Month: December 2010

by Zoë Pollock

 This has got to be one of the coolest (and most useful) airport installations:

eCLOUD, conceived by Aaron Koblin, Nik Hafermaas, and Dan Goods, displays weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) via specialized liquid crystal displays, suspended from the ceilings of the San Jose International Airport. … When it's raining, the eCLOUD appears to be dropping, while in a city that has hazy skies, the display feel slow and lazy. Stormy weather shows a busy cloud, bouncing around wildly.

by Zoë Pollock

 From the 2010 Nielsen numbers:

Fox owned the top 12 cable news shows in average total viewers and swept the top 10 among 25-54-year-olds (MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" came in 13th and 11th, respectively). Even the nightly repeat of the “O’Reilly Factor” averaged more viewers than MSNBC and CNN shows.

Peter Wehner crows:

The genius of Roger Ailes is that he not only brought the network to the top but, once there, continued to build on its dominance. We’ve never seen anything quite like this. It’s no wonder that FOX News provokes such envy and animus from its competitors. They not only can’t beat FOX News; they can hardly compete with it anymore.

'Blue' is looked after at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home whilst awaiting a new home on December 29, 2010 in London, England. Blue is one of a few dogs to have spent their second Christmas in Battersea. Battersea Dogs & Cats Home was founded 150 years ago and has rescued, reunited and rehomed over three million dogs and cats. The average stay for a dog is just 28 days although some stay much longer. Around 550 dogs and 200 cats are provided refuge by Battersea at any given time. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

If I had to pick one book out of the thousands I have read, it would be When God Was a Woman, by Merlin Stone. 

I was nearly 40, a single mom for ten years, holding a bachelors and a masters degree and yet working two jobs to make ends meet.  I was a nominative, semi-engaged Christian, but for personal reasons I had become a seeker of more spirituality than churches seemed to offer.  So one day I picked up this book at the local used bookstore.
 
It was a revelation to me, the idea that the Bible still contained the remnants of the goddess.  I felt that cool water was rushing over me.  For the first time in my life, I felt that there was an open door for me to approach a "god" who looked like me, whose accessibility wasn't confined to the men in the congregation.  But that was just the beginning.  The opening of the door.  I didn't become a pagan or a goddess-worshiping rabble-rouser or even an atheist.  After reading this book, I went on to read other feminist theologians and Bible historians, but it didn't stop there, either.  Within another year I had remarried and gained a new family, and I began to take college courses in history and religion, focusing on archaeology, the Biblical "higher criticism," and modern theological thought.  I learned to separate fact from folklore and fundamentalism and to see the Bible in its original historical context.  At first, the knowledge was devastating, as anyone who came from a "church" perspective to an academic perspective can tell you.  I was most angry, however, at the fact that my educated former clergy, those enthusiastic ministers, all knew the facts but continued to push the fiction on me anyway.  Now, the continuing pursuit of knowledge of the historicity of the Bible and the distortions promulgated by Christianity are my pastime as well as my passion.

I re-read Stone's book once about ten years ago.  I still find it interesting, although somewhat dated, and I'm not sure parts of it still hold up.  Be that as it may, the path it sent me down has lasted for 20 years, and I haven't regretted a minute of it.  Its effect on my perspective is ongoing.  For example, here in Phoenix, the local Catholic bishop recently revoked the Catholic status of St. Joseph's Hospital for performing a life-saving termination of pregnancy on a near-death mother of four.  The hospital's decision saved her life and returned her to her family and young children.  It was a devastating life decision for the family, as you can imagine.  Bishop Olmsted, however, decided he was not only a priest but also a doctor and God, to boot.   He declared the life-saving procedure to be an abortion that was illegal under Catholic doctrine.  The hospital official who made the decision was a nun, whom Bishop Olmsted declared "had excommunicated herself" by saving the mother's life.  I see this religion v. ethics flap for what it is, an example of the Catholic Church's historical war against women that goes back to the very day that Paul of Tarsus began his preaching to the Roman elite rather than to the Jews from which Jesus sprung.  Roman contempt for women permeates the historical as well as the modern Catholic Church.  This bishop, had he been in charge, would have sentenced the mother to death, and her newborn as well as her other four children and their dad to a life without their mother.  Recognition of the Goddess and her role in our spiritual life would help to shed value on the life of women and ameliorate these situations, difficult as they are.

