Mike Froman, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser, was caught trying to force India to drop its legal case against Dow Chemical in his email last July to an Indian bureaucrat.  In the email, he clearly links the Dow Chemical issue to relaxing India’s borrowing limit with the World Bank.

Using a traditional form of damage control, denial, Froman said that there was no connection intended between the two issues, although he did not explain why else he would mention the two subjects together.  He explicitly states that the “Dow issue” would affect the “investment relationship” between the two countries.  So, he doesn’t really leave any other way (or offer any other way) to possibly explain the email.

Dow Chemical owns Union Carbide, which has yet to face trial in India for operating an unsafe pesticide factory, resulting in the deaths of over 8,000 people in Bhopal on Dec 3 1984.  Dow has tried to ignore the issue, but the case has become more high profile over the past few years in India.

His weak response has definitely not quieted the uproar over this release of information by “Times Now.”  In fact, it has even shamed the famously inactive Indian government into publicly renewing its desire to extradite Union Carbides’ fugitive CEO, Warren Anderson, to India to face the homicide charges he has been dodging for over 25 years.

Bhopal residents have been very vocal in their search for clean water, land and justice for the crime, bringing international attention to the unresolved case.  Their agitation has scared off several high profile Dow public events and even some foreign investment.  The Indian government would prefer them to stay quiet and forget about 1984; they want foreign companies to know that environmental and legal standards will be lowered for them and they can operate without much official scrutiny.  As Mike Froman noted, India’s message is mixed. This new leak will confuse it even more and threatens to change the way India promotes itself to US companies, chemical or otherwise.

It seems like British and American McDonald’s make their chicken nuggets differently.  The American version is not only higher in fat but also contains the same petrochemical product that Silly Putty uses.  McDonald’s representative says that different countries use different recipes to cater to their own tastes and that the extra chemical product is an “anti-foaming agent.”

So if you have been wondering why your home-made chicken pieces have been coming out all foamy, you can blame it on not adding enough Silly Putty.

Amazing…read the whole article for the rest of the gory details:

After an 18-month battle that began with SEIU believing it could affect a hostile takeover of its once close union ally, the two unions reached a settlement yesterday almost entirely on UNITE HERE’s terms. SEIU’s raids on UNITE HERE split the labor movement just as Barack Obama took office, undermining labor’s key goals of securing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and comprehensive immigration reform. The settlement represents a major breakthrough for new SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, who accomplished what Andy Stern could not. It represents an even bigger victory for the rank and file members of UNITE HERE, who rose to the challenge posed by SEIU’s attacks and reaffirmed their ability to struggle “one day longer” than their adversaries.

The heart of the agreement is twofold: it ends SEIU’s raids on UNITE HERE’s traditional jurisdictions of hotel, gaming and food service, and returns to UNITE HERE an estimated $75 million dollars stolen from the union by current SEIU Executive Vice-President, Bruce Raynor. It also gives UNITE HERE its office building in New York City, valued at $85 million.

Dupont’s comments are a reminder that Andy Stern thought he would have UNITE HERE begging for peace by September 2009, believing that Raynor had depleted the union of the resources necessary to survive. As it turned out, SEIU was the party desperate to settle, and agreed to a deal that was largely if not entirely on John Wilhelm’s terms.

A lot of this I already knew - I read the Courtney Love article a long time back - but it’s interesting to see the discussion revived again. Click through to read the whole post.

So, back to our original example of the average musician only earning $23.40 for every $1,000 sold. That money has to go back towards “recouping” the advance, even though the label is still straight up cashing 63% of every sale, which does not go towards making up the advance. The math here gets ridiculous pretty quickly when you start to think about it. These record label deals are basically out and out scams. In a traditional loan, you invest the money and pay back out of your proceeds. But a record label deal is nothing like that at all. They make you a “loan” and then take the first 63% of any dollar you make, get to automatically increase the size of the “loan” by simply adding in all sorts of crazy expenses (did the exec bring in pizza at the recording session? that gets added on), and then tries to get the loan repaid out of what meager pittance they’ve left for you.

Oh, and after all of that, the record label still owns the copyrights. That’s one of the most lopsided business deals ever.

