Magpie

Saturday, April 1, 2006

April Fools' Day.

It's out in full force over at ~~Broadsheet~~ Bradsheet.

Don't you be drinking anything when you go over to read it, OK?

[Paid sub or ad view req'd for Salon]

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:19 PM | Get permalink

Visits from the 'night fairies.'

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we have this jaw-dropping account from the Afghanistan city of Kandahar about how the reports of the Taliban's disappearance are, as Mark Twain might say, greatly exaggerated.

The steadily worsening situation in southern Afghanistan is not the work of some ineffable Al Qaeda nebula. It is the result of the real depredations of the corrupt and predatory government officials whom the United States ushered into power in 2001, supposedly to help fight Al Qaeda, and has assiduously maintained in power since, along with an "insurgency" manufactured whole cloth across the border in Pakistan--a U.S. ally. The evidence of this connection is abundant: Taliban leaders strut openly around Quetta, Pakistan, where they are provided with offices and government-issued weapons authorization cards; Pakistani army officers are detailed to Taliban training camps; and Pakistani border guards constantly wave self-proclaimed Taliban through checkpoints into Afghanistan.

But beleaguered Afghans have a hard time getting U.S. political and military officials to focus on these two factors, which feed on each other. U.S. personnel cling to the fictions that Afghans are responsible for the local officials who rule over them--despite the overwhelming moral and material support the United States has provided these officials--and that the Pakistani government is cooperating in the war on terror. And so the Afghan villagers, frightened, vulnerable, and disillusioned, are obliged to come to terms with the "fairies who come at night."

This state of affairs is so bewildering that Kandaharis have reached an astonishing conclusion: The United States must be in league with the Taliban. They reason that America, with its power and riches, could bring an end to the "insurgency" in a month, if it so chose. They figure that America remains a close and munificent ally of Pakistan, the country that is sponsoring the "insurgency," and so the continuing violence must be a deliberate element of U.S. policy. The point is not whether there is any factual basis for this notion, it's that everyone here believes it. In other words, in a stunning irony, much of this city, the Taliban's former stronghold, is disgusted with the Americans not because of their Western culture, but because of their apparent complicity with Islamist extremists.

So do you have any questions as to why the US is losing the war in Afghanistan, too?

Via Newshog.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:57 PM | Get permalink

More on feminist blogging.

Friday's UK Guardian article on feminist blogging [see this earlier post] is, as you might imagine, generating comments on feminist blogs. I thought that Echidne's response to the piece was dead-on:

The question the article asks is whether feminist blogs might be just playthings for the rich and the educated. Then it goes on trying to strike some sparks between the second wave feminists (those whose work was supposed to have been done in the seventies) and the third wave feminists (those whose work is supposed to be done right now but might be all about sex-positivity and girliness).

My lack of forgiveness isn't because of the assertion that blogs are playthings for the wealthy and educated (and for those who blog in their parents' basements). They are, at least in the global arena. So is most anything else not having to do with what is required for basic survival, and feminist blogs are no different in this sense from any other types of blogs or from the general access to computers. But blogs, including feminist ones, do have a democratizing effect on the public discourse. Starting a blog can cost nothing, and the computer skills needed are also fairly minimal. All we need to change is the availability of the internet in poor areas. That, my friends, is not a specifically feminist problem.

When I read Kira Cochrane's Guardian article for the first time, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something wrong with that question of whether feminist blogs are just a 'plaything for the rich and well-educated' — even though I couldn't dispute the fact that these women definitely have easier access to the internet and more time to blog. But after reading Echidne's post, that light over my head went off and I went running to my copy of Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing — her early 1980s book about how writing by women has been ignored, discredited, dismissed, and otherwise made invisible. Sure enough, some of the suppression methods identified by Russ seem to apply here:

Russ: She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
Cochrane: There has also typically been a suspicion that if younger women are interested in feminism it's of a specific variety: what's sometimes called "girlie" feminism. The mainstream media tends to highlight young feminists whose outlook is "sexy". Those, for instance, who frame pole dancing as a feminist act.

Russ: She wrote it, but 'it' isn't really serious.
Cochrane: But is it all just sound and fury? The blogs reflect second-wave ideas of consciousness raising and the personal as political (many women write about their experiences of rape and sexual assault), but there's a question mark over how this feeds into grass-roots activism.

Russ: She wrote it, but there are very few of her.
Cochrane: As with second-wave feminism, this online movement is open to the accusation that it simply represents privileged white women. "Blogging is still somewhat limited, of course," says Georgia Gaden, a postgraduate researcher who has studied feminist blogs, "because although we take our access for granted, many women, globally, don't have that luxury."

I should make myself clear, here: I don't think that Cochrane should have written an uncritical puff piece about feminist blogs. All of her points I've listed here are based in reality and are, in fact, matters of discussion and disagreement among feminists — even the non-blogging sort. But put together, the way in which Cochrane uses her rhetorical questions makes her story come across as a put-down of the enterprise of feminist blogging itself — which is especially sad given that she was probably writing what she believed to be a positive story.

The negative case in which the Guardian story puts feminist blogging is emphasized by its headline:

Feminist blogs are booming. But are they globalising emancipation — or just playthings for the rich and well educated?

That headline probably isn't Cochrane's fault — the blame almost certainly lays at the feet of some Guardian editor. But the headline certainly undermines the positive parts of the article, making feminist bloggers look as though they are operating in some cloud-cuckoo-land, disconnected from women at large, from other feminists, and [possibly] from the 'real world.'

Which is really too bad.

A bit more: While writing this post, I was happy to see that How to Suppress Women's Writing is still in print. A US edition is available from the University of Texas Press. The UK edition from The Women's Press also appears to be in print. Used copies are easy to find, as this list from Bookfinder.com shows.

This magpie recommends Russ' book highly. Everything she said in the early 1980s still goes.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:08 AM | Get permalink

Take that, cynics!

In the last decade, one of the major ways in which activists have sought to help poor nations has been to pressure international lenders to forgive all or part of the crushing debts owed by these countries. And one of the main arguments used by opponents of debt relief is that it won't make any difference; that the money saved by poor nations will just get wasted or go into the pockets of corrupt officials.

