Since there's a blizzard on.

This is a comment from an Economist graphic about increases in nation's wind power usage. Love the commenter's name.



Sex-master wrote:

Feb 3rd 2010 10:58 GMT

Increasing non-fossil fuel electricity generating capacity is to:

1. reduce the dependence on non-renewable energy sources and
2. reduce pollutions from say burning coals, but
3. NOT to deal with IPCC's religious bleif of global warming.

Recommend (5)

A shining moment in the marriage of culture and commerce.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston in 1809. When he was two, both his parents died from tuberculosis. Poe lived most of his life in poverty and sometimes in misery. He would work and work on a poem only to sell it to a newspaper for a few dollars. In 1836, Poe married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. She was sick with tuberculosis, and they had no money to pay for heat so Poe trained their cat to sit on her lap to keep her warm. Virginia's mother lived with the couple as well, and Poe was trying to care for them both with almost no money. When he did get money, he often spent it on alcohol. His biggest problem was that he wasn't paid enough money for what he wrote; in 1845, he sold the poem 'The Raven' to a newspaper for $15.

-The Writer's Almanac

Douchie Poe fans have a mock funeral in recompense for his dying drunk on a Baltimore street.

More proof that pot will save the world.

In this case, a correlative activity, watching TV, as opposed to those associated with alcohol or uppers, can be beneficial to society.

This little ditty is from SeedMagazine.

"With all the negative impacts of TV, it might make you wonder whether TV offers any benefits at all. The pseudonymous neuroscience blogger “Neurocritic” found one studyshowing a benefit of television: People say they’re less lonely when they watch. As with the Dunton study, this is just a self-reported correlation, but if TV really makes people less lonely, that’s inarguably a plus.

But there may be more tangible benefits to TV, especially in developing nations. Daniel Hawes, a PhD candidate in applied at the University of Minnesota, discusses a study of a thousand villages in Tamil Nadu, India. The researchers found that shortly after the introduction of TV into a village, the standing of women improved dramatically. Villagers were more likely to say it was wrong for a husband to beat his wife, and women had greater autonomy and lower rates of pregnancy.

This makes some sense—in the US, the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s followed shortly after the nation-wide explosion of television ownership in the 1950s. It’s quite conceivable that TV’s power to induce social change—by giving people more access to information—is universal.

Paradoxically, while TV may be harmful to an individual’s mental and physical well-being, on the aggregate it could be beneficial to society. Perhaps, as with so many other things, the best advice might be to watch TV—but only in moderation. For more on the impact of TV and other technologies, visit ResearchBlogging.org."

The org mentioned, while not visually stimulating, has some interesting posts.

I say we put Pat Robertson and Rush in boat going to Haiti.

Could argue that to understand the want of relative deprivation necessitates the acknowledgement, acceptance of relative privilege.



"Pat Robertson told his audience in the wake of the earthquake the "true story" that Haiti "swore a pact to the devil" to get "free from the French" and "ever since, they have been cursed." You heard that right. According to Robertson, the Haitian people are cursed and were hit by this horrible disaster because they made a pact with the devil for their freedom." - Media Matters

Kind of makes the Xmas day "underwear bomber" not seem so terror-fying. If there is a god, to quote a friend, "what an asshole."

UN guy: "Exactly what Haiti doesn't need, after all it's been through."

The really fucked-up thing is this might be the only thing that might make the city better. The chance to rebuild seemingly more significant than New Orleans, after Katrina. There will be more resources pouring into the place than ever have, or would, before now. The hurricanes, weather-related or political, of Haiti haven't brought out such an apparently immense response. This seemingly could be on par with a full scale invasion. If the government, only hanging on by a thread before the quake, is undone, the US/UN will have to take over. Martial law could be instated, suspending the country's constitution. This could be parlayed into calls for a constitutional convention of some sort that would be a proxy for installing an even more international friendly government, with US/UN troops remaining for some time.

Nation building anyone? We're doing a bang up job in Iraq and Afghanistan (that's only half sarcasm, and half hope). Though, to my knowledge there's no insurgency in Haiti--yet. And like Katrina, there's a mass exodus of the, presumably, poorer residents of the city.

Some semblance of normalcy, says Clinton. But maybe their normal shouldn't be returned to them, why not make it better?

