I like population theory. Here's my take on the thesis that Social
Security has decreased fertility:

http://wirkman.net/izens/index.php/izen/2007/01/29/worthless_kids

I've written it in such a way that some people will be offended. But I
hope none HERE will be.

Is it worth discussing?

twv
countdown to closing Thinking Matters not yet started

Because of lack of participation, I'm thinking of closing two of my
email discussion groups: Thinking Matters and Reading Matters. Any
objections?

FilmFlam still seems to have some life in it, so I'm not considering
closing it.

TWV
listowner: FilmFlam, ThinkingMatters, and ReadingMatters on YahooGroups

I yammer about the limits of prediction in social science, primarily
economics, on my blog today:

http://wirkman.net/izens/index.php/izen/2007/01/26/
impossibility_is_only_the_half_of_it

Anyone care to bite?

Anyone know any citations for Thomas Theorem studies by economists?


˘˘

T. W. V.

http://www.wirkman.net/

"Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance."

Thinking Matters contributor Byron Marshall has had some health issues
-- I think major surgery -- and I take a moment to wish him a speedy
recovery. Rest up, and get back on the horse, Byron!

A few participants on this list may be amused or vexed (depending) by
some of my more recent blog entries. This on libertarianism in the
Britannica could spark some debate:


http://wirkman.net/izens/index.php/izen/2007/01/18/
britannica_s_entry_on_libertarianism

And I directly discuss our two Shrubbloggers' adventures in an earlier
post. Hi, Eric, Hi, Justin! Hope you are BOTH doing well, and as
always, I'm puzzling through the ideas you and others broadcast and
narrowcast to me... Keep the ideas coming.

And feel free to use this venue, Thinking Matters. No activity, of
late, because of Byron's illness, I guess.

So, let's part on that opening note: Get well soon, Byron!

t

Launched 40 years ago this month, first Earth-observing geostationary
satellite

Forty years ago this month, thanks to an inventive University of
Wisconsin-Madison scientist, our view of the world was changed forever.



On Dec. 6, 1966, a NASA Atlas rocket lofted the world's first
Earth-observing geostationary satellite into a 23,000-mile-high orbit,
high enough to precisely match the spin of our planet on its axis and
remain over a fixed point. On board was an innovative device known as
the spin-scan camera, a gadget that made it possible to image the
entire disk of the Earth and, for the first time, take pictures of the
weather from space.

The 750-pound satellite, ATS-1 or Applications Technology Satellite,
and its camera payload would revolutionize satellite meteorology,
provide the first full-disk images of Earth from space, and lay the
foundation for all of the satellite weather pictures that infuse our
daily lives. It also provided the technology that made it possible to
take the first pictures of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus from a spacecraft.

An invention of the late Wisconsin scientist Verner Suomi, the
spin-scan camera "gave us the first pictures of the full disk of the
Earth from space and would become a cornerstone of the remote sensing
we take for granted today," according to Hank Revercomb, who directs
the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), the center
founded by Suomi and his collaborator, engineer Robert Parent.

"It was a milestone," says Revercomb of launch of ATS-1 and its camera
system. "It was up there before Apollo went to the moon, and it spawned
a continual commitment to monitoring severe weather from space."

The challenge in those earliest days of spaceflight, when there were no
computer chips or modern electronics to do the heavy lifting for
science, was to devise a way to take pictures from a "spinner," a
satellite that spun to create a stable platform in space.

"It is a challenge to take a picture from a spinning spacecraft,"
Revercomb explains. "The spin-scan camera was a clever solution."

The device worked by scanning the Earth as it spun, building an image a
line at a time. With a line resolution of 3.2 kilometers, it took the
camera 20 minutes to make a full picture of the Earth.

"What the camera did was look perpendicular to the spin axis, change
its orientation slightly for each rotation of the satellite, and build
up an image," says Lawrence Sromovsky, an SSEC planetary scientist who
worked with Suomi. "From that vantage point with that camera, you could
see cloud patterns over half of the Earth. As Suomi said, 'You could
see the clouds move, not the satellite.'"

For meteorologists used to gathering data with high-altitude weather
balloons and airplanes, the view from space changed everything, says
Sromovsky.

Technology has long surpassed the spin-scan camera, but the legacy of
Suomi's simple invention is the pictures we see on the nightly news and
on the Web of swirling storms and threatening weather systems.