Waiting in line at a Zambia health clinic

Women and children in the waiting room
of a rural health clinic in Zambia.
[Photographer unknown]

Those critics might want to take a look at what's happening in Zambia:

The government of Zambia today (1 April) introduced free health care for people living in rural areas, scrapping fees which for years had made health care inaccessible for millions.

The move was made possible using money from the debt cancellation and aid increases agreed at the G8 in Gleneagles last July, when Zambia received $4 billion of debt relief; money it is now investing in health and education.

65 per cent of Zambia's citizens live on less than a dollar a day. Until today the average trip to a clinic would have cost more than double that amount, the equivalent of a UK worker having to £120 (US$200) just to visit a clinic.

"This is one of the first concrete examples of how the G8 deal last year has made a real difference to peoples' lives," said Barbara Stocking, Director of Oxfam. "People often bemoan the lack of good news coming out of Africa — well here's an example of real progress. It shows what can happen when people both in the rich world and the developing world push their leaders to deliver. Those who backed the Make Poverty History campaign last year should be proud of this achievement."

User fees were introduced in Zambia under IMF and World Bank pressure in the early 1990s. Young girls in rural areas were the main victims of the policy as their families were rarely willing or able to pay for their treatment.

Of course, the critics of debt cancellation in the US may never have to eat their words, because — so far, at least — I've been unable to find any reference to Zambia's new health care policies in any major US media. Other than the Oxfam press release quoted in this post, the only other reference to the story we could find in a Google News search on 'Zambia health' was at AllAfrica.com — an excellent news source, but not one that's widely known. And even that was just another copy of the Oxfam release.

I guess only the bad news from poor countries is important, huh?

Via Newshog.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:16 AM | Get permalink

Iraqi nation? What Iraqi nation?

Writing in the London Review of Books, journalist Patrick Cockburn says that Iraq's religious and ethinic divisions have put the country well on the road to splitting into three parts: Kurdish, Shi'a, and Sunni.

Iraq is divided and the insurgency is strong, but the real reason for the collapse of Iraq is the weakness of the state. Ali Allawi, the finance minister, told me that corruption had reached Nigerian levels and that the government is just a parasitic entity living on oil revenues. It?'s not merely that a percentage of spending disappears into official pockets: entire budgets vanish. The US and Britain are trying to push Iyad Allawi forward as a sort of super-minister in charge of security. But while he was prime minister in 2004-5, the whole $1.3 billion defence procurement budget disappeared. Millions more were spent on a contract to protect the vital Kirkuk-Baiji oil pipeline but the money was embezzled. The few men hired to guard the pipeline usually turned out to be the same men who were blowing it up. Ali Allawi says the insurgency is largely financed by oil smuggling, and 40 to 50 per cent of the vast profits go to the resistance.

The moment when Iraq could be held together as a truly unified state has probably passed. But a weak Iraq suits many inside and outside the country and it will still remain a name on the map. American power is steadily ebbing and the British forces are largely confined to their camps around Basra. A 'national unity government' may be established but it will not be national, will certainly be disunited and may govern very little. 'The government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,' one minister said. The army and police are already split along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iranians have been the main winners in the struggle for the country. The US has turned out to be militarily and politically weaker than anybody expected. The real question now is whether Iraq will break up with or without an all-out civil war.

Most probably war is coming, but it will not be fought in all parts of Iraq. It will essentially be a battle for Baghdad between Sunni and Shia Arabs. 'The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the fighting,' a Kurdish leader told me. 'The soldiers obey whatever orders they receive from their own communities.' The parts of the country with a homogeneous population, whether Shia, Sunni or Kurdish, may well stay quiet. But in greater Baghdad, sectarian cleansing is already taking place. The place bears an ever closer resemblance to Beirut thirty years ago. The Shia Arabs have the advantage because they are the majority in the capital, but the Sunni should be able to cling on to their strongholds in the west and south of the city. The new balance of power in Iraq may be decided not by negotiations, but by militiamen fighting street by street.

Via Cursor.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:33 AM | Get permalink

It's Embarrassed by the President Day!

And what better day than April 1, eh?
Embarrassed by the President Day logo

Wear or display a brown ribbon to protest the BS from the White House! Why wear brown, you ask? From the organizers:

Firstly, wear a brown ribbon, button, clothes, whatever, in protest of all the BS coming out of the White House and stinking up the nation. Tie a brown ribbon to your car antenna as an antidote to those snarky yellow ones. Secondly, wear brown to remind the world that these guys (and gals) are nothing but modern-day brownshirts.... Thirdly, because it's true patriotism and love for our Democracy to fight these anti-Democracy SOBs in the trenches, in the voting booths, in the media, and in your own communities at any opportunity.

There's more info at the official website. Make sure to check out the list of sponsors. Heh.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:59 AM | Get permalink

Biggest Caribbean coral die-off ever.

Record water temperatures and disease have caused the worst die-off of coral in the Caribbean Sea ever recorded. Scientists report that surveys at monitoring sites throughout the Caribbean show that up to one-third of the coral is dead — but this preliminary estimate may turn out to be conservative.

The immediate cause of the coral die-off is abnormally high water temperatures in the Caribbean. These elevated temperatures kill the algae symbiotes that provide food for the coral, turning them white in the process — a process called 'bleaching.' Coral that remains bleached for more than a week will probably die.

Before this year, bleaching occurred in the Caribbean only during short periods and only among certain species. But the current bleaching episode is taking place all over the sea and among a wide range of species. Much of the coral killed this year had already been weakened by bleaching from last year.

Dead coral in the Caribbean. [Photo: AP]

From an AP report on the die-off:

[According to National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller] "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months...."

The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates — mostly from warming waters — have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what's happening worldwide "an underwater holocaust."

And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of coral reefs.

"The prognosis is not good," said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will investigate coral reef mortality in Jamaica. "If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won't survive in their current state...."

"The 2005 event is bigger than all the previous 20 years combined," he said.

What happened in the Caribbean would be the equivalent of every city in the United States recording a record high temperature at the same time, Eakin said. And it remained hot for weeks, even months, stressing the coral.

So do we have to lose all of the reefs in the Caribbean and other oceans before Dubya's administration takes global warming seriously?

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:04 AM | Get permalink

Friday, March 31, 2006

No, we can't stop our discussion to hear about your problem.