So think of that the next time the RIAA or some major record label exec (or politician) suggests that protecting the record labels is somehow in the musicians’ best interests. And then, take a look at the models that some musicians have adopted by going around the major label system. They may not gross as much without the major record label marketing push behind them, but they’re netting a whole lot more, and as any business person will tell you (except if that business person is a major label A&R guy trying to sign you to a deal), the net amount is all that matters.

Across the United States, laws are being passed to restrict giving food for free, claiming that people who do so are not properly trained to recognize harmful food or to dispose of any trash that is created.  The main target seems to be the homeless in Miami and Orlando.

Food Not Bombs Farm Lunch

As a society, we seem to be trained to believe that the best selling food is the best.  At first it was just accepted as common wisdom that companies are trustworthy sources of safe, high quality products.  But with the growth of small organic farms, government and corporations have stepped in to enforce the belief.  Eleven states have formally criminalized opposition to corporate food.  One radio station took a radio host off the air for opposing corporate control of food.

Suppose you want to vote against corporate food control by avoiding buying GMO foods.  The FDA has stepped in to make it harder for you by discouraging “GMO Free” labeling of food.  They claim their position is justified because of the lack of evidence that GMO foods are unsafe.  However, many consumers avoid buying GMOs for business reasons — to avoid supporting companies that they oppose.  If there is no evidence either way, why did the FDA step in to keep you from supporting whatever business you want?

It might relate to our main point:  Why do American authorities take offense to free food giveaways, claiming minor irrelevant problems such as the pollution potential?  It seems that they are really afraid of the idea of people questioning the conventional wisdom that good food has to come from a profitable business.

A fascinating article from Johann Hari and The Independent.

This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. “My children stopped growing,” a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. “I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died.”

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn’t happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn’t because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors – like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price – made a contribution, but they aren’t enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.

Hari goes on to explain that the cause was speculation in commodity futures, and gives a decent explanation of how these function generally. Then the specifics of the rise in food prices:

Here’s how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world’s frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.

So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose – which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.

It’s worth noting that prices of crops NOT traded in futures markets behaved very differently during this time:

As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period – but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was “the main cause” of the rise.

Amazing.

Wondering where the next energy-related disaster is going to occur? Michael Klare, writing in TomDispatch, lays out four fascinating - and frightening - possibilities.

Scenario 1: Newfoundland — Hibernia Platform Destroyed by Iceberg

Approximately 190 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in what locals call “Iceberg Alley” sits the Hibernia oil platform, the world’s largest offshore drilling facility.  Built at a cost of some $5 billion, Hibernia consists of a 37,000-ton “topsides” facility mounted on a 600,000-ton steel-and-concrete gravity base structure (GBS) resting on the ocean floor, some 260 feet below the surface.  This mammoth facility, normally manned by 185 crew members, produces about 135,000 barrels of oil per day.  Four companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Murphy Oil, and Statoil) plus the government of Canada participate in the joint venture established to operate the platform.

The Hibernia platform is reinforced to withstand a direct impact by one of the icebergs that regularly sail through this stretch of water, located just a few hundred miles from where the Titanic infamously hit an iceberg and sank in 1912.  Sixteen giant steel ribs protrude from the GBS, positioned in such a way as to absorb the blow of an iceberg and distribute it over the entire structure.  However, the GBS itself is hollow, and contains a storage container for 1.3 million barrels of crude oil — about five times the amount released in the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

The owners of the Hibernia platform insist that the design will withstand a blow from even the largest iceberg.  As global warming advances and the Greenland glaciers melt, however, massive chunks of ice will be sent floating into the North Atlantic on a path past Hibernia.  Add increased storm activity (another effect of global warming) to an increase in iceberg frequency and you have a formula for overwhelming the Hibernia’s defenses.

Here’s the scenario:  It’s the stormy winter of 2018, not an uncommon situation in the North Atlantic at that time of year.  Winds exceed 80 miles per hour, visibility is zilch, and iceberg-spotter planes are grounded.  Towering waves rise to heights of 50 feet or more, leaving harbor-bound the giant tugs the Hibernia’s owners use to nudge icebergs from the platform’s path.  Evacuation of the crew by ship or helicopter is impossible.

