeds are racist, homophobic, and offensive to any religion not one’s own," Jim says.

Buildings

2011-04-01T19:53:00.003-07:00

Manhattan's Japan Society building is now the state's youngest landmark:

The structure, designed by Junzo Yoshimura and George G. Shimamoto and first completed in 1971, translates traditional Japanese architectural forms into a modernist idiom, bowing to neither but combining the two languages in an innovative and complex way.

I was there sometime in the late 70s/early 80s and liked it a lot -- partly due to a fantastic lobby exhibit of Japanese kites.

Now the bad news:

Beyond a rising death toll of over 10,800, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan has also damaged a current total of 353 Japanese cultural landmarks, including temples, historic sites and iconic landscapes called “places of scenic beauty.” The Matsushima area, north of Sendai, is among the worst hit in terms of cultural damage.

Here is the famous Matsushima Zuigan-ji Temple, which suffered damage:

This, though, is encouraging:

THE last-standing remains of a medieval castle in Lincolnshire will be opened up to the public for the first time.

The South Kyme Tower once formed one of the four corners of a castle, which was built on a Saxon site.

It is believed that the 14th century castle was once visited by Robin Hood and was built by a knight whose signature is on the Magna Carta.

Here's a (4 minute) look at Zaha Hadid's new Chinese opera house:

Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

The story of the Nob Hill spite fence:

In 1878, railroad millionaire Charles Crocker decided to buy up the lots surrounding his mansion on San Francisco’s Nob Hill to improve his view of the surrounding vistas. He reached agreements with all the neighbors except for German undertaker Nicholas Yung, who refused to sell.

[Crocker's] solution was pure spite: He built a 40-foot fence around Yung’s cottage on three sides, spoiling his view in hopes that he would sell. The fence can be seen behind the central mansion in this photo; only the chimneys of Yung’s house project above it.

“How gloomy our house became, how sad,” Yung’s daughter later wrote. “All we could see out our windows was the blank wood of the rich man’s fury. … The flowers in the garden all died, and our lawn turned brown, while inside the house everything felt perpetually damp.”

Yung held out nonetheless — according to some reports he mounted a 10-foot coffin atop the wall facing Crocker’s house — and the two maintained a senseless deadlock for years. Yung died in 1880 and Crocker in 1888; only then, when the mansion was sold to a new owner, did Yung’s heirs relent and sell their lot.

A series of amazing outdoor murals from all over; here's a taste...

Quebec:

Toronto:

Niagara Falls (duh):

California (?):

And lastly but not leastly, Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura has won this year's Pritzker Prize. Here is some of his work:

political notes (aka "Bad Republicans")

2011-04-01T14:56:00.002-07:00

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A short history of GOP vote suppression. The unifying theme seems to be preventing imaginary vote fraud.

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Scott Lemieux on the latest Supreme Court atrocity:

Let’s say you’re a DA, and your office has an extensive record of disregarding constitutional requirements that relevant evidence be disclosed to defendants and their counsel. This leads to things like a man sitting on death row for 14 years because you don’t turn over evidence that would have proven his innocence. You might be, understandably, subject to a jury verdict for damages based on your gross rights violations. But don’t worry, the Roberts Court will be there to protect you! As Blackstone must have said, better that one hundred innocent people be convicted than one DA be held liable for violating people’s constitutional rights.

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Libby Spencer:

Every day, I keep remembering my friend, who counseled sitting out 2010 to teach the Dems a lesson, asking how much damage could the crazy cons do in two years. It's only been three months...

Mark Kleiman:

First, Joe Klein tells a simple, straightforward truth:

This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner.

Then, having demonstrated that even apparently sane people like Romney and Pawlenty wind up talking like gibbering idiots when they seek the Republican Presidential nomination, Klein concludes … that someone apparently sane, such as Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush, needs to get into the race.

This reflects what the social psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error”: attributing behavior to character rather than to situation. If Daniels or Bush got into the race, he would be forced to sound just like the rest of the lunatics. (As one cable news talking-head said about Huckabee’s rantings on Obama’s upbringing, this is what happens to a party when the fringe becomes the base.)

As Logan Pearsall Smith wrote, you can no more be rich and not behave as the rich behave than you can drink all day and not be drunk. And you can’t seek the GOP Presidential nomination without behaving like a GOP Presidential candidate. In that role, a willingness to mouth hateful nonsense isn’t a character flaw; it’s a bona fide occupational qualification. No point trying to change Republican candidates unless you can change Republican voters.

George Zornick:

Today, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) will announce deep cuts to programs that help the developmentally disabled in his state. Scott will invoke his “emergency powers” to impose a 15 percent cut to the rates charged by group home workers and case workers that help the 30,000 Floridians with cerebral palsy, autism, and Down Syndrome.

[...]

Scott says the cuts are necessary to address a $170 million deficit in the Agency for Persons with Disabilities — but at the same time, he is also proposing $1.5 billion in corporate tax cuts and $1.4 billion more in property tax cuts.
Even more galling, today — the same day his cuts are announced — Scott is scheduled to appear at a Special Olympics Torch Run with his wife and other state officials.

The ACLU blog:

On December 23, 2010, Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was suffering from a major depressive disorder, attempted to take her own life. Friends found her in time and persuaded her to get help. Six days later, Shuai underwent cesarean surgery and delivered a premature newborn girl who, tragically, died four days later.
On March 14, 2011, Shuai was arrested, jailed, and charged with murder and attempted feticide. Had Shuai, who is being represented by National Advocates for Pregnant Women and local attorneys, not been pregnant when she attempted suicide, she would not have been charged with any crime at all.

[...] The state is misconstruing the criminal laws in this case in such a way that any pregnant woman could be prosecuted for doing (or attempting) anything that may put her health at risk, regardless of the outcome of her pregnancy.

That's right: according to the ways the laws are being applied here, the state of Indiana believes that any pregnant woman who smokes or lives with a smoker, who works long hours on her feet, who is overweight, who doesn't exercise, or who fails to get regular prenatal care, is a felon. [...]

Allowing the government to [...] send them to jail when they disapprove of a woman's behavior, would essentially reduce pregnant women to second-class citizens by denying them the basic constitutional rights enjoyed by the rest of us.

Moreover, what does it say about our society — about our obsession with incarceration and using the criminal justice system to treat public health issues [...] — that we would give a life sentence to a woman who tried to kill herself, just because she did so, in a moment of utter despair and distress, at the end of a wanted pregnancy? Is this (or any) punishment really appropriate here? [...]

If, as a society, we truly cared about healthy moms and babies, our focus would be on how we can support pregnant women, not how we can manipulate our criminal laws, and undermine basic constitutional principles, to find new ways to punish them.

***

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