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Archives
when know nothings are in charge
This is another must read. This is why our country is well on it's way to becoming a third world country.
Creative Class War
How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy.
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What should really alarm us is that our capacity to so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition--the other pincer of the claw--as cities in other developed countries transform themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They're doing it through a variety of means--from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they're luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States' province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas. The most advanced cell phones are being made in Salo, Finland, not Chicago. The world's leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle.
As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001--an astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar, though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers. Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope are short-term security concerns--as federal agencies have restricted visas from certain countries after September 11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United States. For instance, most of the decline in science and technology immigrants in the National Science Board study was due to a drop in applications.
Why would talented foreigners avoid us? In part, because other countries are simply doing a better, more aggressive job of recruiting them. The technology bust also plays a role. There are fewer jobs for computer engineers, and even top foreign scientists who might still have their pick of great cutting-edge research positions are less likely than they were a few years ago to make millions through tech-industry partnerships.
But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America's human capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government's attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, "You don't belong here."
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[more]
thanks to Eschaton
photography
Kalpesh Lathigra
[more]
thanks to Conscientious
the politicial opinion complex
This is a must read.
The Awsome Destructive Power of the CPM
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Howard Dean has joined the list of victims of U.S. corporate media consolidation. Dean shares this distinction with Dennis Kucinich and the people of the formerly sovereign state of Iraq, among many others. Dean was stripped of half his popular support in the space of two weeks in January while John Kerry – tied in the polls with Carol Moseley-Braun at seven percent just two months earlier – rose like a genie from a bottle to become the overnight presidential frontrunner. Both candidates were shocked and disoriented by the dizzying turns of fortune, and for good reason. Neither Dean nor Kerry had done anything on their own that could have so dramatically altered the race. Corporate America decided that Dean must be savaged, and its media sector made it happen.
This commentary, however, is not about the merits of Howard Dean. If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s – flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum – can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble. The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of media’s role in the American power structure. The African American historical experience has much to offer in that regard, since the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements were born in a wrestling match with an essentially hostile corporate (white) media. However, there can be no meaningful discussion of the options available to progressive forces in the United States unless it is first recognized that the corporate media in the current era is the enemy, and must be treated that way.
It is no longer possible to view commercial news media as mere servants of the ruling rich – they are full members of the presiding corporate pantheon. General media consolidation has created an integrated mass communications system that is both objectively and self-consciously at one with the Citibanks and ExxonMobils of the world. Media companies act in effective unison on matters of importance to the larger corporate class. For all politically useful purposes, the monopolization of US media is now complete, in that the corporate owners and managers of the dominant organs are interchangeable and indistinguishable, sharing a common mission and worldview. (That’s the underlying reason why their “news” product is nearly identical.) Monopolies do not require a solitary actor – an ensemble acting in concert achieves the same results.
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[more]
thanks to Joerg at Conscientious
nursing art
Postcards of Nursing: A Wordwide Tribute
[more]
thanks to Everlasting Blort
economy
Red Ink Realities
By Paul Krugman
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Even conservatives are starting to admit that George Bush isn't serious when he claims to be doing something about the exploding budget deficit. At best — to borrow the already classic language of the State of the Union address — his administration is engaged in deficit reduction-related program activities.
But these admissions have been accompanied by an urban legend about what went wrong. According to cleverly misleading reports from the Heritage Foundation and other like-minded sources, the deficit is growing because Mr. Bush isn't sufficiently conservative: he's allowing runaway growth in domestic spending. This myth is intended to divert attention from the real culprit: sharply reduced tax collections, mainly from corporations and the wealthy.
Is domestic spending really exploding? Think about it: farm subsidies aside, which domestic programs have received lavish budget increases over the last three years? Education? Don't be silly: No Child Left Behind is rapidly turning into a sick joke.
In fact, many government agencies are severely underfinanced. For example, last month the head of the National Park Service's police admitted to reporters that her force faced serious budget and staff shortages, and was promptly suspended.
A recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does the math. While overall government spending has risen rapidly since 2001, the great bulk of that increase can be attributed either to outlays on defense and homeland security, or to types of government spending, like unemployment insurance, that automatically rise when the economy is depressed.
Why, then, do we face the prospect of huge deficits as far as the eye can see? Part of the answer is the surge in defense and homeland security spending. The main reason for deficits, however, is that revenues have plunged. Federal tax receipts as a share of national income are now at their lowest level since 1950.
