Think what you will; it’s hard to dislike an article that includes a chart with the title “Slugs and snails v sugar and spice”. Really. The article in the Economist looks at studies examining the differences between boys and girls, men and women, monkeys and monkeyettes. Some interesting, marginally inconclusive findings, all encompassed (mostly) by the subtitle: “Men and women think differently. But not that differently.”
(Economist: “The mismeasure of women.” [Aug 3, 2006].)
“Hi, my name is Dr. Johnny Valdez, and I think global warming is bunk!”
“Oh, and did I mention the six-figure donation my organization got from a prominent, ahem, petroleum utilization corporation?”
Not too far from the truth, aside from the total lack of details. Here are some actual details, courtesy of Environmental Defense.
Via the Waterboro Public Library, I stumbled across a blog called, appropriately enough, So what can I do? The site explores ways to enact social change. A lot of them, in fact. A lot of the tips seem to be the ‘easy’ sorts of things of which I’m endlessly suspicious—I tend to be skeptical of the social-change-can-be-achieved-through-easy-feel-good-activities school of thought—but it might be the type of thing you’re looking for, in which case, enjoy.
Going all the way back to mid-February, WorldPress Review carried an interesting story about the US Military’s recruitment schemes, both historical and contemporary.
And did you hear about the starquake? Oh. You did.
Well, did you hear that women are “less likely to get quality heart attack care,” or that cancer-stricken rats live longer if they’re curious, or that a new law in China will require power grid operators to purchase as much renewable energy as possible?
Tackling the very large subject area of Things That Do Not Make Sense, NewScientist picked 13 and wrote up an article on them; the result is quite interesting. Curiously, the list is heavily weighted in favor of spacebourne phenomena like dark matter and the Kuiper cliff.
In a turn of events that does not bode well for the success of Yucca Mountain (you know–the whole radioactive waste storage thing), the Energy Department made a series of dubious choices in preparing to get all its ducks in a row, certification-wise. Like, e.g., used instruments without bothering to calibrate them; and certified instruments prior to their calibration (and before being received).
In other, arguably more positive environmental news, Grist Magazine has a Q&A with author/activist/scientist oil-spill expert Riki Ott (whose book is Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, which ought to be read by all).
And researchers in Ohio make the claim that man-made wetlands do just as well as natural ones in filtering and cleaning water. I’m slightly dubious of the claim, but I’d be a lot more dubious if one of the researchers (William Mitsch) weren’t the author of a wetlands textbook (he is), what textbook I’ve in fact used for a wetlands class in the past.
For those of you with an itch to learn about Daylight Saving Time, the California Energy Commission has a fairly comprehensive backgrounder.
An estimated 11,300 laptop computers, 31,400 handheld computers and 200,000 mobile telephones were left in taxis around the world during the past six months, a survey found Monday.
Taxi drivers in nine cities also said they had found a range of other items left by passengers, including a harp, 37 milk bottles, dentures and artificial limbs. One driver said he even found a baby in his taxi.
Minimum number of countries with a greater capacity to produce nuclear weapons than Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion.
(via Harper’s)
A success story, but not the right kind of success story.
This one’s a story of successful lobbying by Syngenta, which apparently learned the lessons of bad publicity.
Faced with a potential ban on an herbicide it produces (what herbicide is used on 2/3 of corn in the U.S. and 90% of sugarcane), Syngenta spent $260,000 lobbying various governmental entities.
On October 31—the date suggested by the lobbying firm of Alston & Bird—the EPA agreed to re-register the herbicide.
Low levels of the herbicide
“chemically castrate and feminize” male frogs, fish and other wildlife. Students first noticed deformed frogs in 1995 in a farm pond near Henderson, Minn.
And then there’s the fact that men working near the chemical have a higher risk of prostate cancer, and the tentative link between the herbicide and cancer (in, what else, laboratory animals).
Yay.
(via Gristmill, with excerpts/info from AP: “Company spent $260,000 lobbying for herbicide,” by Frederic Frommer [October 27, 2004])
Allow me to deobfuscate:
What you’re seeing is based on exit polls. It shows the correlation between income and vote choice. Bush and Kerry, in this case. (Who, bowing to recent “tradition,” are red and blue, respectively.)
