Eisenhower and National Security
for the 21st Century
I know.. I know.. Those of you who know me are asking 'What free time?"
Sunday, December 05, 2004
If you haven't noticed, I've been working a lot recently on coordinating work for a big conference, so I thought I'd put a link to the conference website just so the few people who hadn't realized what had been sucking away all of my free time....
I know.. I know.. Those of you who know me are asking 'What free time?"
Eisenhower and National Security
I know.. I know.. Those of you who know me are asking 'What free time?"
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Check out this cool idea:
Researchers Compost Old Mobile Phones and Transform them into Flowers
A researcher at Warwick University in the UK has developed a cellphone cover including a flower seed that will decompose to create mulch and grow a flower when discarded.
A researcher at Warwick University in the UK has developed a cellphone cover including a flower seed that will decompose to create mulch and grow a flower when discarded.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Bananaz Burns Down
The Bananaz restaurant that we used to play NTN against burned down early Friday morning. I'm spending a few days at home for Thanksgiving, a few towns away from Bananaz and I read this story in the local paper (photos are available with the link):
Financially troubled club burns; probe of fire’s cause ongoing
The Desert Sun November 27, 2004
By Lois Gormley and Ferdie De Vega
PALM DESERT -- A bar and grill that has wrestled with bankruptcy since 2003 went up in flames early Friday.
Bananaz, at the corner of Highway 111 and Fred Waring Drive in Palm Desert, quickly became engulfed when firefighters arrived on the scene of the 5:31 a.m. blaze, said Battalion Chief Dorian Cooley, Riverside County Fire Department/California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Nearly 50 firefighters and supervisory personnel responded to the scene with at least nine engines and a ladder truck, he said. The cause of the two-alarm fire at the 15,000-square-foot restaurant and bar was still unknown Friday evening. Fire investigators teamed with insurance investigators in an effort to determine the what started the blaze, Cooley said.
The fast-moving fire, which caused an estimated $2.5 million in damage, took place at a time it would be noticed, he said. By late Friday afternoon, investigators had not yet determined where in the building the blaze originated.
Nestled in the heart of some of Palm Desert’s busiest shopping hotspots, the club blaze was quickly spotted by post-Thanksgiving pre-dawn shoppers. A portion of Highway 111 was closed to traffic for seven hours.
Raylene Clark of La Quinta said she watched the firefighters battle the blaze at Bananaz for about an hour early Friday morning from behind a wall at the edge of the Desert Crossing shopping center parking lot across the street just before 6 a.m.
"I was dropping off my stepdaughter at Circuit City," she said. "We came all the way down Fred Waring (Drive)," Clark said, adding that they saw the billowing smoke in front of the mountains. "When you got to Monterey, you could start seeing the glowing," she said.
By 7:15 a.m., ash from the fire had landed on cars and trucks parked at the shopping center, and several onlookers had snapped photographs of the blaze with their cameras and cellular phones.
Charles Shamash, the Beverly Hills-based attorney who represented Bananaz Grill & Bar Palm Desert Inc. in its federal bankruptcy filing, refused comment Friday. Neither club owner Tom Budniak, nor office manager Craig Marlar nor club manager Randy Adams could be reached for comment.
The fire was fully controlled by 9 a.m., but fire crews remained on the scene throughout the day conducting extensive mop-up and overhaul. Charred debris were piled in the empty parking lot that was blocked off by yellow tape. At 4 p.m. temporary fencing had arrived be erected around the building; a few firefighters remained at the scene.
Formerly one of the busiest nightclub restaurants in the area, Bananaz was put up for sale for $3 million, according to a Baxley Properties listing early this year. The sale listing came after the mortgage holder on the building and the land sought to foreclose on the property and its owners filed for bankruptcy protection.
Bananaz Grill & Bar Palm Desert Inc. filed for Chapter 11 protection on June 24, 2003, after Zion National Bank of Utah started foreclosure proceedings. In June 2003, according to federal bankruptcy court records, the business filed for Chapter 11 protection. In September 2003, the case was dismissed and the file with the bankruptcy court closed in October 2003. In January 2004, the sale offering was reported. The Chapter 11 filing listed 25 creditors, ranging from the Internal Revenue Service to music-licensing giant BMI.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Friday, November 19, 2004
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Incredible! I had to push them to send me my absentee ballot but Riverside County lost no time in sending me a Jury Duty summons...
On a completely different note, here's something that's mildly amusing:
The Real Hussein II
A Flash video parody of Saddam Hussein to the tune of Eminem's "Without Me."
It hangs together relatively well with one major caveat. His statement that he "never even made a WMD" is false in that he used relatively simple (although extremely nasty) chemical weapons in the Anfal campaign, particularly on the village of Halabja in 1988. All the data I've seen shows that any WMD stockpiles or capabilities were destroyed or nonexistent at least from the end of the first Gulf War.
On a completely different note, here's something that's mildly amusing:
The Real Hussein II
A Flash video parody of Saddam Hussein to the tune of Eminem's "Without Me."
It hangs together relatively well with one major caveat. His statement that he "never even made a WMD" is false in that he used relatively simple (although extremely nasty) chemical weapons in the Anfal campaign, particularly on the village of Halabja in 1988. All the data I've seen shows that any WMD stockpiles or capabilities were destroyed or nonexistent at least from the end of the first Gulf War.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
I recently stumbled upon this Flash and have mixed feelings about it. So, I thought I'd put it up and see what other people's reactions are:
(Beware-- It's pretty dark. It's also pretty loud.)
What do you think?? I look forward to reading your comments.
War
(Beware-- It's pretty dark. It's also pretty loud.)
What do you think?? I look forward to reading your comments.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
It occasionally dawns on me how much people who pilot vehicles like airplanes, trains, buses, etc. along set routes must get incredibly bored with what they're supposed to tell their passengers over the millions of times that they do a particular route each day.
Like when I hear the following:
-- The pilot of American Airlines flight 3834 from Houston to Dallas comes on the PA at the beginning of the flight:
This is your master and commander of this aerospace vehicle speaking, His Excellency the Captain. Our airspeed velocity and cruising altitude will be....
-- And the operator of a Washington, DC metro train:
This is the Red Line to Glenmont, servicing downtown Washington, DC, Metro Center..... and beyond.....
Like when I hear the following:
-- The pilot of American Airlines flight 3834 from Houston to Dallas comes on the PA at the beginning of the flight:
This is your master and commander of this aerospace vehicle speaking, His Excellency the Captain. Our airspeed velocity and cruising altitude will be....
