Well, I made it into work about 0930, despite being up until 0330 last night watching election returns (I had hoped to stay awake until Obama's victory speech, but it was just too late: 0515 UK time). A few thoughts on watching the dawn of a new era as an ex-pat:
I support the Change Congress movement, which seeks to sever the connections between Congress and the wealthy lobbyists who fund their campaigns. I was disappointed to receive an email from them today titled "How bad can it get?" In this message, CC lays the blame for the ongoing financial crisis squarely at the feet of Congress, which is itself a dubious claim. They then go on to lambaste Congress for giving $700 billion to "Wall St millionaires" as an example of the utmost folly.
I'm incredibly disappointed that this usually quite sensible organization has got this issue so dead wrong, so I'm posting this letter which I sent to them in response:
Dear Change Congress,
I'd like to write to express my disappointment with the email which you've sent to supporters like myself. I associate the Change Congress movement not only with the goal of severing the connection between monied interests and Congress, but also with a desire for political discourse based on facts instead of scandal.
Your appeal is very misleading about the nature of of the proposed Wall St bailout. You say, "They can never find the money we need for health care or education, but somehow they can write Wall Street a $700 billion blank check." This is a gross misrepresentation. Congress isn't giving $700 billion away, they're using it to buy securities, which can some day be resold. Now it may be true that the eventual sale price will incur a net loss, but it might just be the case that the venture makes a profit. In 1992, Sweden spent 4% of GDP in a similar bank buy-out, but it ended up costing betwen 0-2% of GDP after the assets were re-sold. Surely you should know better than to blatantly misrepresent the truth of this bailout.
Furthermore, you say, "I would happily pay an extra $2,000 for health care for poor children. But $2,000 for Wall Street millionaires? What is wrong with our system?" Notwithstanding the point above that this money isn't being given away, the bailouts are not going to be pocketed wholesale by investment bankers. The purpose of the bailout is to inject liquidity into the lending markets which will, it is
true, help out the ailing banks, but also help those millions of Americans you mention get mortgages, car loans and jobs generated by companies borrowing to expand their operations.
I support Change Congress to get away from this hyperbolic fear-mongering, so I'm especially shocked and disappointed to see it coming directly from you!
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Barrett
All sixteen of America's intelligence agencies (why do we need 16?) agree that Iran has not been developing nuclear weapons for the last four years. By any sensible measure this is great news. A looming conflict has suddenly become a very unlikely possibility. Sanctions can be reduced so that Iran can be positively engaged economically. Each nation can pay less attention to the rhetoric from their ideologue leaders and more attention to moderate voices.
This is a showdown that would've had no positive side. Obviously the US military is stretched too thin to seriously engage with Iran. Now everyone can relax. So why does the Bush administration view this development with, at best, mixed feelings?
Choice excerpt from Reuter's reporting of the President of Iran's speech at Columbia:
"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country, In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I do not know who has told you we have it."
"The freest women in the world are the women in Iran."
I will give props to Columbia President Lee Bollinger for standing his ground and allowing the lunatic to speak.
...but you're full of muppets. Today, an MIT student walked into Logan to pick up a friend. She happened to be wearing a circuit board on her EC sweatshirt. Because the BPD (or the TSA, or whatever) are idiots, she was arrested at machine-gun point.
I first learned about this story when I went to Chicken Cottage for a late night snack after a few beers. Being run by a bunch of Arab dudes, they routinely have Al Jazeera on the television late at night. Tonight they were actually running this story in the alternating Arabic/English trailer along the bottom.
God help us.
While I applaud the TSA's decision to lift some of its silly travel bans, these FAQs from their website are pretty amusing:
Q. Why is breast milk not a threat?
A. Breast milk is a medical necessity and it is being classified as such. It must be declared at the checkpoint.Q. How do you ensure liquid explosives disguised as breast milk or medications are not brought through the checkpoint?
A. Since September 2006, certain liquid medications have been permitted
at the checkpoint as long as they are declared to security officers and
are subject to additional screening.Q. Do passengers carrying breast milk need to taste it to prove it is not a liquid explosive?