"He (Suomi) was the first person to prove that there was value to
looking at the Earth from space," argues Sanjay Limaye, an SSEC
planetary scientist, referencing Suomi's earlier milestone experiment
to measure the Earth's radiation budget from space. "Prior to that,
everybody was looking out, to astronomy. Nobody paid any attention to
the fact we might learn something by looking at the Earth because there
was no stable platform to do so."

The same spin-scan technology was also used to take the first portraits
from spacecraft of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus on the early Pioneer and
Mariner missions to other planets in our solar system.

"The Pioneer spacecraft, by design, were spinners," notes Limaye.
"There were no cameras you could put on a spinning spacecraft except
for the spin-scan system."

A later Earth-observing satellite, ATS-3, used spin-scan technology in
1967 to make the first full-color image of Earth from space, before the
famous view of Earth taken by Apollo astronauts on the moon.

Suomi's invention, which, fittingly, soared into space on the
scientist's birthday in 1966, has more than proven its value to the
world, says Revercomb. "It's paid off, certainly. It's how we watch
hurricanes and severe weather. It's how we know storms are coming. Vern
Suomi deserves his title as 'father of satellite meteorology."

I had never been to his blog. Hadn't been to his site since he started
a blog!

>  I wonder if you've noticed that you can post your comments on Malcolm
> Gladwell's blog. Looks like pretty interesting discussions go on
> there.
> http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/01/enron.html

The racism discussion annoys me in part because Gladwell confuses
categories in a few strategic places, such as factual and statistic
beliefs about races and individuals, and then the evaluations and
affiliations overlaid on top of that.

I think I could write a better essay entitled "Defining a Racist."

t


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

James Gill <jimmodaseattle@...> wrote:          Tim,
I wonder if you've noticed that you can post your comments on Malcolm Gladwell's
blog. Looks like pretty interesting discussions go on there.
   http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/01/enron.html


Virkkala <virkkala@...> wrote: Recently on wirkman.net I've posted, for
your delectation, articles on
The Defense of the State (offering what may be a novel formulation),
the Defense of Anarchy (emphasizing the role of contracts as basic
feedback mechanism for peace), two discussions of football and
education, and . . . (drum roll) . . . a picture of me wearing a goofy
hat.

So, hats off to me!

I offer, below, the most recent post.

˘˘

T. W. V.

http://www.wirkman.net/

"Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance."

Democracy's best defense is not that it delivers the will of the
people. It does badly at that. it's that it allows government to
proceed while still getting rid of offending and perhaps even
tyrannical leaders. That is, it allows for the peaceful removal of bad
guys (as well as good guys) from office.

Similarly, so, with the state itself. The best defense of it is not
that it promotes justice and establishes peace. It's very bad at doing
that: it's states that carry on mass slaughter, and injustice is
riddled throughout society because of the structure and machinations of
the state. What the state accomplishes is a modicum of justice and
peace sort of as a side-effect of providing partisan services to groups
of people all trying to live at the expense of others.

It is obvious that anarchists are wrong to argue that the state is
nothing other than a criminal band of robbers, thugs, thieves. Robbers
and thieves do not regularly provide justice and peace to whole sectors
of society. The state does. But it also engages in acts of something
very much like robbery and precisely like mass murder. So we should
acknowledge the services it provides while reminding ourselves that it
does so only in the course of dealing in grave injustice, as well.

Some might be tempted to refer to this defense of the state as an
unintended consequences approach. But that would be incorrect. States
do not provide justice services spontaneously, without planning, or
even as an afterthought.

States provide justice as a loss leader. It is the part of their job
that justifies, in the popular mind, all their other activities, and
spreads a patina of respectability on their other, more lucrative
enterprises. States are in the business of moving wealth and people
around, for the benefit of those nearest to state power. Justice is
something it provides in hormetically small doses to justify everything
else.

So call it The Loss Leader Defense of the State.





James Gill

206-941-9406
www.coolwonder.com
www.instantwonder.com
jim@...
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]






James Gill

206-941-9406
www.coolwonder.com
www.instantwonder.com
jim@...
  __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Tim,
  I just went to your site and see no sign of you in a goofy hat.
  Also, I regret to say that the white on black is very difficult to read, and
your navigation is not very intuitive.

  Sorry for the abruptness of my comments - but I thought you'd be interested.

  Glad to see you're doing lot's of posts, though.

  Hope to see you soon.