-- And the operator of a Washington, DC metro train:
This is the Red Line to Glenmont, servicing downtown Washington, DC, Metro Center..... and beyond.....
Here's a really interesting and potentially fun contest that I recommend y'all try your hand at.
I used to work for an organization from which Citizens for Global Solutions was founded.
Check out their homepage! They do some interesting work...
I used to work for an organization from which Citizens for Global Solutions was founded.
Check out their homepage! They do some interesting work...
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Happy United Nations Day!
The United Nations was founded on this day fifty-nine years ago. Parts of it have received the Nobel Peace Prize eight times over that time though it sadly gets even less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.
I would be hard pressed to name another organization that has done as much demonstrable good for so many people around the world.
Look at the UN website and I guarantee you'll find lots of things that you didn't realize the UN was responsible for-- both in solving huge global problems and in ways that benefit your own daily life.
Take a look and actually speak up when people say manifestly incorrect things about the UN. Yes, it has a lot of flaws but those are nothing in comparison to what good it has done for the world.
The United Nations was founded on this day fifty-nine years ago. Parts of it have received the Nobel Peace Prize eight times over that time though it sadly gets even less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.
I would be hard pressed to name another organization that has done as much demonstrable good for so many people around the world.
Look at the UN website and I guarantee you'll find lots of things that you didn't realize the UN was responsible for-- both in solving huge global problems and in ways that benefit your own daily life.
Take a look and actually speak up when people say manifestly incorrect things about the UN. Yes, it has a lot of flaws but those are nothing in comparison to what good it has done for the world.
Monday, October 18, 2004
Evidence of a Democracy Malfunction:
(compliments of Symi)
-----
Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?
by Frank Rich October 17, 2004
The New York Times
SUCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.
It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.
"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."
It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.
Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.
To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.
It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.
Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.
Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.
The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.
"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"
What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."
(compliments of Symi)
-----
Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?
by Frank Rich October 17, 2004
The New York Times
SUCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.
It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.
"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."
It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.
Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.
To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.
It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.
Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.
Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.
The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.
"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"
What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."
Sunday, October 17, 2004
A while ago, I was working on a project that involved working with a guy who was located down in Metro Atlanta.
His name was Jim Crow.
Yes he is a real person. No, he wasn't pulling my leg.
I had to ask a few times to make sure I had it right but he wasn't fazed. Because he was having to go out of his way to something for the project, I didn't ask him specifically about his name but I'm still trying to figure out how something like that could have happened in earnest....
His name was Jim Crow.
Yes he is a real person. No, he wasn't pulling my leg.
I had to ask a few times to make sure I had it right but he wasn't fazed. Because he was having to go out of his way to something for the project, I didn't ask him specifically about his name but I'm still trying to figure out how something like that could have happened in earnest....
Thursday, October 14, 2004
A very interesting article:
Deconstructing the War on Terror
by Pepe Escobar
October 13, 2004
The Asia Times
"Bush speaks of 'war', but he is in fact incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war." - Jacques Derrida, September 2001
by Pepe Escobar
October 13, 2004
The Asia Times
"Bush speaks of 'war', but he is in fact incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war." - Jacques Derrida, September 2001
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Sunday, October 03, 2004
It's amazing... the Bush administration can't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but they're quite expert at leaving smoking guns around...
How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence
How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence
September 28, 2004
Very interesting. I wonder who specificially is their intended audience. More importantly, I wonder what all of these luminaries would recommend instead.
Friday, October 01, 2004
Finally, I find a real discussion about The Corporation, a documentary film and book that makes the case that the current status of the corporation within society is "psychopathic." It has, perhaps understandably, disappeared from theaters several months ago, after only about two weeks of very active promotion. I haven't seen or heard anything about it since. While I don't think I'd go as far as the movie seems to have done, the fact that it just disappeared really bothers me. I'm a firm believer in sunshine as being the most effective disinfectant.
But I just happened to stumble over this discussion on Radio Netherlands, an interview of law professor Joel Bakan, the book's author, and his responses to a few listener emails. The page opens onto a transcript of the discussion but you can find an audio link if you scroll down a little bit.
Does anyone out there know what happened to the film? I'd be interested to hear about it and what y'all think about the interview.
But I just happened to stumble over this discussion on Radio Netherlands, an interview of law professor Joel Bakan, the book's author, and his responses to a few listener emails. The page opens onto a transcript of the discussion but you can find an audio link if you scroll down a little bit.
Does anyone out there know what happened to the film? I'd be interested to hear about it and what y'all think about the interview.
In case you missed it, here's the transcript of last night's "debate" between John F. Kerry and George W. Bush.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Ok, having grown up in a household that had a strong German hyper-diligent streak to it, I understand the phrase 'If you're going to do something, do it right' but this is just incredible.
Among the many foreign language versions of Deutsche Welle's homepage, somebody thought it would be funny to include something in the artificially developed Klingon language from Star Trek. But this goes waaaay further than just a few mentions....
Among the many foreign language versions of Deutsche Welle's homepage, somebody thought it would be funny to include something in the artificially developed Klingon language from Star Trek. But this goes waaaay further than just a few mentions....
A few happy birthdays to post--
First of all, many happy returns to DC Penguin on her birthday today--
What's this about my looking like I'm nine years old? That should make you, what? About four?? ;-)
Several other people have had birthdays in the recent past, who I don't think have blogs. (let me know if I'm mistaken)
Stuart Washington-- a truly remarkable guy who's pushing the bounds of science by, apparently, trying to read the minds of bats. I only found out about his birthday as it was hurtling by but warm wishes nonetheless....
Guy Jordan-- his birthday was last Thursday but I haven't had a chance to wish him well personally. If he stays at NTN tomorrow until I'm able to get there from my grad Russian class, I'll make sure that changes.
Congratulations all!
First of all, many happy returns to DC Penguin on her birthday today--
What's this about my looking like I'm nine years old? That should make you, what? About four?? ;-)
Several other people have had birthdays in the recent past, who I don't think have blogs. (let me know if I'm mistaken)
Stuart Washington-- a truly remarkable guy who's pushing the bounds of science by, apparently, trying to read the minds of bats. I only found out about his birthday as it was hurtling by but warm wishes nonetheless....
Guy Jordan-- his birthday was last Thursday but I haven't had a chance to wish him well personally. If he stays at NTN tomorrow until I'm able to get there from my grad Russian class, I'll make sure that changes.