Without warning, a gigantic, storm-propelled iceberg strikes the Hibernia, rupturing the GBS and spilling more than one million barrels of oil into rough waters.  The topside facility is severed from the base structure and plunges into the ocean, killing all 185 crew members.  Every connection to the undersea wells is ruptured, and 135,000 barrels of oil start flowing into the Atlantic every day (approximately twice the amount now coming from the BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico).  The area is impossible to reach by plane or ship in the constant bad weather, meaning emergency repairs can’t be undertaken for weeks — not until at least five million additional barrels of oil have poured into the ocean.  As a result, one of the world’s most prolific fishing grounds — the Grand Banks off Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Cape Cod — is thoroughly poisoned.

Does this sound extreme?  Think again.  On February 15, 1982, a giant drillship, the Ocean Ranger (the “Ocean Danger” to its habitués), was operating in the very spot Hibernia now occupies when it was struck by 50-foot waves in a storm and sank, taking the lives of 84 crew members.  Because no drilling was under way at the time, there were no environmental consequences, but the loss of the Ocean Ranger — a vessel very much like the Deepwater Horizon — should be a reminder of just how vulnerable otherwise strong structures can be to the North Atlantic’s winter fury.

Like so much of what Paul Rosenberg writes, I found this post of his fascinating. I don’t read his stuff as faithfully as I ought to, because it usually requires a significant investment of time, but when I do it’s almost always worth it. In this posting he’s drawing from several thinkers in responding to Mike Huckabee’s “ick factor” gaffe about homosexuality, and getting at some deeper issues about the comparative sources of ethics for progressives and conservatives in America. it’s worth reading the whole post for the whole flavor of his writing - just follow the link - but I found these two parts particularly illuminating:

Well, it struck a nerve.  You see, I’d recently been reminded of Jonathan Haidt’s work on liberal and conservative value systems, and it struck me as quite obvious that conservatives have a much bigger “ick factor” thing going on than liberals do.  According to Haidt, there are “five innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics.’”  Conservatives draw on all five of them, while liberals focus on just two.  The “ick factor” fits very neatly into one of the five that liberals don’t cotton to.

More precisely, Haidt says:

Moral Foundations Theory was created to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that five innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The foundations are:

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulate the theory in 2010 based on new data, we are likely to include several forms of fairness, and to emphasize proportionality, which is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

Personally, I see virtue in loyalty and respect for authority - the difference for me personally is that it is earned. I’m loyal to my friends because they’ve earned my friendship, but I’m not going to fall into some sort of blind patriotism just because of the accident of where I was born. Similarly, I’ll think well of people in positions of authority if they earn my respect, but not simply because of the title after their name. That buys them nothing, and I don’t think it should.

I also have some sympathy for the value of purity/sanctity. Which isn’t motivated by a religious tradition, in my case, but one of the reasons why I find pollution morally abhorrent (e.g.) is because it violates and desecrates the purity of nature and the human body. That said, political conservatives and I would find a great deal to disagree with regarding these three ethical foundations. Rosenberg again:

Just a few weeks ago, Greta Christina wrote a piece, “Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative“, in which she relays an argument that liberal values are superior because they are universalizable:

I’ve been chewing over this question [of which values are superior] ever since I heard about this research. In other words, for at least a couple of years. And then, at an atheist conference I spoke at recently, the answer was dropped into my lap, so clearly and succinctly that I kicked myself for not having thought of it myself, by the conference’s keynote speaker, philosopher and MacArthur genius Rebecca Goldstein. (From whom I am stealing this idea shamelessly. Hey, I’m an ethical person, with the good liberal value of fairness. When I steal an idea, I give credit.)

Here’s the idea.

Fairness and harm are better values — because they can be universalized.

Goldstein’s argument is this. The basic philosophical underpinning of ethics (as opposed to its psychological and evolutionary underpinnings) are:

(a) the starting axiom that we, ourselves, matter;
and (b) the understanding that, if we step back from ourselves and view life from an outside perspective, we have to acknowledge that we don’t, cosmically speaking, matter more than anyone else; that other people matter to themselves as much as we matter to ourselves; and that any rules of ethics ought to apply to other people as much as they do to ourselves. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and all that. (Some version of the Golden Rule seems to exist in every society.)

