Magpie

Saturday, April 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some good news from Iraq.

Riverbend, who writes the blog Baghdad Burning, is one of 19 authors whose books have been longlisted for the BBC's Samuel Johnson prize for Nonfiction. That prize is worth £30,000/US$52,394 to the winner.

Riverbend is an anonymous 26-year-old resident of Baghdad, who has been blogging about life in Iraq since shortly after the US-led invasion of her country. Whenever something im important happens in Iraq, it's the first place this magpie checks to see really going on. The first year of Riverbend's posts were collected into the book, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq, which won immediate acclaim in the US and UK. Last year, the book won third place in the Lettre Ulysse prize for Reportage [see this earlier Magpie post].

The full longlist for the Samuel Johnson prize is here.

Via UK Independent.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:13 PM | Get permalink

That wacky Antonin Scalia.

The US Supreme Court's 'Mr Right' just keeps getting himself into the news:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia startled reporters in Boston just minutes after attending a mass, by flipping a middle finger to his critics.

A Boston Herald reporter asked the 70-year-old conservative Roman Catholic if he faces much questioning over impartiality when it comes to issues separating church and state.

'You know what I say to those people?' Scalia replied, making the obscene gesture and explaining 'That`s Sicilian.'

The 20-year veteran of the high court was caught making the gesture by a photographer with The Pilot, the Archdiocese of Boston`s newspaper.

'Don`t publish that,' Scalia told the photographer, the Herald said.

I've tried to find a copy of the photo, but have had no luck so far. If anyone knows of a link, please leave a comment.

Via UPI.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:18 PM | Get permalink

Tap-dancing galore at today's White House press briefing.

Dubya's administration is really nervous about how all those pre-war memos about conversations between the prez and PM Tony Blair. How can I tell? Because nothing else could have made Dubya press secretary Scott McClellan work so hard to avoid giving an answer to tenacious questioning, mostly by Helen Thomas. Notice how many times Scotty flat-out lies and attacks the journalistic integrity of the reporters questioning him:

Q In a follow up for -- from this morning's briefing, I said that the President was aware in the run-up to the war that there were no weapons -- no weapons -- unconventional weapons had been found, and you sort of denied that it was in the memo.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, this morning you said that the President was aware there were no weapons of mass destruction. And that is not what that article spelled out.

Q This is what it -- the memo says: The President and Prime Minister acknowledge that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq in the run-up to the war.

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, let me remind you and take you back to that time period, because there was a U.N. weapons inspection team that was looking at these issues. And that team put out I think some sort of interim report back in December of '02, and that report showed that the regime was not coming clean. And we said at that time that the regime was continuing its pattern of non-cooperation and that if they continued --

Q They also said they didn't find any weapons.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- if they continued down that path, then we were prepared to use force. The President pursued a diplomatic solution. That's why we went to the United Nations. That's why we passed a 17th resolution that called on the regime to disclose or face serious consequences.

Q The memo says he wanted a war, basically that he was determined, and there were no weapons found.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, Helen, that's not an accurate assessment, and you know it. Because you covered --

Q Is this memo wrong?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you covered us at that time period. And let me remind you, go back to that time period, look at the public comments that were made, look at the numerous statements that were made by the President of the United States. We were continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution, but we recognized that it was necessary to prepare and plan accordingly in the event we would need to use force, and that's what we were doing at that time, as well.

But Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, and he continued to defy the international community -- even when he was given one final opportunity, or face serious consequences. So let's not rewrite history. It was very clear what was going on at the time.

Q Is this memo correct?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't -- I haven't seen that memo, Helen.

Q You haven't seen The New York Times' memo?

MR. McCLELLAN: I've seen The New York Times.

Q Well, let me just follow on that. There's nothing in there that suggests that this is not an accurate reflection of a conversation that the President had with Prime Minister Blair, right?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that our public and private comments are fully consistent.

Q And therefore the guts of this appears to be accurate?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know what you're talking about "guts" of. Let's be specific in what we're talking about.

