“After all, I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family’s own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story. Some of you know my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him boy for much of his life.”--- President Obama in Cape Coast, Ghana on July 11, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Quotable
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Throwing our weight
A most recent New Yorker article minces little when it comes to our ever expanding girth...
Men are now on average seventeen pounds heavier than they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds. The proportion of overweight children, age six to eleven, has more than doubled, while the proportion of overweight adolescents, age twelve to nineteen, has more than tripled. (According to the standards of the United States military, forty per cent of young women and twenty-five per cent of young men weigh too much to enlist.) As the average person became heavier, the very heavy became heavier still; more than twelve million Americans now have a body-mass index greater than forty, which, for someone who is five feet nine, entails weighing more than two hundred and seventy pounds. Hospitals have had to buy special wheelchairs and operating tables to accommodate the obese, and revolving doors have had to be widened—the typical door went from about ten feet to about twelve feet across. An Indiana company called Goliath Casket has begun offering triple-wide coffins with reinforced hinges that can hold up to eleven hundred pounds. It has been estimated that Americans’ extra bulk costs the airlines a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of jet fuel annually.
The tricks employed:
In the early nineteen-sixties, a man named David Wallerstein was running a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser, the author of “Fat Land” (2003), one night the answer came to him: jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes, popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another high-margin item, soda.A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.
Of course, the others are not far behind...
while Americans were the first to fatten up, they no longer lead the pack. “Like it or not, we have no choice but to face up to the numbers: current data reveal that in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Malta, and Slovakia, the proportion of overweight adults is actually higher than in the U.S.,” they write. In Asia, Africa, and South America, too, obesity is on the rise.
Meanwhile in Israel
It is documented that of all living species only human beings kill for fun. Here Israeli soldiers do their part in making sure that facts like the above stay true.. Here is testimony from Israeli soldiers who took part in the Dec 2008 Israeli Palestinian war... Youtube video of account here.
An Israeli sniper killed a Palestinian man in order to mark a “score” with his gun. Soldiers fired at houses out of boredom. A commander expressed satisfaction that Gaza hospitals were full. These are some of the testimonies given by Israelis soldiers who fought in the recent Gaza war in a report released Wednesday. “One guy said he just couldn't finish this operation without killing someone. So he killed someone, apparently some sort of lookout,” one soldier reported. “I can definitely say [the Palestinian] was not armed. I can definitely say the soldier regarded this as some children's game and was delighted and laughing after this.” During the past few months, 26 Israeli soldiers – both regular and reserve – shared their most troubling experiences from the war with the organization Breaking the Silence, creating the first large collection of Israeli testimonies from the battle....One soldier reported that a colonel told his battalion before entering Gaza that they would be going into Gaza aggressively and added: “Fortunately the hospitals are full to capacity already, so people are dying more quickly.”...According to the soldiers who talked to Breaking the Silence, combat almost never happened. The army used massive firepower from tanks, artillery, air and sea to prevent soldiers from facing Palestinian fighters or risking injury from a booby-trapped house. For some soldiers, the lack of combat led them to fire on houses or water tanks in frustration or boredom.
Painting Post : Triptych
'Hope', Oil on unstretched canvas in three parts. Combined size: 50" X 170"
Vicariously...
From here:
A Web site — WeChooseTheMoon.org — goes live at 8:02 a.m. tomotrrow, 90 minutes before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It will track the capsule's route from the Earth to the Moon, ending with the moon landing and Armstrong's walk — in real time, but 40 years later. Internet visitors can see animated recreations of key events from the four-day mission, including when Apollo 11 first orbits the moon and when the lunar module separates from the command module, as well as browse video clips and photos and hear the radio transmission between the astronauts and NASA flight controllers. The site also connects the mission back to Kennedy, who first set the goal to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade during a May 25, 1961, speech before Congress.
Photo
From the Hayden Planetarium website and Wikipedia: On Sunday, July 12th, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. Manhattanhenge (sometimes referred to as Manhattan Solstice) is a biannual occurrence in which the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets of Manhattan's main street grid. The term is derived from Stonehenge, at which the sun aligns with the stones on the solstices.