In other words, the philosophical underpinning of ethics are that they ought to be applicable to everyone. They ought to be universalizable.

And liberal values — fairness and harm — are universalizable.

In fact, it’s inherent in the very nature of these values that they are universalizable.

Fairness is the most obvious example of this. I mean, the whole freaking idea of fairness is that it be ought to be applied universally. Tit for tat. What’s sauce for the goose is what’s sauce for the gander. Yada, yada, yada. The whole idea of fairness is that everyone ought to be treated, not identically, but as if they matter equally.

And the value of harm, and the avoidance thereof, can easily be universalized as well. It can be applied to everybody. In fact, the history of the evolution of human ethics can be seen as the history of this principle being expanded to a wider and wider population: to people from other countries, to people of color, to women, etc. etc. etc. It can even be universalized further, and applied to non-humans. (It may well be that, in 200 years, people will look back on the way we treat animals with the same bewildered, “How on earth could they do that?” horror with which we now view slavery.) There’s nothing in the principle of avoiding harm that prevents it from being applied to any creature with the capacity to experience suffering. It is an easily universalizable value.

Conservative values, on the other hand, are not universalizable.

Quite the contrary.

It is in the very nature of conservative values — authority, loyalty, and purity — that they are applied differently to different people. It is in the very nature of conservative values that some animals are, and ought to be, more equal than others.

I do obviously feel that my values are objectively better than those held and espoused by my political opposition. However it makes me a little uncomfortable to be delineating an academic/analytical case for the same. Rather than get into why, I’ll simply say that I’m not endorsing the argument here. I do, however, think that it provides interesting food for thought, which can help inspire useful reflections about our own morality and the sources for the same.

Just to be clear, I’m a big fan of the Large Hadron Collider. It’s the European particle accelerator which studies basic questions in fundamental physics, and which recently underwent an upgrade which allows it to cross territory never before attempted. From the BBC:

Professor Ellis added that as the luminosity increases, one of the things physicists at Cern will be looking for is a mini- black hole.

“It would be absolutely, fantastically exciting if we produced black holes at the LHC,” he said.

“Then we would test our ideas about gravity, quantum physics, string theory. This would be much more exciting than finding a… Higgs boson or even dark matter.”

A Cern report released in 2008 concluded that these mini-black holes would pose no danger, as they would vanish shortly after being made.

I’m not pointing this out because I’m worried about black holes ravaging the European countryside. But it is one more example of human beings harnessing truly awesome powers - powers which we’ve given no historical indication that we’re capable of managing sustainably over the long-term. Before this, my little back-of-the-envelope list included nuclear energy, genetic engineering, cloning, artificial life, and synthetic chemistry (Terraforming, and fossil fuel use - not to mention a few other things - also have catastrophic potential, but via cumulative effect). Creating black holes is therefore a new addition.

It’s been nearly 60 years since a nuclear weapon was used in wartime. But does anyone believe we can make it through the next 600 years of human history without a reoccurrence? I don’t.

Over the long-term, I think each one of these massive powers is likely to be abused by the human race, and it frightens me to think of the consequences. A thousand years from now, how advanced will our ability to create black holes have become? And what will we be doing with it then?

Marchers brandished placards and banners. “The Supreme Court is fascist,” one poster read.

This is taking place in Israel, where 120,000 people marched to support several dozen parents recently held in contempt by the Israeli Supreme Court. Why? Because they refuse to allow their children to go to school with children who aren’t as fundamentalist.

“There is a set of rules [in the ultra-Orthodox community]. We don’t want televisions in the home, there are rules of modesty, we are against the internet,” Mr Litzman was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

“I don’t want my daughter to be educated with a girl who has a TV at home.”

Regardless of what you may think about television and its influence on children - I personally think it’s detrimental - this is only one data point in a very large pattern of increasingly extremist and fundamentalist communities in Israel.

Thanks to the American media, we’re largely familiar with the ugliness of Muslim fundamentalism. We know all about the brutalization of women and the chopping off of hands.