IMF dude seems to agree, he says "something totally new...at the national level" is needed and the "piece meal approach...is not enough to get rid of the problems of the country."

Last time US troops in Haiti on this scale?

Don't quite get the bodies in the road to protest a slow response, almost ironic.

I grew up off Ardennes Ave in a neighborhood with WWII themed street names. Built for vets. Yeah.

From The Writer's Almanac, earlier this month:

It was on this day in 1944 that the Battle of the Bulge began. It took place in the Ardennes forest, a snowy mountainous region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg and lasted for more than a month. It was the last major German offensive, and it was the bloodiest battle of World War II for Americans troops. While estimates about the number of American casualties differ, the U.S. Defense Department lists 19,000 killed, 47,500 wounded, and 23,000 missing.

Among those taken as prisoner of war by the Germans was a young infantry scout named Kurt Vonnegut. He'd only been in the front lines for five days when he got trapped behind enemy lines and taken prisoner. Within a month, he was sent over to Dresden and put to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. He and his fellow American prisoners were detained in and slept at an underground warehouse in Dresden that had been a meat-packing facility and storage locker before the war. The building was marked 'Schlachthof-funf': 'Slaughterhouse-Five.'

Then, in February 1945, about two months after the Battle of the Bulge began, British and American forces started firebombing Dresden. The firestorm created by the massive Allied bombings killed nearly all of Dresden's residents, but Vonnegut and other POWs survived because they were three stories underground, in that meat-storage locker.




Vonnegut published his novel Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, a quarter century after he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and a witness to the Dresden firebombing. In it, he wrote:

'It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'

The Battle of the Bulge ended on January 25, 1945, after Hitler agreed to withdraw German troops from the Ardennes forest. Less than two weeks later, Allied leaders met at Yalta to discuss occupying post-war Germany.


The New York Times:

When Theodore Roosevelt was president, three decades before World War II, the world was focused on the bloody Russo-Japanese War, a contest for control of North Asia. President Roosevelt was no fan of the Russians: “No human beings, black, yellow or white, could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant — in short, as untrustworthy in every way — as the Russians,” he wrote in August 1905, near the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese, on the other hand, were “a wonderful and civilized people,” Roosevelt wrote, “entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.”

Roosevelt knew that Japan coveted the Korean Peninsula as a springboard to its Asian expansion. Back in 1900, Roosevelt had written, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” When, in February 1904, Japan broke off relations with Russia, President Roosevelt said publicly that he would “maintain the strictest neutrality,” but privately he wrote, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side.”

In June 1905, Roosevelt made world headlines when — apparently on his own initiative — he invited the two nations to negotiate an end to their war. Roosevelt’s private letter to his son told another story: “I have of course concealed from everyone — literally everyone — the fact that I acted in the first place on Japan’s suggestion ... . Remember that you are to let no one know that in this matter of the peace negotiations I have acted at the request of Japan and that each step has been taken with Japan’s foreknowledge, and not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.”

Years later, a Japanese emissary to Roosevelt paraphrased the president’s comments to him: “All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine, preserved the Latin American nations from European interference. The future policy of Japan towards Asiatic countries should be similar to that of the United States towards their neighbors on the American continent.”

In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt approved the Japanese annexation of Korea and agreed to an “understanding or alliance” among Japan, the United States and Britain “as if the United States were under treaty obligations.” The “as if” was key: Congress was much less interested in North Asia than Roosevelt was, so he came to his agreement with Japan in secret, an unconstitutional act.

To signal his commitment to Tokyo, Roosevelt cut off relations with Korea, turned the American legation in Seoul over to the Japanese military and deleted the word “Korea” from the State Department’s Record of Foreign Relations and placed it under the heading of “Japan.”

Roosevelt had assumed that the Japanese would stop at Korea and leave the rest of North Asia to the Americans and the British. But such a wish clashed with his notion that the Japanese should base their foreign policy on the American model of expansion across North America and, with the taking of Hawaii and the Philippines, into the Pacific. It did not take long for the Japanese to tire of the territorial restrictions placed upon them by their Anglo-American partners.

Japan’s declaration of war, in December 1941, explained its position quite clearly: “It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under the Anglo-American policy of imperialistic exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation.”

"Nobel Peace Prize President Obama Calls For More War"

- OfficialWire headline. This guy's kind of a nut, but he's got some stuff dead on.

