Category: News-esque

News that doesn’t fit anywhere else

April Fools Comes Early

Seth Anderson0 comment

The New York Times pulls a Sarah Palin…

In Monday’s newspaper, we published a letter over the name of the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, criticizing Caroline Kennedy. This letter was a fraud and should not have been published. Mr. Delanoë’s office has since confirmed that he did not write it.

Printing the letter, which also appeared on nytimes.com until it was removed, violated the standards and procedures of The New York Times editorial department.

It is our practice to verify the authenticity of every letter we publish. Like most of our letters these days, this one arrived by e-mail. We sent an edited version back to the writer of the e-mail and did not receive a response.

At that point, the letter should have been set aside. It was not.

The Times has expressed its regret to Mr. Delanoë’s office for the lapse in judgment that led to this error. We now express those regrets to our readers.

We will be reviewing our procedures in an attempt to ensure that an error like this is not repeated.

[From Editors’ Note – Letter – NYTimes.com]

Ooopie!

The original letter read:

As mayor of Paris, I find Caroline Kennedy’s bid for the seat of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least. What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.

With all the respect and admiration I have for Ms. Kennedy’s late father, I find her bid in very poor taste, and, after reading “Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key” (news article, Dec. 18), in my opinion she has no qualification whatsoever to bid for Senator Clinton’s seat.

We French have been consistently admiring of the American Constitution, but it seems that recently both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from a truly democratic model. The Kennedy era is long gone, and I guess that New York has plenty of more qualified candidates to fill the shoes of Hillary Clinton. Can we speak of American decline?

Bertrand Delanoë Paris, Dec.

18, 2008

Richard Nixon Taught Karl Rove Well

Seth Anderson0 comment

In spirit, if not directly

More than 35 years after he left office in disgrace, a stash of recordings has been made public confirming the popular view of Richard Nixon as a lying, venal, foul-mouthed, paranoid conspirator.

In the 198 hours of recordings and 90,000 pages of documents released by the Nixon Presidential Library, the late president discusses his 1972 election landslide, the Vietnam peace talks and “Christmas bombing” campaign. But mostly he urges staff to use all means necessary to discredit opponents.

“Never forget,” he tells national security advisers Henry Kissinger, above, and Alexander Haig in a conversation on December 14 1972, “the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times.”

[Click to read more of Recordings reveal Richard Nixon’s obsession with predecessors guardian.co.uk ]

Unaccounted For

and I wonder if Still-President Bush defaced the photographs of Clinton? Nixon was a lot more insecure than GWB though, despite being a much more intelligent and accomplished man.

Nixon was also obsessed with his predecessors, instructing his chief of staff Bob Haldeman in July 1971 to organise a covert raid of a Washington thinktank to uncover information it might have about John F Kennedy.

“I want a son-of-a-bitch. I want someone just as tough as I am [to carry out the raid] … I want it done. I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame.”

Documents released alongside the recordings detail the progress made by his staff in carrying out a presidential order to remove all pictures of past presidents from the White House.

An office belonging to a junior civil servant in which he had seen two photographs of Kennedy, one bearing a personal inscription, particularly offended Nixon. “On January 14,” wrote White House staffer Alexander Butterfield in a 1970 memo, “the project was completed and all 35 offices displayed only your photograph.”

2,700-year-old marijuana stash found

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Humans have ingested marijuana nearly as long as they’ve ingested alcohol. Too bad the Catholic Church rituals didn’t include puffing on a sacramental cannabis wafer in addition to drinking the blood of Christ. Our society would be a lot different with so many fewer people in jail for inhaling smoke of a plant.

A Green Step Forward

Researchers say they have located the world’s oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly “cultivated for psychoactive purposes,” rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams1 of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

“To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent,” says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.

The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.

The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.

[From 2,700-year-old marijuana stash found | Weird | News | Toronto Sun]

And this is a new factoid:

The region of China where the tomb is located, Xinjiang, is considered an original source of many cannabis strains worldwide.

