I'm underemployed (and recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout and other health problems), and also available as a paid writer or researcher. If you feel like reading this account, if you'd like & this -- December 19th, 2005 update --
and if you like my blog, and would like to support it by helping me eat (it's a hobby, but I cherish it), and maybe even afford prescriptions --
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Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual; and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The guinea pig is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this lutefisk.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 339
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals."
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Harry Warner, Jr., Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
MichaelMooreWatch.org: Maybe that's what Gary Farber should rename his site, instead of arpagandalf or whatever.
-- Matt Welch
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
I WOKE UP FROM A NAP TO FIND I was linked here, by the way. Am I D-list, or E-list, though?
Isn't Sgt. 1st Class Michael Pratt a hero? Also, significant to the above, this post points an accusatory finger at the blogosphere for not linking. Taken with recent complaints about the A List bloggers keeping an "old boys club," I see this as a continuation of my theory that we are in the midst of a backlash against A listers. The A list has blended into the mainstream media and are tasting their own medicine.
I HAVE YOU NOW. I gotta say that, thanks to your kind donations (it's from you, right?), I splurged $4.99 yesterday for, along with all that food sh-t, a copy of the DVD Clone Wars, aka 2.5 (well, to me, and I'm trying to spread it), and that's it's, as I suspected from downloads, the best Star Wars ever.
THIS IS QUITE HORRIBLE. I really wish I believed in prayer. Instead, I can only hope with all my heart that the Russian submariners and their two passengers are rescued.
Read The Rest Scale: hey, if you were trapped in a submarine running out of air on the bottom of the ocean... well, you probably wouldn't have whether people blogged it on the top of your mind. But anyway.
8/05/2005 02:45:00 PM|permanent link| |
0 comments
STEVEN VINCENT. Nick Gillespie has a lovely remembrance here.
Read The Rest Scale: hey, do you want people to read about you when you're dead?
Outrage grows to even greater bounds beyond no bounds. Infinity upon infinity. I feel shamed.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, with Sharon calling it "a sinful act by a bloodthirsty terrorist."
Indeed.
Magen David Adom ambulances evacuated the wounded to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.
GOTTA LOVE THIS. It took a frakload of time to load, but ya gotta. Whomever did this for NASA is brilliant.
View The Rest Scale: yes. Via my pal Tim Kyger via e-mail. Chills, man. Chills.
More, please.
This is us. This is who we are. This is what we must do.
ADDENDUM: If anyone notices the message at the top of the blog, thanks. (Hasn't happened yet, but we can hope.)
LATER ADDENDA: No, not a single person did. Sometimes hope fails. (There was a single donation, which I'm most grateful for, but do not attribute to this post.)
8/04/2005 03:18:00 PM|permanent link| |
9 comments
SCORPIONS. Jeebus. They gave them Hind helicopters? The fricking Iraqi Army still hasn't gotten the Hungarian (Russian) tanks that are on the way, yet, or any significant number of armored vehicles of any sort, and we've outfitted the death squa-- er, paramilitary with Hinds?
Bloody hell.
I'm nauseated for a whole new reason, it turns out.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, asked if he was satisfied with the information he received on the unit, said, "Yes -- if it existed." But he added: "We're not spending a lot of time going back and dissecting tactical programs."
WHICH RING? It's always interesting when this domain turns up in your referrer logs, isn't it?
pentagon.mil
Nothing terribly unusual, but we welcome our alien master readers in the big building! Um, could you speak to someone about this whole "torture" thing, praps? It's going a bit too far, don't you think?
8/04/2005 01:33:00 PM|permanent link| |
5 comments
SCATTERED BLECHNESS, WITH A CHANCE OF SHOWERS. I'm afraid I'm feeling on the icky/ill side so far today, so forecasts indicate light blogging until this clears up. Have no fear, I shall MacArthur!
8/04/2005 01:22:00 PM|permanent link| |
0 comments
FAITH OF THE HEART. An awful lot of Trek fans, quite likely a majority, hated the Enterprise theme song, the first Star Trek theme music with lyrics, but someone at NASA didn't:
The crew began the day waking up at 10:09 p.m. CDT to "Where My Heart Will Take Me," the theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise. The song, composed by Dennis McCarthy, was selected for the crew as a surprise dedication from the Deputy Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale. The International Space Station Expedition 11 crew of Sergei Krikalev and John Phillips woke 30 minutes later.
The official NASA account started off with this picture:
I bet only a minority of readers know that Gene Roddenbery actually wrote lyrics to the original Star Trek theme (so he could claim half the profits from the song; Roddenbery was not exactly the Utterly Wonderful Man some fans delude themselves he was, to put it mildly).
Oh, and since I'm a better source of info than NASA, I'll point out that their claim that Dennis McCarthy wrote the song is wrong.
Lyrics by Diane Warren Vocal by Russell Watson
More here, if you give a quatloo. Remember: Amygdala is the only trustworthy newsource in the Galaxy.
The Army captain appeared confused. "You're using 'sledgehammer' figuratively?" he asked the enlisted soldier sitting before him.
"No sir," the soldier replied, lifting his hands about 15 inches apart. "The handle of a sledgehammer, about this big . . . to assault the detainees with."
For Sgt. 1st Class Michael Pratt it would have been far easier to look away.
It's grand to see that almost no one has linked to this story (two little-known blogs at the time I post this). (I can't help noticing no one linked to either of my previous two posts on the story, either.)
FRICK! FRICK! FRICK! My PayPal button has disappeared from view in the header above in my Firefox, and no matter what I do, I can't get it back. It appears via IE. I've recreated the code and cut and repasted it. It always shows up in "preview" for the template, but when I load the actual blog, nada. This is damned important. What's wrong? What can I do? Anyone? Help!
(I appear to have managed to insert the "e-mail" form into the word "PayPal" in the header, as a vastly inferior work around, but where's my damn button?!?)
FOLLOW-UP: Weird. I can see the button in the header when I refresh the page, but not if I empty the cache and load the page. I don't understand, but this is where my "knowing squat about HTML" comes in. Can you see the button?
I guess I've broken my cool front about being dismayed at only having two donations since the new button went up. Why is it all the way down here, for no apparent reason, when I pasted it in next to the last word?
8/03/2005 03:03:00 PM|permanent link| |
3 comments
ONLINE GYM CLASSES. Of course. This would have saved a lot of humiliation when I was a kid.
Read The Rest or I'll hit you with this dodgeball.
The board of The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) has voted unanimously to reverse an earlier decision to give its annual Conscience in Media award to jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller, E&P; has learned.
The group's First Amendment committee had narrowly voted to give Miller the prize for her dedication to protecting sources, but the full board has now voted to overturn that decision, based on its opinion that her entire career, and even her current actions in the Plame/CIA leak case, cast doubt on her credentials for this award.
The group's president, Jack El-Hai, posted an explanation on an internal list-serve yesterday, noting the opposition from the rank and file, and also mentioning two other reasons for the unanimous vote:
* “A feeling that Miller's career, taken as a whole, did not make her the best candidate for the award”
* “Divided opinions on the board over whether her recent actions merit the award.”
The American Society of Journalists and Authors is a 50-year-old group of some 1,100 non-fiction independent writers. The earlier vote by its First Amendment committee had already prompted at least one member of that panel to quit her position.
Anita Bartholomew, a freelance journalist who has contributed to Reader's Digest, wrote in a resignation letter, "The First Amendment is designed to prevent government interference with a free press. Miller, by shielding a government official or officials who attempted to use the press to retaliate against a whistleblower, and scare off other would-be whistleblowers, has allied herself with government interference with, and censorship of, whistleblowers. When your source IS the government, and the government is attempting to use you to target a whistleblower, the notion of shielding a source must be reconsidered. To apply standard practices regarding sources to hiding wrongdoing at the highest levels of government perverts the intent of the First Amendment.”
