Time for an Intervention

Sara Robinson (of Orcinus, and now, Group News Blog) makes a call for a national intervention. I agree.

Environmental Updates

South China City Hit By Toxic Red Tide of Algae

"This is the biggest red tide that has ever appeared off the city's coast," the China Daily quoted Zhou Kai, an expert with the local marine environment monitoring station, as saying.

Zhou said the 50-sq-km (19-sq-mile) slick off the west coast of Shenzhen, a major industrial centre bordering Hong Kong in Guangdong province, was the third outbreak this year and was likely to persist without rain.

One-Third of U.S. Water Estuaries in Bad Shape

The EPA analyzed 1,239 sites in its first survey of the country's 28 major estuaries, which provide breeding grounds and shelter for fish and birds.

It found that bodies of water with large numbers of people living nearby suffered the most. While counties with big estuaries make up only 6 percent of the coastal land area, they contain more than two-thirds of the coastal population.

New Blood Tests Needed After Dominican Delays Ruin Survey Into Polluted Site

Blood samples from children in one of the world's most polluted places will have to be retaken, prompting fears the cleanup will be further delayed at the site nicknamed "the Dominican Chernobyl," researchers said Tuesday.

Testing delays ruined the samples from 230 children living in the port town of Haina, where run-off from a former battery recycling plant has poisoned scores of people, said Steve Osborne, a spokesman for the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

Surge of Dead Seabirds Alarms Scientists

The deaths of the birds -- similar to gulls and called greater shearwaters -- have wildlife officials worried about possible changes in the ocean that could have affected the fish that the birds usually eat.

Dutch Try To Grow Environment-Friendly Meat in Lab

Although it is in its early stages, the idea is to replace harvesting meat from livestock with a process that eliminates the need for animal feed, transport, land use and the methane expelled by animals, which all hurt the environment, [Utrecht University veterinary science professor Bernard Roelen] said.

"Keeping animals just to eat them is in fact not so good for the environment," said Roelen. "Animals need to grow, and animals produce many things that you do not eat."

I'd eat it.

Greenwald on the Authoritarian Mind

Tucker, Jonah, Elizabeth and Jillian

Our Leaders are Good and want to protect us. Therefore, we must accept -- and even be grateful -- when they prevent us from knowing what they are doing. The less we know, the more powerful our Leaders are. And that is something we accept and celebrate, for our Leaders are Good and we trust that the more powerful they are, the better we all shall be.

If this piques your interest in understanding authoritarianism, start reading Orcinus.

Compare and contrast with Theodore C. Sorenson's The New Vision: The speech I want the Democratic nominee to give, which calls out to the best of American ideals, rather than fear, hate, and willful ignorance.

Other Half of Four-Part WaPo Cheney Series

Cheney, Part III and Part IV


Publius has some interesting remarks over at ObsidianWings:

[D]ismissing Cheney as “evil” is too easy. Cheney is not some one-time moral aberration, he is the product of deeper, more structural flaws in the American political system. For that reason, we can expect future Cheneys if these fundamental flaws aren’t recognized and addressed.

P gets into the ideological aspect of the broader "process" -- asserting, quite rightly, I think, that "the emergence of a shadow presidency" was "the direct product of the ideology of the 2000 election."

Money and outdated election systems create their own problems, but they don’t necessarily lead to electing inexperienced, unqualified presidents. What does lead to electing inexperienced, unqualified presidents is a media narrative and public debate focused on juvenile, high-school popularity-type criteria.

And now, for my voice, in a brief remark that I shall leave to you, gentle reader, to unpack, mostly, whilst I go back to studying for the bar exam:

We changed how we elect presidents, with JFK. Look, not content, became pre-eminent when Nixon sweated in televised debate with JFK in 1960.

From the Eagleton Digital Archive of American Politics:

Indeed, those who heard the first debate on the radio pronounced Nixon the winner. But the 70 million who watched television saw a candidate still sickly and obviously discomforted by Kennedy's smooth delivery and charisma. Those television viewers focused on what they saw, not what they heard.

Thanks, TV. Now, the Internet, founded in content rather than look, many community voices rather than one paternalistic one, may save us, I don't know. It's changed so over the years, so, I just don't know.

ObsidianWings on the WaPo Cheney articles

The Cheney Series: Abu Ghraib

Second, John Yoo "verbally warned lawyers for the president, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that it would be dangerous as a matter of policy to permit military interrogators to use the harshest techniques, because the armed services, vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the tools or exceed the limits." The fact that these techniques spread through the military was not some sort of tragic unforeseen event. They were warned that this might happen; they decided to allow the use of these techniques anyways; and if they did anything to try to prevent something like Abu Ghraib from happening as a result -- if they tried hard to train everyone involved in interrogations about what they could do and what they could not -- I haven't heard about it yet.

The Cheney Series: War Crimes

Time after time, various people say to Cheney and his staff: look, you need to realize that this line of argument will never be accepted by the courts. And every time, Cheney's response is: we insist on everything; we concede nothing; screw them. There is, as far as I can tell, no acknowledgement of the fact that the Courts have an independent role in setting out the legal limits on the actions of the Executive, or that they are anything more than an annoying hoop that has to be jumped through. Similarly with the Congress.

