Archive for May, 2009
Note: Relevant updates will posted to the bottom. By all means, read all the way to the end, where it gets interestinger and interestinger.
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Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church this morning. According to the New York Times:
Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.
He had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. Full story »
Part eight in a series
Chairman Mao looks a little waxy these days.
 It isn’t for lack of trying. The Chinese government has gone to great pains to keep him looking fresh—at least as fresh as a guy who’s been dead since 1976 can look.
Just as the Russians have Lenin on display in Moscow, the Chinese have Mao on display in Beijing. Those Communists, it seems, love their embalmed leaders. (I wonder if Castro is making similar plans.)
Mao Zedong—or, as Americans learn it, Mao Tse-Tung—served as leader of the Communist army during the Chinese civil war of the 1930s, and then became leader of the entire country when the Communists eventually won in 1949. He served as chairman until his death in 1976.
And that’s when the legend of Mao took off. Full story »
I need to admit this up front. I have a condition. My great aunt Doreen called it Brain Fag and said it ran deep in all the Hargrove men, but I don’t think there’s an official name for it, and certainly no effective treatment. It’s sort of hard for me to talk about, but the best way I can put it is that I suffer from occasional moments of high stupidity. Oh, what the hell. I have Brain Fag, and it isn’t getting any better.
How do I know? Let’s look at the facts. When I was a kid, I dressed up as a matador and went to school actually thinking I looked cool. I bought a book titled “How to Hypnotize Bees.“ And tried it. Twice. I believed my friends when they said emu tipping was possible. I still have that scar. Just last year, I was “It” in a game of tag with 22 middle school students. I still have that scar, too. I bought Lehman Brothers stock because Jim Cramer said it was a good idea. Full story »
My students, colleagues, and I have been forming an impression of the Chinese during our trip to China these past ten-plus days. But what do the Chinese think of Americans?
Full story »
Part seven in a series
If Shanghai was New York City, then Beijing is Los Angeles. The city sprawls over some nineteen thousand square kilometers—all of which is clouded in smog.
The heavy traffic, smog, and city sprawl make
Beijing feel like L.A. Beijing lacks the glistening skyscrapers of glass and steel that proudly advertise Shanghai’s modernity. Instead of building up, Beijing has built out. The city radiates outward in a series of rings with beltways, called ring roads, circling around.
Smack dab in the middle, where a typical city center might rise skyward, sits the Forbidden City, the former palace of the emperor back in the days when China still had one.
In that regard, Beijing might be more like Washington, D.C. than L.A. Full story »
Ewww. A pedofurry.
Thanks for passing this on, JS. Just thanks a lot.
In Colorado, you are allowed to enroll your children in school without them having had all their supposedly required vaccines. Instead, Colorado parents are allowed to sign a waiver and then enroll their children. According to a KCFR/Colorado Public Radio interview with a medical researcher working for Kaiser Permanente, this fact partly explains why Colorado has about 800 cases of pertussis (aka whooping cough) a year, one of the highest rates in the country.
Kaiser Permanente (KP) is a large HMO that maintains its patient records in electronic form, a fact that makes the records very useful for researching disease. A new study performed by researcher Jason Glanz of KP finds that children who have never received a pertussis vaccine are 23x more likely to catch the disease than children who have been vaccinated. Of the approximately 800 cases of pertussis per year, that works out to 767 children who might not have caught pertussis if they’d been vaccinated, while only 33 children would have caught pertussis even after receiving the vaccine. Full story »
Part six in a series
Wu Tao stands at the front of the bus, microphone in hand, radiating charm.
Wu “Harry” Tao (right) talks with St. Bonaventure
professors Carl Case (left) and Darwin King at the
Winter Palace in Xi’an. As our group rides around Xi’an, Wu Tao serves as our tourguide. He stands in the bus’s center aisle and regales us with stories about the city’s past. He wears a dark t-shirt with a big numeral “8” on it—which has made him easy to find in a crowd—jeans, a pair of open-toed sandals, and a million-yuan smile.
When he points something out to us and tells us its name, he carefully repeats it and even spells it out for us to ensure we can follow him.
Tao is his given name while Wu is his family name, but Chinese custom puts the family name first, then the given name: Wu Toa.
Like many Chinese, Wu Tao has an American name, too: Harry. “Like Harry Potter,” he says with good-natured amusement. A lot of things appear to amuse him. He smiles freely and chuckles often.
The students are wild about him. Full story »
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the the Global Positioning System (GPS) could degrade significantly as early as next year. The GAO report says that the existing GPS satellites are aging and need to be replaced, but new satellites are years late and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. For this reason, the constellation of 31 GPS satellites has a chance of falling below the minimum number needed (24 satellites) to provide the required accuracy for military uses starting in 2010.
Normally, the trials and tribulations of the GPS system might not be considered a climate issue, given that most people only know about the everyday items that use GPS signals – smart phones and car navigation systems for starters. But GPS is used for thousands of lesser known applications. Full story »
Part five in a series
One day, thirty-five years ago, Yang Quanyi found a head in his well. His discovery helped changed the face of China.
 The date was March 29, 1974. Quanyi, a farmer in his thirties, was digging a new well, without much success, when he struck gold.
It wasn’t gold, literally—it was a head made from terra cotta, the same clay material used for making flower pots. And for Quanyi, it didn’t work out so great, at least not at first. When the government swooped in to investigate his discovery, Quanyi lost the lease to his land (there’s no private land ownership in China).
