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Aug 12 2008
Lenovo W700’s built in Wacom Tablet
Posted by Jim as Security
I know what you're saying "hey, is that a Wacom Tablet there!". Well, yes it is. Lenovo's ThinkPad W700 is a 17" marvel that sports a built-in Wacom digitizer. Dutifully aimed for the graphics industry it would seem it is a good "idea". While I am just not too sure about the right palm rest, for me, it is a little "out there" but I could see myself using this too. Anything that would make me work well with my graphics programs (PhotoShop or CorelDraw) without requiring me to add more to my bag, well is an ace.
While I do not see this model at Lenovo.com yet, the Lenovo ThinkPad W700 will ... Continue reading »
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Jan Dawson [View Page] Posts: [Operation Nuna Nishi: Free Reference Service via Facebook], [one big library unconference], [more mir], [music information retrieval (mir)], [ubiquitous computing and the future], [new issue of ABQLA bulletin], [web2.you videos are up on the wiki], [social tagging colour experiment], [guerillamail], [google earth hour interface]
Jan Dawson
aggregating library, technology, and music information retrieval info
Operation Nuna Nishi: Free Reference Service via Facebook
Posted August 3, 2008 by A soft launch has been performed of an idea that I’ve been cultivating for several months now: to provide free reference service via Facebook. If people use this service, I would hope to collaborate with other information professionals to create an application which serves the same purpose. My second motivation was to gain experience giving reference since it’s a part of what I want to do.
How to Use it
Users can post questions on Nuna Nishi’s wall or message her if they wish to remain anonymous and the interaction can be confidential. To view questions and answers, users can view the “wall-to-wall” on Nuna Nishi’s profile. A weekly recap of reference questions will also be posted on Nuna Nishi’s blog and this will be imported via the Notes application.
Setting up
Facebook doesn’t allow new profiles with the word librarian in the name. I was only interested in applying my idea to profiles since I could see the effectiveness of using the wall to wall and message features as the platform. It seemed logical to have Nuna perform the service since she is in fact a virtual reference librarian in Second Life on Info Island International.
The First Week
The first week was a success. Visit Nuna’s reference log for details. Four questions in four days. Of course the first question was provoked to test the experiment. The next three questions came within the next two days with Nuna only having a total of about eight friends. There are still a few kinks related to the new facebook interface. For example, the new wall won’t allow a shared link with the posted answer. For now, I’ve remedied this by reverting to the old interface when I answer a question and it works great.
Is there a market for this? I’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
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one big library unconference
Posted July 8, 2008 by On Friday July 27 2008, I attended York University Library’s One Big Library Unconference.
90 participants were registered and invited to propose a session that they would also lead. Proposals were arranged on tables and voted upon the morning of the unconference. The schedule was made by unconference organizers based on participant votes. The following is a brief summary of the sessions I attended:
Trevor Owens (of Center for History and New Media in Fairfax, VA) led the session on Zotero.
I use Zotero already. Here is everything you need to know about it. I use it because it is a Firefox add-on that is ever-present on my browser. I can easily collect articles, websites, and store .pdfs as collections in my Zotero library. It is hoped that the next development for Zotero will be to provide remote access by becoming web-based. Also development on social aspects would enhance user reference sharing.
David Fiander (of University of Western Ontario) and Amanda Etches-Johnson (of McMaster University Libraries) led the session on Drupal.
Drupal is an open source web content management system. It is modular so as the user develops, they download modules to activate things. The Onion and the LSW’s (Library Society of the World)’s VERY new website are examples of Drupal.
John Fink (of McMaster University Libraries) and Dan Scott (of Laurentian University) led the session on Evergreen.
Evergreen is an open source OPAC that is also built in modules. Here is a demo. A feature that I found interesting was that Evergreen has the capacity to pass messages using an instant message vehicle similar to google talk. An interface that allows for message passing opens up many possibilities for funcionality user relationships. As a functioning OPAC, there are several features which are currently lacking such as the organization of acquisitions, serials, recalls, and reserves. I’m sure it won’t be long though…
Stacy Allison-Cassin (of York University Libraries), Nasser Saleh (of Queen’s University Engineering and Science Library), and F. Tim Knight (of York University Law Library) led the session on Semantic Web, Folksonomies, and Bibliographic Control
This was my favourite session as it addressed many thoughts I have been having regarding the access to information and finding ways to balance controlled vocabulary with natural language and social tagging. Our information society has changed our interaction with information by moving from a transaction to a relationship. We find something, tag it, pass it on, blog about it, and related it to other materials. I feel it’s our responsibility to capture user-generated content and organize it.
A major point I feel passionate about is the idea that we can’t dismiss users who tag with emotional tags such as “boring”, “sucks”, and “cool” because emotional tagging adds another dimension: the review! We need to find a way to balance social tagging and controlled vocabulary so that info has exhaustive points of access. It’s obvious, yes?
The Unconference was a huge success. I met my brilliant Twitter friends and I met brilliant librarians and technologists. Lastly, the inspiration and innovation is resonating with me as I plan my move to TO and my career in the community of Toronto librarians.
I hope we’ll do it again next year!
Comments: 4 Comments
more mir
Posted June 5, 2008 by music-ir.org describes itself as the “virtual home of music information retrieval research”. on this website, you can find useful MIR info such as:
the IMIRSEL (International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory) project
a research bibliography, “vital research papers in the field of Music Information Retrieval”
links to past conferences and meetings: ISMIR (International Conference on Music Information Retrieval); SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) 2003 Workshop; Mid-West Regional Colloquium
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music information retrieval (mir)
Posted April 14, 2008 by I’ve been interested in learning more about music information retrieval systems. here are a few resources i’ve been looking at:
*There’s a Google Tech Talk called “from sound synthesis to sound retrieval and back” by Xavier Serra of Music Technology Group at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Serra has quite a few projects in development from sound retrieval systems that look for similar harmonic structure or rhythm to developing tangible interfaces. He also demonstrates the “reacTable” which is an instrument that Bjork used on her Volta tour.
Some really cool things happening with MIR. With signal processing, users can access more than just what libraries normally catalogue (info attached to the physical format, digital info like text, digital sound data) and go further up the symantic ladder to obtain info like pitch, duration, timbre, intensity and further up the ladder as high as type of music, key of music, melody within a polyphonic piece, etc.
*“Information Retrieval for Music and Motion” by Meinard Muller is one of those good Springer books. I’m just getting into it now, but it looks pretty comprehensive. Two major parts: part 1 Analysis and retrieval techniques for music data; and part 2 Analysis and retrieval techniques for motion data.
Comments: 3 Comments
ubiquitous computing and the future
Posted April 12, 2008 by Just stumbled upon this video: Vision of the Future (Part 1): the intelligent revolution
a very good explanation of Second Life, MUVES, web 3.0, and artificial intelligence. just watch it, man.
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new issue of ABQLA bulletin
Posted April 10, 2008 by The Spring 2008 issue of the ABQLA Bulletin is out.
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web2.you videos are up on the wiki
Posted April 1, 2008 by check out videos of two web2.you workshop presentations:
Jessamyn West “Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarians 2.0″
John Dupuis “Blogging for Professional Development”
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social tagging colour experiment
Posted March 31, 2008 by I came across this blog post from Delores Labs where they report on data collection tasks from Mechanical Turk, “a marketplace where anonymous people can do tasks that take a small amount of time and training”.
There are 1300 colours and anonymous people were asked to label them.
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guerillamail
Posted March 30, 2008 by a website that provides disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 Minutes. In that time frame, you can read and reply to e-mails sent to the temporary e-mail address.
Comments: 1 Comment
google earth hour interface
Posted March 29, 2008 by is black today out of respect for earth hour (or it so that people can cheat cuz it gives off less light in the dark?)
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War in Context - [View Page] Posts: [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: August 13], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 11], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 10], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: August 9], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 7], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 6], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 5], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 3], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 2], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 1], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: July 31], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: July 30], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: July 29], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: July 28], [NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: July 27]
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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: August 13
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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: August 13
Russia’s strike shows the power of the pipeline
It was surely not lost on Russia’s bully in chief, Vladimir Putin, that the oil giant BP decided to shut down the pipeline that runs through parts of Georgia controlled by Russian troops. Indeed, that was one of the aims of the cross-border incursion.
Putin understands better than anyone that oil and gas are the source of Russia’s resurgence as a military and economic power and his own control over the Russian government and key sectors of its economy. It is oil and gas that provide the money to maintain Russia’s powerful military, along with a vast internal security apparatus and network of government-controlled enterprises that allow the president-turned-premier to maintain his iron grip on the levers of political and economic power.
Editor’s Comment — For those who see American power as wholly dependent on its military strength, the Georgia War will have come as a breath of fresh air. Russia demonstrated the incontestable power of military hardware and an old-fashioned army and the perfect justification for revving up an ideologically-lite New Cold War.
The real lesson here should however be about energy. The world’s second-largest oil producer is enfeebled by its flagrantly excessive oil consumption. Were it not for that, America would now be reaping the rewards of being an oil-rich nation while Russia’s power would correspondingly be diluted. What will it take for America to realize that it’s long past time for it to stop pigging itself?
Georgia: Mikheil Saakashvili, the man who lost it all
When he burst on to television screens across the world last week, speaking perfect English, Mikheil Saakashvili looked every inch the charismatic New York-trained lawyer that he is.
Known to friends as “Misha” the cosmopolitan 40-year-old is unquestionably brilliant, speaks half a dozen languages and has a Dutch wife he met in Paris.
But Mr Saakashvili has handed Russia a victory it could scarcely have dreamed of - his decision to invade South Ossetia has left his army humiliated and he could soon be fighting for his political life with no prospect of any meaningful help from his Western allies.
Editor’s Comment — An emerging conspiracy theory is that Georgia would not have triggered a war with Russia without having Americans — such as the McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann — egging them on. There might be a grain of truth to this idea, but I suspect that the sad truth is disastrous political judgments can too often be attributed to the psychological flaws of the individuals who make them. By most accounts, Mikheil Saakashvili is a man in whose hands power has always rested like a bomb waiting to explode.
Georgia President Saakashvili accepts Russia’s truce proposal
Bowing to the reality of vastly superior military might, the Georgian president said Tuesday that he would accept a Russian cease-fire agreement to end a five-day conflict, despite terms that some described as humiliating to his small, proud nation.
President Mikheil Saakashvili, while at times seeming defiant, appears to have all but given up his bid to reclaim two disputed regions on the Russian border. Russia, which said it had suspended a campaign that routed Georgia’s U.S.-trained military, continued bombing sites deep in the country hours later.
At a rally attended by thousands of people in Tbilisi, Saakashvili pledged that one day Georgia would beat Russia.
While aide advised McCain, his firm lobbied for Georgia
Sen. John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.
The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.
The McCain campaign said Georgia’s lobbying contract with Orion Strategies had no bearing on the candidate’s decision to speak with President Mikheil Saakashvili and did not influence his statement. “The Embassy of Georgia requested the call,” said campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.
But ethics experts have raised concerns about former lobbyists for foreign governments providing advice to presidential candidates about those same countries. “The question is, who is the client? Is the adviser loyal to income from a foreign client, or is he loyal to the candidate he is working for now?” said James Thurber, a lobbying expert at American University. “It’s dangerous if you’re getting advice from people who are very close to countries on one side or another of a conflict.”
War puts focus on McCain’s hard line on Russia
The intensifying warfare in the former Soviet republic of Georgia has put a new focus on the increasingly hard line that Senator John McCain has taken against Russia in recent years, with stances that have often gone well beyond those of the Bush administration and its focus on engagement.
Mr. McCain has called for expelling what he has called a “revanchist Russia” from meetings of the Group of 8, the organization of leading industrialized nations. He urged President Bush — in vain — to boycott the group’s meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006. And he has often mocked the president’s assertion that he got a sense of the soul of Vladimir V. Putin, who was then Russia’s president and is now its prime minister, by looking into his eyes. “I looked into his eyes,” Mr. McCain said, “and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.”
His hard line has been derided as provocative, and possibly dangerous, by some so-called realist foreign policy experts, who warn that isolating Russia would do little to encourage it to change. But others, including neoconservatives who deem promoting democracy a paramount goal, see Mr. McCain’s position as principled, and prescient. Now, with Russia moving forcefully into Georgia as Mr. McCain seeks the presidency, his views are being scrutinized as never before through the prism of Russia’s invasion.
After mixed U.S. messages, a war erupted in Georgia
One month ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia, for a high-profile visit that was planned to accomplish two very different goals.
During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.
But publicly, Ms. Rice struck a different tone, one of defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure. “I’m going to visit a friend and I don’t expect much comment about the United States going to visit a friend,” she told reporters just before arriving in Tbilisi, even as Russian jets were conducting intimidating maneuvers over South Ossetia.
U.S. puts brakes on Israeli plan for attack on Iran nuclear facilities
The American administration has rejected an Israeli request for military equipment and support that would improve Israel’s ability to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
A report published last week by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) states that military strikes are unlikely to destroy Iran’s centrifuge program for enriching uranium.
The Americans viewed the request, which was transmitted (and rejected) at the highest level, as a sign that Israel is in the advanced stages of preparations to attack Iran. They therefore warned Israel against attacking, saying such a strike would undermine American interests. They also demanded that Israel give them prior notice if it nevertheless decided to strike Iran.
As compensation for the requests it rejected, Washington offered to improve Israel’s defenses against surface-to-surface missiles.
How the United States did not reinvent war… but thought it did
“War is the great auditor of institutions,” the historian Corelli Barnett once observed. Since 9/11, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. That adverse judgment applies in full to America’s armed forces.
Valor does not offer the measure of an army’s greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush conceived of a bold, offensive strategy, vowing to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The military offered the principal means for undertaking this offensive, and U.S. forces soon found themselves engaged on several fronts.
Two of those fronts — Afghanistan and Iraq — commanded priority attention. In each case, the assigned task was to deliver a knockout blow, leading to a quick, decisive, economical, politically meaningful victory. In each case, despite impressive displays of valor, fortitude, durability, and technological sophistication, America’s military came up short. The problem lay not with the level of exertion but with the results achieved.
U.S. analyst depicts Al Qaeda as secure in Pakistan and more potent than last year
Al Qaeda’s success in forging close ties to Pakistani militant groups has given it an increasingly secure haven in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan, the American government’s senior terrorism analyst said Tuesday.
Al Qaeda is more capable of attacking inside the United States than it was last year, and its cadre of senior leaders has recruited and trained “dozens” of militants capable of blending into Western society to carry out attacks, the analyst said.
The remarks Tuesday by the intelligence analyst, Ted Gistaro, were the most comprehensive assessment of the Qaeda threat by an American official since the National Intelligence Estimate issued last summer, which concluded that Al Qaeda had largely rebuilt its haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Posted: August 13th, 2008 under News Roundup.
NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 11
Russia bids to rid Georgia of its folly
One word explains why the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union have obliged themselves to sit on their hands, while Russia’s defends its citizens, and national interests, in the Caucasus, and liberates Georgians from the folly of their unpopular president, Mikheil Saakashvili. That word is Kosovo.
Russia sent troops into the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia to take on Georgian troops that had advanced into the territory. Four days of heavy fighting have seen thousands of casualties and the Georgian forces withdrawing. Russian troops were reported on Monday to be continuing fighting in parts of Georgia, including around the capital Tbilisi.
Eight hundred years of Caucasian history explain why Saakashvili has brought such destruction and ignominy on his countrymen over the past few days. Queen Tamar, the greatest of the Georgian sovereigns (1184-1213), is responsible for the habit Georgian rulers have displayed for the past millennium of treating neighboring Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ossetia and the Black Sea coast of Turkey as protectorates. But as Tamar also taught her countrymen, Georgian ambition always runs out of gas when the neighbors prove to be just as ambitious, richer or tougher.
In Georgia and Russia, a perfect brew for a blowup
As the bloody military mismatch between Russia and Georgia unfolded over the past three days, even the main players were surprised by how quickly small border skirmishes slipped into a conflict that threatened the Georgian government and perhaps the country itself.
Several American and Georgian officials said that unlike when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, a move in which Soviet forces were massed before the attack, the nation had not appeared poised for an invasion last week. As late as Wednesday, they said, Russian diplomats had been pressing for negotiations between Georgia and South Ossetia, the breakaway region where the combat flared and then escalated into full-scale war.
“It doesn’t look like this was premeditated, with a massive staging of equipment,” one senior American official said. “Until the night before the fighting, Russia seemed to be playing a constructive role.”
A path to peace in the Caucasus
The past week’s events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone. Already, thousands of people have died, tens of thousands have been turned into refugees, and towns and villages lie in ruins. Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all.
The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia’s separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia’s territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force — both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar — it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.
Nevertheless, it was still possible to find a political solution. For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground.
Pakistani Taliban repel government offensive
Taliban fighters forced Pakistani soldiers to retreat from a militants’ stronghold near the border with Afghanistan over the weekend, after a three-day battle sent civilians fleeing from government airstrikes.
The pullback from Bajaur, an area of Pakistan’s tribal region where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have forged particularly close ties, came after the military began an offensive there late last week.
Military spokesmen said 6 soldiers had been killed, though the Pakistani Taliban put the number at 22. It was unclear how many civilians had died.
Iraq demands ‘clear timeline’ for U.S. withdrawal
Iraq’s foreign minister insisted Sunday that any security deal with the United States must contain a “very clear timeline” for the departure of U.S. troops. A suicide bomber struck north of Baghdad, killing at least five people including an American soldier.
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told reporters that American and Iraqi negotiators were “very close” to reaching a long-term security agreement that will set the rules for U.S. troops in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.
Zebari said the Iraqis were insisting that the agreement include a “very clear timeline” for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces, but he refused to talk about specific dates.
After setbacks, Sadr redirects Mahdi Army
Moqtada al-Sadr has taken yet another step in an attempt to transform his Mahdi Army militia from a force intent on battling US soldiers into a much broader social and political network that can still hold sway in the shifting landscape of Iraq.
During Friday prayers in Sadr City, clerics read instructions from the young anti-American leader ordering his militiamen to join a new religious and cultural wing of the movement that he is calling the Momahidoun, or “those who pave the way.”
The move comes just months after Mr. Sadr’s movement was dealt a serious blow in springtime battles with both American and Iraqi forces in Baghdad and Basra that ended when Sadr called off his fighters after the deaths of hundreds of his followers and innocent Iraqis.
“The Mahdi Army is in a real crisis,” says Abdul Kareem al-Mohmedawi, a native of Sadr City and deputy editor of Al-Jamaher, a liberal newspaper in Baghdad. “There is a weapons shortage and a shortage of volunteers.”
Palestinian ‘gambit’ could be prophetic
For the second time in four years, Ahmed Qurei, the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel and a former prime minister, has wielded what can best be described as the bi-national weapon.
In a closed-door meeting on Sunday night with top Fatah leaders, Mr Qurei, a stalwart of the PLO, told those assembled that while the current round of negotiations was serious this did not mean that agreement was in sight.
In fact, he said, in remarks that were repeated in a subsequent statement issued by his office, “if Israel will not support our choice of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories including East Jerusalem, then the alternative demand of the Palestinian people and leadership will be a bi-national state”.
His remarks would appear to be a bargaining gambit as Palestinian-Israeli negotiations perhaps enter a crucial phase.
Posted: August 11th, 2008 under News Roundup.
NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 10
In Georgia clash, a lesson on U.S. need for Russia
The image of President Bush smiling and chatting with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from the stands of the Beijing Olympics even as Russian aircraft were shelling Georgia outlines the reality of America’s Russia policy. While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.
And State Department officials made it clear on Saturday that there was no chance the United States would intervene militarily.
Mr. Bush did use tough language, demanding that Russia stop bombing. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded that Russia “respect Georgia’s territorial integrity.”
What did Mr. Putin do? First, he repudiated President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in Beijing, refusing to budge when Mr. Sarkozy tried to dissuade Russia from its military operation. “It was a very, very tough meeting,” a senior Western official said afterward. “Putin was saying, ‘We are going to make them pay. We are going to make justice.’ ”
Georgia-Russia clash: American culpability and the Kosovo connection
When Kosovo declared independence and the US and other European states recognized it — thus sidestepping Russia’s veto in the United Nations Security Council — many of us believed that the price for Russian cooperation in other major global problems just went much higher and that the chance of a clash over Georgia’s breakaway border provinces increased dramatically.
By pushing Kosovo the way the US did and aggravating nationalist sensitivities, Russia could in reaction be rationally expected to further integrate and cultivate South Ossetia and Abkhazia under de facto Russian control and pull these provinces that border Russia away from the state of Georgia.
At the time, there was word from senior level sources that Russia had asked the US to stretch an independence process for Kosovo over a longer stretch of time — and tie to it some process of independence for the two autonomous Georgia provinces. In exchange, Russia would not veto the creation of a new state of Kosovo at the Security Council. The U.S. rejected Russia’s secret entreaties and instead rushed recognition of Kosovo and said damn the consequences.
Now thousands are dead. The fact is that a combination of American recklessness, serious miscalculation and over-reach by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as Russia’s forceful reassertion of its regional national interests and status as an oil and gas rich, tough international player means America and Europe have yet again helped generate a crisis that tests US global credibility.
Georgia: Russia demands to be regarded as number one
Russia’s regional objectives are therefore straightforward. It aims to show its neighbours, by means of the Georgian example, that Russia is “glavniy”: that its contentment is the key to “stability and security”, and that if Russia expresses its discontent, Nato will be unwilling and unable to help. It aims to show Nato that its newest aspirant members are divided, divisible and, in the case of Georgia, reckless. It aims to show both sets of actors that Russia has (in Putin’s words) “earned a right to be self-interested” and that in its own “zone”, it will defend these interests irrespective of what others think about them. For Russia, the broader implications are also becoming straightforward. To its political establishment, to the heads of Gazprom and Rosneft, to its armed forces and security services and to their advisors and “ideologists”, the key point is that the era of Western dominance is over.
Far from rejecting “globalisation”, as Westerners might suppose, their view, in Foreign Minister Lavrov’s words, is that the West is “losing its monopoly over the globalisation process”. The Beijing Olympics are reminder enough that the cresting of what Russians call Western “democratic messianism” and the rise of “sovereign democracies” is not purely a Russia-driven process. But the West needs to know that Russia is determined to play a significant part in that process and that it is now able to do so.
Georgia’s volatile risk-taker has gone over the brink
The Caucasus is the kind of place where, when the guns start firing, it’s hard to stop them. That is the brutal reality of South Ossetia, where a small conflict is beginning to spread exponentially.
Leave aside the geopolitics for the moment and have pity for the people who will suffer most from this, the citizens - mostly ethnic Ossetians but also Georgians - who have already died in their hundreds. It is a tiny and vulnerable place, with no more than 75,000 inhabitants of both nationalities mixed up in a patchwork of villages and one sleepy provincial town in the foothills of the Caucasus.
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to care less about these people than about asserting that they live in Georgian territory. Otherwise he would not on the night of 7-8 August have launched a massive artillery assault on the town of Tskhinvali, which has no purely military targets and whose residents, the Georgians say, lest we forget, are their own citizens. This is a blatant breach of international humanitarian law.
War in Georgia: The Israeli connection
Israel began selling arms to Georgia about seven years ago following an initiative by Georgian citizens who immigrated to Israel and became businesspeople.
“They contacted defense industry officials and arms dealers and told them that Georgia had relatively large budgets and could be interested in purchasing Israeli weapons,” says a source involved in arms exports.
The military cooperation between the countries developed swiftly. The fact that Georgia’s defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli who is fluent in Hebrew contributed to this cooperation.
“His door was always open to the Israelis who came and offered his country arms systems made in Israel,” the source said. “Compared to countries in Eastern Europe, the deals in this country were conducted fast, mainly due to the defense minister’s personal involvement.”
Make diplomacy, not war
Iraq and Afghanistan are the messes getting attention today, but they are only symptoms of a much broader cancer in American foreign policy.
A few glimpses of this larger affliction:
¶The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.
¶This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.
¶More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.
Washington rushes to adjust to Maliki’s rising credibility
US and Iraqi negotiators are days away from agreeing on an “aspirational” date for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraq. Barack Obama and John McCain will find language in the accord to allow each to take credit on the campaign trail for shaping that outcome.
But the big political winner from this slimmed-down, vague agreement on US forces will be Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - whom the Bush administration seriously considered pushing out of office last year but has learned to accommodate.
Something surprising is happening to the once rigid, self-centered George W. Bush presidency. The administration is adjusting policy to reflect the changing political landscape of the United States - and of Iraq, where Maliki has emerged as the center of gravity in Shiite politics as other leaders fail physically and politically.
U.S., Iraq remain unresolved on dates for U.S. troop pullout
U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have agreed on most elements of a framework under which U.S. combat troops would withdraw from Iraqi cities sometime next year, but dates have not yet been settled and Iraqi political approval of the draft accord remains uncertain, according to Bush administration officials.
“What makes this complicated is that, until the whole package is done, it’s not done,” one official said, adding, “Yes, we have things on the table that we’ve agreed to,” but they await high-level Iraq agreement that may be weeks away, if not longer.
Several officials close to the negotiations traced a long and potentially perilous path through Iraq’s fractious political landscape that could delay the deal or derail certain elements. Once the text is finalized, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki must gain approval from his multiparty executive and national security councils and his Council of Ministers.
Mystery shrouds assassination of Syria’s top security adviser
A blanket of secrecy shrouds the assassination of Brigadier General Muhammad Suleiman, the security adviser of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
An informed Syrian source has told Asharq Al-Awsat that Brigadier General Muhammad Suleiman, the Syrian president’s “right-hand man” and security adviser, was assassinated amid mysterious circumstances at dawn Friday/Saturday [2 August] by a sniper that opened fire at him from the sea opposite the shore of the city of Tartus northwest of Syria.
The source said the Suleiman was the officer in charge of sensitive security files in the Syrian president’s office and was also in charge of financing and arming the Syrian army. Syrian sources have said that in addition to his other tasks, Suleiman was the liaison officer between Syria and Hezbollah. However, in a statement to the Agence France Presse, a Hezbollah official denied that the party knew Suleiman or knew about his killing. The assassination of Suleiman - who was one of the Syrian officials that Detlev Mehlis, the former head of the international tribunal investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, wished to investigate - comes about six months after the assassination in the center of Damascus of Imad Mughniyeh, the official in charge of Hezbollah security operations.
The United States v. the Driver
Last week was hardly the first time that we have found ourselves scratching our heads in anguished confusion about what, exactly, President Bush is trying to achieve by trashing the Constitution at Guantánamo Bay. But the sentencing of Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, to five and a half years in prison is a good moment to stop and reflect.
For years, Mr. Bush and his supporters have been telling the world that it is necessary to hold prisoners without charges, to abuse them in ways most civilized nations consider torture, and to deny them basic human rights because of the serious threat they pose to America. These are “dangerous terrorists captured on the battlefield,” Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement on Wednesday.
The administration considered Mr. Hamdan such a priority that it took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, insisting Mr. Bush had the power to hold anyone he deemed an enemy combatant for as long as he wanted under any conditions he wanted. Mr. Hamdan’s trial was the first by a military commission in Guantánamo.
We use the word “trial” loosely. The proceedings were marked by secret testimony by secret witnesses. The former chief prosecutor in Guantánamo testified that he quit after being told that these trials could not produce acquittals. In the end, Mr. Hamdan was found guilty only of providing material support to terrorists and was sentenced to five and half years — a term he might complete before year’s end. Still, in the twisted world of Mr. Bush’s prison camps, it is unclear if Mr. Hamdan will be released after serving his sentence.
An Israeli strike on Iran, a plan that just doesn’t fly
Leave aside the possibility that the threat of an Israeli attack may be designed to give leverage to U.S. and European diplomats pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear efforts. Leave aside the question of whether, if you believed that such a strike was truly imminent, you’d predict it in a major newspaper. Leave aside the fact that no Israeli strike could happen without a U.S. green light and permission to fly over Iraq. And leave aside the perennial suspicions that Israel’s military elite, which sees the Jewish state as the West’s foremost strategic asset in the region, also tends to see the Middle East through the prism of the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. Could Israeli threats be serious?
We hope not, because we don’t buy the underlying premises. Here’s the argument one hears almost daily in Israel: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a jihadist fanatic; he is bent on (as he put it) wiping Israel “off the map,” and his insistence on denying the Holocaust shows that he may be vile enough to perpetrate another one; the Iranian regime is on the fast track to developing a nuclear weapon. So the West — and if not the West, then Israel alone — must treat Iran as though it were the national equivalent of a suicide bomber. It must strike now, without hesitation, before it’s too late.
Posted: August 10th, 2008 under News Roundup.
NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: August 9
Old media dethroned
When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.
From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it — reporting that turns out to be largely correct — and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.
Editor’s Comment — That John Edwards finally had no choice but to engage in what has become a pro forma act of “coming clean” - the up-close-and-personal prime-time confession - was really among the least interesting of the ways in which he could have revealed himself. What would have been far more telling would have been for him to share the calculations he must have been making in late 2006.
Did he really believe he could make it all the way through a presidential campaign without this story coming out? Or was he holding in reserve a Clintonian back-up plan to engage in the kind of damage control that helped Bill and Hillary save their first run for the White House?