Photo from a good friend of mine, George Lewycky.
Painting Post
The third in the 'Hope' triptych is finally complete. 1 of 3 here, 2 of 3 here... All of them were painted from photographs taken by volunteers for the organization Doctors Without Borders in documenting the aftermath of the killing of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu militia using clubs and machetes, with as many as 10,000 killed each day...
'Hope, No. 3', 50" X 70", Oil on canvas, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Quote...
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." --Flannery O'Connor
Monday Poem
Master and Slave by Carl Phillips
For the longest time, he said nothing. I looked
through the glass at what he was looking at: brindled
dog shaking the rain free of herself in a field of flowers,
making the colors stir where, before, there’d been
a stillness like what precedes a dangerous undertow or
a choice that, for better—and worse—will change a life
forever.
If you can’t love everything, he said,
Try to love what, in the end, will matter. Not the dog,
doomed to fail, but the rain itself; the rain, getting
shaken . . . There are days when, almost, I think I know
what he meant by that. I can understand—I can at least
believe I do—his face, his mouth, that last time: for once,
unferocious; done with raging at his own regretlessness and confusion.
No, really...
Noticed on bookslut's blog.
A federal prison in Colorado has prohibited an inmate from reading two books by a popular American author because they supposedly contain information "potentially detrimental to national security." The author's name? Barack Obama.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
Viewpoint
On Indians being opportunistic and the reasons behind it... (again, this is filed under 'viewpoint').
Max Weber explained the success of capitalism in the US, Germany and Britain as coming from their populations’ Protestant faith. This ethic, or culture, was missing from the Catholic populations of South America, Italy and Spain. Protestants, Weber said, extended Christianity’s message of doing good deeds, to doing work well. Industry and enterprise had an ultimate motive: public good. That explains the philanthropists of the US, from John D. Rockefeller to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates.What explains the behaviour of Indians? What explains the anarchy of our cities? To find out, we must ask how our behaviour is different.Some characteristics unite Indians. The most visible is our opportunism. One good way to judge a society is to see it in motion. On the road, we observe the opportunism in the behaviour of the Indian driver. Where traffic halts on one side of the road in India, motorists will encroach the oncoming side because there is space available there. If that leads to both sides being blocked, that is fine, as long as we maintain our advantage over people behind us or next to us. This is because the other man cannot be trusted to stay in his place.The Indian’s instinct is to jump the traffic light if he is convinced that the signal is not policed. If he gets flagged down by the police, his instinct is to bolt. In an accident, his instinct is to flee. Fatal motoring cases in India are a grim record of how the driver ran over people and drove away.We show the pattern of what is called a Hobbesian society: one in which there is low trust between people. This instinct of me-versus-the-world leads to irrational behaviour, demonstrated when Indians board flights. We form a mob at the entrance, and as the flight is announced, scramble for the plane even though all tickets are numbered. Airlines modify their boarding announcements for Indians taking international flights. ...The question is: Why are we opportunists?In his great work Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti observed that the rewards religions promised their faithful were all far off, in the afterlife. This is because a short goal would demand demonstration from god and create sceptics instead of believers. There is an exception to this in Hinduism. Hinduism is not about the other world. There is no afterlife in Hinduism and rebirth is always on earth. The goal is to be released entirely and our death rites and beliefs—funeral in Kashi—seek freedom from rebirth. Christianity and Islam are about how to enter heaven; Hinduism is about how not to return to earth, because it’s a rotten place. Naipaul opens his finest novel with the words “The world is what it is”, and Wittgenstein ( “The world is all that is the case”) opens his Tractatus similarly.Hinduism recognizes that the world is irredeemable: It is what it is. Perhaps this is where the Hindu gets his world view—which is zero-sum—from. We might say that he takes the pessimistic view of society and of his fellow man. But why?The Hindu devotee’s relationship with god is transactional: I give you this, you give me that. God must be petitioned and placated to swing the universe’s blessings towards you. God gives you something not through the miracle, and this is what makes Hinduism different, but by swinging that something away from someone else. This is the primary lesson of the Vedic fire sacrifice. There is no benefit to one without loss to another. Religion is about bending god’s influence towards you through pleas, and appeasement, through offerings.Society has no role in your advancement and there is no reason to give back to it (in any way, including leaving the toilets clean behind you) because it hasn’t given you anything in the first place. That is why Indian industrialists are not philanthropists. Rockefeller always gave a tenth of his earnings to the Church, and then donated hundreds of millions, fighting hookworm and educating black women. Bill Gates gave $25 billion (around Rs1.2 trillion), and his cause is fighting malaria, which does not even affect Americans. Warren Buffett gave away $30 billion, almost his entire fortune. Andrew Carnegie built 2,500 libraries. Dhirubhai Ambani International School has annual fees starting at Rs47,500 (with a Rs24,000 admission fee) and Mukesh Ambani’s daughter was made head girl. An interesting thing to know is this: Has our culture shaped our faith or has our faith shaped our culture? I cannot say.