Congratulations all!
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Happy Birthday to me... Happy Birthday to me...
Kind of torn about how to feel about today being my birthday. A lot of things have changed since I was born, though. 25 years is both too short and too long a time to be around...
(I was listening to this NPR story about the use of 'educational' filmstrips in the classroom. Damn, those recordings take me back. They were using those in my school district until the end of the 1980s!)
I'd like people to know about my birthday but don't want to toot my own horn about it. Doing that always seems to come across as expecting people to react in paroxysms of awkward congratulations. --Definitely not what I want.
In a perfect world, this kind of thing would somehow be more genuine, though I have no idea how it would work....
I guess I'm just being wistful... and rambling. Well, I'm a quarter of a century old and getting older, so tough! There's a lot more rambling to come.
Kind of torn about how to feel about today being my birthday. A lot of things have changed since I was born, though. 25 years is both too short and too long a time to be around...
(I was listening to this NPR story about the use of 'educational' filmstrips in the classroom. Damn, those recordings take me back. They were using those in my school district until the end of the 1980s!)
I'd like people to know about my birthday but don't want to toot my own horn about it. Doing that always seems to come across as expecting people to react in paroxysms of awkward congratulations. --Definitely not what I want.
In a perfect world, this kind of thing would somehow be more genuine, though I have no idea how it would work....
I guess I'm just being wistful... and rambling. Well, I'm a quarter of a century old and getting older, so tough! There's a lot more rambling to come.
Friday, September 17, 2004
Anger mixed with frustration mixed with sadness...
This is what you get when you blindly follow the 'free market.' Oro Grande is only about 50 miles from where I'm from.
The New York Times
September 17, 2004
Collapse of 60 Charter Schools Leaves Californians Scrambling
By SAM DILLON
Ken Larson was pacing the floor of his office in a tiny elementary school in Oro Grande, Calif., surrounded by the chaos of fax lines beeping, three beleaguered secretaries peppering him with questions and phone lines ringing for the umpteenth time.
It had been a month since one of the nation's largest charter school operators collapsed, leaving 6,000 students with no school to attend this fall. The businessman who used $100 million in state financing to build an empire of 60 mostly storefront schools had simply abandoned his headquarters as bankruptcy loomed, refusing to take phone calls. That left Mr. Larson, a school superintendent whose district licensed dozens of the schools, to clean up the mess.
"Hysterical parents are calling us, swearing and shouting," Mr. Larson said in an interview in Oro Grande last week. "People are walking off with assets all over the state. We're absolutely sinking."
The disintegration of the California Charter Academy, the largest chain of publicly financed but privately run charter schools to slide into insolvency, offers a sobering picture of what can follow. Thousands of parents were forced into a last-minute search for alternate schools, and some are still looking; many teachers remain jobless; and students' academic records are at risk in abandoned school sites across California.
Investigators are sifting through records seeking causes of the disaster, which has raised new questions about how charter schools are regulated.
"Until the Charter Academy went into its tailspin, few people predicted that these crashes could be so bloody, but this has been a catastrophe for many people," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "The critics of market-oriented reforms warned of risks with the philosophy of let-the-buyer-beware, but in this case, buyers were just totally hung out to dry."
Jack O'Connell, the California superintendent of schools, said in an interview that a majority of the state's 537 charter schools were making a solid contribution to public education. But Mr. O'Connell has concluded from the disaster that the state must apply "tough love" in regulating them, "to keep this kind of near-bankruptcy and chaos from happening again," he said.
"If there's mismanagement and malfeasance, we'll come in and put you out of business," he said.
Back in 1999, the national movement to provide alternatives to parents through charter schools, which face less burdensome regulation than other public schools, was gaining steam. Many charter schools have since flourished, and experts say that some of them offer an excellent education. But in Southern California, there were signs of trouble soon after C. Steven Cox, a former insurance executive whose only educational credential was his brief service on a local school board, founded the Charter Academy.
State auditors are now scrutinizing Mr. Cox's financial records to determine whether he exaggerated enrollments and to sort out claims from a line of creditors, said Scott Hannan, director of school fiscal services at the California Department of Education.
"But our highest priority is securing the student records," Mr. Hannan said. That is a sore point with Mr. Larson, who said that thousands of students' immunization and academic records had been virtually abandoned all across California.
Mr. Larson, superintendent of a tiny school district in Oro Grande, a Mojave Desert village 88 miles northeast of Los Angeles that looks like a set for "Bad Day at Black Rock," has converted a storeroom at his school into a warehouse for the records. He has arranged for dozens of file cabinets holding student records to be trucked to Oro Grande from schools that have closed across the Mojave Desert, he said, but he has no way to collect records and equipment left behind elsewhere.
Mr. Larson said Mr. Cox approached him in 2001, preaching the charter school gospel that money spent on filing reports to government regulators would be better spent in classrooms, and asking the Oro Grande district to license him to found charter schools. The Oro Grande school board approved the idea, and two other California districts forged similar relationships with Mr. Cox between 1999 and 2001.
Mr. Cox eventually founded 60 satellite schools in low- and middle-income communities stretching from Chula Vista near the Mexican border to Gridley, 140 miles northeast of San Francisco, and under California's financing formulas the state paid him about $5,000 annually for each student he enrolled. As his business grew, he hired his wife, son, daughter-in-law and other relatives to work at his corporate headquarters in Victorville, near Oro Grande.
But by early 2003, Mr. Cox had become mired in several costly confrontations with the California Department of Education; one centered on whether 10 of his schools were in violation of a 2002 law barring charter operators from opening schools in counties they had not registered in. The state withheld more than $6 million that Mr. Cox had expected to receive.
Mr. Cox sued, seeking to force payment, but lost that battle after running up huge legal fees, and the state withheld money as a result of other disputes, too. By the summer, Mr. Cox's financial difficulties had grown severe, and on July 28, the trustees of one of the four charters responded to the mounting crisis by voting to close the schools they had licensed. Mr. Cox stalked out of that meeting and stopped responding to most phone calls.
Within a week and a half, trustees voted to close the rest of Mr. Cox's schools, and his second in command announced to scores of employees gathered at the Victorville headquarters that they were out of a job. Kim Ehrlich, a billing supervisor, said she spent the first half of August with workers dismantling the offices around her, phoning local utility companies across California to turn off the power at Charter Academy schools, then lost her job.