Ironically, confessing to his infidelity seems like the lesser of the confessions Edwards could have made.
Reticence of mainstream media becomes a story itself
For almost 10 months, the story of John Edwards’s affair remained the nearly exclusive province of the National Enquirer — through reports, denials, news of a pregnancy, questions about paternity and, finally, a slapstick chase through a hotel in Beverly Hills.
Political blogs, some cable networks and a few newspapers reported on it — or, more accurately, reported on The Enquirer reporting on it. Jay Leno and David Letterman made Mr. Edwards the butt of jokes on their late-night shows, but their own networks declined to report on the rumors surrounding him on the evening news. Why?
A number of news organizations with resources far greater than The Enquirer’s, like The New York Times, say they looked into the Edwards matter and found nothing solid enough to report, while others did not look at all.
New evidence suggests Ron Suskind is right
If Ron Suskind’s sensational charge that the White House and CIA colluded in forging evidence to justify the Iraq invasion isn’t proved conclusively in his new book, “The Way of the World,” then the sorry record of the Bush administration offers no basis to dismiss his allegation. Setting aside the relative credibility of the author and the government, the relevant question is whether the available facts demand a full investigation by a congressional committee, with testimony under oath.
When we look back at the events surrounding the emergence of the faked letter that is at the center of this controversy, a strong circumstantial case certainly can be made in support of Suskind’s story.
That story begins during the final weeks of 2003, when everyone in the White House was suffering severe embarrassment over both the origins and the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. No evidence of significant connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the al-Qaida terrorist organization had been discovered there either. Nothing in this costly misadventure was turning out as advertised by the Bush administration.
Plucky little Georgia? No, the cold war reading won’t wash
For many people the sight of Russian tanks streaming across a border in August has uncanny echoes of Prague 1968. That cold war reflex is natural enough, but after two decades of Russian retreat from those bastions it is misleading. Not every development in the former Soviet Union is a replay of Soviet history.
The clash between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, which escalated dramatically yesterday, in truth has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain’s widely unexpected military response with the comment: “No great power retreats for ever.” Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev.
Has Georgia overreached in Ossetia?
Whether or not the effect was intended, Moscow now appears to be using Saakashvili’s strategic overreach to teach a brutal lesson not only to the Georgians, but also to other neighbors seeking to align themselves with the West against Russia. Saakashvili is appealing for Western support, based on international recognition of South Ossetia as sovereign Georgian territory. “A full-scale aggression has been launched against Georgia,” he said, calling for Western intervention. But given NATO’s previous warnings, its commitments elsewhere and the reluctance of many of its member states to antagonize Russia, it remains unlikely that Georgia will get more than verbal support from its desired Western protectors. Saakashvili appears to have both underestimated the scale of the Russian backlash, and overestimated the extent of support he could count on from the U.S. and its allies. The Georgian leader may have expected Washington to step up to his defense, particularly given his country’s centrality to the geopolitics of energy — Georgia is the only alternative to Russia as the route for a pipeline carrying oil westward from Azerbaijan. But Russia is not threatening to overrun Georgia. Moscow claims to be simply using its military to restore the secessionist boundary, which in the process would deal Saakashvili a humiliating defeat.
Although its outcome is yet to be decided, there’s no win-win outcome to the offensive launched by Georgia with the goal of recovering South Ossetia. Either Saakashvili wins, or Moscow does. Unless the U.S. and its allies demonstrate an unlikely appetite for confrontation with an angry and resurgent Russia in its own backyard, the smart money would be on Moscow.
‘Invasion of Georgia’ a ‘3 a.m. moment’
When the North Caucasus slid into war Thursday night, it presented Senators John McCain and Barack Obama with a true “3 a.m. moment,” and their responses to the crisis suggested dramatic differences in how each candidate, as president, would lead America in moments of international crisis.
While Obama offered a response largely in line with statements issued by democratically elected world leaders, including President Bush, first calling on both sides to negotiate, John McCain took a remarkably—and uniquely—more aggressive stance, siding clearly with Georgia’s pro-Western leaders and placing the blame for the conflict entirely on Russia.
The abrupt crisis in an obscure hotspot had the features of the real foreign policy situations presidents face—not the clean hypotheticals of candidates’ white papers and debating points.
Iran, the US and the post-Cold War world
The American-European-led international diplomatic minuet with Iran is the most interesting and significant political dynamic in the world today. What happens on the Iran issue will determine power relations for years to come, far beyond Iran’s immediate neighborhood, because some critical issues are captured in the Iranian nuclear question. These include global energy flows, the credibility and impact of the UN Security Council, the limits of economic and political sanctions, the capacity of determined regional powers to defy greater global powers, the interplay between Israeli, Western and global interests, the coherence of political Europe, and the spirit and letter of international law, conventions and treaties.
Domestic political posturing in Iran, the United States, Israel and Europe aside, three core issues are at stake here: Iran’s right to develop nuclear technology for verifiably peaceful purposes; Israeli concerns that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be an existential threat, which Israel will never allow to happen; and Western fears of Iran’s military power, nuclear capabilities, and radicalizing political influence around the Middle East.
Pakistan army to ask Pervez Musharraf to resign
Pakistan’s all-powerful army chief will ask President Pervez Musharraf to resign from office within a week, a senior government official claimed today.
The claim was supported by a former military aide to the president who said that the army’s leadership wished Mr Musharraf to be spared the humiliation of impeachment.
The civilian government intensified an attritional, seven-month long power struggle with the presidency when it announced earlier this week that it is to begin impeachment proceedings against Mr Musharraf on Monday.
Close Musharraf allies say he has no plans to resign under pressure
President Pervez Musharraf will stage a spirited defense against impeachment charges that the governing coalition is pursuing against him, and has no intention of resigning under pressure, his key allies said Friday.
Mr. Musharraf, who has been president for nearly nine years, faces the first impeachment proceedings in Pakistani history, after the leaders of the two major political parties in the coalition announced Thursday that they would seek to remove him.
The grounds for impeachment included mismanagement of the economy, along with Mr. Musharraf’s imposition in November of emergency rule and the firing of nearly 60 judges, the party leaders said.
A US withdrawal deal with Sadr?
Shi’ite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr stepped back into Iraq’s political fray Friday with an offer that (if genuine) Washington would be hard-pressed to refuse: Set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and the Mahdi Army will begin to disband. “The main reason for the armed resistance is the American military presence,” said Sadr emissary Salah al-Ubaidi, who spoke to reporters in Najaf Friday. “If the American military begins to withdrawal, there will be no need for these armed groups.”
Sadr in the past has vowed to expand the humanitarian work of his movement but promised to maintain fighters from his Mahdi Army militia, which has fought against both the Iraqi government and U.S. forces. Al-Ubaidi’s remarks effectively offered the strongest assurances yet that the Mahdi Army is willing to stand down entirely in Iraq, if American military forces back away.
In Iraq, regional politics heats up
A growing number of Iraqi groups are choosing to pursue their agendas through politics instead of bloodshed, a trend that has helped bring down levels of violence. But as Iraqis leave behind the sectarian cataclysms of recent years, ethnic and regional political disputes in several parts of Iraq are becoming more pronounced.
In the south, ruling Shiite parties are vying for electoral power against loyalists of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Shiite tribal leaders. In the west, Sunni tribes are challenging the political control of established Sunni religious parties. And in the north, ethnic Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens are in a struggle for control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
“What we have now is people who know how to use weapons and who now want to play politics,” said Mithal al-Alusi, an independent Sunni legislator. Even so, some leaders seem unable to decide whether to trust their fortunes to the ballot box.
Posted: August 9th, 2008 under Editor's comments, News Roundup.
NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: August 7
Redefining the war on terror
You recently wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe that was highly critical of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. And you argued that regardless who is elected in November, moving away from the current president’s policies vis-à-vis terrorism will be difficult. Can you explain this criticism?
The real object of the exercise was less to offer a critique of the Bush administration than to suggest that the legacy of this administration, in my view at least, is really much greater than most people seem to appreciate. In my mind, so much of the debate has been focused on Iraq, narrowly and specifically. I believe that most observers have not fully appreciated the enormity of either the changes that the Bush administration has made or changes they’ve been able to prevent, in terms of both the content of our foreign policy and the apparatus that makes our foreign policy. Now there are some people who may argue that that legacy is a very positive one. If you are a neo-conservative, my guess is you think the Bush doctrine of preventative war is a good thing. If you’re a critic, you think it’s wildly reckless and stupid. But the real point is that there is this great legacy and, in my judgment, it is that larger legacy that we have to have as the focus of the tension in the presidential campaign, not simply [asking], ‘Were you for the surge or were you against the surge?’ That was really the object of the exercise.
500: Deadly U.S. milestone in Afghan war
Not long after Staff Sgt. Matthew D. Blaskowski was killed by a sniper’s bullet last Sept. 23 in eastern Afghanistan, his mother received an e-mail message with a link to a video on the Internet. A television reporter happened to have been filming a story at Sergeant Blaskowski’s small mountain outpost when it came under fire and the sergeant was shot.
Since then, Sergeant Blaskowski’s parents, Cheryl and Terry Blaskowski of Cheboygan, Mich., have watched their 27-year-old son die over and over. Ms. Blaskowski has taken breaks from work to watch it on her computer, sometimes several times a day, studying her son’s last movements.
“Anything to be closer,” she said. “To see what could have been different, how it — ” the bullet — “happened to find him.”
For months, the Blaskowskis felt alone in watching their son die in an isolated and nearly forgotten war. And then, in June, the war in Afghanistan roared back into public view when American deaths from hostilities exceeded those in Iraq. In the face of an expanding threat from the Taliban, the conflict is becoming deadlier and much more violent for American troops, who three weeks ago reached their highest deployment levels ever, at 36,000.
Bin Laden’s former driver is sentenced to 5 1/2 years
Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the convicted former driver for Osama bin Laden, was sentenced Thursday to 66 months in prison by the military panel that convicted him of a war crime Wednesday.
The military judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, had already said that he planned to give Mr. Hamdan credit for the 61 months he had been held, meaning that Mr. Hamdan could complete his criminal sentence in five months. After that his fate is unclear, because the Bush administration says that it can hold detainees here until the end of the war on terror.
The unexpectedly short sentence was far less than military prosecutors had sought. Through more than five years of legal proceedings against Mr. Hamdan, prosecutors had pursued a life sentence, and earlier in the day, faced with Mr. Hamdan’s acquittal on the most serious charge against him, prosecutors recommended a sentence of at least 30 years and said life may be appropriate.
Pakistan’s ruling coalition plans to impeach Musharraf
The feuding leaders of Pakistan’s ruling coalition said Thursday that they’ll impeach President Pervez Musharraf, a move that could trigger political upheaval in a crisis-torn nation that’s crucial to the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and to the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.
Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and the spouse of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif, the head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, announced after three days of talks that an impeachment motion will be brought before parliament soon.
“The coalition leaders believe that it has become imperative to move for impeachment,” Zardari told a news conference. “We have the votes and the political will.”
Sharif the likely winner of Pakistan’s power play
The news of the potential impeachment of President Pervez Musharraf means further political instability for Pakistan - at least in the short term.
Though a deal has finally been done between the Pakistan People’s party (PPP), effectively led by the late Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari, and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), this indicates a very temporary coincidence of interest rather than a new solidarity. The beleaguered president’s decision not to go to China for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games indicates he is taking the threat seriously.
No Pakistani president has ever been impeached and the procedure laid down in the 1973 constitution is likely to mean a classic drawn-out Pakistani politico-legal wrangle. Impeachment is a political process relying on a two-thirds majority of both houses of parliament deciding to remove the president from office on grounds of gross misconduct, physical or mental impairment or violation of the constitution.
Can Pakistan clean up its intelligence agency?
As Pakistan faces mounting pressure from its neighbors and the United States to clear pro-Taliban elements from its intelligence service, its weak government is struggling to respond in a convincing way.
Last week, American officials alleged that members of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had helped plan the bombing of the Indian consulate in Kabul, Afghanistan, last month. The claim echoed those lodged by both affected neighbors, India and Afghanistan.
On top of these accusations came reports that a top CIA official had confronted Pakistani leaders with evidence of the ISI’s support for militants that the Pakistani Army has been battling in the country’s restive northwest tribal areas.
Rice: US won’t tell Israel yes or no
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that the US would not “say yes or no” to an Israeli military strike on Iran. In an interview with Yahoo News and Politico, she also said that Iran’s answer to the incentives package offered by world powers “is not a really serious answer”, and warned that new economic sanctions were the next likely step if the country continued to refuse to freeze its nuclear program.
“We don’t say yes or no to Israeli military operations. “Israel is its own sovereign. We are in close contact with Israel and we talk about the diplomatic track we’re on… They’ve said diplomacy can work here, and I know they’re doing their part to talk with all countries with which they have diplomatic relations to explain why it is important to have a tough edge to our diplomacy,” Rice said.
“We were basically hiring terrorists”
Donning pale yellow shirts with Iraqi flags stitched on the chest, Alah al-Janabi and Mahmoud al-Samorai stood recently in the blistering sun at the crowded entrance to the bustling Dora Market. Al-Janabi, 30, proudly displayed a shiny black pistol on his hip; al-Samorai, 25, slung his Kalashnikov assault rifle over his shoulder as he patted down a shopper entering the market. Nine months ago, the two men joined the Sons of Iraq — the U.S.-funded, mostly Sunni organization of 103,000 armed guards that functions as part neighborhood security watch and part paramilitary force, and has been instrumental in tamping down violence in Iraq.
What these men did prior to this work — when sectarian militias and Iraqi security forces fought pitched battles through the Dora neighborhood, killing and wounding scores of people — is unclear. When asked, the two looked at each other and shrugged. “There were no jobs,” al-Samorai finally said. Maybe he and his colleague hid in their homes while sectarian fighting raged outside. But it is also possible that they fought alongside the Sunni militias, as did many Sons of Iraq members, according to American forces that patrol the area.
“When the SOIs stood up, we were basically hiring terrorists,” said Lt. Justin Chabalko, using the military acronym for the Sons of Iraq. Chabalko’s 2-4 Infantry Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division frequently patrols the Dora Market.
Iraqis fail to agree on provincial election law
Iraqi lawmakers adjourned for the summer on Wednesday without passing a crucial election law that many here hoped would solidify the recent, still fragile gains in security. The failure seemed likely to mean the postponement of provincial elections, originally set for October, until next year — polling seen as vital to reconciling the deep-seated tensions among Iraq’s political and sectarian groups.
The decision to go on vacation rather than settle the issue underscored how little progress had been made on the most important recent political question to confront Iraqi leaders, in contrast to the military strides in making Iraq safer than it had been in years. The law was seen as so important to prevent new outbreaks of violence that President Bush, eager to leave office claiming lasting progress in Iraq, had called several Iraqi lawmakers urging them to pass it.
The elections would be the first provincial balloting in almost four years. Negotiations broke down over the politically explosive issue of who controls the ethnically mixed and oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk. The last elections were boycotted by many Sunni Muslims, the minority in Iraq who held power for decades under Saddam Hussein and were the prime engine for the deadly insurgency during this war.
A glossary of Iraq euphemisms
Christopher Hitchens, critiquing his friend Martin Amis, once casually referred to “the moral offense of euphemism.” It’s a beautiful and cutting phrase. The inability to call something what it is represents an opening salvo in an assault on the truth. An early acquiescence to the moral offense of euphemism is nothing less than the first stage of surrender to corruption. Whether the rot is manifested or merely intellectual is a distinction that will erode with time.
Few governments have relied more on euphemism than the Bush administration. Euphemism is different from spin. Spin puts the best face forward on a given policy; euphemism uses its opposite to describe itself. Hence the Clear Skies Initiative to weaken the Clean Air Act; the Freedom Agenda to describe military domination of the Middle East; or Enhanced Interrogation to discuss torture.
The Iraq War has been characterized by euphemism since its inception. The name “Operation Iraqi Freedom” denotes a foreign military occupation of Iraq endlessly described as liberation — a term that, in practice, means the absolute opposite of any common-sense definition of “freedom.” For over five years, foreign troops have enjoyed the legal right to kill any Iraqi whom commanders deem fit to kill; to search any house commanders deem fit to search; and to detain any Iraqi whom commanders deem fit to detain. This is, clearly, a condition Americans would never accept for themselves. Debate can reasonably occur over whether the war is worth it or whether the rules of engagement are appropriate. But no one can responsibly call this condition “freedom” for Iraqis.
Gates’s next mission
Defense Secretary Bob Gates has been talking recently about how to rebuild America’s national security architecture so that it fits the 21st century. The next president should think about assigning Gates to fix what he rightly says is broken.
Gates is an anomaly in this lame-duck administration. He is still firing on all cylinders, working to repair the damage done at the Pentagon by his arrogant and aloof predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. Gates has restored accountability in the military services by firing the secretaries of the Army and Air Force when they failed to respond forthrightly to problems. And he has been an early and persuasive internal administration critic of U.S. military action against Iran.
Amazingly for a defense secretary, Gates has been arguing against the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. In a speech last month, he urged more funding for the State Department and other civilian agencies, saying they have been “chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long.” In Washington, that’s almost unheard of — sticking your neck out for the other guy — and it’s one reason Gates’s reputation has been steadily rising.
Posted: August 7th, 2008 under News Roundup.
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Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Phytoestrogens and the Hypohalamus
From Science Daily : Two hormone-like compounds linked to the consumption of soy-based foods can cause irreversible changes in the structure of the brain, resulting in early-onset puberty and symptoms of advanced menopause in research animals, according to a new study by researchers at North Carolina State University.From Lawyers, Guns and Money :
Information from MSM is sparse and contradictory. One of the best summaries is at the blog mentioned above, in the section Confrontation in the Caucasus.
So far we have the Georgians claiming to have essentially surrendered over Ossetia, but the Russians keeping on going into Georgia and attacking the city of Gori despite this, with paratroops and forces entering Abkharzia too; A naval blockade, with the Georgian Navy coming off second best against overwhelming enemy forces near the port of Poti; And Abkharzian forces making hay while the sun shines, with 1000 troops set to attack (with Russian aid?) the strategic Kodori gorge.am a Rocket Scientist.
Also hormonally odd (my blood has 46xy chromosomes anyway) and for most of my life, I looked male, and lived as one, trying to be the best Man a Gal could be. Anyway, in May 2005 that started changing naturally for reasons still unclear, and I'm now Zoe, not Alan : happier and more relaxed not to have to pretend any more.
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Search Engine Journal [View Page] Posts: [Online Identity Searching and Tracking Tools], [Yahoo Releases its Fire Eagle Geo-Location Service], [How to Get Rid of Multiple Subpages & Not Get Penalized], [Google Gets 70.77% Share of July US Searches], [Will Google Dominate Its Own Search Results?], [We Are Too Dependent on GMail], [How Much Might Your Website Be Worth?], [Search Conferences 101: 33 Reasons Why You Should Go to the IM Charity Party at SES San Jose], [Reasons Why Google Likes Spam : Google & Spam’s Love Hate Relationship], [14 Places To Spot Popular Trends - What’s Hot Where and When?]
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Online Identity Searching and Tracking Tools
August 13th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 1 Comment
Reputation management is a too hot topic to be left out of discussion here, especially for your own names. If you love searching for your name (either out of vanity or for business purposes), you will enjoy playing with the following online identity searching and tracking tools:
1. Twitter Search (previously known as Summize) searches for your name mentions at Twitter. To track your reputation there you can either subscribe via feed or get email updates through the service called TweetBeep.
2. Twing lets you find out what people say about you throughout forums and discussion boards. You can choose to search forum posts or topics there.
3. Blog search engines:
Google Blog Search : play with Google Blog Search sorting options (”sort by relevance | date) and advanced searching options (inpostauthor:”Author Name“, inblogtitle:name)
Yahoo Releases its Fire Eagle Geo-Location Service
August 12th, 2008 by Arnold Zafra | 1 Comment
Yahoo has released its Fire Eagle service out-of-beta which means that anyone who has an existing Yahoo account can now take their locations to various web services with full control on how and where their location data is shared. [Read more →]
How to Get Rid of Multiple Subpages & Not Get Penalized
August 12th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 11 Comments
SEOs come across this problem very often: what is the best way to get rid of lots of website pages without loosing rankings or getting into any sort of penalties? The problem may be associated with:
moving the site to a new domain;
changing a CMS;
optimization process (for the sake of better crawl rate and usability); etc.
WebmasterWorld thread discusses the issue of removing multiple low-quality pages “primarily as a benefit to the users“; and the pros and cons of the following solutions:
Using 301-redirect across the board (for all the removed pages);
Letting the removed pages return 404 header status-code (and probably block them via Robots.txt).
[Read more →]
Google Gets 70.77% Share of July US Searches
August 12th, 2008 by Arnold Zafra | 2 Comments
New data from Hitwise showed that Google is still leading the major search engine pack gaining 2% increase in July’s share of US searches from previous month. Comparing the current data with that of last year, Google has posted a 10% in share of US searches in the same month last year. Overall Google has accounted for 70.77% share of all the searches conducted by Americans in July. [Read more →]
Will Google Dominate Its Own Search Results?
August 12th, 2008 by Pablo PalatnikAs Google launches Knol, its weapon to battle Wikipedia, many ask themselves if Google will dominate its own search results, which in search, already dominates the market.
Forbes.com posted a very interesting article (I believe it came from PaidContent.org – want to cite the right source,) “Iteration #419: Is Google A Content Company?” which poses a great question, maybe a great threat to many. Once we start seeing Knol results popping up in the searches above most Wiki articles, then we can become really suspicious of any Google funny business, but for now, there hasn’t been much proof of that as it states in the article.
Let’s think about Googles platform and how they come into play with search results:
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Past and Future are a duality of which Present is the reality.
The now-moment alone is eternal and real - Wei Wu Wei
Sunday, August 03, 2008
An Indian and proud to be one
Being part of the team organizing the whole event on the 15th of August, 2008 I was wondering if I could contribute in any other way possible. Organizing and coordinating an event is quite big a task and makes you lose focus on smaller but significant things that one can be part of, and I realized that penning down one’s thoughts is just that.
Last night I was actually thinking about what to write and mindlessly browsing through the TV Channels, when suddenly I noticed the names A.R. Rahman and Mani Ratnam. Bombay, one of my favorite movies was playing on one of the channels. I think it’s the umpteenth time I’ve watched it, still the sensitivity of the movie in capturing the message of unity and patriotism is just flabbergasting. By the end of it I’d got the all important dose of ‘enthusiasm’ to pen this article down.
At this moment my mind is caught in a sea of pictures that I came across during the recent serial blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. Such cowardly attempts of creating unrest, panic and taking lives of innocent people has been going on since an unbelievably long time, be it in Mumbai, Hyderabad or the recent attack on Jaipur. But we have always shown the resolve to stand up and start walking again.
At this juncture when India has seen 60 splendid autumns and is on the verge of breaking barriers into the league of economic superpowers, I would like to rake this thought in you of reaffirming our roots and build the resolve to lead India into intriguing new horizons.
Every Republic and Independence Day, I am sure that there is a moment in all of our lives when we might have felt that one single chord that I N D I A strikes within.
Do we lend it an ear, is the big question though?
It is often said that we don’t say the essential things that ought to be said. And one such emotion that we have taken for granted is the feeling of oneness, pride of being an Indian. The pride of the diversity in culture, geography, historical heritage, and the struggle we have been through to see this day of freedom. So this Independence Day allow me and repeat along when I say “PROUD TO BE AN INDIAN ”.
This is exactly what we at IBS-Bangalore wish to vociferate in the PEACE MARCH on the 15th of August, near Café Coffee Day, Jayanagar 4th Block.
Come join us and help us with our unique initiative of spreading the right vibes of a rapidly developing INDIA.
JAI HIND
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Introspection --> Newer Avenues
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tag-on … Shall we?
I’ve been facing a real dearth of things to write about. Thanks Neha for this open invite.
i am: S anjaya K adaba S rivatsan.i think : too much or I don’t… really.i want: a balanced life and a beautiful wife.i have: everything in me to make it big.
i wish: i had taken up the S.A.I offer during my 10th.i hate: when I can’t make people happy.i miss: my school days, my days at HP, i fear: failure.i feel: sleepy right now.i hear: a dog barking.i smell : wet jasmine creepers by my window. for a ‘masculine child’ for Don Corleone’s daughter’s first child. Well jokes apart, I crave for the best in life like all of us do. Nothing different here! for something I don’t know about.i regret : few things… I’ve done. to see my loved ones ache. believe in being positive and get going. a introvert. I’ll make it big one day. since 20th Jan ’06 here. believe in carrying today’s baggage tomorrow, be it hangovers or conflicts. 6-7 hours of sleep… alright 7-8 hours a day, An hour of work out in the gym, an outing once in 2 months, my friends pulling my leg big time and finally a soul mate soooooooooooon!!!
Hey you guys Rj, Shamit, Maha, Sudeep, Shilpa, Rajib why not give it a shot?
~Sanju
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Off The Road [View Page] Posts: [Everybody learn how to click], [ACS Feed Goes Wrong], [Cell: Ouch! Nanowires: Oops!], [Chinese graduate students], [The doi.org delay], [Breath figure], [Annoucement (continued)], [Annoucement], [Morality vs Legality, Loud Bloggers, etc.], [Update to 'Developing Government Fears Disclosure?'], [Lab Clock DIY], [Developing Government Fears Disclosure?], [Changes in Morphology and Bulk], [The Chemspider Efforts], [Why Chemists Blog?], [Spreading Molecular Biology Techniques among Chemists], [A Group of Chemical Cowboys], [English Education in China], [Imagination limited by technology?], [Self-Assembled, Soft, and Smart], [Mesoporous carbon from block copolymer (and why I haven't blogged things for weeks)], [Self-Cleaning/-Degrading Hair], [Chemistry on a Compact Disc], [My new colleague], [Best ad for chemistry]
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Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Everybody learn how to click
Till February this year, 'Click Chemistry' was still able to appear in the Top Topic, of the Essential Science Indicators. It is 6 years after the phrase was used in the pioneer review on ACIE (2001 , 40 , 2004-2021. DOI: 10.1002/1521-3773(20010601)40:113.0.CO;2-5), so I thought the time has gone when you can easily put your communication on Adv Mater or ACIE only by tagging it with the word 'click'; the field has become just as ordinary as what any average journal may oversee. Even Sigma-Aldrich has caught up to host a specific page for its click chemicals. But it is still heated in 2007, and there is recently a tutorial review on Chem Soc Rev (DOI: 10.1039/b613014n). Someone did some lbl polyelectrolyte capsules, something everyone should know for quite a while and Langmuir would probably refuse to accept, and he published it on Nano Lett (DOI: 10.1021/nl070698f), only because he clicked between the layers a bit.
So everybody is to learn something about how to click your reaction into an ACIE VIP paper or something like that.
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Thursday, May 31, 2007
ACS Feed Goes Wrong
ACS's feed burner goes wrong every now and then. It will feed you a whole pile of papers from a journal you never subscribe in a the name of one of your subscription, for example a pile of Bioconjugate Chem. papers in your Macromolecules subscription. This time as the snapshot shows, it feed me with JACS in my Nano Lett. folder, both of which I have subscripted.
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Saturday, May 26, 2007
Cell: Ouch! Nanowires: Oops!
Scientists have successfully had some cells lying on a nail bed consist of silicon nanowires. The silicon nails penetrates the cells but does not stop them from living, differentiating and functioning (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2007 . DOI: 10.1021/ja071456k).
Silicon nanowires are prepared by conventional methods and used without further modification except necessary sterilization. Mouse embryonic stem (mES) cells were directly cultivated on the nanowire substrate. Scary SEM images show that the cell bodies are penetrated by several nanowires per cell, but green fluorescent protein (GFP) tests show that the cells are still alive. If the substrate is coated with tissue culturing materials, the mES cells can differentiate into cardiac myocytes and start beating! By penetrating through the cell body, the nanowires can even deliver DNA carriers (PEI) into the cell. This research tells us that dangerous stuff in macroscale can be friendly in nanoscale.
Update: C&EN just released an account of this research: Cells On A Bed Of Nails.
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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Chinese graduate students
This is a poll for the post on my blog in Nature Network.
Which deficiency of Chinese graduate students do you hate most?
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The doi.org delay
Sometimes new papers on journals from John Wiley & Son failed to link with doi.org in time. And when you click a DOI url you may see:
But if you search for this DOI in Wiley Interscience website you can get the paper:
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Andrew
Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
Mainland Chinese, patriot, orthodox Marxist, pianist, polymer chemist, graduate student of South China University of Technology. Fields of interest: soft matter, self-assembly, molecular devices, and smart materials.
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Why Chemists Blog?
Spreading Molecular Biology Techniques among Chemi...