As for me, I still live within the Judeo-Christian environment, but I try to bring feminine Goddess-consciousness to all of my spiritual decisions, and I continue to add dozens of books every year to my collection of factual insight into the folklore collection that is the Bible.  The facts are much more compelling than the fundamentalist fantasy.  Thanks, Merlin Stone, for breaking me out of my American Christian blinders, and thanks, Conor, for asking.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

This is going to sound like a bad undergraduate paper, but one of the movies (and the novel it was based on) that really impacted me is "Ordinary People."

I saw this movie when I was a senior in high school. I grew up in the suburbs and identified with this family as depicted. My upbringing was not quite as upper middle class, more lower upper middle (if that makes sense). But we lived by the same unwritten/unspoken WASPY suburban rules. The biggee was that we didn't put our business on the street. No matter what was going on at home, we presented a happy, shiny, upstanding suburban family to the world at large. We didn't talk about our thoughts, our feelings, our fears. We got up everyday, made our beds, washed our faces and went to school or work where we tried our hardest to excel. While my mother was not nearly as brittle as the Mary Tyler Moore character, she could be emotionally restrained and a bit unavailable in that way. I don't see this now as a personality flaw. She was a product of her time and upbringing. My father was less emotionally available than the Donald Sutherland character. But he worked hard to provide for his family and chased the upward mobility expected of him.

What blew me away about this movie was that this family was truly ordinary (in my world view). They were moving through each day, doing what was expected without question. They were attractive and they seemed to have it all. They did not appear to be very self-reflective; they were where they were supposed to be. When a senseless tragedy blew their world apart, it became quickly apparent to everyone but them that they weren't a happy solid family unit that could weather any storm. 

This rocked my world. It made me wonder — could my seemingly happy and cohesive family unit withstand such a tragedy? Would we hang together or fracture separately?  I can report that over the past 30 years we have been tested in large and small ways. We also grew together and separately. We're more open and demonstrative than we used to be, but as we've all grown older, we've naturally grown apart. Through deaths (my father's), marriages, divorces, births, career upheavals, etc., we've gone our separate ways but also come together when needed. We're all less concerned with what other people think and live more authentically (at least I like to think so).

I don't know if it was my age and/or the fact that I was getting ready to leave the nest (as it were), but that movie was the first time I seriously considered some age-old truths. Things are not always what they seem. Bad things happen to good people. People in pain will lash out and push away those they love and need the most. Toughness and inflexibility do not equal strength. "Ordinary People" is still one of my favorite movies. It is beautifully written and superbly acted. Though it is a product of its time in term of styling, it holds up.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Elsewhere at The Atlantic, Walter Armstrong posts this jaw-dropping dispatch:

On Day 12 of WikiLeaks's release of U.S. State Department cables, the daily drip, drip, drip of diplomatic secrets implicated the pharmaceutical industry. The company was Pfizer, the country was Nigeria, and the context was the long-simmering, still-bitter aftermath of the drug giant's quick-and-dirty 1996 trials of an experimental antibiotic for children during a devastating meningitis outbreak. A truly chilling cautionary tale of industry-funded clinical trials in the developing world, this event is recalled in the West mainly as the inspiration for John le Carré's evil-pharma thriller The Constant Gardener.

The cables suggest that the world's largest drugmaker may have blackmailed the head of Nigeria's Ministry of Justice into dropping a $6 billion criminal lawsuit.

by Zoë Pollock

Mark Benjamin reports on George Clooney's latest endeavor, the Satellite Sentinel Project. In conjunction with the UN and other organizations, the project will employ private satellites to monitor the situation on the ground in Sudan, in advance of January's referendum on independence:

The images will be analyzed and made public at www.satsentinel.org (which goes live on Dec. 29) within 24 hours of an event to remind the leaders of northern and southern Sudan that they are being watched. "We are the antigenocide paparazzi," Clooney tells TIME. "We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum."

by Conor Friedersdorf

Reihan is excited about a new entrepreneurial venture:

Weeks ago, Business Insider profiled a few of the Chicago-based start-ups that angel investors Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky, best known for backing Groupon, are funding, including an intriguing stealth concept: a company that leverages "the power of the social graph" to build more reliable and more meaningful credit scores. This is exactly the kind of idea that drives my left-of-center friends up the wall, and I love it. It is a sociological truism (or is it a lazy assumption?) that we are like our friends, hence childbirth and obesity are "contagious." Something similar presumably applies to our financial proclivities.