Footnotes:
  1. which equals 1.73 lbs, if you were curious [↩]

Bush Drunk Again

Seth Anderson0 comment

We were laughing at this last week, after watching the Daily Show clips of Still-President Bush looking red faced, and inappropriately full of mirth. Maybe his alcoholism was true all along, and the White House has been lying to the American public. Wouldn’t be the first time. Gee, these pretzels are making me thirsty…

The margarita-like drink combines pisco — a Peruvian brandy — with lemon juice, egg whites and other ingredients and is considered mandatory in the South American country for welcoming guests and other festive occasions.

This week’s gathering has been no exception.

Even teetotalling US President George W. Bush, who famously quit drinking at 40, was spotted apparently sipping a pisco sour during the summit on Saturday.
It was unclear whether he actually drank any, or whether it was an alcohol-free version.

The White House rebuffed questions about the matter.

[From AFP: Peru summit hits sour note with ‘Pisco diplomacy’]

Why “rebuff” questions unless you don’t want to be caught in a lie, especially in a foreign country where the White House handlers cannot force event organizers to agree. They don’t want to say, “no, no booze”, and then have some Peruvian staffer say, “but I added double brandy to Senior Bush’s drink!” Easier just to ignore the question. That strategy has worked before, after all.

And remember how pissed Laura Bush was?

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: “Stop, George.”

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against “falling off the wagon” and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

“When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot,” said one insider. “He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: “Stop George!”

“Laura gave him an ultimatum before, ‘It’s Jim Beam or me.’ She doesn’t want to replay that nightmare — especially now when it’s such tough going for her husband.”

Seymour Hersh, American Hero

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“Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (P.S.)” (Seymour M. Hersh)

Rachel Cooke has an excellent profile of the great American hero, Seymour Hersh in the Guardian UK:

Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. ‘Brad Pitt loved this place,’ says Hersh with a wolfish grin. ‘It totally fits the cliché of the grungy reporter’s den!’ When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated – the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It’s not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees, trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems, each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers. By the time I look at Hersh again – the full panorama takes a moment or two – he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its horns on it.

And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about their scoop, they describe him – the competition. He was unlike any reporter they’d ever seen: ‘Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and rumpled, bleached khakis.’ Forty years on, little has changed. Today he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and – thanks to a tennis injury – he is walking like an old guy: chest forward, knees bandy, slight limp in one leg. There is something cherishably chaotic about him. A fuzzy halo of frantic inquiry follows him wherever he goes, like the cloud of dust that hovers above Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown strip. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his thoughts pour forth, unmediated and – unless you concentrate very hard – seemingly unconnected. ‘Yeah, I shoot my mouth off,’ he says, with faux remorse. ‘There’s a huge difference between writing and thinking.’

[From Rachel Cooke meets Seymour Hersh, the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington | Media | The Observer ]

and this tidbit makes me really anticipate the Obama presidency, perhaps some of the more heinous crimes of the Bush Administration will be exposed:

The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. ‘You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president’s inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:] “You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.” So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.’ He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won’t change anything – ‘They’ve got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves’ – it will reveal how the White House ‘set out to sabotage the system… It wasn’t that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.’

A little personal history:

Seymour M Hersh (the M is for Myron) was born in Chicago, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Lithuania and Poland (he has a twin brother, a physicist, and two sisters, also twins). The family was not rich; his father, who died when Seymour was 17, ran a dry-cleaning business. After school he attended a local junior college until a professor took him aside, asked him what he was doing there and walked him up to the University of Chicago. ‘Chicago was this great egghead place,’ Hersh says. ‘But I knew nothing. I came out of a lower-middle-class background. At that time, everyone used to define themselves: Stalinist, Maoist, whatever. I thought they meant “miaowist”. Seriously! Something to do with cats. Among my peers, they all thought I would write the great novel, because I was very quick and cutting. I’ve just read Philip Roth’s new novel [Indignation], and the arrogance of his character reminded me of that certitude. I was always pointing out other people’s flaws.’ He went to law school but hated it, dropped out and wound up as a copy boy, then a reporter for the local City News Bureau. Later he joined Associated Press in Washington and rose through its ranks until he quit for a stint working for the Democrat senator Eugene McCarthy. Pretty soon, though, he was back in journalism. ‘Using words to make other people less big made me feel bigger, though the psychological dimension to that… well, I don’t want to explore it.’ His wife of 40 years, Elizabeth, whom he describes as ‘the love of my life’ in the acknowledgements of Chain of Command (they have three grown-up children), is a psychoanalyst. Doesn’t she ever tell him about his ego and his id? He looks embarrassed. ‘No, no… marriage is… different. When you live with someone you don’t… The hardest part for her is when she tells me to take out the garbage and I say: “Excuse me? I don’t have time. I’m saving the world.”‘ Later, however, he tells me that journalism, like psychoanalysis, is about ‘bringing things into focus’.

