Month: July 2008

by Chris Bodenner
"I’m not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there. But I won’t even go inside that thing now. It’s disgusting," – Veronyka Cordner, a homeless woman in Seattle gesturing toward one of the city’s five automated public toilets, which soon will be removed after four years because of crime and sanitation concerns. The toilets, which cost taxpayers $5M, are being sold on Ebay for $89K apiece.

by hilzoy

I’m as sympathetic as anyone to conservationists’ complaints that people care more about threats to what they call “charismatic megafauna” than, say, the demise of some humble insect that’s the linchpin of an entire ecosystem. But baby penguins are in a class of cute all their own:

(My candidate for Face of the Day. Credit: Paul Ward.)

So the news that they are washing up dead in large numbers makes me cast my normal concern for bacteria and nematodes to the wind and wail: Nooo! Not baby penguins!!!

“Hundreds of baby penguins swept from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro’s tropical beaches, rescuers and penguin experts said Friday.

More than 400 penguins, most of them young, have been found dead on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro state over the past two months, according to Eduardo Pimenta, superintendent for the state coastal protection and environment agency in the resort city of Cabo Frio.

While it is common here to find some penguins — both dead and alive — swept by strong ocean currents from the Strait of Magellan, Pimenta said there have been more this year than at any time in recent memory. (…)

Costa said the vast majority of penguins turning up are baby birds that have just left the nest and are unable to out-swim the strong ocean currents they encounter while searching for food.”

No one seems to know why this is happening; possible culprits include overfishing, pollution, and global warming.

By Patrick Appel
In a 1867 article, while arguing for international copyright laws, James Parton wrote about the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

Others talked about slavery; [Harriet Beecher Stowe] made us see it. She showed it to us in its fairest and in its foulest aspect; she revealed its average and ordinary working. There never was a fairer nor a kinder book than "Uncle Tom’s Cabin"; for the entire odium of the revelation fell upon the Thing, not upon the unhappy mortals who were born and reared under its shadow. The reader felt that Legree was not less, but far more, the victim of slavery than Uncle Tom, and the effect of the book was to concentrate wrath upon the system which tortured the slave’s body and damned the master’s soul. Wonderful magic of genius! The hovels and cotton-fields which this authoress scarcely saw she made all the world see, and see more vividly and more truly than the busy world can ever see remote objects with its own eyes. We are very dull and stupid in what does not immediately concern us, until we are roused and enlightened by such as she. Those whom we call "the intelligent," or "the educated," are merely the one in ten of the human family who, by some chance, learned to read, and thus came under the influence of the class whom Mrs. Stowe represents.

By Patrick Appel

In response to Savage, a post by Autism News Beat:

This was not the first time that Savage, who holds master’s degrees in medical botany and medical anthropology, and a PhD in “nutritional ethnomedicine”, has shown his ignorance of autism. Last month, Dr. Savage, née Michael Weiner, said “In my day if a kid shot his mouth off in class we wasn’t called autistic, he was called a pain in the neck.” Autism, said Savage, is a racket for poor families to collect disability payments from the government. In Savage’s sad little world, there is no ASD or ADD: “To me, there is only one disease they all have – S.T.U.P.I.D.” The ignorance is not confined to autism – he once said that 99 percent of all depression “is rage turned inside.”

Either Savage skipped class the days his professors talked about “medicine”, or he’s an entertainer who doesn’t care who he hurts. I vote for the latter.

Chances are, Savage knows that autism is a real disorder, with a strong genetic component, and that changes in diagnostic criteria have led to a spike in diagnoses over the last 20 years. But how boring is that? How many of his eight million listeners would sit through 15 minutes of their hero going all Dr. Phil, telling us that autistic children need understanding and accommodation? So much more entertaining to joke about smacking the handicapped.

The need to entertain first, then inform, has long been a favorite subject of media watchdogs and scholars. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published 20 years ago, Neil Postman showed us how mass media, primarily television, convert otherwise serious conversations into entertainment. Treating autism as entertainment, whether it’s calling the disorder a scam, or peeking into alternative medical clinics to see what some parents do to their kids, preempts serious discussion. Shocking, unverified anecdotes are elevated over dry scientific consensus. Preposterous medical claims are presented for their shock value, with little effort given to refutation. Over time, the public loses its appreciation for serious issues, as once serious issues morph into entertainment.