The difficulty lies in identifying our true social graph. When money is at stake, it becomes important to weight different relationships appropriately. And of course money being at stake will incline us to "curate" our social graph, to make it less like our real social relationships and more like an idealized version of the same — or rather a version designed to maximize our credit score, or whatever other metric we're looking to game. 

Regardless, we have to start somewhere.

Ah, but we don't have to start somewhere! We could decide that the commodification of our friendships is creepy and ridicule it, or boycott any product that inclines us to "curate" our social graph, having concluded that the incentives at work are perverse.

by Conor Friedersdorf

There's a guy named Juan Carlos Vera. He worked at an ACORN office in San Diego, California. One day, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles walked in with a hidden video camera, and pretended to be a pimp and prostitute. They asked for help smuggling underage girls across the Mexican border so that they could work in a brothel. Confronted with what appeared to be a sex trafficking plot, you'd hope that someone would play along, get as much information as possible, and call the police. And guess what? That's exactly what Mr. Vera did! Unbeknownst to O'Keefe or Giles, he called his cousin, a police officer, shortly after they left his office.

Perhaps you know what happened next. Having cut his teeth editing The Drudge Report and its notoriously misleading headlines, Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart published the ACORN videos, which fooled me at the time – I praised them, and even encouraged Breitbart to pressure attorneys general into investigating the organization. I've never felt like such a fool. Some of the ACORN tapes reflect very badly on that organization, but taken as a whole, they are misleading in a lot of ways. 

The San Diego ACORN video was particularly misleading.

Put another way, Andrew Breitbart published videos that made an innocent man look as if he was complicit in a plot to traffic underage girls across the border. Granted, he didn't do this on purpose. Still, it happened. And it cost the guy his job:

A man fired from ACORN's San Diego-area office for discussing human smuggling with a fake pimp and prostitute reported the incident to police two days after it happened, according to information released by the police. Juan Carlos Vera was fired by ACORN after a videotape was aired on Fox News showing him discussing with a couple posed as a pimp and a prostitute the best ways to smuggle underage prostitutes into the U.S. from El Salvador.

"It's better if it's in Tijuana," Vera is heard saying in the video.  "Because I have a lot of contacts in Tijuana."

But police said in a press release that Vera reported the incident to his cousin, a detective with the National City Police Department. Vera worked in ACORN's National City office. The detective contacted a federal task force that deals with human smuggling, and an officer from the task force asked for more details. 

So Breitbart is factually wrong. He is also still insinuating than an innocent man was willing to be complicit in the transnational smuggling of underage prostitutes. All this seems like a story to me! Something that would be of interest to folks on the press beat like Howard Kurtz or Jack Shafer or others. And shouldn't all the press outlets that wrote about the ACORN tapes from San Diego note this development? I'd even say that conservative publications that value informing their readership more than having a good relationship with a powerful ideological ally like Breitbart should report on this story. But do such publications exist?

If Breitbart has evidence that the California AG's report is wrong, he should come forward with it. If not, he should apologize for tarnishing Vera's reputation and costing him his job. Absent one or the other, can anyone defend him?

by Zoë Pollock

Ann Althouse dismisses the DADT same-sex shower issue:

It's utterly routine to encounter people who are thinking about having sex with you. Sometimes these are people you would regard as acceptable sexual partners and sometimes they're not. So what? It's insane to let that bother you. If they don't say anything or do anything or act out in any way, it's nothing to us. If your ability to go about doing what you need to do is undermined by worrying about other people's sexual thoughts, then you are abnormal. It's ironic for the people who think homosexuals are abnormal to believe that heterosexuals are abnormal.