Month: July 2009

Torture is Torture

Seth Anderson0 comment

As part of an instructive and interesting conversation between pro-torture NBC journalist Chuck Todd1 and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald

Greenwald: Let me ask you this question: The United States is a party to a treaty – I don’t know if you ever read it or not, it’s called the Convention Against Torture – and one of the things it does is it obligates all signatories to the treaty to prosecute any acts of torture. And it was signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988, and when he transmitted that treaty to the Senate, explaining what that treaty does, he wrote, quote, “Each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory, or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

Do you think the U.S. should be bound, is bound by that treaty?

[Click to continue reading Salon Radio: Chuck Todd – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]

The audio file of the interview is also available here.

Complete text of the Convention Against Torture is here, the Wikipedia entry says:

Article 1 of the Convention defines torture as:
Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
– Convention Against Torture, Article 1.1

Actions which fall short of torture may still constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 16.

Article 2 of the convention prohibits torture, and requires parties to take effective measures to prevent it in any territory under its jurisdiction. This prohibition is absolute and non-derogable. “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever” may be invoked to justify torture, including war, threat of war, internal political instability, public emergency, terrorist acts, violent crime, or any form of armed conflict. Torture cannot be justified as a means to protect public safety or prevent emergencies. Neither can it be justified by orders from superior officers or public officials. The prohibition on torture applies to all territories under a party’s effective jurisdiction, and protects all people under its effective control, regardless of citizenship or how that control is exercised. Since the Conventions entry into force, this absolute prohibition has become accepted as a principle of customary international law.

Because it is often difficult to distinguish between cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and torture, the Committee regards Article 16’s prohibition of such treatment as similarly absolute and non-derogable.
The other articles of part I lay out specific obligations intended to implement this absolute prohibition by preventing, investigating and punishing acts of torture.

[Click to continue reading United Nations Convention Against Torture – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Footnotes:
  1. no, not really, I suppose the more precise term would be that Chuck Todd doesn’t believe in prosecuting Republican administration crimes that occurred last week, only prosecuting future crimes [↩]

Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Clear Channel is in a bit of financial trouble, and apparently so are their cohorts in “Republican-slanted news is the only news people want” category, Sinclair Broadcasting. Good, I hope they both become nothing more than a footnote to future histories of the George Bush administration.

Lonely Zenith

you’ll remember Sinclair Broadcast Group as the TV group that carried the anti-Kerry smear documentary in prime time, just before the November 2004 election. You may also remember them for the infamous “The Point” editorial segments during their stations’ newscasts — featuring the right wing rantings of corporate management.

Perhaps you even recall their experiment in “central casting” — firing most of the news departments at their local stations, and instead running “local” newscasts from all over the country out of a central studio in Baltimore.

Well, it now appears that Sinclair is on the verge of bankruptcy

…

Five years ago, Sinclair was also the darling of the right for running that anti-Kerry documentary on all 58 of their stations, and for conservative editorials on all of those stations as well. Those who saw ever greater consolidation as the road to maximizing corporate profits were enamored of Sinclair’s experiment with producing “local” newscasts for their stations from a central studio at corporate headquarters in Baltimore.

Unfortunately for Sinclair, viewers were unimpressed by “local” newscasts that were produced hundreds or even thousands of miles from home — and tuned out in droves. And the right wing editorials created negative publicity for Sinclair’s stations. Ultimately. the central studio for producing newscasts was shut down, and the right wing editorials were cancelled. And the group has, by and large, floundered in mediocrity ever since. So far as I’m aware, none of Sinclair’s 58 stations is a market leader, and few are even in the top three — when you run a group on the cheap and attempt to push a national agenda onto your local stations, the result is predictable: poor ratings and a weak identity in your local markets.

As a result, Sinclair was poorly positioned for dealing with the advertising downturn of the past 18 months.

[Click to continue reading Daily Kos: Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy]

Bwa-ha-ha! Couldn’t happen to nicer corporations1

Footnotes:
  1. and by nicer I mean of course the opposite. Sinclair Broadcasting is just scum, plain and simple. [↩]

You Should Sign Up for the B12 Daily Email

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Taking a cue from Kottke1, I am reminding you that you should sign up for my daily email. Signing up should only take a minute or less if you are a fast typer, I absolutely promise to never send you unsolicited email2. Feedburner/Google has enabled the email to include items that don’t necessarily make it to my weblog, but that I still think are interesting, or are otherwise topics of note. Like news stories that I Digg, YouTube video I “favorite“, Flickr photos I upload, etc.