A Group of Chemical Cowboys
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Self-Assembled, Soft, and Smart
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Best ad for chemistry
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Tropaion [View Page] Posts: [CFPs Journal of Hellenic Religion Volume 2], [Olympic Games and Modern Games], [Worship, women’s ritual and reality in classical Athens], [Prometheia 2008], [Vladimir Propp and Structuralism], [Ancient Tragedy first time in Albania!], [Aischyleia and the growth of Eleusina], [Myth of Oedipus with silent motion], [Ancient Nemea Games re-enacted], [Dating Odyssey...by the Moon], [Early Christian 'Holy Wine' Factory Found], [Collectors of old books...revisited], [Secrets of the past are revealed in Greek caves], [Thracian Temple of Dionysus in Bulgaria?], [Collector of old books? You will be arrested!], [Invasion at Museums], [Underwater highway and the ancient sites], [Modern bureaucracy and Old Temples], [A call for a new spiritual rebirth], [Greek temple discovered in Alexandria], [A Dark Rome], [Ancient Greek theatres are crumbling], [An Olympic Black Flanked Ceremony], [The Athenian Agora Change the World?], [Socrates and Self-Confidence]
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CFPs Journal of Hellenic Religion Volume 2
Posted by
Nikolaos Markoulakis
at
Monday, August 11, 2008
.
11/08/08. From 2001 is discussing and commenting Hellenic Polytheism.
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Labels:
classics,
greek religion,
science,
writing project
Nottingham UK - The Journal of Hellenic Religion’s (JfHR) Editorial Panel decided to pursue a second volume of the Journal, which will be forthcoming in the mid 2009.
A brief reaffirmation of the Journal’s statement is as follows: The JfHR is a peer-reviewed annual periodical. It has as a main theme the original multi-principle study of ancient Greek Religion (i.e. theology, history, philosophy, politics-sociology and archaeology-anthropology).
The theme / subject of the forthcoming Volume 2 will focus on gender relations, concept of love, eros, and sexuality in the ancient Greek religious praxis and theology. The articles should include a full bibliography and endnotes.
The editorial panel may request editions and small alterations and a summary of the peer-reviewed process will be send after the author’s request. The authors hold their copyright. The contributors should sign the License to Publish based on the JISC and Surf Foundation Principles available at http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/.
Submission of any material must be on electronic form (doc, rtf), accompanied with the legal name and a current email and postal address of the author and emailed to the Editor: n.markoulakis–at–markoulakispublications–dot–org–dot–uk
Contact Information: Mr. Nikolaos Markoulakis, The Hive - Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham, NG1 4BU, United Kingdom.
As the Publisher of this Journal I have to give my sincere gratitude and thanks to Chris (from Thoughts on Antiquity) and to Gill (Ancient History at about.com) for promoting the CFPs.
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Olympic Games and Modern Games
Posted by
Nikolaos Markoulakis
at
Saturday, August 09, 2008
.
09/08/08. From 2001 is discussing and commenting Hellenic Polytheism.
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olympic games
Yesterday the open ceremony of the XXIX Olympiad in Beijing, which involves around the lit of the flame torch base in the main athletic venue. It is up to our individual critical observation of whether or not the Beijing and / or the Modern Olympics are indeed part of the fundamentally recognized concept and values of pure athletic competition and most importantly of the ancient Olympics. Personally, I believe that Modern Olympics are indeed of no connection of its claimed past and its ideals that Pierre de Coubertin when first introduce the Modern Games in 1894. Though, I do believe that Modern Olympics must exist but with essential changes in IOC. Nevertheless, let us go through the main ‘ideals’ that the Modern Olympics represent:
Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.
Olympism indeed was a philosophy of life as well as of continues strife and physical – not chemical – endurance. There is no true in IOC’s claim of ‘balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind’ if indeed that body has nothing do to with its natural stamina but rather of a systematic doping as it is commonly known that ‘super star’ athletes do use chemical supplements – legal doping – and even illegal chemicals. It was not long ago that gold mental athletes had stated the use of such chemicals and drags, which had both negative effects on their physical and mental health. Having that in mind how is possible to consider the IOC’s statement as valid and not just a simple sarcasm? Is it, thus, the education that IOC, the international athletic organizations, governments and the grand number of international pharmaceutical, media and sports industry to pass over the new generations? Is this their ‘fundamental ethical principles’? In addition what is the concept of IOC’s ‘joy of effort’? It is, unfortunately not an ‘effort’ but rather an endeavour to rich the targeted record – which as we can notice after the WWII the human athlete became a super-human with records rising gradually from them and onwards.
The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.
The Charter of the IOC has nothing to do with the ancient Olympics, one more non existed aspect is the Olympic Truce. Do we really believe that today (first day of the Olympics 2008) there is a Truce in between the states members of the IOC? I will simply answer no.
What is the problem? The problem is extremely visible as it is shiny and glamorous: the ‘gold’ of the Modern Olympics. ‘Gold’ for both the governments, organizations and the corporation involved. Maybe is better to accept the ‘simple’, ‘natural’ and ‘human’ rather than the ‘glamour’, ‘super-natural’ and the ‘cyborg’.
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Worship, women’s ritual and reality in classical Athens
Posted by
Nikolaos Markoulakis
at
Saturday, August 09, 2008
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Labels:
ancient greece,
fertility goddesses,
gods and goddesses,
greek women,
household worship,
museum,
rituals
The current post's title, Worship, Women’s Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens, is the forthcoming exhibition by the National Museum and the Onassis Cultural Foundation in New York for the following year. There is no yet a formal Press Release. The exhibition will hold 158 artifacts from the National Museum, Acropolis, Kerameikou, Thebes and others including with 29 artifacts from the British, Metropolitan, Louvre, Vatican, Berlin and other foreign Museums.
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Prometheia 2008
Posted by
Nikolaos Markoulakis
at
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
.
05/08/08. From 2001 is discussing and commenting Hellenic Polytheism.
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Labels:
festivity,
greece,
olympus,
paganism,
pollytheism,
prometheia,
theater,
video
The annual three days, from the 21st until the 22nd of June, festive, which is known for its 'pagan' environment once again gained a grand attention by thousand of Greeks and foreigners at the Mount Olympus, Greece. Theatrical, poetry and athletic competitions (dromena) have been dressed with 'religious' attitude and importance. Polytheistic and cultural groups as well as individuals with their families and friends report to us that "[...] once again we had a very good summer time" under the shadow of the Holly Mount of Olympus.
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CFPs Journal of Hellenic Religion Volume 2
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You know everything for ancient Sparta? Read more here.
Essential Readings (under construction)
A Companion To Greek Religion by Daniel Ogden
Ancient Greek Religion by Jon D Mikalson
Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi by Stuart Lyons
Making a Landscape Sacred by Lucia Nixon
Philostratus: Apollonius of Tyana; Letters of Apollonius; Ancient Testimonia; Eusebius's Reply to Hierocles
Platonic Theology by Marsilio Ficino
Theories of Mythology by Eric Csapo
Periodicals of Interest (under construction)
Journal of Hellenic Religion
Sparta Journal
Contributors
Nikolaos Markoulakis
James Head
About
Tropaion is a web-log / electronic journal and Carnival for the ancient Greek Religion and history. The main goal of the web-log is to present original peer-reviewed and well referred posts on theoretical and practical aspects of the ancient Greek religion, to add to a broader circulation of Humanities and Classics in the Internet as well as to rise awareness for the Neo-Hellenic Polytheism today and to explore its relation with its ancient past.Tropaion consists of two main authors, Nikolaos Markoulakis and James Head (aka James O'Dell). Nikolaos Markoulakis holds degrees on political sciences and research studies, currently is an post-graduate of International Relations and looks forward to a PhD on this discipline. He also holds certificate on paleography as he was voluntarily working for the Academia of Athens transliterating an 18th century manuscript of Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment era. James Head was a teacher in United Kingdom teaching sciences and mathematics.
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Sparta - Free Issues...
New Discovery: The Defensive structures of ancient Heraklion
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Wild fire in Evinochori Aitoloakarnanias (Archaeological Site Kalydonas)
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The Secret Diary of Greg Swann [View Page] Posts: [Fake Greg Swann at RE BlogWorld], [Todd Carpenter is Fake Greg Swann - final post], [Dan Green is…], [A slow week for RE.net, but a great start for Fake Greg Swann], [To the vindictive idiot who stalks the real GS], [How Social Networks REALLY work], [How to put your real estate blog on the first page of Google warrentied], [Who is Fake Greg Swann’s top referrer?], [The blogroll is growing], [1000+ hits in the first three days]
The Secret Diary of Greg Swann
Though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment.
Fake Greg Swann at RE BlogWorld
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OK, I lied. One more post. This blog was a glorious viral networking excersize. I took what I learned here, and in the rest of my three years of blogging to create my own Real Estate Blogging Conference. Join me, along with a great group of top flight real estate and mortgage bloggers in Las Vegas on September 19 to kick of the largest blogging and new media conference in the world.
Todd Carpenter is Fake Greg Swann - final post
Published December 31, 2007
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Brian Brady nailed me from day one. I took it as a great compliment Brian. To have figured it out so fast can only mean you know me, flaws and all.
I wanted to do something like this for a while, and the blog war over the B&W video was the final motivator. My idea was to start an anonymous blog, like the original 4realz. The main problem with a blog like that it’s very hard to get traction, especially with the explosion of bloggers who are now offering their own advice.
I planned to get caught. Some of the title tags in the blogroll were clues, as was my post about Keywords, and I left the spell checker off. I knew someone would figure it out sooner or later. Jim Duncan was at the top of my list once I saw he was using REMBEX to to try to figure it out. That made me smile more than anything. But I also knew that it wouldn’t matter if a few people were pretty sure, so long as more than one blogger was posting. People who thought they knew who I was would also figure out that I wasn’t the only one. Anonymity for each post would be preserved Tony Clifton style. I also decided to wait until I saw how others responded before inviting anyone in.
The behind-the-scenes post reflects everyone who I invited in. I invited Brian because he was the first to figure it out. I invited Jay because he was the second. I invited Dustin because he was the first to discover FGS, and because, who wouldn’t want him on the team? He’s been an RE.net friend since long before Greg ever coined the term. Andy Kaufman was invited because he proved in his Agent Genius article to understand exactly who had inspired me. Daniel and Mariana were invited because I thought they, above everyone else, handled the B&W incident with the most class and humor. Only a few accepted. I’ll let them tell their own story if they wish.
I gave Greg a hint so obvious that he may have easily overlooked it. In a personal, merry X-mas email, on the night before launching FGS, I quoted from The Mouse That Roared. With respect to both sides of the B&W debate, that’s how I perceived some of the outrage. Just below the title of this blog, a second quote from the same book is staring you all right in the face.
fandi fictor Ulixes was a term cobbled from Wikipedia that roughly means, “The Deceitful Odysseus”. As Kris Berg once said, “the latin I know all comes from the back of a one dollar bill”.
Up until Friday, I was 100% positive that this would go on indefinitely. The events of the last few days changed my mind. Lots of people accused me of being the real Greg, and engaging in a publicity stunt. Some of the private mail, and deleted comments were rather offensive. I did not envision that it was going to cause problems for Greg’s reputation. Sorry Greg. Another problem was that it became obvious that virtually every reader was more concerned about “Who Is” than any of the posts that were actually about real estate. This might of changed in the future, but I only intended to create enough publicity to get the blog rolling, not consume it. The final straw was a mistake that I made that was realized by Brad Coy. My WP template did not display the authors name, but the RSS feed did. I exposed one of the contributors, which in my mind was a paramount sin. I have already apologized to that person.
This is all taking way to much effort, and the paranoia I have interacting with my online friends is getting rather unmanageable. Damn you Dan Green!
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. 2000 Page views in one week is as much a credit to the real Greg Swann’s name as it is to my tomfoolery. I will mark this experiment as a failed blog, and a glorious viral marketing exercise.
I’ll continue to comment on RE.net, in public, on Blog Fiesta. It won’t be quite as much fun though, thanks for playing along.
Dan Green is…
Published December 30, 2007
Uncategorized
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One sneeky blogger. But there’s more to the puzzle my freind.
Now, can he keep a secret?
A slow week for RE.net, but a great start for Fake Greg Swann
Published December 30, 2007
Uncategorized
5 Comments
I started working on this blog last Sunday. The idea was in my head for a few months, but the B&W incident finally motivated me to act. At the same time, I wondered how bloggers would be around to react to it in the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
This is a notoriously slow time for my real blog. Not a whole lot of content has come from RE.net in general over the last week. The Inman Blog has been dormant since the 21st. It’s understandable with the holidays.
FGS was discovered on the 24th, and has averaged about 300 hits a day. Traffic is better than I anticipated, but I assume it will level off as the curiosity wanes a bit. With little to talk about on the RE.net front, we’ve been playing games with many of our posts. As the holidays pass, the blog will shift more to commenting on RE.net. We’re still going to have some fun though.
Building this site has created a few unexpected consequences. A few have tried to use FGS as a platform to attack the real Greg Swann. That aint gonna happen folks. We won’t condone personal attacks toward anyone. It has encouraged others to employ some trickery of their own. We’re fine with that. But don’t expect us to play by traditional rules. Also note that our deceitful ways end at the border’s edge. You won’t see Fake Gregg Swann commenting as Fake Greg Swann on other people’s blogs. If you do, it’s not the real FGS.
More rules may be needed. Less rules would even be better. It’ll depend on how the discussion evolves.
To the vindictive idiot who stalks the real GS
Published December 29, 2007
Uncategorized
5 Comments
I see your posts all over RE.net. It’s always under a different name, but it’s also the same STUPID argument. Nobody that knows anything at all about RE blogging gives a damn about their ALEXA rank. Your post today was deleted. Your posts will be deleted on every occasion. This is out of respect for each and every reader of this blog who’s time I will not allow you to waste.
How Social Networks REALLY work
Published December 28, 2007
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My favorite being, “Your soul mates’s future spouse (the two will randomly run into each other at a real life party)
How to put your real estate blog on the first page of Google warrentied
Published December 28, 2007
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The biggest problem with SEO advice is not that everyone is giving it, but that what works now may not work tomorrow. Anyway. Here’s my advice. It’s warrentied for today only.
Steal someone’s thunder while complimenting them at the same time.
Link to everyone you know, don’t even bother asking them to link back.
Use a free blog platform
Viral title tags > Keyword title tags
Forget Seth Godin, make Tony Clifton your mentor
1400 hits in the first four days, during the slowest week of the year, and page one results on Google. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Who is Fake Greg Swann’s top referrer?
Published December 27, 2007
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The WordPress Dashboard. Proving that linking to others, and leveraging their vanity and/or curiosity, is one of the fastest ways to get noticed. Blogrolls are not just for SEO.
The blogroll is growing
Published December 27, 2007
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I added a few more blogs to the blogroll. Had to cover some tracks. I also changed the titles on some of the existing linked blogs. I’ll be doing that from time to time.
On another note, I received some hate mail today. In the spirit of anonymity, I’m not going to post it. It was not from anyone obvious. Most people have reacted positively. That’s good because FGS is not here to attack anyone.
A couple nights ago, I watched Jimmy Kimmel interview Don Rickles. When asked how he gets away with all the slurs that constitute the bulk of his act, Don compared himself to a professional boxer. The fight itself is nothing personal. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially he said,
” When I throw a punch, I know in my heart that it’s funny, and that’s why I get away with it.”
Please note that any malicious insult you infer here at FGS was never intended to be perceived that way.
1000+ hits in the first three days
Published December 27, 2007
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It took well over a month to produce that on my first blog. Thanks for stopping by!
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Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker [View Page] Posts: [The MBTA: one mistake may be regarded as a misfortune; 900 looks like carelessness], [Noted without comment], [Today, so far], [“I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.”], [On Mary’s perpetual virginity], [Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation], [Turkey and the “Muslim-secular” battle], [Reading Milton, other than Paradise Lost], [LazyMusic request: Zappa’s Apostrophe/Over-Nite Sensation], [My phone is broken]
Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker
Proud member of the reality-based community since 1978.
The MBTA: one mistake may be regarded as a misfortune; 900 looks like carelessness
slaniel | Boston; Kenmore Square; MBTA | Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
Attention conservation notice: 900 or so words of whinging ahead about the MBTA, and about the city generally.
There’s an article in today’s Globe about the continuing MBTA construction delays at Kenmore. I would give a substantial fraction of my salary — seriously — if people could explain to me why MBTA projects are always overdue and wildly over budget, and if those same people could then solve the problem.
It’s been noted many times recently: in an era of expensive gas, a functioning MBTA would jump in and prove to people that mass transit is just what they’re waiting for. It’s not happening: the MBTA is falling even more apart at precisely the time when it ought to be working better.
To add insult to injury, the MBTA’s putative leader, Dan Grabauskas, drives an SUV to work every day from his home in Ipswich. This despite the fact that Ipswich is right on the commuter rail (Newburyport line, a couple stops shy of the end). And also despite the fact that the MBTA is now running a campaign it calls “Dump The Pump” to get people onto its vehicles.
Every time the MBTA could be overdue on a project, it is. The Longfellow Bridge is sort of fixed now, so trains passing over it can now go 25 mph rather than the 10 mph where they’ve been stuck since June; this is still slower than the usual 40+-mph travel speed over that bridge. Several times over the past few months, we’ve heard that the repairs would be completed within a weekend or two.
When an organization screws up this consistently, the press owe it to us to ask why it always screws up. Like Tom Friedman, the MBTA “does not get these things right even by accident.” I wish the MBTA itself had the honesty to explain this: after the hundredth T slowdown because of “signal work,” someone should be asking why signal work so consistently slows down the trains. Do other transit systems have so many signaling problems? Or are “signaling problems” cover for “breakdowns in union negotiation”?
I’m inclined to look at Boston generally. I’m unversed in the Big Dig, and of course I realize the fundamental fact about it: the city and the U.S. were moving an interstate highway under a 400-year-old major metropolis built on landfill. That’s nontrivial. I understand this. But it’s the same issue as with the MBTA: being Boston, the smart money would have bet that the project would go insanely far over its budget.
For a city with so many universities and so many smart people — and especially so many engineers — you’d expect that it would be the greatest city in the world, and that its construction projects would be monuments to man’s technological achievements. It’s not so, unfortunately. (Perhaps I flatter universities.)
The reason this gets to me so much, if it’s not clear, is that I love my city. I moved back here after being away for a year and really missing the place. Every time I flew into Logan, I would say a little something — seriously — to Boston upon first spotting its skyline. It was always something like “Hey Boston. Glad to see you. I missed you.” I still say something to Boston when I’m riding the red line over the Longfellow.
I want only the best for this city. I want it to succeed. When college students graduate, I want them all to stay here. I want the constant influx of new faces and smart people to make this place fun, livable, and dynamic. By all rights it should be the coolest town on earth: lots of young people means lots of restaurants selling good cheap food all night long. Like New York City, I should be able to duck into a diner at 5:00 in the morning. I should be able to buy noodles whenever the urge overtakes me.
Yet it’s not like that. I blame the T for some of that. We should be like Paris: no more than a 10-minute walk from any spot in the city to a T stop. The T should be running 24 hours per day like New York’s subway. And with all the smart people in this city, engineering problems should not grind the place to a halt.
It all smells very much like politics: buried deep within the MBTA and the city government, someone has paid someone else off; or the union won’t fix something because one of its members is pissed at Grabauskas; or there’s a feud going between the Italian wing and the Irish wing of city government. Something. If someone knows the politics, I’m sure that’s 99% of the story; I would love to hear it. And I would love for the Globe to dig down to this next level. When a bridge is effectively running at 25% capacity for a few months, I want my local media to explain the root cause, rather than constantly turning to “MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.”
What I want to know is: as someone who loves this city very deeply, what can I do to fix what’s broken? I’m not leaving this place. I want to make it better.
Comments (8)
Noted without comment
slaniel | Male subtext; Miscellaneous Linkage | Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
Guys keep hitting on my wife, which I can understand, so it doesn’t bother me. She looks pretty good, all’s fair. But please, don’t tell me I’m So Lucky or that I’m A Lucky Man. Brenna could not understand why this would make me angry when them kissing her arm or whatever would not. I let her in on a little man secret. When you tell a guy that he is a Lucky Man, you aren’t saying it because she seems like a really nice person. What you are telling him is that you would so fuck that. You would fuck that to pieces.
–Tycho from Penny Arcade
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Today, so far
slaniel | My Life and My Friends | Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Bade my lovely girlfriend farewell at the ungodly hour of five-what-the-hell-o’clock, as she headed for the airport in Manchester on her way to Chicago for a week. (I am now a bachelor. Call if you would like to hang out.) Passed back out into dreamland.
Woke up around 7:30, wandered around her now-empty house, showered, got out the door by 8:30.
Walked the 2.7 miles from her house to the train station in Exeter, NH. Did this in 48 minutes. I was all worried that I would miss the train, so I didn’t even stop by Me & Ollie’s as is my wont. I decided to hold off on breakfast and coffee until I got back to Cambridge, at which point I would satisfy both needs at Toscanini’s. Tosci has a killer Sunday brunch; as its owner, Gus Rancatore, described it: “It’s food that people would actually want to eat, and better than the sort of brunch you’d go to with your parents.” Consequently, it is packed on Sundays. I wonder why Tosci doesn’t then serve breakfast every day, like Miracle of Science does. (MoS’s weekday breakfasts, starting at 7 a.m., are to my mind one of Cambridge’s undiscovered treasures. My friend Joe and I are routinely two of three people there at that time of morning.)
As it happened, the train was 10 or 15 minutes late anyway. Without coffee or adequate sleep, I passed out near-immediately into a very deep slumber from which I didn’t awake until Woburn — a “city” that one Amtrak conductor routinely announces like so: “Next stop, Woburn: the bio-tech ghetto!” You might think, by the way, that “Woburn” is pronounced like the two words “whoa” and “burn.” In that you would be wrong. If you aren’t inclined to adopt the accent, you’ll pronounce the first syllable “woo”; if you want to be a local, the whole word is “woo-bin.” But no one ever pronounces it like it’s spelled. Sort of like “Worcester,” which is not “War-chest-er”; it is “Woost-er.” A little 411 for the non-Massholes in the room.
Home, Tosci, coffee, breakfast. And a nap on the couch before an open window with a light breeze wafting in.
I have had worse days.
Comments (2)
“I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.”
slaniel | Religion | Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Hands raised if you believe the above-quoted statement is shorthand for the following.
“I have a lot of ill-formed ideas about what god is, and I do believe in a creator. But I don’t want to take the time to think too hard about what I actually believe. If I were reasonably precise about my own thoughts, it might turn out that I’m obviously wrong. So I’m going to cover some uncooked thoughts in metaphysical handwaving; this aura of mystery around essential triteness will make people think I’m deep, or that my god is somehow lodged deep within my soul — when in fact the truth is that there’s no there there, and I don’t really have anything interesting to say on the topic.”
Another possible alternative for this post’s title:
“I don’t believe in god. Yoga’s cool, though.”
Comments (4)
On Mary’s perpetual virginity
slaniel | Religion | Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
I don’t have much time to write about the subject right now, but I’ll ramble at
some point soon about the virginity of the Virgin Mary. It seems like a good
jumping-off point for some non-vacuous discussion of Christianity. Specifically:
my sense is that Aquinas tried to reduce the portion of Christian doctrine that had
to be taken on faith to as small a core as possible. My sense further is that
Mary’s virginity is part of this irreducible core.
From The Reformation, page 97:
Erasmus faced up to one theological issue dependent on the use of allegory
that later proved as troublesome to Protestants as to Catholics: This was the
universally held belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity … Much of the traditional
case for this belief, which has no direct justification in Scripture, was based
on an allegorical use of Ezek. 44:2, which talks about the shutting of a gate that
only the Lord could enter. This was then bolstered by a forced Greek and Latin reading
of Isaiah’s original Hebrew prophecy that a young woman (not a “virgin” in Hebrew)
would conceive a son Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14). Erasmus could not read these texts as
Jerome had done. In response to shocked complaints about his comments, he set out
a precise position: “We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is
not expounded in the sacred books.” In other words, Erasmus acknowledged the ancient
claim that there were matters of some importance that had to be taken on faith — because
the Church said they were true — rather than because they were found in the Bible. Erasmus
had begun to discover a problem that would become one of the major issues of the Reformation
and that faced all those who called for Christianity to go back ad fontes. Did the Bible
contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition the Church guarded, independent of it? The issue
of Scripture versus tradition became a vital area of debate that had no straightforward
outcome for either side, whatever they might claim.
And here’s Aquinas, from the
Summa. It’s unconvincing unless you accept some ideas about the perfection
of God and of Christ. I don’t accept those ideas, as it happens.
It seems to me that questioning as far as possible the roots of faith could lead just
as easily to a deep faith as it could to atheism.
Anyway, more on this later. It seems to me that diving deeply on this one issue would
go a long way toward understanding Christianity more broadly.
Comments (5)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation
slaniel | Reformation, The | Friday, August 1st, 2008
Maybe the quickest way to summarize my understanding of the Reformation, now that I’ve finished MacCulloch’s book, is like so: “Christians took some time off from killing Jews and Muslims to kill each other. Eventually the descendants of the original mother Church numbered like grains of sand, all mutually loathing one another. After exhausting themselves with murder, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, some of those descendants decided that it would be better to figure out how to get along with one another. And lo, Toleration was born.”
The somewhat longer story is that the Ottoman Empire was encroaching on Europe’s southern and eastern borders, and actually took over enough land — Granada, for instance — to scare the daylights out of Christians. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others took this opportunity — quite coincidentally, it seems — to fume about the Church’s corruption. The laity saw the Ottomans’ invasion as a warning sign that the last days were coming, and that the Church would have to atone for its sins. This combined with, it seems, increasing literacy and the birth of the printing press to make access to the Bible easier. Hence people could turn to their Scripture, see that doctrine wasn’t always as their priests insisted it was, and maybe even occasionally compare one Church father to another. Origen, for instance, stands uncomfortably beside Augustine. So we begin the sola scriptura movement, justification by faith alone, and a move away from centralized Church hierarchy.
The Church didn’t take this laying down, of course, so they fought back on multiple fronts and eventually reclaimed most of Europe as Catholic territory. Spain never needed this “Counter-Reformation,” as it happens, because Spain never succumbed to the Reformation itself. Spain had already had an Inquisition directed by the infamous Tomás de Torquemada, so it had already weeded out internal resistance. The Church of the eastern tradition, which we today label Greek and Russian Orthodox, never had a Reformation, because it had already been overrun completely by the Ottomans.
Once the gates to questioning were open, people ran off in every conceivable direction from what the Bible said. The Bible actually says nothing about infant baptism, so the Anabaptists (literally rebaptists) picked up on that and insisted on adult baptism. The Bible left it questionable, at the very least, whether Mary was actually a virgin (the Bible apparently said Jesus had brothers — I did not know this), so various people questioned her holiness. There were debates over what seem nowadays like obscure, needless theological disputes, such as whether the physical substance of the wafer is everywhere in the world that people happen to be eating it — whether Christ’s body, that is, magically transports itself into each worshipper’s mouth. This is known as the doctrine of “real presence.” People seem to have died over it. MacCulloch doesn’t convincingly explain for non-believers how a small-scale doctrinal issue translates into large-scale murder.
There’s a fascinating and no doubt endlessly depressing sociological study just waiting to leap out of real presence. Here’s a provisional hypothesis: people often fight with each other more when they agree than when they don’t. I wonder whether more blood has been spilt amongst Christians than between Christians and Muslims.
Somehow Europe changed from millennia under a single church to viewing that same church’s leader, the Pope, as the Antichrist. I would like to explain how this happened, but I don’t really understand it — and unfortunately, I don’t think MacCulloch’s book is the place to go to explain that arc. He covers more or less all of Europe from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries, jumping around from country to country at will. It’s hard to pick out a “moral of the story,” and in fact I think MacCulloch eschews such a moral. He appears to be of the historical school that takes Big Lessons as insults; there’s something to be said for this, if you’d prefer not to see your histories make straightforward what is in fact complicated, contingent, and random. From this reader’s perspective, anyway, MacCulloch’s style is more distracting than helpful. His book would probably work better as a reference — grab it off the shelf and find something relevant to your particular area of interest — than it does as a straight-through narrative.
The theology in MacCulloch’s book is slight — really only enough to put a bit of context around these disputes. Yet the theological questions seem fatal. As I think Augustine was the first to point out: if god is omniscient, then he knows how our lives will play out. If he knows how our lives will play out, then it takes an act of great sophistry to claim that we have free will in any meaningful sense. Predestination might also make you ask what the purpose of prayer is; hasn’t god already made up his mind? If you’re Aquinas, you’re going to argue that god is perfect, therefore unchanging, therefore not in the business of making decisions; his mind was made up long ago. Indeed, this perfect god spends his time contemplating himself. (I honestly forget how Aquinas justifies prayer, under this light.)
Some scholars of the Reformation, most notably Calvin, took this predestination to heart. Here’s where the logic of predestination runs into politics. Time and again throughout MacCulloch’s book, theologians pull their worshippers back from the brink just before those worshippers realize where the logic of their religion is leading them. If all that matters is faith, for instance, and if all the truth one needs is available in books that any of us can read, then self-appointed leaders have much less of a role to fill. This wouldn’t work at all, of course. At the very least, it wouldn’t help the religion to fit well into civil society: political leaders need their people to stay in line.