NatWest said it had launched an inquiry after Chris Lancaster, 18, of Tiptree, Essex, received a cash card with the wording: "Mr C Lancaster Dick Head".
A NatWest spokesperson said on Wednesday: "We have apologised unreservedly to Mr Lancaster."
The spokesperson added: "This is completely unacceptable and we have launched an investigation."
The Solo card was a replacement for one Mr Lancaster had lost.
He said he saw the insulting words as he was about to hand over his new card to pay for goods in a supermarket and was so embarrassed he put the card back in his wallet.
As well as apologising, he said NatWest had promised to pay him compensation.
Just one quick look, and there's ever so much more I could link to just from the past week; it's all good. Just one quote from the last, as the Master speaks on the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay:
So what would Fox’s Bill O’Reilly do to fix the problem? Kill ‘em all:
O’REILLY: I don’t give them any protection. I don’t feel sorry for them. In fact, I probably would have ordered their execution if I had the power.
If Asian bird flu mutates into a form that spreads easily between humans, an outbreak of just 40 infected people would be enough to cause a global pandemic. And within a year half of the world’s population would be infected with a mortality rate of 50%, according to two studies released on Wednesday.
And yet, the models show, if targeted action is taken within a critical three-week window, an outbreak could be limited to fewer than 100 individuals within two months.
[...]
“If an outbreak occurred tomorrow, it would be devastating,” warns Neil Ferguson from Imperial College London, UK, who led one of the studies. Nature and Science have released the two studies in tandem. The authors stress that an outbreak is no longer an “if” scenario - they are now talking about “when”.
Read The Rest Scale: it's dry, but, yes, I think that millions of people dying from what is predicted to be a preventable sure thing is kinda important, and worth a glance. Maybe we should actually do something, even.
8/03/2005 01:19:00 PM|permanent link| |
1 comments
ISN'T IT CUTE of the Times to print the unlisted phone number, and a picture of the hidden entrance they were forbidden to photograph, of this "secret" restaurant?
[The owners] aren't trying to guarantee obscurity. Restaurants, after all, need paying customers. They just want to attract the right sort, they say.
So the Times busts them. Interesting journalistic choice.
This whole thing about "word-bombs" and profanity is a bit odd, as well; but, then, I've never really grokked the whole "clean" and "dirty" language thing, anyway. I grew up understanding that, for utterly opaque reasons, some people find some words, quote, "dirty," unquote, and will be offended if you use them. Never made the slightest sense to me, although I, of course, try to work with the rules when appropriate (on my own blog, I say what I feel like saying), and I'm still trying to grasp the theory of how and why this should be. (What was that journal of forbidden language I used to enjoy so much?; the name is slipping my brain at the moment, but I'm sure it will come back to me.)
Stepping into the debate over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr., Representative Tom DeLay, the majority leader, has agreed to appear in a telecast called "Justice Sunday II" to rally conservative Christian support for remaking the court.
Mr. DeLay's planned appearance adds the imprimatur of a top Republican elected official to the event, which seeks to call attention to what its organizers say is the Supreme Court's hostility to Christianity and traditional families in its decisions about abortion, homosexuality and government support for religion. It will be broadcast to churches and Christian television stations and distributed as a video.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and the principal organizer, called Mr. DeLay, of Texas, "a natural fit" with the program.
Imagine me and you I do I think about you day and night It's only right To think about the girl you love And hold her tight So happy together If I should call you up invest a dime And you say you belong to me And ease my mind Imagine how the world could be So very fine So happy together I can see me lovin' nobody but you For all my life When you're with me baby the skies'll be blue For all my life Me and you and you and me No matter how they toss the dice It had to be The only one for me is you And you for me So happy together
Also, Pat Robertson is hoping some Justices drop dead. Or retire.
[...] In a televised prayer on Tuesday for Judge Roberts's confirmation, for example, the television evangelist Pat Robertson asked his viewers to pray: "Take control, Lord! We ask for additional vacancies on the court." (A "prayer point" on the Web site for Mr. Robertson's "Supreme Court Freedom Project" includes "additional vacancies" as well.)
THEY DIDN'T INCLUDE THE SLEDGEHAMMER HANDLE. The WashPo eventually got around to writing about the story I posted on the 28th, but did have the virtue of adding various other details, albeit not mentioning, as above, some in the Denver Post verson.
The U.S. military initially told reporters that Mowhoush had been captured during a raid. In reality, he had walked into the Forward Operating Base "Tiger" in Qaim on Nov. 10, 2003, hoping to speak with U.S. commanders to secure the release of his sons, who had been arrested in raids 11 days earlier.
So naturally, we seized him as a prisoner, and commenced torturing him.
And if anyone wants to explain how this is all about playing with the air-conditioning temperature, or making him wear a bra, or having a female soldier tease him, or how delicious his chicken meals were, well, read the story, eh?
In fairness, we'll stipulate this:
The heavyset and imposing man was moderately cooperative in his first days of detention. He told interrogators that he was the commander of the al Quds Golden Division, an organization of trusted loyalists fueling the insurgency with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles, machine guns and other small arms.
But read what then happened after "the gloves came off."
And note this:
At Blacksmith, according to military sources, there was a tiered system of interrogations. Army interrogators were the first level.
When Army efforts produced nothing useful, detainees would be handed over to members of Operational Detachment Alpha 531, soldiers with the 5th Special Forces Group, the CIA or a combination of the three. "The personnel were dressed in civilian clothes and wore balaclavas to hide their identity," according to a Jan. 18, 2004, report for the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.
If they did not get what they wanted, the interrogators would deliver the detainees to a small team of the CIA-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary squads, code-named Scorpions, according to a military source familiar with the operation. The Jan. 18 memo indicates that it was "likely that indigenous personnel in the employ of the CIA interrogated MG Mowhoush."
Obviously, concerns about Ambassador John Negroponte's history were totally unfounded.
After buying the car, von Zehle quickly noticed it had a few of those "extras" for which some car buyers pay thousands extra.
"One of the neat things, aside from the fact it's armored, is it has microphones that allow you to hear people talking outside the car and loudspeakers so you can talk back to them," von Zehle said. "It also had a pretty neat crowd-control device."
Although he had to dismantle it, the "crowd-control device" consisted of a series of pipes that would shoot out flames from the side of the car.
Dismantle it? That's the best part.
There was also other damage. Von Zehle said he thinks his driver from Baghdad to Amman got into an accident. "The right front fender was mashed and the hood didn't match," he said. "Someone tried to cover up the damage."
Von Zehle has fixed everything but a broken front passenger window. Sounds simple, but it's a major sticking point. A new bulletproof window costs $14,170 and it isn't the kind of item local auto parts stores carry.
OH SO ORIGINAL. The Grauniad sends a reporter, Tanya Gold, to the first British academic conference on Harry Potter, which they naturally call a "convention," although it's possible that's not an entirely unfair description. In any case, as is to be expected, the tone is entirely one of mockery of all those idiotic people.
Same as it ever was.
Since it was in Reading, I wonder if Dave Langford dropped by, but I suspect not. (I've been to Reading! Stayed with the Langfords! Saw the Gaol!)
SERENITY NOT YET. A mildly long Joss Whedon interview/profile, focusing on his scripts, all sorts of scripts. Who wouldn't like to see his version of Return of the Jedi?