but you should read the rest of the article yourself.

I’d love to see a film made about Sy Hersh, but Brad Pitt? Really? Whatever gets you funding, I guess.

Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking

Seth Anderson0 comment

Good for them, at least ten years late, but better late then never.

NBC hopes to benefit from the same user behavior. Beginning with its Chicago affiliate, WMAQ, on Monday, the company will turn its TV station Web sites into full-fledged city guides. John P. Wallace, the president of NBC’s local media division, said the partnerships with content providers and the links to third-party sites will “tap into our communities much deeper than we have been able to historically.”

“It’s a change in mindset,” he said. “We’re looking at the fragmented local market and saying, ‘We’re going to provide a destination where you can come and search across different segments.’ ”

Brian Buchwald, the division’s senior vice president for local digital media and multiplatform, said the move amounts to an acknowledgment that local television stations must do more online than merely regurgitate their newscasts online. “We need to be a lot more than just TV stations if we’re going to be relevant,” he said.

NBC’s local media operation has hired about 55 people to create original content and filter the Web. A test version of the Chicago site last week linked to The Chicago Sun-Times, USA Today, TMZ and the local blog Chicagoist. The sites do not distinguish between the articles written by their own staff members and the links to outside sites.

“If we can provide them great content, that’s wonderful. If it comes from somebody else, that’s fine, too,” Mr. Buchwald said.

As simple as that sounds, it represents an attitude shift. While linking to other sources is not a new occurrence by any means, it can still seem misguided to journalists who work vigorously to break a story ahead of other news outlets.

Mr. Karp believes the use of blogs by news organizations has helped newsroom managers accept that filtering the Web for visitors is a valuable editorial function. For bloggers, linking to original reporting, primary sources and discussions about stories is a form of etiquette, assigning credit to others who have written about a topic.

[From Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites – NYTimes.com]

Now, if only the Chicago Tribune would start to use permalinks, and open up their archive to articles from their long history. Even if it is only for subscribers, like Harpers, The Nation, and The New York Times (and others) do.

Soros on The Credit Crisis of 2008

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“The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means” (George Soros)

Quite enjoyed the clarity of the discussion between Bill Moyers and George Soros. I don’t have the training or experience to have an informed opinion as to what they actually said, but it sounded like sense.

In his new book, THE CREDIT CRISIS OF 2008 AND WHAT IT MEANS, George Soros explains the credit crisis through the lens of his conception of financial markets and human affairs, a theory he calls “reflexivity.” What we are seeing, according to Soros, is not just the deflation of the housing bubble, but that of a much bigger “super-bubble” twenty-five years in the making. Based on too much credit and too little regulation, the super-bubble has supported an unsustainable world order, where the United States consumes more than it produces.
In his interview with Bill Moyers, Soros lays out several short-term prescriptions for dealing with the crisis, one of which — directly injecting cash into banks in exchange for a share of the company — was authorized in the $700 billion bailout, and is being considered by the US Treasury.

But along with stopping the slide into more dire financial straights, Soros also has a vision for a post super-bubble world. For Soros, this unraveling, though inevitable, need not cause too much despair. Consumption has been the motor of our economy for 25 years, he explains, and now that motor is gone. But we can create a new motor to deal with one of the main aspects of our over-consumption problem — energy. Combating global warming will require a huge amount of effort — the amount of change and development that can restart an economy. Soros goes on to explain:

I think we all have to consume less. We will consume less because we will have to. And rather than being unemployed, let’s keep employment up. We’d use it for dealing with global warming. That, I think, is the way that this could work in the right way.