Readings
An Atlantic correspondent on IEDs (improvised explosive devices).
It's hard to appreciate how devilish these devices are until you watch one blow. I first saw a controlled explosion of an IED ten years ago, when I worked at The Cambodia Daily. An occasional trick among Phnom Penh goons was to rig up one of the country's millions of scattered landmines and put it under a rival's tire, to be driven over when he pulled out of his parking spot. The rival spotted the device, and hours later a bomb squad came and detonated it in situ with spectators gathered a few blocks away. I expected a loud firecracker-boom, followed by a little puff of dust and golf claps from the assembled onlookers. Instead, the boom arrived like a thief, stealing my senses from two hundred meters, rattling my eyes in their sockets, and flinging a huge cloud of dust and sand over me and the rest of the fleeing crowd. It was, quite simply, a concentration of force unlike anything most of us have ever seen, unless we work in demolitions.
Voices
Carine, 14 years old from Masisi (a town in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Obama is in Ghana today.
From here: "I live in the centre of Masisi town, near the hospital where Médecins Sans Frontières works. I go to primary school and am in year five. I really enjoy school. My favourite lesson is geography but actually, I like all my classes and particularly my teacher. Lessons are really interesting and this is very important to me. I’d like to become a nurse. So, I have to study hard. My dad works in the Masisi health centre and I can see that he helps a lot of people. I’d like to do the same.I have a lot of friends at school and I get on very well with everybody. But I don’t have a boyfriend. My dad would never accept it! School is much more important and he thinks that I should not have that kind of distraction!. I’m scared that one day the war will start again here. When there was fighting nearby a lot of people were wounded and killed. I am afraid that something could happen to my father or my mother. All this fighting could start again and this worries me a lot. If the war returns, I won’t be able to go to school anymore and then I’ll never be a nurse and maybe I won’t get married. At school, there are children from the nearby Kilimani camp for displaced people. These people live with barely anything, and I really pity them. If the war starts here again, nothing good will happen.” All this fighting could start again and this worries me a lot. If the war returns, I won’t be able to go to school anymore and then I’ll never be a nurse and maybe I won’t get married. Summer holidays started just a few days ago. This means that I won’t go to school for two months. But I won’t be bored! I have to help my mother with the housework. There is a lot to do as I have an older brother and four little sisters. The youngest one is one year old and I look after my little sisters when mum is not at home, or for example, when she goes to the market. I don’t mind. Later, I want to have children and to get married too. Besides housework, I’ll be able to play with my sisters and my neighbours! We play ball and jumping skipping rope, we walk around Masisi and we talk a lot…"
From Wikipedia: Masisi is a town and administrative district (territory) in the Nord-Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a centre of the conflicts between the Congolese army and militias such as that of Laurent Nkunda which has plagued the eastern Congo since the ending of the Second Congo War and which threatens to start a third Congo war. Hutu and Tutsi militias originating from the Rwandan genocide and civil war are involved, and the conflicts relate to Rwandan border security and the control of eastern Congo's minerals.