The sudden collapse blindsided even the charter school principals. Melody Parker, whose Village elementary school in Inglewood was one of the most popular schools in Mr. Cox's organization, said that although her budget had been slashed and Mr. Cox had grown aloof, she never imagined that his organization could fall apart.
"It hit us like a tornado," Ms. Parker said. On Aug. 12, she informed teachers that their jobs were gone, and the next day she told hundreds of parents gathered at the school that it would not open for the fall term. Many had still not found schools by the second week of September, she said.
"The collapse was so disheartening,' said Dwayne Muhammad, who works in a funeral home and whose daughter Aisha was to attend the Village's fourth grade this fall. "Everybody began rushing to find alternate schools."
Mr. Muhammad has visited eight schools in the weeks since, all of which have been full, he said Monday. "We've been left by the wayside."
The nonprofit California Charter School Association said in a report this week that 80 percent of the students displaced from Mr. Cox's schools had since enrolled in other charter schools. Some teachers, like Maria Boatwright, who taught first grade at the Village, have found new jobs at other charters.
But teachers all across the state have reported difficulties in finding new teaching positions because most schools had hired their staffs by the time the academy collapsed, Mr. Larson said.
At the interview in Oro Grande, he produced a stack of letters from distraught, jobless teachers. Travis D. Taylor, who taught art and science to students at a Charter Academy school in Gridley, wrote to say that he had not been repaid the hundreds of dollars he spent on books and science equipment for his students.
Mr. Taylor's mother, Shelly, said that since the collapse, Mr. Taylor had been unable to find another teaching job. With his debts mounting, he has been harvesting rice "to keep his head above water," she said.
Mr. Cox did not respond to requests for an interview left on his voicemail, sent by e-mail and relayed through former employees. Mr. Larson has not been able to reach him either, he said.
One of Mr. Larson's secretaries interrupted the interview to announce that the landlord of a school forced to close in Los Angeles was threatening to dump desks and student records in the street to make way for a new tenant. Mr. Larson wrestled with the notion of driving a truck to Los Angeles himself to fetch the assets.
"There's 100 desks down there," he muttered. "What would we do with 100 desks?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/education/17charter.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
This is what you get when you blindly follow the 'free market.' Oro Grande is only about 50 miles from where I'm from.
The New York Times
September 17, 2004
Collapse of 60 Charter Schools Leaves Californians Scrambling
By SAM DILLON
Ken Larson was pacing the floor of his office in a tiny elementary school in Oro Grande, Calif., surrounded by the chaos of fax lines beeping, three beleaguered secretaries peppering him with questions and phone lines ringing for the umpteenth time.
It had been a month since one of the nation's largest charter school operators collapsed, leaving 6,000 students with no school to attend this fall. The businessman who used $100 million in state financing to build an empire of 60 mostly storefront schools had simply abandoned his headquarters as bankruptcy loomed, refusing to take phone calls. That left Mr. Larson, a school superintendent whose district licensed dozens of the schools, to clean up the mess.
"Hysterical parents are calling us, swearing and shouting," Mr. Larson said in an interview in Oro Grande last week. "People are walking off with assets all over the state. We're absolutely sinking."
The disintegration of the California Charter Academy, the largest chain of publicly financed but privately run charter schools to slide into insolvency, offers a sobering picture of what can follow. Thousands of parents were forced into a last-minute search for alternate schools, and some are still looking; many teachers remain jobless; and students' academic records are at risk in abandoned school sites across California.
Investigators are sifting through records seeking causes of the disaster, which has raised new questions about how charter schools are regulated.
"Until the Charter Academy went into its tailspin, few people predicted that these crashes could be so bloody, but this has been a catastrophe for many people," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "The critics of market-oriented reforms warned of risks with the philosophy of let-the-buyer-beware, but in this case, buyers were just totally hung out to dry."
Jack O'Connell, the California superintendent of schools, said in an interview that a majority of the state's 537 charter schools were making a solid contribution to public education. But Mr. O'Connell has concluded from the disaster that the state must apply "tough love" in regulating them, "to keep this kind of near-bankruptcy and chaos from happening again," he said.
"If there's mismanagement and malfeasance, we'll come in and put you out of business," he said.
Back in 1999, the national movement to provide alternatives to parents through charter schools, which face less burdensome regulation than other public schools, was gaining steam. Many charter schools have since flourished, and experts say that some of them offer an excellent education. But in Southern California, there were signs of trouble soon after C. Steven Cox, a former insurance executive whose only educational credential was his brief service on a local school board, founded the Charter Academy.
State auditors are now scrutinizing Mr. Cox's financial records to determine whether he exaggerated enrollments and to sort out claims from a line of creditors, said Scott Hannan, director of school fiscal services at the California Department of Education.
"But our highest priority is securing the student records," Mr. Hannan said. That is a sore point with Mr. Larson, who said that thousands of students' immunization and academic records had been virtually abandoned all across California.
Mr. Larson, superintendent of a tiny school district in Oro Grande, a Mojave Desert village 88 miles northeast of Los Angeles that looks like a set for "Bad Day at Black Rock," has converted a storeroom at his school into a warehouse for the records. He has arranged for dozens of file cabinets holding student records to be trucked to Oro Grande from schools that have closed across the Mojave Desert, he said, but he has no way to collect records and equipment left behind elsewhere.
Mr. Larson said Mr. Cox approached him in 2001, preaching the charter school gospel that money spent on filing reports to government regulators would be better spent in classrooms, and asking the Oro Grande district to license him to found charter schools. The Oro Grande school board approved the idea, and two other California districts forged similar relationships with Mr. Cox between 1999 and 2001.
Mr. Cox eventually founded 60 satellite schools in low- and middle-income communities stretching from Chula Vista near the Mexican border to Gridley, 140 miles northeast of San Francisco, and under California's financing formulas the state paid him about $5,000 annually for each student he enrolled. As his business grew, he hired his wife, son, daughter-in-law and other relatives to work at his corporate headquarters in Victorville, near Oro Grande.
But by early 2003, Mr. Cox had become mired in several costly confrontations with the California Department of Education; one centered on whether 10 of his schools were in violation of a 2002 law barring charter operators from opening schools in counties they had not registered in. The state withheld more than $6 million that Mr. Cox had expected to receive.
Mr. Cox sued, seeking to force payment, but lost that battle after running up huge legal fees, and the state withheld money as a result of other disputes, too. By the summer, Mr. Cox's financial difficulties had grown severe, and on July 28, the trustees of one of the four charters responded to the mounting crisis by voting to close the schools they had licensed. Mr. Cox stalked out of that meeting and stopped responding to most phone calls.