  Jim

Virkkala <virkkala@...> wrote:                                  Recently
on wirkman.net I've posted, for your delectation, articles on
  The Defense of the State (offering what may be a novel formulation),
  the Defense of Anarchy (emphasizing the role of contracts as basic
  feedback mechanism for peace), two discussions of football and
  education, and . . . (drum roll) . . . a picture of me wearing a goofy
  hat.

  So, hats off to me!

  I offer, below, the most recent post.

  ˘˘

  T. W. V.

  http://www.wirkman.net/

  "Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance."

  Democracy's best defense is not that it delivers the will of the
  people. It does badly at that. it's that it allows government to
  proceed while still getting rid of offending and perhaps even
  tyrannical leaders. That is, it allows for the peaceful removal of bad
  guys (as well as good guys) from office.

  Similarly, so, with the state itself. The best defense of it is not
  that it promotes justice and establishes peace. It's very bad at doing
  that: it's states that carry on mass slaughter, and injustice is
  riddled throughout society because of the structure and machinations of
  the state. What the state accomplishes is a modicum of justice and
  peace sort of as a side-effect of providing partisan services to groups
  of people all trying to live at the expense of others.

  It is obvious that anarchists are wrong to argue that the state is
  nothing other than a criminal band of robbers, thugs, thieves. Robbers
  and thieves do not regularly provide justice and peace to whole sectors
  of society. The state does. But it also engages in acts of something
  very much like robbery and precisely like mass murder. So we should
  acknowledge the services it provides while reminding ourselves that it
  does so only in the course of dealing in grave injustice, as well.

  Some might be tempted to refer to this defense of the state as an
  unintended consequences approach. But that would be incorrect. States
  do not provide justice services spontaneously, without planning, or
  even as an afterthought.

  States provide justice as a loss leader. It is the part of their job
  that justifies, in the popular mind, all their other activities, and
  spreads a patina of respectability on their other, more lucrative
  enterprises. States are in the business of moving wealth and people
  around, for the benefit of those nearest to state power. Justice is
  something it provides in hormetically small doses to justify everything
  else.

  So call it The Loss Leader Defense of the State.






James Gill

206-941-9406
www.coolwonder.com
www.instantwonder.com
jim@...
  __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Recently on wirkman.net I've posted, for your delectation, articles on
The Defense of the State (offering what may be a novel formulation),
the Defense of Anarchy (emphasizing the role of contracts as basic
feedback mechanism for peace), two discussions of football and
education, and . . . (drum roll) . . . a picture of me wearing a goofy
hat.

So, hats off to me!

I offer, below, the most recent post.


˘˘

T. W. V.

http://www.wirkman.net/

"Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance."




Democracy's best defense is not that it delivers the will of the
people. It does badly at that. it's that it allows government to
proceed while still getting rid of offending and perhaps even
tyrannical leaders. That is, it allows for the peaceful removal of bad
guys (as well as good guys) from office.

Similarly, so, with the state itself. The best defense of it is not
that it promotes justice and establishes peace. It's very bad at doing
that: it's states that carry on mass slaughter, and injustice is
riddled throughout society because of the structure and machinations of
the state. What the state accomplishes is a modicum of justice and
peace sort of as a side-effect of providing partisan services to groups
of people all trying to live at the expense of others.

It is obvious that anarchists are wrong to argue that the state is
nothing other than a criminal band of robbers, thugs, thieves. Robbers
and thieves do not regularly provide justice and peace to whole sectors
of society. The state does. But it also engages in acts of something
very much like robbery and precisely like mass murder. So we should
acknowledge the services it provides while reminding ourselves that it
does so only in the course of dealing in grave injustice, as well.

Some might be tempted to refer to this defense of the state as an
unintended consequences approach. But that would be incorrect. States
do not provide justice services spontaneously, without planning, or
even as an afterthought.

States provide justice as a loss leader. It is the part of their job
that justifies, in the popular mind, all their other activities, and
spreads a patina of respectability on their other, more lucrative
enterprises. States are in the business of moving wealth and people
around, for the benefit of those nearest to state power. Justice is
something it provides in hormetically small doses to justify everything
else.

So call it The Loss Leader Defense of the State.

I didn't see this in the after-the-election re-hash:

http://www.examiner.com/a
-397530~Brian_Doherty__Third_parties_play_spoilers_for_Dems__GOP.html


Brian Doherty: Third parties play spoilers for Dems, GOP

WASHINGTON - The Republicans’ reaction to their Election Day “thumping”
has been dramatic and entertaining.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Republican National Committee
Chairman Ken Mehlman are on their way out the door.