A paraphrase of a quote:

History may not repeat itself, but it does seem to rhyme.
-The New Yorker

The original:

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

(Yeah, okay, it's not the right Pope; sue me.)

It was on [November 30] in 1095 that Pope Urban II, while on a speaking tour in France, called for the first Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. There was no imminent threat. Muslims had occupied Jerusalem for hundreds of years. But Urban II had noticed that Europe was becoming an increasingly violent place, with low-level knights killing each other over their land rights, and he thought that he could bring peace to the Christian world by directing all that violence against an outside enemy. So he made up stories of how Turks in Jerusalem were torturing and killing Christians, and anyone who was willing to join the fight against them would go to heaven.


About 100,000 men from France, Germany, and Italy answered the call, formed into several large groups, and marched across Asia Minor to the Middle East. Nearly half of them died from exhaustion and sickness before they ever reached their destination. They began sacking cities along the way, and they fought among each other for the spoils of each battle. When they reached the trading city of Antioch, they killed almost everyone, including the Christians who lived there. By the time they got to Jerusalem, it had recently fallen into the hands of Egyptians, who were friendly with the Vatican. But the crusaders attacked anyway, killing every Muslim they could find. The Jews in the city gathered in the temple, and the crusaders set it on fire. Pope Urban II died two weeks later, never hearing the news.

-The Writer's Almanac

You've got your tax cuts in my bailout! (or: Where's My Bailout?)

Comments posted to an article in The Nation about unemployment and the White House's jobs summit thing:

Joblessness? What's the big deal? Why don't we just spend 100 trillion dollars and pay everyone in America $1,000,000 per year! Problem solved!
Isn't liberal economics fun?
-Posted by pontificus at 12/02/2009 @ 09:09am

Or cut 100 trillion in taxes to Steve Forbes and Citgo...and we can all get jobs writing for a magazine or working on an oil rig?
Isn't conservative economics fun?
-Posted by Mask at 12/02/2009 @ 09:26am

look at post #2 and #3...this is essentially the nation anonymous web postings boiled down to two opposing sides...
and this is how we rant, over and over and over, forever...
it's a wonderful life!
-Posted by urmygyro at 12/02/2009 @ 09:30am

One thing Americans should be thankful for this Thanksgiving

...is that they have not put on as much weight as the average turkey. Between 1960 and 2008, turkeys bulked up by around 11lb (5kg) to 29lb, an increase of 64%, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Coincidentally, in that same period the average American man gained 28lb, almost the equivalent of a turkey, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, another government agency, and a Gallup poll of 2008. This year an estimated 250m turkeys will be raised, 8% fewer than a year ago, but still almost enough for one bird each for America's 308m people.



-The Economist

Twenty-three by Liam Rector

When he was 23 and beautiful
He liked to hang around
With other beautiful people.

He liked to get intoxicated with them,
Have sex with them, make money
With them. Among them,

He found, one did not have to strain.
Other people
Wanted to hang around with them

And came bearing gifts,
A little something. (These
Gift-bearers were a lot like

Politics itself is, "Showbiz
For ugly people.") In this world
If anything went wrong there

Was always enough money around
To cover it. After he was through
With this crowd he started hanging

Out with a bunch of academic
Gangsters. These were
A different crew altogether:

Smart, on the main, but mean
And eaten alive by resentment.
They never had enough money

And were bitter beyond belief,
Compared, say,
To a troupe of electricians.

Freud said somewhere
In our unconscious
We are always 23.

("Twenty-three" by Liam Rector, from The Executive Director of the Fallen World. (c) University of Chicago Press, 2006.)

Dicks.

On this day in 1973, school officials in Drake, North Dakota, burned copies of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut had served in WWII, and he was captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner in Dresden when the Allies bombed the city. For years, he tried to find a way to tell his story. Meanwhile, he went to graduate school in anthropology, worked at General Electric, got married and had three kids and adopted three more, and struggled to find his voice as a writer. His stories kept falling flat -- too serious and straightforward. But finally he wrote his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969. It was extremely popular and for the most part it got great reviews, but it has been banned many times, for being obscene, violent, and for its unpatriotic description of the war.

