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"I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career... I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate."

—Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)

Saturday, February 4

Not in the Mood 

My fellow weblogger at Medley was lucky enough (?) to be called by a Democratic Party fundraiser at a crucial juncture:
"I said: 'Actually - we're really pissed off at the Democrats and the cloture vote yesterday, so we're not in the mood to give the party any money right now.' And then I hung up.

I have to run to something in 5 minutes or else I might have stayed on the line and ranted a bit longer at the poor volunteer.

Sorry, Howard - still love you, man, but your party has betrayed me, betrayed the country, and betrayed the Constitution and I won't soon forget it."

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A Zombie Error 

“So - are images of the Prophet Muhammad illicit in Islam? From what some people do and say you might think so.

Not so fast. This is a classic zombie error - a commonplace belief that will. not. die!

I am not a specialist in Islamic art, but I teach an occasional low-level survey of the field at these Colleges, where we have an excellent Visual Resources Collection for a school of our size, a collection which is unfortunately for your visual delight very observant of copyright laws, so I can't post any pictures. I popped some terms into the search engine and came up with this list of paintings of the Prophet Muhammad executed by Muslims that we happen to own slides of; this is not an exhaustive list!

So, journalists, don't tell us this is a taboo subject matter in Islam. The physical depiction of the Prophet Muhammad may be a taboo subject matter in some sects of contemporary Islam, but let's all be clear -- this is not a universal prohibition.

Here are LOTS of examples for you arranged in chronological order...” (The Cranky Professor via walker)
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Friday, February 3

Icy Ball Xena Is Larger Than Pluto 

So Is It a Planet?: “A ball of ice and dust discovered last year in the outskirts of the solar system is 30 percent wider than Pluto, a team of German astronomers is reporting today.

The finding definitively makes the icy ball — temporarily labeled 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena — the largest known object to be discovered orbiting Earth's sun since Neptune was identified in 1846, and adds to the debate over what should be considered a planet.” (New York Times)
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Evolution mystery: 

Bacteria acquired gene for brown recluse spider venom: “It's a case of evolutionary detective work. Biology researchers at Lewis & Clark College and the University of Arizona have found evidence for an ancient transfer of a toxin between ancestors of two very dissimilar organisms--spiders and a bacterium. But the mystery remains as how the toxin passed between the two organisms. Their research is published this month in the journal Bioinformatics, 22(3): 264-268, in an article titled "Lateral gene transfer of a dermonecrotic toxin between spiders and bacteria."” (EurekAlert)
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Ghostbusters 

Paranormal investigation and protection services: “[We] offer a variety of discrete and personal paranormal protective services, ranging from cleansing houses/businesses of malign paranormal influences to curse protection and exorcism, combining tested ancient wisdom with modern scientific and philosophical perspectives, backed by over 20 years of practical experience in this unusual area of expertise.”
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Fixing Windows with Knoppix 

“Do you use Knoppix? This bootable Linux distribution that comes in the form of a CD or DVD can be a lifesaver when your computer goes awry. In this feature, we guide you through the process of fixing Windows with Knoppix, which includes resizing Windows partitions, solving key system file problems, and recovering data. This is a chapter from the ExtremeTech book Hacking Knoppix.” (ExtremeTech)
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EMP Warhead Tested 

“Britain, which has taken the lead in developing EMP (ElectroMagnetic Pulse) devices, is testing a new EMP warhead with the United States.” (Strategy Pages)
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Black Hole FAQ 

Everything you ever wanted to know (Ted Bunn, Berkeley Cosmology)
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Revered as a feminist icon... 

...and then she met Jesus: “Sitting on plump cushions in the faux drawing room of a London hotel, Naomi Wolf decides, for some reason, to talk about her epiphany. Wolf, the most widely read feminist of her generation, is fresh from a bruising radio encounter on Woman’s Hour with her own heroine, Germaine Greer.

