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WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Magpie is a former journalist, attempted historian [No, you can't ask how her thesis is going], and full-time corvid of the lesbian persuasion. She keeps herself in birdseed by writing those bad computer manuals that you toss out without bothering to read them. She also blogs too much when she's not on deadline, both here and at Pacific Views.

Magpie roosts in Portland, Oregon, where she annoys her housemates (as well as her cats Medea, Whiskers, and Jane Doe) by attempting to play Irish music on the fiddle and concertina.

If you like, you can send Magpie an email!



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Saturday, March 26

Ooooooh, shiny!

Trash your favorite website!

Sorry about that!


You can blow it up with nuclear weapons, pulverize it with meteor strikes, and have dinosaurs trample it, among other things. Big fun!

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:56 PM | Get permalink



We've been trying not to post on the Terri Schiavo story ...

But this news report out of Florida really gives us the creeps:

Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The [Miami] Herald has learned.

Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.

For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called "a showdown."

In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

"We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in," said a source with the local police.

"The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene," said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. "When the sheriff's department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off."

The incident, known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday's events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge's order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge's order whenever an agency appeals it.

And that's just the overview, folks. You can read the details here.

If what had happened before this incident hadn't already told us how little the US religious right thinks of the law — and how willing their minions in government (in this case, Dubya's brother Jeb) are willing to abandon all but the thinnest pretense of following the law — it's eminently clear now.

There could be big trouble ahead, we fear.

Via Miami Herald. [Free reg. req'd.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:15 AM | Get permalink



Friday, March 25

Lest we forget.

There's often a terrible price to be paid when the law doesn't protect workers.

On March 25, 1911, 147 workers at the Triangle Shirt Waist Company in New York City lost their lives as the company's premises (which occupied the top floors of a 10-story building) were consumed by fire. Most of those killed were women and young girls between the ages of 13 to 23, all of whom worked for low wages in sweatshop conditions.


1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire cartoon

Contemporary political cartoon


Approximately 50 workers died as they leapt from windows to the street. The others were burned or trampled to death while desperately trying to escape via stairway exits that the company had illegally locked to in order to prevent 'the interruption of work.'

Company owners are charged with seven counts of manslaughter, but will be found not guilty. In the days just before the fire, Triangle and other employers had grouped together to fight the NYC Fire Commissioner's order that fire sprinklers be installed on their premises.

If you want to know more about the Triangle fire, start with this online exhibit from the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

And if you think that events like the Triangle fire are something you only read about in history books, read this post (or almost any other post) at Confined Space. Or think about the deaths that luckily didn't happen when some Walmart stores locked in their workers overnight.

Via Daily Bleed.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:53 AM | Get permalink



And still more breaking news ....

Not like we didn't know that there was something creepy about our Dear Leader:

(Washington, DC, March 25, 2005) Lawyers for George H.W. and Barbara Bush took the case of their son, George W. Bush, to federal court today in an attempt to force doctors to remove the feeding tube that ties him to his guardian, Karl Rove. The tube was inserted many years ago when doctors realized that Mr. Bush could not function in an acceptable manner in society, or make decisions, even bad ones, without it...

The rest is here.

Via corrente.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:53 AM | Get permalink



And in more breaking news ....

This story just in:

Two prominent neurologists who have asked to remain anonymous have examined CNN behind closed doors and determined that the network is irreversibly brain-dead, as flooded with cerebral fluid as the hull of the S.S. Poseidon. It still retains some primitive reflexes and signs of animation, but a brain-scan revealed the sort of minimal activity usually associated with punch-drunk prizefighters condemned to a flophouse cot, or a broken toaster. "CNN barely has two brain cells left to rub together," one doctor said, lacing up his tennis shoes for a quick getaway.

Via Suburban Guerilla.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:44 AM | Get permalink



Attention US citizens!

Some important changes have been made to your US citizenship agreement.

SUMMARY OF NEW TERMS

SECTION 5
The Freedom of Speech section of the Agreement is amended to distinguish between Regular Preferred Speech and Non-Preferred Speech. The Non-Preferred Speech rate applies to all speech which is not in good standing as defined under the "Preferred Citizen Rate Eligibility" section of your Agreement. Both the rate and your freedom of speech may vary based on changes in the National Terror Alert Level.

SECTION 9
The Rates and Fees Table, including rates for personal and corporate income tax, estate tax, Social Security tax, and all other Federal taxes, levies, duties, and surcharges, remains unchanged, except that it is to be read while being held up to a mirror.

SECTION 11
The Rule of Law section of the Agreement remains in effect, except that it no longer applies to Us. It may also, from time to time, cease to apply to Contributors above a certain level (see Schedule G, attached).