Plus you should subscribe to my daily email3 so that you have something fun to read as you drink your morning beverage. A dose of B12’s Solipsism can only enhance your day!

Hotel Visitor

Oh, and you should follow me on Twitter too, if you are so inclined. I have other social media accounts, but I don’t care if you friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Tumblr blog, for instance.

Footnotes:
  1. I hope Jason Kottke doesn’t mind being referred to by simply his last name, I’ve been reading his weblog for so long now, to me he is the blogosphere equivalent of single-named celebrities like Bono or Nenê [↩]
  2. unless you want me to, of course. Ahem [↩]
  3. usually gets released around 1 AM CST [↩]

3 Days of the Sotomayor

Seth Anderson0 comment

Gail Collins (humorously) summarizes the Judge Sotomayor confirmation hearings, including this exchange between Judge Sotomayor and David Brooks right-thigh man, Senator Lindsey Graham of North Carolina1

Oath

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Judge, before I read a string of anonymous comments about your temperament problem, I’d like to make you repeat that wise Latina remark again just for the heck of it.

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: Thank you, Senator, for the opportunity to revisit that matter. I appreciate that the man who once said he’d drown himself if North Carolina went for Obama has a special contribution to make when it comes to the importance of thinking before you speak.

[Click to continue reading Gail Collins – 3 Days of the Sotomayor – NYTimes.com]

zing!

Footnotes:
  1. well, probably, since David Brooks will never confirm nor deny, we might never know who took liberties with David Brooks’ inner thigh [↩]

The Great American Bubble Machine – Gasoline

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Matt Taibbi’s putdown of Goldman Sachs is finally online if you didn’t get a chance to read it yet. He places Goldman Sachs at the scene of several crime scenes, also known as stock market bubbles. For instance, the summer of 2008’s massive gas price increase. Reserves of crude oil were as high as they had ever been, demand was lower because of a world-wide economic slowdown, why then did gasoline prices exceed $4?

Gas At Last

Taibbi explains:

As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a “traditional speculator,” who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps — to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC’s oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldmanowned commoditiestrading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren’t the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops — Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap — the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman’s argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the “Bona Fide Hedging” exemption, allowing Goldman’s subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market — driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash — finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers — and that’s likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

[Click to continue reading about the gasoline bubble: The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone]

Read the entire article here

Palin knows more about energy policy than anyone else in America

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Sarah Palin knows more about energy policy than anyone else in America, or so claimed John McCain. Hmm, surprisingly1 Ms. Pal-Around Palin seems to have lost most of her knowledge since last fall.

Standard Oil Co of Ind

Sarah Palin, the soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska, has an opinion piece (a screed, really) in Tuesday’s Washington Post in which she shrilly blasts away at “President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan,” calling it “an enormous threat” to the U.S. economy.

…

Palin’s thesis comes loaded with plenty of rhetoric and zero facts. It offers nothing more than assertions about the emissions reduction part of the bill, ignores the energy investment and green jobs provisions, blames “Washington bureaucrats” for hampering oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (not Congress, where elected lawmakers have repeatedly expressed the American public’s desire to keep ANWR off limits), and fails to even take note of the underlying issue—catastrophic climate change.

Couldn’t Palin’s ghostwriters have cribbed from any of the well-researched, highly technical criticisms produced by just about every conservative think tank in the land?

[Click to continue reading Palin eschews facts and economics in blasting cap-and-trade bill | Grist]

Laughable, really.

385 parts per million - Polapan Blue

Joseph Romm adds:

Amazingly, the Post has published an op-ed on climate change legislation by the governor of the state that is currently the most battered by climate change, without any discussion of climate change or its impacts on that state. Heck, even Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski pointed out in a May 2006 speech on climate change that the tremendous recent warming had opened the door to the “voracious spruce bark beetle,” which devastated over three million acres in Alaska, “providing dry fuel for outbreaks of enormous wild fires.”