The percentages essentially translate into the fraction of people in their income group voting for whatever party. So where Bush receives a 63% for the $200,000-and-over people, it means that 63% of those people voted for him. (I’m pointing this out because I’m not sure how readily apparent this convention is.)
The connection isn’t linear, but it’s fairly, surprisingly, straightforward. People with higher incomes voted overwhelmingly for G. Bush, and people with lower incomes voted overwhelmingly for J. Kerry.
Also interesting—though not pictured on this graph—is that the only income levels where Ralph Nader pulled any percentage points were $100-150,000 and the $200,000-and-over group.
Just thought I’d share.
(Also, please note that the Y axis does not go from 0 to 100%. While this does in fact accentuate the trends [or what-have-you], it was done mostly to save space.)
James Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere (previously quoted elsewhere on this blog) has a blog of sorts.
“Of sorts,” because it has none of the easy navigation or granularity typically associated with blogs (much less the links, blogroll, etc.); if you want to adhere to the author’s intent, it’s probably best to do away with analogy and just say that it’s called The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle.
If The Geography of Nowhere’s any indication of typical, the aforementioned TCNC is typically gloomy, cynical, and darkly funny.
The following is a snippet:
I was in Dallas two weeks ago, a wilderness of eight-lane freeways and sodium vapor lamps. I had to remind myself that this is how most Americans live. The so-called “city” was a product of the late 20th century cheap oil fiesta. If you live there, driving is mandatory, and lots of it, over heroic distances. It took me half an hour (and forty bucks) to get across just the north side of the sprawling town to the airport at five-thirty in the morning when the traffic was still light. This is exactly the kind of place that is going to be in deep trouble over the next four years. There are scores of places like it all over America. The people who live in them will be full of consternation and gall when their chosen living arrangement begins to fail them. They will blame whoever is sitting in the oval office.
“Why didn’t you tell us something awful was going to happen?”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
The main pretension of the Presidential campaigns is the idea that the next President will have any ability to control the events that will most determine how we live in this country. The federal government is likely to become more impotent and therefore increasingly irrelevent.
“Why didn’t you do something?”
“We didn’t want to upset you.”
What was the “truth” about the American condition in 2004? The truth was that we had made some bad choices about how we live and that events would soon compel us to change drastically whether we liked it or not. Nobody wanted to hear that, and no political leader dared say it.
(Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler; …and about the “navigation” thing… if you want to read previous entries, you ought to go straight to the archives )
Momus aka Nick Currie writes:
For those of you thinking of leaving America today — and there are many, I’m sure — I’d say just do it. Walk away.
…
So just leave. America doesn’t deserve you. Walk away. America doesn’t need your talent, your creativity and your intelligence. Or rather, it needs them desperately, but it will never acknowledge that. It’s too stupid to understand that. If it calls for you, it will call for you for the wrong reasons. It will call you up as a soldier. It will call for you as canon-fodder in some spurious and unnecessary war that serves the interests of 1% of its population and an even smaller percentage of the world’s population. Even if it lets you live in relative peace as a mere civilian, it will force you to live in ways that destroy the world’s weather systems and its environment. It will use your tax to fund pre-emptive wars of aggressive imperialism against impoverished nations with energy resources.
Sarah Anderson, of the Institute for Policy Studies, dissents:
Ready to say screw this country and buy a one-way ticket north? Here are some reasons to stay in the belly of the beast.
1. The Rest of the World. After the February 2003 antiwar protests, the New York Times described the global peace movement as the world’s second superpower. Their actions didn’t prevent the war, but protestors in nine countries have succeeded in pressuring their governments to pull their troops from Iraq and/or withdraw from the so-called “coalition of the willing”. Antiwar Americans owe it to themajority of the people on this planet who agree with them to stay and do what they can to end the suffering in Iraq and prevent future pre-emptive wars.
Momus/Currie’s “Exit this Roman shell” post is worth reading in its entirety, and Anderson’s plea, called “Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada”, presents a number of cogent points.
On a much more lighthearted note, Paris Hilton appears to still be among the living despite:
Was VOTE OR DIE too ambiguous, perhaps?