Karl Rove, who predicted a GOP victory to the bitter end, found himself
thrown under the bus and a punch line after the election. “I obviously
was working harder in the campaign than he was,” President Bush said of
Rove half-jokingly last week.

And talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh surprisingly admitted that he had
abandoned his conservative principles by shilling for these
big-spending Republicans, but claimed he’d no longer carry their water.

The GOP’s post-mortem also includes the realization that libertarians,
a group they always assume will vote for them, cost them control of the
United States Senate.

Montana’s incumbent Republican Sen. Conrad Burns lost to Democrat Jon
Tester by more than 2,500 votes. Stan Jones, the Libertarian Party
candidate, whose claim to fame is his Star Trek-like blue skin, earned
10,339 votes, four times the number of votes Burns needed to hold on.

Jones’ skin is permanently blue-gray because he drank too much
colloidal silver thinking it would help prevent disease. Many pundits
thought his presence in the Senate race was the perfect illustration of
the complete irrelevance of third-party candidates in our two-party
political system. Instead, he changed the outcome of the entire midterm
elections. After all, it’s a completely different narrative if
Republicans hold the Senate.

The GOP can consider blaming libertarians in Missouri, as well.
Incumbent Sen. Jim Talent lost to Democrat Claire McCaskill by 45,000
votes, with Libertarian Frank Gilmour receiving more than 47,000 votes.

When a third-party candidate earns more votes than the difference
between the two major parties, that candidate is generally labeled a
“spoiler.” Built into that attitude is the presumption that, absent a
third party choice, the voter would have given his support to a major
party candidate.

Ralph Nader was widely derided for “spoiling” the election for Al Gore
in the 2000 presidential race, based on the belief that a Green voter
would have preferred a Democrat if a Green candidate had not been an
option.

Senator-elect Jim Webb’s supporters surely would’ve blamed Green Party
candidate Glenda Gail Parker — and her 26,000 votes — if he hadn’t
edged out Sen. George Allen.

A similar belief about spoiling follows the Libertarian Party. The
image of Republicans as the major party that stands for smaller
government leads many to believe that a Libertarian vote really ought
to have been a GOP vote.

In 2000, libertarians cost Republican Slade Gorton in Washington state
a Senate seat and the GOP clear control of the U.S. Senate. And in 2002
libertarians prevented the GOP from picking up a U.S. Senate seat in
South Dakota.

Such outcomes shouldn’t surprise them. The Republicans had a careless
belief in their rightful sovereignty over the whole idea of limited
government, dating back to the colorful anti-state rhetoric of past
standard bearers Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. They have taken the
libertarian vote for granted, and they have lost the Senate because of
it.

The Libertarian Party itself is small, but Pew Research Center pegs 9
percent of voters as libertarians who “oppose government regulation in
both the economic and the social spheres” and the American National
Election Studies puts that number even higher, at 13 percent.

Republicans lost this bloc of voters with their $200 billion-plus war
in Iraq; the biggest entitlement program (Medicare) expansion in a
half-century; record government spending; a $247 billion budget deficit
for fiscal 2006 alone; and a religious right agenda that meddles in
Americans’ personal lives — see Terri Schiavo.

Republicans abandoned limited government so libertarians were happy to
play spoilers and send them packing.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason magazine and author of the
forthcoming book “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of
the Modern American Libertarian Movement” (PublicAffairs).

[note: Brian was, for a short time, a roommate of mine in Port
Townsend, WA.]

Reason magazine, in protest to Time's "You. Yes, You." pick for "Person
of the Year," invited its contributors to pick one. Editor Nick G. came
up with my first idea for a pick, and offered an interesting paragraph
to defend himself:

> Nick Gillespie
> Reason editor-in-chief and editor of Choice: The Best of Reason.
>
> Milton Friedman. In many ways, we've been living (thankfully) in the
> late, great economist's country for the past 35 years or so-an America
> with no draft and low inflation, and one in which we are more "free to
> choose" from different ways of living than ever before. Here's hoping
> that in the coming years, we adopt something like his universal school
> voucher proposal, which would not only revolutionize education but
> social class too. He was that rarest of public intellectuals: engaged,
> passionate, and scrupulously fair and well-meaning toward opponents.
> When he died in November at the age 94, I thought of the eulogy for
> the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi: "When nature removes a great
> man, we explore the horizons for a successor. But none comes and none
> will, for his class is extinguished with him."