In one of the most unintentionally humorous pieces of crap the Post has ever subjected on the public, Palin states:

Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.

Seriously.

[Silver lining note: In a perverse way, perhaps we should be grateful to the Post. Probably the best thing that could happen to climate legislation is if Palin becomes the lead spokesperson attacking it.]

Let’s set aside the rather obvious fact that the bill that doesn’t even start imposing a cap until 2012, so it’s absurd to assert it will “undermine our recovery over the short term.” The reverse case is, in fact, stronger — see Nobelist Krugman attacks “junk economics”: Climate action “now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump” by giving “businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities.”

Moreover, even in 2012, the total value of the allowances will be under $50 billion (in a $15 trillion economy) and all that money is going to be returned to the economy, so again, like all economic models show, the bill will have no significant negative impact.

No, what’s so laughable about this piece is that Palin wouldn’t even be considered by the Post as a suitable candidate for an op-ed on the climate bill if it weren’t for the national media’s focus on personality-driven politics.

[Click to continue reading Quitter-in-chief Sarah Palin attacks climate action and clean energy in falsehood-filled piece | Grist]

I echo the thought: the best thing for climate change legislation is probably having Sarah “Quitter” Palin as its lead opponent. More fact checking at Media Matters if you want a laugh (at Ms. Sarah Barracuda Palin’s expense). And at The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Brad DeLong’s blog, John at Eschaton, and probably elsewhere.

For the record, I don’t know enough about the proposed Cap and Trade legislation to say whether it is something I support or not, but I do know that Sarah Palin is probably even more clueless.

Footnotes:
  1. not really [↩]

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip (click to pre-order from Amazon)
Calvin and Hobbes was that rare newspaper comic – smart, funny, and not cloyingly cutesy. And rare also in that once Bill Watterson grew tired of creating it, he stopped, and dropped out of the public eye. No recycled Peanuts here.

For ten years, between 1985 and 1995, Calvin and Hobbes was one the world’s most beloved comic strips. And then, on the last day of 1995, the strip ended. Its mercurial and reclusive creator, Bill Watterson, not only finished the strip but withdrew entirely from public life. There is no merchandising associated with Calvin and Hobbes: no movie franchise; no plush toys; no coffee mugs; no t-shirts (except a handful of illegal ones). There is only the strip itself, and the books in which it has been compiled – including The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: the heaviest book ever to hit the New York Times bestseller list. In Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip, writer Nevin Martell traces the life and career of the extraordinary, influential, and intensely private man behind Calvin and Hobbes. With input from a wide range of artists and writers (including Dave Barry, Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Lethem, and Brad Bird) as well as some of Watterson’s closest friends and professional colleagues, this is as close as we’re ever likely to get to one of America’s most ingenious and intriguing figures – and a fascinating detective story, at the same time.

Only 3,160 Calvin and Hobbes strips were ever produced, but Watterson has left behind an impressive legacy. Calvin and Hobbes references litter the pop culture landscape and his fans are as varied as they are numerable. Looking for Calvin and Hobbes is an affectionate and revealing book about uncovering the story behind this most uncommon trio – a man, a boy, and his tiger.


“The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes) (v. 1, 2, 3)” (Bill Watterson)

You can read a weeks worth of the strip at the GoComics website

Epeolatry

Seth Anderson0 comment


“THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE” (O. W. HOLMES)

words at the Seattle Public Library
[words at the Seattle Public Library]

I’ve been meaning to work this word into conversation for a while now, ever since I encountered it on the Word-of-the-Day email list. It seems like a fun, obscure thing to accuse someone of1

Similar to idolatry and iconodulism, epeolatry literally means the worship of words. It derives from epos, which unlike logos more specifically means word in Greek, and was apparently coined in 1860 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.[1]. You may be hard-pressed to find an admitted epolatrist because the term connotes a sort of blind devotion, sanctimony, or hypocrisy; or more specifically, an advanced form of reification. Figuratively speaking, the word can be playfully applied to philologists, linguists, or lexicographers.
The term is of significant satirical value and may be used in the denigration of popular religions or belief systems. For example, one could call Christianity an epeolatric religion because the majority of its teachings hinge on the words of the Hebrew Bible. However, you are unlikely to encounter the word in any form because it remains obscure.