Printer-friendly patterns of John Kerry and George Bush at FabulousFoods.com.
(via This Modern World)
Last night1, Turner Classic Movies kicked off a monthlong series called “Party Politics and the Movies,” in which senators are invited to choose and introduce their favorite films. John Edwards was the inaugural guest, and his selection was almost shockingly bold: Dr. Strangelove. … Edwards was bashful about drawing parallels, but host Ben Mankiewicz finally baited the hook for him: “Is there any message you would like President Bush or Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to get from this movie?” Edwards’ answer, delivered in his usual courtly drawl, was a quiet little knife in the president’s ribs: “Human beings are fallible. They make mistakes … That’s why it’s so important to have somebody at the top of the civilian government who understands what’s happening and has good sound judgment.”
Next Thursday night, John McCain will introduce another Kubrick film, Paths of Glory… one of the most virulently antiwar movies of all time.
(Slate: “How John Edwards learned to stop worrying and love Dr. Strangelove,” by Dana Stevens [October 8, 2004])
Note:
1 Actually, October 7th.
GRABEL: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.
BUSH: I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you never heard of, and some of them big.
And in a war, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have made that decision. And I’ll take responsibility for them. I’m human.
But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I’ll stand by those decisions, because I think they’re right.
BUSH: That’s really what you’re — when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re trying to say, “Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?” And the answer is, “Absolutely not.” It was the right decision.
The Duelfer report confirmed that decision today, because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program. And the biggest threat facing America is terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
We knew he hated us. We knew he’d been — invaded other countries. We knew he tortured his own people.
On the tax cut, it’s a big decision. I did the right decision. Our recession was one of the shallowest in modern history.
Now, you asked what mistakes. I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I’m not going to name them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings on national TV. (emphasis added)
It’s actually a pretty straightforward question: name 3 mistakes you’ve made, and tell us how you’ve tried to fix them.
Never mind strategy, or political technique, or the subtleties of debate: if Bush truly thought he didn’t make any mistakes, his answer should have been fairly straightforward: “I don’t believe I’ve made any mistakes.”
He then could have gone on to defend what other people view as mistakes, and then explain why they weren’t mistakes, thus defending his original point (I haven’t made any mistakes).
Curiously, that’s not what he says.
Instead of actually coming out and stating that he hasn’t made any mistakes, he addresses the question implicitly. Or vaguely. Or something.
The point is, the person asking the question requested three mistakes.
Bush offered three items.
Since he didn’t state from the get-go that he hasn’t made any mistakes, one reasonable conclusion to draw is that he has made mistakes, and knows it, in one way or another.
Taking this at face value—which, admittedly, is a stretch (bear with me)—there are three things Bush mentions, and defends. He offers three things, and the question asked for three mistakes.
Is it too much to presume that the three things he offers (Afghanistan, Iraq, taxes) were in fact three mistakes he’s made?
Just a thought.
(hat tip to Orcinus for the debate snippet; the whole segment is available at MSNBC)
Slate asked a variety of prominent American novelists, ranging from Edwidge Danticat to John Updike, for a frank response to the following question: Which presidential candidate are you voting for, and why? Thirty-one novelists participated, with four for Bush, 24 for Kerry, and three in a category of their own.
Dan Chaon, Amy Tan, John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Orson Scott Card, Diane Johnson, Jonathan Franzen, Judith Guest, Edwidge Danticat, Chang-Rae Lee, Jane Smiley, Lorrie Moore, Robert Ferrigno, Jennifer Egan, Russell Banks, Daniel Handler, Roger L. Simon, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult, A.M. Homes, Thomas Mallon, Gary Shteyngart, Jim Lewis, Vendela Vida, David Amsden, Elizabeth Hardwick, Nicole Krauss, Richard Dooling and Thomas Beller weigh in.