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Oreo Movie
[more]
thanks to Cursor
poster art
Atomic Movie Posters
[more]
empire
POWER RANGERS
by Joshua Micah Marshall
Did the Bush Administration create a new American empire—or weaken the old one?
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The empire-makers of 2002 weakened America’s covert empire because, at a critical level, they didn’t understand how it worked. As Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay note in “America Unbound” (Brookings; $22.95), a new history of Bush’s foreign policy, Administration hawks believe that American global supremacy is possible not only because America is a uniquely just nation but because others around the globe see it as such. The current unipolar state of the world is the best evidence of this: because most countries see American power as being more benign than not, they acquiesce in it. But this acquiescence isn’t irreversible.
In ways that many hawks have been slow to realize, the demise of the Soviet Union has had a paradoxical effect on America’s role in the world. What has made the United States more powerful militarily has made it weaker politically. For half a century, American policymakers had been accustomed to habits of deference from democratic allies in Europe and Asia. Yet fear of the Soviets was responsible for much of that deference. That’s why, in the decade after the Cold War, the makers of our foreign policy recognized that America could best protect its supremacy by making sure that smaller countries felt, even in some small measure, that they had been “dealt in.” This was one function of those balky international organizations, and not the least important objective of international diplomacy.
The current Administration has, of course, taken a different tack. As Fareed Zakaria observed last year, after speaking to government officials in dozens of countries around the world, almost every country that has had dealings with the Bush Administration has felt humiliated by it. America isn’t powerful because people like us: our power is a product of dollars and guns. But when people think that America’s unique role in the world is basically legitimate, that power becomes less costly to exert and to sustain. People around the world have respected and admired American power because of the way America has acted. If it acts differently, the perceptions of American benevolence can start to ebb—and, to judge from any public-opinion poll from abroad over the last year, that’s essentially what has happened. When it comes to political capital, too, this is an Administration with a weakness for deficit spending.
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books
Melancolie de Januaire
by Garrison Keillor
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Here we are filled with melancolie de Januaire as Marcel Proust said in his Remembrance of Things Past (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu) all about his experience temping at Purdue University and his romance with the mysterious Madeleine, that delectable little cupcake. He returned to Paris and to Mama but could never forget her or Purdue and this pain drove him to create magnificent art that nobody would read, at least not anyone whom I know personally, though many of them have a copy of R.O.T.P. right there smack in the middle of their bookshelf.
Let us talk about unread books for a moment, dear reader. They are filling up my house and perhaps yours and what are we going to do about it? A tower of books stands on my bedside table swaying slightly in the dark, Dante and Herman Melville and Dickens's Great Expectations and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and about forty-three other books I've purchased from Powells.com over the past few months. You know how it is when you browse a great independent bookstore web site. You're filled with noble ambitions to finally Catch Up on your reading so you don't feel like such a dolt when everyone at the dinner party except you has read Man Athwart the Midden by Soutane Tippet that everybody and his uncle is reading nowadays. You want to be abreast of what's current in the World of Thought and also you want to read the books you were assigned to read in college lo those many years ago. Yes, you feel bad about not having read Moby Dick and yet getting an A in Miss Pickett's 19th-Century American Novel class thanks to your brilliant term paper, "The Prosthetics of Obsession: Ahab's Peg Leg As Instrument of Exclamation." So you order it, and Jane Austen and Boswell's Life of Johnson and Johnson's multi-volume biography by Robert Caro and a few other tomes and now they teeter eleven feet high over your bed and could fall and give you a concussion. This has happened. There are seriously ugly people walking around who were as good-looking as you or me until a stack of unread books fell on them as they slept. Poor things.
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pakistan
US Plans Spring Offensive in Pakistan
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The U.S. military is making plans for an offensive that would reach inside Pakistan in coming months to try to destroy operations of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, the Chicago Tribune reported on Wednesday.
The newspaper, in a report from Washington citing military sources, said the plans involved thousands of U.S. troops, some of them already in neighboring Afghanistan.
The Pakistani government denied to Reuters that it would allow such an operation and the Pentagon declined to confirm that such a plan was being worked on.
The Chicago Tribune said the plans were advanced but their execution would depend on events on the ground.
This was "not like a contingency plan for North Korea, something that sits on a shelf. This planning is like planning for Iraq. They want this plan to be executable -- now," one source was quoted as saying.