Bitch Ph.D. explains one more time why feminists aren't particularly interested in hearing about how bad men have it, too.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:07 PM | Get permalink

Happy birthday!

It's not just Magpie's 3rd blogiversary today, but I notice that it's also the second birthday for Air America Radio, the US liberal talk network featuring programs by [among others] Randi Rhodes and Al Franken. [And, of course, this magpie's big radio crush: Rachel Maddow.] We know that Air America must be doing its job, because right-wingers spend a fair amount of effort predicting that the network is going to disappear Any Minute Now.

While we have our criticisms of Air America — get Al Franken a new co-host, dammit! — we sure are glad they're on the air and we wish them many more good years.

Air America's website is here. You can listen to them live here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:43 PM | Get permalink

Feminist blogging starts getting noticed.

The UK Guardian has an article on feminist blogging today, and they didn't do a half-bad job of it. The Carnival of Feminists [excerpted here twice a month] got a nice mention:

Go online, though, and you are immediately struck by the huge variety of outlook and opinions. This is most evident at the twice-monthly Carnival of Feminists, set up by British blogger Natalie Bennett, who also runs Philobiblion, a women's history blog. Each carnival (usually on the first and third Wednesday of the month) is hosted by a different blogger, who invites people to contribute articles on current events or a general theme: "radical feminism", for instance, or "1970s feminism and what it means today". The host then chooses the best pieces, putting links to between 50 to 100 articles up on their site and providing a short commentary on each. This effectively creates a major new anthology of feminist thought every two weeks.

Mentions also went to Philobiblon, Feministing, Bitch PhD, Broadsheet, F-word, Pandagon, AngryBlackBitch, Mind the Gap and Gendergeek — although it certainly would have been nice if the Guardian had supplied links. [Are you listening, Guardian?] If you're unfamiliar with any of those excellent blogs, follow the links.

Via Philobiblon.

More: One of the gendergeeks responds to the Guardian article.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:28 PM | Get permalink

The attempted murder of New Orleans.

I've been meaning to Mike Davis' piece about the 'reconstruction' of New Orleans for a few days now, but somehow it kept getting put on the back-burner — a fate it definitely didn't deserve. The piece is a brilliant indictment of local politicos, the [mostly] white business community, and Dubya's administration for their attempt to use the Katrina disaster as an opportunity for social engineering on a massive scale. Without, of course, the consent of the people being 'engineered.'

In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly" and mount "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"--the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.

Davis' article is a most definite must-read. You'll find the whole thing here.

Via The Nation.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:47 PM | Get permalink

Oh what a tangled web.

In an excellent piece in the National Journal, Murray Waas reports that, before the invasion of Iraq, Dubya was warned warned several times that Saddam Hussein's much ballyhooed purchases of high-strength aluminum tubes likely didn't have anything to do with building nuclear weapons. Those aluminum tubes were cited publicly by both Dubya and Secretary of State Colin Powell as part of the reason why toppling Saddam Hussein was necessary.

Saddam's aluminum tubes

The sinister aluminum tubes.
[Undated photo from US Department of State]

[Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

The previously undisclosed review by Hadley was part of a damage-control effort launched after former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged that Bush's claims regarding the uranium were not true. The CIA had sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate the purported procurement efforts by Iraq; he reported that they were most likely a hoax.

Just this material would be enough to make Waas' story important, but there's more. According to Waas, the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame — who's married to Joseph Wilson — was part of a larger scheme to keep the public from knowing that one of the prez's main rationales for going to war had been challenged — at least until after Dubya could be re-elected.

It's a complicated story and Waas' piece is dense, but it's essential reading. So go read it.

If you have trouble connecting all the dots, you should also look at the BooMan's annotated version of the Waas piece over here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:45 AM | Get permalink

Happy blogiversary to us!

Magpie turns three today. Who'd have thunk it?

When we made our first post on March 31, 2003:

Dubya was president.
Right-wingers and religious fundamentalists were running the US government.
The US was involved in a dangerous, no-win war in Iraq.
The Democrats were hell-bent on nominating John Kerry for president, one of this magpie's least favorite choices.

Three years later:

Dubya is president.
Right-wingers and religious fundamentalists are running the US government.
The US is involved in a dangerous, no-win war in Iraq.
The Democrats are hell-bent on nominating Hillary Clinton for president, one of this magpie's least favorite choices.

Obviously, we all have a lot of work to do.

Thanks to everyone who reads Magpie and to all the bloggers who show their excellent taste by quoting from Magpie or linking to it. Special thanks to Mary and Natasha, our blogmates at Pacific Views, for helping to keep me sane. And big thanks to ... well, y'all know who you are.

I hope that the US and the world are in better shape for the end of Magpie's 4th year.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:53 AM | Get permalink

No comment.

Buried in a story about corporate profits in the US in the last quarter of 2005:

Before-tax corporate profits increased 14.4% to an annual rate of $1.48 trillion, or 11.6% of GDP...

It's the largest share of GDP for profits since the second quarter of 1966.

Via MarketWatch.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 AM | Get permalink

Going, going ...

Most of us don't have to worry a lot about global warming on an immediate level. Sitting here in my home in Portland, for example, I don't have to fear that rising sea levels will have the Pacific knocking at my door. Sea levels would have to rise 60 meters [200 feet] for that to happen, and even the most pessimistic predictions I've seen only expect a rise of 7 meters [22 feet] or so above the current level.

But if I were living in the island nation of Tuvalu, things would be very different.

Look quick before Tuvalu is gone

Aerial view of Funafut Island, Tuvalu.
Notice any mountains?

Tuvalu is a small country of about 11,000 people, located about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. The highest point in the country is just 5 meters [16 feet] above see level, and many places are only one meter [about a yard] above the sea. Given this, many predictions put Tuvalu under water some time after mid-century. Even now, islanders have noticed that high tides are higher and beaches smaller, and that water is coming up through the soil in many places.

Alexandra Berzon has written a sobering article about how global warming is already affecting the people of Tuvalu, and what they are doing to avert — or just cope with — the likely disappearance of their homeland within the lifetime of many now alive.