Everything you said was right on the money. The Millennium Falcon would not be piloted in the climactic scene by Lando Calrissian and a frog. It would have been Han, getting it done. The “other” to whom Yoda referred would of course have been a young, female, badass Jedi, because where else would I go with that? It would have not been revealed in the first five minutes that Darth Vader was going to be redeemed. And, yeah, there would have been a little less incest.
Questions answered!
[...] Is it a certainty at this point that Shepherd Book [the mysterious preacher character who haunts both “Firefly” and “Serenity”] once did the bidding of evil men? I would say. Yeah.
You think we’ll ever see that story? I’m not ruling it out. Obviously, one doesn’t like to speak of sequels without carrying nine rabbits’ feet, crossing one’s self and knocking on wood, but that is a thread that is not lost to me.
Read The Rest Scale: you can't stop the signal. Joss is his usual amusing self, and at some length! You can't stop the signal!
SPECIAL AMYGDALA ADDED VALUE! When Joss talks about early drafts of the Alien: Resurrection script (bearing no resemblance to the eventual film), here are a couple. And this is one in pdf. And here are drafts of Toy Story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and A:R.
About A:R:
And it was always either “the director had a vision” or they had a budget issue. And as a script doctor I’ve been called in more than a few times, and the issue is always the same: “We want you to make the third act more exciting and cheaper.” And my response inevitably is, “The problem with the third act is the first two acts.” This response is never listened to. I usually walk away having gotten one or two jokes into a script and made some money and feeling like I am just bereft of life. It’s horrible. The exceptions were “Toy Story” and “Speed,” where they actually let me do something.
In the case of “Alien: Resurrection,” they decided to spend their money in other places than going to Earth. And I just kept saying, “The reason people are here is we’re going to do the thing we’ve never done; we’re gonna go to Earth.” But there were a lot of things that we hadn’t done that we ended up not doing because of a singular lack of vision.
But rather than go into all of the reasons why “Alien: Resurrection” is disappointing to me, I will tell you that, yes, I wrote five endings. The first one was in the forest with the flying threshing machine. The second one was in a futuristic junkyard. The third one was in a maternity ward.
And the fourth one was in the desert. Now at this point this had become about money, and I said, “You know, the desert looks like Mars. That’s not Earth; that’s not going to give people that juice.” But I still wrote them the best ending I could that took place in the desert. And then finally they said, “Y’knowww, we just don’t think we need to go to Earth.” So I just gave them dialogue and stuff, but I don’t remember writing, “A withered, granny-lookin’ Pumkinhead-kinda-thing makes out with Ripley.” Pretty sure that stage direction never existed in any of my drafts.
So now read the rest, if you like (why wouldn't you like?)
I'd really like to read his X-Men movie script. And his Batman script. All discussed. Shiny.
PANHANDLING. No obligation involved, of course, but as I mentioned here and here, I've been out of meds for about a month now, and if you feel like making a small donation, so that, say, perhaps, if I'm blessed, and you're a very nice person, and 20 of you contributed $5 each, or ten of you $10 each, or whatever, I'd be able to get another month's meds, and that would be very lovely.
If there's anything left over after that, and it's still playing, I'd be happy to tell you what I thought of Batman Begins for another $6.50 (matinee), and of Fantastic Four for another $15 (it's playing only at a mall in Longmont I'd have to pay $8 bus fare to get to and from). PayPal button is at the top of the page, of course.
I'm afraid I continue to have a hole in my budget of about $75-$150 each month, after I've paid rent and phone bill, which comes out of food and meds, let alone laundry money or other luxuries, while I continue to look for other feasible employment/income. Just saying, and thanks again to all who have contributed or continue to contribute to supporting this blog and me. Many thanks!
YAHOO STARTS BLOGADS with an announcement tomorrow, Wednesday, it says here. This seems to be an idea a number of folks are leaping on, beyond just Pajamas Media; I've had a couple of other approaches. This story doesn't even mention Blogads.com, though.
Airport security guards already use hand-held electromagnetic wands to detect metal hidden under clothing. The same wand can also sniff for traces of the gases some explosives emit into the air.
If the passenger is a suicide bomber who realises the wand has found something, the guard might not have enough time to pull out handcuffs or a gun. So the new wand will have a hidden secret – a transformer which steps the detector’s battery power up to 100 kilovolts and feeds it to disguised metal electrodes at the end of the wand.
If the wand gives a silent warning of explosives, the guard can then subtly slide the pads onto the passenger’s neck or hands and press a shock button. The patent reassures that the effect is “temporary and reversible”.
So an innocent traveller who “happened to have a significant amount of metal on his person or happened to treat explosives legally” should wake up shaken but unharmed.
Very reversible, assuming the searchee hasn't had a heart attack. Note: this is a patent, not something in use or production today.
Read The Rest: 3 out of 5 if you want to know about the two other inventions, one that will allow for better hearing of people in noisy cars or pubs or wherever, and the other a "chameleon" cell phone that will switch behaviors depending upon circumstances.
FORCED TO LISTEN. George Lucas murmurs a couple more sentences about his Star Wars tv plans, and folks all over lean in to hear.
Read The Rest as interested; it's not much more than he's already said, actually, but wot the hell. On other wacko, people-have-too-much-money, SWfronts:
A lightsaber used by actor Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy sold for $200,600 to an anonymous bidder at an auction of Hollywood memorabilia in Beverly Hills, Calif., on July 29, the Associated Press reported. The lightsaber used by David Prowse under the mask of Darth Vader fetched $118,000.
Other items that brought big bids included a leather jacket worn by Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which brought in $94,400, and a leather jacket worn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, which went for $41,300, the news service reported.
The Star Wars items came from the collection of Gary Kurtz, who worked closely with director George Lucas from 1973 to 1981. The producer put up 75 pieces from his private collection to raise money to open a public film archive.
Hey, I met Gary Kurtz! For about thirty seconds. He came to SunCon, the 1977 Worldcon (which I wore a zillion hats at as one of the committee running it), to accept George Lucas's special Committee Award for, well, you know.
Kurtz also came to a few subsequent Worldcons; you can read about the context, and his version of how SW came together, here. He was also at Worldcon the previous year, MidAmericon, in Kansas City, with Mark Hamill, Charlie Lippincott, and others, where I completely didn't bother to go look at the little exhibit on the upcoming film, because it sounded like such crap, as most sf movies generally were. Who knew?
Meanwhile, the Scotsmananticipates the upcoming Worldcon, and the Herald talks to Chris Priest (the real one) and Geoff Ryman about slipstream and sf in a reasonably decent piece. And the NYRB looks at Spielberg's War Of The Worlds.
Finally, we have further word from T. Pratchett about the new Discworld release, along with the rest of the usual British sf round-up in Ansible:
`Now that the bound proof copies of Thud! are out, and will no doubt be winging their way to an e-bay near you, I would like to say that ANYONE WHO READS A WORD OF IT before publication day will be MADE TO SIT IN THE CORNER and their ENTIRE COUNTRY will be given DOUBLE DETENTION until every single person SAYS SORRY!!!!!'
Just so. And look for my old friend, fan and author, Jim Young:
Jim Young is all excited: `If you look very, very closely, you can actually see me briefly in War of the Worlds. As Tom Cruise is driving his van into a crowd of refugees in upper New Jersey, before getting to the Hudson River ferry boat, there's a panning shot from the driver's window of Cruise's van. You see five men standing mute alongside the vehicle. I'm the guy in the blue parka. I thought I'd actually be more visible, because they did a couple of takes of me pounding on the windshield of the van shouting "Please stop. Help us." But that's the editing process!'
THE NAZI ROOTS OF ARAB ANTI-SEMITISM. This is a heck of a good article on the subject, by Matthias Kuentze. Somewhat longish, yes, but worth reading just about all of it.