Evan Eisenberg has the rest of the changes here.

Via Slate.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:56 AM | Get permalink



Thursday, March 24

Howdy!

Given that Magpie's second anniversary is coming up (March 31, if you want to sent gifts), we thought it was a good idea to make the blogroll reflect what we're actually reading these days.

So we're giving a gigantic, wholesale Magpie hello to the following fine blogs:

alphabitch
Gordon.Coale
Marian's Blog
The Next Left
The Panda's Thumb
The Rittenhouse Review
Sappho's Breathing
SCOTUSblog
xymphora

And we added these blogs to 'Shiny Things,' over in Magpie's right-hand column:

Everlasting Blort
grow-a-brain
Life in the Present

There are also a few new non-blog links scattered around, but we'll leave you to find them.

Go check 'em all out!

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:18 PM | Get permalink



Ooooooh, shiny!

The remnants of a supernova.

Simeis 147

Supernova remnant Simeis 147 [Photo: Robert Gendler]

You can read more information and see a somewhat larger version of the photo here. A much bigger photo is here.

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:37 PM | Get permalink



Go Portland!

This magpie's home town (Portland, Oregon) is threatening to be the first US city to pull out of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force network. The reason? The FBI won't grant city official the top-secret clearances that Portland Mayor Tom Potter says are needed to protect the constitutional rights of Portland residents.

Potter, himself a former Portland chief of police in the liberal northwestern state of Oregon, and Leonard, have said city officials need the clearances so they can monitor the task forces to ensure that the constitutional and civil rights of Portland residents are not violated.

The two cite the case of Brandon Mayfield, a local Muslim convert, who was arrested and held for two weeks in May 2004 because of claims that his fingerprint was found on evidence in the 2004 Madrid train bombing. Mayfield was freed without any charges after the FBI admitted the fingerprints did not match. [...]

The FBI said that it would consider giving Portland Police Chief Derrick Foxworth the top-secret clearance, but not the mayor and city attorney.

FBI officials also warned that the mayor's move could also threaten the city's involvement in other joint crime-fighting efforts, such as one which targets child pornography or a Regional Computer Forensics Lab.

One True b!X at Portland Communique has been doing a top-notch job of covering the JTTF issue. You can access his complete coverage via this post.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:35 PM | Get permalink



Wednesday, March 23

Sometimes it's funny what can cheer a gal up.

As we said in another post, we've been pretty depressed by the news since Dubya took office for his second term. But just now, we ran into something that made us feel better by rubbing our face in how bad things are.

'Whatever can you mean, Magpie?', we hear the multitudes ask.

We're f*cked, all right.


Yep, it's nothing other than the 'How F*cked by Bush You Are Test.'

We scored 'Pretty F*cked.' How about you?

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:39 PM | Get permalink



Howdy!

A big ol' Magpie hello to Pinko Feminist Hellcat, who we really should have blogrolled long ago.

We read her every day. You should, too.

And if you are looking for more women bloggers, make a visit to Blogs by Women, which we've also added to the blogroll.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:35 AM | Get permalink



Charles Darwin.

He has a posse. And if you're tired of the religious right's attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in the public schools, maybe you should join it.

Darwin's posse

Without more public displays of affection for the theories of natural selection and evolution, it is likely that more and more schools will allow or even promote the teaching of evolution "alternatives" that invoke magic by supernatural entities. To provide some of the needed visible support for science and reason, please consider distributing Darwin-themed bookmarks to your geeky friends, or by stickering something with his image. Sure, these efforts are probably completely futile, but wouldn't you sleep better tonight knowing that you've done your part to delay our slip into Dark Ages II, even if only by a few days?

The site has PDF files for stickers and bookmarks, along with suggestions of what to do with them. This effort may be small potatoes, but it's still nice to see some in the scientific community taking imaginative action to counter the propaganda of 'intelligent design' reactionaries.

Via Null Device.

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



Tuesday, March 22

On the edges of science.

Scientists are far from having the answers to everything, as these thirteen things that don't make sense demonstrate:

11 The Wow signal

It was 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.

Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?

The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.

The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.

Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.

Via New Scientist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:54 PM | Get permalink



'Where are the women?' — the continuing story.

As we noted below, that whole 'Where are the women bloggers?' ritual discussion has made its periodic appearance in the blogosphere. We still aren't going to add anything to the discussion ourself — there are just too many eloquent women out there saying exactly what needs to be said.

Stepping up to the plate in the last couple of days is Katha Pollitt, a columnist and editor at The Nation (and one of our favorite commentators). And not only does she have something to say about female bloggers, she has even more to add to the current discussion in the 'mainstream' press about the lack of women on the editorial and op-ed pages of US newspapers.