Scientists predict that climate change will have a disproportionate impact on underdeveloped nations. Activists are pushing for recognition of "environmental" or "climate" refugees in the hopes that industrialized nations will better understand the side effects of climate change if a whole new class of "refugees" come knocking on their doors. In a 2003 Guardian article, the New Economics Foundation's Andrew Simms wrote, "Creating new legal obligations to accept environmental refugees would help ensure that industrialized countries accept the consequences of their choices. In certain circumstances, the suggestion that the solution must lie at the national level could be absurd -- the national level may be under water." And he's not alone in his thinking: In a letter to Nature magazine last year, the Council for Responsible Genetics' Sujatha Byravan and Tellus Institute fellow Sudhir Chella Rajan proposed that countries responsible for climate change take exiles in proportion to the CO2 emissions they release. Under that plan, the United States, which last century produced around 30 percent of global carbon emissions, would house around 30 percent of the displaced. That translates into a quarter to three-quarters of a million additional refugees a year.

This issue is already being played out on a small scale in the halls of government in Australia and New Zealand. Ministers there are considering whether to grant Tuvaluans and other threatened islanders special immigration privileges because of their plight. Helen Clark, New Zealand's liberal Labor Party prime minister, is reported to have unofficially promised Tuvalu's leaders that New Zealand will be a refuge for all Tuvaluans in the event of an environmental crisis. But some conservatives, like New Zealand First M.P. Pita Paraone, say other nations should share the burden: "Tuvaluans need to be aware that there are other countries in the Pacific basin that can accommodate them just as easily as we can."

In Australia, the liberal-opposition Labor Party recently released a climate-change plan saying Australia should start preparing to accept thousands of islanders -- including those from Tuvalu -- into the country when their homes become uninhabitable because of climate change. And the country's Green Party recently introduced a motion in Parliament that would have officially recognized this class of migrants. But, according to the Australian newspaper the Mercury, Environment Minister Ian Campbell dismissed those suggestions: "To start planning an evacuation of the Pacific is really a ludicrous policy. It's absurd," he said. "The Australian government's policy is to work closely with the Pacific island nations." But that's assuming, of course, that these Pacific island nations continue to exist.

As Berzon points out, it's not only island states like Tuvalu that have to worry about relatively small rises in sea level. Low-lying areas of mainland nations will be affected, too. Bangladesh, the Netherlands, and the US state of Florida immediately come to mind.

You can read the rest of Berzon's Tuvalu article here, at Salon.

[Paid sub or ad view req'd]

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

History does repeat itself.

Last year, the US media ignored the Downing Street Memo, which showed that Dubya's administration was planning to rumble in Iraq while publicly claiming that it didn't want a war.

Now, the US media are, with very few exceptions, ignoring a similar UK government memo released by the NY Times.

What does it take to get the US media to report a 'smoking gun'? Pointing it at their heads?

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Silence is ... interesting.

You may have noticed that a deafening silence has been emanating from Washington since the story broke on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia may have a secret nuclear weapons project.

Given the past record of Dubya's administration, we're betting that some or all of the following things are going on at the White House, Pentagon, and State department:

The administration didn't have a clue that the Saudis had an active nuclear weapons program.
The Saudis had earlier assured Washington that they didn't have a nuclear weapons progrem.
The administration can't figure out how to respond, especially given the trouble it's making for Iran because of its nuclear program.
The administration is hoping that if it doesn't say anything, the public won't notice that anything is wrong.
The administration is hoping that if it doesn't say anything, the Saudi nuclear weapons program will just go away.

I'll keep you posted on this one.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Turning blue.

The March Survey USA polls of all 50 states are out, and things continue to look bad for Dubya and the GOP. [I so love good news!]

It's so blue

[Data: Survey USA, March 2006; Map: dreaminonempty]

Dubya's overall approval continued to drop nationally, dipping four more points to put the prez at 36%. One of the most important factors in the drop is that Dubya is losing support among Republican voters.

If you go over to Daily Kos, dreaminonempty slices and dices the new poll data in more ways than you can imagine.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:24 PM | Get permalink

Still second-class citizens.

Lesbians and gay men who live in Massachusetts may be able to get married, but out-of-state couples are out of luck.

In two related 6-1 decisions, the state's Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples from other states cannot marry in Massachusetts unless their home state also allows same-sex marriages.

Not married

Amy Zimmerman [left], her partner Tanya Wexler, and their children.
Zimmerman and Wexler sued Massachusetts for the right to marry, and lost their case today.
[Photo: Chitose Suzuki/AP]

According to the court, Massachusetts laws 'have not endowed nonresidents with an unfettered right to marry.' As a result, wrote Justice Francis Spina in the majority opionion, the fact that the state's high court previously ruled in favor of same-sex marriages 'does not now compel a conclusion that nonresident same-sex couples, who have no intention of living in Massachusetts, have an identical right to secure a marriage license that they could not otherwise obtain in their home states.' So, unless a couple hails from Rhode Island and New York, their Massachusetts marriages are now invalid. And even the validity of marriages from those two states has been kicked back down to lower courts to decide.

In its decision, the high court upheld a rarely used 1913 law originally passed to deal with the 'problem' of mixed-race marriages. Even the majority admitted that, by upholding this law, they were placing a much heavier burden on lesbian and gay couples, rather than heterosexual couples.

Justice Roderick Ireland was the court's only dissenting voice today. He voted to rule the 1913 law unconstitutional, saying it was 'deeply rooted in discriminatory notions of marriage:

[The] resurrection of a moribund statute to deny nonresident same-sex couples access to marriage is not only troubling ... but also fundamentally unfair. This law has not been enforced for almost 100 years, and certainly never with the vitriol on display.

Via NY Times and AP.

More: I've found the text of the decision [available here as a PDF], and here's the full context of the dissenting commments by Justice Ireland:

Moreover, the Commonwealth's resurrection of a moribund statute to deny nonresident same-sex couples access to marriage is not only troubling and, as the Superior Court judge stated, offends the "spirit" of Goodridge [the earlier decision allowing same-sex marriages], but also is fundamentally unfair. This law has not been enforced for almost one hundred years, and certainly never with the vitriol currently on display. To use a law that has not been used for over one hundred years to deny same-sex couples access to marriage contravenes the public policy of this State to protect all persons, including homosexuals. We have seen this before, and we declared "history must yield to a more fully developed understanding of the invidious quality of the discrimination" before us.