It's a subject I've long known quite a bit about, but this nicely covers a fair amount of important and revealing detail, particularly tracing out the direct intervention of the Nazi regime in Arab affairs, and their crucial role in conveying the poisonous notions of anti-Semitism that had previously barely existed in Muslim society.
A sample:
Islam was quite a different story. Here it was not the Jews who murdered the Prophet, but the Prophet who murdered the Jews: in the years between 623 and 627 Mohammed enslaved, expelled, or killed all the Jewish tribes of Medina. As a result, the characteristic features of Christian anti-Semitism did not arise in the Muslim world. "There were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, no charges of diabolic evil. Jews were not accused of poisoning wells or spreading the plague."18 Instead, the Jews were treated with contempt or condescending tolerance. This cultural inheritance made the idea that the Jews of all people could represent a permanent danger for the Muslims and the world seem absurd.
This insane idea had therefore to be hammered into the Arab- Islamic world all the more forcefully. The conflict over immigration and land ownership in Palestine was not the reason, merely an opportunity, for its spread. Thus, for example, the pamphlet on "Islam and Jewry" distributed by the Germans to Muslim members of the "Handzar" Bosnian SS division talked about an "ancient enmity," while Radio Zeesen evoked in ever-new variations the theme of the "eternal enemy, the Jew." A speech given by the Mufti in November 1943 is typical:
This people has been the enemy of the Arabs and Islam since it came into being. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: "you will find that the most hostilely-disposed toward the believers are the Jews." They tried to poison the praiseworthy Prophet, put up resistance to him, were filled with hostility to him and plotted against him. This was the case over 1300 years ago. Since then, they have never ceased to hatch plots against the Arabs and Mohammedans.19
Thus was an eternal threat to all Muslims concocted from Mohammed's defeated contemporaries.
For the Mufti, the reference back to the seventh century fit the bill for a second reason: his hatred of the Jews was a declaration of war on the "invasion of liberal ideas" into the world of Islam. Since the start of the 20th century, Egypt had been opening up to the outside world; in the 1920s Turkey replaced the Caliphate with the Atatürkist model; and Reza Khan, too, was promoting the secularization of Iran. The Mufti made not the slightest concession to this reformist trend in his sphere of control. He saw Jerusalem as the crystallization point for the "rebirth of Islam" and Palestine as the center from whence resistance to the Jews and the modern world was destined to emanate. Speaking at a religious conference in 1935, the Mufti complained: "The cinema, the theatre and some shameless magazines enter our houses and courtyards like adders, where they kill morality and demolish the foundation of society." The Jews were blamed for this alleged corruption of moral values, as demonstrated by another statement of Haj Amin el-Husseini: "They [the Jews] have also spread here their customs and usages which are opposed to our religion and to our whole way of life. The Jewish girls who run around in shorts demoralise our youth by their mere presence."20
So, yes, the modern Islamist extremists are fighting you and us because of ideas instilled by the Nazis, and we are still fighting Nazi philosophy, if you look into this, absorbed, mutated, and adopted, into Islamism where it had pretty much not existed prior to the 20th Century. This has been much written about, but this is a most useful account of some of the threads.
An interesting companion piece is this on anti-Semitism by Paul Johnson (yes, it's from Commentary, and yes, they're full of neo-con musings, but that doesn't mean everything they publish is wrong or worthless).
I've read this "Saudi Arabia has no constitution" for years, in various places, or, alternatively that "the Quran is the Saudi Constitution," and always wondered what the hell this was, chopped liver? (Seems unlikely, doesn't it?)
There's also Article 5:
Article 5
(a) The system of government in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is that of a monarchy. (b) Rule passes to the sons of the founding King, Abd al-Aziz Bin Abd al-Rahman al-Faysal Al Sa'ud, and to their children's children. The most upright among them is to receive allegiance in accordance with the principles of the Holy Koran and the Tradition of the Venerable Prophet. (c) The King chooses the Heir Apparent and relieves him of his duties by Royal order. (d) The Heir Apparent is to devote his time to his duties as an Heir Apparent and to whatever missions the King entrusts him with. (e) The Heir Apparent takes over the powers of the King on the latter's death until the act of allegiance has been carried out.
BOLTON, BOLTON, BOLTON. A subject I've not been too fascinated by, as you can see by my relative lack of linking to stories about him, save when he has amnesia, although I've read most of the stories about him, and much commentary.
But it's my impression that few people noticed this story, asserting that most of the heavy lifting on UN reform is already done. Regardless, if people want to hype and reiterate The Problems With Bolton, I'm fine with that, but he's officially recess appointed now, and until we get a fresh story of him fouling up, or something equally significant, I'm not going to spend much time talking about things I can't change. You go ahead, though, as you like.
COMPUTERIZED WHITEBOARDS. A few years ago, circa 1998 or thereabouts, I lived for a year in Boston, and did a bunch of temp work at MIT, some jobs going on for some months; a couple were at the Media Lab, so I spent a couple of months or so working there every day, which had, as you'd imagine, some very fun aspects, although the jobs were pretty much just drudgery.
But in the course of working there, I noticed that all the conference rooms had plain old whiteboards, and this struck me as very odd, that, of all places, the Media Lab didn't have computerized whiteboards of some sort (one trivial duty I performed for one job was wiping down the whiteboards).
NO ONE WILL KNOW OUR PLAN! A quite amusing tale of busting an internet hoax via referrer logs and a bit of poking about. Hey, it's got sex, "greenlighting," and "WookieFetish"; what more could you ask for?
The page that linked to my site was locked up in WookieFetish's members-only discussion boards. I signed up for an account using my real name and the handle "cfarivar."
I'm immediately reminded of the fact that several times a week my referrer logs show a link to your Amygdala from some discussion board or other, some occasionally requiring a sign-up to see; I generally take a quick glance at the open ones, and on rare occasions, at the closed ones.
What's always amusing is that the discussions are always conducted on the assumption that the person linked to could never actually possibly be aware of the discussion; it's always interesting to see what people think of you, or what you say, when they assume you won't read it.
I get that from LiveJournal links, which occur daily, as well, although some may be warned off when they read this. One particularly amusing incident occurred a few months ago, when I checked out one LiveJournal entry to find the guy cursing me up and down for what I'd said (about the all important topic of Revenge of The Sith, no less), and using icons with "FUCK YOU! and the like on the entry. I posted a polite response, and when I returned to see if there were any reply, a while later, the icons had all been wiped away to nice neutral ones, and the ranting cursing about me had disappeared, replaced with an entry about how I'd shown up and all. The poster was clearly embarrassed to be caught being so rude, but I was simply amused, since changing it all after I'd seen it hardly prevented me from having seen it.
I'm almost sorry to mention this, since I'd hate to see a drop off in links ripping me a new one behind my back.
I try to always respect the views of the plain people of the Internet, the little people, after all. (This. Is. A. Joke.)
THEY'RE JUST WILD ABOUT HARRY. So, a couple of weeks ago, an interminable profile of Harry Reid ran in the Post that I didn't bother mentioning, because there wasn't anything particularly interesting to mention about it, other than that there it was (oh, and Harry Reid used to box, if you haven't heard).
Now The New Yorker has another interminable Reid profile, although this one is somewhat more interesting, since it focuses more on Reid's politics, and a bit less on the folksy biography, although it does contain many of the same folksy anecdotes about Searchlight, Nevada, and Reid.
But what's up with this? Has Reid hired a new press person? Is he running for something? Suddenly getting fond of reading about himself? Unable to still the efforts of his admirers?