It must have stung to be boxed around the ears by the matriarch icon who once described Wolf’s first book, The Beauty Myth, as the most important feminist tract since her own opus, The Female Eunuch. But Greer, like many other feminists, appears to have cooled towards 43-year-old Wolf since her 1991 polemic against the cosmetics industry radicalised a new generation of women.

Wolf’s follow-up books: Fire With Fire, on career success; Promiscuities, on sexual awakening; and Misconceptions, on marriage and childbirth – developed a feminist treatise from the mirror of her own experiences: what other feminists call an easy life.

Maybe it is an echo of Greer’s withering voice that spurs Wolf to open up for the first time in public about her spiritual awakening. Perhaps it is being asked once too often about the hitherto unexplained “mid-life crisis” that caused her to go off, in her early 40s, into the woods of upstate New York to write her latest book, The Treehouse. This self-help meditation on her father’s wisdom has drawn accusations that the author is embracing what she used to refer to as “patriarchy”.” (Sunday Herald)
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The New Geopolitics of Empire 

“What hope remains under these dire circumstances lies in the building of a new world peace movement that recognizes that what ultimately must be overcome is not a particular instance of imperialism and war, but an entire world economic system that feeds on militarism and imperialism. The goal of peace must be seen as involving the creation of a world of substantive equality in which global exploitation and the geopolitics of empire are no longer the principal objects. The age-old name for such a radical egalitarian order is “socialism.”” (Monthly Review)
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The Moral Status of Animals 

“In 2000 AD, the High Court of Kerala, in India, addressed the plight of circus animals "housed in cramped cages, subjected to fear, hunger, pain, not to mention the undignified way of life they have to live." It found those animals "beings entitled to dignified existence" within the meaning of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which protects the right to life with dignity. "If humans are entitled to fundamental rights, why not animals?" the court asked.

We humans share a world and its scarce resources with other intelligent creatures. As the court said, those creatures are capable of dignified existence. It is difficult to know precisely what that means, but it is rather clear what it does not mean: the conditions of the circus animals beaten and housed in filthy cramped cages, the even more horrific conditions endured by chickens, calves, and pigs raised for food in factory farming, and many other comparable conditions of deprivation, suffering, and indignity. The fact that humans act in ways that deny other animals a dignified existence appears to be an issue of justice, and an urgent one.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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Cookie Monsters of Death Metal 

Curious parallels pursued by WSJ Opinion Journal: “While the extreme branch of heavy-metal music known as death metal is defined in part by often-vile lyrics about violence, catastrophic destruction, nihilism, anarchy and paranoia, its singing style is associated with a beloved goggle-eyed, fuzzy blue puppet.

Death-metal vocalizing is also known as Cookie Monster singing, if not in tribute to, at least in acknowledgment of, the "Sesame Street" puppet that blurts in a guttural growl, his words discharged so rapidly that they tend to collide with each other.

All this was news to people at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind "Sesame Street." "We have nothing to do with it," said Ellen Lewis, vice president of corporate communications. "What is it?"”
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the social costs of dating 

“...[T]he price for our liberation has been high. It has been: Dating. Has any generation before ever had to go on so many dates? The economies of major metropolitan centers are now almost wholly reliant on the dating industry—in the bistros, bars, nightclubs. At every turn, the dater finds himself flattered: advice books, reality television shows, an infinite selection of white striped shirts to wear untucked over jeans. The contemporary novel increasingly organizes itself around a series of dates.

Every culture produces its paradigmatic social situation, and the date is now ours. ” (n+1)
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Pandora and Last.fm 

Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders. I recently wrote a post on FmH in response to reports about new software algorithms to pigeonhole the formal qualities of pieces of music to make recommendations based on analytic conclusions about your tastes. In short, I stated that a more subtle, sophisticated and ultimately more pleasing recommendation engine already existed — social recommenders like last.fm (audioscrobbler), which I use, which point you to new music based on the listening experience of a body of users whose tastes are similar to yours. Here is a more elaborate discussion of the strengths and weaknessess of the two approaches, which weblogger Steve Krause neatly contrasts as 'nature vs. nurture.'
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End of an Era 

Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams: “After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams.