Within a week and a half, trustees voted to close the rest of Mr. Cox's schools, and his second in command announced to scores of employees gathered at the Victorville headquarters that they were out of a job. Kim Ehrlich, a billing supervisor, said she spent the first half of August with workers dismantling the offices around her, phoning local utility companies across California to turn off the power at Charter Academy schools, then lost her job.
The sudden collapse blindsided even the charter school principals. Melody Parker, whose Village elementary school in Inglewood was one of the most popular schools in Mr. Cox's organization, said that although her budget had been slashed and Mr. Cox had grown aloof, she never imagined that his organization could fall apart.
"It hit us like a tornado," Ms. Parker said. On Aug. 12, she informed teachers that their jobs were gone, and the next day she told hundreds of parents gathered at the school that it would not open for the fall term. Many had still not found schools by the second week of September, she said.
"The collapse was so disheartening,' said Dwayne Muhammad, who works in a funeral home and whose daughter Aisha was to attend the Village's fourth grade this fall. "Everybody began rushing to find alternate schools."
Mr. Muhammad has visited eight schools in the weeks since, all of which have been full, he said Monday. "We've been left by the wayside."
The nonprofit California Charter School Association said in a report this week that 80 percent of the students displaced from Mr. Cox's schools had since enrolled in other charter schools. Some teachers, like Maria Boatwright, who taught first grade at the Village, have found new jobs at other charters.
But teachers all across the state have reported difficulties in finding new teaching positions because most schools had hired their staffs by the time the academy collapsed, Mr. Larson said.
At the interview in Oro Grande, he produced a stack of letters from distraught, jobless teachers. Travis D. Taylor, who taught art and science to students at a Charter Academy school in Gridley, wrote to say that he had not been repaid the hundreds of dollars he spent on books and science equipment for his students.
Mr. Taylor's mother, Shelly, said that since the collapse, Mr. Taylor had been unable to find another teaching job. With his debts mounting, he has been harvesting rice "to keep his head above water," she said.
Mr. Cox did not respond to requests for an interview left on his voicemail, sent by e-mail and relayed through former employees. Mr. Larson has not been able to reach him either, he said.
One of Mr. Larson's secretaries interrupted the interview to announce that the landlord of a school forced to close in Los Angeles was threatening to dump desks and student records in the street to make way for a new tenant. Mr. Larson wrestled with the notion of driving a truck to Los Angeles himself to fetch the assets.
"There's 100 desks down there," he muttered. "What would we do with 100 desks?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/education/17charter.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
For those of you confused by the cover of "The Economist" I posted a few days ago:
Look at this for background.
Look at this for background.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
So... I was at work the other day and get a strange call on my cell phone... my brother!? I hadn't heard from him in at least 6 months. Apparently Los Angeles hasn't swallowed him up.
In fact, he's coming to DC tomorrow night! Still a bit stunned myself but I'll manage. Any recommendations as to what to do with him?
Now I've just got to get rid of this cold... Blech!
In fact, he's coming to DC tomorrow night! Still a bit stunned myself but I'll manage. Any recommendations as to what to do with him?
Now I've just got to get rid of this cold... Blech!
Quite possibly could be lost footage from Office Space... or maybe not...
The guys in this video probably worked about as hard as Peter did, at least.
Search for chair_test.wmv if it doesn't open automatically.
The guys in this video probably worked about as hard as Peter did, at least.
Search for chair_test.wmv if it doesn't open automatically.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Bizarre--
Mood of Blagoveshchensk customs officers should improve
Aromatherapy lamps are to be installed at customs posts in Blagoveshchensk, Amur Oblast, Vostok-Media news agency reported in July. In an effort to improve the mood of customs officers, maintain their psychological well-being and reduce stress, their union has initiated the aromatherapy drive. Customs officers will also be able to take aromatherapy courses.
-- Russian Far Eastern News (September 2004)
(Keep in mind, Blagoveshchensk is on the border with China, north of Manchuria.)
Mood of Blagoveshchensk customs officers should improve
Aromatherapy lamps are to be installed at customs posts in Blagoveshchensk, Amur Oblast, Vostok-Media news agency reported in July. In an effort to improve the mood of customs officers, maintain their psychological well-being and reduce stress, their union has initiated the aromatherapy drive. Customs officers will also be able to take aromatherapy courses.
-- Russian Far Eastern News (September 2004)
(Keep in mind, Blagoveshchensk is on the border with China, north of Manchuria.)
Friday, September 10, 2004
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Yaay! Redheads finally get a little more respect! And so cute!!
LONDON (Reuters) - They say blondes have more fun, but redheads will have the edge on Sunday when they get into London Zoo for free to view a rare new-born ginger-coloured monkey.
The endangered south east Asian Francois Langur monkey, called Laa Laa, has typical baby orange fur which in six months will turn a glossy black.
London Zoo said 9,500 red-heads had already downloaded free vouchers from its Web Site.
"It has been very popular. We will accept all shades of red, auburn, titian, ginger, you name it," a Zoo spokesman said.
Ginger Sunday will also allow red-heads, often the butt of jokes in Britain, to win some friends since the vouchers allow them to bring a friend, be they brunette, blonde or even bald.
Britain has one of the highest concentrations of redheads in the world, but a recent survey showed that 9 out of ten were teased at school about their hair colour.
A national utility company even decided to poke fun at redheads when it ran an ad campaign during 2000 which showed a family of gingers above the caption - "There are some things in life you can't choose".
Red Letter Day for Red-Heads at London Zoo
LONDON (Reuters) - They say blondes have more fun, but redheads will have the edge on Sunday when they get into London Zoo for free to view a rare new-born ginger-coloured monkey.
The endangered south east Asian Francois Langur monkey, called Laa Laa, has typical baby orange fur which in six months will turn a glossy black.
London Zoo said 9,500 red-heads had already downloaded free vouchers from its Web Site.
"It has been very popular. We will accept all shades of red, auburn, titian, ginger, you name it," a Zoo spokesman said.
Ginger Sunday will also allow red-heads, often the butt of jokes in Britain, to win some friends since the vouchers allow them to bring a friend, be they brunette, blonde or even bald.
Britain has one of the highest concentrations of redheads in the world, but a recent survey showed that 9 out of ten were teased at school about their hair colour.