But Jesse Walker surely had the best comment:

> Jesse Walker
> Reason managing editor and author of Rebels in the Air.
>
> You. Yes, I'm siding with Time. Someone has to do it, since the
> magazine is being criticized left and right by people who think it's
> some sort of copout to honor a genuinely important story -- the rising
> power of the user-driven Web -- rather than doing the usual year-end
> celebrity bake-off. YouTube and Wikipedia are making more of a mark on
> this country than any petty politician, and I see nothing wrong with
> Time acknowledging that. Besides, one of the few things I hate more
> than the "Person of the Year" award itself is all the critics who act
> as though Time's choice is somehow significant. You think you can make
> a better pick? Start a blog, list your own choices, and ignore Time
> entirely. You can do that now. That's why you're the Person of the
> Year.

More on http://www.reason.com/news/show/117486.html . . .

In the spirit of the Time, I just put up MY "Person of the Year." On
wirkman.net.

˘˘

T. W. V.

http://www.wirkman.net/

"Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance."

t. virkkala (virkkala@...) has sent you a news article.
(Email address has not been verified.)
------------------------------------------------------------
Personal message:

Crowbars and fire extinguishers! Monks go ape in Greece.

7 monks injured in clash over monastery - Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061220/ap_on_re_eu/greece_monks_clash

============================================================
Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/

On my blog today I lurched into libertarian theory, which many of you
many not care one whit about.

But the issue at hand is a crucial issue for me, and has been since I
first called myself a libertarian.

I regard some libertarian positions as abused metaphors rather than as
logical truths. One of these is the doctrine that "taxation is theft,"
a maxim expressed over and over again in the libertarian movement.

i disagree. I disagree on the grounds of factuality, on grounds of
relevant differences between various kinds of expropriation.

As I attempt to explain on http://www.wirkman.net/, at this exact
address

     http://wirkman.net/izens/index.php/izen/2006/12/19/taxation

This problem is allied with the subject of natural law. It is my belief
that most libertarians are gravely deficient in being able to keep
separate the many levels of normative discourse, and of the logical map
of  reality, and they repeatedly err in a characteristically
simple-minded way. Much natural law talk, and many of the slogans of
the movement, offend against logic and language.

I realize now that I've never really got to the heart of this in my
writings, and I'm a bit late in explaining several of my major
contentions. Oh, well.

The main thing to remind ourselves is of the distinctions like this:

    What is
    What might be
    What we want

Many libertarians, in their rush to promote what they want, contort and
oversimplify the reality of what is, and do not gain any great purchase
on the realm of the counterfactual possibility.

Of course, libertarians are not the only ones. But because they so
completely wish to transform many of the norms and rules of society, as
well as many of its institutions, their lapses loom larger than the
lapses, say, of a standard-brand modern Repug or 'Crat.


˘˘

T. W. V.

http://www.wirkman.net/

"Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance."

Mises dot org now has William Graham Sumner's classic essay online:

http://www.mises.org/story/2398

Among the many good lines? This one:

"The most important thing which we shall inherit from the Spaniards
will be the task of suppressing rebellions."

t

nice collection of turtle stuff. I'm a turtle fan, myself, and have been since I
was a little kid. I looked at all the pics of turtles in the Reptile Guide when
I was a kid, and still read books about sea turtles. Mim of the Mississippi was
a favorite picture book. I would adopt box turtles, bring home small river
turtles from the store, and had a mystic encounter with a sea turtle at
Marineland Aquarium.

Virkkala <virkkala@...> wrote: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12turt.html?
ex=1323579600&en=2bf77a3245365fbd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 12, 2006
All but Ageless, Turtles Face Their Biggest Threat: Humans
By NATALIE ANGIER

This was no euphemistic brushoff, no reptilian version of “Sorry, I’ll
be busy that night washing my hair.” Paddling around in a tropically
appointed pool at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the husky female
Gibba turtle from South America made all too palpable her disdain for
the petite male Gibba that pursued her. He crawled onto the parqueted
hump of her bark-brown shell. She shrugged and wriggled until he
slipped off. He looped around to show her his best courtship maneuvers,
bobbing his head, quivering his neck. She kicked him aside like a clot
of algae and kept swimming.

“I feel sorry for the little guy,” said Jack Cover, a turtle specialist
and the general curator of the aquarium. “He’s making no progress,
she’s got zero interest in him, yet he just keeps coming back for
more.”