In 1973, a 26-year-old high school English teacher assigned Slaughterhouse-Five to his students, and most of them loved it, thought it was the best book they had read in a long time. But one student complained to her mom about the obscene language, and that mom took it to the principal, and the school board voted that it should be not only confiscated from the students (who were only a third of their way through the book), but also burned. Many of the students didn't want to give up their books, so the school searched all their lockers and took them, and then threw the books into the school's burner. While the school board was at it, they decided to burn Deliverance by James Dickey and a short-story anthology.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to one of the members of the school board, and he said:

"Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books -- books you hadn't even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real."

In recent years, several churches across the United States have organized public burnings of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

The Writer's Almanac for November 10, 2009
Listen: http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,j144,dv,mjb,z6o,ddg7,fqwa

Me and media (online reports & radio), a conversation from last night. (or: the Day the Military Died)

A little more than twelve hours ago:

It’s come home. Again. But, maybe, only truly for the first-time. Finally, here, the meta-psychical costs are being paid, at the home front—the worst shooting at a military base, ever. They, whoever—some guy—were, are soldiers. The apparent antagonist is a psychiatrist. And he’s alive. I’d like to hear what he’s got to say. I don’t like the looks of him, his name. This might be a big fucking pebble in the pond. I can only imagine, since I’ve no access, in what way the cable news channels are tweaking-out on this. This is going to be, this is big.




[Headlines:]

Muslim groups fear backlash after Fort Hood shooting

Muslim, Arab Groups Condemn Fort Hood Shooting, Brace For Backlash

“At this juncture, again, there is no concrete reporting as to whether Nidal Malik Hasan was in fact a Muslim or an Arab. All that has been reported is that he served in the Department of Psychology at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda Naval Facility in Bethesda, Maryland. He is believed to be 39 or 40 years old.”

“…his family is shocked by Hasan's actions and that Hasan was a "good American":

Both his parents are American, I want to make sure everyone understands, he was a good American, and we are shocked.

Contrary to prior reports, Hasan has "always been Muslim" and is not a recent convert.”




[Oh, this is fucked:] Stand up to the aggressors. Shooting at Little Rock. Bombs in Times Square.

Nidal Malik Hasan. Barack Hussein Obama. [This is not good. Not good, at all. It is] “horrifying,” Obama says.

[I’m scared to turn on the radio. But I do. It’s not any better.]

A psychiatrist on his way to Iraq. A motive? Yes. Two others? High kill count, begs more shooters. Still on lock down. Someone in your own mist…. And on Wall St., today. Shortage of seasonal flu vaccine because of swine flu vaccines priority. Bernard Kerik screwed. Global warming bill held up by Republicans. Such people will go to hell, says Taliban leader. Militants in Yemen.

Same day as Saddam Hussein sentenced to death 3 years ago today.

[Looking to be a serious case of shooting one’s own foot.]

Palestinian parents. [Oh, that’s great.] Looking more and more like only one shooter. From Virginia Tech, [ha. Lee’s, his former co-worker, is beginning to get fucked.] Why didn’t he come forward before?

Born and raised American. When do we hear about the religion of murderers? …Naval oranges. [Hassidic construction tips. Catskills.] Absorption. A huge, huge problem. [Hassid-lish. He’s hawking tiles. He says, he doesn’t usually do this. Sure.] These tiles can withhold heat or cold.




[Why didn’t they let him out?]

Why didn’t he shoot up the chain of command? Why these servicemen? This is gonna be white-washed, says military psychologist, the MI screwed up.... Eventually, we’re just gonna say enough of it, and treat them all like the enemy. Muslims need to step up, or they’ll be suspect. We’re just gonna get tired of it. –I like him. He's a psychologist, but he talks real: doesn't make excuses for abhorrent behavior.

Nine Bodies

About Australia's Black Saturday wildfires, earlier this year.

The Inferno by Christine Kenneally
The New Yorker, October 26, 2009

"The death toll rose from fifteen to a hundred and seventy-three. It was clear that some bodies would never be recovered, having been effectively cremated. Others were found unburned in positions that suggested that they had simply dropped dead while running from the flame; the radiant heat from a bushfire, which can ignite mattresses and curtains through closed windows, can kill at a considerable distance more or less instantaneously. Survivors with even more excruciating stories. As people had escaped, they had seen they neighbors bodies lying in the streets. A few days after the fire, police found a house with the remains of nine bodies: eight adults had formed a protective huddle around a baby."