Christian fundamentalism - like the Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph and the assassination of abortion doctors - occasionally pops up in the media, but it doesn’t get quite as much exposure.

The mainstream American media really doesn’t care about Hindu fundamentalism, which has a long history, including the assassination of Gandhi and the more recent pogrom and economic boycott of Muslims in Gujarat.

Likewise, Jewish fundamentalism - like the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, settler violence, and the increasingly frenzied culture war in Israel - gets short shrift. But it’s there, and in Israel, it’s on the rise. Not just as a political force, but as a strong and deep-rooted cultural force.

Slowly but steadily, a decade-old business around the dead and universally despised dictator Adolf Hitler is emerging as a small-scale industry in India.

So says the BBC, and they’re right. I’ve known about this for some time, and it goes far beyond the sales of Mein Kampf and Hitler memorabilia that the BBC reports on. There have been full-scale and successful efforts to glorify Hitler in school curricula, particularly in the state of Gujarat, where a state-supported pogrom in 2002 butchered Muslims en masse and displaced hundreds of thousands.
Here’s a news article from 2004, discussing the Gujarati textbooks and their idolization of Hitler:

AHMEDABAD: Gandhi is not so great, but Hitler is. Welcome to high school education in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, where authors of social studies textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks have found faults with the freedom movement and glorified Fascism and Nazism.

While a Class VIII student is taught ‘negative aspects’ of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, the Class X social studies textbook has chapters on ‘Hitler, the Supremo’ and ‘Internal Achievements of Nazism’.

The Class X book presents a frighteningly uncritical picture of Fascism and Nazism. The strong national pride that both these phenomena generated, the efficiency in the bureaucracy and the administration and other ‘achievements’ are detailed, but pogroms against Jews and atrocities against trade unionists, migrant labourers, and any section of people who did not fit into Mussolini or Hitler’s definition of rightful citizen don’t find any mention.”

Naturally, this is being pushed by the extreme right-wing in India - the forces that orchestrated and supported the 2002 pogrom and would like to orchestrate and support Muslim extermination on a larger scale. Hitler is being taught and glorified intentionally.

I know this because of my prior work. But honestly, it doesn’t take THAT much effort to dig up. A Google search would suffice.

The BBC has one of their crack journalists based in Mumbai, and they authored the BBC article. Naturally, top-notch as they are - and plugged-in to India and the political scene as they are - they’ll mention WHY there’s this fetish for Hitler in India, right? It’s not like it’s rocket-science hard, or even brownie-baking hard. More like plant-watering hard. A challenge easily overcome by the crack staff at the BBC.

“It’s hard to narrow down what makes the dictator popular in India,” the article whines.

LAME.

It goes on to mention that Hitler is popular among “the young” but I wager that those “young” follow into a very narrow political spectrum - a spectrum the BBC only hints at.

In the past, a couple of right-wing Hindu leaders have also expressed their admiration for Hitler.

More than a couple. More like a movement. But don’t expect to hear that from the BBC.

From McClatchy:

As Israel ordered a slight easing of its blockade of the Gaza Strip Wednesday, McClatchy obtained an Israeli government document that describes the blockade not as a security measure but as “economic warfare” against the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory.

…The government has long said that the aim of the blockade is to stem the flow of weapons to militants in Gaza. …However, in response to a lawsuit by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, the Israeli government explained the blockade as an exercise of the right of economic warfare.

“A country has the right to decide that it chooses not to engage in economic relations or to give economic assistance to the other party to the conflict, or that it wishes to operate using ‘economic warfare,’” the government said.

Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, said the documents prove that Israel isn’t imposing its blockade for its stated reasons, but rather as collective punishment for the Palestinian population of Gaza. Gisha focuses on Palestinian rights.

The Israeli government took an additional step Wednesday and said the economic warfare is intended to achieve a political goal. A government spokesman, who couldn’t be named as a matter of policy, told McClatchy that authorities will continue to ease the blockade but “could not lift the embargo altogether as long as Hamas remains in control” of Gaza.