Q Well, comments made about the inevitability of war, the President's feeling about that at one --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the President was making numerous public comments at the time, David. You covered those comments. The use of force was a last option, but we recognized that it was necessary --

Q It was his mind frame, though.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- to prepare and plan, and that's what we were doing at the time. And if you go and look at the public comments at the time, going back to late in the fall and winter period of 2002, on into 2003, we were making it very clear what the regime needed to do. And if it didn't do it, we were prepared to enforce the Security Council Resolution 1441, which called for serious consequences.

Q It didn't call for going to war.

Q Let me ask you a more fundamental question. The President -- according to this report of this memo -- said to Prime Minister Blair that he didn't expect that there would be any sectarian violence. That's obviously proven -- he was disproven. That is, in fact, the case that there is sectarian violence. Some worry about the prospects of civil war.

My question, though, is the President's judgments, this administration's judgments about the war that did not come to pass, that created a credibility problem with the American people with regard to how they view this war, does that not hurt the President when he now says, we need patience and we have to persevere?

MR. McCLELLAN: First of all, you made a very long statement there, and I'm not accepting the premise of the beginning of your question that that's an accurate reflection of things. We've talked about what we anticipated and what we didn't anticipate and what we prepared for.

And I think credibility is about doing what you say you're going to do. We did what we said we were going to do. Tyrants around the world know that we mean what we say, because we followed through on the resolution that was passed at the Security Council and held Saddam Hussein's regime to account. And he has been removed from power. The world is better off because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

We are working to transform a troubled region of the world, and that goes directly to our own security. The Middle East has been a breeding ground for terrorism. We had a false sense of stability because of previous foreign policies of previous administrations. This President made the decision after September 11th that we were going to take a comprehensive approach to the war on terrorism, and that we were going to work to spread freedom.

Q You're getting off point.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, it's very much on point.

Q Well, if I was too long-winded, let me just -- let me just be more precise.

MR. McCLELLAN: Sure.

Q The President assumed incorrectly, hindsight tells us, that there would not be sectarian violence after the invasion. Is that correct?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, there were certain things that we anticipated, and certain things that we didn't anticipate. The President has talked publicly about what some of those were. And we've also worked to adapt and adjust to circumstances on the ground. Any time you're engaged in a war -- and the President talked about this issue last week -- things aren't going to go necessarily according to the plans. You've got to be flexible, you've got to be able to adapt and adjust to the circumstances on the ground. And that's exactly what we have done.

We know that the terrorists have made this the central front in the war on terrorism. They want to spread sectarian violence and create civil war. But the Iraqi political leaders and Iraqi religious leaders have come together, and they said, we need to move forward, we need to continue to move forward on forming a government that represents all Iraqis. The Iraqi army has held together. They have shown that they can perform well and help restore calm and restraint. And that's important, too. Now, there are certain areas where they didn't. But I think you have to look at the full picture. And just to make comments like that doesn't take a look at the full picture.

Amazing how little information Scotty gave out in that, isn't it? As near as we can tell, the only substantial admission he made was that he read the NY Times today.

Of course, the reason that Scotty was so evasive — even by his standards — is the wide divergence between Dubya's public statements during the immediate pre-Iraq war period and his statements as revealed in the memos quoted today by the NY Times. Think Progress has thoughtfully compiled a list of the major contradictions:

Public statement:
Bush: "I've not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully." [3/6/03]

Private statement:
“The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.” [Bush/Blair meeting, 1/31/03]

Public statement:
Bush: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq." [3/8/03]

Private statement:
“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.” [Bush/Blair meeting, 1/31/03]

Public statement:
Bush: "Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it." [3/17/03]

Private statement:
“But [Bush] had to say that if we ultimately failed [to get a second U.N. resolution], military action would follow anyway.” [Bush/Blair meeting, 1/31/03]

And those contradictions merely scratch the surface. It's going to be fun watching the administration duck and weave over the next few days. And to see how much this new information affects Dubya's standing in the polls.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:21 PM | Get permalink

Better late than never, I suppose.

Now that other media outlets have taken the heat for releasing the information, the NY Times has finally run a detailed front-page story on the 'Downing Street memos' and the other previously secret UK government documents about the build-up to the Iraq invasion. Not much is new, but the article is a fairly good summary of what the documents reveal about Dubya and Tony Blair's real views before the war began.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:50 PM | Get permalink

No surprise here.