Just wondering. (Yes, I expect that it's just that he is the Minority Leader, and it's unsurprising that he'd cooperate with what happen to turn out to be pretty much positive long profiles in major publications, since that's a key part of politics; I was just struck by seeing these two in such relatively rapid succession.)
President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools.
[...]
Bush compared the current debate to earlier disputes over "creationism," a related view that adheres more closely to biblical explanations. As governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution.
On Monday the president said he favors the same approach for intelligent design "so people can understand what the debate is about."
[...]
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. " You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Shortly afterwards, the President also affirmed that American schoolchildren should also be "exposed" to Flat Earth theory, and the Biblical understanding that the Sun revolves around the Earth, as well as the fact that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. All part of helping Americans keep the lead in technology!
On another subject, the President also said:
"I'm not going to be involved with the Roe v. Wade case in the midst of a judicial nomination," Bush said. "John Roberts is going to be put on the Supreme Court, hopefully, in an expeditious manner, and he will answer the questions put to him. It is clear that if he were to answer those questions, he would have to recuse himself from future cases."
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. Annoyingly, there's no transcript here, yet, at least.
ADDENDUM: Matt Yglesias notes what we know, that Bush is putting forth an extremely popular view:
The Pew Center asked Americans if we should teach creationism alongside evolution in public schools. 57 percent said "yes" and only 33 percent said "no."
True enough, and polls reveal all sorts of bizarre popular beliefs. I have a dour suspicion that quite a few people have no idea that the Constitution prohibits a "religious test" for office, as well.
For some reason, a lot of bloggers have linked to this crappy AP summary of what Bush said. Naturally, Pharyngula is always the place to be for evolution/ID/creationism debates (although P.Z. is rather over-dismissive of all religion, period, in my view).
Welcome, AOL readers, and feel free to click on "home" on the left sidebar and read other posts, and return, and also feel free to note the message at the top of the blog. :-)
WHERE'S A GOOD PLACE TO LOOK FOR 9 TONS OF OPIUM if you happen to be in Afghanistan? Why, in the provincial governor's office, of course!
For nearly two months, U.S. officials have kept mum about a massive new opium seizure in Afghanistan. In early June, counternarcotics agents raided the offices of the governor of Helmand province, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, and found a whopping 9 metric tons of opium--nearly 20,000 pounds, drug control officials tell U.S. News. The seizure is by far the largest since the Drug Enforcement Administration returned to Afghanistan in 2002, says a senior U.S. official, and raises troubling questions about the ability of the Afghan government to crack down.
"DEA can confirm the seizure," said spokeswoman Rogene Waite, but she offered no details. Gen. Mohammed Daud, head of the Afghan Interior Ministry's Antinarcotics Department, denied that any such incident occurred, but another Interior official told of at least two raids on the governor's offices. Attempts to reach Governor Akhundzada were unsuccessful, but in the past he has denied any illegal activity.
No one seems terribly chatty about this little incident; I wonder why?
My guess is that the governor is perfectly innocent, and they found the stuff under the sofa cushions, where it simply accumulated from bits falling out of people's pockets. He just didn't vacuum enough, is all!
By MOHAMED OSMAN The Associated Press Sunday, July 31, 2005; 4:53 PM
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- A plane carrying the former rebel who ascended to Sudan's No. 2 leadership post after a recent peace agreement landed safely Sunday after losing contact in bad weather on its way back from Uganda, Sudanese state TV said.
State television interrupted its regular programing to say that Vice President John Garang "has landed safely at a camp in southern Sudan." The report did not specify where.
[...]
Earlier Sunday, Ugandan army spokesman 2nd Capt. Dennis Musitwa said a helicopter carrying Garang apparently went down Saturday. The discrepancy between the time and the type of craft could not be immediately explained.
[...]
In Nairobi, Kenya, a spokesman for Garang's political party, Yasir Arman said that Garang was "safe and sound " in southern Sudan, but he declined to give further details.
I can't imagine why. But it's great to know that Garang was all safe and sound on the ground, right up until he mysteriously rose into the sky and crashed, later.
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER. That's what the Colombian paramilitary, the "United Self-Defense Forces," is doing.
"Here you have a law that couldn't be better designed to give the criminals a way out," said Myles Frechette, a former American ambassador to Colombia who read the rights report and has closely studied the new law. "It's a complete get-out-of-jail card - unbelievable."
Human Rights Watch release here, and here's the report.
Read The Rest Scale: well, at least check out the news story, eh? Oh, yes, the Colombians are asking America to supply $100 million dollars to pay for the cover-up of their criminals taking power. (We last discussed the "Self-Defense Forces" here.)
8/01/2005 07:50:00 PM|permanent link| |
0 comments
"I like my president," said Mr. Shaaban, with a sense of conviction, even pride. "He cannot come down to the street and look at the problems of 80 million people. He delegates responsibilities. It is the government that is responsible."
[...]
Mr. Hassan, who was keeping an eye out for the police, said that the country had many problems, but that his main concern was the economy.
"It's not about the president, it's about the government," he said. "The president is busy with external affairs. Our problems are great, but the president doesn't know what is happening in our government."
If only the czar knew! God save the czar!
ObLiberal: Kinda like some folks and our government, at times.
People head to Reno for all sorts of reasons. Some want to gamble. Others are looking for a hasty wedding or quickie divorce. I've come to the Biggest Little City in the World to drink my own pee.
No, really.
Not straight up, of course. First, I'll run it through a new NASA water purification system that collects astronaut sweat, moisture from respiration, drain water, and urine - and turns it all into drinking water.
This has been such a constant in space stories since the 1920's that it's surprising to realize it's still cutting-edge engineering. And, seriously, it might actually lead to more drinking water in areas of poverty and drought.
IS BLOGGING OVER YET? Forget the rest of the story about the wonders of corporate blogs; I just want to pluck out this quote:
But they don't necessarily know how to reach out in a personal way on the Internet, said Griff Wigley, principal of Wigley & Associates, a Web log coaching firm in Northfield, Minn.
Think they're hiring? (What are the qualifications?) (Italics mine.)
BETTER HEALTH THROUGH CON JOBS. Doesn't the Hippocratic Oath say something about this sort of thing?
Psychologists in the US claim to have come up with a way of influencing people to avoid fattening foods – by giving them false beliefs.
[...]
By using a technique called false feedback, volunteers were made to believe, falsely, that they had become sick on strawberry ice cream when they were children. Up to 40% of the affected test subjects then reported that they would avoid strawberry ice cream in the future. It is evidence that false beliefs can have healthy outcomes, says psychologist Elizabeth Loftus at the University of California, US, who designed the study.
Loftus and colleagues gave 228 undergraduate students food questionnaires. The test subjects subsequently received feedback they falsely believed was personalised and had been generated by a sophisticated computer program. The feedback told them they had become ill eating fattening foods – strawberry ice cream and chocolate chip cookies – as a child.
The bluff led a substantial minority to believe they had felt ill after eating the ice cream - but not the cookies. The researchers think the suggestion did not work for the cookies because cookies are a more commonly eaten snack.
The method could be adapted for widespread use, says Loftus. That would require figuring out the “active ingredient” in the methodology and incorporating it into a vehicle for widespread delivery. “It might involve stories or visuals of people getting sick eating particular foods,” she says.
And your genitals will rot and fall off if you don't get enough exercise! And if you smoke ciggies, you'll get lung cancer! Oh, wait.
ObLiberal: Say, hasn't the Bush Administration already adopted this technique in politics?
HEY, BLOGGERS! The New Yorker may not think of it, but if you write a sufficiently aggravating post, maybe you, too, can get yourself sued by Khalid bin Mahfouz! How many suits against blogs do you think he could sustain?