A national utility company even decided to poke fun at redheads when it ran an ad campaign during 2000 which showed a family of gingers above the caption - "There are some things in life you can't choose".
Thursday, August 05, 2004
You've got to hand it to this guy---
GHANA BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 1
Saturday, July 31, 2004
(FBIS Transcribed Excerpt)
The EGLE (Every Ghanaian Living Everywhere) Party has asked the US government to make amends for derailing Ghana's progress through the sponsorship of the 1966 coup d'etat that overthrew the government of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.
According to Mr Danny Ofori-Atta, chairman of the party, the Central Intelligence Agency's recent declassified files clearly admit the role of the United States played and it was only fair that it made up for causing Ghana's economy to stagnate ever since.
He has, therefore, called for a total cancellation of Ghana's 5bn-external debt and the setting up of "credit guarantee for a private company capitalized with 5bn which will be in the form of a 30-year US Treasury insurance guarantee to back the capital of the private company to be listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange". (Passage omitted)
(Description of Source: Accra Ghana Broadcasting Corporation Radio 1 in English -- state-owned, government-controlled radio)
Ghana: Opposition party wants US to pay for 1966 coup
GHANA BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 1
Saturday, July 31, 2004
(FBIS Transcribed Excerpt)
The EGLE (Every Ghanaian Living Everywhere) Party has asked the US government to make amends for derailing Ghana's progress through the sponsorship of the 1966 coup d'etat that overthrew the government of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.
According to Mr Danny Ofori-Atta, chairman of the party, the Central Intelligence Agency's recent declassified files clearly admit the role of the United States played and it was only fair that it made up for causing Ghana's economy to stagnate ever since.
He has, therefore, called for a total cancellation of Ghana's 5bn-external debt and the setting up of "credit guarantee for a private company capitalized with 5bn which will be in the form of a 30-year US Treasury insurance guarantee to back the capital of the private company to be listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange". (Passage omitted)
(Description of Source: Accra Ghana Broadcasting Corporation Radio 1 in English -- state-owned, government-controlled radio)
Friday, July 30, 2004
I wish this were a surprise-- but it unfortunately was only a matter of time:
Bombs rock American and Israeli embassies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Bombs rock American and Israeli embassies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Well, the whole Democratic convention has been and will be analyzed and hyped so there isn't much original I would add.
The only thing I can say is that I am extremely glad to see them reaching across party lines to formulate "American" policy instead of "Democratic" policy. I know it's only talk until it is lived up to but it puts a lot of momentum towards turning the corner from the 50-50 stalemate we've been stuck in.
We'll see.
The only thing I can say is that I am extremely glad to see them reaching across party lines to formulate "American" policy instead of "Democratic" policy. I know it's only talk until it is lived up to but it puts a lot of momentum towards turning the corner from the 50-50 stalemate we've been stuck in.
We'll see.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Just when you thought North Africa didn't need any more problems, with grinding poverty, Islamic extremism and the crisis in Darfur....
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has launched an urgent appeal for $83 million to curb a deadly locust plague ravaging north and western African crops. Government ministers from Algeria, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia met in Algeria this week to discuss efforts in their countries to deal with the problem before drafting a plan at regional level.
News clip from today's Global Development Briefing by the Development Executive Group
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has launched an urgent appeal for $83 million to curb a deadly locust plague ravaging north and western African crops. Government ministers from Algeria, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia met in Algeria this week to discuss efforts in their countries to deal with the problem before drafting a plan at regional level.
News clip from today's Global Development Briefing by the Development Executive Group
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Unfortunately, my blog is one of the first things that has to go when I get busy but here's something to show that I'm still around....
US Cuts Off Aid to Uzbekistan
Monday, May 17, 2004
It was a slow day and the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry
It was a dry wind and it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers and the automatic earth
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry
It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry
"The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon
Graceland album
This has been running through my head as I hear the news and (try to) deal with a lot of stuff that has been coming up in my life recently. Hope to be posting a bit more soon.
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry
It was a dry wind and it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers and the automatic earth
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry
It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry
"The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon
Graceland album
This has been running through my head as I hear the news and (try to) deal with a lot of stuff that has been coming up in my life recently. Hope to be posting a bit more soon.
Sunday, April 04, 2004
"Holy Men in Tights!"-- A Superheroes Conference
A call for papers at a conference hosted by the Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia
I know a few people who could submit papers here no problem....
A call for papers at a conference hosted by the Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia
I know a few people who could submit papers here no problem....
Interesting:
Global Dispatch: From Turkey to Tibet
The Guardian, Monday February 23, 2004
Brian Whitaker tries to pin down the boundaries of the Middle East and discovers that over the years it has been all things to all (self-interested) people
I have been writing about it in the Guardian for almost four years and I'm fairly sure that I have been there, but I have to confess that I don't know for certain where the Middle East is.
The only consolation - for me, if not for those on the receiving end of US Middle East policy - is that the state department, the Pentagon and the military are as confused as I am.
Read the entire article
Global Dispatch: From Turkey to Tibet
The Guardian, Monday February 23, 2004
Brian Whitaker tries to pin down the boundaries of the Middle East and discovers that over the years it has been all things to all (self-interested) people
I have been writing about it in the Guardian for almost four years and I'm fairly sure that I have been there, but I have to confess that I don't know for certain where the Middle East is.
The only consolation - for me, if not for those on the receiving end of US Middle East policy - is that the state department, the Pentagon and the military are as confused as I am.
Read the entire article
Thursday, April 01, 2004
This is disturbing:
Spying Commonplace at the UN, Diplomats Say
It reminds me of a story one of my former professors used to tell. A native of Ceaucescu's Romania (one of the more paranoid Communist satellites), she was celebrating the new year with her family in Bucharest when she, knowing her phone was being monitored, said simply into the phone (without dialing or having it ring):
"Happy New Year"
and a man's voice on the phone responded:
"Happy New Year to you too."
Spying Commonplace at the UN, Diplomats Say
It reminds me of a story one of my former professors used to tell. A native of Ceaucescu's Romania (one of the more paranoid Communist satellites), she was celebrating the new year with her family in Bucharest when she, knowing her phone was being monitored, said simply into the phone (without dialing or having it ring):
"Happy New Year"
and a man's voice on the phone responded:
"Happy New Year to you too."
Happy April Fools Day!
This came out at least a week before but this is just too funny to be true...
Canada Could Ditch Winter Blues by Annexing Caribbean Paradise Some Canadians (including members of Parliament) are lobbying for Canada to annex the Turks and Caicos Islands!