Drinking cocktails that mix alcohol and energy drinks [like Red Bull] can make you feel your're sober when you're not. That's the conclusion of a study on drink mixing just completed at Brazil's Federal University of São Paulo.

[Lead scientist Maria Lucia] Souza-Formigoni and her colleagues found that volunteers in both groups felt they had better motor coordination when drinking alcohol mixed with the energy drink than when they consumed alcohol alone.

But in a test of motor skills where subjects had to transfer pegs on a board, those drinking alcohol mixed with an energy drink did not perform better than those who drank the alcoholic drink by itself. And both groups showed similar impairments in a visual test that challenged them to push buttons in response to a flashing signal on a screen.

The researchers say that young adults should understand that drinking energy drinks with alcohol may impair their judgment, because they perceive themselves to be less affected by the alcohol. "They should drink with more caution, that's the suggestion," says Roseli Boerngen de Lacerda, who studies substance misuse at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil.

This magpie notes that all of the 26 study subjects were male. Given the results studies on how alcohol affects women [at least the ones that I've seen], my guess is that mixing alcohol and energy drinks is an even greater danger if you're female.

Via New Scientist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:19 PM | Get permalink

[Almost] no comment.

From US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, speaking on March 8 at University of Freiburg in Switzerland:

Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was "astounded" at the "hypocritical" reaction in Europe to Gitmo. "War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. "Give me a break." Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don't have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: "If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy." Scalia was apparently referring to his son Matthew, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

This magpie notes that the Supremes will hear arguments on a case involving Dubya's assertion that the US can try Guantánamo prisoners in military tribunals rather than civilian courts.

Via this article at Newsweek.

More: The Progress Report has a video of Scalia's Freiburg speech here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:09 AM | Get permalink

You know what they say ...

... about how one of the signs of being nuts is when you do the same stuff over and over again, but expect the result to be different?

You might want to look for signs of this kind of craziness in Afghanistan, suggests Ted Rall.

Things look the same to me

[Cartoon: © 2006 Ted Rall]

If you want to see how Rall finishes his case, take a look at the whole cartoon, over here. And if you want to see more of Rall's work, check out his website.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:02 AM | Get permalink

Maybe that painting wasn't such a bargain after all.

How to tell if that piece of fine art is a fake.

Shouldn't those glasses be on the man?

Subtle, very subtle.
[Original: Grant Wood; Photoshopper: Anonymous]

We also liked this one, this one, this one, and this one.

Via Worth1000.

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

Sunday, March 26

This should settle the whole 'good news from Iraq' issue.

But given how right-wingers and apologists for Dubya don't care about facts, I'm sure they'll go on accusing the media of undermining the prez's war effort in Iraq.

Earlier today, CBS News' Baghdad reporter Lara Logan demolished the notion that there's this huge amount of good news in Iraq that just isn't making it into US newspapers and newscasts. In an interview with Howard Kurtz on CNN's Reliable Sources, Logan categorically rejected criticisms that she and other reporters in Iraq are slanting the news.

Lara Logan tells it like it is

Do you think Kurtz really expected the answer Lara Logan was giving him?
[Image: CNN]

From the Reliable Sources transcript:

KURTZ: Bush and Cheney essentially seem to be accusing you and your colleagues of carrying the terrorist message by reporting on so many of these attacks. What do you make of that?

LOGAN: Well, I think that's -- that is a very convenient way of looking at it. It doesn't reflect the value judgment that's implicit in that.

As a journalist, if an American soldier or an Iraqi person dies that day, you have to make a decision about how you weigh the value of reporting that news over the value of something that may be happening, say, a water plant that's being turned on that brings fresh water to 200 Iraqi people. I mean, you get accused of valuing human life in a certain way depending on how you report it.

And also, as -- I mean, what I would point out is that you can't travel around this country anymore without military protection. You can't travel without armed guards. You're not free to go every time there's a school opening or there's some reconstruction project that's being done.

We don't have the ability to go out and cover those. If they want to see a fair picture of what's happening in Iraq, then you have to first start with the security issue.