On the company's web site, if you click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible:

"Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."

The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases. Faxes didn't help. Email could be counted as the final nail in the coffin.” (Live Science)
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Preaching to the Converted 

Ed Fitzgerald opines at unfutz: “I'm rather amazed at people around the lefty blogosphere spending so much time and effort debunking the claims and suggestions Bush made in the speech, I suppose because I take it for granted that pretty much everything he says will be a lie -- or, to be scrupulously fair, everything will exist somewhere on a continuum between "deliberately misleading" and "outright falsehood".

I guess someone has to say the obvious, but since most lefty blogs are preaching to the choir, and the mainstream media shows only limited interest in applying the only kind of "balance" that really matters -- that between the maximum amount of truth and the minimum amount of misinformation -- it seems somewhat like a waste of energy to me.” (unfutz)
Readers will notice that I had no commentary on the State of the Union. My reasoning is much the same as Ed's. He and I share the dubious distinction, it seems, of being quite opinionated authors of weblogs with very small audiences and no broader notice (sorry, Ed!), a situation accentuating the concern about preaching to the choir. The polarization of the weblogging world, moreover, is just mirroring the process in society as a whole. Timothy Leary once said something like, "You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind." However, call it arrogant or closeminded if you like, but I believe in my opinions, and I am confident that those who share my viewpoint have a monopoly on balance, as Ed defines it — maximal truth and minimal misinformation. Although I am sure the right wingnuts feel the same, I have no insecure need to entertain their madness politely. As someone once said, my mind isn't so open that any ol' thing can fly in.

Just as I become viscerally ill if I have to listen to Dubya for more than a soundbite's worth of tortured incoherency, illogic and deception, I am relieved that I am barely exposed, except in the odd comment here and there, to rightwing dissent against my views (although, in another sense, I miss it, since, to coin a saying, the contempt of the contemptible is a compliment). I would love to hear if readers have any counterexamples of recent meaningful exchange across the ideological gulf, in the weblogging sphere or elsewhere — where they are listening to each other or perhaps (shudder) even influencing each other's viewpoints...

Addendum: Dennis Fox responds, in part:

"...I try not to forget that other people reach different conclusions about complex issues without being idiots.

On the other hand, it’s also dangerous to let awareness of complexity prevent political conclusions and action, a topic I’ve blogged about before. The traditional academic objective style and the perennial recommendation that “more research needs to be done” strengthen the status quo. So does the related tendency of people who identify with the political middle to reject all nonmainstream input. Our goal should not be to oversimplify — which happens too often on the left as well as on the right — but to reach commitment and action despite awareness of complexity.

Forums for people who fundamentally disagree can be interesting, but I suspect not many underlying assumptions change. I’ve tried in the past to spur discussion across ideological lines, especially in the Israel/Palestine context, but I’m not sure how often that turns out to be useful. Dialogue groups that focus on this kind of exchange can increase understanding, empathy, and friendship — positive outcomes — but as far as I know they don’t routinely lead to effective action toward social change. When we think we are on the side of justice and equality, calls for dialogue and understanding can lead to expectations of compromise that mask rather than resolve justified grievances...."
Read the entire post.
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It's four weddings and a doctor 

“A Saudi man, caught up in a tug-of-war between his divorced parents, landed up in the hospital after they forced him to marry four times in six months. ” (New Kerala)

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Quote of the day 

“"The important questions facing our society today are not republican or democrat, liberal or conservative, religious or secular. They are compassion or greed, domination or empathy, justice or abuse. I myself stand for compassion, empathy, and justice. I don't see much of that in the halls of power and avarice, but I see plenty of it in my neighborhood, genuine acts of kindness and caring. Power and money corrupts while humility and gratitude enobles." — Harry Holleywood” (Markham's Behavioral Health) I believe this 'Harry Holleywood', by the way, is a fabrication of Markham. A Google search reveals that quotations on Markham's site have been attributed to Holleywood on a number of occasions, but that Holleywood appears nowhere else ont he web except as a misspelling of 'Hollywood'. Doesn't chage the emrits of the quotation, IMHO...