Ireland's dissent begins at page 23 of the ruling. It's worth wading through the legal stuff to see how Justice Ireland lays out the political reasons that are really behind barring non-resident couples from marrying. We were especially interested in his comparison of the current court's decision with the high court's 1836 ruling that a slave brought to Massachusetts becomes free even if the laws of their home state barred that freedom.court decision

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:36 PM | Get permalink

Obscenity.

US Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said that 'I know it when I see it.'

The BBC, however, is more systematic. They take a survey.

Via badscience.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:36 PM | Get permalink

That gesture of Scalia's.

Ever since the story broke about US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia allegedly giving the finger to his critics while at a Boston Church [see this earlier post], both Scalia and the right-wing echo chamber has been saying that the justice did no such thing. A freelance photographer snapped a picture of Scalia's gesture, but that photo hasn't been available to settle the argument.

Well, today the Boston Herald published the photo.

Not the finger, but ...

Not the finger, but definitely obscene.
[Photo: Peter A. Smith]

From today's Herald's story:

[Peter] Smith was working as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese's weekly newspaper at a special Mass for lawyers Sunday when a Herald reporter asked the justice how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality as a judge given his public worship.

"The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, 'To my critics, I say, 'Vaffanculo,'" punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.

The Italian phrase means "(expletive) you."

To which I'll add that, on the few occasions when I've been the recipient of this gesture from Sicilian men, it's been very clear that they were saying exactly what the article claims Scalia meant.

So while the right-wingers are right that Scalia didn't give the finger, it's definitely true that the meaning of Scalia's gesture was exactly the same as if he had flipped his critics off.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:04 PM | Get permalink

Saving the Republic from the forces of perversion.

This past weekend, Christian right-wingers gathered in Washington for a conference called 'The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006.' ['Values voter', you'll recall from the 2004 US election, is the code word that the right uses instead of 'religious fundamentalist' or 'fundamentalist Christian' — neither of which are very palatable to non-fundamentalist voters.] Obviously unbothered by the question of whether there can be a 'war on Christians' in a country where the religious right is a major force in the current administration, right-wing Christian leaders and GOP politicos spent the conference trying to figure out how to rally the Christian fundamentalist rank and file and keep the forces of darkness from gaining control of the country in this year's midterm elections.

Embattled GOP congressmember Tom DeLay comes to Jesus
during the 'War on Christians' conference.
[Photo: Win Mcnamee/Getty Images]

Journalist Michelle Goldberg had the strong nerves needed to attend the conference, and she's written up her account of the proceedings over at Salon. If you're not already scared by the hard-core Christian right, you will be after reading her story.

I was especially struck by the following:

Laurence White, a bearded Lutheran pastor in a clerical collar who followed DeLay, repeated a quote that he, like many before him, erroneously ascribed to Alexis DeTocqueville: "America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will also cease to be great."

"My friends," White said in a stentorian voice like burnished oak, "America is no longer good. Unrighteousness, evil, corruption, perversion and death are now standard operating procedure in the United States of America. If we do not put an end to it now, in this moment of divine destiny, then God will and God should judge America."

This was remarkable language to hear at a political forum. Imagine if Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi gave a conference address that was followed by a furious condemnation of her country. She would have to scramble to distance herself from it and would be excoriated in the press regardless. But it's not unusual to encounter this kind of thing at one of Scarborough's events because they manage to bring together congressmen ... with some of the most radical elements of what was once the right-wing fringe.

That last phrase — 'most radical elements of what was once the right-wing fringe' — points to what this magpie finds so scary about this lot. Even back in the 1970s, religious fundamentalism of this stripe was way out of the mainstream. Nobody took these folks seriously then because their beliefs were so wacky. But move ahead a few decades and those same folks are now within a heartbeat of gaining control of the country and forcing their brand of theocracy on all of us.

We don't dare underestimate them.

[Paid sub or ad view required for Salon]

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:04 PM | Get permalink

Making sense of Israel's election.

No, I'm not going to do that for you. I'm just as confused by the results as anyone else.

But journalist/novelist Linda Grant has some interesting observations on the election that I haven't seen anywhere else:

One of the things I first noticed when I returned to visit Israel in 1998 after a long absence, was the number of old people you saw. In Britain, they are invisible; in Israel, they are sitting in pavement cafes. But most noticeable of all was the sight of elderly men and women being guided along the street by Filipino and Thai care workers. Israel first opened its doors to migrant labour at the time of the first intifada, when it restricted the numbers of Palestinians crossing the borders each day to do the low-paid jobs Israelis refuse to do. Thousands of care workers from the far east came to Israel to work, to live in the most intimate proximity with elderly people the state had forgotten.

The elderly people who voted yesterday for the Pensioners party were among the first Israelis. They were the young, ecstatic crowd gathered in May 1948 on Rothschild Boulevard, crying and laughing with delight as Ben Gurion read aloud the declaration of independence. They were the generation that built the country, that fought its wars for it, that believed in a better tomorrow after the nightmare of the very recent past. They turned their backs on yesterday, with all its horrors, and set their faces to the future.

You simply cannot hope to come close to understanding Israel by dismissing it as a western colonialist plot. It was made up of real people, not sets of ideological constructs — immigrants from the recent horrors of Europe. And they felt they were literally fighting for their lives

The bitterness and anger they feel at the robbing of their benefits by Netanyahu's Thatcherite economic programmes, their poverty, their humiliating dependence on the kindness of strangers, is an indication of the depths of their betrayal by the state they made; by a government who robbed them blind to hand over their pensions to settlement construction, to give tax rebates and mortgage relief to fanatics who don't give a damn about the state of Israel and its inhabitants, only the land of Israel, this little bit of turf right here that the Torah mentions. Holy ground and to hell with you, whether it's your olive trees growing on what under international law is Palestinian soil, or you are 75 years old with a bag of rusty medals, struggling to keep warm in winter on the coastal plain.

So why did so many young people propel the Pensioners party into the Knesset? Somehow, between Sunday and Tuesday, it became cool; it was the hip thing to do. The young seem to be giving their vote not to the political classes, to Israel to Zionism, but to the actual individuals who laid the first foundations for the country where they were born. Watch that trend.