The unkind view of this reality is that theology is so much chin music to support a preconceived conclusion. The more charitable take is that society as a whole takes time to understand the consequences of its own beliefs — much like Copernicus, who died without really understanding what he had wrought; it took Galileo and Newton to push the revolution to its logical end. (Newton, by the way, spent as much time writing about Christian mysticism as he did about the inverse-square law; so MacCulloch tells us.)
No matter how logical all these conclusions might be, the logic still has to start from axioms. If you’re a Christian, those axioms will almost certainly contain something about God’s role in the universe or Christ’s perfection. If you are a non-believer, these axioms need arguing. I’ve not yet found a book on the subject of Christianity that argues in a manner calculated to convince rational, educated nonbelivers. Supposedly Aquinas went as far as anyone to reduce Christianity to a tiny core surrounded by an impenetrable wall of logic, but the core is still unbelievable if you’ve not already bought into some contentions about Christ. I haven’t, so much of the theological debate — over, again, issues such as whether Christ is literally in the wafer — look irremediably silly to me.
The most interesting part of this book, to me, is what happened at the end of centuries of religious murder: societies dipped their toes in the water of “toleration” — i.e., “not killing other people because they think of god differently than you do.” This is what liberal democracy is: it’s the realization that since we’re all going to have to live together, we all need to give up a little something to make it work. Even getting this off the ground is very tricky: if Catholics believe that they will always be in the majority, why should they believe that they need to relent at all in their pursuit of religious monopoly? Here’s where some studies comparing the spread of religious toleration in homogeneous societies to heterogeneous ones would be valuable; for his part, MacCulloch notes that the United States was one of the first places where toleration took off, and was also the destination for immigrants from all over Europe. (Martha Nussbaum published a book recently subtitled “In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality”, which I just couldn’t get into.)
Like Borge’s infinite library, there probably lies within The Reformation the answer to every secret, and the disproof of every answer to every secret. I’d have liked a shorter volume with more clear story arcs — more analysis and less data. With that said, this is probably the sort of book that one returns to over the years, finding bits of goodness each time.
Comments (0)
Turkey and the “Muslim-secular” battle
slaniel | Turkey | Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Every article about the recent Turkish crises feels obliged to mention that there’s some sort of battle happening between Islam and secular government. Far be it for me to suggest that this is a way to fit an unfamiliar environment into a convenient Western narrative, but: this is a way to fit an unfamiliar environment into a convenient Western narrative. Take the New York Times story on today’s development:
The case had paralyzed Turkish politics since the indictment was filed in March and had moved Turkey to a final confrontation between religious and secular Turks about who will rule the nation.
The indictment before the court accused the governing party, Justice and Development, known as A.K. for the initials of its Turkish name, of trying to turn Turkey, a secular democracy, into an Islamic state.
I am no expert on Turkey, obviously, so please take everything I say here with ample salt. But it is not our culture. In Istanbul, the most “Westernized” city in all of Turkey (or so I’m told), you hear Muslim calls to prayer five times a day. There are mosques every few blocks.
Maybe the shortest way to get to my point is to ask: wouldn’t it change the Times’s story somewhat if they noted that Turkey is 99.8% Muslim? 99.8%. That is a degree of religious homogeneity that American conservative Christians could only dream of.
It’s nonvacuous, despite that, to say that Turkey is officially secular. It could be that the governing Muslims don’t let their religion influence their governance. Or it could be — the article doesn’t completely make it clear — that the 0.2% of the country that isn’t Muslim are the only people allowed in government. If that second option is true, that doesn’t seem like something we should be cheering; do we really respect “democracy” when it’s democracy of a highly unrepresentative sort?
While in Turkey, I realized two things that I really need to learn about:
This unending belief in the West — which seems to have started back when the Ottomans were attacking the Holy Roman Empire — that there is a war between Islam and Christianity. Even if the Islamic warriors are tiny and essentially powerless terrorist groups, with no practical ability to topple the West, this narrative continues.
Nationalism. The Ottoman Empire seems to have been a heterogeneous brew of ethnicities that, if you read A Peace to End All Peace, wouldn’t be recognizable as a “nation” in the sense that 21st-century Westerners would understand that word. It tolerated Jews alongside Muslims alongside Armenians alongside Turks. Suddenly there came a point when the “Turks” recognized themselves as such, killed off those who weren’t “Turks,” and booted the rest out of the country. I recall reading in Pamuk’s Istanbul that more Jews left Turkey in the half-century after independence than left it in the half-century after the Ottoman takeover. (This could just be a statistical sleight-of-hand owing to a larger 20th-century population, of course.)
How do you convince people that they are in this group, those guys are in the other group, their group deserves death, and your group is special because of (inter alia) its language? Certainly some variant of this has been going on forever (I’m thinking of the “shibboleth” story from the book of Judges, 12:4-6), but … something about Turkey is special here. Understanding nationalism means understanding Turkey, and probably understanding the latter would buy you nearly all you need to know about the former.
P.S.: Before anyone mentions it: yes, rereading Hobsbawm wouldn’t hurt.
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Reading Milton, other than Paradise Lost
slaniel | Milton, John | Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Paradise Lost was a rough slog for me; I think I got through half or 2/3 of it before abandoning the enterprise. Nowadays I’d do better, because I’ve developed some skills at reading unpleasant books. (Witness my current read, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation.) But still, I’m not inclined to dive back into Paradise Lost; as Dr. Johnson put it,
Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.
But Milton was great for other reasons, I gather. He was an important player, somehow, in the English Civil War, and people still cite Areopagitica. Can anyone out there point me to a good compendium of non-Paradise Lost Milton?
One thing I’ve also realized recently is that reading the original texts without commentary is nearly pointless. This is something people have told me for a while about legal texts: yes, there’s value in reading Court decisions, but you really do need someone to embed that decision in the context that makes it important. Something similar is surely the case for Milton, as it is for any important Christian (Origen, Augustine, Aquinas…).
Has anyone tried the Cambridge Companion to Milton?
Comments (4)
LazyMusic request: Zappa’s Apostrophe/Over-Nite Sensation
slaniel | Apostrophe/Over-Nite Sensation | Saturday, July 26th, 2008
If anyone out there has the above-named album in a convenient electronic format, could you please send it my way? Email works well for this: steve@laniels.org.
And yes, if you’re curious: I did try buying it via Amazon MP3s, but it’s not available there. I buy a lot of music that way. It’s gotten to the point where my need for instant music gratification makes buying an actual CD extraordinarily unlikely.
I could also buy through iTunes, which I’ve got to work through Wine. But iTunes files are DRM-encrusted. If anyone out there knows how to strip off the DRM, let me know. Yes, I know that I could burn to a CD and re-rip to MP3. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t work well enough under Wine to allow interaction with hardware. So I can’t do the buy-burn-rip sequence. This is, in fact, one of the reasons that has delayed my buying an iPhone: if I wanted to put any interesting apps on it, I would need a Windows box from which I could run iTunes.
Hence: if anyone has it, I would love to download it from you.
Update (27 July 2008): Done and done, thanks to a generous reader. Hats off to my anonymous friend.
Update (27 July 2008): My library’s computer system asked me tonight, “Did you mean overbite sensation?” No, but I really wish I did.
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My phone is broken
slaniel | My Life and My Friends | Saturday, July 26th, 2008
I dropped my phone on the floor last night (at Toscanini’s, if you’re curious), and now it’s all messed up: without a headset plugged in, I can neither hear anything nor transmit my voice over the wire. With a headset, I can hear but not speak.
So if you need to get in touch with me over the next few days, try text message (6173085571@vtext.com), home email (steve@laniels.org), work email (slaniel@itasoftware.com) or work phone (617-714-2722).
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Translate Turkish with me?
slaniel | Istanbul: Memories and the City; Turkey; Şehir Mektupları (City Dispatches) | Thursday, July 24th, 2008
After reading Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, I’m really inspired to read some books in the original Turkish — particularly those by Ahmet Rasim. Pamuk had a lot of good things to say about Rasim’s book City Dispatches, which appears to be unavailable in English. My friend David tells me that it’s known as Şehir Mektupları in Turkish; it’s available for $5.99 plus shipping from tulumba.com. I ordered a copy a while back; it took some time to get to me, but I now have it.
So, with Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar at my side, and the Redhouse Turkish-English/English-Turkish Dictionary, I am going to give translating it a go. Turkish is a beautiful language; I’m really looking forward to this.
It will have to wait a short while, though. Once I finish Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation, the illustrious mrz and I are going to hit up Protestant Thought Before Kant. Somewhere in there, I will also be hopefully reading and reviewing my first book for Bookslut.com, who’ve graciously (foolishly?) decided that I’d be a good match.
But after those books — say, around the beginning of October — I intend to take a month or so to translate City Dispatches. It should be a lot of fun. Anyone who wants to join in should grab a copy off Tulumba and read along with me.
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Did I loan any of you The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law?
slaniel | Posner, Richard | Thursday, July 24th, 2008
I’ve been looking for my copy of Landes and Posner’s The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law for a few weeks now, ever since some friends and I got in a discussion of trademark law and public health. TESoIPL is a terrific book, which I read a few years back. (My list of previously-read books tells me that I finished it almost exactly four years ago today.)
I can’t find it, though, and I wonder if I lent it to anyone. I highly doubt I would have sold it; it was too good to sell, and in any case I’m pretty sure it’s loaded with margin notes. It’s also not on the list of books I sold off when I was unemployed.
So did I lend it to anyone who reads this blog? If I don’t find it soon, I’ll probably just buy another copy.
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Political figures deserve less media endorsement
slaniel | Terrorism and psychopathology thereof | Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
I just got a mailing from the ACLU, announcing that Michael Mukasey had proposed one or another new way to gut the Constitution. As is my wont, I googled for Mukasey and intended to click on the News link. But among the links returned by Google was this excerpt:
The fundamental problem here is that the media give Mukasey’s words automatic credence because he is Mukasey. But it actually goes a bit deeper than that: not only should the media not give him that credence; they should obviously give him less because he is a public figure. Mukasey’s utterances on the subject of terrorism are as suspect as Steve Jobs’s on the awesomeness of the iPod, say. “Jobs Asserts That New iPod Is Best Ever” would not be a headline, for obvious reasons. Why does Mukasey deserve any more credibility here than Jobs does there?
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WordPress + Gears = great
slaniel | Gears | Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
WordPress 2.5 or 2.6 — I don’t exactly remember which — incorporated
support for Google Gears. This was an extremely excellent idea. If you’re someone like me whose WordPress blog contains many categories — I have a category for books, subcategories for each author, and subsubcategories for each book — WordPress was getting slow: every time you refreshed most any page, WP was reloading the full category list. Now the Gears backend stores all those categories — along with, I’m sure, lots of caches of other data structures — on the local disk. If I say that WordPress is now 20 times faster than it was pre-Gears, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Every aspect of it is now faster.
If I understand the way these things work, bits of HTML 5 are now rolling into people’s browsers.
One part of HTML 5 will be more-sophisticated client-side storage; this may in fact be the first innovation in web-standard client side storage since cookies.
I believe there will be both a lightweight backend database (à la sqlite?) and an associative array.
Each browser will no doubt implement its own client-side storage. Perhaps they’ll use Gears? They could, given that its license is the New BSD License. I don’t know enough about such things to explain why, say, Firefox would pick Gears over some alternative. And in fact I don’t know what the alternatives are, beyond what Firefox itself might be developing internally.
If Google isn’t locking anyone into its code, then what’s in it for them? Maybe people will get used to programming against Google APIs and won’t want to switch to
other APIs? That seems like a rather … polite form of lock-in.
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Awesome: Google Maps now gives walking directions
slaniel | Maps | Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
This is something I’ve dreamt of for a long while: getting Google Maps directions if you’re on foot, rather than in a car. Awesome.
One thing I’ve always done to approximate foot distance is to compute the driving distance from A to B, then the driving distance from B to A, and take the smallest. That accommodates somewhat for one-way streets. This new Google innovation is far cooler.
I’ve wondered for a while whether rewriting everything to give foot directions is difficult. The way I’ve envisioned Google Maps internally is as a giant
adjacency matrix, with
distances as the matrix entries. Most of those distances need to change if one-way streets go away. So internally, does Google Maps switch from one
adjacency matrix to another in order to handle pedestrians? Not that that’s a huge deal for them — what’s another few hundred gigs of memory between friends? –
but I do wonder if I’m on the right track.
Thanks to Adam Rosi-Kessel for discovering this.
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“I shot a moose…”
slaniel | Allen, Woody; Hilariousness | Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
I relistened to Woody Allen’s “I shot a moose…” standup routine yesterday. It is quite brilliant. I felt a bit sad listening to it, though, because I’ll never be able to reproduce the hilarious shock that I felt upon hearing it for the first time. I wish I could return to that state of childlike glee.
If you’ve not listened to it, please download it from my cache in Ogg Vorbis format, or MP3. It’s about 3 minutes long. Those are 3 well-spent minutes.
If you happen to hate Woody Allen, by the way, I should note here that a friend listened to the sketch today after asking me, “Will I still find this funny if I’ve found every single Allen movie I’ve tried to watch completely unbearable?” He ended up loving it, so I have hope for the rest of humanity.
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The language police, volume N
slaniel | Language | Friday, July 18th, 2008
Could people stop using the phrase “déjà vu all over again”? It was a Yogi Berraism. It was supposed to be silly and redundant, like all Yogi Berraisms: “déjà vu” obviously already means “once again.” Yet I could count the number of times that journalistic institutions have used “déjà vu” without “all over again” on two hands.
A review of Jane Mayer’s terrific-sounding new book, for instance, contains this bit:
In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like déjà vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else’s civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.
Drop the “all over again,” people. It will make you feel better.
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The IRS mass-transit benefit
slaniel | Law; Mass transit and city design | Friday, July 18th, 2008
I’ve been trying to figure out for a while exactly where the tax law says that employers can deduct more for parking fringe benefits than they can for mass-transit fringe benefits. A bit of digging just answered my question, thanks to the IRS’s guide to fringe benefits for employers. That guide points us to Cornell’s law archive, oddly enough; why can’t the IRS archive the laws that govern it?
Specifically, employer fringe benefits are defined within Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter , Part III, Section 132, Subsection (f), Subsubsection (2), to wit:
(2) Limitation on exclusion
The amount of the fringe benefits which are provided by an employer to any employee and which may be excluded from gross income under subsection (a)(5) shall not exceed—
(A) $100 per month in the case of the aggregate of the benefits described in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of paragraph (1), and
(B) $175 per month in the case of qualified parking.
I would still like to figure out why the parking benefit is higher than the mass-transit benefit. It’s not as though mass transit always costs less than $100 per month: I could very easily spend $250 per month shuttling back and forth to Newburyport or Providence. In any case, the tax-law documentation itself doesn’t explain the reason behind the policy.
At work, they asked us what fringe benefits would be useful to us. I suggested
that perhaps they spend some money to equalize the parking and mass-transit benefits:
pay us $75, or the excess of our mass-transit expense over $100, whichever is smaller.
Which is a nice teachable math moment, for those who are interested. Suppose I incur $200 in
mass-transit expenses in a month, so my company reimburses me $175. I owe taxes on $75 of that,
because the government only lets my company deduct $100. Suppose I’m in the 28% tax bracket;
that means I owe $21 in taxes on the $75. But the people who receive the parking benefit don’t
need to pay $21 in taxes. So a company committed to fairness would also reimburse me for that
$21. That’s $21 in additional income, on which I would then be taxed. I’d owe $5.88 in taxes,
specifically (again, 28%). So my fairness-minded company would reimburse me $5.88.
And so forth, ad infinitum. In total, the company would reimburse me
$75 + $21 + $5.88 + $1.6464 + $0.460992 + $0.12907776 + …
This is known as a geometric series, with ratio .28. It has a finite sum, namely
$75/(1-.28) = $75/.72 = $104.17. My company needs to reimburse me $104.17 to
give me the same benefit that car drivers already get.
An easier way to arrive at the same conclusion is like so:
my company needs to pay me $x to equal the parking benefit.
I will be taxed 28% on those $x. So after taxes, I will have
$(1-.28)x in the bank. I want my after-tax benefit to equal
the $75 that parking users get.
So I want (1-.28)x = 75, whence x = 75/(1-.28). Different route,
same answer.
My company didn’t think quite as much of my idea as I did. Nice
geometric series, though.
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Some thoughts on health insurance
slaniel | Health care and insurance; Helping the Less Fortunate | Saturday, July 12th, 2008
I’ve gotten in dozens of discussions with people about health insurance in recent years.
For some reason the phrase “adverse selection” rarely pops up. I don’t know why. As far
as I can tell, it is the important issue in health insurance — it is the reason why
universal health insurance is the only conceivable solution to the problem. But few people
have heard of it. So here goes. Very simple.
Suppose health insurance isn’t mandatory — that is, you can choose not to be insured.
If it’s too expensive, you won’t participate. In particular, if you’re a healthy person,
you might rationally decide that you won’t need to be covered.
To make it concrete: suppose premiums are $100 a month, and that you — as a healthy
person — decide that you’ll incur less than $100 per month in health-care expenses.
So you don’t get insured. All your healthy countrymen do likewise.
So now the only people left in the insurance pool are those who think they’ll need
more than $100 per month in health care. Since $100 is the minimum, the average
person in the insurance pool needs more than $100 in care. So let’s say that now the average patient who’s left in the insurance pool needs $150 in care per month. The premium has to go up to at least $150 so that the insurance company can break even. Now some more people are priced out of insurance: they think that insurance costs too much, so they don’t get covered. Premiums rise again. And so forth.
Eventually, the only people left in the insured pool are those who need the most
care. Premiums are too high for everyone else.
Mandatory health insurance is the only conceivable solution to this problem. If people can’t leave insurance, then the healthy people stay in and help subsidize the less-healthy. Then when the healthy folks turn old and are themselves less healthy, their countrymen can subsidize them.
The U.S. recognized adverse selection as the problem years and years ago. This is
why Medicare exists: old folks are not insurable at any price. Older folks will necessarily
have higher premiums to start with, and adverse selection drives them still higher.
Which is to say that we’ve known about the failures of the health-insurance market
for decades. There is no mystery to the problem, or to its solution. The problem is
adverse selection; the only solution is universal coverage.
Now “universal coverage” can mean lots of things. It can mean
Government-provided insurance.
The government mandating that everyone have insurance through a private insurer. Massachusetts has done this.
Public/private competition: everyone has insurance, either through a private insurer or the government. Americans are free to choose whichever insurance they like, and are free to switch between insurance providers. Competition selects the best insurer. This is the system that President Clinton proposed.
Everyone is entitled to a minimum standard of care, and can pay for anything they want above that. This is how I’m told the French system works.
etc.
When people imagine universal health care, I think they have the first bullet in mind.
Naturally there’s the concern that if you insure people against something, they’re more likely to do it. If you guarantee people treatment for drug abuse, they’re … more likely to abuse drugs? It’s not exactly clear what people might mean here. The general term is “moral hazard” (quaintly Victorian, that), and Malcolm Gladwell smacked it down nicely back in 2005:
A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.
Granted, there may be some justice to the moral-hazard idea. If my car is insured, I’ll maybe be more reckless when I’m out on the road.
But there’s a distinction in there that it’s important to clarify: I should be punished for risks that I bring on myself, and should not be
punished for risks I was born with. If you were born with Down’s syndrome, a just society won’t let you suffer because your parents can’t afford to
pay. If you routinely get high and crash your car, society shouldn’t pay for your car or your bad behavior. This much is common sense.
At the same time, it may cost more to monitor people’s bad behavior than it would to just cover them no matter what they do. Looking at the actual
costs and benefits would go a long way. Surely we have a lot of data, both from U.S. car-insurance statistics and from foreign health care.
One other thing to note: before you mention that “people in Canada/England/France complain about the quality of their health care” or “people in those countries have to wait a long time to get care,” consider the 15% of Americans who can’t get care at all. Or rather, they can get care by going to the emergency room — typically, after waiting for their health to become a crisis and, as Gladwell says, removing their teeth with pliers.
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A sad day
slaniel | Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its routine v | Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
FISA was eviscerated today. I’m not happy about this. I’m not happy that Obama voted to end debate on the FISA bill. But what I want to mention here is that I’m sad we couldn’t get forty Democrats with spines to filibuster it.
How hard is that? 40. 40. We are the majority party, are we not? I called Senator Dodd’s office to ask why he didn’t filibuster it this time around. One of his aides told me that he couldn’t get 40 votes, so his filibuster would have been clotured immediately. I asked whether Dodd could have tried filibustering even symbolically; his aide repeated that, no, in fact that wouldn’t have even got off the ground.
I called the office of Senator Kerry, who to his credit voted for all the right amendments. His aide told me that the senator did all he could to fight it. I asked why he didn’t filibuster. He gave me the same answer as Senator Dodd’s aide. I replied that if I called 40 Democratic senators, I would most likely get 40 copies of the same answer. Kerry’s aide told me that this was probably right. I replied that I felt as though I were shaking my fist at the sea. Kerry’s aide didn’t know what to do with that information.
Why in god’s name can’t my party ever get its act together? And by this point, they can’t claim ignorance. Practically the whole world is telling them that they continue to get played on the national-security card. This has been going on since Joe McCarthy. I would retort with “they know politics more than I do” if they had shown any evidence of knowing anything about politics.
At least Republicans know how to kowtow to their base. Who’s the Democratic base? Ostensibly the poor, labor unions, and civil libertarians (who are somehow supposed to be part of the GOP; if you can square that particular circle, go win a million dollars with your mathematical ability). They’re doing a bang-up job with that.
The Democrats won in 2006 by not being Republicans; I didn’t think then, and I don’t think now, that they actually did anything to deserve it. They may well win in 2008 on that basis as well. Americans may be so fed up with Republicans that Democrats win by default. Shouldn’t we aspire to more than that?
Even if that is how we win, we need to do more than squeak by. We need a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, because at least the people we’re playing against know how to use the tools at their disposal. And once we get that filibuster-proof majority, we need to figure out what we stand for. That way we can stand together as one bloc when it comes time to vote — just like the Republicans do.
I’ve often heard it said, here, that the Democrats — liberals generally — are the party of questioning, which explains why we can’t get together around a single ideology. That is the purest form of self-flattering bullshit. I would enjoy comparing our ideological cohesiveness to liberals in other countries — say, the British Labour Party. There are a lot of reasons for our lack of cohesion; many of them probably reduce to abandoning our base. If Democrats knew they were the party of rectifying capitalism’s evils, or the party of the poor, or the party of the downtrodden, a lot of people could get behind that. The party doesn’t stand for any of those things, though. Read Joan Didion: what the party stands for, and has stood for since just after the 1968 DNC, is a particular kind of milquetoast packaging — a smaller-than-life median voter theorem that knows how to lose elections.
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Circular Reasoning [View Page] Posts: [The 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Team Skeptic at the Ideology Olympics], [The 91st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Dr. Absconsus’ Cabinets of Curiosities], [The 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Coming at you from Down Under], [The 89th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The "I'd rather be in Vegas" edition], [The 88th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle at the 11th hour!], [The 87th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Dirty Limericks Edition], [The 86th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: A bitch of a meeting!], [], [The 84th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle], [The 83rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: You're all Expelled!], [The 82nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The Genesis of the Skeptics' Circle], [The 81st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Leap Day Edition!], [The 81st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: There has been a change of plans this week], [The 80th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Is Valentine's Day the right time for skepticism?], [The 79th Skeptic’s Circle - Rollin With Teh Lol-ling], [The 78th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Still high from the chelation], [Skeptics’ Circle #77–The Overmedicalized Edition], [Skeptics' Circle Archive 2007], [The 76th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: A dish brush?], [All the way from Denmark: The 75th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle], [The 74th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: A special Thanksgiving day edition], [The 73rd Meeting of the Skeptic's Circle: Click on the boxes], [The 72nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Sister Mary Elephant strikes], [The 71st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Puzzle me this], [The 70th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The conspiracy meets]
Circular Reasoning
An archive site for the Skeptics' Circle. It includes a list of past Skeptics' Circles, future hosts, and announcements.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
The 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Team Skeptic at the Ideology Olympics
It's that time again, the time that comes around once a fortnight for skeptical bloggers and blog readers to gather together to celebrate that best that skeptics have had to offer since the last time they gathered. It's time for the 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. This time, it's hosted by Martin over at The Lay Scientist and it tells the tale of Team Skeptic at the Ideology Olympics, starting with a press conference:
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The 91st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Dr. Absconsus’ Cabinets of Curiosities
It's that time again, time for yet another foray in to the best skeptical writing the blogosphere has served up over the last two weeks, this time hosted by Sam Wise over at Sorting Out Science, who has collected it all for you in one convenient location known as the 91st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. You can't go wrong checking it out.
Friday, July 04, 2008
The 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Coming at you from Down Under
Better late than never (for me to announce it, I mean), the 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has descended upon the blogosphere from Down Under, this time brought to you by prominent Australian skeptic and battler against woo, a guy who's even harsher on antivaccinationists than I am, Peter Bowditch.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The 89th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The "I'd rather be in Vegas" edition
Better late than never, they always say. Michael Meadon may have been a few hours later than the usual edition of the Skeptics' Circle, but when he finally delivered the 89th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle it was well worth the wait. He even showed me a promising new blogger:
Thursday, June 05, 2008
The 88th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle at the 11th hour!
I must admit that I was getting a bit worried. Morning came today, and there was no Skeptics' Circle. I went to work. Every so often throughout the day I checked again.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
The 87th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Dirty Limericks Edition
You know, after over three years of existence and nearly two years that I've been entrusted with the responsibility of organizing it, I thought I had seen pretty much every possible permutation of how the Skeptics' Circle could be hosted. We've had cartoons, soda machines, stories, raucous meetings in pubs, and a whole bunch of other cool ideas, mixed in with some "just the facts, m'am," straight ahead hosting. But there's one permutation we haven't had yet:
Thursday, May 08, 2008
The 86th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: A bitch of a meeting!
Sometimes being a skeptic can be a real bitch. And no one knows that better than the host of the latest installment of a blog carnival that has, believe it or not, been running over three years now, the ever-popular Skepbitch. She's served up a heaping helping of the best skeptical bitching from the last two weeks. Head on over and enjoy!
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Better a little late than never, I'm happy to say that the 85th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has arrived at Andrea's Buzzing About:. What is it about Andrea anyway? And what is this obsession about looking under rocks? What will be found under all those rocks? There's only one way to find out!
Thursday, April 10, 2008
The 84th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle
...at Archaeoporn.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The 83rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: You're all Expelled!
I have to hand it to Mike, the host of this week's Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. He's decided to do something that I never would have thought possible: He's gotten Ben Stein to introduce the entries to this week's festival of skeptical thinking--which is why you're all "expelled"!
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Monday, May 01, 2006
Boycotting Yahoo!
Over the past several years, Yahoo has aided the Chinese Communist government in capturing "freedom-promoters." Yahoo has turned over draft emails, posts, and IP addresses. Other US-based companies have been accused of such crimes, but none of these companies have acted against the freedom of speech as enthusiastically, cooperatively, and blatantly as Yahoo!
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Yahoo! Aids the Communist Party
Here's part of an AP article from a week ago:
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Faith, Hope, and Charity- Part 2
Hope
Friday, April 21, 2006
The Oath- Book Review
The Oath
Friday, April 14, 2006
Faith, Hope, and Charity- Part 1
Charity
Friday, April 07, 2006
Vacation!
That wonderful time of year! My family and I will be headed up to Pennsylvania for a couple of days to visit with my grandparents, so I won't be blogging for almost a week. I should return to the blog world on Thursday. In the meantime, check out these posts by some other bloggers:
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Noah's Ark Found?
Satellite images taken over the past three years have spotted what many believe could be Noah's ark. These images capture an object almost 1,015 feet in length resting on Turkey's Mount Ararat.
Matthew 11:28
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
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Belgrade 2.0 [View Page] Posts: [Strange Case of Dr Dabic and Mr Karadzic [14]], [Radovan Karadzic arrested [4]], [Sun Is Shining In Banatski Sokolac [1]], [Beauty will save the world [6]], [Saban Bajramovic – a legend leaves us [5]]
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Posted 2008-07-23 21:45 under Politics
,
Off The Record
by Viktor Marković / 14 comments
Owen noticed in a comment on the previous post that there is a strange lack of reactions coming from Serbian blogs, well, ok, in any case in comparison to how big the news is. And the news is big, perhaps the biggest this year. But since it all started, the number of strange information has been increasing in such a manner that it’s maybe not so strange to imagine a lot of people just stare and listen in disbelief, myself included. There is a lot of questions circling around the Serbian and international press these days, and way too few answers. This is an attempt to collect them and try to find some answers.
Where has he been living all these years? Estimates in the press say that he has been living in Belgrade in the past 2 to 4 years, what about before that?
How did he come up with the idea of alternative medicine guru as a disguise? Perhaps he was a fan of TLN?
Why choose the role of a person that has such an exposure to broad audiences? Why choose to hide in a big city at all? What’s so wrong with bin-laden style mountain hideouts, caves and woods, hanging out with bears and sheep? I bet that a lot of his supporters are a bit sore to find out that their hero chose such a wimpy new-age disguise…
Who is the girl he’s been, according to rumors, seeing and living with? I hope his wife is not so mad at him, it was probably just a part of the disguise.