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Dept. of Solastalgia (cont'd.) 

Seducing the Medical Profession: “New evidence keeps emerging that the medical profession has sold its soul in exchange for what can only be described as bribes from the manufacturers of drugs and medical devices. It is long past time for leading medical institutions and professional societies to adopt stronger ground rules to control the noxious influence of industry money on what doctors prescribe for their patients.” (New York Times editorial)
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Leader's Rise Reflects Growing Concern in Republican Ranks 

"The surprise election of Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio as House majority leader was a cry of concern by an entrenched Republican majority, acutely worried that voter unease about corruption and partisan excesses could threaten its control of Congress this November." (New York Times )
Concern in the Republican ranks?? So what do the Republicans do about it? They give you a new boss who's the same as the old boss, just billing him as a 'fresh face' and a reformer. Boehner (and don't you dare pronounce it 'boner') just weeks ago refused to give back #30,000 he had received from the Indian tribes at Abramoff's behest; he was distributing checks from the tobacco lobby to members of Congress on the floor several years ago; and he is so intimately connected to the lobbyists that he sleeps with one. When René Magritte captured the essence of surrealism by hanging a picture of a pipe with the legend "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", he created a profound sense of disquiet. When the Republicans do it, it is business as usual.

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Thursday, February 2

Gun-toting motorists more prone to road rage 

“Gun lobbyists like to repeat the quote often attributed to American writer Robert Heinlein, that "an armed society is a polite society". But this is certainly not true for motorists.

A survey of 2400 drivers carried out by David Hemenway and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health shows that motorists who carry guns in their cars are far more likely to indulge in road rage - driving aggressively or making obscene gestures - than motorists without guns.” (New Scientist)
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Quote of the Day: 'Our Bull Connor' 

Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-NY): "If there's one thing that George Bush has done that we should never forget, it's that for us and for our children, he has shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all..." (New York Sun, 9/23/05, via micheline)
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Wednesday, February 1

What Really Happened 

Cindy Sheehan: “As most of you have probably heard, I was arrested before the State of the Union address last night.

I am speechless with fury at what happened and with grief over what we have lost in our country.

There have been lies from the police and distortions by the press (shocker). So this is what really happened...” (TruthOut)


And:
Representative Lynn Woolsey's statement regarding Cindy Sheehan. "Much has been made of the arrest of Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan before last night's State of the Union address. Mainstream media coverage has made it seem as if Sheehan was in the balcony of the House of Representatives under false pretenses. In fact, she was invited. Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, personally purchased a ticket to the speech for Sheehan. Rep. Woolsey today issued the following statement regarding Cindy Sheehan's arrest in the gallery of the House of Representatives before the State of the Union address. (TruthOut):

"Since when is free speech conditional on whether you agree with the President? Cindy Sheehan, who gave her own flesh and blood for this disastrous war, did not violate any rules of the House of Representatives. She merely wore a shirt that highlighted the human cost of the Iraq war and expressed a view different than that of the President. Free speech and the First Amendment exist to protect dissenting statements like Ms. Sheehan's last night."