Via Comment is free.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:34 AM | Get permalink

How stupid is the US media?

They can be pretty damn stupid, says writer Alisa Valdes-Rodrigues.

Over at La Queen Sucia, she opens a few windows in on the media's ignorance as revealed by the coverage the 'immigrant issue.' Here are a few of her points:

1. The vast majority of Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S. (75 percent of us) were born and raised here, including many of us who have roots here that predate the arrival of the pilgrims....

4. Immigrants to contemporary USA come from EVERYWHERE. There are, for instance, 100,000 Nigerians in Houston, and tens of thousands of ILLEGAL Irish in Boston and other parts of the nation. If this debate is truly about immigration, as opposed to racist portrayals of Latinos, please curb your coverage to be more responsible....

6. You can be a Mexican American and never have had an ancestor come over the US border; vast portions of the United States of today USED TO BE MEXICO or SPAIN. If you failed to learn this in high school, your teachers should be fired....

13. Please tell us what the problems are that are caused by illegal immigrants. Don't just say there is a "debate". Tell us in concrete terms what the risks and dangers are being brought to the US by "illegal" immigrants. Now tell us how these problems, if any, differ from the problems caused by U.S. citizens of all other backgrounds. Be precise. Can't find any? Thought so.

She tears CNN's Lou Dobbs and the rest of the US media a few other new ones, too. Read the rest here.

Via Feministe.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:07 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Since Saudi Arabia is our great friend.

I'm sure it's not a problem that the Saudis may be running a secret nuclear weapons program.

Right?

Via AFP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:02 PM | Get permalink

The Kaloogian story keeps getting better.

When we last left right-wing GOP congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian, he'd blamed that fake picture of Baghdad that appeared on his campaign website on one of his staffers. [In case you haven't read our earlier post, that photo showed a street in Istanbul, Turkey, not Baghdad.] And he promised that a new, accurate photo would be going up some time today.

Well, the photo's up and here it is:

No bad news here

And here's the new caption:

Downtown Baghdad
We originally posted a photograph not of Baghdad, Iraq but from Istanbul, Turkey where our delegation traveled on the way home to the United States. We apologize for this mistake. We have corrected it with a photograph we took from Baghdad. We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it — in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.

This magpie might just be another one of those defeatists who don't support our troops and give aid and comfort to the terrorists, but I'll be damned whether I can tell from that photo whether Baghdad is 'calm and stable' or whether there's wholesale murder going on in the streets. Regardless, I doubt that Kaloogian [or whichever staffer he'll say took the new photo] learned anything of importance about Iraq while standing on that hotel balcony in the Green Zone.

In the scheme of things, Kaloogian's fake photo of Baghdad probably isn't a big deal in and of itself. But what it exemplifies for me is that disdain for the truth and a disrespect for peoples' intelligence that is so common among members of the GOP's right wing [which is most of the party, these days]. Following the typical gameplan for dealing with political problems, Kaloogian initially lied about whether the photo was accurate, then blamed the photo on someone else, and finally had put up a photo that had no bearing on the point he was trying to make. And through it all, he's claimed that the people complaining are just a bunch of nitpickers.

Does that remind you of anyone else, hmmm?

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:24 PM | Get permalink

If you're going to tell a lie.

You should at try to cover your tracks.

A case in point: Howard Kaloogian is a right-wing Republican running in the special election to fill the remaining term of Duke Cunningham, the US representative who recently resigned his office after being convicted of tax evasion and bribery. On his website, Kaloogian has pictures of his 'fact-finding' trip to Iraq, including the photo below [located here on the Kaloogian website], which supposedly shows the perfectly calm streets of downtown Baghdad — no bombs going off, no gunplay, no fires. Obviously all those press accounts of how bad things are in Iraq are wrong, right?

Not Baghdad

Kaloogian's caption: 'We took this photo of dow[n]town Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it — in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.'

Not exactly.

Like kpete at Democratic Underground, I thought that the photo was rather suspicious right away. Over on the left, for example, there's a couple walking hand-in-hand, with the woman wearing a fairly tight and revealing top [at least by present-day Iraqi standards]. Given the activities of fundamentalist moral police in Iraq these day, it seemed rather unlikely that this couple could idly stroll along the streets of Baghdad.

But even more damning are the street signs: They're written in Roman characters, rather than in the Arabic script. that I'd expect to see. Interestingly, there's a country that borders Iraq where signs are generally written in Roman characters: Turkey. [The founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, ordered Arabic script replaced with a modified Roman alphabet in 1928.]

And it turns out that the photo does indeed show Turkey. To be precise, it's a street scene in Bakirköy, a suburb of Istanbul, Turkey's largest and most cosmopolitan city. A photogrpaher named Faruk has posted a set of Bakirköy photos online, and the third photo from the bottom of the page shows the same street as in Kaloogian's 'Baghdad' photo. Over at Left on the Lake, Daniel Cody has posted the Kaloogian and Faruk photos next to each other, pointing out objects that appear in both photos.

All of this leaves us wondering why the hell Kaloogian posted the fake photo in the first place. I mean, it's not like he can blame the photo on an 'overzealous campaign worker' — Kaloogian wrote the caption for the photo himself. Didn't Kaloogian expect that, given that he's running for Cunningham's seat, that left-wing bloggers would be going over his website with a fine-tooth comb? Or did Kaloogian figured that no one would care if he was caught in a lie? After all, Dubya's been getting away with that sort of behavior for years.

Inquiring magpies want to know.

There's a lively discussion of the Kaloogian photos going on in the comments to this post at Daily Kos.

More: I spoke too soon about Kaloogian not being able to blame the 'Baghdad' photo on a campaign worker. After initially defending the photo, Kaloogian is now blaming both the photo's appearance on his website and the caption on one of his staffers.

By the way, Kaloogian didn't go to Istanbul on his trip, either.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:49 AM | Get permalink

The time is now.

Shaula Evans has the question of the hour. [Note the placement of the asterisk.]

At what point do we say dictatorship? At what point do we say banana republic? At what point do we reach the tipping point where Americans will stand up and fight* to get their country back?

For those Americans not yet divorced from reality, the ACLU makes a compelling case that the time is now.

