Month: June 2011

Even for Morrissey.

The Other McCain meets Palin's Twitter account.

A hard-to-believe ballet performance inside a wind tunnel:

(Hat tip: LikeCool)

Mandy Van Deven interviews Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men:

Gender imbalance is often portrayed in the media as something poor women in rural areas do. It's often conflated with infanticide, which is only a small part of the problem. If you look at the numbers, educated women in India are much more likely to scan for sex and abort a female fetus. Literate women are more likely to do it than illiterate women. In China, it's the booming areas in the East where people are making more money where this is happening. That's alarming because it means the problem could trickle down, and it means we have to think about the issue and its solutions in a different way.

One recalls the famous Niebuhr passage:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.

Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

And then one reads this story. A 27-year old Rais Bhuiyan was working at a gas station when a white supremacist enraged by 9/11 came in and shot him in the face. The attacker was on a spree of non-white killings and was captured, tried, and sentenced to die next month. Buiyan wants to commute his assailant's sentence, despite having his face almost destroyed and being blind in one eye. Here's why:

"I strongly believe he was ignorant," Bhuiyan explained to the audience. "He couldn't differentiate right from wrong. … By executing him now, we are losing everything." His Muslim faith, he said, teaches forgiveness, not vengeance.

Nadeem Akthar, the brother-in-law of another of Stroman's victims, Hasan, spoke at the press conference as well. "The last 10 years have been a long 10 years," he told the audience. "We've been going through a lot of turmoil … but we made it here." He quoted Sura 5, verse 32 from the Quran, something he said his sister, Hasan's wife, had wanted him to share. "If someone slays one person, he has slain mankind entirely," reads the verse. "And if someone has saved one person, he has saved mankind entirely."

Some commandments bridge many faiths. But to see them come to life is an inspiring thing.

PM Carpenter sees little difference between his conservative progressivism and what he calls my progressive conservatism. And it is true, I think, that the current British Tory party might better fit into today’s Democrats than today’s Republicans. But although I acknowledge that for an entire generation or two, “conservatism” has come to mean ideological, fundamentalist, cultural panic and hallucinogenic economics, I don’t want to concede the tradition of Burke, Babbitt, Hayek and Oakeshott to the left. Money quote from Carpenter in a post addressed to me:

I’m reluctant to get into the historical “origins” game, since once begun, one soon discovers there is no chronological end; that is, there is no indisputable, pin-pointable beginning point for virtually any contemporary phenomenon. That said, I would nevertheless suggest that though chronically unwell, authentic “conservatism” is alive, as your essay yesterday, and on frequent occasions before, showed.

Yet rather than labeling today’s immensely corrupted version of conservatism as “unconservative,” might I suggest you adopt historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1960s’ critical characterization of “pseudoconservatism” (regarding the ideological, radical right of that era). You are correct in seeing what flourishes now as un-conservative, but because its unscrupulous “conservative” practitioners insist on advertising their advocacy of it with a prodigiously pseudointellectual flamboyance, then let us, in turn, properly label their version for what it is: pseudoconservative.

Hofstadter’s essay is, indeed, staggering in its accuracy about today’s pseudo-right and its manifold pathologies. David Greenberg has a great review of his influences here.

Yum:

The “meat” is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. The researchers color the poop meat red with food coloring and enhance the flavor with soy protein. Initial tests have people saying it even tastes like beef.

(Hat tip: Steven Taylor)

Em D, a female Muslim blogger, cheers on the the women of Saudi Arabia:

That distant dream on the horizon of a Saudi Arabia without sexual harassment, with proper traffic laws, of a Saudi Arabian society that does not demean women, that respects them as the Qur'an, the God they claim to follow does: "Never will I turn away from the deeds of any of you, male or female; you are of one another" (3:195) – will be just that, a distant dream, until we women of Saudi Arabia have the courage to stand up and demand our God-given rights. And when we do, God be with those who refuse us…

The Guardian is live-blogging the day's #Women2Drive events.

The Green Zone, Baghdad, 12 pm

A reader writes:

That ThinkProgress (really?) report is just a rehash of US Solar's press releases.

Comparing the steel production sector (actual goods produced) to the number of electricians and plumbers who have been cross-trained to install solar heaters and PV panels has got to be one of the weirder apples-to-oranges economic comparisons ever.

Reading the BLS figures for Building Equipment Contractors (construction and installation), there are about 1.6 million workers already in that sector. About 150K are in HVAC and another 360K are electricians (roofers are oddly underrepresented, so they must fall under a different category). Of those 510,000 workers (plus an unknown number of roofers), even with US Solar's best figures only 90,000 are cross-trained to handle installation of PV panels and solar heating modules.

The BLS gets pretty granular (there are rows for installers of home media entertainment systems), yet there is no breakout whatsoever for installers of solar panels. This may be a lag in creating such a category (although that home media data would seem to indicate they try to stay pretty current), but it seems more likely that these solar jobs are more often adjuncts to an existing business than business lines in and of themselves.

They don't break down furnaces vs. boilers, so solar heat is probably just yet another HVAC job. And yet, HVAC jobs are down, like all other jobs. In two year intervals, HVAC went from 232K in 2004, 250K in 2006, 260K in 2008 and 224K in 2010. Where's the huge growth in solar jobs?

At best, the HVAC jobs are simply swapping technologies (solar heat for gas heat) with no net increase in jobs. PV installation should be counted as "new jobs", but it apparently is just a small adjunct to existing roofing and electrical jobs. None of this makes the comparison any more apt – creators of a one product vs. part-time installers of a different product is a useless statistic. You'd have to compare every industry that "installs" steel – which would be enormously larger than even the most generous reading of solar installation jobs. Call me back when they compare solar manufacturing jobs to steel manufacturing jobs.