[From Bill Moyers Journal . George Soros | PBS]

If you missed the broadcast, there is a streaming video at PBS.org, and transcript here.

Paul Krugman Wins Nobel Prize for Economics

swanksalot0 comment

We’ve read Krugman for many years, and although we’ve never met him in person, are still happy for his public recognition.

The American economist Paul R. Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.

Mr. Krugman, 55, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and a columnist for The New York Times, formulated a new theory to answer questions about free trade, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

“What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions,” the academy said in its citation.

“He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography,” it said.

Mr. Krugman was the lone of winner of the 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) award, the latest in a string of American researchers to be honored.

[From Krugman Wins Nobel Prize for Economics – NYTimes.com]

Kudos. You can leave congrats on his blog, if you are so inclined1 and he’s interviewed by Catherine Rampell of the New York Times economics blog here

and appropriate of nothing, but since I wanted to see what it looks like, electoral college info-porn:

Requires Flash version 8+.

Get Adobe Flash player

Footnotes:
  1. I didn’t, but you might [↩]

Is John McCain an Asshole

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Survey says…

Yes!!

You may have received an email reading something like this:

It was just before John McCain’s last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).

It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately.

He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was “if he likes this so much, why hasn’t he memorized any of this yet?” I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his “readings” which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people’s buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.

Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn’t meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight.

McCain’s appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.

Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking:

“Oh, that was Cindy’s idea – I didn’t have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can’t imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona . No, it wasn’t my idea at all.”

I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, “If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson”. Given McCain’s personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII — but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan . I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn’t seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.

My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island . Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn’t be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, “Don’t you know who I am.” I looked him in the face and said, “Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met” and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain’s bullying.

Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can’t imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President.

Snopes.com, one’s first source for fact-checking internet based assertions, is not sure whether this tale is true or not, but most pointedly, they do not debunk it outright. John McCain has vacationed at Turtle Island many times, and the rest of the description fits Angry John as well (racist, quick to fly off the handle, disdainful of women, disrespectful of his wife, yadda yadda).

Resident wonders why holes must be dug, filled every day

Seth Anderson0 comment

Who says the Iron Rice Bowl1 is a thing of the past! Austin, Texas has ensured that all road construction projects last much, much longer than they need to by spending half of the day digging and covering the same patch of dirt.

Not all the work has felt like progress, however. For the past two weeks, the contractor, Oscar Renda Contracting, has excavated a hole 20 feet long, 20 feet wide and 20 feet deep every morning to reach the sewer lines. Then, at the end of each day, crews have refilled the pit and covered it with a temporary asphalt cap so Monroe Street could be reopened at night.

Since the work started about Sept. 20, at least half of each 12-hour workday has been devoted to digging and refilling the same pit to comply with a city policy that stresses keeping city streets open to traffic as much as possible, said Chris Williams, an employee of Oscar Renda. The size and depth of the holes make using metal cover plates unsafe.

[From Resident wonders why holes must be dug, filled every day]

A modern day Sisyphus, in other words.

Footnotes:
  1. 铁饭碗 tiě fàn wǎan was the Chinese phrase for an occupation that was guaranteed for life, regardless of changing circumstances. Wiki entry explains its origin [↩]

Rebuilding America

swanksalot0 comment

We’re all fairly sick of hearing about the so-called “greatest generation”, but let there be no doubt, the Civilian Conservation Corps did awesome work for the nation, and the spirit of the WPA should be resurrected to rebuild our current crumbling country. Just think how much good could be accomplished with the $700,000,000 proposed to bail out Wall Street fat cats (not to mention taxpayer funds handed over to AIG, IndyMac, Fannie Mae and all the rest. Money that could instead be spent beautifying our nation.)

WPA Project No 960

Before surging ahead, however, let’s look back. Seventy-five years ago, our country faced an even deeper depression. Millions of men had neither jobs, nor job prospects. Families were struggling to put food on the table. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, soon widely known as the CCC.