The collective punishment of a civilian occupied population was explicitly outlawed after World War II in the Geneva Conventions. That’s why this is important - Israel is admitting to war crimes, and daring anyone to do anything about it.

is Rachel Maddow:

From Roll Call:

Facing a tough political cycle, the DCCC is redoubling its efforts to enlist K Streeters to help its most vulnerable “Frontline” program Members with fundraising, messaging and campaign strategy.

The ask was formalized Wednesday evening at a dinner at Acqua Al 2, an Italian restaurant on Capitol Hill, organized by Jennifer Crider, political director for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and deputy executive director at the DCCC.

Over dinner, DCCC Political Director Jennifer Pihlaja and Regional Candidate Services Director Lauren Dikis helped divvy up which lobbyists would work directly with the most vulnerable Members.

But the decision to formally assign lobbyists to lawmakers is unusual, according to several Democratic lobbyists.

“It was not just a fundraising ask,” according to a lobbyist in attendance. “It was also to help out with campaigns.”

“They said, ‘These people could use extra help, not only in terms of resources, but also advice in terms of setting up ground messaging,”’ the lobbyist added.

“They basically asked us to adopt a Member,” according to another lobbyist at the dinner, who declined to speak on the record.

Just sayin’

From the BBC:

An American man who claimed to be on a mission to hunt down Osama Bin Laden has been arrested in northern Pakistan, police say. …

He had a pistol, dagger and a sword and was carrying night-vision equipment as well as Christian literature. …

Mr Khan said that when [Gary] Faulkner was asked if he felt he had a chance of tracing Bin Laden, he replied: “God is with me, and I am confident I will be successful in killing him.”

…Because that’s what God does. That’s what he’s all about. He doesn’t have anything better to do. He just helps people hunt and kill other people.

Anyone who watches sports knows ESPN.  And people who watch ESPN know that it has a long tradition of broadcasting non-traditional “sports” such as dog shows, chess matches and dances.  Recently they produced and televised the National Spelling Bee  – not just the final round shown on ABC, but also the preliminaries – on prime time.

Before explaining why this is interesting, let’s look at competitive spelling’s history.  The bee is about 200 years old, coming out of schools in the American Midwest as a way to judge students’ intelligence.  By 1925, a Kentucky newspaper formalized the contest as a statewide competition.  They found it profitable enough to promote the concept to newspapers in other states, turning it into a national contest.

World War II basically killed it and spelling bees might have retreated back to the school house.  But by this time, the event was so popular that it attracted corporate interest.  Media conglomerate E W Scripps had taken it over and still owns the National Spelling Bee today.  The interesting part is the Bee is not part of their non-profit Scripps Howard Foundation.  Instead, it is run directly out of their corporate office – on a not-for-profit basis they claim. This is the same office that owns a myriad of television stations, newspapers, cable and television production companies… even comic strips.

Even more interesting, no serious academic today believes that spelling is a measure of intelligence.  Indeed, it is hard to see the connection between intelligence and the obscure words used in televised rounds.  Many of these “final words” come directly from other languages, making the correct spelling arbitrary.

But Scripps still actively promotes the Spelling Bee to teachers, solidifying the link to schools and academia and distancing it from media control. Their carefully worded promotional material avoids claiming any educational value, saying it helps students “improve spelling [and] learn concepts.”  In the end, its purpose seems mostly to deliver a valuable target market to ABC and ESPN’s sponsors.

So why don’t we contests on prime time network television that encourage children to increase actual literacy, apply scientific principles, use logic, or develop original ideas?  Because that doesn’t sell enough advertising to be worth it.  Do parents, teachers and schools see it any differently?

Lots of oil to play in and die in.

(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

From the BBC:

Thick gloves are donned, essential for protection against the solenodon’s most ancient feature - it is the only mammal in the world that can inject venom through its teeth.

While the poison is not deadly to humans, it is far from ideal to get bitten - and this seems even more pertinent as the creature first tries to sink its sharp teeth into Dr Sam Turvey, and then, when it is my chance to hold it in my glove-covered hand, me.

Naturally, it’s on the verge of extinction.

Or maybe plastic. I’m going with the latter, but you can be the judge. This came from MSN, but I killed the window before saving the link:

The plasticization of the human race continues.