I have three stuffed animals at home that I hide when I expect visitors. (Guys don’t do stuffed animals.) But my fuzzy critters serve a purpose. Four years ago, I destroyed my living room TV set by throwing a beer bottle at it in anger and frustration. I had been watching Lou Dobbs.
So, for years, I have been throwing stuffed animals at Lou instead of beer bottles. But now I need throw them no more. Lou no longer haunts my 7 p.m. viewing. He quit his CNN program in a multi-syllabic huff this week. CNN’s venerable, respected chief national political correspondent, John King, will take over in January. I’m sure I won’t have to throw stuffed animals at Mr. King.
But I once considered Lou venerable and respected. He’s a Harvard grad, y’know, a self-touted intellectual giant in matters of finance and economics. That’s why I began watching him years ago. I learned from him things I did not know. But for the past few years, Lou has only taught me the face of intellectual arrogance, bigotry, and unexceptional reporting masquerading as “advocacy.” Full Story »
My first experience with the UK was registering my company and opening business bank accounts. In South Africa, as a local, it takes two months to register the company and another three months to then open the bank accounts.
In the UK, it took 24 hours. And I walked away with a personal credit card, despite having no credit history. This, by the way, after the collapse of the credit industry. Not that I’m complaining.
This vote of confidence allowed me to rent a small apartment just outside the centre of Oxford. I was told that, living alone, I could apply for reduced rates. I’m used to dealing with municipalities. So, I fortified myself with a jug of coffee and a book, and phoned. Full Story »
In January of 2009, it snowed in Oxford. Deep drifts covered the meadow outside my study window. I watched as a fox, stark red against the pillow-white, tensed-and-leapt tensed-and-leapt through the fluffy deeps. It landed easily on a tree trunk, recently fallen across the river at the bottom of my tiny garden, and then ran along the informal bridge to my side before disappearing into a hedge.
I have seen snow before, but never lived in a place where snow thrusts itself into your daily life. The familiar landscape of fields, farmlands and wilderness was utterly transformed. I could see just how much wildlife lived around me. Bunnies hopped. Deer loped. Birds scratched.
I took a morning off, just to go see what the massive Port Meadow would look like. I got only a few yards on my bicycle before becoming glued in the snow. So I walked. It was magnificent. Full Story »
With all the excitement of this historic election, it is normal to overlook other news that normally would not have been missed; especially, the flagrant abuse of power by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Throughout Chertoff’s tenure as Homeland Secretary, I have said countless of times, as long as Homeland Security and ICE continues their “round them all up, ask questions later” policy, it will always be an open season on all Latinos/as, regardless of their citizenship.
It is ironic with less than a week for the election, I am proven correct again. According to the Los Angeles Times, ICE once again mistakenly detained a US citizen. Guillermo Olivares Romero, 25, was held in a detention center for two weeks.
Federal authorities have released a Los Angeles man from immigration detention after acknowledging that he is a U.S. citizen.
Guillermo Olivares Romero, 25, was held at an Otay Mesa detention center from Sept. 25 until Oct. 9, when an American Civil Liberties Union attorney presented his birth certificate, school and vaccination records to immigration authorities. He was released that day.
In an interview with HOY (h/t to el profe of Latino Like Me), Olivares said “No me creyeron. … Me decían que yo era mexicano porque me parecía a los mexicanos.” (They didn’t believe me. They told me I was a Mexican because I looked like a Mexican.) Full Story »
And what about Vancouver? Is it an even more hip version of Seattle?
By Sara Robinson
British Columbia is a very small province — well under five million people — and a very big one, nearly twice the size of California. The economy was entirely resource-based for most of its history, and still is; but they’ve worked very hard to get the movie and tech businesses up here, and succeeded wildly. Because of this history, even though Vancouver is the original home of both Greenpeace and the Suzuki Foundation, environmental oversight is still not what it should be — certainly, not what I came to expect living in California, which I now realize was exceptional in many ways on that front. Full Story »
Yo, Barack! Hey, John! I know you’ve been busy, cruising around the country, giving those same ol’ stump speeches over and over again. (Doncha get tired of that? We sure do.)
Park for a minute and tell us something. After you’re elected president, what are you gonna do with those buffoons running the Minerals Management Service that collects each year oil and gas royalties of $10 billion from oil companies? The Interior Department’s inspector general says top officials there have been involved in “financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.”