Such an intervention would be political dynamite for Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has only allowed a very limited U.S. military presence in his country. He has cooperated with Washington against al Qaeda but is under pressure from Islamic parties at home.
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you only need one
Garret mentioned these singlespeed world championships. I googled singlespeed and found this interesting site.
Singlespeed Conversions
by Sheldon "One Is All You Need" Brown
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Modern 24-27 speed bikes are marvels of technology, and allow a cyclist to select the gear ratio that will make the most efficient use of his/her energy. If what you're after is getting the maximum possible speed/distance for the minimum effort (and there's nothing wrong with that!) a multi-speed bike is what you need...but, efficiency isn't everything!
If you're riding for sheer pleasure, or for exercise, you don't necessarily place that high a premium on output results, as measured in speed, distance or vertical climb. Instead, you may care more about the actual experience of riding your bike. In this case, you may be a candidate for a singlespeed bike.
Riding a singlespeed can help bring back the unfettered joy you experienced riding your bike as a child. You don't realize how much mental energy you devote to shifting until you relinquish your derailers, and discover that a whole corner of your brain that was formerly wondering when to shift is now free to enjoy your surroundings and sensations.
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[more]
I want one of these. I need to take a trip down to my local bicycle shop.
oil
Demand for Oil Outstripping Supply
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In some year ahead — and by no means one necessarily that far ahead — we'll go through another bout of winter weather like this one but with one critical distinction that will make all the difference, even though it will have nothing to do with the weather.
Assume that we experience the same prolonged, extreme cold and high winds and succession of snowstorms, all right across the country.
But assume, as well, that in that year the fuel by which we heat our houses, offices, factories and stores, and by which we power our cars, trucks, airplanes, trains and buses, is having to be rationed.
Rationing doesn't here mean actual physical rationing, with householders and car drivers limited to so many liters a month.
It means, instead, rationing by price. As oil supplies dwindle, not in themselves (or not for a long time) but in relation to demand, so will the price at first escalate, and then soar.
That's bound to happen. It will happen because the demand for oil is bound to outstrip the supply of oil, and of natural gas and coal and of other hydrocarbons.
The U.S. Energy Department reckons that this "tilting point" won't happen until 2037. Its calculation is widely criticized, with its forecasts for increases in demand dismissed as far too conservative.
One well-known petroleum geologist, Colin Campbell, has put the tilting point at 2010, or little more than a half-decade away. Another, Kenneth Deffeys, forecasts that it will occur this year.
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photography
"Breathing Shadows"
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In our first encounter with the photographs of Tokihiro Sato, we find a very poetic, lyrical world. Strange particles of light dispersed throughout the landscapes, cityscapes and deserted houses. Objects bathed and rimmed with light like illuminations. Perfectly still and deep, they present a single scene of light that seems to breathe.
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[more]
thanks to Junior Bonner
president awol
AWOL Bush: Debunked? Hardly!
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Rapidly following Peter Jennings' lead, right-wing and ostensibly "nonpartisan" pundits in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere are busily claiming that Michael Moore's contention that George W. Bush was a "deserter" has been "debunked," and that Wesley Clark's failure to repudiate him on this point demonstrates his unfitness for the presidency.E
They wish.
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Bush's Military Record Reveals Grounding and Absence for Two Full Years
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"I think that people need to be held responsible for the actions they take in life. I think that's part of the need for a cultural change. We need to say that each of us needs to be responsible for what we do." – George W. Bush in the first Presidential debate, October 3, 2000.
''I did the duty necessary ... That's why I was honorably discharged" – George W. Bush, May 23, 2000
From the beginning of his Presidential campaign, George W. Bush has forcefully and repeatedly insisted that he faithfully fulfilled all his military obligations by serving his time as a member of the Texas Air National Guard.
But the first independent investigation of Bush's military record by a former Air National Guard pilot has revealed the following:
1. Pilot George W. Bush did not simply "give up flying" with two years left to fly, as has been reported. Instead, Bush was suspended and grounded, very possibly as a direct or indirect result of substance abuse.
2. The crucial evidence – a Flight Inquiry Board – that would reveal the true reasons for Bush's suspension, as well as the punishment that was recommended, is missing from the records released so far. If no such Board was convened, this raises further questions of extraordinary favoritism.
3. Contrary to Bush's emphatic statements and several published reports, Bush never actually reported in person for the last two years of his service – in direct violation of two separate written orders. Moreover, the lack of punishment for this misconduct represents the crowning achievement of a military career distinguished only by favoritism.