By Patrick Appel
Poulos lays out what McCain should do: 

McCain can lose more independents by getting stupid on Iraq than he can lose Republicans by getting smart. Under the circumstances. And under related ones — in the totality of them, if you like — McCain has nothing to lose by glomming onto Obama/Maliki on Iraq. He can draw a host of other important distinctions. He can question the 90% of Obama’s foreign policy that has nothing to do with Iraq. He could, in fact, make pledges not to preventively invade any foreign countries. Wouldn’t that be a game-changer, eh?

By Patrick Appel
Larison is skeptical of Bush’s time horizon and Obama’s linking a timetable to conditions:

This is not really a shift, as the NYT would have it, so much as it is yet another rhetorical dodge.  Officially, the administration has always wanted to leave Iraq as quickly as possible, and we all know that this claim is not credible.  The difference between such a horizon and a firm timetable is clear enough: the former can be revised and allowed to recede far off into the future, while a timetable ought to mean that there are certain dates by which such-and-such a number of troops must be withdrawn with a final target date for removing all combat troops.  To the extent that anyone links a timetable to conditions, as Obama has done, he is leaving the door open to the same kind of perpetual revision and delay that the “time horizon” concept already allows.  In this, he is not really doing anything new…

By Patrick Appel
Abe Greenwald has a point:

At some point, a viable exit is 16 months away….over the past few months, John McCain’s line on withdrawal should have gone something like this: “If at some point, this kind of progress in Iraq makes for genuinely stable circumstance then “timetables” will simply be a non-loaded description of how the U.S. troops come home. But Senator Obama has been proposing arbitrary time-tables for a year-and-a-half now. The important thing is that we’re seeing sea-changes in Iraq and that would not have been the case if Obama’s withdrawal mantra had been heeded.” Instead, by letting the media’s version of his position frame the tone of his rhetoric, John McCain has handed Obama a false victory.

By Patrick Appel

I’m not sure how much this changes things:

Dr. Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, issued a statement saying Mr. Maliki’s statement had been “as not conveyed accurately regarding the vision of Senator Barack Obama, U.S. presidential candidate, on the timeframe for U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq,” but it did not address a specific error. It did soften his support for Mr. Obama’s plan and implied a more tentative approach to withdrawing troops.

Matt isn’t impressed. Neither is Allahpundit:

As if it’s not bad enough that they’re trying to spin this after the fact, the Times reports that the statement was put out by Centcom, just to make the U.S. fingerprints on it extra legible, I guess. In any event, Maliki’s desire to make any timetable contingent upon further security gains was already clear from the Spiegel translation…

By Patrick Appel

Shore Birds by W. S. Merwin

While I think of them they are growing rare
after the distances they have followed
all the way to the end for the first time
tracing a memory they did not have
until they set out to remember it
at an hour when all at once it was late
and newly silent and the white had turned
white around them then they rose in their choir
on a single note each of them alone
between the pull of the moon and the hummed
undertone of the earth below them
the glass curtains kept falling around them
as they flew in search of their place before
they were anywhere and storms winnowed them
they flew among the places with towers
and passed the tower lights where some vanished
with their long legs for wading in shadow
others were caught and stayed in the countries
of the nets and in the lands of lime twigs
some fastened and after the countries of
guns at first light fewer of them than I
remember would be here to recognize
the light of late summer when they found it
playing with darkness along the wet sand

(Image by Flickr user clairity)

By Jessie Roberts

Voices without Votes rounds up South African reactions to Obama’s candidacy. Below, an excerpt from the comments section on an interesting post that questions whether South Africa is ready for its own minority president:

A white President? NO…we’ve come too far to go back. In as much as I feel disillusioned by the cracks within the ANC…voting for anyone else would be tantamount to invalidating everything that my fore-fathers fought for. It’s still too early to even consider such!