She developed a special expertise in tracing the money behind terrorist organizations, and after 9/11 she wrote a book called “Funding Evil,” largely about the financing of Al Qaeda. Like other authors, Ehrenfeld drew passing attention to the role of Khalid bin Mahfouz, a member of a prominent Saudi banking family, who was, she wrote, allegedly involved “in the funding of terrorism.”
[...]
Shortly after the publication of “Funding Evil,” Ehrenfeld began receiving demands for retractions from British lawyers for the bin Mahfouz family. She refused to give in, so in 2004 she was sued before the same London judge who decided the Polanski case. “My book wasn’t even published in England,” Ehrenfeld says. “But they said that because someone bought twenty-three copies there online, that was enough for me to be sued there.”
Ultimately, Ehrenfeld decided not to go to England and contest the suit. “There was no way to win,” she said. “Under English law, it wasn’t enough that I could prove that I had written what my sources told me, but I would have had to prove the underlying truth of the accusations as well. No one can meet that standard.” So last year the judge entered a default judgment against Ehrenfeld, which now amounts to at least a hundred thousand dollars.
Ehrenfeld then hit on a novel strategy. Having lost the libel case abroad, she sued bin Mahfouz in an American federal court, seeking to block the enforcement of the foreign judgment against her on the ground that it violated her First Amendment rights. “The Saudis are using their wealth to intimidate people from writing about them,” Ehrenfeld said. “I thought it was time to fight back.” (Her legal fees already amount to approximately two hundred thousand dollars.)
The bin Mahfouz family maintains a Web site (www.binmahfouz.info) largely devoted to recounting its various lawsuits, most of them filed in England, against journalists around the world. (The site does not note that Khalid bin Mahfouz, who held a thirty-per-cent ownership share of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, paid a settlement of almost a quarter of a billion dollars after the bank’s notorious collapse.)
Hey, I've heard that the bin Mahfouz family supports terrorism! What have you heard?
I'D JUST LIKE TO SAY that I've never bought a bottle of water in my life. The whole concept has always seemed borderline looney to me, but who am I to begrudge well-off people throwing away their money on symbols and nonsense?
(cough, PayPal button up again, cough)
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 on a small way you can stop a small drainage on the world's resources. I do, to be sure, carry a bottle of tap water, whenever I'm going out for long and take my Bag Of Essentials.
8/01/2005 01:10:00 PM|permanent link| |
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IT'S NOT THE COLOR YOU THINK IT IS. Nor the colour. Quite nifty optical illusion shows you that you perceive colors very differently indeed depending upon their context.
They look harmless enough, the inconspicuous packets often next to the cashier at gas stations, convenience stores, beverage stores and bars. But according to consumer protection officials, that's what makes them all the more dangerous, since the powder inside contains alcohol, and a lot of it -- about 4.8 percent by volume. That is the equivalent of one to one-and-a-half glasses of liquor.
The product is called subyou, manufactured by a company in North Rhine-Westphalia, and is marketed squarely at teenagers with slogans like "taste for not much dough" and "gets a good buzz going." Add the powder to cold water, and consumers have an alcoholic drink containing either vodka or rum.
Remember kids: just add vodka to the powder for that special extra kick!
It's little known that NASA invented this for the space station.
EVER BEEN FIRED? Then this is the site for you! Read stories of being fired! Write your own! Win a contest! Remember: your experience isn't real until it can be found on the web!
YOUR FUTURE, AS SOME PEOPLE WOULD HAVE IT, is here (partially: see below to see where the Daily is partially in error, apparently):
Wisconsin has passed a bill entitled UW Birth Control Ban-AB 343. This bill prohibits University of Wisconsin campuses from prescribing, dispensing and advertising all forms of birth control and emergency contraceptives. Wisconsin State Rep. Dan LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, introduced this bill based on the belief that “dispensing birth control and emergency contraceptives leads to promiscuity.”
[...]
With this bill, rape victims will no longer be able to turn to campus health services to obtain emergency contraceptives to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, or receive postrape counseling and education — adding even more stress to a traumatic event. Students who want birth-control prescriptions, emergency contraceptives or even information about preventive birth control are forced to seek out these services at off-campus clinics. This poses a problem not only for students who attend rural Wisconsin university campuses and might not have a clinic nearby but also for many students who attend urban campuses but do not have access to transportation, money, insurance or time to travel to an off-campus clinic.
Anyone ever seen a pro-abortion bill before? This is most certainly one.
Mind, the bill has passed Wisconsin's House, but not their State Senate; it isn't law yet, and there's time to lobby the Wisconsin State Senate to kill this despicable insanity (the bill, anyway).
Here is the bill. The Daily story seems to be partially in error, in that the bill does not seem to ban "all birth control." The intent seems to primarily be to ban "Plan B" birth control, but, hey, I'm sure it will go a long way to fulfill Dan LeMahieu's desire to eliminate female "promiscuity." Because that's what really matters. Man, who can wait until we can democratically write state rules about abortion and banning it, huh?
What it actually says is this:
No person whom the board employs or with whom the board contracts to provide health care services to students registered in the system may advertise the availability of, transmit a prescription order for, or dispense a hormonal medication or combination of medications that is administered only after sexual intercourse for the postcoital control of fertility to a registered student or to any other person entitled to receive university health care services.
(c) In addition to the prohibition under par. (b), no person may advertise, prescribe, or dispense a hormonal medication or combination of medications that is administered only after sexual intercourse for the postcoital control of fertility on system property, except for property leased under s. 233.04 (7).
So it just bans "Plan B," apparently. But that's awful enough. And, of course, will still lead to abortions, and unwanted pregnancies, and misery. Good job.
DUM, DE-ADDENDUM: Ms. Bitch. Ph.D. suggests in the comments that the bill would be more broad, and provides a link; check it out, and see what you think. Obviously, I think this bill is fruitcakey, and should be aborted, under any interpretation, but despite the quote attributed to the Wisconsin Attorney General, and although I Am Not A Lawyer (IANAL), I find it difficult to understand how the bill could be interpreted that way (presumably, something to the effect that the "standard" pill consists of "hormonal medications," and thus might be covered; whether it might be judged unconstitutional -- presumably for going against Griswold -- I couldn't say); but make up your own mind.
8/01/2005 12:04:00 PM|permanent link| |
7 comments
THE ONE-MAN STAR WARS is debuting in NY. I've seen this guy on talk shows, and it's amusing for three minutes, but, frankly, I really wouldn't dream of paying for the privilege, myself, nor have any great interest in seeing the whole thing (I kinda suspect I'd be unlikely to take more than half an hour, at most, but I could be all wrong).
But, hey, if he makes a living at it, or just pocket change, more power to him.
Performing the One-Man Lord of the Rings in front of Sir Ian McKellen must have been interesting.
JOHN GARANG AND KING FAHD, TOGETHER AT LAST. It's quite impossible for me, sitting in Boulder, Colorado, to predict the consequences of John Garang's death in a helicopter crash in Sudan, but first appearances suggest that the first results of the death of the Southern rebel leader who recently made peace and became Sudan's First Vice-President, may not be good. At the very least, it's not a visible contribution to Sudan's immediate "stability." Getting killed three weeks after taking office certainly does raise suspicions.
But long-term? I dunno. It's certainly worth noting the event, at the least.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.75 out of 5. Of course, the passing of the vegetable King Fahd is worth noting, too, and the consequences also unpredictable. Interior Minister Prince Nayef, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, and now-king Abdullah are all elderly; who the hell knows what Saudi Arabia will be like in ten years? This is, nonetheless, likely to be important to me and thee.