Perspectives in capitalism
The cheap tricks private health insurance companies sometimes use to screw the rest of us... This one is called 'rescission'.
A House oversight subcommittee took a close look at a particularly shameful practice known as “rescission,” in which insurance companies cancel coverage for some sick policyholders rather than pay an expensive claim. The companies contend that rescissions are rare. But Congressional investigators found that three big insurers canceled about 20,000 individual policies over a five-year period — allowing them to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims. The companies typically argue that the policyholders withheld information about pre-existing conditions that would have disqualified them from coverage. But the subcommittee unearthed cases where the pre-existing conditions were trivial, or unrelated to the claim, or not known to the patient. When executives for the three companies were asked if they would be willing to limit rescissions to cases where the policyholder deliberately lied on an application form, all said they would not. This tactic will not be ended voluntarily.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
From a photo essay
Majid Fateh Abdil Aziz El Najjar unlocked the door of his home to allow me to see the damage caused by Israeli tank fire and phosphorous shell attacks. As we entered the foyer I noticed a small, decaying bouquet of flowers leaning against a wall. That is where Majid’s wife of sixteen years, Hanan Fateh Abdil Ghani Qodeh, was killed.“She waited eight years for me,” he told me. “When I was in an Israeli prison, she waited eight years so that we could marry. We were in love.”We walked around the house for some minutes, looking to see what could be salvaged, but rubble covered the entire house.
Portraits of Survival by Asim Rafiqui in Gaza taken during the last days of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead that was launched on December 27, 2008, the last day of Hanukkah.
New eats: Try BK's Lakshmi ham sandwich
Innovative marketing techniques from Burger King...
From here: How's this for a global marketing strategy? Each month target a different international market with an ad that offends some segment of the population, then, after earning a lot of media attention, apologize and pull the ad. Burger King has removed the in-store advertisement that has offended some. That's the pattern of offense Burger King has established in the past few months. Most recently, the fast feeder had cultural and religious groups screaming today in the latest installment of what has become a series of monthly melees. A few hours after an ABC News reported that ads in Spain depicted the Hindu goddess Lakshmi atop a ham sandwich -- with the caption "a snack that is sacred" -- Burger King announced that it would pull the ads. Many Hindus are, of course, vegetarian.
Reverse momentum
Now, about our lady Palin - the gift that never stops giving...
Sarah Palin's bombshell that she is resigning as Alaska governor actually has boosted her a bit among Republicans, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, though it also has dented her standing among Democrats and independents.Two-thirds of Republicans want Palin, the party's vice presidential nominee in 2008, to be "a major national political figure" in the future. Three-fourths of Democrats hope she won't be.Ow, ow, ow! That just makes my damn brain hurt!Let me get this straight. The woman QUITS because of ETHICS complaints filed against her by her CONSTITUENTS and that makes her MORE Presidential?I knew the GOP was in bad shape but this is absolutely unbelievable.
Readings
On the forgotten ethic of working with ones hands...
The summer of my 13th year I stayed with relatives in central Ohio. When my Aunt Beth saw a classified ad for a local farm in the newspaper, she asked if I'd like to earn a little extra spending money picking blueberries. With visions of new clothes breakdancing in my head, I set an early alarm so my aunt could drop me off at the farm by 7 am. I picked and picked and picked, crouched under a canopy of branches to shelter myself from the sun, working to perfect the technique of pulling an entire cluster off the bush without crushing a single blueberry. With the morning sun just beginning to emanate a kind of heat foretelling the coming of a scorching afternoon, I proudly presented my first full bucket of blueberries to the field foreman just before 11 am."Good work," he said. "You've earned three dollars and sixty-seven cents."After nearly four hours crawling through the field, sweat drenched my hair; dark brown mud painted my long pants and tennis shoes; purple stains speckled my face and covered my fingers; scratches marked jagged red scrawls across my hands and face; my back and neck ached from the hours hunched under the bushes. I'd never known such exhaustion. The only reason I had no thoughts of hunger was because I'd eaten every blueberry accidentally crushed by the clumsiness of my inexperienced fingers. All that work wouldn't even buy me a McDonald's super-value meal. "This is bullshit," I thought, abandoning my bucket by a truck and sneaking away from the farm so none of the other workers would see me giving up. I walked about a mile to the nearest payphone and called my grandmother to come pick me up. The rest of the afternoon I spent lounging on her couch in the air conditioning, watching MTV and nursing wounds aggravated in their seriousness by my own perception of the hardship I'd endured during four hours in the field.