[From Epeolatry – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

This particular Oliver Wendell Holmes book2 is available at Project Gutenberg as well as Google Books


Suggested entry at the new word-centric site, Wordnik.

Footnotes:
  1. being an epeolatrist presumedly [↩]
  2. that I’ve never heard of before today [↩]

Minions of Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked 3000 cellphone accounts

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Either Rupert Murdoch is too close a friend of most US media conglomerate CEOs, or else they are scared of incurring Murdoch’s wrath. What other explanation for the lack of coverage of the juicy Guardian UK scoop regarding Murdoch illegality?

But so far the Guardian, which last Wednesday broke the news of how two newspapers belonging to Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked into the mobile phone accounts of “two or three thousand” people, as well as “gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized phone bills [belonging to] Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars” has the story pretty much to itself.

On the surface this is surprising. Here, after all, is a story that combines boldface names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Elle MacPherson, Nigella Lawson and George Michael with the official spokesman of the Conservative Party (Andy Coulson, media strategist for Tory leader David Cameron, was editor of the News of the World when the paper allegedly paid private investigators for access to the celebrities’ accounts) and Rupert Murdoch, the world’s most powerful media baron. The BBC put the story at the top of its world news lineup, and followed up the next day with a story about how some of famous targets were contemplating lawsuits. So why has the Guardian’s incredible scoop turned out to be a 2 day wonder?

[Click to continue reading  The Dog That Didn’t Bark]

Quite curious, no?

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group News papers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures as well as gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them.

[Click to continue reading Murdoch papers paid out £1m to gag phone-hacking victims | Media |The Guardian]

such as

When the high court last summer ordered the News of the World to pay damages to Max Mosley for secretly filming him with prostitutes, the paper was furious. In an angry leader column, it insisted that public figures must maintain standards. “It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are TRUE,” it said. “This is all about the public’s right to know.”

Even as those words were being published, lawyers and senior executives from News International’s subsidiary News Group were preparing to run to court to gag Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who was suing the News of the World for its undisclosed involvement in the illegal interception of messages left on his mobile phone.

By persuading the high court to seal the file and by paying Taylor more than £400,000 damages in exchange for his silence, News Group prevented the public from knowing anything about the hundreds of pages of evidence which had been disclosed in Taylor’s case, revealing potentially criminal behaviour by journalists on its payroll. It also protected some powerful and influential people from the implications of that evidence.

[Click to continue reading  Trail of hacking and deceit under nose of Tory PR chief guardian.co.uk ]

Red Light Night

names like:

Scotland Yard disclosed only a limited amount of its evidence to Taylor. The Guardian understands that the full police file shows that several thousand public figures were targeted by investigators, including, during one month in 2006: John Prescott, then deputy prime minister; Tessa Jowell, then responsible for the media as secretary of state for culture; Boris Johnson, then the Conservative spokesman on higher education; Gwyneth Paltrow, after she had given birth to her son; George Michael, who had been seen looking tired at the wheel of his car; and Jade Goody.

When Goodman, the News of the World’s royal editor, was jailed for hacking into the mobile phones of Palace staff, News International said he had been acting without their knowledge. One of the investigators working for the paper, Glenn Mulcaire, was also charged with hacking the phones of the Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, celebrity PR Max Clifford, model Elle MacPherson and football agent Sky Andrew as well as Taylor. At the time, the News of the World claimed to know nothing about the hacking of these targets, but Taylor has now proved that to be untrue in his case. Others who are believed to have been possible targets include the Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan, who has previously accused the News of the World of bugging his car; Jeffrey Archer, whose perjury was exposed by the paper; and Sven-Göran Eriksson, whose sex life became a tabloid obsession.