Skipping to the very bottom of the post, we find out why Evans thought she needed to use that asterisk:

* Gentle readers, I am an immigrant with an FBI file of my own. Please allow me to very specifically clarify that when I say 'fight,' I mean use every legal and non-violent method possible. And keep in mind that by advocation political dissent and non-violence, in this Republican administration's eyes I have just identified myself as a terrorist.

Think about that.

Think hard about that.

Via Tsuredzuregusa.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:39 AM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

From time to time, Magpie links to entries from the latest photoshopping contest at Worth1000 [as we did in this recent post]. But a lot of the time, the stuff at Worth1000 is rather predictable and pedestrian — technically good but lacking soul. But even in the most lackluster contests, like the current one in which people took old posters and turned them into satirical propaganda for unlikely subjects, there can be some gems.

For example, the poster below is absolutely brilliant.

He knows!

You can view a larger version of the poster here.

And don't miss this one — which is on the same subject and, I'd guess, from the same hand.

After seeing what Santa's really up to, this magpie's definitely going to be watching her step.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:09 AM | Get permalink

Swinging between their worse and better angels.

Over at Body and Soul, Jeanne has a compelling post that views the current immigration debate in the US through the lens of her mother's loyalty to Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic party. I was particularly struck by the post's ending:

I had a surprising experience with this yesterday, with the way people can swing wildly between their worse and better angels. I drove a very conservative elderly neighbor to the hospital, and sat with him for quite a while in the waiting room. He told me something I never knew about him before: He spent almost his entire childhood in an orphanage. He left it and went straight into the navy.

That's a hard way to begin life, I said. My father escaped a tiny, dirt poor town in Tennessee by going into the navy. It's the only way out for a lot of people, isn't it?

While we were talking, Fox News was running on a tv bolted to the wall. It was too noisy to hear anything, but we saw pictures of crowds waving Mexican and American flags. A man sitting across from us grumbled at the television -- something about people breaking the law and now demanding rights.

My neighbor, who I have heard make innumberable negative comments about unions, illegal immigrants, and liberals, looked up at the tv. Oh damn. I was about to ask how his granddaughter was doing, quick, before the subject could turn to politics, when he said, quietly, almost the way my mother spoke the uncomfortable truth about people who didn't like Roosevelt, "I can't blame them. They just want to work."

"People take whatever way out they can find," I said.

And he agreed. People do that. People like him.

Jeanne is always worth reading, but sometimes — like with this post — she's really worth reading. The full post is here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:06 AM | Get permalink

Wanted: Dead or alive.

Political cartoonist Jimmy Margulies points a finger at the sinister presence luring illegal immigrants to the US.

The criminal revealed!

[Cartoon © 2006 Jimmy Margulies]

You can see more of Margulies' cartoons here.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Yet another way that the Iraq war is like the Vietnam war.

An increasing number of deserters from the US military are seeking asylum in Canada.

Hundreds of deserters from the US armed forces have crossed into Canada and are now seeking political refugee status there, arguing that violations of the rules of war in Iraq by the US entitle them to asylum.

A decision on a test case involving two US servicemen is due shortly and is being watched with interest by fellow servicemen on both sides of the border. At least 20 others have already applied for asylum and there are an estimated 400 in Canada out of more than 9,000 who have deserted since the conflict started in 2003.

From UK Guardian, via WB42 5:30 Report With Doug Krile.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Your [US] tax dollars at work. In Alaska. Again.

First, there was the infamous 'bridge to nowhere,' a US$ 200 million span linking Ketchikan [pop. 14,500] to Gravina Island [pop. 50 on a good day] — funds for which were included in Dubya's latest budget. {See our 2004 Pacific Views post for details.]

But one boondoggle wasn't enough for Dubya's administration. The Department of Homeland Security set its sights on Dillingham [pop. 2400] — a southwest Alaska town accessible from the rest of the country only by air or sea. While you or I might not think there's a grave threat of terrorism there, Homeland Security knows that terrorists could sneak a dirty bomb into Dillingham, put it on a barge to Seattle, and Boom! No more Emerald City.

It's to prevent such a tragedy that Dillingham's city government asked for — and Homeland Security gave them — a US$ 202,000 grant to install surveillance cameras all over town. 80 cameras, in fact, 60 of which are already in place. That's one camera for every 30 residents. For comparison, the port at Anchorage [pop. 627,000] has only 40 cameras.

A quick search found that some of Dillingham's cameras can be accessed online, so this magpie decided to go hunting for terrorists. The shot below of the city dockyard shows what is obviously some sort of communication from al-Qaeda.

View from one of Dillingham's cameras

A message to Osama?

Although the terrorist operatives have done their best to obscure the meaning of their message, they haven't been able to fool Magpie's crack team of analytic and cryptographic experts. In a Magpie exclusive, I can now reveal what the terrorists are saying: 'Hi' is code for 'Please leave the dirty bomb here. Kiss Seattle goodbye.' And 'Mae' is al-Qaeda's code name for Osama bin Laden. Good thing Dillingham put up those cameras, eh?

Getting serious, though, the Dillingham cameras are not only a serious invasion of residents' privacy, but an example of how state and local governments are using Homeland Security money for questionable [if not totally ridiculous] projects. And doing so while legitimate security needs at the country's major ports go unmet.

It's anyone's guess how long Dillingham's cameras will stay up. Not everyone in town is happy being on candid camera, and there's currently a drive to force the city government to remove the cameras, led by a former Dillingham mayor.

Via LA Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:45 AM | Get permalink

Remember Salam Pax?

If you were reading Magpie [or any number of other blogs] in the days immediately before and after the invasion of Iraq, you undoubtedly read posts about the 'Bagdad blogger,' Salam Pax, and his blog Where is Raed? Although there was some doubt about the blog's authenticity in right-wing circles, Pax's claim to be blogging from Baghdad was true, and he provided some of the only unfiltered accounts from inside Iraq during the lead-up to the war, and during the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

Since Pax's identity was a closely guarded secret, I'd never seen a photo of him until just now, when we ran into an article about his March 24 appearance at San Jose State University in California.