If it’s true that he has been visiting a cafe in Belgrade with his picture on the wall, hell, even sat directly under it while playing gusle and drinking, than at least I can guess who tipped him off – probably some sharp-eyed (and still sober) regular who noticed the striking similarity between the picture on the wall and rhe strange guest sitting under it.
Last but not least – what will this bring to Serbia? Should we think about this at all? Isn’t it enough that the suspect is brought to justice at all, do we really have to ask ‘what’s in it for us?’
I’m also interested to hear your reaction when you found out that he’s been arrested. Surprised? I know I was.
Also pay attention to those few blogs that were following the case thoroughly:
14 Comments
Posted 2008-07-21 23:37 under Breaking News
,
Politics
by Viktor Marković / 4 comments
Looks like one of the most sought after war criminals, Radovan Karadzic has been arrested couple of minutes ago. Stay tuned.
Karadzic wikipedia site
twitter news in realtime
google news in realtime
google blogsearch in realtime
4 Comments
Previously In The Blog:
2008-07-23 21:45: Strange Case of Dr Dabic and Mr Karadzic 14 Comments
2008-07-21 23:37: Radovan Karadzic arrested 4 Comments
2008-07-17 01:40: Sun Is Shining In Banatski Sokolac 1 Comments
2008-06-12 16:40: Beauty will save the world 6 Comments
2008-06-09 23:47: Saban Bajramovic – a legend leaves us 5 Comments
2008-06-09 18:58: Panchevo city - the zone of the dead No Comments
2008-05-27 01:51: A tourist's observations about Eurosong 1 Comments
2008-05-25 15:45: The end of Eurovizija in Beograd 3 Comments
2008-05-24 01:54: Do you feel Laka? 5 Comments
2008-05-19 02:56: Eurovision - the drug of the nation 1 Comments
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Strange Case of Dr Dabic and Mr Karadzic
Radovan Karadzic arrested
Sun Is Shining In Banatski Sokolac
Beauty will save the world
Saban Bajramovic – a legend leaves us
Panchevo city - the zone of the dead
A tourist's observations about Eurosong
The end of Eurovizija in Beograd
Do you feel Laka?
Eurovision - the drug of the nation
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Dialectic
The Blog Of The University of Newcastle Philosophy Club
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Other Philosophically Inclined Writers Festival Events
Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!Keeping with posting obituaries several weeks after the event, John Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who coined the terms ‘Black Hole’ and ‘Worm Hole’ died last week on the 13th of April. Wheeler had collaborated with Albert Einstein, and that is about as much as I know. Instead of trying to write up something more substantial, I have decided instead to link to an interview with Wheeler by Paul Davies, recorded in 2003 and played on Radio National’s The Science Show this weekend.
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Gary Gygax fails his save verse death
A little belated: Gary Gygax, the man who co-invented Dungeons and Dragons, author of the first edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and co-founder of TSR, Inc. (tactical studies rules), died last week on the 4th of March.
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Finally, Marriage Licenses for All
The legalization of gay marriage is a huge milestone in the fight for equal rights. Still, it begs the question: why do people get married, anyway?
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DESCA Feedback [View Page] Posts: [Consortium Agreement Tool Excel-based], [6.1 General structure], [art. 9.4], [Article 7.2.1], [Agreed time limits], [Consortium Plan ?], [Consortium Plan ?], [], [Quorum], [Why invent yet another name for the Project Management Team (in the DESCA template it is called Management Support Team)?]
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Consortium Agreement Tool Excel-based
31st July 2008
Hi. In the context of coaching SMEs in their cooperation decisions we needed a fast way to utilize the Desca CA Model. We have consequently developed a small excel-based tool basically acting as semi-automated CA document configurator highlighting the critical decisions along the way. I would love to discuss this with a member of the Desca Core Group and see whether there is interest in our approach. As smE-MPOWER Community we fully support the open knowledge strategy and are happy to share the tool in case of interest. Let me know.
andreas, Fraunhofer IFF, Magdeburg
Posted in IPR | No Comments »
6.1 General structure
28th July 2008
Hi, this clause is causing us problems, namely the paragraph:
“The Coordinator is the legal entity acting as the intermediary between the Parties and the European Commission. The Coordinator shall, in addition to its responsibilities as a Party, perform the tasks assigned to it as described in the EC-GA and this Consortium Agreement.”
has been interpreted to mean that the coordinator has a legal right to represent each of the parties which is not true if the coordiantor does not have the power of attorney to do so. Deleting the word “legal” would alleviate this interpretation. I’d really appreciate your thoughts on this please.
With thanks - Dajana (University of Durham, UK)
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
art. 9.4
15th February 2008
I would like to have some more information (and, possibly, references) on the comment on art. 9.4 of the Desca model, when it is said that, in case of access to Background for use, the royalty-free option generates “concerns regarding violation of competition law” and, for public funded Party, “state aid provisions”.
Posted in IPR | No Comments »
Article 7.2.1
28th November 2007
Please, a clarification on Article 7.2.1 concerning Budgeted costs elegible for 100 % reimbursement will be very welcomed.
It seems that the simplified method does not require in principle any certification.
Would this sentence refer actually to the certificate on average personnel costs, (unless a certificate on the methodology is provided)?.
Posted in Finance | No Comments »
Agreed time limits
28th November 2007
In article 3.3. the last part of the first sentence refers to agreed time limits in different articles. As not all of these articles mention any time limit, I would suggest that this part (“as agreed in respective articles”) is deleted in any new version.
I agree with the comment relating to the Consortium Plan and Consortium Budget. Is it desirable and realistic to operate with such parallel documents to the Annex I? Please consider this for the next version.
IPR:
Co-authorship is also a relevant issue where I often see references made to the Vancouver convention http://www.icmje.org/. Have you had any discussions on this?
Concerning Background, I would like to mention that there might be a contractiction in option 1 under article 9.1 between the included and excluded background. Please consider this thoroughly.
Posted in General Issues and Liability | No Comments »
Consortium Plan ?
28th November 2007
Are we sure that that the “Consortium Plan”, as an update version of the Description of Work (Annex I) established by the Consortium, will be accepted by the E.C. for the project reviews, instead of the last version of the “Annex I” itself ?
If so, is there a process for the validation of any “Consortium Plan” amendment?
Posted in General Issues and Liability | No Comments »
Consortium Plan ?
18th October 2007
Are we sure that that the “Consortium Plan”, as an update version of the Description of Work (Annex I) established by the Consortium, will be accepted by the E..C. for the project reviews, instead of the last version of the “Annex I” itself ?
If so, is there a process for the validation of any “Consortium Plan” amendment?
Posted in Governance | No Comments »
18th October 2007
Llevo más de media hora intentando ver como se usa (se introducen los datos) en el DESCA y no lo consigo. Hasta ahora la sensación de “friendly” que tengo es muy escasa
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Quorum
18th October 2007
A Coordinator is worried to find himself in meetings of the General Assembly not reaching the 2/3 quorum of members (DESCA 6.2.3) and thus unable to deliberate validly, with all present parties incurring travel costs for nothing.
Posted in Governance | No Comments »
Why invent yet another name for the Project Management Team (in the DESCA template it is called Management Support Team)?
18th October 2007
The generally agreed standards for project management (and certfication of project leaders) - PMP in the US and IPMA internationally - use the well-known Project Management Body-of-Knowledge (PMbok). Please refer to PMbok for more information. A Google search will also quickly show you the relative popularity of the terminologies, with “Project Management Team” an overwhelming winner.
Suggestion: change - quickly - the DESCA template to use Project Management Team instead of the confusing “Management Support Team” terminology.
P.S.
Posted in Governance | No Comments »
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Saturday, August 02, 2008
Gratis and libre open access
Peter Suber, in the August 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter just released, has found an elegant solution to the emerging need for definitions to clarify the two basic concepts of open access, free as in free to read and free as in free for use. The distinction between gratis and libre mirrors a similar distinction in open source software. While the terms may be unfamiliar, this could be an advantage, as there would not be conflicts with preexisting uses of words.gratis open access, as this is often the focus of open access policies.Libre access, or freedom for use, is a very important concept. It is a reflection of the maturity of the open access movement that this distinction needed to be made, from my perspective. Now that we have 50 open access mandates with more coming, and a scholarly communications system well on the way to transition, it is time to be talking about libre access.It's staggering to think about what could happen if the knowledge we have painstakingly discovered, articulated, tested, refined, validated, gathered, and delivered to the tarmac were systematically distributed to all who need it. Imagine if what was known became more widely known, especially among those who could put it to use .
E-LIS passes 8000 documents
As of about 8:45 am MST today, E-LIS, the open archive for library and information science (http://eprints.rclis.org/) contained 8023 documents. When I looked on Friday, the total was just under 8000 which means that E-LIS went over the 8000 mark sometime in the last few days. While it's not as an auspicious number as, say, 10,000, I think it's worth recognizing.
what's in rebecca's pocket? [View Page] Posts: [Is the Internet making us stupid?], [Ben Stein - When You Weren't Looking, They Were Working ], [Book Recommendation: Basic Economics], [Things may be quiet around here....], [Photos of earthquake damage in Beichuan Qiang County, Sichuan, China], [Haiku Torah], [What's in Season across the US, month by month], [Generation Y: Dumber than Gen X - or More Agile?], [Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?], [2008 Summer Reading Lists ], [Book suggestions for those who like House], [Portion sizes, then and now], [What is normal memory, and how to avoid Alzheimer's], [Misogyny I Won't Miss - Marie Cocco], [The Pentagon's Five Step Plan For Making Iron Man (for real!)]
rebecca's pocket
about / archive / syndicate
» That's what I said (and said and said).(via waxy) [ 06.13.08 ]
» Too true - and important - not to post: When You Weren't Looking, They Were Working
Get it in your heads that if you throw away your moral duties to your parents, you are thieves. You were born on third base and your parents put you there, and you think you hit a triple. It's not true. It's time to give back.
Thanks Mom and Dad, and parents everywhere, for taking such good care of us. [ 06.10.08 ]
» Can anyone recommend a good basic book on economics? Something for an interested layman (me) that will clearly explain the basic concepts? Please email me. [ 06.09.08 ]
» I have sustained a minor injury that restricts my ability to type. If this weblog is slow or even silent over the next month or so, please don't worry. I'm away from the keyboard taking care of myself. Update: I'm going to have to avoid the computer completely for a while. See you in a month. [ 06.07.08 ]
» Unbelievable photos of the devastation from the May, 2008 earthquake in
Beichuan Qiang County, in Sichuan, China. (via s1a-tweet) [ 06.05.08 ]
» The Torah in haiku. (via br) [ 06.03.08 ]
» What's seasonal in your area? Browse the Epicurious Peak Season Map - select a month and click on your state. (via se) [ 06.02.08 ]
» Is Generation Y really The Dumbest Generation?
[T]here is no empirical evidence that being immersed in instant messaging, texting, iPods, videogames and all things online impairs thinking ability. "The jury is still out on whether these technologies are positive or negative" for cognition, says Ken Kosik of the University of California, Santa Barbara, codirector of the Neuroscience Research Institute there. "But they're definitely changing how people's brains process information." [ 05.30.08 ]
» Scientific American: Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes? [ 05.29.08 ]
» Worth Reading marks the beginning of summer reading season with the first list of lists for 2008. Because of my injury, I won't be able to maintain a master list of summer reading lists this year - perhaps they can take up the mantle?
Update: They have! This list is growing every day. Keep checking back for additional summer reading ideas. [ 05.28.08 ]
» Book suggestions for readers who enjoy the television series "House". Especially intriguing: A historical thriller series set in the 12th century about a cynical, smart female physician/coroner, Adelia Aguilar, who is brought to England to solve murder mysteries for King Henry II. [ 05.27.08 ]
» Even I was surprised by the differences: Portion Sizes, Then and Now. (via se) [ 05.20.08 ]
» Sue Halpern on what the latest medical research can tell us about "normal" memory, and how to avoid Alzheimer's. [ 05.16.08 ]
» Marie Cocco on things she won't miss about the Democratic primary race.
I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item. [...]
I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.
Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch Month, right?"
It really has been appalling. We've come a long way, baby. [ 05.15.08 ]
» Brookings Institution: A Look at the Pentagon's Five Step Plan For Making Iron Man Real. (via tl) [ 05.14.08 ]
» The NYTimes Lede has an interesting overview of just what the Red Cross does every day of every year. Your donation of any amount will help. [ 05.13.08 ]
» A Little Weekend Thinking: Nick Bostrom's article Where Are They? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing is a meditation on the implications of The Fermi Paradox: if there is extra-terrestrial life in the universe, where is it? Bostrum starts with two seemingly contradictory facts: "Humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization" and "The observable universe contains vast numbers of solar systems, including many with planets that are Earth-like, at least in the sense of having masses and temperatures similar to those of our own orb. We also know that many of these solar systems are older than ours".
From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.
The article prompted some thoughtful responses, first from Jamais Cascio who posits several scenarios in which intelligent life could be out there, but invisible to us; or in which they would not be motivated to colonize the entire universe in the way that humans were motivated to colonize the whole Earth.
Tim O'Reilly posed his idea about the Great Filter:
If indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.
Good thinkers, both, and I agree with Tim that - for us, anyway - further development of alternative energy is dependent on oil. With regard to that point, it seems to me that a more basic question would be to wonder if our massive oil fields are unusual, and whether civilizations emerging on other planets would have to rely on other resources (wood, water, and wind) that simply aren't sufficient to propel a civilization into a Space Age?
As for Jamais' proposition that they may be out there, but we may not be able to hear them, I've wondered for a long time whether we'd even recognize an alien life-form. It seems like there are so many assumptions underlying our search for extra-terrestial life - which is not the same as a search for intelligence. What if we discovered a planet made of cognitive minerals? Would we even be able to figure that out? And even if we did, would they be able to recognize us? [ 05.09.08 ]
» Maybe the most wonderful art installation ever: Telephone Sheep. I want one. [ 05.08.08 ]
» Don't miss Slate's fascinating review of Daniel Radosh's new book, Rapture Ready!, an exploration of the strange contradictions of the world of Christian pop culture.
The entertainers in Radosh's book complain about watchdog groups that count the number of times a song mentions Jesus or about the lockstep political agenda a Christian audience expects. They complain about promoting an "adolescent theology" of Christian rock, as one calls it, where they "just can't get over how darned cool it was that Jesus sacrificed himself." In his interview with Radosh, [Mark Allan Powell, a professor who teaches a class on contemporary Christian music at Trinity Lutheran Seminary,] pulled out an imitation of a 1982 New Wave pop song with the lyrics; "You'll have to excuse us/ We're in love with Jesus." This, he explained, was the equivalent of a black-velvet painting of Elvis. Only it's more offensive, because it's asking the listener to base his whole life around an insipid message and terrible quality music.
Bonus factoid: a Christian version of Punk'd, called Prank 3:16. [ 05.07.08 ]
» It's a new world: NYTimes.com is asking readers inside Myanmar to help report on the disaster by sending in photographs, video or written accounts of the storm and its aftermath. [ 05.06.08 ]
» Cooking for One: I'm Happy When It's Crunch Time
[S]o I'm on a mini salad crusade. I'm tired of cooks, especially restaurant chefs, failing to give salads their due. Too often, menus offer skimpy green salads designed as punishment for dieters, or bucket-size Caesars with so much fat that you might as well go ahead and order that burger. Even the priciest salads often fail to impress. I can hardly remember the last time I saw something on a menu besides a mozzarella-and-tomato, a beet-and-goat-cheese or mixed greens. Salads deserve more.
So what makes a good dinner salad?
Wow, there are some great ideas in this little article. (via mamr) [ 05.05.08 ]
» Reader's Advisor Under the Radar: Great Historical Mysteries You May Have Missed. [ 05.01.08 ]
» Women are valued for being nice. And when they aren't nice, they are seen as seen as personally flawed, and are punished for it.
That's my conclusion upon reading All Terrain's a discussion of a couple of studies on women in the workplace. First, there's anger. Women who get angry at work tend to be pegged as "angry people", while men are assumed to be responding to external forces. Then there's negotiating at work:
[The study] found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more--the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice."
There are so many ways to go with this - from work in general, to the current presidential campaign, to the gender disparity in salaries, and the dearth of female CEOs (and speakers at conferences).
None of this is to downplay the effects of actual discrimination: read Dalia Lithwick's enlightening discussion of the recent Supreme Court decision to bar women from filing for discriminatory pay if they complain more than 180 days after their first paycheck. [ 04.30.08 ]
» Hail to the Chef, Walter Scheib, White House Chef for the Clintons and Bushes.
The truth of the matter is that while presidents' families will occasionally provide the chef with a family recipe or one clipped from a magazine or borrowed from a Web site, for the most part, they have much more on their minds than what to put on the table every night.
And while we're on the subject, isn't the whole thing a tad sexist? I don't believe that anyone has asked Bill Clinton what he'll be looking for in a chef should his wife become president or what he'll serve at his first state dinner. [...] And, as far as I know, no one has asked him for a cookie recipe. [ 04.28.08 ]
» It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the human foot. But we're wrecking it with every step we take.
I'm afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.
Look, it's not your fault. It's your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don't just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood fee—are getting trounced in a war that's been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.
Don't miss the trompel'oeil foot paintings (including stilletos!) that accompany the article. (via mamr) [ 04.28.08 ]
» Nine years ago today, I wrote the first entry for Rebecca's Pocket. A lot has happened since then. As always, thanks for reading. [ 04.27.08 ]
» For Earth Day this year, I'm reviewing a few books I've received recently that have environmental themes. [ 04.25.08 ]
» Book Review: Hey Mr. Green: Sierra Magazine's Answer Guy Tackles Your Toughest Green Living Questions, by Bob Schildgen.
Hey Mr. Green: Sierra Magazine's Answer Guy Tackles Your Toughest Green Living Questions is a compilation of questions and answers from Bob Schildgen's popular column for Sierra Magazine. In it, he answers questions sent in by Sierra Club members about how to green their lifestyle.
Arranged in 5 sections - At Home, Food for Thought, Out and About (transportation), The Three Rs (reduce, reuses, recycle), and The Big Picture (the environment, politics, and religion) - the book reproduces the column's question and answer format, making it easy to dip into. Many of the questions are very thoughtful, and the answers are entertainingly written and seem to be very well researched. Followup questions are frequently included, providing a more nuanced discussion of the issues involved in each individual choice.
It's an easy, non-threatening read, probably most useful and inspirational for people with an interest in greening their lives but little motivation to research their questions themselves.
This book was provided for review from the publisher.
[ 04.25.08 ]
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EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL
Comments from Australia on the mostly parlous state of modern education by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former High School and University teacher. Read THIS before you spend money on education.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Exams for British High School diplomas 'now two grades easier than 20 years ago' Tell-all report cards to rate Australian schools Surprising sense from a Leftist Better Grades Through Bling-Bling When Will School Choice Come to the 'Land of the Free'? Note: Australia has for many years had a system where the Federal government pays a substantial share of the costs of private schools, thus greatly reducing the burden on parents who seek private education for their children. As a result, around 40% of high school students in Australia are privately educated Australian education unions oppose choice Like the little Stalinists they are Four-Year-Old Expelled for Acting Like a Child Swedish Left indoctrinating schoolkids British education spending spree has 'failed pupils' Homeschooling OK - even in California Reversed: Ruling that parents had no right to teach children British universities discriminating against private school students Under big pressure from the government -- in the name of "equality" The irrelevance of sociology California Court OKs Homeschooling Britain: Correct spelling under attack Just because students can't spell `their' and `truly' doesn't mean we should accept variations that break all our useful rules Florida school-voucher plan allowed on the ballot It's a disgrace that people have to fight to give voters a say. But the antidemocratic education groups are fighting tooth and nail to prevent that Surprise! Free college boosts enrolment Australia: EDUCATION, EDUCATION The Howard government made a big issue of declining educational standards but lost power before it could do much. Education problems remain, however, with the vested interests of Left-dominated government teachers entrenched against any reforms. Three recent articles below Second-ranking government universities fear private competition Call for standards in testing Year 12 of school Postmodern path to student failure The Harvard kindergarten A BOOK REVIEW of "Back to School, Turning Crimson" By Philip Delves Broughton. Review by ANDREW FERGUSON It's time for education reform
Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.
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Draconian Observations [View Page] Posts: [Analyst-Gate Expected], [CRS goes Africom], [Return of the Complex: Men or Matériel], [Nagl: Teach a Man to Fish], [Economist on Africom], [UN Civil-Military Handbook Out], [Looking Through the Modern State], [Prediction is Hard: Pentagon on Social Networks], [Three Phases of Afghanistan and Poppy Strategies], [The Modern State, Core & Gap], [Marine Corps Humanitarian Task Forces], [JFCOM: Shaping Ambition (Sort of) Implodes II], [JFCOM: Shaping Ambition (Sort of) Implodes], [The New UK Security Strategy: Thin, Somewhat Timid], [UK's New NSS and NSC: Lessons for Scandinavia], [Air Force Snubs Boeing, Shows Maturity], [Sarko in South Africa and Army Ads], [State Department Memo on Iraq], [New Army Field Manual - Implementing Iraq], [China Getting Involved in Darfur?], [Replacing the F16 - Norwegian Television], [AFRICOM again], [TicTacs #8: Como decimos ayer], [Tic Tacs #7], [Civilian SSTR Planning: NSC or Private Sector Lead]
Draconian Observations
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Analyst-Gate Expected
Is public diplomacy an information operation? It would seem some folks at Pentagon OSD thought so. The New York Times piece on how ex-military analysts were briefed by Pentagon in the period before the Iraq war should perhaps come as little surprise. But neither should the reaction. It isn't rocket science: Nobody likes to get fooled. And deliberate attempts at doing so will only undermine the credibility of the fooler - especially among those where there were the most to gain. Here from AFP:
"It's temporarily suspended so we can take at look at some of the concerns," said Whitman. Teleconferences and briefings for the military analysts have been halted pending the review, which is being conducted by the Pentagon's public affairs office, he said. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has not directly addressed the issue since the New York Times carried a lengthy report on the program April 20, except to say that the analysts should make clear they were speaking only for themselves.
The New York Times found that the Pentagon laid on special briefings and conference calls for the retired officers, many of whom then repeated the talking points as military experts on television news shows. The Times also found that many of the media analysts also worked as consultants or served on the boards of defense contracting companies, but that those ties often went undisclosed to the public.
Moreover, the whole thing should be a slap oin the wrist for the media whose interest in colorful commentators sometimes exceeds their willingness to research their affiliations. The Onion caught that part brillantly: "Actual Expert Too Boring for TV".Labels: information operations, onion, policy innovation, public diplomacy
Monday, April 28, 2008
CRS goes Africom
Africom has caught the eye of the ever-decent CRS guys:
Labels: africa, AFRICOM, crs, policy innovation
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Return of the Complex: Men or Matériel
One of the cold war's major and paradoxical features was always the role of President Eisenhower's military-industrial complex: A sort of cabale of production and R&D and procurement - all dedicated to the cause of freedom, its defense and progress. During the 1990s, and as a result of the post-Vietnam willful doctrinal blindness, this setup had resulted in a tech-driven approach to war. One of pure war, outside its political context. RMA stood and stands for industrial age warfare, just with tech instead of infantry; one where mass still counted but now as intelligent hardware, rather than men and artillery.
The AIA represents roughly 275 aerospace and defense companies, ranging from giant contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. to smaller companies that play supporting roles. Defense stocks are strong, and the Pentagon's budget is at historic highs.
But with a change of administration looming and the tab for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan mounting, concern is growing that a peak is at hand. Recognizing the growing fiscal pressure that the next administration will face, the AIA wants the government to find ways to hold down costs for operating and maintaining the armed forces and devote more resources to buying military hardware. The AIA is also concerned that growth in the Army and the Marine Corps will drive nonweapons costs such as health care and training even higher.
For fiscal 2009, the Bush administration requested $515 billion for the Defense Department, with billions more in supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. That would be approximately 3.7% of GDP. But tough decisions that would effectively shut down production of Lockheed's F-22 Raptor fighter or Boeing's C-17 were postponed for the White House's next occupant.
The AIA suggests that the Pentagon spend $120 billion to $150 billion a year on weapons procurement, up from the fiscal 2009 request of $104 billion, saying that the military's air superiority is in "serious danger" because of age and underinvestment. The group says the U.S. "cannot afford to pull back investment spending as it has done during past postwar defense drawdowns -- the nature of the security environment strongly mitigates against taking such a risk during what may be a generation-long war on terrorism."
The interesting and problematic thing about this proposed turning of the tide is that no major program was ever cut in order to pay for the small wars paradigm. The total cost - not of running the wars, but of transforming for them - is probably only a fraction of the cost of running the missile defense program alone.Labels: coin, industry, Long War, policy innovation, rma, sstr
Monday, April 14, 2008
Nagl: Teach a Man to Fish
In the new issue of Armed Forces Journal, John Nagl argues that we should focus more on host nation training units to meet the demands of the long war. Incidentally, that is one of the things that the new, no-longer-Shaping but CSE or Cooperative Security & Engagement JOC from JFCOM will be about (more on that debacle in this post). The operational elements of this in terms of major conflicts was in principle described back in the old SSTR JOC as a development on Internal Defense Operations. But this will be about both the peace time version (African peace ops capacity building, i.e. like ACOTA (CRS report, pdf file from FAS) and the war version (Afghanistan, where both Brits and Americans have integrated commands).
Labels: development, policy innovation, private sector, state-building, training
Friday, April 11, 2008
Economist on Africom
The Economist has picked up on Africom, but seems not to accept one basic premise of Africom. Namely, that American and African interests may coincide a long way when it comes to protecting globalization:
Labels: AFRICOM, globalization, policing
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
UN Civil-Military Handbook Out
There's a new UN CIV-MIL handbook out. The focus is kind of a field manual level - the full title is "The United Nations Civil-Military Coordination (UN-CMCoord) Officer Field Handbook". The manual was funded and initiative was taken by both OCHA and the EU's 'ministry' (Directorate General, DG) for humanitarian aid:
Labels: EU, S/CRS, state-building
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Analyst-Gate Expected
CRS goes Africom
Return of the Complex: Men or Matériel
Nagl: Teach a Man to Fish
Economist on Africom
UN Civil-Military Handbook Out
Looking Through the Modern State
Prediction is Hard: Pentagon on Social Networks
Three Phases of Afghanistan and Poppy Strategies
The Modern State, Core & Gap
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Library clips [View Page] Posts: [Some Rights Reserved], [Links for 2008-08-12 [del.icio.us]], [Roundup : Monittor, Phweet, TwitStamp, Roomatic, TwitHire], [Grow Your Wiki Consultancy Services], [Links for 2008-08-11 [del.icio.us]], [Roundup : Mloovi, MyTextFile, Rejaw, Kwippy, IM Feeds], [Links for 2008-08-08 [del.icio.us]], [Links for 2008-08-07 [del.icio.us]], [Visibility gets you and your community value noticed], [KM 2.0 culture], [Links for 2008-08-06 [del.icio.us]], [YackTack will track comments about your content that happens at other places], [Links for 2008-08-04 [del.icio.us]], [Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0], [Links for 2008-08-03 [del.icio.us]], [Roundup : JogTheWeb, BoostCast, YouFig, Posterous, Protonotes], [The context of blogs], [KM : round 2.0]
Library clips
sharing ideas thoughts and feedback
August 12, 2008
Roundup : Monittor, Phweet, TwitStamp, Roomatic, TwitHire
Filed under: tools, roundup
Monitter - a Twitter search engine that shows results from three searches in three columns, it has a widget for your blog sidebar, and also limits searches within a km radius.
Phweet - talk to Twitter friends over the browser or mobile phone without having to reveal phone numbers. Type in your friends username and a message, and a Phweet URL will be sent, it will call you and you await for your friend to join in, you can invite others as well…see more.
TwitStamp - Create a widget of a users latest tweet or create a widget from a particular tweet by entering the ID number in the tweet URL. For more ways to create tweet embed code, see more.
Roomatic - a Twitter chatroom, join a room and enter a tweet, it will automatically live in this room. If you don’t include the word of the room in your tweet it will add it for you with a hashtag.
TwitHire - a Twitter job board
BONUS
Comments (0)
Grow Your Wiki Consultancy Services
Filed under: wiki
Stewart Mader, Wiki Evangelist for Confluence, has decided to go his own way and formally do what he does best, and be a full-time wiki consultant.
There are lots of enterprise 2.0 type consultancies, but a non-vendor consulting specifically about wikis must be a first.
Stewart’s blog is an education hub for enterprise wiki adoption.
If you want a quick fix check out Stewart’s series 21 days of wiki adoption, and for the more indepth know-how check out his book WikiPatterns, that also has a accompanying wiki website.
Congratulations to Stewart for being a pioneer in his field, and best wishes for spreading the word.
Comments (1)
August 11, 2008
Roundup : Mloovi, MyTextFile, Rejaw, Kwippy, IM Feeds
Filed under: tools, roundup
Mloovi - Translate any RSS feed…I’ve been waiting for something like this since NativeText.
MyTextFile - a no frills online text editor made for Google. I may find this handy, as I once used the text editor feature on Blummy quite a lot. But Ido find myself using Google Sites for this sort of thing.