That wacky Fahd:
In "The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom" (Norton, 1987), Sandra Mackey said he "built one elaborate palace after another," including an exact replica of the White House in Washington, D.C. (He never moved in because of the political repercussions of a Saudi king's imitating an American president.)
In "The Arabs" (Random, 1987), David Lamb reported that King Fahd employed the Washington artist who designed the floating space city in "Star Trek" to refurbish his Boeing 707 with gold-plated hardware, a three-story elevator and plastic chandeliers.
Presumably they mean this episode. Gosh, wouldn't it have been great if Fahd had been transported to an oil rig and made to drill? I don't think he really got the point of the episode.
"I don't do feelings," Dr. Griffin said at a breakfast in Washington last month. "Just think of me as Spock." His audience laughed at the reference to the pointy-eared icon of rationality on "Star Trek," as did he.
Oh, okay, this, too:
But Dr. Griffin does do space, and he told a Senate committee not long ago that when his mother, a teacher, gave him a book on astronomy in 1954 at age 5, he knew he wanted to spend his life exploring space. And though he still keeps that childhood volume on his shelves, he took another lesson away from it. "Based on what we know today," he said, "everything in that book was wrong."
("Gee, and I started with the Three Bears," said Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland. Dryly, Dr. Griffin responded, "Well, we went down different tracks.")
YOUR MOTION TO DECLASSIFY IS CLASSIFIED. And because of that, it's utterly impossible to say from this whether the charges against the government are substantial and true, or completely baseless and simply piggy-backing on the current issues.
YES, "COLORFUL" IS ONE WORD for Las Vegas mayor Oscar B. Goodman.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 for a living movie character, or perhaps someone who should have been on either Starsky & Hutch or Vegas with Robert Urich (yeah, I'm fairly sure he's already been on Las Vegas).
MONDAY ADDENDUM: Yes, he's on tonight's repeat of Las Vegas, which starts in two minutes on the East Coast, but two hours from now here, and three hours from now on the West Coast.
WE BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDEAST. Fun, fun, fun for all!
Wielding bamboo batons and small leaded clubs, Egyptian security agents attacked and beat protesters on Saturday as they tried to rally in the central Tahrir Square here, chanting slogans calling for the end of Hosni Mubarak's 24-year-reign as president.
The police battled protesters Saturday as one carried a sign calling for an end to "24 years of oppression" under President Hosni Mubarak.
A contingent of several thousand black-uniformed riot police officers, with shields and batons, together with squads of plainclothes agents, each armed with a blackjack, cornered small groups of protesters and then beat them, often tearing their clothing, as commanding officers, with stars on their shoulders, shouted for the beatings to continue.
Hey, this is a cultural tradition; stop trying to impose your culturally imperialistic notions on others! Besides, Mubarak is an ally in the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism®. Woot.
Assignment desk: find Major Robert Preston and Captain John Carr, both now reportedly out of the military, and attempt to get them to comment on these memos; first, of course, verify them; second, gain more knowledge of context, and if they stand by them.
Colonel Borch did not respond to telephone messages left at his home. Captain Carr, who has since been promoted to major, declined to comment when reached by telephone, as did Major Preston. Both Captain Carr and Major Preston left the prosecution team within weeks of their e-mail messages and remain on active duty.
Ah, well, if they're still on active duty, contra ABC News (of Australia), it's no surprise they're no-commenting. But the Times clearly believes this is all on the up and up, and their responses from other officers indicates that the memos are authentic and the accusations actually made.
7/31/2005 08:40:00 PM|permanent link| |
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ROCKET-SHIP SOUNDS. Stephen Hunter also loves Stealth. Not.
THE FIGHT FOR LABOR RIGHTS is passe, or an outright enemy, in the view of many, as are child labor laws, unions, and any and all sorts of rights, or protections, of workers, these days. Ignorance of labor history, or, worse, false, or, shall we say, limited knowledge about the alleged evils of unions, is widespread.
CONNERY MUSES, in the truly important news. The story is being sold as "Connery calls it quits" on acting in movies, but I don't buy it; call me cynical, but I see a fine ploy to be in the news and keep your price high (especially since the figures that they quote in the story as paying him are not, in fact, at all high by Hollywood standards), and a terrific interest in British newspapers in headlines that make people buy papers.
But there are still various amusing elements.
"I'm fed up with the idiots ... the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who green-light the movies," Connery says.
"I don't say they're all idiots. I'm just saying there's a lot of them that are very good at it [being idiots]. It would almost need a Mafia-like offer I couldn't refuse to do another movie."
[...]
Connery reveals he has no regrets about turning down a role in one of the biggest money-earning film series ever - as Gandalf the wizard in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Not because the pay on offer was too low, however. "Yeah, well, I never understood it," he said. "I read the book. I read the script. I saw the movie. I still don't understand it."
Wonderful as Connery is in the right role, I'm perfectly happy to have had Sir Ian, and albeit I can't say how I'd react to a control alternative, my bias pushes me now to prefer McKellen.
Read The Rest if you want the stuff about his pulling out of cooperating on a biography that would have examined his Sixties flip comments about the virtues of hitting women, and otherwise gone warts-and-all. It's probably useful, in considering his above opinion, to keep in mind that his last film was League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (you should go read the comic!).
7/31/2005 03:46:00 PM|permanent link| |
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THE FORGOTTEN REALITY OF DARFURcontinues. Euan Ferguson writes:
They are talking about rape: about having to have the babies of rape, and about bringing them to this camp.
'I want to tell you about me,' shouts the man. The translator translates, and the man grows less agitated because someone is finally listening, however reluctantly. 'I had to dig up my family,' he begins. We all stop, and quieten, and finally listen, to Sharif Yahaya, from a small village near the town of Tawila.
'Janjaweed had come and killed them, many near me, and we buried them, and we all went away. And came back. Days later. Maybe at the wrong time.
'Janjaweed were there and told us to dig up all the graves. I don't know why, I think just to make it worse. We had to dig people up who had been dead, and then look at the bodies, and then put them back in the earth. Just to make it worse. Just to show that they could make it worse.'
This is Darfur, today, where everyone has a story, each one worse than the last.
[...]
Not awful places, these camps: but terrifying and impossibly huge. To drive the perimeter at a fair lick can take an hour. To helicopter over it, more than three minutes.
WHO SAYS AUSTRIANS ARE BUTTONED-DOWN? Really, they could show Bob Newhart something, when you can get into a prestigious museum free by going naked.
Vienna's prestigious Leopold Museum is usually a pretty buttoned-down place, but on Friday, some of the nudes in its marble galleries were for real.
Scores of naked or scantily clad people wandered the museum, lured by an offer of free entry to "The Naked Truth," a new exhibition of early 1900s erotic art, if they showed up wearing just a swimsuit — or nothing at all.
Yeah, that should bring in more paying appreciators of fine art, don't you think?
PARENTS, WANT YOUR KIDS TO HAVE FUN? This summer, send them to Hamas summer camp! Swim, play ball, have sack races, learn about suicide belts, sing intifada songs, learn to drill and march! It's all good!
JAMES BOND IN "FROM ICANN WITH LOVE." Is British Intelligence deleting al Qaeda web sites? As ever, I'm skeptical, but the Times of London seems to buy it.
PTERRY STRIKES BACK. I had some words on J. K. Rowling's, and Time magazine's, recent swipes at fantasy writing here. Now Terry Pratchett, longtime fan, unsurprisingly agrees with me.
The magazine also said Rowling reinvented fantasy fiction, which was previously stuck in "an idealised, romanticised, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves".