Unvarnished
Harpers provided some 'spin-free' facts about the imbroglio unfolding in Honduras here. An excerpt below.
Based on his response to events in Honduras, Barack Obama may as well be Ronald Reagan or George Bush when it comes to coups in Latin America. The Obama administration initially managed to muster “concern” about the coup, and has been acting in a cowardly fashion ever since. The only reason it has moved at all was that it was forced by the united front by Latin governments of left and right. If Zelaya is returned to power, it won’t be because of anything Obama did.
Readings - then and now
From a 1948 New Yorker article reviewing the then published Kinsey report on sexual behavior.
The Kinsey report also reveals a widespread failure to live up to the popular ideals of virginity until marriage and monogamy thereafter. Eighty-five per cent of all men who marry have had some sexual relations with women before marriage. Nearly one-half of all married men have extramarital relations. Moreover, more than one-third of all men have engaged in homosexual practices at some time or other after the start of adolescence. There is a definite difference between the patterns of sexual activity of men who go to college and the patterns of those who leave school at an early age, which means, roughly, between the patterns of the well-to-do and the patterns of the poor. The latter are much more likely to engage in premarital sexual activities, though rarely with the girls they marry. They are also far more intolerant of most types of perversion. (Such practices, the report indicates, are so common that "perverted" begins to have a slightly ironical sound.) It is often said that the sex impulse can be sublimated —turned aside into artistic or other forms of creative endeavor. This volume shows no evidence that this is true; on the contrary, it justifies a strong inference that it is not. The sexual power of each individual appears to be an inborn characteristic; evidently it is diminished neither by extensive sexual activity at any one period of life nor by the expenditure of energy in other directions.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Anatomy of an execution
From a New Yorker article about platoon dynamics and American infantrymen in Iraq...
Two infantrymen performed the executions. One of them was William Hunsaker, the specialist. Just before Operation Iron Triangle, he was told that he would be promoted. His platoon sergeant considered him to be "one of the better soldiers that I had." He was admired for his discipline and work ethic - he once cleaned up the remains of Iraqis who had been shot in a truck. He read voraciously, and quoted Nietzsche: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." At some point, Hunsaker decided that the three detainees were monsters, and that killing was "a lesser evil for a greater good." He has since said, "The men I killed were terrorists, men who would have done worse to us if the situation was reversed." Even today, he says, he has not lost sleep over the killings. The other soldier, Private First Class Corey Clagett, was known for his lack of discipline and for bragging, and he seemed to take lightly the idea of shooting the detainees. "I thought it was basically like an initiation," he later testified.Hunsaker and Clagett used a knife to cut the zip ties on the detainees' wrists, and then partly lifted the men's blindfolds. Hunsaker looked each detainee in the eye, and gestured for them to run. Al-Jemi and the teen-agers did not understand him, or perhaps they were reluctant to run, so Clagett yelled, "Yalla!" - "Hurry," in Arabic - at which point they fled. Clagett threw the knife in their direction, hoping to create the impression that one of them had dropped it while escaping. Hunsaker shot the youngest detainee first. "I was going to make it quick and as painless as possible for him," he later testified. "So I took careful aim and shot the first one through the heart and the back, and shot him in the head." Hunsaker shot a second detainee through the chest. Then, he recalled, "Clagett opened up fire, and just sprayed bullets, eventually fatally wounding the third, before I could get a shot at him." Hunsaker felt disoriented. He removed his helmet, walked back to Komar - Abdullah's house, and squatted in the doorway. He put his face in his hands to control his feelings. "1 was angry at Clagett," he recalled. "If you are going to do it, you know, do it right. There is no sense in causing the extra suffering by just spraying bullets." Clagett who had not killed anyone before, later told a psychiatrist that during the shooting his "mind just went blank." At the sound of the gunfire, the rest of the squad ran over, when Girouard saw the bodies, he turned pale. One of the detainees had somehow survived the shooting, and Graber - one of the infantrymen who had objected earlier - recalled Girouard telling him, "Put him out of his misery." Graber, focusing on the dying detainee's strained breathing, fatally shot him.