Subsequent archeological work revealed the scope of what Quanyi and his friends had stumbled upon: a lost tomb containing some eight thousand terra cotta statues, all smashed to bits. Full story »
It is a dark time for the rebellion. Although the Bush administration has been defeated, imperial troops have co-opted groups like MoveOn and vast swaths of the Democratic Party in their continued pursuit of global dominance.
Evading the Imperial Department of State, a group of freedom fighters without a leader has withdrawn to the remote corners of the blogosphere.
The evil lord Barack Obama, obsessed with imperial glory, is dispatching thousands of new storm troopers and imperial governors into the far reaches of South Asia…
Full story »
This year large metropolitan newspapers have folded in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson. More will likely follow. Journalists at the Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Citizen joined the 10,000 print newsies downsized or bought out from print newsrooms over the past few decade. Media pundits (including me) cluck-cluck incessantly over these democracy-wrenching signs of the impending journalistic apocalypse.
But readers in those cities still have print options for newspapers providing some local news.
Not so in the mountain town of Carbondale, Colo., whose population about equals its elevation. The Valley Journal, founded in 1975, had its plug pulled in March, reports DeeDee Correll of the Center for Rural Affairs. The 6,000 residents had no other sources of local news.
Their solution: Publish a newspaper themselves.
Full story »
UPDATE: In the last day or Food Will Win the War has surged ahead of Doco by a 73%-27% margin, which leads us to suspect that FWWtW fans have discovered the majesty of ToR. The question now is whether Doco loyalists will strike back. We’ll know soon – polls close at midnight Thursday. Listen and get your votes in…
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In last week’s match, Boulder’s Rose Hill Drive eliminated Antony & the Johnsons by a margin of 62%-38%. We’re not sure if this is an upset or not since A&tJ have a much higher international profile, but congratulations to both bands for a fine showing. RHD moves on to round 2, where they’ll face the winner of this week’s contest.
Our first contestant, from Raleigh, NC, please welcome the very hip, rootsy blues/punk/funk of Doco. Full story »
Guess away…
China changes before my eyes as I fly from east to west.
 Shanghai’s ever-present haze is made even grayer under cloudy skies. But after our flight takes off, we punch through the clouds to find plenty of sun. The cloudcover beneath us soon gives way, and I can see the landscape beneath stretched out like a broad canvas.
Farmers have painted square fields, bisected by the thin brown lines of roads and the dark green lines of irrigation channels. I see plenty of bright blue squares that, in America, one would take to be swimming pools, but in China, the squares indicate the corrugated sheet metal popular for roofing. Settlements dot the landscape everywhere.
I can’t spot a single undeveloped plot. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but from my vantage point tens of thousands of feet in the air, it looks like the Chinese have committed every square foot for habitation, business, or agriculture. I have no idea where any wildlife could possibly live.
The broad coastal plain around Shanghai eventually gives way to small clusters of hills that, in turn, grow into an impressive range of mountains. Atop the step mountains and in the deep valleys, I finally see wilderness.
But the topography isn’t the only thing about China that changes. Full story »
Break out the linguistic life jackets, folks. We’re about to be inundated with the overuse and abuse of the word mainstream with regard to President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
Politics is at its heart a battle for control of language and symbols. Now that the president has nominated Judge Sotomayor, [insert name of political party or faction here] will seek to [support | undercut] that nominee through [messaging | framing | "truth"]. Ideological control of mainstream, a word signifying ownership of the core values of a majority of Americans, is at stake.
Full story »
 Thomas E. Ricks, erstwhile journalist and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, has become the embodiment of the warmongery’s moral and intellectual duplicity.
Ricks’s most recent 15 minutes of fame involved an appearance at a Firedoglake book forum. In reply to a commenter who asked if “more deaths in Iraq are worth it,” Ricks said, “I think staying in Iraq is immoral. But I think that leaving Iraq is even more immoral.” In a nutshell, Ricks framed the core fallacy in the long war philosophy: that two wrongs can make a right. This theme dominates Rick’s work these days. The Gamble and the media blitz that accompanied its debut were dazzling examples of what Voltaire was talking about when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Full story »
Hot links from recent days Full story »
 We watch sports for a variety of reasons. To revel in the thrill of head-to-head competition. To marvel at the athleticism. To root for the home team, in which we have somehow invested a piece of our own identities. To mark our place in the timeless ritual. To learn, even.
With the NBA, there’s one more reason: to see which narrative the league has decided is the most compelling.
Now, I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think the world is biased against me personally and I don’t believe that the refs are out to get my team. In most cases, my attempts to explain bad officiating, whatever the sport, need go no further than “basic incompetence.” Full story »
Once again the question of whether al-Qaeda is granted safe haven by Iran raises its ugly head. It makes its appearance just in time to maintain the temperature of relations between Iran and the United States at 0° C and avert any thaw.
An article in the May issue of the CTC Sentinel, the journal of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, brought it to our attention. In Saudi Arabia’s 85 Most Wanted List, Christopher Boucek writes:
Several on the list are accused of belonging to a cell in Iran led by Saleh al-Qaraawi (#34), the alleged leader of an al-Qaida group in Iran.A senior Saudi security official told the author in February 2009 that roughly 35 of the 85 are in Iran, protected by elements of the Iranian government who facilitate the Saudis’ movement and transit in official vehicles. [Emphasis added.] Full story »
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