A. No. We will not ask a traveler to taste breast milk.
Why does this sort of thing always seem to happen in the USA? I know bad stuff happens everywhere, but this phenomenon of Joe Bloggs gunning down random people seems to be distinctively American. It's hard to figure exactly why this is the case, and none of the explanations are very make you feel good about being American. One obvious explanation (certainly in the UK media) is America's prolific gun culture. We, resoundingly more than any other Western country, believe that the cost in bodies and dollars of gun crime is a reasonable price to pay for the right to own guns. Unfortunately I'm depressed, rather than hopeful that this latest tragedy will change many minds about just how high that price is.
Read Thomas Friedman's piece, "The Power of Green" in this past Sunday's Times Magazine. I have long loved Friedman's work (which I can no longer read because the Times obnoxiously hides their Op-Eds behind their subscription service). He has always tackled the issues I think are most critical to understanding and changing the world and he does it without the burden of a political agenda.
In this particular case he makes the argument that climate change is the most important issue of all, and we'd better start facing up to it. But he does it in the way he always does, with a can-do optimism that suggests the ways we can face the challenge instead of merely bemoaning its existence. Friedman has always embodied some of my favourite things about America: harsh realist, willing to sacrifice to live up to a challenge and fiercely competitive. He talked this way about the war in Iraq for a long time (and I agreed with nearly everything he said) before it descended into its present state of depressing inevitability.
There are lots of excellent points in the article that I'd like to highlight, but I'm too tired. So instead, just read it.
Headline in the New York Times:
Hunger strike breaks out at Guantanamo.
Don't hunger strikes take time to develop by their very nature? Did one of the guards jump on his radio and report, "Alert, a hunger strike has broken out in cell block D. I repeat a hunger strike has broken out!"
As most people have probably heard, Michael Richards (Seinfeld's Kramer) launched into a bizarre tirade during a standup routine recently where he repeatedly abused hecklers in the audience, calling them niggers over and over again. He's now flailing about to try to recover, but black audience members who have been interviewed on the Today show are demanding Richards pay them "compensation".
Excuse me?
What did he do that requires he give them money? I mean, clearly he's a racist ass, but that doesn't mean he has to go around paying people he offends. In fact, it demeans that deeper point when the people who were targets of the rant turn around and try to make a quick buck.
P.S. Does anyone still want to see pictures from Amsterdam and Paris? I've lost the motivation to finish that rig...
The Martyr's Memorial on Magdalen Street commemorates the burning at the stake of Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer and Nicholas Ridley in the 1550s. Queen Mary had them executed (along with some 300 other Protestants) for refusing to submit to the authority of the Pope. That is, in England, 450 years ago, the penalty for heresy was death.
Why is it then, that only one of the world's major religions has been left behind in the Middle Ages? In one of the supposedly "democratic" Muslim nations, "liberated from tyrrany" by Americans, it is evidently a capital crime to convert to Christianity. I mean, how is it possible that there are still places where this happens? Historians out there: What happened (or, more likely, failed to happen) in the Islamic world that prevented it from joining the rest of humanity beyond the age of martyrs?
David Irving, a British "revisionist historian" is currently sitting in an Austrian prison for publicly denying the holocaust while in that country. How is it possible that 10 countries, including Austria, can have such harsh laws against advocating such beliefs? The maximum punishment he could face is 20 years in prison!
Irving seems to have taken an "Intelligent Design" style approach to the Holocaust; he avoids the oft-mocked hardline claims such as complete denial of the Holocaust and instead focuses on supposedly rigorous "research" claiming things like: the death toll was much lower than is currently supposed, Hitler had no knowledge of the ongoing extermination of Jews, there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, etc. His works have become much-touted by neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups, further tarnishing his once impressive academic reputation.