Periander, however, understood Thrasybulus’ actions. He realised that he had been advising him to kill outstanding citizens, and from then on he treated his people with unremitting brutality.
Herodotus, Histories
What Herodotus knew in 440BC, some 2,500 years ago, was this: opportunity is set on the margin. It is the historical power to choose either astonishing innovation, or “unremitting brutality”.
Consider the power of the margin. Say the average inter-city passenger airplane can carry a maximum of 150 passengers. Now, they may fly full at peak times, but they don’t at others, so the airline will set themselves a target of 85% occupancy. Plus, they’ll want a 15% profit (at least) on their capital.
This means that the airline doesn’t begin to make a profit until the 109th person gets on board. Everyone is important, but a plane that flies with only 108 people on board runs at a loss.
These subtle marginal effects can rock markets, bankrupt companies, and destroy nations. Full Story »
An unknown candidate, a gathering of Minutemen, Bob Barr (or maybe not), and immigration. Do progressives have anything in common with these people on this topic? Well, maybe. Just a bit.
So, the Minutemen are in town agitating about securing our borders. We’ve been thinking about the idea of a border fence for quite awhile and up until recently we were adamantly opposed. For one thing, it seemed unlikely to work, and for another, anybody who’s been to a Home Depot lately can tell you that fencing is expensive as hell.
But now we think we’ve been convinced. Good fences make for good neighbors, goes the old adage, and we now believe that a border fence would go a long way toward solving any number of immigration-related problems. Full Story »
It has been nearly seven years since the tragic events of 9/11, yet, the southern border continues to be used as a scapegoat in our ongoing “war on terror.” Security has become synonymous with stopping undocumented immigration, and unfortunately, this country’s immigration policies have resulted in very real negative consequences.
In the wake of the ever-expanding enforcement operations conduced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a “hidden system” has been created where there is no concern to the fate of those detained. They simply have become the sacrificial victims of a broken immigration system. Full Story »
Today, the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility just released a report on the improper hiring practices by Monica Goodling, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) White House Liaison and Senior Counsel to the Attorney General. According to the report, Goodling broke federal law by discriminating against job applicants on account of their political views.
In an effort to win back lost Hispanic votes, Republican presidential hopeful Senator John McCain held a closed door meeting with more than 100 Hispanic leaders in Chicago. However, things did not turn out as he hoped.
Blogger Matt Ortega reports that the event was attended by Rosanna Pulido, State Director for the Illinois Minutemen Project, who was not too thrilled with McCain’s double talk on immigration.
“I have friends in Washington, DC, on this issue,” she says. “We’ve had conversations on this issue.” After comprehensive immigration reform was killed in the Senate and McCain changed his rhetoric on the subject on the campaign trail, Pulido says, “we were hopeful after John McCain started saying, ‘I understand where the American people are coming from, there’s gotta be enforcement first,’ we thought great, he’s had a change of heart.”
So she went to the meeting, a room full of 150-200 people. “Sure enough,” Pulido says, “his mantra at the meeting was comprehensive immigration reform.’ And there were cheers and applause whenever he mentioned comprehensive immigration reform.”
“Then he said, ‘I bet some of you don’t know this — did you know Spanish was spoken in Arizona before English?’ And the crowd roared. I was appalled,” Pulido said. “He was pandering to these people — that’s what they wanted to hear.”
McCain knows he cannot win the election without the Latino vote. However, by pandering to his audience when it comes to immigration, John McCain is playing a dangerous game – one that will cost him the Latina/o vote come election day.
A couple of years ago, I addressed the Reconquista myth because this myth was making it rounds among hard-core right-wing pundits. It seems the same conspiracy theory is once again making those rounds again. One of the approaches xenophobic conservative pundits use to stir up fear so people are willing to support tough immigration policies is race baiting. Given the history of race relations in the US, history has shown repeatedly that this nation is willingly to act aggressively in punishing minorities.
The same right-wing populist fears that fueled the Cold War anti-communism, rallied against the Civil Rights Movement and brought about the armed citizens militia movement in the 1990s have reappeared with an elaborate conspiracy theory about the reconquering of America – La Reconquista – the idea that Mexicans are invading America to reclaim it for Mexico.