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[more]
thanks to BookNotes
bugs
Mostly beetles
[more]
thanks to The J-Walk Weblog
zoe update
Zoe is doing much better. We finally found a med that helps her pain. I think that this is a short or medium term solution, but it will let us get to whatever the long term solution might be. Things are starting to get back to normal.
testingtesting
Tonight is another webcast from my living room with the dulcet tones of the TestingTesting House Band. So click on in for an fun evening of living room music.
TestingTesting will be going on a little hiatus. As regular readers may know, my partner, Zoe, has been having problems with IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). It has gotten to the point that I can no longer devote the time to TT that I need to. I need to be there for her and to try to get some actual work done too. We are working on getting her into the University of Washington Gasteroentology unit and their Pain Clinic. Our next scheduled show is March 22, with Jean Mann. Hopefully we will have things under control by then. We will be back.
campaign 2004
The New Hampshire primaries are on us. These two blogs are on the very frozen ground of New Hampshire, freezing their various body parts off for us. Read all about it!
Talking points Memo
daily KOS
Both are must reads.
street art
I first discovered this site in 1996. Then I lost it. Now I have found it again. This is good.
Art Crimes
The Writing on the Wall
[more]
thanks to Jeroen's Semi Blog
democracy
America as a One-Party State
Today's hard right seeks total dominion. It's packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.
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America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.
In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest.
We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.
Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.
Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election.
Taken together, these several forces could well enable the Republicans to become the permanent party of autocratic government for at least a generation. Am I exaggerating? Take a close look at the particulars.
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[more]
thanks to Body and Soul
prints
ito yuhan
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Ito Yuhan (1882-1951) was a landscape artist who designed several woodblock prints during the 1930's. His work was published by Nishinomiya Yosaku. According to one source, Yuhan worked as a movie producer in later life, but this is unconfirmed. He is best known for designing several views of Miyajima printed in blue tones. His prints are characterized by vivid colors and subtle gradations. They look similar to watercolors, as they lack an outlining keyblock. Yuhan's soft style transcends his rather typical subject matter, evoking the romantic beauty of Japan's unspoiled past. The absence of human figures adds to the sense of quiet timelessness.
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[more]
thanks to plep
The One-State Solution
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For some years, most people sympathetic to Palestinian national aspirations - or simply alert to their durability and the political dangers they pose - have assumed that a stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would require the formation of a Palestinian state in the (dwindling) areas not yet annexed by Israel, in what is left of British Mandate territory. This old staple of the Palestinian national movement was even belatedly approved by Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush. The Palestinian Authority itself was set up by the Oslo process as a pre-statal entity, intended to establish by stages an independent Palestinian cabinet and parliament, as a prelude to sovereignty over (a disarmed, landlocked, dependent) Palestine. Most recently, a courageous coalition of Israeli and Palestinian professionals has tried to imbue the two-state solution with new energy by formulating a detailed agreement - the so-called Geneva Accords. All these efforts have referred, vaguely or specifically, to the withdrawal of Jewish settlements, without which a Palestinian state would make no territorial sense.
Yet at some point in the past decade, this foundational precept became an obfuscating fiction. As many people privately acknowledge, and as Tony Judt has now proposed in the New York Review of Books, the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed, its death obscured (as was perhaps intended) by daily spectacle: the hoopla of a useless 'road map', the cycles of Israeli gunship assassinations and Palestinian suicide bombings, the dismal internal Palestinian power struggles, the house demolitions and death counts - all the visible expressions of a conflict which has always been over control of land.
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'One Man, One Vote: And Then What Will We Do?'
By Anne Gwynne
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And next the reiteration of the song of the perpetual victims - Zionism must continue 'in the face of violent Arab opposition'. Did I miss something here? Violence? Whose 50,000 soldiers have been brutally and illegally occupying whose Land? Answer - Israel, in violation of over 350 UN Resolutions. Not a misprint. The UN has passed more than 350 Resolutions against Israel, though it failed on some 850 more, vetoed by the USA.