Kiva Loan Number 13

Seth Anderson0 comment

Atsu Mlaga from Togo has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Avetonou, Togo

Repayment Term: 7 months (more info)

Activity: Agriculture   Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To buy fertilizers   Currency Exchange Loss: Covered       Default Protection: Covered

Atsu Mlaga is a rice grower in Avetonou. He is 49 years old, married, and the father of five. He would like to use this loan to buy fertilizers to increase his yields and also to hire sharecroppers, in order to expand his arable land. He is counting in this opportunity to improve his family’s living conditions.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Atsu Mlaga from Togo has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Togo
Avg Annual Income: $1,700
Currency: Communauté Financière Africaine Francs BCEAO (XOF)
Exchange Rate: 470.5172 XOF = 1 USD

Kiva Loan Number 14

Seth Anderson0 comment

Moussa Innocent Ngirabega from Rwanda has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Kicukiro/kigali, Rwanda   Repayment Term: 10 months (more info)

Activity: Clothing Sales

Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To buy more clothes

Currency Exchange Loss: Possible       Default Protection: Covered

Greetings from Ngirabega Moussa Innocent, a 38-year-old married man with four children aged nine, seven, four and two years old, and one dependent orphan, who is sixteen years old. His family live in the Kicukiro district of Kigali city, the capital of Rwanda.

Moussa Innocent owns a plot in Nyarugenge market where he sells clothes, particularly for women and girls. Innocent started this business sixteen years ago. He is seeking his first loan worth 500,000 RWF from Kiva partner, Vision Finance Company, in order to buy more clothes to expand his store. Before he received this loan, he was earning a monthly salary of 150,000 RWF, and from increased profit he will have more savings and reinvest in his business.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Moussa Innocent Ngirabega from Rwanda has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Rwanda Avg Annual Income: $1,000 Currency: Rwanda Francs (RWF) Exchange Rate: 568.2000 RWF = 1 USD

Kiva Loan Number 10

Seth Anderson0 comment

– Flor De Maria from Peru has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Ayacucho, Peru

Repayment Term: 8 months (more info)

Activity: Retail   Repayment Schedule: Monthly

Loan Use: To buy wine and pecans

Currency Exchange Loss: Covered       Default Protection: Covered

Flor de Maria is a member of the community bank “Luz Divina”. She is 50 years old, divorce and has 4 children; Flor was born in the city of Ica and works as a nurse at the City Hospital. Flor de Maria sells pecans and wine to employees of various institutions. She is asking for a loan of $675 that will be invested in the purchase of wines and pecans. Flor dreams are to expand her business, to have a pecan’s crop and export them.

Translated from Spanish by Adriana Pierce, Kiva Volunteer

Flor de Maria es socia del Banco Comunal Luz Divina. Flor de Maria es separada, tiene 50 años y 4 hijos, natural de la ciudad de Ica, de profesión enfermera y trabaja en el hospital de la ciudad, Flor de Maria vende vinos y pecanas que adquiere en la ciudad de Ica, sus ventas los realiza a los trabajadores de diferentes instituciones. Flor de Maria necesita un préstamo de 2000 soles dinero que será invertido en la compra de vinos y pecanas. Los sueños de Flor de Maria son ampliar su negocio, tener su pecanal y vender al extranjero.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Flor De Maria from Peru has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Peru
Avg Annual Income: $6,715
Currency: Peru Nuevos Soles (PEN)
Exchange Rate:

Reading Around on July 13th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 13th from 11:10 to 19:39:

  • Unscientific America and those awful atheists : Pharyngula – Mooney and Kirshenbaum are busily carping at these ghastly “New Atheists” for imagined transgressions against reason and the appropriate application of science, but what do they have to say about Christians who believe that crackers turn into Jesus in their mouths, or that a magical ensoulment occurs at fertilization to turn a zygote into a fully human being, or that children should be kept in ignorance about sex, or that woman’s role is as subservient breeder, or that using condoms to prevent disease is a violation of a divine dictate that the only purpose of sex is to have babies, or that people who love other people of the same sex deserve stoning…? Compared to the “New Atheist” insistence that remarkable claims about magic sky fairies ought to be regarded as patent nonsense, those can be rather destructive to society…and also negatively affect the acceptance of science. Rick Warren surely deserves as much condemnation as Richard Dawkins.