One of the detainees captured by the Charlie Company as part of Operation Iron Triangle before he was killed on May 9, 2006. Photo ripped from the June 6th edition of the New Yorker
Comparing two architects of war (and death)
Comparing two war architects Rumsfeld (Iraq) and the recently deceased Robert S. McNamara (Vietnam) in a review of a new book about the former.
Asked to assess Mr. Rumsfeld’s tenure, Mr. Graham reports, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger gave him “high marks as a secretary of defense trying to revamp the U.S. military but scored Rumsfeld low as a secretary of war,” noting that the same was true of Robert S. McNamara, the only other Pentagon chief with an equally controversial term in office. Mr. Graham points out that both Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McNamara came from the corporate world, both had keen analytic minds and “insatiable appetites for data,” both sought tighter civilian control of the military and both presided over long, costly and unpopular wars. The big difference between the two men, Mr. Graham adds, is how they ultimately viewed their own tenures: “despite his public cheerleading for the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara privately became dubious about its wisdom and effectiveness while still in office” and came to recognize “that he had failed as defense secretary because of mistakes he and others had made in Vietnam.” In contrast, Mr. Graham writes, Mr. Rumsfeld “did not leave office doubting his handling of the Iraq war” and “has acknowledged no major missteps or shown any remorse on the subject to date.”
Today's dose of irony
Racist senator from Virginia, George 'macaca' Allen is writing a book called 'The Triumph of Character'. For more on his macaca background, see here.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Big Brother chronicles
Scanning and grading workers smile's to boost customer satisfaction...
From here: More than 500 staff at Keihin Electric Express Railway are expected to be subjected to daily face scans by "smile police" bosses. The "smile scan" software, developed by the Japanese company Omron, produces a sweeping analysis of a smile based on facial characteristics, from lip curves and eye movements to wrinkles. After scanning a face, the device produces a rating between zero to 100 depending on the estimated value of the fulfilled potential of a person's biggest smile. For those with a below-par grin, one of an array of smile-boosting messages will op up on the computer screen ranging from "you still look too serious" to "lift up your mouth corners", according to the Mainichi Daily News. A growing number of service industries are reportedly using the new Omron Smile Scan system for "smile training" among its staff. Workers at Keihin Electric Express Railway will receive a print out of their daily smile which they will be expected to keep with then throughout the day to inspire them to smile at all times, the report added. (via)
Quote
From the draft report of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board:
“If the U.S. fails to adopt an economywide carbon abatement program, we will continue to cede leadership in new energy technology. The U.S. is now home to only two of the ten largest solar photovoltaic producers in the world, two of the top ten wind turbine producers and one of the top ten advanced battery manufacturers. That is, only one-sixth of the world’s top renewable energy manufacturers are based in the United States. ... Sustainable technologies in solar, wind, electric vehicles, nuclear and other innovations will drive the future global economy. We can either invest in policies to build U.S. leadership in these new industries and jobs today, or we can continue with business as usual and buy windmills from Europe, batteries from Japan and solar panels from Asia.” (via).
Monday, July 06, 2009
Sign o' the times...
Someone is making money off Twitter - finally...
Australian media marketing firm uSocial is offering a new paid service allowing organisations to buy Twitter followers to aid their marketing campaigns. According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month. It is selling followers in various packages, starting at 1,000 for $87, which is delivered in seven days, and going all the way up to 100,000 followers at a cost of $3,479, delivered over a year.
Viewpoint
So what does it take to succeed? An interesting take here.
Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
... Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true. But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.
Friday, July 03, 2009
We actually murdered this guy...
Excerpts from Saddams last interview...
Full interviews here.