When journalists are free to move around this country, then they will be free to report on everything that's going on. But as long as you're a prisoner of the terrible security situation here, then that's going to be reflected in your coverage.

And not only that, but their own figures show that their reconstruction project was supposed to create 1.5 million Iraqi jobs. To date, 77,000 Iraqi government jobs have been created. That should give you an indication of how far along they are in terms of reconstruction.

We have to put everything in its context. We can't go to one small unit and say, oh, they did a great job in this village and ignore all the other villages that haven't seen any improvement in their conditions.

KURTZ: There is no question that the dangerous conditions for journalists there are making it much harder to report on some of these signs of progress, as you point out. But I look at just the last couple of weeks of your coverage. Besides covering the Saddam trial, you reported on allegations that U.S. troops had killed a group of civilians. Then you reported an attack on a police station, the bombing of a police convoy, you talked about the threat of a civil war. All legitimate stories. But critics would say, well, no wonder people back home think things are falling apart because we get this steady drumbeat of negativity from the correspondents there.

LOGAN: Well, who says things aren't falling apart in Iraq? I mean, what you didn't see on your screens this week was all the unidentified bodies that have been turning up, all the allegations here of militias that are really controlling the security forces.

What about all the American soldiers that died this week that you didn't see on our screens? I mean, we've reported on reconstruction stories over and over again, but the order to (ph) general for Iraqi reconstruction says that only 49 of well over 100 planned electricity projects happened.

So we can't keep doing the same stories over and over again. When a police station's attacked, that's something new that happened this week. If you had any idea of the number of Iraqis that come to us with stories of abuses of U.S. soldiers and you look at our coverage over the last -- my coverage over the last few weeks, or even over the last three years, there's been maybe two or three stories that have related to that....

KURTZ: So what you're saying is that what we see on the "CBS Evening News" or other networks actually is only a snapshot, is only perhaps scratching the surface of the kinds of violence and difficulties that you are witnessing day after day because you can only get so much of this on the air?

LOGAN: Oh, yes. Absolutely. [Our] own editors back in New York are asking us the same things.

They read the same comments. You know, are there positive stories? Can't you find them?

You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.

Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked.

I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country. Reconstruction funds have been diverted to cover away from reconstruction to -- they've been diverted to security.

Soldiers, their lives are occupied most of the time with security issues. Iraqi civilians' lives are taken up most of the time with security issues.

So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here? [Emphasis added]

Logan also rejected charges by right-wing commentator Laura Ingram that the press is 'reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off' instead of going out into the field and talking to Iraqis. After reiterting the difficulties and danger that reporters face when trying to get out of the Green Zone, Logan pointed out that reporters who do get into the field [such as ABC's Bob Woodruff, who was badly injured north of Baghdad] are called irresponsible and have their integrity questioned by the same people who criticized them for staying in their hotels.

To appreciate both how angry Logan was about the charges made against the Iraqi press corps, and the lameness of some of Kurtz's questions, you really need to see the interview. Luckily, Crooks and Liars has posted links to Windows Media and QuickTime video files here.

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

The future is marching.

That's the thought with which Nathan Newman begins an eloquent post reflecting on yesterday's huge demonstration in Los Angeles against proposed changes in US immigration laws [see this earlier Magpie post for more] and similar demonstrations in Chicago, Denver, and other US cities.

I don't usually grab most of someone else's post, but Newman's words need to be repeated:

There is a historic decision for Democrats to make in the coming year. They can listen to their better angels and fight for the basic principle that those in economic need should not be treated as criminals or they can embrace short-term anti-immigrant expediency and lose both their soul and long-term political advantage.

Some see the issue as whether the undocumented committed an illegal act. But the real question should be whether our current immigration policy is itself moral. Slavery was legal, but that didn't make those who defied it immoral.

The United States has an estimated 12 million people living in our country without legal status. Do we seriously expect to deport that many people in an act of ethnic clensing that would bring global condemnation?

And globalization can't just mean that money has freedom but people don't. If anything, we need more rules for money and fewer for people — since the ability to walk away from bad job choices is about the only right the poorest of the poor have ever had in this world. Take away the right of mobility from workers and all the rest of their rights largely disappear as well....