Here's the site they put up to promote the idea
The Turks and Caicos is a small island group near the Bahamas, thousands of miles from even the closest point in Canada. They've got a population of not even 20,000 people and they're talking about making it a possible new province?!
This came out at least a week before but this is just too funny to be true...
Canada Could Ditch Winter Blues by Annexing Caribbean Paradise Some Canadians (including members of Parliament) are lobbying for Canada to annex the Turks and Caicos Islands!
Here's the site they put up to promote the idea
The Turks and Caicos is a small island group near the Bahamas, thousands of miles from even the closest point in Canada. They've got a population of not even 20,000 people and they're talking about making it a possible new province?!
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Where I come from, life is unfit to be lived. Given the strong winds and poor public transport, whatever you plan to do turns into an immensely arduous undertaking. At the age of fourteen you are already incredibly weary, and you don't get a proper break until you're fourty-five. Very often people go out shopping and don't come back, or else they write a novel and on page 2,000, they suddenly realize how confusingly out of hand the whole thing has got and start all over again from the beginning. It is a timeless life, one of the gtreat achievements of which is the chance to die in one's own bed.
From Russian Disco by Wladimir Kaminer (Ebury Press; August 1, 2002)
From Russian Disco by Wladimir Kaminer (Ebury Press; August 1, 2002)
With all the stories of crises and bad things happening throughout the world, I thought it would be good to post something positive for a change:
Participatory Government: A New Reality Slowly Emerges in Tajikistan (January 2004, from the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative of the American Bar Association)
Participatory Government: A New Reality Slowly Emerges in Tajikistan (January 2004, from the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative of the American Bar Association)
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
According to the State Department,
"More democracy is the best antidote to terror."
-- Richard Boucher, State Department Spokesperson
Powell Offers Help in Uzbekistan Probe
Funny how our democratic freedoms in this country are continually eroded with things like the Patriot Act.....
"More democracy is the best antidote to terror."
-- Richard Boucher, State Department Spokesperson
Powell Offers Help in Uzbekistan Probe
Funny how our democratic freedoms in this country are continually eroded with things like the Patriot Act.....
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Taking a quick break during a crazy day at work.....
Which Homestar Runner character are you?
this quiz was made by jurjyfrort
Which Homestar Runner character are you?
this quiz was made by jurjyfrort
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
To explain the puzzling absence of recent blog postings, I present this rant:
Argh--
I finally get my computer fixed after fighting with Dell to get my warranty recognized, my requests getting lost twice because of computer problems on their side, long delays in actually having the repairman come to perform surgery, and digging up a strange OS that my system had never run to reboot my computer to find that the firm I took it to initially for data retrieval had stuffed an entirely different harddrive into my defunct machine!
(try to say all that in one breath)
So where does that leave me? I've been basically computerless for 2 months, using only a klunky system here at work, trying to get my system back in order and I'm stuck with a messed up piece of hardware running the memories of some AU Washington program student whose most pressing computer need was downloading pictures of Matt Damon...... Argh! [sorry Tim ;-)]
So bear with me as I plunk down a big wad of cash (that I don't really have) to get operational again. I should be more digitally active when that comes...
Argh--
I finally get my computer fixed after fighting with Dell to get my warranty recognized, my requests getting lost twice because of computer problems on their side, long delays in actually having the repairman come to perform surgery, and digging up a strange OS that my system had never run to reboot my computer to find that the firm I took it to initially for data retrieval had stuffed an entirely different harddrive into my defunct machine!
(try to say all that in one breath)
So where does that leave me? I've been basically computerless for 2 months, using only a klunky system here at work, trying to get my system back in order and I'm stuck with a messed up piece of hardware running the memories of some AU Washington program student whose most pressing computer need was downloading pictures of Matt Damon...... Argh! [sorry Tim ;-)]
So bear with me as I plunk down a big wad of cash (that I don't really have) to get operational again. I should be more digitally active when that comes...
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Lots of upheaval here, made worse by an ongoing battle to make the electronic gadgets in my life work. I've succeeded in resolving problems with my phone and now the long saga of my string of computer problems seem like they will (hopefully) come to a close soon. (We'll see if the repair person comes when they said they would)
In the meantime, here's something bizarre that caught my eye:
(from RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 8, No. 30, Part I, 17 February 2004)
PUTIN ENCROACHING ON SANTA'S SPHERE OF INFLUENCE. A boy living in Ufa who sent Russian President Putin a letter saying he "does not believe in God but believes only in the president" has been given a computer, an RFE/RL Ufa correspondent reported on 12 February. The gift was reportedly paid for by local authorities. Another child from Bashkortostan reportedly wrote to Putin asking for a puppy. The 8-year-old girl from Ufa received a reply saying her request was forwarded to the Bashkortostan authorities. Ufa's Sovietskii Raion administration, which was tasked with dealing with the issue, determined that the girl's family is too impoverished to support the puppy. However, raion officials said that they cannot avoid giving the child a puppy because it was an order by the Kremlin. JAC
In the meantime, here's something bizarre that caught my eye:
(from RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 8, No. 30, Part I, 17 February 2004)
PUTIN ENCROACHING ON SANTA'S SPHERE OF INFLUENCE. A boy living in Ufa who sent Russian President Putin a letter saying he "does not believe in God but believes only in the president" has been given a computer, an RFE/RL Ufa correspondent reported on 12 February. The gift was reportedly paid for by local authorities. Another child from Bashkortostan reportedly wrote to Putin asking for a puppy. The 8-year-old girl from Ufa received a reply saying her request was forwarded to the Bashkortostan authorities. Ufa's Sovietskii Raion administration, which was tasked with dealing with the issue, determined that the girl's family is too impoverished to support the puppy. However, raion officials said that they cannot avoid giving the child a puppy because it was an order by the Kremlin. JAC
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
I'm glad this story is finally percolating up through the Western media but it has hit a brick wall of late--
Trial Could Dredge Up Sordid Role of US (in Iraq)
I'm looking for the transcripts of American officials commenting on the Halabja chemical weapons attack-- surprising nobody has brought those up in view of recent events...
And it's also interesting that Bill Frist is the recipient of this ricin attack, or whatever it turns out to be ...
Why him and (apparently) only him? There are plenty of more government officials that would give extremists on any side more "bang for the buck" without running into that much security. Frist has kept a relatively low-profile and am just confused as to why this is happening to him specifically instead of a more random or high-profile target.