Which army has slaughtered over 3,000 Palestinians, including more than 600 children since September 2000? Again the answer is Israel. Destroyed some 7,000 buildings and homes? Designated every road to be Jewish-only? Injured and disabled some 55,000 innocent people overwhelmingly, with live ammunition? Bombed and rocketed whole populations and areas from the most modern warplanes and attack helicopters of a military, which has recently overtaken that of the UK in size and capability? Taken prisoner 25% of a whole population? Killed 190 prisoners through torture? Holds 8,000 prisoners without lawful cause or trial? Regularly snatches patients from Intensive Care Units and flings them into Army vehicles? Has killed nearly 100 ambulance patients, 20 medical staff, injured many hundreds, destroyed 100 ambulances, damaged hundreds more, denies access every day to Ambulances and to Hospitals? Too much to absorb isn't it? OK, I will halt the list there. The answer in every case is Israel. This entire partial list happened over the last three years - though even bigger massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide were perpetrated earlier by the Jewish colonial land-grab from the 1940's onwards.
[...]
It is not the Palestinians who refuse to make peace. Far from it. In 1948 Count Bernadotte formatted a partition agreement, which was accepted by the Palestinian leaders and rejected by the state of Israel - Israel then murdered Count Bernadotte for his efforts. In 1976 the Palestinians again accepted the de facto existence of Israel on the Western part of historic Palestine and within the 1967 borders. It was the Israelis who scuppered the deal - remember that they cannot have Jordan without first taking the Land of Palestine. It looks as though Zionism has established itself well and truly on this Palestinian 'Land of Love and Peace' (Constitution of Palestine, 1988)
However, the crux of Spyer's article is the expression of Zionist racist horror at the idea of the Palestinians achieving equality in population and (in Ehud Olmert's words), 'demand[ing] "one man, one vote"[!] 'And then what will we do?' he asks. Only a few lines earlier Israel was a 'western and liberal democratic' state! If it were a democracy that would be the normal voting structure! There are already some 1.5 million Palestinians living in Israel, without any of the human rights which even fledgling democracies deem essential. They 'are not, and never will become Israeli citizens'. Israel - a democracy? Is there another democracy where every man and woman (except the lunatic fringe) is conscripted into the military for three years, and remain soldiers for the rest of their working life?
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The above piece was written by a remarkable Welch grandmother — Anne Gwynne.
WELSH NURSE LIVE AUDIO UNDER FIRE IN NABLUS
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WHO IS ANNE GWYNNE?
Anne Gwynne is a sixty five year old grandmother and retired bank manager from Wales, Great Britain, who now lives in the ancient city of Nablus, in the illegally occupied West Bank in Palestine. She has long been an advocate of the rights of the oppressed, and of their struggle for self-determination. She worked with the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, and has volunteered with the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA. As an independent humanitarian worker in Palestine, Anne has worked with the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC), and is a regular contributor to such sites as Counterpunch, Media Monitors, The Palestine Chronicle, and the Palestine Media Center. She has given interviews on Canadian radio, as well as for Flashpoints and other Pacifica programs. As Anne herself has written "I am here in the beautiful but suffering city of Nablus where I am every day taking details of Israeli war crimes because no one, to the knowledge of the people here, has taken any interest in Nablus."
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[more]
There are links to articles she has written as well as radio interviews such as...
5/16 Anne Watches Palestinian Fighters Resisting an Israeli Attack at Night
Her articles have also appeared at Ramallah Online. This is a very good selection of her eyewitness reports.
photography
Agricultural Research Service Image Gallery
Aphthona flava flea beetle feeding on leafy spurge.
[more]
thanks to Spitting Image
All the images have high resolution versions.
iraq — vietnam on internet time
Helena Cobbam has a nice overview of the latest develpopments in Iraq. She ends it with...
Sistani, Clausewitz, the world
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My verdict is still that the popular movement and its leadership in Shi-ite Iraq are significantly turning the wheels of world history at this point...
One problem for the neo-cons, I have long felt, is that they never really took to heart the deep truths inherent in Clausewitz's dictum that, "War is an extension of politics by other means." One clear implication of that dictum is that it is the politics of any given situation that are, at the end of the day, what really counts-- and that "war" is only one possible way to affect politics.
So yes, a country can indeed "win" a war on the battlefield, and then lose it royally by mishandling the political situation that follows.
Case study today, class? Iraq.
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Iraq may be on path to civil war, CIA officials warn
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CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said yesterday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.
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[more]
photography
Susan Dobson
[more]
thanks to Conscientious
homeland insecurity
Trip Home From Europe Becomes Kafkaesque Ordeal
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A German woman married to a Brooklyn schoolteacher had been told that she had all her papers in order when she took a quick trip to show off her infant daughter to her parents in Germany.