If we want to slow immgration to the United States, the real way to do it is to end sweatshops in Mexico and the rest of the developing world and end the rising inequality in global wealth within such countries. Mexico, for example, has increasing wealth, but because of the trade deals we created with them, most of that wealth goes to the richest section of the population — Mexico has 13 billionaires yet working families are left struggling to survive.

To tell such refugees from an economic system the US government helped engineer that they are to blame for their fate is immoral. And progressives should be standing side by side with the labor unions, civil rights groups and religious leaders marching by the hundreds of thousands in the streets to demand decent treatment for those refugees and a more just global economic system.

Via NathanNewman.org.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:37 PM | Get permalink

Bad Putin! Bad!

It appears that Russian president Vladimir Putin plagiarized big chunks of his PhD dissertation.

At least Putin has a PhD — and not a courtesy MBA, like another president we could name.

For the last word on this matter, however, this magpie must defer to SusanG.

From UK Sunday Times, via BOPNews.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:18 PM | Get permalink

And now for something completely different.

In the mid-1970s, Monty Python was just starting to get known in the US. While their TV show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, had made them a household word in the UK, the program had just started airing in the States. And the limited fame that this brought the Pythons was largely accidental. The 'Flying Circus' had been rejected by PBS, and only started airing on PBS affiliate KERA in Dallas after a staffer viewed an episode and went nuts for the program — after literally rescuing the tape from a pile of rejects. After it became a cult favorite in Dallas, bolder PBS stations here and there across the country begain airing it as well.

Python Graham Chapman inspects the business end of a stuffed armadillo
during a 1975 pledge drive at KERA. [Image: © KERA]

In 1975, the Pythons were making their first tour of the US, mainly in hopes of finding a distributor for their then-new film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. During that trip, the troupe [less John Cleese, for reasons unknown] stopped by at KERA during the station's pledge drive. They were interviewed by the same staffer who'd rescued their program from the trash pile, and they took some questions from members of an unexpectedly large studio audience. The Pythons' job done, that interview then disappeared into the mists of history.

Or so it was thought.

It turns out that a KERA engineer taped the interview and then stuck it aside on a shelf or in a drawer. That unmarked tape somehow survived decades at KERA, suffering only partial damage when someone later taped over part of the interview. [If you've ever worked in public radio or TV, you'll know how unlikely the tape's survival was.] The tape of the interview ecently resurfaced at KERA and was instantly recognized as the treasure it was — a rare view of the Pythons when they were probably at the peak of their form.

As things do, video of the interview has made its way onto the web, and you can watch it here, courtesy of the blog for the public radio program The Sound of Young America.

Via Boing Boing.

More: In the comments, Jesse Thorn from TSOYA writes to tell us about their program with ex-Python Terry Jones. This magpie won't have time to listen ourself until later tonight, but you can listen it now if you go here. Enjoy!

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:06 AM | Get permalink

He died with his boots on.

From the LA Times obituary for Buck Owens:

Just hours before he died, Owens was on stage Friday night with the Buckaroos singing at his $5-million Bakersfield nightclub and restaurant, Buck Owens' Crystal Palace, something he'd done routinely since opening it almost 10 years ago.

"He had come to the club early and had a chicken-fried steak dinner and bragged that it's his favorite meal," Shaw said. After dinner, Owens told band members he didn't feel up to performing and decided to drive home. On his way to his car, fans on their way in told him that they had come from Bend, Ore., and that they were really looking forward to hearing him sing. Owens turned around and did the show.

"He mentioned that onstage: 'If somebody's come all that way, I'm gonna do the show and give it my best shot. I might groan and squeak, but I'll see what I can do,' " Shaw said. "He died in his sleep — they figure it was about 4:30 [a.m.] — probably of heart failure. So he had his favorite meal, played a show and died in his sleep. We thought, that's not too bad."

That reminds us of something that Johnny Cash said in a 1997 interview: 'Halfway through 'Ring of Fire' or 'I Still Miss Someone' or 'Sunday Morning Coming Down,' I'll just keel over and die on the stage, under the lights, with my band and my family around me. That's every performer's dream, you know.'