(as a disclaimer, I have friends who work in the Senate offices that have been evacuated and am therefore extremely serious in my condemnation of this and any other terrorist attack)
Trial Could Dredge Up Sordid Role of US (in Iraq)
I'm looking for the transcripts of American officials commenting on the Halabja chemical weapons attack-- surprising nobody has brought those up in view of recent events...
And it's also interesting that Bill Frist is the recipient of this ricin attack, or whatever it turns out to be ...
Why him and (apparently) only him? There are plenty of more government officials that would give extremists on any side more "bang for the buck" without running into that much security. Frist has kept a relatively low-profile and am just confused as to why this is happening to him specifically instead of a more random or high-profile target.
(as a disclaimer, I have friends who work in the Senate offices that have been evacuated and am therefore extremely serious in my condemnation of this and any other terrorist attack)
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Instead of having to deal with the tedious process of nurturing democratic institutions in Iraq, the United States should solve the whole controversy about elections by sending out a ballot asking "Should Saddam Hussein be recalled?"
Bursting with gratitude for their benificent liberators, the United States, Iraqis of all political backgrounds would undoubtedly embrace democracy as totally as it is in the US. Arnold Schwarzenegger would surely win in a landslide.
California would be bursting with gratitude too.
Bursting with gratitude for their benificent liberators, the United States, Iraqis of all political backgrounds would undoubtedly embrace democracy as totally as it is in the US. Arnold Schwarzenegger would surely win in a landslide.
California would be bursting with gratitude too.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
It's me again-- Still plagued with computer problems and much more...
Have lots of things to write on:
Like why you should avoid American Express-- especially financial services.
How the toppling of the Shevuardnadze regime in Georgia demonstrates the operation of a very interesting activist movement in many of the former Soviet republics.
How the Republican junta running our country is finding even more ways to run it into the ground.
All this and much more, when I actually can dedicate time to writing!
In the meantime:
Check out al3x.net, a site maintained by Alex Payne; who I had the pleasure of meeting recently.
Read this article to get a little perspective on how many people still see Stalin.
And watch me indulge my love of maps, this one of the states I've visited (thanks, Tricia). Anyone want to show me around the south or the midwest?
create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide
More soon.....
Have lots of things to write on:
Like why you should avoid American Express-- especially financial services.
How the toppling of the Shevuardnadze regime in Georgia demonstrates the operation of a very interesting activist movement in many of the former Soviet republics.
How the Republican junta running our country is finding even more ways to run it into the ground.
All this and much more, when I actually can dedicate time to writing!
In the meantime:
Check out al3x.net, a site maintained by Alex Payne; who I had the pleasure of meeting recently.
Read this article to get a little perspective on how many people still see Stalin.
And watch me indulge my love of maps, this one of the states I've visited (thanks, Tricia). Anyone want to show me around the south or the midwest?
create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide
More soon.....
Monday, January 19, 2004
It's one of the most overused cliches of the universe but you really don't know how much you use something until it's gone. Without warning, my computer has stopped working entirely; not even responding to being plugged into the wall. I?ve done as much as I can to figure out what's going wrong to no avail. Hardware problems are beyond my experience and I?m trying to figure out where to go from here. Lots of mitigating circumstances, complications and headaches.
So, I have another quibbling excuse for not writing as much as I have material.
But, here are a few things that have caught my eye recently:
Growing up in a family of teachers, I can tell you that this is all too true:
Talk the Edutalk
Take a look at this interesting and revealing story about a focus of real power behind the president:
The Strong, Silent Type
I also got this email forwarded to me and thought that it deserved to be distributed to the paltry readership of my blog:
The American Family Association, an anti-gay organization, is doing a poll on gay marriage. They are going to present the results to Congress, hoping to gain support for the federal constitutional amendment to define "marriage" as solely a heterosexual union. However, anyone can take their poll, so please pass this URL far and wide. (I doubt they expect anyone but their own, anti-gay members to answer it.)
Marriage Poll
Note: If the link doesn't work, go to www.afa.net and in the upper right corner of the web page is the poll link.
So, I have another quibbling excuse for not writing as much as I have material.
But, here are a few things that have caught my eye recently:
Growing up in a family of teachers, I can tell you that this is all too true:
Talk the Edutalk
Take a look at this interesting and revealing story about a focus of real power behind the president:
The Strong, Silent Type
I also got this email forwarded to me and thought that it deserved to be distributed to the paltry readership of my blog:
The American Family Association, an anti-gay organization, is doing a poll on gay marriage. They are going to present the results to Congress, hoping to gain support for the federal constitutional amendment to define "marriage" as solely a heterosexual union. However, anyone can take their poll, so please pass this URL far and wide. (I doubt they expect anyone but their own, anti-gay members to answer it.)
Marriage Poll
Note: If the link doesn't work, go to www.afa.net and in the upper right corner of the web page is the poll link.
Thursday, January 08, 2004
The Bush Administration: The model of financial responsibility....
The United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Jan 6. by the IMF, noting the rising U.S. budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance. The report warns that the United States' net financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 40 percent of its total economy within a few years-"an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country," according to the fund, that could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.
(From the Global Development Briefing for January 8, 2004-- Published by The Development Executive Group)
The United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Jan 6. by the IMF, noting the rising U.S. budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance. The report warns that the United States' net financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 40 percent of its total economy within a few years-"an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country," according to the fund, that could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.
(From the Global Development Briefing for January 8, 2004-- Published by The Development Executive Group)
Sunday, January 04, 2004
It’s been a long time since I have posted anything—too long. And, you know me, I’ve got a few (thousand) thoughts and ideas scribbled down on little scraps of paper…..
Time to do some… well—whatever the digital equivalent of scribbling is…
Happy Birthday to two great people!
We're just coming up to a state holiday in Borealum as its favorite son and Answer Guy is getting just a little bit wiser than before. Happy Birthday, Tim!!! :-)
And warm wishes go out to another friend, this time a chick-- or should I say Rotisserie Gold? ;-) Happy Birthday Michele!!
Time to do some… well—whatever the digital equivalent of scribbling is…
Happy Birthday to two great people!
We're just coming up to a state holiday in Borealum as its favorite son and Answer Guy is getting just a little bit wiser than before. Happy Birthday, Tim!!! :-)
And warm wishes go out to another friend, this time a chick-- or should I say Rotisserie Gold? ;-) Happy Birthday Michele!!
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