From 1933 to 1942, the CCC enrolled nearly 3.5 million men in roughly 4,500 camps across the country. It helped to build roads, build and repair bridges, clear brush and fight forest fires, create state parks and recreational areas, and otherwise develop and improve our nation’s infrastructure — work no less desperately needed today than it was back then. These young men — women were not included — willingly lived in primitive camps and barracks, sacrificing to support their families who were hurting back home.

My father, who served in the CCC from 1935 to 1937, was among those young men. They earned $30 a month for their labor — a dollar a day — and he sent home $25 of that to support the family. For those modest wages, he and others like him gave liberally to our country in return. The stats are still impressive: 800 state parks developed; 125,000 miles of road built; more than two billion trees planted; 972 million fish stocked. The list goes on and on in jaw-dropping detail.

Not only did the CCC improve our country physically, you might even say that experiencing it prepared a significant part of the “greatest generation” of World War II for greatness. After all, veterans of the CCC had already learned to work and sacrifice for something larger than themselves — for, in fact, their families, their state, their country. As important as the G.I. Bill was to veterans returning from that war and to our country’s economic boom in the 1950s, the CCC was certainly no less important in building character and instilling an ethic of teamwork, service, and sacrifice in a generation of American men.

[From Tomgram: William Astore, Rebuilding America, Remaking Ourselves]

and don’t forget the cash pissed away in the sands of Iraq:

Here’s where our federal government really should step in, just as it did in 1933. For we face an enormous national challenge today which goes largely unaddressed: shoring up our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The prestigious American Society of Civil Engineers did a survey of, and a report card on, the state of the American infrastructure. Our country’s backbone earned a dismal “D,” barely above a failing (and fatal) grade. The Society estimates that we need to invest $1.6 trillion in infrastructure maintenance and improvements over the next five years or face ever more collapsing bridges and bursting dams. It’s a staggering sum, until you realize that we’re already approaching a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war alone.

Occupation Forces

Seth Anderson0 comment

American Imperialism, not a topic fit for polite company, especially the pearl-clutchers in Washington, DC, and their courtiers and handlers in the US press.

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations,” known informally as “lily pads” (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard — that is, the population of an American town — are functionally floating bases.

And here’s the other half of that simple truth: We don’t care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainst

ream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Now, that’s the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that’s more than you care to know, stop here.

[From The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It | | AlterNet]

Hey, at least our bridges aren’t collapsing. Err, well, at least our homes aren’t in foreclosure. Err, well, you know what I mean. Why invest in education, national infrastructure, healthcare or other such frivolity when there is a military to fund and a planet to police…

Tom Engelhardt continues:

Let’s face it, we’re on an imperial bender and it’s been a long, long night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its massive expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no tomorrow; we’re still building bases as if the world were our oyster; and we’re still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But let’s start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and blue. Remember the 1990s when the U.S. was hailed — or perhaps more accurately, Washington hailed itself — not just as the planet’s “sole superpower” or even its unique “hyperpower,” but as its “global policeman,” the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that famed five-sided building in Washington D.C, promptly began dropping police stations — aka military bases — in or near the oil heartlands of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.

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The Wall Street Journal in decline

Seth Anderson0 comment

Reluctantly agree: the WSJ has changed its blend of news coverage in a less interesting style. Joe Nocera of the New York Times writes:

With its new orientation toward Washington and politics, The Journal was bound to overflow with stories about the presidential race, as indeed it did. Still, what struck me about The Journal this week — what struck me hard — was how little business news the first section of the paper contained.

Every day the lead story, and the big photo, was devoted to the convention — stories that said more or less the same thing as everyone else’s. And most days, only one of the four front-page stories was devoted to business. Inside, it was even worse: pages of political and international coverage, which came at the expense of business. On Tuesday, in fact, there wasn’t a single mainstream business story in the entire first section. And the business stories that did run lacked the kind of nuance, analysis and wonderful story-telling that used to characterize The Wall Street Journal I loved.