While the Man in Black didn't get his dream, it looks like Buck Owens may have got it for him.

By the way, there's much more about Buck Owens [including an extensive collection of links] in this Magpie post from yesterday.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:57 AM | Get permalink

Global warming didn't do it.

Nope. I think it was aliens with heat rays. Or anything but global warming, 'cause Dubya doesn't believe in global warming.

Going, going ...

Boulder Glacier 1912 [left] and 2005 {right].
[Photos: George Grant, Greg Peterson]

In 1850, the area now included in Glacier National Park had 150 named glaciers. Today, 26 of these are left. And global warming is the culprit:

In 1997 the U.S. Geological Survey began the Repeat Photography Project in [Montana's Glacier National Park] to compare how glaciers have changed over the last century. Photographers returned to locations where old-timers had taken photos long before they could possibly have imagined their scientific value. Locating these vantage points was the trickiest part of the project, as some required extensive off-trail hiking.

The before and after pictures released this week are dramatic—all that remains of some glaciers are big puddles. Others have simply faded away to expose bare mountainsides. The images were taken at similar times of year under similar conditions.

Based on the pictures and global recession rates, scientists predict that the park will be glacier free by 2030.

And the solution suggested by some right-wingers and apologists for greenhouse-gas producers is that we should just get used to living without glaciers.

That ain't gonna do for this magpie.

You can view a whole series of before and after photos of glaciers in Glacier National Park if you go here.

Via Live Science.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:03 AM | Get permalink

"Crash', self-indulgence, and white supremacy.

This magpie has to admit that I was royally pissed off when a second-rate film like 'Crash' won the 'Best Picture' Oscar over what most people thought was the obvious best film, 'Brokeback Mountain.' Given that, we were really pleased to read the excellent evisceration of 'Crash' by Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer over at the Black Commentator. Their well-argued contention is that, far from being a thoughtful film about race in the US, it's actually a film that reinforces racism and white supremacy.

While viewing "Crash" may make some people, especially white people, uncomfortable during and immediately after viewing, the film seems designed, at a deeper level, to make white people feel better. As the film asks us to confront personal prejudices, it allows us white folk to evade our collective responsibility for white supremacy. In "Crash," emotion trumps analysis, and psychology is more important than politics. The result: White people are off the hook.

The first step in putting white people back on the hook is pressing the case that the United States in 2006 is a white-supremacist society. Even with the elimination of formal apartheid and the lessening of the worst of the overt racism of the past, the term is still appropriate, in ideological and material terms.

The United States was founded, of course, on an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites that was used to justify the holocausts against indigenous people and Africans, which created the nation and propelled the U.S. economy into the industrial world. That ideology also has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white immigrant group.

Today, polite white folks renounce such claims of superiority. But scratch below that surface politeness and the multicultural rhetoric of most white people, and one finds that the assumptions about the superiority of the art, music, culture, politics, and philosophy rooted in white Europe are still very much alive....

That ideology also helps white Americans ignore and/or rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution of resources. Studies continue to demonstrate how, on average, whites are more likely than members of racial/ethnic minorities to be on top on measures of wealth and well-being. Looking specifically at the gap between white and black America: on some measures black Americans have fallen further behind white Americans during the so-called post-civil rights era....

What does this white supremacy mean in day-to-day life? One recent study found that in the United States, a black applicant with no criminal record is less likely to receive a callback from a potential employer than a white applicant with a felony conviction. In other words, being black is more of a liability in finding a job than being a convicted criminal. Into this new century, such discrimination has remained constant.

That's white supremacy. Many people, of all races, feel and express prejudice, but white supremacy is built into the attitudes, practices and institutions of the dominant white society. It's not the product simply of individual failure but is woven into society, and the material consequences of it are dramatic.

It seems that the people who made "Crash" either don't understand that, don't care, or both.

With their assertion that — despite what the film says — that more tolerance is not the solution to the problem of racism — that, in fact, white supremacy can happily exist side-by-side with tolerance — Jensen and Wosnitzer have written a powerful piece that's likely to upset a lot of people. Especially white people.

You should go read the whole thing.

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