Rejaw - more microblogging…1000 character posts, with real-time updates…threaded replies
Kwippy - yet more microblogging
IM Feeds - get RSS alerts via IM like GTalk, also see Anothr, Rasasa, ZapTxt, Feed Crier, and the rest.
Comments (0)
August 8, 2008
Visibility gets you and your community value noticed
Filed under: community
Someone mentioned today that they hope our organisation doesn’t measure value based on just online communities. That there is so much community activity done on the phone and in meetings that brings value to the business that may not be known about. The concern is that people that are visible are going to get recognition over others that are more offline workers, who may even contribute more value. Consequently communities should be called portals.
First off, you may be the most talented person in a room who works behind the scenes and creates great value, but if you don’t speak up in a room how will anyone ever know. Online communities put you on the map, now you can be seen. Sometimes people don’t even know offline communities exist. If you do have an online community, and you have active members behind the scenes, it’s up to the Facilitator to feature this value by publishing a blog post, etc…or encouraging the member to do some featured posts.
I don’t think the CEO is going to search to see if there is value out there, I think it’s up to you to make yourself known and be seen.
The idea for online communities is to extend this and give an online presence, an enabler to enhance what you are already doing in email, on the phone and in person. A shop front, a place to hang out where you can keep all your documents, and have conversations. Now that you are on the map and visible, others can benefit from your talent and this means your value is now extended to more people, which means your value contributions are greater. You also get the benefit of visitors dropping by, offering suggestions and evolving your content, people you didn’t know beforehand could become the new guru in your team.
I say to people that CoPs are like our central document repository, but here we get a homepage rather than a folder, we get a document repository, and the big thing is all those conversations we have in email can actually be done in the community blogs and forums. My sell is that it’s a document repository with conversations. Everything happens in the one place, nothing is distributed or falls off the radar like in email silos.
I see portals a step up from a gateway page of links, having a page of widgets is more like a portal because you can access stuff from other sites from the one place. Communities are not just a webpage that a bunch of people visit. Communities are a group of people who share an interest and get things done together, and having an online version of these physical interactions can help immensly…and also for exposure of your community.
Just because there are offline communities that are overlooked, and are not getting the kudos like online communities (who may even contribute to a lesser value at large), it doesn’t mean they should be called portals rather than communities. Offline or online, visible or invisible, a community is a bunch of people coming together adding value to their goals.
Comments (0)
August 7, 2008
KM 2.0 culture
Filed under: km
Just listened to a good quality discussion on The Scoop podcast on social productivity in the workplace (enterprise 2.0 and all that).
Stephen Collins is right on the pulse, he talks about the tribal village feel that online networks have enabled to surface in getting stuff done and learning.
Especially the horizontal value (saving time and money) we get from networking rather than replying on our vertical network to source information
Another of the participants added that social productivity enhances the level of engagement, and relationship which is how the netgen work.
There’s a lot of talk about creating a knowledge sharing culture…here’s my take.
I’m not sure on this, I think we have to create conditions so that the culture emerges…the knowledge workers have to create the culture.
Rather than change culture, we hope that a slowly changing culture will emerge by creating the conditions below:
- informal social tools with low barrier to entry
Culture is not a pre-requisite:
- start off with replacing email with blogs and wikis for in the flow (more directed work)…this is stuff people are already doing in email anyway
As we facilitate this type of environment where people can connect, trust others, and have basic tools to converse, then they will begin to share, in fact this will increase when they start depending on each other…at this stage “social productivity” will become the norm.
Comments (0)
August 6, 2008
YackTack will track comments about your content that happens at other places
Filed under: blogs, conversation
Just tested out YackTrack and find it a very useful tool. For a publisher (blogger) it seems to do for comments, what Technorati does for blog posts.
That is, Technorati can track blog posts that link to your blog posts, this way you know who is talking about you.
Comments to blog posts are also becoming of a distributed nature.
eg. If someone bookmarks your blog post at StumbleUpon or Digg and there is a few comments how would you know.
YackTack will track comments about your content that happens at other places.
I’ve even embedded the YackTrack link in the footer of my blog post template. You can also get this as a bookmarklet for blogs that don’t have this footer link, and it’s more convenient than entering a URL on their homepage.
They also have another feature called “Chatter” which has the beginnings of a comment search engine.
Question
On your results page it displays an RSS feed. This is like a comments feed for comments that don’t live at your blog.
What I would like to do is subscribe to just one RSS feed for my blog so I can be notified of comments that happen elsewhere about any post on my blog.
This is similar to Technorati…I don’t have to subscribe to an RSS feed for each of my posts, I only subscribe to one feed that takes care of all my posts.
Next I’m looking for a similar thing for the bookmarkosphere.
Comments (3)
August 5, 2008
Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0
Filed under: km, learning
Some quick snippets on how we more effectively adapt to change within an informal, fragmented and networked environment such as enterprise 2.0.
The idea here is on the learning organisation where people are connected in networks, and publish and converse their know-how. This is perpetual social learning embedded into daily work, which enables more situational awareness.
Dave Snowden on Everything is Fragmented:
“The more you structure material, the more you summarize (either as an editor or using technology), the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change. For years now I have asked this question at conferences around the world: Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories?”
“…we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness”
“The free flow of the blogosphere, ad hoc collaboration, Facebook and many other tools work because they conform with the patterns of expectation that arise from our evolutionary uncertainty. Have you ever heard anyone ask Wikipedia or the blogosphere, “How do we create a knowledge sharing culture?” No, but when I visit the knowledge management practitioners in organizations around the world, it is the dominant question. It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.”
Jay Cross on What’s so different about learning today?
“Until recently, the secret of success was to learn what had worked in the past and do that. Education and training faced backward. People learned the conventions and rules of thumb that worked for their ancestors. When things were slow to change, this was an excellent strategy…”
“…but things are changing so rapidly today that the only certainty is that what’s ahead won’t resemble the past. The rear view mirror no longer reflects the future. Workers need to be able to assess new situations, learn in real time, and improvise solutions. That’s an entirely new learning agenda, for it means putting enough trust in workers to give them the wheel”
Comments (0)
August 4, 2008
Roundup : JogTheWeb, BoostCast, YouFig, Posterous, Protonotes
Filed under: tools, roundup
JogTheWeb - webpage slideshow, also see webslides and TrailFire.
BoostCast - create your own video sharing site, also see Digital Reality.
YouFig - a whitelabel community…there are so many of these sites now, Ning still does it for me.
Posterous - microblogging like Tumblr, mambler and Soup.io
Protonotes - annotate a website with stickynotes, as if there aren’t enough of these, but it does look nifty and collaborative
Comments (0)
August 2, 2008
The context of blogs
Filed under: blogs, km, learning
Samuel Driessen over at the infoarch blog has picked up on a key point in my post Conversations, Connections and Context
In it I said:
“This is great if the context of the blog post suits the need of your situation, but what if it doesn’t?
Is the arguement that blogs are not trying to be what they can’t be vs codified documents that have an intention they cannot meet (they are not achieving what they are intending to achieve)?
So, nothing can have a constant context, blog post or not.”
I suppose my main point is that blogs, as raw and informal as they are, are not a panacea for context, but they are a hell of a lot better than codified documents.
You may have trouble understanding the context of a blog post, and have not yet developed a relationship with the blog or author (eg. you don’t subscribe or regularly read the blog, you don’t leave comments, etc…), in fact it could be the first time you have seen this blog.
Some things you can do in the immediacy.
LEAVE A COMMENT
READ THE ARCHIVES, ESPECIALLY POSTS ON THE SAME AND SIMILAR TOPICS
CHECK OUT THE BLOGGERS NETWORK
CHECK OUT THE BLOGGERS LIFESTREAM
This illustrates the power of the blog format in enabling you to build some sort of higher abstraction with the author, ie. get to know the author, so you come to understand their intended messages and contexts.
participation + blogs = learning
Samuel has a really great point:
“I can send back an email in a couple of seconds to someone with whom I share a certain context. I can leave out all the details when I reply to him/her. But when I want to answer him/her via my blog I also have to think about all the other people that don’t share that context. Because they don’t, they’ll be frustrated when they read my post. Writing such a post (instead of an email) would take more of my time. Or am I missing something?”
He left a comment on my post on the same point:
“Can you just move an email conversation to a blog without providing (more) context (to other readers)?”
This is very true, but you have to weigh up the pros and cons of how your conversation is documented.
Sure, emails cut to the chase, but no-one else is going to know that conversation existed.
As I mentioned at least with blogs, there is opportunity to seek clarification for context, but you have to work at it. And bloggers, most of the time, link back to their past posts for background on their present post.
Just like your email conversations, in your blog circle you can post without establishing background
The beauty is that you form a blog network around yourself, you participate and discover, and when you are in this zone, you are part of the vernacular.
What started as an issue of not understanding the context of a blog post, enables you the opportunity to go on a discovery of understanding.
When you come out the other end not only do you now have the shared context to undertanding this blog post, but you have discovered:
The destination is nature’s way of giving you a good excuse to go on a journey.
Comments (1)
August 1, 2008
KM : round 2.0
Filed under: km, learning
Of late I’ve been posting about the concept of knowledge management in relation to social computing and networks, mostly focusing on how social computing networks are more self-organised keeping context intact, where knowledge flows rather than being managed. But I do agree that there is a need for a coordinator to facililtate, set boundaries, curate, garden, etc…
A lot of the talk is focused on whether the process of codification is managing knowledge anyway, it’s non-effectiveness due to a lack of high abstraction and shared context…and my investigation leading to a realisation that “explicit knowledge” is just information.
I do agree that blogs, like offline conversations with people you know, have more of a successful chance in transferring know-how, as there is familiarity and probing with the source, an “as it happens rawness”, with no other intention except expression, compared to codification that is written with an end result in mind. Rather than codification, the coordinator takes a curating approach to compile these similar fragments. You could call this codification or perhaps a review, but at least it’s based on the raw workings out, which can be referred to for more information.
Then there is the other end of the spectrum of trying to find usable information at a time of need, and ultimately whether this behaviour is too narrow for organisations to adapt, respond and learn…compared to a social ecosystem that is more tuned in, the “come to me web” effect (links, tags, subscribing)…where we have more capabilities and situational awareness to act.
Let’s get over the addiction or safety to the supply-side of “best practices”, and become a network of radars for innovation. I think there is a place for best practices, but not too much where you don’t allow the processes or conditions for the emergence of innovation.
For more, read my previous posts to catch up on how social computing networks better achieve the aims of knowledge management without even trying to do it, this being the first stage that is a part of a bigger change of how we work and are managed, where managers may be more effective as facilitators and coaches and knowledgeworkers more autonomous in getting work done.
Gee, that was a bigger introduction that I intended, but readers of this blog will be familiar with my brain splurges.
In this post I’m sharing the thoughts of others that are also riding this wave of a more effective and enjoyable way to work, first up is Lee Bryant from the Headshift blog:
“Some have millions of documents in primary EDMS storage, but they have literally no idea which ones are important. Thanks to centralised storage and centralised access, nobody can find what they need and eveybody fears they are missing something important. But contrary to the KM orthodoxy, you cannot actually codify knowledge - it downgrades to information when stored in databases, and crumbles to dust.”
“The problem with existing enterprise software is that there is simply not enough diversity of inputs to stimulate intuitive decision making, which is why the most adept individuals in organisations rely on more basic, offline techniques to know what is going on.”
“The information overload people face within organisations today is the worst kind: the wrong sort of information, with no individual control over inputs.”
“Instead of trying to gather all data and then analyse it in real-time, we need to help people build a better radar, go with the flow and trust in their own ability to sense what matters and make decisions. We need more peripheral and contextual information and less sequential memo and email processing. We need to create multiple paths to things we need to improve findability, as Peter Morville says, rather than focus just on storage and retrieval. Classification within organisations is calcification - it kills context. Social navigation and filtering is cheaper and more effective.
Next is Dan Rasmus:
“The first time around, knowledge management was hardly a smashing success. When organizations several years ago tried to take advantage of the experience and insights of their workers, they captured information in large, structured data systems for access and retrieval. Unfortunately, those systems were often cumbersome and difficult to use, leading to low levels of participation and abandoned knowledge bases. Workers also suspected their own positions might be at risk after they shared their personal insights and knowledge.”
“Change happens too fast for people and organizations to rely exclusively on structured processes and the rigid IT solutions that support them.”
“…understanding about the role of knowledge in empowering people. Rigid, structured systems for data capture can easily be supplemented with more user-friendly applications that provide better integration into day-to-day work.”
“It is virtually impossible to design a process that anticipates every potential outcome. A DKE embraces people as part of structured processes and enables them to access the resources they need in a more flexible and responsive way. When people are empowered as a part of process-driven work, organizations can achieve the economy of structure, combined with the responsiveness and adaptability that only people can provide.”
And Bill Ives comment in this post:
“…most of the successful KM applications were workflow aligned and when KM was a separate document repository outside of business processes, it was much less successful. Then it became managing knowledge rather than supporting work”
Going back to my earlier post about knowledge and information, the insightful Paula Thornton, left a comment and I would like to share it here, she alludes to the impossible act of managing knowledge and instead says the aim is to “facilitate thinking to support ‘doing’”…this is inline with the concept of a learning organisation.
Then she gets into the epistemology, saying, “it isn’t information until it ‘informs’”.
And then this great anecdote on the need for personal context between you and the information for it to actually inform you:
“You’re in the middle of the Mojave desert. You come upon a gas station, but it’s abandoned. Lying on the counter is a map. Most would consider the map information: data in context. But there’s another criteria. It isn’t information until it’s in individually-relevant context (it has to be both important and understandable to me). In the middle of the desert, there is no context. The map is useless noise.”
Excerpts of my reply to Paula:
“I know where you are going Paula, KM is integrated into how you work. In the future there may not be KM, as it’s just how we work. KM is simply common sense, a way of being. Why would you work any other way.
“This stuff that organically emerges or manifests tells them something about themselves, they are learning from their interactions by participating. They can take back these rich insights and apply this new thinking in their doing (as you put it).”
“Social tools are humanistic as they are about conversation and connection, that’s how we get work done in the offine world.”
“I can see we need information managers, but I’m not sure about
“But we do need someone to make sure that all these knowledge sharing activities and way of being are occuring, this person will be managing knowledge-related activities, not knowledge itself.”
The I went over and found out that Paula, like I, is talking about this stuff from her own soapbox:
“The fundamental potential of 2.0 is emergent”
“The goal is not to manage knowledge, but to facilitate action or enhance thinking”
“Even more fundamental to the deeper philosophy here is that knowledge is relevant…it can only reasonably be applied to specific conditions. Few knowledge management technologies embrace the reailty and ensure that the relevant conditions are captured and likewise communicated.”
Paula alludes that knowledge needs to be free, to flow, bounce around, and evolve (and perhaps facilitated), rather than managed and shelved from the top-down.
Lyndar has a quote in the comments:
“Provided with the right tools and a culture that values openness, knowledge gets transferred effectively without management.”
As does Lou Paglia:
“I think in the 2.0 framework, the word “management” is almost synonymous with “enablement” or “facilitation”. We’ve shifted (or at least I think we have) from it meaning “full control”.”
In Dave Snowden’s blog post response he says:
“…I think it fairly self evident that a large number of business goals require knowledge to be managed in some form or other”
What I think Dave may be refering to is curating or steering the self-organisation, like a plumber directs water, like a film director directs a film.
I really want an example of this…
Perhaps an example could be the facilitator steering self-organised conversations into a direction that meet business goals. The facilitator can get involved or manipulate the flow of conversation by creating a blog post/comment, forum topic/reply that brings back the richness of the brainstorming and applies it to a task. Isn’t this the idea of Communities of Practice.
So perhaps we are moving on from knowledge management practices, to manipulating complex environments…not sure what you call this person other than a leader. I think leaders need to know how to deal with and steer complex environments, KM is not a separate thing, it should be embedded in how leaders work.
I’d like to finish on that note, but I just came across a perfectly relevant piece by Jon Husband:
“Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.”
““how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question. It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used. This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work”
“Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing. It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction“
This is inline with Joe Firestone’s thoughts:
“ …the idea that we must make knowledge workers unusually altruistic to get them to share and transfer knowledge ignores the many examples of social systems and organizations in which collaboration is based on normal motivations including self-interest.”
Back to Jon Husband:
“Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets”
“We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects. The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we can coherently manage).”
“An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.”
These last two quotes echo what we covered earlier, the role of the coordinator to steer by constraints…actually isn’t this what Jack Vinson always talks about…hmm…I’ll have to go back to his posts now that I’m ready for them.
The comments from Jon Husbands post…this is where the richness is, in these comments, where everyone is riffing off each other:
Jon Husband - “I do think we need a new word for what is often understood as “managing”, or a different (wider, more adaptive and more oriented towards sensemaking and taking practical action after the sense is clear) understanding of that word.”
Stephen Collins - “KM can exist without the technology. The technology offers a platform for pervasiveness and ease of implementation. But without management drive, cultural capability (localised or across the organisation) and openness, you’re doomed - tech or no tech.”
This makes sense to me, offline, there’s so much richness and know-how in conversations and interactions, and techniques like world cafe, story listening, etc. are an example. But you have to convene for the latter, what about the offline interactions that are happening as you do your work, this is why online networks are an important outlet to express you discoveries, questions, concerns, etc…
Paula Thornton - “I am still at a loss as to what is uniquely KM and to what purpose it serves that is not already served by established disciplines.”
Stephen Collins - “…anything 2.0 is not about the technology. Technology is and always has been an enabler.”
“…organisations feel they need a KM practice because they don’t actually do the things that embed KM practices into corporate DNA.”
“KM shouldn’t need to be “done” as a particular thing belonging to a particular part of the organisation. It should just be. Be a part of what you do every day. Be a part of how your organisation operates.”
“KM only needs a revolution where KM is implemented as a widget. As a “thing” to be done. As a process. Once you embed stuff in corporate DNA and people’s attitudes that are just about “doing stuff”, revolution becomes unnecessary.
Organisations that are truly successful with KM implementations (and E2.0, Web 2.0, etc., etc.) aren’t about having “a KM process”. They’re about changing the culture, the “way we do things around here”.”
Olivier Amprimo’s (Headshift) comment is a blog post on its own:
“KM is not about tools, it is about how we understand what is important in value creation.”
““What you can’t measure, you can’t manage”. Because knowledge is implicit, we have to explicit it to manage it. We need to rematerialize. KM did a good job by documenting and referencing knowledge. We have created some massive knowledge bases.”
For me once it’s explicit it’s information, but I will agree it’s an intimate know-how driven type of information. This difference here is in the quality of information, it’s personal and not subscribing to a structured spec, it’s expressed as it happens.
this mean interactions and conversations, and what is exactly managing mean in this scenario?
“That exactly where the shift is : from documentation to conversation.”
“With this shift, there is another shift happening. We change both our conception of knowledge management and knowledge itself. We now concentrate on knowledge sharing and we understand knowledge differently.”
I like this analysis below:
“When it comes to defining knowledge, one can distinguishes three dialectics: Explicit vs Tacit, Ontological vs Contextual and Private vs Public. The first one is based on the physical status of knowledge, the second one on its epistemological status and the third one on its economical status.”
“In the KM era ‘Explicit – Ontological – Private’ understanding prevails. That is the reason why there are many processes (explicitation), data (ontology) and egoist ‘knowledge is Power’ behaviors. This later is the reason why KM fails.
He refers here to the work in progress and thinking out loud culture:
“We try to work on present knowledge, not past knowledge. We try to materialize conversations, knowledge on the go. ECM focuses on the result: a document. Enterprise 2.0 tools focus on the journey between the idea generation and idea formalization. In between what you have there is individual and collective work : reflexion and conversation. Enterprise 2.0 tools capture, at the very same time they enable, conversations. And in a much more efficient way than emails, distributed by nature, as centralized in one place (a blog, a wiki). You now have knowledge management on the go”.
Concurring with the thoughts of many others:
“While KM was regarded as a specific job, with a specific team who has specific expertise, it is now dispersed throughout the organization as embedded in operational processes. There is no KM anymore because it is just everywhere.”
“But what happens now with knowledge sharing is not often the responsibility of the KM team.”
“They don’t have to deal with data and documents, they have to deal with people. Only now Drucker’s “Managing knowledge is managing people” is operationally meaningful to KM people.”
Let’s end with a quote on Ray Sims’s blog on the convergence of KM and learning…somewhere complexity needs to fit in here:
“…the traditional distinctions as Knowledge Management is “seen as providing information to support performance of an indeterminate task at the moment of need,” whereas Learning is “seen as creating a more enduring change in the learner to enable him/her to perform better across a specified range of future tasks.””
One more:
“Learning is a peer to knowledge. To learn is to come to know. To know is to have learned”
Off to watch some clips on Informal Learning.
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The Inverse Square Blog [View Page] Posts: [More on McCain’s innumeracy…energy policy edition], [Guest Post: Michelle Sipics on the limits to private sector R and D], [Pre-holiday housekeeping], [Why Obama is right and McCain wrong on Energy: MIT edition], [Further to Ambinder’s Folly.], [Carbon TV: Steve Colbert meets Eric Roston], [Program Notes/Book Notes: William Gibson/The Way We Live Now edition], [Wierdest verbal image of the day…], [If you thought popular writing about science has problems…], [Why science writing is hard — Andrew Sullivan (and surrogates) illustrate.]
The Inverse Square Blog
science and the public square — by thomas levenson
More on McCain’s innumeracy…energy policy edition
Posted August 10, 2008 by Tom Outsourced almost entirely to Rob Perks, posting at the NRDC’s Switchboard blog. (h/t Natasha Chert’s very useful blog round up over at MyDD.com
Perks’ basic point is the simple, brutal arithmetic of the gap between US oil consumption and US domestic supply. We consume 24 percent of the world’s total, he tells us, and produce 2 percent. PerkD writes:
Do the math: drilling is not a credible answer to the price pinch we’re all feeling. Despite what President Bush claims, opening up our remaining offshore protected areas is a crude gimmick – pure and simple.
Of course, it’s not really Bush we have to concern ourselves anymore. John McCain is the man who matters now when it comes to the oil-first approach to energy. He still claims, on his website, that drilling offshore is a meaningful response to US dependence on foreign oil, our balance of trade deficit — and by implication our vulnerability to price spikes like the one we’ve experienced this year. Go read the statement on McCain’s issues page. It is a model of incoherence, rhetorically and politically.
But most of all, what McCain says he wants he can’t have — and it doesn’t take the proprietary models of the energy gurus to figure out why. Perks is in fact more right than he writes above. It isn’t just that we cannot drill our way into a position to move global oil prices significantly. It’s that even if drilling could produce results tomorrow — instead of the seven to ten year horizon actual oil people tell us it will take to see significant flows from new fields — US oil, what’s left of it, is relatively high-cost. The reason that there are a bunch of leases already let that remain undrilled is because the cost of oil production in places like Alaska’s North Slope and the outer continental shelf is high.
What that means, of course, is that lower cost producers — say Saudi Arabia — can manipulate production to maximize their revenue and margins, and we still won’t be able to do anything about it. Put it another way: absent an Iraq-sized pool of oil waiting somewhere nearby to be discovered, extractable at something a lot less than it takes to grab extreme oil, and neither US dependence on foreign supplies nor our vulnerability to world market supply-and-demand pricing is going to change.
McCain may or may not be able to count well enough to grasp this. He certainly seems to hope the rest of us can’t.
Comments: 1 Comment
Guest Post: Michelle Sipics on the limits to private sector R and D
Posted August 10, 2008 by Tom Guest blogger and my former student Michelle Sipics is back with another post centered on her major area of interest — mental health, and especially the intersection of mental health inquiry and treatment and the care and well-being of the elderly.
It’s a crucial topic, IMHO, and it is one that does not get the attention it needs, as part of the larger neglect, at least in writing for the public, of the experience of aging in the United States (and presumably elsewhere, though my knowledge of science/medical journalism stops at the water, and certainly at the English language barrier).
So — see what Michelle has to say, and think about the question she leaves us with.
__________
<!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
Back in June, my good host posted about the media coverage of the psychological tolls of
A fellow commenter–Tom Tyler, by name–suggested that waiting for politicians to fix or
Those who have read my first guest post on this blog may recall that I have a particular
I think this is a potentially great example of what Tom Tyler discussed in his
Personally, I don’t. I see this as an example of the private sector seeing a market
Now, the big question for me: how does this concept–private-sector development that can
One obvious issue that comes to mind is drug development. Pharmaceutical companies could
A similar possibility is an anti-depressant targeted specifically for the elderly. Why
So with all of these problems, is it really to the benefit of pharmaceutical companies
Personally, I do think private R&D can still have a huge impact in geriatric mental
My main reason for writing this post was to find out what others think. Can private R&D
Comments: 2 Comments
Pre-holiday housekeeping
Posted August 1, 2008 by Tom As previously announced, I’m outta here for a few weeks. (You know the three best parts of an academic job: June, July, and August. Not that I’m happy about it or anything.)
I will be posting very occasionally, and my guest blogger, Michelle Sipics, will have at least one thing, and I hope more to say as the month unwinds.
But I’m going out into the world with the least possible computer I could find — one of these lovely little linux baby laptops that may be jumping the shark already, if mention in the NY Times is the death knell I think it may be for geek cool. (I’m pleased to say that I ordered mine the day before the Times piece ran. Out of such small triumphs is shaky self-esteem preserved).
However, as a life-long inverse-power user, this is my first brush with anything remotely Linux-oid. I read but I did not believe this, thus confirming my condemnation to tech purgatory.
Now everyone tells me I have nothing to fear. Almost everyone:
So — if I go silent from points foreign…you’ll know the reason why.
Update: Up from the comment thread: this gets the inverse square seal of approval.
Comments: 4 Comments
Why Obama is right and McCain wrong on Energy: MIT edition
Posted August 1, 2008 by Tom Continuing the energy theme just a little longer….
This may be a bit of home-institution boosting, and I haven’t done any due diligence on this press release, but still, this is promising news out of Daniel Nocera’s lab at MIT. It is also a perfect example why Obama’s emphasis on alternatives to oil and coal is the better choice of governing philosophies for US energy policy, and McCain’s oil now, oil forever approach is not.
Nocera and his post doc, Matthew Kanan have taken a long look the process of photosynthesis that enables plants to extract usable energy from sunlight. They’ve come up with a two-step process that can split ordinary, neutral pH water into hydrogen and oxygen to supply the feedstocks for fuel cells that could supply electricity to power cars, homes or whatever. The key to the idea is the use of solar-generated electricity to power the electrolysis taking place in the Nocera lab’s device. More detail in the press release, and Nocera’s general description of this line of research here
There is, as always, the caveat: this is a research finding, not an industrial process. It will take time and significant engineering creativity to turn this advance into a major source of energy and a partial replacement for carbon-based fuels — if it ever gets there.
But this is the necessary initial step. You don’t get alternative energy unless you do the research. You can’t do the research if you can’t get funding. It is difficult — though to be sure, as this finding shows, not impossible — to pay for this work when you have a disinterested or actively hostile, petroleum-addicted President and administration. A President Obama would do so — candidate Obama has already made that very clear as recently as yesterday, whatever the national press thought of the important news of the day. A President McCain, delivering on candidate McCain’s promise to develop all available domestic sources of oil….not so much.
Here’s the MIT press release making the point for me:
The success of the Nocera lab shows the impact of a mixture of funding sources - governments, philanthropy, and industry. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.
You don’t get what you don’t pay for.
And as a lagniappe, this bit of barely informed editorializing: the reason McCain’s approach is wrongheaded is not just that there it encourages the use of polluting sources of energy instead of pursuing clean or cleaner sources; it’s not that there is some mystical reward to using a renewable source as opposed to a notionally available, notionally cheap(ish) nonrenewable source — this isn’t a tree - hugger argument. No, it’s wrong because it increases the liklihood that the transition we will have to make someday to a non-oil based economy will come harder, more expensively, and more destructively than it needs to, or would under a more science - friendly approach. The real energy question is when and how much do you want to pay the piper.
That is: McCain hasn’t noticed, though he has surely been told, that oil is something of a mug’s game, coming under pressure from both supply and demand sides. Between peak oil and the rise of major developing nations — economies that remained tied to oil are buying into not just an increasingly high price for their energy, but also a significant, and I would bet, on nothing more than a hunch, an increasing risk of oil shocks, major disruptions in supply and/or price over the next decades.
That, as much as the absolute cost of energy as a share of any economic activity, is what ought to scare people, (if my hunch is correct). Major uncertainty is a very expensive quality; when the probability collapses into a particular damaging event, the impact on real people’s real lives is profound. Why on earth should we place ourselves more in the path of such an oncoming train than we have to.
And one last note — as I’ve given Marc Ambinder some eminently deserved grief (hey–if he can assert his judgment as fact, so can I) for his blithering yesterday about why he isn’t talking about energy, he has a solid post about Obama’s economic message today that contains a bit of content reporting and a bit of process analysis. Nothing fancy, but just an example of a beat reporter writing a clear and useful little story from within his defined territory. Credit where credit is due.
Comments: Be the first to comment
Further to Ambinder’s Folly.