[From The Wall Street Journal, R.I.P. – Business, Power and Deals – Executive Suite blog – NYTimes.com]

I’ve been a subscriber since 19941, give or take, with a few years off when my finances got shaky, and there is certainly less compelling content in the WSJ as of late. Maybe only a momentary glitch? Possibly, yet Murdoch does have a very strong vision for how newspapers should function, and I’m afraid the WSJ will never be the same paper.

But to me — and I’m speaking now not as a someone who works for a competitor but as someone who has always adored reading The Wall Street Journal — the paper he is producing is less distinctive, less interesting and less important to its core business readership. The Journal of yore always assumed that its readers knew the basic facts of a big story, so it worked hard to find new, fresh angles that required smart reporting and original thinking. The old Journal could barely bring itself to publish a quarterly earnings story without putting it in context for the reader. Most painful for me are the memories I have of the rollicking Wall Street Journal narrative that was such a staple — a behind-the-scenes story about some shenanigans inside a company that only The Journal would ferret out and tell. Nobody else in journalism wrote those stories on a regular basis, and now that The Journal has largely stopped writing them I fear they are going to disappear, like an ancient dialect that dies out.

Footnotes:
  1. and still skip the editorial pages without a second thought [↩]

More on the Decline of Newspapers

Seth Anderson0 comment

More on the Decline of Newspapers and media in general, from Digby, who was on a panel about the media and the blogosphere with Arianna Huffington, Chris Cilizza, Jonathan Alter and Gregory Maffei:

Alter insists that nobody listens to the gasbags and pundits so we shouldn’t worry about them. I asked him how he thought people got their information about politics and he said from their talkative coworker or politically engaged relative and things like chain emails. It’s apparent that many in the mainstream media have not see the documentation and analysis that’s been done online about how the stories and themes of elections, as conceived by political operatives and political pundits, dominate the campaigns and color the voters impressions of the candidates. Maybe the inside of the bubble is too heady a place to be able to connect those dots.

(In the meantime, perhaps I should just direct everyone to Bob Somerby…)

I find it difficult to keep my patience with the inevitable discussion about how the news media is losing money and can’t afford to do the all important news gathering on which we internet parasites depend. It’s as if this problem has happened in some vacuum in which journalism itself has no culpability. They brought a lot of it on themselves, particularly when they gleefully allowed Drudge to rule their world and Rush to be feted and groomed by mainstream conservative politicians without raising an eyebrow. (Live by the wingnuts, die by the wingnuts.)

[From Hullabaloo]

Builds upon the late-great Molly Ivins’ point: the best way to get more subscribers is to put out a better paper, not just whine.

Guampedia Missionaries

Seth Anderson0 comment

Missionaries for good, for the spread of knowledge, we hasten to add, not zealots…

Shannon Murphy and her staff of two are practically missionaries. But it isn’t religion they’re hawking. Instead, the trio is spreading the good word about Guam and behind them are more than a hundred others following in their path.

To deliver their message, Murphy and company are relying on the Internet and the Guam Humanities Council project Guampedia, an online encyclopedia about the island.

“We think it will make for a better understanding about the depth and history about the people here,” says Murphy, Guampedia’s managing editor who holds a hefty passion for Guam and its people.

[From Sharing Guam: Guampedia aims for understanding of island | guampdn.com | Pacific Daily News]

The federal government can be a positive factor in people’s lives sometimes:

The Council jumped on board with the project in the year 2000 when the National Endowment for the Humanities began offering grants to create online encyclopedias around the country.

“We had to spend two years developing the content, figuring out what kind of software,” Murphy says. “We had to hire someone to do all the software and do all the programing.”

As an aside, these sort of federal grants are anathema to Republicans like John McCain. He considers them waste, but happily throws away billions in tax-payer dollars for oil corporations.

Anyway, congratulations to Guampedia for a successful launch, we look forward to watching their continued growth. The Guampedia is one of the first National Endowments to actually get off the ground (fourth to start, per Shannon Murphy), many states considered the work a bit too challenging to tackle, at least at first. Now, if only the Guampedia could add an RSS feed of new content…

Here was a television interview on the topic from last week, including statements from my aunt Shannon :

The video clip includes Guam commercials, so you can feel like you are actually watching Channel 8 KUAM on Guam, plus a flashing error message about “No disc”.