But her return home in late December turned surreal and terrifying when Homeland Security officials at Kennedy Airport rejected her travel documents, confiscated her passport, then detained her and the 3-month-old overnight in a room with shackled drug suspects. They let her go only after ordering her to leave the country no later than tomorrow.
After a month of desperate efforts by her American husband, their lawyers and legislators, late yesterday a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department said that the woman, Antje Croton, 36, would be granted a last-minute reprieve. But Mrs. Croton said she had received no written notification. "I'm in a nightmare," she said as she packed yesterday afternoon, having abandoned hope of straightening out the problem. "I feel like I'm in the wrong movie."
Her husband, Christopher Croton, said the couple was not convinced their ordeal was over. "The experience has been like trying to open a door to a room that does not exist," Mr. Croton said. "That's the irony here. My German-born wife has to come here to experience this wall of, just The State."
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[more]
I feel much safer now.
pencil technology
lead holder.com
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Leadholder can be broadly defined as any durable instrument that is designed to hold and be refillable with consumable pieces of graphite so that the graphite can be conveniently used for drawing or writing. Within this definition there are subsets such as porte-crayons, mechanical pencils, and drafting leadholders. This website is primarily concerned with drafting leadholders, which are commonly called by draftsmen in the US as simply leadholders.
Koh-I-Noor Technigraph: This pencil is the standard by which all other drafting leadholders are judged.
Because leadholders of this type are the specialized tools of draftsmen and artists, they are generally unknown to those outside this coterie. You can probably find one or two models at your local art supply store if you look hard enough. Not long ago you would have been confronted with dozens of makes and styles of these instruments.
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From 1965 to 1979 (minus a couple of years working in photo labs) I worked at Boeing as a draftsman. (We later became called drafters.) I had a number of lead holders just like the one above. This was one of our tools of the trade. We sharpened them in lead pointers. I used one, exactly like this, for years.
What a blast from the past! In 1979 my group got 4 CAD (Computer Aided Design) terminals. I got on those as soon as I could and never looked back. This site also has some wonderful ads.
[more]
thanks to The J-Walk Weblog
food
ARCH ENEMY
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LAST February, Morgan Spurlock decided to become a gastronomical guinea pig.
His mission: To eat three meals a day for 30 days at McDonald's and document the impact on his health.
Scores of cheeseburgers, hundreds of fries and dozens of chocolate shakes later, the formerly strapping 6-foot-2 New Yorker - who started out at a healthy 185 pounds - had packed on 25 pounds.
But his supersized shape was the least of his problems.
Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock's entire body deteriorated.
"It was really crazy - my body basically fell apart over the course of 30 days," Spurlock told The Post.
His liver became toxic, his cholesterol shot up from a low 165 to 230, his libido flagged and he suffered headaches and depression.
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thanks to Magnetbox
drawing
The Drawing Club
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The Drawing Club is a workshop for anyone who likes to draw. It has a fun, relaxed atmosphere that welcomes both beginners and professionals alike. Every week there will be a different model in costume interacting within a cool theme with carefully selected music. Instruction is provided one on one for those who would like some.
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thanks to life in the present
Drawing classes were probably the one thing that helped my photography the most. It does teach you to see.
the thing that eats your brain
Worker says discovery of infected cow was 'a fluke'
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Dave Louthan says he remembers her well: an old dairy cow with specks of blood on her tail, spooky about going down the ramp into the slaughterhouse.
The government says the discovery that the Holstein had mad-cow disease proves its surveillance program, which focuses on "downer" or nonambulatory cows, works. After last month's discovery, the U.S. Department of Agriculture banned downer cows in the food supply.
But Louthan says it was "a fluke" that the Holstein, a cow he describes as "a good walker," was tested.
And even if it had been deemed a downer, under emergency rules enacted earlier this month it would have been sent to a rendering plant, where tests are not done at all.
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teeny little things
The Micropolitan Museum
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For several centuries artists have depicted the human figure, still-lifes, landscapes or non-figurative motives. One subject has been widely neglected all those years:
Micro organisms!
The Micropolitan Museum finally exhibits these often overlooked works of art which are only visible with the aid of the microscope. Curator Wim van Egmond has collected the finest microscopic masterpieces nature has ever produced during eons of natural selection and other life-sculpting mechanisms.
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Diatoms also live attached to a substrate.
These sessile diatoms can often be found
as brown scum growing on red algae
or other larger organisms.
[more]
thanks to dublog
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