In a series of interrogations before his execution, Saddam Hussein told an F.B.I. agent that on the eve of the 2003 American invasion, Iraq was trapped between United Nations orders to demonstrate that it had disarmed and a fear that appearing too weak would invite attack from its powerful neighbor and foe, Iran.
.. Mr. Hussein told the F.B.I. that if United Nations sanctions against his country had been lifted, Iraq would have sought a security agreement with the United States to protect it from Iran.
.. The interviews contain few major revelations, but they underscore once again both Mr. Hussein’s striking miscalculation of the risks he faced and the United States’ mistaken estimate of the threat Iraq really posed.
Full interviews here.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Photo
From Northwestern University Library's collection of more than 7,600 photos chronicling the European colonization of East Africa between 1860 and 1960. Taken by European explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officials, travelers, and early commercial photographers, the photos document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during a period of dramatic change.
A Kikuyu warrior buying a wife from her father, the King, (payment in goats), East Africa.
Kikuyu women with water vessels (gourds) beside village store-houses, East Africa.Readings from the 80's (the 1880's)
Much has been said about the danger to women, especially young women, traveling alone of annoyance from impertinent or obtrusive attentions from travelers of the other sex. I can only say that in any such case which has ever come within my personal knowledge or observation, the woman has had only herself to blame. I am quite sure that no man, however audacious, will—at all events if he be sober—venture to treat with undue familiarity or rudeness a woman, however young, who distinctly shows him by her dignity of manner and conduct that any such liberty will be an insult. As a rule, women traveling alone receive far more consideration and kindness from men of all classes than under any other circumstances whatever, and the greater independence of women—which permits even young girls in these days to travel about entirely alone, unattended even by a maid—has very rarely inconvenient consequences.
- Lillias Campbell Davidson, from Hints to Lady Travelers. An early bicycle enthusiast, Davidson founded the Lady Cyclists' Association in England in 1892, writing that the new machine offered, "the greatest boon that has come to women for many a long day."
From here.
Thinking time
A quiz noted on McSweeneys:
IRAN OR STAR WARS?1. Supreme Chancellor2. The Special Clerical Court3. Assembly of Experts4. Third Senate5. Guardian Council6. Imperial Ruling Council7. Supreme Leader8. Army of the Guardians9. General Ministry10. Galactic Senate
Answers:
Iran - 2, 3, 5, 7, 8
Star Wars - 1, 4, 6, 9, 10
Meanwhile on Wall Street
The sub prime mortage meltdown seems like distant memory...
From here: Based on analysts' earnings forecasts for 2009, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is on track to pay out as much as $20 billion this year, or about $700,000 per employee. That would be nearly double the firm's $363,000 average last year, and slightly higher than the $661,000 for the average Goldman employee in fiscal 2007, according to analyst estimates reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Readings
Interesting point of view...
If Bernie Madoff's crimes were "extraordinarily evil," as his sentencing judge declared, than how to we describe the crimes of Joseph Stalin, or the warp speed massacres in late 20th century Rwanda? How do we distinguish linguistically between a massive Ponzi scheme and genocide? It's not an idle semantic question. Hyperbole, pop culture's lingua franca, doesn't simply exaggerate; it also diminishes. It threatens to obliterate essential moral and aesthetic distinctions, undermining our ability to recognize gradations of good and evil, freedom and repression, or beauty, intelligence and talent.Yes, Madoff ruined countless lives (literally, considering the effect of his fraud on charities as well as individual investors.) Yes, he stole on a grand scale and earned his imprisonment. Yes, apparently he had his share of neuroses, (like reported obsessive compulsive tendencies,) but who doesn't? Generally, he seems such an ordinarily evil man. His sins -- greed, selfishness, dishonesty, an absence of empathy -- are all distressingly common. Indeed, his story owes its symbolic resonance to the ordinariness of his character and crime. Extraordinary people stand apart. Madoff stands within and for the acquisitive, status hungry culture that lionized him, the tribalism that led so many Jews to trust him, and the corrupt financial and regulatory system that allowed him to prosper.
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