"Stifling the truth will not blind Americans to the immorality of sending young Americans to die in an unnecessary war, against a nation that posed no threat to our security. The President's speech last night was yet another attempt to distort history, as he suggested - once again - that the 9/11 terrorists came from Iraq. Everyone knows this is not true. We must not be afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes. It's time to bring our troops home."
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The 'Marlboro Man' Marine Comes Home 

"Remember the 'Marlboro Man' marine? He's now 21, home from Iraq and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
'The photo of the 'Marlboro Man' in Fallujah became a symbol of the Iraq conflict when it ran in newspapers across America in 2004. Now the soldier has returned home to Kentucky,where he battles the demons of post-traumatic stress....The man in the photograph is James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an icon, although in ways [Dan] Rather probably never imagined.
He's quieter now -- easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can't look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on invisible triggers. The diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. '
After returning home and being diagnosed with PTSD by a military psychiatrist, the military still wasn't finished with him. They sent him to New Orleans to help bring law and order to the city in the wake of the Katrina disaster..." — Jeralyn Merritt (Huffington Post via walker)
...and that's only the beginning...

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Tuesday, January 31

R.I.P. Stew Albert 

'Yippie' leader departs with idealism intact: "Stew Albert, a co-founder of the theatrically unruly Youth International Party -- whose members were more commonly known as Yippies -- and one of the last remaining radical leftists of a colorful cohort that once included Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, John Lennon, Timothy Leary and Tom Hayden, died Monday in Portland of liver cancer. He was 66.

...A lifelong radical and activist, unlike many aging '60s radicals and hippies who grew into careerists who worried about their own kids and drugs, Mr. Albert continued to carry an idealistic torch for the 1960s, marching, protesting, speaking and writing on behalf of radical social change.

Mr. Albert moved to Portland in 1984 with his wife, Judy Gumbo, whom he married in 1977, and young daughter. He worked as a freelance writer and editor from his Northeast Portland home, helped raise his daughter and enjoyed his reputation as a hell-raiser. He was active in Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity, an anti-racism group, and was president of Oregon Jewish Agenda, which in the mid-'80s started promoting Arab (Palestinian)-Jewish dialogue.

'I came here to bring the holy spirit of the '60s to this younger generation,' he said in 2000." (Oregon Live — thanks, abby)
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Monday, January 30

Remove me! 

“Do those unsubscribe links actually work, or are they just another spammer scam? A reporter goes undercover in the world of fake Rolexes to find the answer.” (Salon)
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Sunday, January 29

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him 

“The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.” (New York Times)
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The Top Ten Censored News Stories of 2005 

Project Censored's "I Want to Know" Project (via Common Dreams)

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Benford's Law 

“Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses.

"The truth is," he said in an interview, "most people don't know the real odds of such an exercise, so they can't fake data convincingly."

There is more to this than a classroom trick.

Dr. Hill is one of a growing number of statisticians, accountants and mathematicians who are convinced that an astonishing mathematical theorem known as Benford's Law is a powerful and relatively simple tool for pointing suspicion at frauds, embezzlers, tax evaders, sloppy accountants and even computer bugs.” (rexswain.com)
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A Defeat for Anti-Americanism 

Washington Post editorial: “Mr. Martin becomes the second G-8 leader in four months to exit from office after discovering that anti-U.S. demagoguery is no longer enough to win an election. Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, also tried to rescue his political career last fall by parading his differences with Mr. Bush; the result was the victory of Angela Merkel, who has moved swiftly to repair relations with Washington. Interestingly, both Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Martin won previous campaigns by playing anti-American cards, in 2002 and 2004 respectively. While it's not clear that the level of ill feeling toward the United States or its president has changed much in Germany or Canada, it's obviously not the foremost concern of voters fed up with domestic mismanagement -- or, perhaps, political venality.”
Emphasis added; it is disingenuous to bill this trend as a defeat for anti-Americanism, as the italicized sentence concedes. Anti-Americanism is alive and well, in Canada, Germany and the rest of the world, with few exceptions. The proximal cause of contemporary anti-Americanism is the Bush regime, after the preceding decade of benevolence and goodwill the U.S. and the rest of the world enjoyed. The real defeat of anti-Americanism will be to turn the Republicans out of office in the U.S.
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Rewriting history under the dome 

“Online 'encyclopedia' allows anyone to edit entries, and congressional staffers do just that to bosses' bios: The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.” (Lowell Sun)

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