Recently, Media Matters reported that G. Gordon Liddy, on his nationally syndicated radio show, stated that undocumented immigrants from Mexico “want to reconquer America.” Full Story »
“Who killed her?” asked the five-year-old daughter of an acquaintance upon being told that her granny had died. That she could have died of old age and natural causes never occurred to the little girl. It is a chilling reminder of the type of society that South Africa has become.
It’s often difficult to get the attention of my students. But when I told them that it’s possible that a few of them would see the year 2100, and that most of their children surely would, they stopped furtively texting under their desks and began paying attention.
When I was born just after World War II, I told them, the population of the United States was about 141 million; of the world, about 2.7 billion. Now, 62 years later, Americans tip the scale at about 303 million; the world’s population has grown to about 6.6 billion.
A little extrapolation of U.S. Census data, I told them, shows the American population hitting 518 million at mid-century and 758 million in 2100. The world’s population is likely to grow to 14 billion at century’s end. Imagine what that world — their world — would be like, I challenged them.
But I was too optimistic. In a report to be released today, a Virginia Tech professor estimates that between 2100 and 2120 the population of the United States will reach one billion people. Full Story »
One makes a life-changing decision for some time in the future and then … And then time goes by. The shock wears off. Denial (or futurism) creeps in.
It wasn’t until I was emptying my flat as my cleaning lady took possession of most of my bits and bobs that it really hit home.
The life of a cleaning lady
There are around 15 million South Africans of working age (out of a population of 41 million). Around 8 million have jobs. The rest don’t.
For 2 million uneducated, barely literate women there really is only one choice for earning a living. They clean the homes of the people who do have jobs. These are the cleaning ladies, or “Domestic Workers”. Maids, in other words.
Sometimes they live in and cook and clean and wash. Sometimes they turn up once a week to do some ironing and basic cleaning. They’re not paid much. The minimum Government-mandated wage is less than $1 per hour.
Since most white English-speaking South Africans battle with African names, these women call themselves mundane platitudes, like Beauty, or Faith, or Monica. I think half the cleaning ladies in Cape Town are called Monica. Full Story »
Day of Islam
Paul L. Williams
Prometheus Books, 2007
The left is notorious for its queasiness about national security. It’s as if it’s afraid to bring the issue up for fear that hawks will use it as a license to wage even more war. Let sleeping dogs lie, progressives think, as they rattle on about diplomacy to the exclusion of a rational discussion about the use of force.
Another area they tend to steer clear of for fear of encouraging the right’s worst tendencies is illegal immigration. But that only compounds the problem that begins with their neglect of defense. Turns out a component of national security is nested within illegal immigration, like drugs in the gut of a mule. Full Story »
Generating electricity from ocean currents, waves, and the tides have the opportunity to provide significant amounts of electricity. As I reported several weeks ago, the first significant wave power installation has been given the green light by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for installation off the Olympic Peninsula. Another type of water-based energy is the tidal barrage. The basic idea is that you find an area where there are very wide swings between high and low tides, put up a dam across a bay or lagoon, and then use the water flow from the tide to fill and empty the bay and use turbines to generate electricity. One scheme uses both the rising and falling tides, driving the turbines both direction while another scheme uses just the falling tide. Last week, the BBC had an update on the Severn tidal barrage. The Severn tidal barrage would be a huge barrage (and likely a road) across the Severn River Estuary and the Bristol Channel, an area that, given its large tides and the support of the Severn River emptying into the Channel, should be able to provide approximately 5% of the United Kingdom’s electricity. The problem is that the estuary is also a huge bird sanctuary, so the environmental impacts are potentially huge. This is one of the reasons that U.K. Business secretary John Hutton announced that there would be a 2-year long study period of the energy vs. environmental and economic tradeoffs culminating in a period of public comment in 2010. The Severn barrage study is an unfortunately excellent example of the hard choices between environmental protection, economics, and energy that every nation will have to make in the process of decarbonizing the carbon economy. Full Story »
I have three stuffed animals at home that I hide when I expect visitors. (Guys don’t do stuffed animals.) But my fuzzy critters serve a purpose. Four years ago, I destroyed my living room TV set by throwing a beer bottle at it in anger and frustration. I had been watching Lou Dobbs.