Posted August 1, 2008 by Tom Thanks to Brad Delong for taking my pique with Marc Ambinder and running with it. (In my ongoing attempt to keep some strand of overt science running through this blog while the election season has me obsessed I e-mailed the web’s reality check with my rage at Marc’s seeming pride at being as trivial as he wants to be, and said, in effect “you do it.” To my great pleasure, Brad did.
Brad did say that he thought that writing about energy and its discontents did fit the brief for this blog, so, with permission from that august source…here’s how Marc finished off his sterling performance of yesterday:
While we’ve been focusing on the race card, the Republican echo chamber has been sounding full tilt about Barack Obama’s Jimmy Carter-esque turn as advice columnist to Americans about energy. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity spent part of their broadcast mocking Obama for urging Americans to inflate their tires to help conserve gasoline.
Obama had a point, and the auto industry recommends the same thing as do governors Schwarzenegger and Crist, but nevermind; the ridicule fix is in. An effective GOP shot.
I suppose the author of a “reported blog on politics” gets to judge whether a campaign tactic is effective. But look how he characterized Obama’s comment. Jimmy Carter-esque advice. And a quick trip to Youtube certainly shows that the echo chamber was indeed in full cry.
Now look at what Ambinder didn’t tell us. He didn’t tell us that the point Obama was making was not simply that you could save some gas with properly inflated tires — but that McCain’s energy “plan” (sic) is so feeble that its oil drilling proposals would have no effect at all for a decade, while the risible gas tax holiday would save the individual driver as much as…wait for it…properly inflating your tires.
So how come McCain’s snark, which has the merit of, in essence, encouraging people to waste gas and cash, gets the approving nod, and Obama’s on point policy jab–also couched as a snark, gets no mention. Because the GOP echo chamber told Ambinder what to cover.
If you do want to see the substance of Obama’s response to the McCain energy fantasy — really, it’s not a plan, it’s a couple of really bad ideas that we can only hope will be no worse than ineffective — read on, from the prepared remarks for yesterday’s economic security rally.
I understand the politics. In a country desperate for action, ideas like a gas tax holiday or expanded oil drilling in the waters off our coasts are popular. And I’ll say this – if there were real evidence that these steps would actually provide real, immediate relief at the pump and advance the long-term goal of energy independence, of course I’d be open to them. But so far there isn’t.
As good as they sound, the history of gas tax holidays is that the prices go up to fill in the gap, and the big winners end up being the retailers and oil companies – not the American people. That’s what happened when we had a gas tax holiday in Illinois that I supported, and that’s why we ended up repealing it. It didn’t work. And it would also drain the federal highway fund of billions of dollars and cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs.
When it comes to offshore drilling, even Senator McCain has acknowledged that it won’t provide short-term relief. In fact, if we started drilling today, we wouldn’t see a drop of oil for seven years, and even then it would have little if any impact on prices.
Meanwhile, the oil companies currently have the rights to drill on 68 million acres of land and offshore areas that they haven’t touched. I believe that before we give the oil companies any more land, it’s time we tell them to start drilling on the land they already have or turn it over to someone who will, because we need that oil. We should also invest in the technology that can help us recover more oil from existing fields. And we should also look to our substantial natural gas reserves to tap a source of energy that’s already powering buses and cars here and around the world.
In the long-term, however, we have to remember that these domestic resources are finite. Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling, America still has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves. Senator McCain may believe otherwise, but that is not a real solution to our energy crisis.
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Carbon TV: Steve Colbert meets Eric Roston
Posted July 30, 2008 by Tom In case you missed it last night — you can see it here.
Colbert is the energizer bunny. Eric did a good job — but Stephen definitely made him work.
Closing line (Colbert’s) “This book is made of carbon.”
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Program Notes/Book Notes: William Gibson/The Way We Live Now edition
Posted July 30, 2008 by Tom
Stimulated by Matthew Yglesias’s shoe fetish revelation, let me recommend (after you check the link) that you (a) listen to Karrie Jacobs elegant commentary on public radio’s Marketplace program, and then (b) go read the book she praises, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.
I’ve read, if not everything Gibson has written, then a pretty fair subset. (Long ago I wrote up some of my thoughts about his work in an essay for the long gone and much missed New York Academy of Science magazine, The Sciences. Ah well; all text is grass.) I think Pattern Recognition is his best, both intellectually rich and a fine exploration of character and emotion. His sense of technology as a solvent of human expression and feeling is so sharp.
I’m there with the comparison Matt makes in his post; I made the same point using different measures here. But Gibson is a better guide than either of us ever will be to the labyrinth of brands and signals in which we live now.
Image: Vincent van Gogh, “A Pair of Shoes,” 1886. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Comments: 1 Comment
Wierdest verbal image of the day…
Posted July 29, 2008 by Tom Comes from the increasingly self-paroding Carly Fiorina.
Defending the self-admitted economic illiterate, John McCain, as the better steward of American wealth and well being than his opponent, she told reporters that McCain has spoken with various econ gurus “to make sure that he continues to keep his pulse on the American economy.”
Googling shows that the italicized phrase has turned up quite a bit lately.
But think about it. You can take a pulse, or keep your finger on a pulse. But putting your own pulse on something? What’s up with that? I have to say, at breakfast this morning I really did not need the image of McCain’s beating heart lub-dubbing and splooshing all over every laundromat, mall, cubicle farm, cattle lot and the rest of the places and ways Americans make their living.
This is undoubtedly much less important than the real argument going on, in which the McCain team’s approach seems to be to ignore the data of the last sixteen years about the impact of tax increases and decreases on growth and budgetary discipline.
The short form: despite the claims of Fiorina and Martin Feldstein, (one of those whom Brad DeLong might have in mind when he talks about economists associated with the Bush adminstration now having to pay the reputation price,) tax increases do not in themselves destroy prospects for growth — the evidence of the Clinton years destroys that shibboleth. As for McCain’s alledged commitment to fiscal discipline, there’s been a bit of news this week to remind us that tax cuts do not as a matter of principle pay for themselves.
Even shorter form: Just as Delong notes that economists backing Bush’s deficit cutting claims in 2003-4 were lying; these and other McCain affiliated advisors are not telling the truth now. Caveat emptor.
Image: Jan en Caspar Luyken, Illustration of a Surgeon, c. 1690. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Comments: 2 Comments
If you thought popular writing about science has problems…
Posted July 29, 2008 by Tom Try economics — and you could do worse for a wince and chuckle than read this helpfully edited version of the “I got mine jack” school of what the post’s writer calls glibertarian economics.
It’s always nice after a dealing with crap in one’s own area to see the silliness play out next door.
Don’t miss the comments either.
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Why science writing is hard — Andrew Sullivan (and surrogates) illustrate.
Posted July 29, 2008 by Tom Outsourced largely to a e-mailer to Andrew Sullivan’s blog.
The back story: A study in the journal Obesity (press release here) extrapolates from current data to suggest an enormous increase in the percentage of Americans who become obese (defined as possessing a Body Mass Index over 30). If this comes to pass, it would evoke a huge amount of spending to deal with health consequences of such American expansion.
The claim gets picked up in Wired, which then lands it in a drive-by post on Sullivan’s extremely popular blog.
The only problem: no one in the expanding circles of puffing this very slender piece of work took note of the key phrase which, to the original study author’s credit, did make it into the press release that otherwise over-hyped its subject. The release said: “Their projections illustrate the potential burden of the U.S. obesity epidemic if current trends continue.” (Italics added.)
Here’s the comment that — also to his credit — Patrick Appel (subbing for Andrew) then published:
It never fails to impress me the fact that people see a journal article and then turn their critical reasoning skills off. Looking through the actual paper in question, it’ll be figure 1 that’s giving the headliner quote of 86% fat by 2030. Except that this is wrong….
…the kicker: these are *linear* extrapolations, taken out well beyond where they actually tell us anything. The tell-tale hint? Take those projections out another 15 years and they say the overweight plus obesity fraction will be 100% before 2045. Yes, that’s right. Not a single healthy person left alive in the US. Marathon runners? Triathletes? Starving supermodels? Richard Simmons? All of them obese. Presumably from the fresh vegetable blight of 2040, forcing every last one of us to subsist entirely on Chicken McNuggets and Spam.Oh, and that trend they’re talking about is extrapolated from 3 data points. Sure, it’s suggestive, but I wouldn’t scream bloody murder from these stats.
….Yes. Chalk this one up there with, “According to current trends, housing prices will keep rising, allowing us to take on LOADS of bad debt!”
Exactly so.
The moral of this story is one I and my colleagues at the MIT science writing grad program try to drum into our students very early. Just because a press release or a paper says something doesn’t mean you can suspend your bull-shit sensor. Science writing is a specialized beat because claims are asserted in technical language, and in many cases, in forms that require at least a bit of statistical due-diligence to assess.
Simply glossing a press release with a hip-ish reference to Wall-E (Wired), and then passing on the news as fact (Appel-for-Sullivan) ain’t close to good enough; in fact, I would say, this kind of slapdash reporting (or transcribing) that does a fair amount of damage to the public’s willingness to pay attention to scientific results — not as much as the overtly fraudulent kind of stuff that comes out of the Discovery Institute or climate change denialists — but still, this kind of stuff doesn’t help matters.
Now — professional or credentialed science writers are hardly immune to all kinds of flaws of their own, ranging from the cheer-leading problem (in which science writers only tell the “good” stories - and miss, for example stuff like this. (Abstract only — full article costs $).
Then there is the context problem - it’s possible, for example, to get so absorbed in the particular fashion in a field that it becomes hard to remember — and report, that there is more to physics than string theory, for example, or that the identification of the gene “for” something is only a tiny part of the biological knowledge needed to comprehend most of what’s going on in an organism.
And certainly, plenty of science writers don’t possess in themselves enough specialized knowledge to smell out dicey stories in much or most of what they cover. I could not do any of the science I have covered over the last quarter of a century. What I have learned (with some hard lessons, to be sure) is to check not just the facts of any story I want to write — but its meaning as well.
In this case, the facts were fine. A study does exist that says what the Wired item and the Appel post say it does. But it was the interpretation of those facts that was off. In this case, as the commenter above points out, the issue was simple — any trend line that suggests incidences exceeding 100 percent coming soon ought to raise a couple of alarm bells.
Ideally, this kind of first-order BS test should not require specialized beat-centered training. Anyone writing for the public about more or less anything ought to know enough about numbers to get that one; it is or ought to be as much a part of a liberal arts intellectual arsenal as is the skill of writing a clear sentence.
To that end, I wish I could publish here the guide to mathematical reasoning my colleague Alan Lightman has written to introduce the science writing grad students at MIT to the tools they can use to make sense of the hype factor in science news. He’’s getting ready to turn that material into a short book, I believe, and it can’t come to soon.
In the meantime, this concise and funny book is a good place to start.
Image: Cornelis de Vos, “The Triumph of Bacchus,” 17th century. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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Arts Events This Week
Two social art events will be the highlights of the week. Civilian Art Projects and Planaria Records are jointly throwing a closing party this Friday:
So, we at Velodrome like music.
In an effort to combine these two subjects of our affinity, we’re teaming up with Civilian Art Projects to throw an excellent closing party for the Screams and Screens gallery that has been going on for the past month.
We’ve enlisted the help of the following musicians:
ILYA MONOSOV (Planaria / Holy Mountain / Drag City / Language of Stone)
They will be opening up the night and playing till a reasonable hour. At which point, Velodrome will commandeer the space for our usual shenanigans (italo/post-punk/disco/house/80s hold the cheese).
There will be booze for low prices and videos and things.
There will also be really awesome screen printed art for your enjoyment. Civilian describes the exhibit as such:
—-
This summer, the galleries at Civilian Art Projects will be overflowing with unique and distinct approaches to screen-printing. The artists curated by Panache — Bert Bergen, Alexander Campaz, Brian Chippendale, Rob Corradetti, Nat Damm, Sohale Darouian aka 333, El Jefe Design, E*Rock, Jesjit Gill, Gunsho, Kayrock and Wolfy, Jason Killinger, Planaria Designs, Seripop, Urban Inks and Zeloot approach the print from an individual perspective, bringing to the work a unique “eye burner” aesthetic (a phrase used by Urban Inks, one of the design groups in the exhibition), as heard by the curator.
According to Panache, “the vibrant colors and bold contrasts compounded with multiple layers of patterns and screens, adds a discombobulating visual effect on the viewer. Each poster ‘pops’ or ‘screams’ out at you, and is unique from the next print because each one is individually produced through its own screening process. This creates a freedom in the work that lends the artist a medium that has no boundaries, limitations or defined lines. Hopefully making you stop and think or at least take a second glance at what’s in front of you and the world around you.”
—-
The space is at 403 7th St NW, 3rd Floor. That is four blocks down 7th from the Chinatown Metro stop. This means you can come to the party, and then catch a bus to NYC afterwards to catch DFA presenting PS1 on Saturday, if, of course, you don’t stay in town for Audrey’s Covers Coffee House party and Nouveau Riche. So. many. choices.
Think of the possibilities.
Art Whino has moved from Old Town to the National Harbor and is celebrating the summer there with festivities.
We hope to see you out there. Each night we will bring you a unique programming with live music, interactive art and movies.
Don’t miss out and cool off from the summer heat at Art Whino at National Harbor.
Friday, Jul, 25
D J M I K E L P A N D A ®
Magician David London
Saturday, Jul 26
VANDAVEER
Magician David London
Posted: July 21st, 2008 under events.
Think Tank Talks This Week
Monday July 21, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
Posted: July 21st, 2008 under events.
Starbucks DC Store Closings
Starbuck’s latest “full list” of store closures doesn’t contain many stores from our immediate area at all. Most central is the 21st & L street location. To pad out the list, I’ve included all closing the stores in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Some of you do commute between DC and those outlying places.
14073 21ST & L STREET 2101 L ST WASHINGTON DC
7588 HARBORPLACE 301 S LIGHT ST BALTIMORE MD
11772 SPOTSYLVANIA TOWNE CENTRE 137 SPOTSYLVANIA TOWNE CTR FREDERICKSBURG VA
Posted: July 18th, 2008 under news.
July DC Drupal Meetup Videos Posted
Kapitolist missed Monday’s Drupal meeting at Stetson’s. (Stetson’s is on the same block as Local 16, host of tonight’s Twin Tech meeting.) However, thanks to streaming video, the quick fire sessions are now available for viewing:
videos on qik
videos on ustream.tv
Free video streaming by Ustream
Posted: July 17th, 2008 under events.
David Lat Moving to New York
Kapitolist got an invitation to David Lat’s going away brunch in DC through Facebook. (Everything now is done on Facebook isn’t it?) David founded and manages the successful blog Above the Law. Somewhere along the line the ATL got rolled into the Breaking Media family of blogs that includes dealbreaker and fashionista. David, according to an interview with Marisa McQuilken of BLT, is moving to New York to oversee all the sites and help develop new ones. Breaking Media could someday join the ranks of the blog mini-empires Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker Media. Best wishes to David on his new assignment. (Kapitolist will post pics of the cupcakes at the farewell brunch if possible.)
Posted: July 17th, 2008 under news.
Market Capitalizations of DC Area Public Companies
Kapitolist thought it would be fun to rank the Washington, DC region’s publicly traded companies on their market capitalizations. We’ve taken a 41.5 mile radius from 20002, Union Station, DC to be the definition of “DC Area” for our purposes here. That covers out to Middleburg, VA and Towson, MD. (Yes, spherical trigonometry was involved in this exercise.) The capitalizations are as of market close July 17, 2008.
First, we note the shrinkage of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac due to the mortgage upheaval. The once biggest companies in the region are now a fraction of their bubble-era size. In fact, both rank below the less glamorous Sallie Mae. Danaher shares the top spots with the steady military giants, but is it really a DC business? My impression is that Danaher’s presence in the District of Columbia is limited to a floor of a building on Pennsylvania Ave. Readers can correct me if I am wrong. Meanwhile, Sprint-Nextel is off the list as it consolidated headquarters earlier this year in Overland, Kansas. If it were still here, Sprint-Nextel would take Danaher’s spot at number three. Not all is lost, as a vestage of Nextel, NII, still remains based in Reston and holds the ninth spot.
Interesting at number twenty-one is FTI Consulting. Bearing Point, Booz Allen, Accenture, Wyatt Watson are big names in this region; who knew we had a $3.5 billion market cap consulting firm in our backyard with
NVR, Inc at twenty-seventh with a $2.6 billion cap has avoided the wake of the housing bust faced by other homebuilders. NVR’s stock price is up 25% from five years ago. Oh yeah, NVR’s stock trades around $515.
Micros Systems is twenty-eight with a $2.4 billion cap. California doesn’t have a lock on all the great software businesses, and nor do the one thriving ones found here have to be military related. Micros’ domain is the relatively mundane but broadly important business of enterprise point of sale systems for hospitality and retail.
With a name like Synutra and headquarters in Rockville, you’d think it was yet another biotech firm of that tech corridor. However, the firm’s full name is Synutra International and the two together it gives a hint of something totally different: Synutra is the third leading manufacturer of baby formula in China–and it is based here. The entire top management team is Chinese. Talk about globalization.
Kapitolist can go on and on about the neat firms in the rankings. Look for yourself, and please share your observations with us in the comments.
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Posted: July 17th, 2008 under news.
Twin Tech Party Tomorrow Oversubscribed
The RSVPs for tomorrow’s Twin Tech Party at Local 16 has blown the capacity limits at 610. The organizers are shunting 70 people from the waiting list to nearby Chi Chi Lounge. The sample list of attendees below shows good representation from the tech, media, and politics sectors. Sarah Lacy, who famously interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, at SXSW, will be in attendance to launch her User Generated Book Tour.
Read more »
Posted: July 16th, 2008 under events.
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The Virtual Stoa
Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah
Emma Pooley, who made a thrilling attack at the start of the final lap of the women’s road race and today won the silver medal in the women’s time trial, isn’t just a terrific cyclist. She is also the co-author of a scientific paper on “centrifuge modelling of the behaviour of double porosity soils”. More champion cyclists like this, please.
(Or, indeed, like the indomitable Gaul, Jeannie Longo, the 49-year old French rider, who missed out on the bronze medal in the time trial by two seconds, and who incidentally also seems to be racking up the academic qualifications.)
Filed under: cycling, academics on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 2 Comments
Oxford Expands?
Policy Exchange is basically a parody of what a think-thank is supposed to be — the proof of that is its decision to have the laughable Anthony Browne in a senior position for quite a while now — but people say that it’s fairly influential on Conservative party “thinking”, so perhaps we should pay attention. So here’s a link to a page on its new report, which you can download, that recommends that Oxford (current population, c.150,000) should grow by an order of magnitude or so, with a million new homes being built around the city.
Since it’s the Conservatives on the County Council who have been opposing a very modest urban extension of Oxford on land south of Grenoble Road (a mere four thousand houses), a right-wing U-turn of quite staggering proportions may be on the cards. Alternatively, people may decide that it’s best, all things considered, to ignore pretty much everything that Policy Exchange has to say.
Filed under: tories, oxford, idiots on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 4 Comments
DSW, #284
H. G. Wells, novelist and socialist, born in Bromley, 21 September 1866; died in London, 13 August 1946.
Filed under: dsw on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Failure Is Not An Option
From tehgraun’s minute-by-minute Olympics coverage this morning [at 4:32am]:
Jessica in Connecticut provides an insight into superpower manipulations: ‘’You may not be aware of how the medal count is being tallied over here. Instead of using the official IOC medal table, which places the greatest emphasis on the number of gold medals earned (and thus shows China in the lead), US media outlets are determining standings based on total medals won. No prizes for guessing who’s in the lead when you count it that way.”
Americans, is this true?
Filed under: sport on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 7 Comments
Jericho Boatyard Campaign
While we were standing around outside the Town Hall this morning, Philip Pullman was being interviewed on the Today Programme [and scroll down to 0837 for the audio link].
(More over here.)
Filed under: jericho on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Posh Spice, ‘48er
Well, not quite.
But Victoria Beckham’s great-great-great-grandfather turns out to be Carl Heinrich Pfaender, an associate of Karl Marx and, like him, an exile in London after participating in the failed revolutions of 1848-9.
In the notes to this article by the aged Engels, Pfaender is described in these terms: “C’était un homme d’une finesse toute particulière, spirituel, ironique, dialectique.”
If you prefer to hear about this kind of thing in German, why not try over here? (”Die Glamourfrau ist eine Schwäbin”, that kind of thing).
[thanks! SF]
Filed under: leftwingery on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 2 Comments
DSW, #283
Robin Cook, contributor to The Red Paper on Scotland, Labour MP and Foreign Secretary, born 28 February 1946, died 6 August 2005.
Filed under: dsw on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Why Hadn’t I Heard About This Chap Before?
Extraordinary story.
[There’s an old page about him from the Tory Party website in the Google cache here.]
Filed under: tories on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
The Oath of the Harrieti
Cracking cartoon in yesterday’s graun, from Martin Rowson:
[The original is, e.g., here.]
Filed under: british politics on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Summer Reading
What are you all reading this Summer? Any recommendations?
Having decided I really ought to read a few novels again, I’ve recently bought-but-not-started Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill (which I understand is about cricket) and Isle of Dogs, by Daniel Davies (which I understand is about dogging). I’d also like to start on Patrick Cockburn’s Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq soon, but I suspect non-fiction reading will for the foreseeable future be dominated by new academic titles like Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics, vol.2, “Suarez to Rousseau” and Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love, both of which have just been published, hooray.
Filed under: books on Monday, August 4th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 26 Comments
DSW, #164
Wang Hongwen, Chinese communist and youngest member of the Gang of Four; born around 1934; arrested in 1976 and sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment; died 3 August 1992.
Filed under: dsw on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
TMS
For much of the Summer I’ve found Test Match Special pretty hard to listen to; yesterday and today I’ve been hooked. It could just be that the compellingness of TMS directly correlates to the compellingness of the match, and when the cricket’s not that interesting, then all the reasons that make you think, “God, the commentators really annoy me” come to the fore and you switch off the radio. Or it could just be that they haven’t had Geoffrey Boycott on this morning, so it’s a lot less irritating than usual. Does Boycott not work on Saturdays? Or have they realised he’s really annoying and sacked him?
Also - why on earth is the final day of Test cricket this Summer Monday 11 August (assuming the game makes it to the fifth day)? That’s preposterously early. Grr.
Filed under: cricket on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 11 Comments
DSW, #163
Edward Aveling, English socialist; Eleanor Marx’s partner, and a participant in the English translation of Capital. From the ODNB:
Notorious both for the debts which he habitually incurred and for his numerous affairs with women, Aveling was widely regarded as being without scruples in his private life. The many accounts of his repulsive physical appearance are not borne out by surviving photographs and seem to be informed more by the ‘moral dread’ which he occasioned in some people than by his unremarkable features. William Morris’s daughter called him a ‘little lizard of a man’ and Olive Schreiner said that he looked like an illicit diamond buyer. According to Hyndman, ‘nobody can be as bad as Aveling looks’.
He was born in Stoke Newington, 29 November 1849, and died in Battersea, 2 August 1898.
Filed under: dsw on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Bloody Hell
Paul Collingwood’s just hit a century, in what’s turning out to be a smashing Test Match.
Filed under: cricket on Friday, August 1st, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 4 Comments
Dave Hill on Boris Johnson and Anthony Browne
Over here at CiF.
Filed under: idiots on Friday, August 1st, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour
David Miliband’s playing his cards very shrewdly, isn’t he?
Based on his past behaviour, and my accumulated sense that he’s a bit of a coward, I’d have guessed up to last week that he’d probably follow a “wait until the premiership falls into my lap” kind of strategy, and that that would probably fail, so full credit to him for trying something different. It certainly makes the prospect of a Milburn / Clarke / Byers comeback a bit more remote, and that can only be a good thing. And, my goodness, he couldn’t have scripted the last 48 hours or so any better than they’ve turned out for him.
As I’ve more or less indicated before, although various mostly-Labour-supporting bloggers like to harrumph around these times about how people inside and outside the party should shut up, stop doing “Kremlinology”, focus on the issues, etc., these periods when parties are in meltdown over leadership crises are just about my favourite chunks of political time, and I’m going to enjoy this one to the full.
One other observation to those who deplore the current situation. One of the reasons quite so much happens in smoke-filled rooms, unattributable briefings, behind-the-scenes shenanigans these days is that the Party rules make it quite so difficult to mount a formal leadership challenge to an incumbent Prime Minister. When the leadership is obviously hopeless, therefore, backstairs channels are often the only ones available. I’ve just been re-reading Machiavelli’s Discourses, and one of the points he makes very early on is that you want your political institutions to be such that formal public challenges to authority are very easy, precisely in order to discourage what he calls calunnia, “calumnies”, or doing everything in semi-private unattributable ways through insinuation and rumour. Both parties (sorry Lib Dems, you still don’t count) have tightened up their rules over the last fifteen years or so, in order to make challenges to the leadership harder, but the not-especially-unpredictable result of all of this is that we’re likely to get more rather than fewer episodes like Duncan Smith (2003), Blair (2006-7) and Brown (2008) over time than we would otherwise, and it’s at these moments that party democracy gets sidelined in favour of the demi-semi-public machinations of political elites.
Filed under: british politics on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 89 Comments
DSW, #31
Jean Jaurès, French socialist. Born 3 September 1859, shot dead 31 July 1914.
Filed under: dsw on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Retrolecture: The Satanic Verses
There was a good piece by the excellent Samuel “On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion” Fleischacker in Norm’s Writer’s Choice series last week, not least because most of it is actually about the book Rushdie wrote, which is sometimes hard to recover through the increasingly thick fog of what became “The Rushdie Affair”. He liked it as much as I did, when I read it in the second half of 1989, though with a much richer appreciation of what we might call Rushdie’s engagement with theodicy than I’d have been capable of sustaining back then, years before I started reading Augustine.
It’s nice to be reminded, too, of Martin Scorsese’s film of The Last Temptation of Christ. Fleischacker thinks it had “a far deeper religious sensibility” than that of its critics who charged it with heresy. That might be true, but I just remember it as tortured, laughable nonsense. (”Heaven’s a party, and everyone’s invited!”, says Scorsese’s Christ at one point, or something similar, and I don’t recall it ever getting more profound.) His Gangs of New York was also very, very bad, but there seems to be something about the badness of the religious film that gives it a certain kind of grandeur, of which the badness of the secular film falls short.
Filed under: books, films, religion on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 9 Comments
Gordon Brown, Ha Ha Ha
The Don is quite funny over here, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Brown’s premiership is politically dead in the water, and we’re just waiting to see how the endgame plays out.
Up to now, people have been comparing him with the hapless John Major (which is what made this intervention quite so funny), but the real tragedy / comedy [delete according to taste] of his predicament is that the relevant analogy is increasingly becoming that of Iain Duncan Smith in October 2003, and that’s a terrible, terrible fate for anyone to suffer.
(Still, given that Brown himself can bring this all to an end at any moment, and to virtually everybody’s relief, perhaps our sympathies should be somewhat limited.)
Filed under: british politics on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 16 Comments
Retrolecture: Pour Marx
Le Monde, in one of its summer retrospective thingummies, over here.
Filed under: academics, newspapers, france on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
De Otio
In case you were wondering, as I was, why the Latin newsfeed on the sidebar hasn’t been updated for a while, “Nuntii Latini ob ferias aestivas ad tres menses intermittuntur, quam ob rem proxima emissio non ante quam Nonis Septembribus (5.9.) fiet.” [Over here.]
Filed under: latin on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 1 Comment
“As Woman B observed, and most Germans would agree, it is inappropriate and offensive to equate everything German with the Nazi era.”
I quite enjoyed reading the Max Mosley judgment. Favourite snippet:
Mr Thurlbeck [the NotW reporter] also relied upon the fact that the Claimant [Mr Mosley] was “shaved”. Concentration camp inmates were also shaved. Yet, as Mr Price [Mr Mosley’s QC] pointed out, they had their heads shaved. The Claimant, for reasons best known to himself, enjoyed having his bottom shaved – apparently for its own sake rather than because of any supposed Nazi connotation. He explained to me that while this service was being performed he was (no doubt unwisely) “shaking with laughter”. I naturally could not check from the DVD, as it was not his face that was on display.
Filed under: life in britain on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | No Comments
Spank me, and call me Cassandra
A long interview with Raj P, in tehgraun.
Filed under: books, friends and family on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 1 Comment
Catching Up
Just back from a week up an Alp, happily disconnected from the outside world. (Lots of mountain goats, but no marmots, alas.) Did I miss anything? I learned from French motorway service stations on the way home that England lost a Test Match and the Labour Party lost a by-election, both in rather embarrassing fashion. Anything else?
Filed under: life in britain on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Chris Brooke | 6 Comments
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Soldiers' Angel - Holly Aho [View Page] Posts: [Recent Funnies], [Soldiers' Angels - Items Needed!!], [Playing Catch-up], [Mission Trip to Peru], [9th Annual "We support our veterans" program], [That explains a few things....], [I totally don't get these V-8 commercials], [The Soldiers' Angels Traveling Museum], [America's Favorite Mom- Vote for Patti Bader!], [The Barack Obama Magic 8-Ball]
Soldiers' Angel - Holly Aho
Its times like this I am glad I'm not in charge...but if I was there wouldnt be an issue here
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Recent Funnies
A few days ago we took my oldest son and three of his friends to a nice restaurant for dinner. One of his friends ordered a steak (I think for the first time). The waiter asked him, "And how would you like it cooked?"