But surely his decision to say stupid things shouldn't be punishable by imprisonment? People deny history and reality every day, but we don't expect them to go to jail for it. Partially this illustrates one of the differences between American jurisprudence and that of European democracies. The founding fathers of the United States considered freedom of speech to be so paramount that it is featured in the very first amendment to the Constitution. I'm certainly not saying that European governments are rampantly censoring their citizens, just that such a law (banning belief or non-belief of anything) could never be passed in the US, where the right for any nutcase to say what he pleases is considered to be the ultimate safeguard against tyrrany.
The New York Times recently featured a beefy two-part article about the debate between scientists and proponents of "intelligent design". The spooky thing about this most recent attempt to insert religion into science is the way they paint their perspective as a scientific alternative. By publishing popular books and an occasional paper in a scientific journal (the reviewers must've been asleep at the wheel) they have created the illusion that there is actual scientific debate concerning the validity of the theory of evolution.
The proponents of intelligent design try to fool the public into believing that this is a scientific debate by presenting a series of scientific-sounding arguments against evolution. All of their points are straw men couched in mixed metaphors, but they seem convincing to non-scientists. This mendacity is illustrated by their use of the term "neo-Darwinists" to describe their opponents (who comprise essentially all of mainstream biology), as if Darwinism is a cast-off relic of an earlier time recently resurrected by crop of crazed atheists.
These quacks become insidious when they try to push their agenda on the American education system. They encourage school systems to "teach the controversy" and let students make up their own minds. This position is dangerously agreeable to lots of American parents: It has a certain free-speech air of reasonable discourse about it, which makes it seem very American; furthermore most Americans do believe in God so they're relieved to have some compromise which apparently reconciles science and religion.
If this attitude becomes widespread it represents a deadly threat to science education. The academic window-dressing of intelligent design is immediately transparent to a scientist, but not so to a 7th grader curious about biology. Presenting intelligent design as a scientifically viable alternative to evolution is a criminal deception of the young. This is made worse by the fact that many scientists dismiss intelligent design in crass terms that offend faithful people who don't really care that much about evolution anyway. Discussion of the nature of the Creator belongs in churches, mosques and synagogues, not in biology labs.
Bullshit, you can be mine.
When did Tom Cruise become such a maniac? Doesn't he have PR people who tell him that he instantaneously changed from a slightly washed-up actor to a raving-mad Scientologist pedophile? First it was the whole Katie Holmes thing with him jumping around during interviews like a lovesick 15 year old, then he started pushing his whole Scientologist schtick too. Evidently the "history of psychology" culminated in L. Ron Hubbard. Yeesh.
Man I could really go for an engram right now.
I've been following some of the stories (made publicly visible by Nicholas Kristof's NYT editorials) of honour rapes (women raped by the village elders as a punishment for certain "crimes") perpetrated in Pakistan (as well as other places). In a BBC story today appeared the following:
A village council allegedly ordered the rape because her younger brother was seen with a woman from a more influential tribe.
It's practically a self-parody. Is it actually possible that places like this still exist? The article goes on to say that the victim in this case is being prevented from travelling abroad by the Pakistani government because they're worried she might "undermine Pakistan's image". You think?!
Today, the BBC reported that Heinz is buying the HP Sauce Company. The article had the following insight on how Heinz is staying ahead of the market:
The purchase from French group Danone is the latest
stage in Heinz's current strategy of focusing on ketchups, condiments
and sauces.
Here I am, 3000 freaking miles away and one of the respectable English daily papers, the Guardian, is reporting on Amal's time travellers' convention. It's a simple idea, really: if you publicize a time-traveller gathering event scheduled for tomorrow (or Saturday in this case) well enough, and the evidence lasts far enough into the future that people living in some distant time when time travel is possible, you may just get a future time traveller to show up. When I first heard about it, I smiled and remembered all the stupid shit we did in college.
Now this has evidently become a worldwide news story. There are acid-free paper slips being hidden in rarely used tomes, radio waves being broadcast into space and print media coverage from newspapers all over. Congrats to Amal, I hope you get lots of future-attendees. I'll nip into the Bodelian (2nd largest library in Britain) and leave a note about it in some 11th century manuscripts.