Pratchett, whose first fantasy novel was published 34 years ago, wrote to the Sunday Times saying the genre had always been "edgy and inventive".
"Ever since The Lord of the Rings revitalised the genre, writers have played with it, reinvented it, subverted it and bent it to their times," he wrote.
"It has also contained come of the very best, most accessible writing for children, by writers who seldom get the acknowledgement they deserve."
He also expressed surprise at Rowling's comments that she only realised Harry Potter was fantasy after the first book was published.
"I'm not the world's greatest expert," he wrote.
"But I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?"
Naahhh....
Incidentally, do you think the Times of London gave Harry Potter enough coverage?
Read The Rest Scale: well, you should read what I said, of course.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MEMO; this from within the FBI.
The strongly worded memo, written by an FBI supervisor then assigned to Guantanamo, is the latest in a series of documents that have recently surfaced reflecting unease among some government lawyers and FBI agents over tactics being used in the war on terror. This memo appears to be the first that directly questions the legal premises of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition"—a secret program under which terror suspects are transferred to foreign countries that have been widely criticized for practicing torture.
In a memo forwarded to a senior FBI lawyer on Nov. 27, 2002, a supervisory special agent from the bureau's behavioral analysis unit offered a legal analysis of interrogation techniques that had been approved by Pentagon officials for use against a high-value Qaeda detainee. After objecting to techniques such as exploiting "phobias" like "the fear of dogs" or dripping water "to induce the misperception of drowning," the agent discussed a plan to send the detainee to Jordan, Egypt or an unspecified third country for interrogation. "In as much as the intent of this category is to utilize, outside the U.S., interrogation techniques which would violate [U.S. law] if committed in the U.S., it is a per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute," the agent wrote. "Discussing any plan which includes this category could be seen as a con-spiracy to violate [the Torture Statute]" and "would inculpate" everyone involved.
A senior FBI official, who asked not to be identified because the issue is sensitive, said the memo was not an official bureau legal conclusion. Its author was at Gitmo to advise on interrogation techniques, not to render legal opinions, the official said. (The memo's author, a former New York City prosecutor, declined to comment to NEWSWEEK.)
I'm sure it wasn't the "official bureau legal conclusion"; had it been, it would have necessitated, at the least, a huge fight within the Department of Justice, and possibly with Department of Defense and the White House; but the political appointees are unlikely to ever let such a thing go that far.
THE COMING FLU PANDEMIC. Your Amygdala stays alert and frightened for you, the home viewer! How many shopping days left until millions die?
Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.
Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades -- the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia -- is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.
If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to defend against a disease that, history shows, could potentially kill millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.
Theoretically, antiviral drugs could slow an outbreak and buy time. The problem is only one licensed drug, oseltamivir, appears to work against bird flu. At the moment, there is not enough stockpiled for widespread use. Nor is there a plan to deploy the small amount that exists in ways that would have the best chance of slowing the disease.
The public, conditioned to believe in the power of modern medicine, has heard little of how poorly prepared the world is to confront a flu pandemic, which is an epidemic that strikes several continents simultaneously and infects a substantial portion of the population.
Since the current wave of avian flu began sweeping through poultry in Southeast Asia more than 18 months ago, international and U.S. health authorities have been warning of the danger and trying to mobilize. Research on vaccines has accelerated, efforts to build up drug supplies are underway, and discussions take place regularly on developing a coordinated global response.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will spend $419 million in pandemic planning this year. The National Institutes of Health's influenza research budget has quintupled in the past five years.
"The secretary or the chief of staff -- we have a discussion about flu almost every day," said Bruce Gellin, head of HHS's National Vaccine Program Office. This week, a committee is scheduled to deliver to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt an updated plan for confronting a pandemic.
Despite these efforts, the world's lack of readiness to meet the threat is huge, experts say.
[...]
The most outspoken is Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. In writing and in speeches, Osterholm reminds his audience that after public calamities, the United States usually convenes blue-ribbon commissions to pass judgment. There will be one after a flu pandemic, he believes.
"Right now, the conclusions of that commission would be harsh and sad," he said.
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.
[...]
The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy (Deseret News). An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby).
The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years. The influenza virus had a profound virulence, with a mortality rate at 2.5% compared to the previous influenza epidemics, which were less than 0.1%. The death rate for 15 to 34-year-olds of influenza and pneumonia were 20 times higher in 1918 than in previous years (Taubenberger). People were struck with illness on the street and died rapid deaths. One anectode shared of 1918 was of four women playing bridge together late into the night. Overnight, three of the women died from influenza (Hoagg). Others told stories of people on their way to work suddenly developing the flu and dying within hours (Henig). One physician writes that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly "develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen" and later when cyanosis appeared in the patients, "it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate," (Grist, 1979). Another physician recalls that the influenza patients "died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth," (Starr, 1976). The physicians of the time were helpless against this powerful agent of influenza. In 1918 children would skip rope to the rhyme (Crawford):
I had a little bird, Its name was Enza. I opened the window, And in-flu-enza.
ABOLISHING SOFTWARE PATENTS. This call to do that, and rely instead on copyright and trademark protection, seems fairly persuasive to me (as have other such arguments that I've read). Anyone have an opposing case?
SMOKE 'EM IF YOU GOT 'EM. Showtime has a new half-hour dramedy called Weeds coming up, in which the lead character sells maryjane, the killer weed, in suburbia; since it stars Mary-Louise Parker, whom I've loved ever since Grand Canyon, I'd be very curious to check it out, and my urge is amplified by the description, but, alas, not affording even basic cable tv, I'll have to wait for Some Day.
But if you see it, let me know what you think, eh?
OKAY, COMICS ARE TAKEN MORE SERIOUSLY BY SOME PEOPLE. The Gray Lady examines the architecture of Grant Morrison's Cinderella City as seen in Seven Soldiers. Complete with slide show of imagery from the comic.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) today began considering a poster promoting Iain M Banks's latest science fiction book after receiving a complaint from a passenger on the London Underground.
The poster, which first appeared on the tube on July 4, included a line from Justina Robson's review which appeared last year in the Guardian describing The Algebraist as "a perfect place to have your mind blown to smithereens".
"We are looking into a poster on the London Underground for the new science fiction novel of Iain Banks," said ASA spokesman Matt Wilson. "The complainer objected to the critic's position on it, saying 'have your mind blown to smithereens'. Given the recent attacks on the Tube they felt this was not appropriate, so we are in the process of looking at this to see if action needs to be taken."
Jessica Williamson, publicity manager at Orbit books, apologised for any offence caused, saying that the posters had been printed in June. "Orbit books would like to apologise for any offence or upset that may have been caused by the posters for the paperback of Iain M Banks's The Algebraist," she said. The campaign was due to finish on July 17, and "was never intended to relate in any way to the tragic events of July 7."
The investigation is still at a very early stage. "It's a tricky one," said Matt Wilson. "Emotions are running a bit higher and you have to take that into account. Obviously there's a difference between a matter-of-fact, throwaway statement and something that's trying to hop on the back of an event. You've got to keep a sense of perspective."
It's hard for me to see what's "tricky" here, but I Am Not A Briton. What would they do about an ad that no longer exists, anyway? Fine Orbit? For what? Not anticipating a Tube bombing campaigning, and not thinking that "mind-blowing" would offend anyone? (The notion that it's offensive, even so, still strikes me as explainable only by the sort of understandable fear and hysteria that such events create, but perhaps I miss some nuance; besides the story only indicates a single complaint, which makes the idea of taking it as worthy of launching an "investigation," and writing a news story about, even more bizarre to me, but, again, I Am A Foreigner.)