First, Pollitt on women bloggers:

That opinion writing is a kind of testosterone-powered food fight is a popular idea in the blogosphere. Male bloggers are always wondering where the women are and why women can't/don't/won't throw bananas. After all, anyone can have a blog, right? In the wake of the Estrich-Kinsley contretemps, the Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum mused upon the absence of women bloggers and got a major earful from women bloggers, who are understandably sick of hearing that they don't exist. "I'm staring you right in the face, Kevin," wrote Avedon Carol (sideshow.me.uk), "and even though you've said you read me every day you don't have me on your blogroll. It's things like this that make me tear out my hair when people wonder why women are underrepresented...." There are actually lots of women political bloggers out there--spend half an hour reading them and you will never again say women aren't as argumentative as men! But what makes a blog visible is links, and male bloggers tend not to link to women (to his credit, Kevin Drum has added nineteen to his blogroll). Perhaps they sense it might interfere with the circle jerk in cyberspace--the endless mutual self-infatuation that is one of the less attractive aspects of the blogging phenom.

And then Pollitt on the lack of women on the editorial/op-ed pages:

Why are there so few women op-ed writers? Amy Sullivan thinks it's because women are socialized out of the requisite personality traits: confidence verging on arrogance, thick skin, love of combat. At every step, from kindergarten on, girls are rewarded for being docile, quiet, unadventurous and alert to the feelings of others, and boys are rewarded for being the opposite. The end result is that political magazines like the Washington Monthly get lots more pitches from men. Women just don't come knocking.

I've been an editor at The Nation, where I now write a column [...] I would certainly agree that men send in more unsolicited articles ? almost none of which are usable, by the way, so I'm not sure what that example is supposed to prove. But ultimately it's the editors, not the slush pile or the volume of queries from freelancers, that determine what goes in a magazine. The phone works both ways! From what I have seen, editors are much more open to men and men flourish accordingly. Older editors, who are mostly men, mentor younger men in whom they see their younger selves, and these young men richly pay them back in admiration, even (surely not!) flattery and sycophancy.

Editors socialize with these acolytes, form friendships with them, offer them important career-making assignments (how often have you seen a "think piece" by a woman that wasn't about a "woman's issue"?), encourage them to take risks and give them more chances if they screw up. Marty Peretz at The New Republic was famous for this kind of mentorship, as was the Washington Monthly's Charles Peters. It wouldn't have occurred to me to approach the Washington Monthly when I was a freelancer ? partly because my politics were further to the left, but also because it was such a notoriously masculine preserve. Everything about it suggested that I had as much chance of appearing in its pages as in Popular Mechanics. I'm not saying no woman could get the odd assignment at the magazines that mostly publish men, but to make a career you need to be part of the family, you need to be the person to whom the magazine offers plum assignments and sudden opportunities, that gives you a kind of carte blanche (what's on your mind? what's on your plate? when are we going to see that piece on Outer Mongolia?), and that lets you develop as a voice and a personality. Women rarely get that kind of opportunity ? and the thing is, they know that. So what looks to you, Amy, like being easily discouraged or not trying is actually women assessing, fairly accurately, their chances.


Magpie (hearts) Katha Pollitt.

Via The Nation and Washington Monthly.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:13 PM | Get permalink



Sunday, March 20

The real divide?

Writer John Scalzi thinks that if you analyze US politics in terms of liberal vs. conservative, you'll have trouble making sense of what's going on — especially since Dubya and his minions took control of the wheel of state. According to Scalzi, the real divide is between rationalists and irrationalists:

The big problem with rationalists is that they continually underestimate the irrational, assuming, in that charmingly smug way of theirs, that no one really thinks like that when it's rather blatantly obvious that they do -- and there's a lot of them. Rationalists get stuck inside their own echo chambers and forget that outside the echo chamber there's a whole bunch of people who are all-too-easily swayed by the ambitiously irrational. At this particular moment in history the really busy irrationalists are on the right, but it wasn't that long ago that they were on the left, and no doubt they'll be there again before I die.

Irrational politics are dangerous; I don't need to recount my general litany of complaints about the Bush administration's policies to make that point. Rational conservatives should be aware that the irrational conservatives are not your friends; rational liberals, the same (rational moderates, rest easy; for some unfathomable reason, there don't seem to be very many irrational moderates). Indeed, the rational all along the political spectrum should realize they have far more common cause with other rationalists, in terms of effective governing, than they do with the irrationalists who ostensibly share their politics.

Scalzi's post isn't long, which gives you even less excuse not to go here and read the whole thing. You might also want to read the comments about Scalzi's idea here.

I think our man Scalzi is on to something. How about you?

Via Null Device.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:57 PM | Get permalink




Liar, liar, pants on fire!


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