  • Baglione

  • Unscientific America, the gift that keeps on giving : Pharyngula – “Ultimately, this whole exchange illustrates the failure of Mooney/Kirshenbaum’s arguments. The demotion of Pluto, the rise of the “New Atheism”, PZ Myers, and blogging are all recent phenomena — they do not deal with the causes of the disconnect between society and science, and treating them is a distraction from dealing with the real problems. This book is more like a collection of poor rationalizations for complaining about stuff they don’t like than a serious and scholarly attempt to address a significant social problem. To useless, I must also add the adjective lightweight.”

  • Atheist

  • Greetings in a Taxi – “A raised hand generates an irresistible magnetic pull on a taxi driver. After some years the mind is trained to seek it out to the point of forming light-poles, reflections in parked cars, weaving tree branches, and on a slow night, just about any shape into that desired sign, the symbol of time not spent in vain. Depending on the time of day or night, what follows that hopeful hand will vary from absolute silence to aggressive and usually unwanted camaraderie, but in every case it always begins with some sort of greeting..”
  • Palin’s Long March to a Short-Notice Resignation – NYTimes.com – Oh, boo fucking hoo. Her acid tongue was able to destroy her base all on its own.

    “Lawmakers who had supported her signature effort to develop a natural gas pipeline turned into uncooperative critics.

    Ethics complaints mounted, and legal bills followed. At home Ms. Palin was dealing with a teenage daughter who had given birth to a son and broken up with the infant’s father, a baby of her own with special needs and a national news media that was eager to cover it all.

    Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser ”

eat a bag of dicks

Suicide Ramp Reconstruction to Begin

Seth Anderson0 comment

Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune passes on the news that the long-delayed project of reconfiguring the entrance ramps1 to the Kennedy Expressway is finally going ahead, with some changes.

Washington Suicide Ramp

Downtown Chicago must often throw the dice — and perhaps mumble a quick prayer or profanity — while attempting to merge, squeeze, plead or fight their way into highway traffic.

Hundreds of collisions result each year at the “suicide merges” along the Kennedy, the second-busiest expressway in the Chicago region. (The Dan Ryan Expressway ranks No. 1.)

After postponing safety improvements for years on the 1960s-era highway design, the state is now targeting federal stimulus grants for the $9.3 million project to try to straighten out the mess.

Work is set to begin Monday toward rebuilding six notoriously dangerous center-access entrance ramps to the Kennedy. And that inevitably will cause a whole different kind of mess: a months-long traffic nightmare at a crucial choke point for Chicago’s highway system.

[Click to continue reading: Kennedy Expressway left-lane ‘suicide’ ramps makeover begins Monday — chicagotribune.com]

Kennedy Suicide Ramp

Any improvement is good, but I would prefer the original plan had been viable, namely, moving the ramps to the right of the road. You know, like 95% of all on-ramps.

The first phase of work, aimed at improving traffic flow and reducing crashes on the Kennedy ( Interstate Highway 90/94) near the Hubbard’s Cave tunnel, focuses on realigning three exit ramps. The change is intended to allow for more gradual maneuvering off the expressway and to discourage drivers from aggressively weaving across lanes and causing rear-end or side-swipe collisions, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.

“Hubbard’s Cave is an area where we see fender-benders every day,” said IDOT spokeswoman Marisa Kollias.

After the exit ramps are overhauled, crews will start rebuilding the entrance ramps in September to improve the lines of sight and lengthen the acceleration lanes, IDOT officials said.

When the construction dust settles in November, reconfigured and more motorist-friendly entrance ramps to the Kennedy will open eastbound at Lake, Randolph and Madison Streets; and westbound at Madison and Adams Street and Jackson Boulevard, IDOT officials said.

The earthen remnants of the Kennedy entrance ramps at Washington Boulevard and Monroe Street, which were closed in 2005 and 2006, respectively, will be removed to make way for longer, gentler ramp entrances at Randolph, Madison and Adams, officials said.

Footnotes:
  1. often called the suicide ramps – I tend to avoid them altogether, leaving my house a few minutes earlier and taking another ramp [↩]

Skate Boarding – Ilford HP5 400

swanksalot0 comment

Pulaski Park. Unfortunately, was not quick enough to get a clear shot of this dude, he was trucking on his skate board though.

View Large On Black

the dudes lounging on their stoop is what makes this photo interesting to me (view the bigger version to get a good look)