For this reason, it's not surprising that Cheney treats reversals of his policies in the Courts, or Congressional action overruling them, not as setting limits on what he should do, but as minor setbacks in a bureaucratic war, setbacks that he can overturn through deviousness and persistence. It's worth stopping to think about how wrong this is.

The Cheney Series: Weakness And Dysfunction

Besides explaining the backstory behind the administration's policy on torture, the Post's series of articles on Cheney (1, 2) also makes it clear that Dick Cheney is the co-worker from hell: secretive, devious, vindictive, backstabbing, and absolutely relentless in pursuit of his goals.

.

Part 2 of WaPo's article on Cheney

"Pushing the Envelope of Presidential Power"

Ever notice

How we always describe people who die of cancer as doing so after an x-many-weeks/years/whatever battle?

Always the heroic battle metaphor.

Excellent Article on VP Cheney

'A Different Understanding With The President'

Firstborns Get Dibs on Everything -- Even IQs

Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher I.Q. (NY Times)

Oh, the things I love about this article:

4. The way the article seems tailor-made to depress everyone who's not the eldest of their sibs. Can't you just hear a younger sib, now? F--- me, even my damn IQ is a hand-me-down!.
3. The "golly, we bet the results are the same for women, even though we only analyzed male subjects."
2. That adult attention as an infant is theorized as a factor, yet that doesn't explain men who become the eldest sib, and apparently smarter, to boot. Instead -- and this is my out-of-thin-air theory, thanks -- maybe being pushed to do, to sink or swim, in a pressure cooker that younger sibs don't get to the same degree, has a significant effect on IQ. Push comes to shove, you find yourself developing all sorts of necessary skills.
1. The fact that we measure intelligence w/such rough devices to begin with. I mean, honestly, how many kids' answers change to these dippy IQ questions, that have nothing to do with how smart they might actually be? (Something to bear in mind when asking yourself if these results really would be the same for men and women, given the patriarchy.) Look at the whole section in there on once-a-decade advancements v. genuinely revolutionary ideas:

Charles Darwin, author of the revolutionary “Origin of Species,” was the fifth of six children. Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish-born astronomer who determined that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the planetary system, grew up the youngest of four. The mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, the youngest of three, was a key figure in the scientific revolution that began in the 16th century.

Firstborns have won more Nobel Prizes in science than younger siblings, but often by advancing current understanding, rather than overturning it.

“It’s the difference between every-year or every-decade creativity and every-century creativity,” Dr. Sulloway said, “between innovation and radical innovation.”

This is deeply unsettling and disappointing

Scalia asks, ‘Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?’

Remember, in some legal circles, Scalia is considered one of the giants in conservative intellectual thought.

It’s likely that Scalia was using a cultural reference to prove a broader point about torture and the rule of law, but I’m not entirely sure what that point is. It seems to have something to do with Scalia’s apparent belief that those U.S. officials who commit torture deserve legal amnesty, just so long as the ends justify the means.

Just think, having this guy sitting on the Supreme Court was disconcerting before he started using fiction to rationalize torture.

I’ll spare you the tirade on why torture is morally indefensible, and why torture doesn’t provide useful information anyway, and why relying on fictional characters to justify real-life crimes is patently ridiculous, but will instead focus on two points.

First, Bauer-like scenarios don’t happen.

[snip]

Second, Bauer-like scenarios offer the wrong lessons.

Ultimate Flip-Flop

Bishop Romney's Sadistic Anti-Abortion Counseling If you're too busy to read it: eyewitness testimony that Mitt Romney claimed to be pro-choice for political reasons only, when running for office in Mass. He lied, flat out, to get elected.

It's a great article for other reasons:

Suzan Mazur: How do you think Mitt Romney will do ultimately in the presidential race?

[Prof.] Judy Dushku: He’s got so much money. He’s publicly appealing and charming – more charming than McCain. And I think the Republicans will not tolerate a Guliani, so he has a very good chance. It depends on whether the Democrats can get their act together and present someone better.

Suzan Mazur: And he’s a good business man. But don’t you think the business model has gone as far as it can go in presidential politics? Isn’t it time for a switch to leadership that cares about more than business moguls and generals?

Judy Dushku: You’re talking to a Social Democrat who reads Paul Krugman and CounterPunch and thinks that it has all been downhill since the New Deal restraints on business and legal protections of unions and peoples’ rights. As a professor of government for over 40 years, I believe that we’ve never been in such terrible shape since the robber barons. The control of corporate money on America is a disaster and has led to the decline and fall of democracy.

Remember Abu Ghraib

Sy Hersh's story on General Taguba.

This is Appalling

Some group of Christian fundamentalists intend to honor their 'martyr', Paul Hill, by
reenacting his murder of Dr John Britton and James Barrett at an abortion clinic.

They're going to celebrate the murder of two human beings. By reenacting it.

These people are sick.

I'm In The News

2007 Graduate Appointed As Fellow.

C'est moi!

Guiliani: Bush III, Only Worse

Definitely an article to read: Giuliani: Worse Than Bush He's cashing in on 9/11, working with Karl Rove's henchmen and in cahoots with a Swift Boat-style attack on Hillary. Will Rudy Giuliani be Bush III? . At RollingStone.com.