My son's friend looked shocked a moment and then sputtered out, "Done?"
..Don't bring me no half cooked food! LOL
Also recently, my oldest son was telling me about his adventures in his online game he likes to play. Apparently, in the game you can set up a shop as a merchant and sell game items to other players, like coins, weapons and armor. He was gleefully recalling his latest store experiences of working up to be a millionaire. He told me how he'd purchased a bunch of items that were nearly worthless, and then set up shop and sold each item for thousands of points (or whatever). He laughed as he said that lots of players were buying these items and he was raking in the profits.
I instantly felt sympathy for the players buying his stuff and said "Awww, these are probably new players who aren't aware of the Items' real value. Poor people!"
He replied, "Well, I named my store 'Gigantic Rip-offs, Buy Here!'"
And another...
Last month my kids and I were eating lunch together when Tommy (my 7 year old) said he needed more water to drink and stood up with his cup. Noel (my 13 year old) looked in his cup and chimed in that he also needed a refill and told Tommy to fill his cup too. Tommy looked at him askance and said "Get your own drink."
Well, Noel, being so much older than the rest, often acts like a not so benevolent king with his minions when ordering his younger brothers around. He replied, "Don't be a twerp! What, is it too hard to fill my cup too? Not strong enough to carry it?" Handing his cup to Tommy he ordered "Get my water!"
Tommy's defiant face wiped clean into an obedient and friendly face as he politely took the cup and headed to the faucet. Not realizing something had just gone horribly wrong for him, Noel continued eating and feeling like royalty. Tommy took quite a long time at the sink, and mildly suspicious at this Noel often turned around to check on what he was doing. But Tommy was always at the sink, holding a cup, water running. After more than 30 seconds however, Noel began to throw new insults over his shoulder at Tommy. "What, is it too hard for you to get water?"....."What is taking you so long slave?"...."Can't find your way back to the table?" After each insult he smiled at his ingenuity and wit.
Finally, Tommy returned to the kitchen table with 2 cups of water. Noel checked his cup and then took a big drink as Tommy sat. Noel spit it right back out and shrieked, "HOT water? Are you retarded? Why would you pick hot water?"
Tommy smiled politely and replied, "I don't know what you mean. My water is nice and cold." He smiled and took a sip.
Noel hasn't bossed Tommy around in a while.
548 Words . Holly Aho .
07/24/08 .
02:11:53 am .
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258 views Send feedback
Soldiers' Angels - Items Needed!!
The Soldiers’ Angels warehouses in NC & CA are a wee bit like Mother Hubbard's cupboard.... E-M-P-T-Y!
Please be aware that both warehouses send out MUCH needed items to the soldiers (male & female), wounded service members and all those in need.
Everyone understands the financial tightness going on now....but please... search your hearts and do what you can.
'I'd love to help, but if I spend $10.00 - $20.00 on things, I can't afford to ship them'.
SOLUTION: Walmart or Target cards would be wonderful!! Send the cards, allowing those in charge of the NC/CA warehouses to buy things needed.
OR IF YOU CHOOSE TO SHIP:
Things that are needed are socks, panties, bras, t-shirts, powdered drink mixes (the individual packets are best because they can be added to a bottle of water), cookies, Chips, Pretzels, Tuna in a pouch, Beef or chicken or turkey jerky, Cheese spread (no aerosol cans please), Ramen Noodles, Snack Cakes, Gum, Nuts, Granola Bars, Pop Tarts, Dried Fruit, Trail Mix, Pistachios, Raisins , Red licorice twists, Tootsie Rolls (both the candy and lollipops), Peanut Butter, Triscuits, Wheat Thins, Canned Meats – No Pork Products, Hard Candy – Individually Wrapped Face Cleansing Pads, Moisturizers, Wet wipes, Eye Drops, Lip Balm, Toothpaste, Toothbrushes, Soap, Body Wash, Shampoo and Conditioners, Deodorant, Sun Block, Foot powder, AA & AAA batteries, Craft kits, Scrap booking crafts, Books (mysteries, action, drama and science fiction are popular), Magazines – new or nearly new - (Sports, News, Entertainment, Travel, Nature), Decks of cards, Small hand held games, Crossword Puzzles, Baseballs, Baseball gloves, Soccer balls, Basket balls, Volley balls, Squirt guns, Frisbees, CD's, DVD's, Blank Cards, Stationary, Paper, Pens, Letters……..
Please keep in mind that all food items must be in the manufacturer’s original packaging. NO chocolate ~ 110 degree heat and chocolate do not mix well. M&M’s are fine.
We also need Ziploc bags for packing items; these are great not only to make sure that potentially leaky items don’t make a mess but also for the soldiers to keep sand out of their things while in the desert.
Please help OUR heroes with their needs.
Soldiers' Angels
366 Words . Holly Aho .
07/07/08 .
12:40:31 am .
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519 views Send feedback
Playing Catch-up
Well, it's been a busy spring, that's for sure! In case you haven't totally given up on my blogging, I've got a boring personal update post for you. Cute and funny stories ahead, I promise, so keep reading! First of all, for the exciting news, we've managed to move into a beautiful house!!! We are in heaven, loving our new place. After losing our home to foreclosure several years ago, we began renting an apartment, that while spacious (as far as apartments go), was old and not in the best shape. We'd resigned ourselves to possibly living there a good long time until our credit had recovered.
Now, while I'm not complaining about the apartment, it did lack any sort of a yard. Our building shared a parking lot with the bar below our apartment and the police department next door. Imagine telling your kids to go play in the parking lot! So, while our apartment was decent sized, it was still difficult to entertain 5 kids there during the winter, or long rainy days.
Well, 2 weeks ago on a lark I looked at http://craigslist.com for home rentals. There happened to be one just down the street, a 3 bedroom new house for $1800. Out of curiousity I made an appointment to see it. After viewing the home I told the guy showing it to us, "I'd like to say first, that $1800 is more than we'd like to pay. Can you do better? And before you answer, I must tell you that I have 5 kids, 2 cats and credit that is lucky to rate an F grade." He called me back that night with an offer of $1500 a month. I was stunned!
I figured, who else is that desperate to rent their house? So I began making some serious calls, and we began visiting homes. No one, absolutely no one, turned us down. We finally settled on a beautiful house on the lake with a giant backyard, 5 bedrooms, and a very large deck on both the front and back of the home. It's been heavenly!!
I love being able to send the kids outside to play! I bought a 12' trampoline with enclosure for the backyard, and the neighbors have great kids our own kids' ages. So, what a dream come true - a blessing!
I've also adopted a new pet - Henry the rooster. He lives on my parent's farm as a free range chicken, and I never knew how awesome silly chickens can be. He's actually much smarter than I'd have guessed. Now, when I come over to their house he sees my car and comes running to me. He then follows me all over the farm like a baby ducky. If I haven't visited in awhile he comes up to the house and looks on the deck to see if I'm there. He was 2 years old when I began to tame him last fall. Now he is a wonderful friend and such a pleasure! He'll sit on my lap while I read a book, and once began snoring when he fell asleep. Did you know chickens can snore?!?
On a sadder note, but still a reason for thankfulness all things considered, my parent's cat was hit in their driveway by their own car. I bought them the cat 8 years ago, and we all think of him as a wonderful loving pet. I took him directly to the vet and it turns out that for such a tragic accident he was very fortunate in his injuries. No broken bones, no internal damage, just a 10 inch gash that required lots of stitching and medicine. So thank God he was so easy to fix up and save.
Well, that's the whole heads up for now, with more to follow later, and some interesting Soldiers' Angels news coming up as well!
635 Words . Holly Aho .
06/15/08 .
12:34:08 am .
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792 views Send feedback
Mission Trip to Peru
This summer my church is going on a mission trip to Lima, Peru. Most people signed up for the trip last January. I felt led then to find out more information, but didn't. Guess I was being stubborn or something. I'm not a missionary, what on earth could I do? I couldn't imagine myself being useful in this way. But God kept bringing it up, and finally last Sunday I decided to listen. I joined the rest of the group to sit in on the monthly trip meeting (planning and what have you for the trip).
The official deadline for joining the trip was last Feb, so I felt pretty safe that I'd made sure it was too late to go, and I could at least say I'd done my best when I finally decided to go learn more about the trip. But, as it turns out, I was wrong. I'm not sure why God would want me on this mission trip, I've never ever been on one before. But, if He really means it and wants me to go, I will.
Next step is, fundraising for the airfare and whatnot. My husband and oldest son can go with me on the trip, provided the funding is enough, and since I have no idea what to expect at this point I'm just doing my best to plan for success with the 3 of us going and learning together. The cost is $2400 for each adult and $2300 for my son. A whopping total of $7,100.00! Not including lost wages for the 10 day period we are gone. That seems an astounding amount of money to me. I'll tell you this, the only way we would possibly be going is if God really wants us to and provides the means to do so. There would be no other way.
So, I guess at this point I'm willing, and will wait to see if He is serious.
If you would like to help with funding for the missions trip, I would appreciate it! Half of the money is due in 10 days - by the 15th of May! (Because I waited so long - definitely will be God's work if this happens) You can make your check out to Grace Church and mail it to me:
You can also donate directly online here: https://public.serviceu.com/payment/default.asp?OrgID=1585&PaymentID=2858&&&
Any amount is welcome, and if I don't raise enough money for us to go on the trip I will still be turning over all funds to make sure the trip is a success for everyone else.
Also - even if you can't donate financially, I would LOVE your prayers in this! The mission trip is July 25th - August 4th. The church has made this trip in the past, and this trip will follow very much like the last one, which you can read all about here!
522 Words . Holly Aho .
05/05/08 .
06:04:38 pm .
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1329 views Send feedback
9th Annual "We support our veterans" program
Grace Church in Eden Prairie will host its 9th annual “We Salute Our Veterans” program to honor veterans on Saturday, May 17, beginning at 10:00 a.m. The program will feature former NASA astronaut Jack Lousma (Colonel, USMC, Retired). Colonel Lousma was in the Marine Corps for 25 years. While working for NASA, he was a pilot and performed two spacewalks aboard Skylab (America’s first space station). He was also the commander of an orbital test flight of the space shuttle Columbia. He has received four honorary doctorate degrees.
The program will include veteran testimonies and recognition, plus inspirational and patriotic music.
Pastor Dean Morin, pastor to adults at Grace Church who organizes the event, remarked, “The war in Iraq has elevated our awareness of the great sacrifice our veterans have made to preserve our freedom. This program will give everyone from the Twin Cities an opportunity to honor our brave military men and women who serve our country. And we are delighted to have Colonel Lousma as our featured speaker.”
The “We Salute Our Veterans” program is a free event. An optional lunch is provided after the program for $8.00 with advance reservations by calling 952-224-3032 before May 8.
For more information about Col. Lousma, click here.
Grace Church is located in Eden Prairie at the southeast corner of Pioneer Trail and Eden Prairie Road, one mile west of Flying Cloud Airport. For directions, go to http://www.atgrace.com/directions or call 952-224-3180.
239 Words . Holly Aho .
05/05/08 .
05:43:44 pm .
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1255 views Send feedback
That explains a few things....
Today my hubby and I were in the kitchen when he did something particularly clumsy. My hubby is more the affectionately ornery sort, so I kept my mouth shut as I looked at him askance, but the expression on my face must have spoke volumes. He looked at me and said, "I can read your mind, and that's not nice! Didn't your mother teach you that if you can't think anything nice, don't think anything at all?"
I replied, "No, but that explains an awful lot about you."
88 Words . Holly Aho .
05/02/08 .
12:11:08 am .
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1240 views 3 feedbacks
I totally don't get these V-8 commercials
Is anyone else with me?
What? Let me get this straight. V-8 has a full serving of vegetables. So, if you drink one, why the heck do you need to actually eat your vegetables? So you can get 2 servings? I'm just saying, it's weird! If you drink the V-8, should be fine to order whatever you want, or not eat crappy green veggies. Stoopid commercial.
68 Words . Holly Aho .
03/19/08 .
11:19:40 am .
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1539 views Send feedback
The Soldiers' Angels Traveling Museum
Learn more or get the code to share this video on your website here:
18 Words . Holly Aho .
03/12/08 .
11:53:17 am .
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1418 views Send feedback
America's Favorite Mom- Vote for Patti Bader!
Brandon nominated his mother for America's Favorite Mom. Copy and paste this link in your address bar and vote for her! We'd really appreciate it!
http://www.americasfavoritemom.com/mothers-day-2008/mom/Patti-P-3418
My Mother Patti-Patton Bader
Read the rest and vote for Patti Here!
107 Words . Holly Aho .
03/04/08 .
01:20:11 pm .
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2001 views Send feedback
The Barack Obama Magic 8-Ball
Need some advice? Something that will inspire and encourage you without saying anything really substantiative? You need to ask the Barak Obama Magic 8-Ball!!
Go ahead, ask it a question and then click the 8-ball for your motivating answer that leaves the real thinking to you!
Bwaaaaahaaaaaahaaaaa!
50 Words . Holly Aho .
02/29/08 .
10:51:09 am .
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1847 views 1 feedback
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August 25, 2005
Movable Type 3.2 released and better than ever
By Emily Chang
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August 17, 2005
AJAX fade anything technique
By Emily Chang
See what Max has done with the Yellow Fade Technique (YTF) made infamous by Basecamp and then further tweaked by Adam Michela into the Fade Anything Technique (FAT). Max has taken that and adapted it into his blog. Read more about it in his post Designing With AJAX: CSS and AJAX Web page Transition.
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New Republican Party Blog [View Page] Posts: [McCain Makes New Hilarious Ad About Obama and His ‘Fan Club’], [John Edwards Admits Repeatedly Lying About Affair, Georgia and Russia Begin Conflict, and Obama Takes a Vacation], [Paris Hilton Has Better Energy Ideas Than Barack Obama, Says John McCain Out With a New ‘Celebrity’ Ad For Obama], [Call Bush to Force Nancy “I’m Trying to Save the Planet” Pelosi into Special Session of Congress for Energy Crises], [Obama Uses Race Card Again, But This Time Admits it], [Likely Voters Eschew Media Cooing and Leftist European Throngs to Give McCain Lead in New Poll], [McCain Ad Charges Obama Cancelled Meeting With Injured Troops, But Had Time To Go To Gym], [McCain Uses Ads to Deride Obama’s Ever Changing Iraq War Mumbo-Jumbo], [McCain in Mexico Says to “Seal the Border,” While His Campaign in U.S. Blasts Obama’s Newest Iraq Flip-Flop], [On Verge of Getting Backing From Major Evangelical Leaders, McCain Adds Steve “Artillery Shell” Schmidt to Campaign Top Spot]
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Call Bush to Force Nancy “I’m Trying to Save the Planet” Pelosi into Special Session of Congress for Energy Crises
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McCain Makes New Hilarious Ad About Obama and His ‘Fan Club’
Posted on August 13, 2008 by Denny
Arizona Senator and presidential GOP nominee-to-be John McCain is at it again. He just won’t give Barack a break when it comes to pealing back Obama’s veneer to reveal what Obama really has in store for America. His new ad is not exception.
The ad begins with a narrator saying: “You’ve seen him in London, Paris and Berlin. Now you, too, can join ‘The One’s’ fan club in America.”
The spot features one young woman complimenting Obama’s “aura,” and a second young woman singling out his “very soft eyes” for praise. And then there’s a fellow saying of Obama: “Hot chicks dig Obama.”
Later, the narrator says: “We know he doesn’t have much experience. And isn’t ready to lead. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t dreamy.”
I laughed for a good 15-20 seconds watching this ad. It’s a hoot!
Meanwhile, McCain. who had been taking an increasingly tough line against Moscow well before the crisis in Georgia, told a town meeting in Pennsylvania that he had spoken with the president of the former Soviet republic, Mikhail Saakashvili, to assure him that “Today we are all Georgians.”
McCain accused Russia of using “violence against Georgia to send a signal” to “any country that chooses to associate with the West.” He said that Russian leaders must realize they risk “the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world.”
Of the two presidential candidates, only Obama has been critical of both sides of the conflict in the first serious foreign policy crisis to flare up since they began their battle for the Oval Office.
On Monday, Obama said, “There is no possible justification for these attacks,” while noting that “Georgia should refrain from using force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and a political settlement must be reached that addresses the status of these disputed regions.”
On Tuesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered a halt to military action and went on national television to explain to Russians what he says happened.
“The security of our peacekeepers and civilians has been restored,” Medvedev said. “The aggressor has been punished and suffered very significant losses. Its military has been disorganized.”
McCain, who has called for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight, kept up the pressure on the Kremlin leadership and what he views as its increasingly autocratic rule.
“Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin must understand the severe, long-term negative consequences that their government’s actions will have for Russia’s relationship with the U.S. and Europe,” said McCain.
In other political news, “The spectacle of yet another Leftist Democrat, John Edwards, looking the American people dead in the eye and lying to them is nothing new.”
Does John Edwards have a lying spirit?
“What we did do was expose Edwards as a dishonest politician, a man who tried to exploit American military people to prop up his preposterous theory that the United States economy punishes the poor.”
Hillary Supporters Warning Of Another Boston Tea Party
Colorado Democratic Party Threatens Clinton Delegate For Being Critical Of Obama
McCain-Romney 2008!
Filed under: Barack Obama, Democrats, GOP, John Edwards, John McCain, Liberalism, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republicans, news, united states | 1 Comment »
John Edwards Admits Repeatedly Lying About Affair, Georgia and Russia Begin Conflict, and Obama Takes a Vacation
Posted on August 8, 2008 by Denny
In an interview to be broadcast tonight on Nightline, recent Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards will tell America through ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff that he repeatedly lied to them about having an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter - and that he doesn’t even love her.
Edwards will also deny he’s the father of Hunter’s baby girl, Frances Quinn, even though the former 2004 Vice-Presidential candidate of John Kerry said he has not taken a paternity test to prove his statement.
Edwards will claim that he is not the father based on timing of the baby’s birth on February 27, 2008, claiming the affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.
A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has admitted to being the father of the child.
Also, according to friends of Hunter, Edwards met Hunter at a New York city bar in 2006. Later, his political action committee even paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.
Edwards will say the affair began after she was hired and traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.
The National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards. At that time, his campaign staff and Hunter blatantly branded the report as false.
“The story is false, it’s completely untrue, it’s ridiculous,” Edwards had told reporters then.
Edwards will also admit that the National Enquirer story about him visiting Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month was in fact true, and say that his wife had not known about the meeting.
Edwards will claim his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family, became aware of the affair in 2006.
Do I see a cover-up to decieve the American public anywhere in this story? YES!
Meanwhile parts of Russia’s 58th Army — including 150 tanks and armored vehicles — were reportedly moving Friday on the capital of South Ossetia after Georgian troops entered the city in an attempt to crush separatist forces seeking to control the breakaway province.
Finally, Illinois Senator and Democratic-nominee-to-be Barack Obama is vacationing in Hawaii, and McCain’s campaign had something to say about that.
“Instead of calling on his friends and allies in Congress to return to put a much-needed energy policy in place to fight sky-high gas prices, Barack Obama is joining them with a beach vacation of his own,” said McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds.
The Republican National Committee even chimed in their opinion of an Obama vacation in the middle of an energy crises.
“In addition to plenty of beaches and sun, Barack Obama will see some of the highest gas prices in the country when he vacations in Hawaii,” an RNC spokesman, Alex Conant, wrote in an email to reporters. “Obama deserves a break from the campaign trail, just like Americans deserve a break from high gas prices. Obama’s opposition to offshore drilling will only make it harder for Americans to afford their own family vacations.”
In other political news:
McCain: Russia needs to reverse “perilous course”
McCain slams Obama over drilling off coasts
McCain says Obama wants to forfeit war in Iraq
Bill Clinton to address Democratic convention
McCain-Romney 2008!
Filed under: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Democrats, GOP, Iraq, Islamofascism, John Edwards, John Kerry, John McCain, Liberal Media, Liberalism, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republicans, congress, economy, news, united states | 11 Comments »
Paris Hilton Has Better Energy Ideas Than Barack Obama, Says John McCain Out With a New ‘Celebrity’ Ad For Obama
Posted on August 6, 2008 by Denny
After GOP-nominee-to-be Arizona Senator and “white-haired guy” John McCain made an ad touting Illinois Senator and Democratic-nominee-to-be Barack Obama’s celebrity status after he came back from his European tour minus meeting injured U.S. servicemen recovering from injuries suffered in combat asked if Obama is ready to lead, Paris Hilton has come out with a video which basically endorses McCain’s position on energy solutions for America.
I don’t know if Ms. Hilton had the foresight into what exactly she was doing when she made the video extolling drilling offshore, where it is now prohibited due to Speaker of the House of RepresentativesNancy ‘I want to save the planet’ Pelosi’s hard-fisted parliamentary moves that caused Congress to adjourn without any appropriations being passed because she thought maybe a Democrat or Republican would be able to put drilling offshore into one of the bills. But when she said that her “energy policy” was to “do a hybrid of both candidates,” including focusing on new technologies AND opening up our offshore to oil discovery and extraction “with strict environmental oversight,” she is disagreeing with Nancy AND Barack Obama, while pushing for Republican and McCain efforts at comprehensive energy policy for America.
Barack Obama may be trying to weasel out of yet another policy postion, this time about drilling for American oil on American soil and territory, but he has yet to totally flip on offshore drilling except he my allow it in an as yet undefined ”compromise” solution to a nonexistent current process that I guess would happen AFTER he became president. He cannot lead now, but displays absolute assuredness he will be able to so AFTER he is elected president. Barack displays the characteristics of a genuine charlatan about his so-called leadership abilities, in my opinion.
The current political reality is that he cannot, or will not, get Nancy to change her mind and let the House of Representatives actually represent, or keep a growing number of Democrats towing their worn-out talking point about drilling for oil on “eighty-five million acres” that don’t contain much oil underneath it.
”It sounds like Paris Hilton supports John McCain’s ‘all of the above’ approach to America’s energy crisis — including both alternatives and drilling. Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan,” John Mccain said after learning of her video.
“John McCain says we need offshore oil drilling and we need it now,” campaign manager Rick Davis said in an email to supporters recently. “Senator Barack Obama has consistently opposed offshore drilling - calling it a ‘gimmick.’ Senator Obama’s solution to high gas prices is telling Americans to make sure their tires are inflated.”
Obama had said this last week: “There are things that you can do individually though to save energy; making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much.”
Even the Republican National Committee had fun with Obama’s new energy plan for America.
“…the RNC is providing members of the media with complimentary tools related to Barack Obama’s energy plan – a brand new tire gauge,” the RNC wrote in a press release recently. “Because, instead of actually increasing America’s domestic oil supply, this is how Obama thinks Americans should try to alleviate burdensome pain at the pump.”
Heck, McCain even used it as a way to financially help his campaign to raise money to battle Obama.
“Today, I’m asking for your help in putting Senator Obama’s ‘tire gauge’ energy policy to the test,’ McCain campaign manager Rick Davis had written to potential donors. “With an immediate donation of $25 or more, we will send you an ‘Obama Energy Plan’ tire pressure gauge. Will simply inflating your tires reduce the financial burden of high gas prices on your wallet?”
And McCain seems to be going after Obama’s jugular on the issue of drilling.
“We need oil drilling and we need it now offshore and we need it now. He has consistently opposed it. He has opposed nuclear power. He has opposed reprocessing. He has opposed storage. And the only thing I’ve heard him say is that we should inflate our tires. So he has no plan for addressing the energy challenges that we face,” McCain said during a Panama City press conference on Friday.
Meanwhile, Americans are suffering high energy and food prices while the Congress enjoys their tax-payer funded five week vacation without providing leadership for America on virtuously any major issue facing the nation.
In other political news, Salon quotes McCain as saying something seemingly rather foolish: “I encouraged Cindy to compete,” he told the crowd. “I told her [that] with a little luck, she could be the only woman to serve as both the first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.” The biker beauty pageant features topless women.
And according to a new poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, Americans are sick of hearing about Barack Obama. With Election Day still three months away, 48 percent of Americans said they’re hearing too much about the Democratic candidate. Only 26 percent said the same about his Republican rival, John McCain.
McCain-Romney 2008!
Filed under: Barack Obama, Democrats, GOP, John McCain, Liberal Media, Liberalism, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi, Politics, Republicans, congress, conservative movement, economy, news, polls | 5 Comments »
Call Bush to Force Nancy “I’m Trying to Save the Planet” Pelosi into Special Session of Congress for Energy Crises
Posted on August 4, 2008 by Denny
I URGE all those who truly care about the poor and this country’s dependence on dangerous sources of foreign energy to call the White House (1-202-456-1111) and your Congress person to DEMAND that president Bush call a special session of Congress to deal IMMEDIATELY with our country’s current energy crises. I have already done so and let them have an ear full of my mind. The poor, of which I used to be part of for decades, are hurting and not being able to feed their family’s more often lately. I call upon all Democrats, Republicans and Independents to call president Bush and Congress to urge them to do their job and help America BEFORE they help themselves to more of a tax payer subsidized 5 week all paid vacation consisting totally of pereragatory self overindulgence in complete luxury.
Thankfully I am not the only one calling attention to this urgent issue.
Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Chairman of the House Republican Study Committee (RSC), and Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN), former Chairman of RSC on August 1, 2008, urged President Bush to call for a special session of Congress. This after Congress adjourned because Nancy “I want to save the planet” Pelosi would not let the House do it’s job and pass any appropriations legislation like they are supposed to do to fund the budget for next year. She seemingly was afraid someone would be able to work a bill into one of the appropriations bills that would allow drilling on our own territory that is now off limits and scientist think may contain several BILLION barrels of oil and TRILLIONS of cubic feet of natural gas. These fuels, which America will need for decades even though other sources of energy must be explored and increasingly utilized, can be made available to the general public in just a few short years, with immediate, long-term positive results felt in the economy.
READSTATE is also urging president Bush to call a special session of Congress to deal with the current energy crises.
Nancy Pelosi, who just wrote a book to be made out of paper and ultimately tossed in a landfill, with fewer than 20 legislative days before the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, decided that Democrats would NOT be able to do the will of the people and CAST A VOTE on energy policy she disagreed with, and with complete and utter contempt for the smart American people she declared, “And when you win the election, you win the majority, and what is the power of the speaker? To set the agenda, the power of recognition, and I am not giving the gavel away to anyone.”
Astonishingly, Pelosi also told America: “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet…I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”
“I have always loved longitude,” Nancy Pelosi said before breaking into laughter. “I love latitude; it’s in the stars. But longitude, it’s about time. … Time and clocks and all the rest of that have always been a fascination for me…Whoever makes that discovery, rules,” she said.
So now the entire appropriations process has ground to a halt because, even after promising fairness and open debate, Pelosi has resorted to parliamentary devices that effectively precludes Republicans from offering policy alternatives.
“Just as some Democrats in both the House and the Senate are beginning to heed the American people’s calls for more American energy production, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has threatened to do something quite different. She’d rather “pack it up and go home,” House Republican Leader John Boehner said.
This is from Boehner’s web page:
“Ms. Pelosi, who considers energy legislation a personal priority, does not appear ready to shift her view, based on discussions in a private meeting with members of the leadership on Thursday. According to accounts from those present, Ms. Pelosi said that if Democrats relented on drilling, “then we might as well pack it up and go home.”
Here are some more of Boehner’s thoughts:
“This stunning admission is more than a little ironic since the Speaker made repeated and empty declarations of ‘energy independence’ throughout 2007…declarations like these:
“We hope to have legislation on global warming and energy independence through the committees by July 4th, so that this year, Independence Day is also ‘Energy Independence Day.’” (1/18/07)“We hope to have legislation that will be a starting point on global warming and energy independence through the committees by July 4th, so that this year, Independence Day is also Energy Independence Day.” (2/08/07)
“House Democratic leadership will be working hand in glove with the committees, to unveil a package for July 4th – ‘Energy’ Independence Day.” (4/25/07)
“We have elevated this issue by creating the Select Committee, and we will make this July 4th Energy Independence Day.” ( 5/08/07)
“With confidence in American ingenuity and high faith in our future, we Democrats declare America’s independence from foreign oil.” (6/28/07)
“We had the results of a tasking that the leadership gave to the 11 committees of jurisdiction, to the chairman, to say, by June, so that we can announce our package for the Fourth of July, energy independence day for us.” (Press Conference, 6/29/07)
The Speaker, of course, was referring to July 4, 2007. That landmark date of “energy independence” was more than a year ago. Since then, gas prices have increased 38 percent – part of the incredible 76 percent increase in the price at the pump since Democrats took control of Congress on January 4, 2007. And NOW the Speaker and her colleagues in the Democratic leadership want to ‘pack it up and go home’???”
I agree with Mr. Goehner.
Call president Bush today and ask him to call a special session of Congress to do their job and fix our energy crises.
Filed under: Democrats, GOP, John McCain, Liberal Media, Liberalism, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi, Politics, Republicans, congress, conservative movement, john boehner, news, president Bush, united states | 5 Comments »
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