A few of the choicest morsels (in my opinion):
“I’ll vote for John Kerry. His election won’t reverse our nation’s rush to establish a fascist plutocracy, it’s too late for that.” (Russell Banks)
“Richard Nixon, because I found him so fascinating the first time around I’d be curious to see what he could do from the beyond…?” (A.M. Homes)
“Mark me on the Bush side of the ledger, a lonely side for this survey, I’m certain. Most novelists live in their imagination, which is a fine place to be until the bad guys come knock knock knocking. … Kerry will dance the Albright two-step with Kim Jong-il, consult with Sandy Berger’s socks, and kowtow to the U.N. apparatchiks who have done such a fine job of protecting the Cambodians, Rwandans, and the Sudanese. No thanks. No contest.” (Robert Ferrigno)
“Are there really any novelists voting for Bush?” (Lorrie Moore)
(Slate: “Roll Call” [October 11, 2004])
I’m not nearly as fanatical about Fafblog as any number of other folks are, but the following piece, “drivin with Donald,” is pure gold. Better, even. I’m quoting it in its entirety because, well, it’s that good. (Also because it’s related to the previous post here regarding a real-life Rumsfeldian incident, albeit without Rumsfeld’s involvement.)
Though I should also take care to note that, even supposing you do read the whole thing here [which, let's be honest, you shouldn't], a trip to Fafblog is wholly warranted on account of the most excellent “picture” that accompanies the grade-A documentary writing.
Anyway, here it is:
Donald Rumsfeld is no perfectionist.So we’re ridin on down the road in our Cross Country Journey of Inner Discovery and Of Course the American Dream when Donald Rumsfeld hits a moose.
“Maybe we should stop an get a tow truck,” says me.
“Gosh, that seems pretty excessive,” says Donald Rumsfeld. “I mean, was a moose hit? Yes. Do the antlers sticking through the windshield make driving trickier? You bet. But should we just turn around and quit because the road got a little bumpy? I’d say no.”One thing about Donald Rumsfeld that you have to give him credit for is he always cuts through the crap to tell it like it is in his no-nonsense style. I am reminded of this when we hit the second moose.
“Moose happen,” says Donald Rumsfeld. “There are moose, and we’ll hit ‘em. That’s the way it goes. We’ve lost two tires and the brakes. That’s life. I’m drunk, legally blind and have been charged with eight counts of vehicular manslaughter in the last three years. Gotta deal with it. Nothing’s perfect.”
“If you think about it the more moose get hit by us, the fewer moose there are to get hit by us!” says me.
“I like the way you think,” says Donald Rumsfeld.Donald grabs a beer an misses a pedestrian. Hooray! One of the moose is still alive an kicks at the engine. “Bad moose,” says me. “No beer until you stop.” Donald Rumsfeld throws an open bottle a Coors at the back seat to put out the fire.
“Are parts of the car on fire? Sure. Would we like them not to be? Of course. Have I gone insane from three decades of snorting military-grade rubber cement? Quite possibly. Do we need everything to be perfect for us to go out on the road? Well, that’s absurd,” says Donald Rumsfeld.
“That’s very true,” says me. “We cannot make the perfect the enemy of the terrible.”The bridge up ahead is either out or doesn’t exist. But if we waited for everything to be perfect before we did stuff well then we’d never get anythin done! Forward, onward, downward, Donald Rumsfeld!
(via Alas, a Blog)
Really, it could have happened to anybody.
A 20-ton piece of road machinery mowed down a fence and a couple of trees on property belonging to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (news - bio) after the brakes apparently slipped and the machine rolled away.
“It was a freak accident,” said Michael Trujillo, director of public works for Taos County.
(AP: “20-Ton Machine Mows Down Rumsfeld’s Fence” [August 20, 2004])
Via Digby at Hullabaloo:
The one and only time I interviewed Mr. Bush, when he was running in 2000, he called me by the wrong name several times, which was no big deal, and I didn’t correct him. But after this went on for a while, his adviser Karen Hughes, who was sitting in on the interview, finally said: “Governor, her name’s not Alison, it’s Melinda.”“I think I know what her name is; we just had lunch last week,” Bush responded. “Your name IS still Melinda, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t changed it since last week?”
“No.”
“OK, then. Glad we got that cleared up.”
Hughes persisted, though. “Governor, you were calling her Alison.”
“I wasn’t calling HER Alison,” he said, with apparent conviction. “I was calling YOU Alison.”