Finally, a photo of Salam Pax

'Baghdad blogger' Salam Pax [left] answers a question from an audience member.
[Photo: Spartan Daily]

From the Spartan Daily account of Pax's appearance:

"I thought that the moment the bombs would drop, that would be the last time I was blogging," Pax said....

Pax, who is in his early 30s, said it was strange to watch Baghdad be torn apart by bombs on television.

"You feel the ground rumbling," Pax said, "and a couple of seconds later, you see the screen flare up and you see where the bombs are falling...."

Every morning after the nighttime bombings, Pax and some members of his family would venture out to see the damage firsthand. When Pax's Internet connection was working, he would blog about the destruction he saw.

"I avoid looking at those entries," he said.

Pax said the early days of the war were "bad and strange and weird."

Although it was hard for Pax, who studied architecture, to see some of his favorite buildings destroyed, he said there was a sort of "euphoria" in the air when the war started.

"I was one of the people that were convinced there was absolutely no way we could get rid of Saddam on our own," Pax said. "We had to basically make a deal with the devil."

Via Doc Searls.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:13 AM | Get permalink

Counting the cost of food.

And not merely the price any of us pays when we buy food at a market, but the energy cost of that food. In a 2004 article that's even more pertinent now than it was then, Richard Manning looks at the true cost of what we eat: The cost of producing agricultural chemicals and transporting food from one place to another — often from one end of the earth to the other. The financial and environmental costs from how industrial agriculture depletes the soil and puts nitrogen where it shouldn't be, like in the 'dead zone' at the mouth of the Mississippi. The human cost as grain is used to feed cattle rather than feed people. And how all those costs eventually can be traced back to oil.

America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled "processed," meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America's poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food....

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way—and it appears they will—we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a "clean fuel." This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs' demands for fuel compete with the poor's demand for grain.

On a more day-to-day level, writer Chad Heeter looks closely at the energy cost of his breakfast, and finds that [metaphically, at least] he's eating Valvoline, not driving a Prius.

Take that box of McCann's oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, healthy goodness: a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices. Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the flakes require a few steps 'twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann's Web site illustrates each step of cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes. Those five essential steps require significant energy.

Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which in turn is inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. Only then does my breakfast leave Ireland and travel 5,000 fuel-gorging, carbon-dioxide-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in California.

Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps suggests birthplace in the good old Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, stamped "A Product of Chile," tells all — and what it speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California.

From Harper's and San Francisco Chronicle, via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:36 AM | Get permalink

Pop quiz!

You're in Canada and you want to get one of the following into the United States. Which is more likely to be stopped by Homeland Security?

A package of Canadian prescription drugs, sent through the mail.
A shipment containing enough radioactive material to make a 'dirty bomb,' hand-carried across the border and accompanied by fake Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents.

Hint: The 13,000 packages recently confiscated by Homeland Security weren't radioactive.

Another hint: US drug manufacturers won't lose any money if the package makes it into the country.

For details, go here and here.

Via CNN and Boston Globe.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:10 AM | Get permalink

Boston stats explode another racial myth.

You know, the one about how drug addiction is something that happens in 'the ghetto' among 'those people.' And how, since 'those people' have so little self-control and respect for the law, they 'deserve' whatever bad stuff life dishes out to them.

New statistics show that, at least in Boston, the racists don't have the numbers to back them up. According to the city's health commission, three out of four people who died from drug overdoses in the past five years were white, even though whites make up only half of the city's population. That proportion held up over the full five years that were studied.

The figures show the deadly grip of heroin, OxyContin, and other drugs tightening in Boston, where 50 percent more residents died from drugs in 2003 than in 1999, the time period covered by the study. Of the 145 drug-related deaths in 2003, most from overdoses, 94 of victims were white, 32 black, and 19 Hispanic....

Drug counselors confirmed the city's findings on racial differences in mortality rates, part of an exhaustive annual report on the health of Bostonians. For example, among the 1,000 people treated in 2004 by Victory Programs Inc., a network of 18 residential treatment centers in Boston, 62 percent were white, 22 percent were black, and 11 percent were Hispanic, officials there said.

I'd love to see figures for other US cities. I bet the trends are similar.

Via Boston Globe.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:06 AM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Covers of Soviet kids' books from the 1920s and 1930s!

The early years of the Soviet Union were a time of cultural and artistic ferment. The graphic style of that era has become so familiar that present day art and advertising often lifts designs from Soviet propaganda posters. Most people [including me, until now] don't realize that the same innovative graphics appeared in children's books of the time.

Soviet-era children's book

Fedorino gore [Fedora's grief], c. 1930.
[Cover art: V. Tvardovskii]

The book cover shown above comes from an excellent online exhibition of Soviet-era children's book covers from the collection of the International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands. In trying to find out more about Soviet children's literature, I also found an equally good online exhibit of Soviet kids' books from the special collections at Canada's McGill University. Both are big fun!

From the intro to the McGill exhibit:

Among the many radical changes in the Soviet Union after the 1917 Revolution, the transformation of children's books offers one of the most vivid reminders of the vast ambitions of the new social order. Building simultaneously upon the progressive legacy of the 19th century Russian literature and upon the dazzling tradition of Russian Futurism, a linguistic, literary and artistic movement that galvanized Russian intellectuals in the early decades of this century, post-Revolutionary publishing for children introduced a vast array of new measures that transmogrified this previously undistinguished genre. In addition to the powerful visual impact of the boldly designed books, there were marked increases in the number of titles published annually, a skyrocketing in the size of individual editions and the creation of an entire branch of the publishing industry dedicated solely to children's literature.

In the first decade after the Revolution, general book production climbed from 26,000 to 44,000 titles a year; the number of copies published rose from 133 million to 190 million. Children's books naturally followed the mass trend and a first printing of 100,000 and up was common.... Other significant factors included, on the one hand, an often blatantly propagandistic service to the demands of Communist education but, on the other, the possibility of creative refuge for major authors and artists unwilling or unable to participate in the standard celebratory odes to Soviet leaders.

Thanks to MetaFilter for the tip about the IISH collection.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 AM | Get permalink

Monday, March 27, 2006

What's next? 'Palestinians only' water fountains and restrooms?

Amira Hass reports on the Israeli military's plans for two-level highways in the West Bank, with Palestinian traffic on the bottom.

Via Haaretz.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:14 PM | Get permalink