And why not? The male Gibba may be clueless, he may at the moment have
the sex appeal of a floating toupee, but he is a turtle, and, as a
major new book and a wealth of recent discoveries make abundantly
clear, turtles are built for hard times. Through famine, flood, heat
wave, ice age, a predator’s inspections, a paramour’s rejections,
turtles take adversity in stride, usually by striding as little as
possible. “The tale of the tortoise and the hare is the turtle’s life
story,” said Mr. Cover, who calls himself a card-carrying member of the
“turtle nerds” club. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

With its miserly metabolism and tranquil temperament, its capacity to
forgo food and drink for months at a time, its redwood burl of a body
shield, so well engineered it can withstand the impact of a stampeding
wildebeest, the turtle is one of the longest-lived creatures Earth has
known. Individual turtles can survive for centuries, bearing silent
witness to epic swaths of human swagger. Last March, a giant tortoise
named Adwaita said to be as old as 250 years died in a Calcutta zoo,
having been taken to India by British sailors, records suggest, during
the reign of King George II. In June, newspapers around the world noted
the passing of Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise that died in the Australia
Zoo at age 176 — 171 years after Charles Darwin is said, perhaps
apocryphally, to have plucked her from her equatorial home.

Behind such biblical longevity is the turtle’s stubborn refusal to
senesce — to grow old. Don’t be fooled by the wrinkles, the halting
gait and the rheumy gaze. Researchers lately have been astonished to
discover that in contrast to nearly every other animal studied, a
turtle’s organs do not gradually break down or become less efficient
over time.

Dr. Christopher J. Raxworthy, the associate curator of herpetology at
the American Museum of Natural History, says the liver, lungs and
kidneys of a centenarian turtle are virtually indistinguishable from
those of its teenage counterpart, a Ponce de Leonic quality that has
inspired investigators to begin examining the turtle genome for novel
longevity genes.

“Turtles don’t really die of old age,” Dr. Raxworthy said. In fact, if
turtles didn’t get eaten, crushed by an automobile or fall prey to a
disease, he said, they might just live indefinitely.

Turtles have the power to almost stop the ticking of their personal
clock. “Their heart isn’t necessarily stimulated by nerves, and it
doesn’t need to beat constantly,” said Dr. George Zug, curator of
herpetology at the Smithsonian Institution. “They can turn it on and
off essentially at will.”

Turtles resist growing old, and they resist growing up. Dr. Zug and his
co-workers recently determined that among some populations of sea
turtles, females do not reach sexual maturity until they are in their
40s or 50s, which Dr. Zug proposes could be “a record in the animal
kingdom.”

Turtles are also ancient as a family. The noble chelonian lineage that
includes all living turtles and tortoises extends back 230 million
years or more, possibly predating other reptiles like snakes and
crocodiles, as well as birds, mammals, even the dinosaurs.

The turtle’s core morphology has changed little over time, and today’s
250 or so living species all display an unmistakable resemblance to the
earliest turtle fossils. Yet the clan has evolved a dazzling array of
variations on its blockbuster theme, allowing it to colonize every
continent save Antarctica and nearly every type of biome nested
therein: deserts; rainforests; oceans; rivers; bogs; mountains; New
Brunswick, Canada; New Brunswick, N.J.

“Turtles can persist in habitats where little else can survive,” said
Dr. J. Whitfield Gibbons, a professor of ecology at the University of
Georgia in Athens.

Troubles Foreseen

The iconic turtle likewise has colonized the human heart. People may
despise cats or fear dogs, but practically everybody has a soft spot
for turtles. “Turtles are by far the most popular reptile,” said Peter
C. H. Pritchard, director of the Chelonian Research Institute in
Oviedo, Fla. “Unlike snakes, which may threaten you and which move like
a flash, turtles are benign and slow, and you can’t dislike or distrust
the clumsy.”

Yet such warm and fuzzy feelings have proved cold comfort for turtles,
and herpetologists fear that in humans the stalwart survivors from the
Mesozoic era may at last have met their mortician. Turtle habitats are
fast disappearing, or are being fragmented and transected by roads on
which millions of turtles are crushed each year. “There’s no defense
against that predator known as the automobile,” Dr. Gibbons said.

Researchers estimate that at least half of all turtle species are in
serious trouble, and that some of them, like the Galapagos tortoise,
the North American bog turtle, the Pacific leatherback sea turtle and
more than a dozen species in China and Southeast Asia, may effectively
go extinct in the next decade if extreme measures are not taken.
“People love turtles, people find them endearing, but people take
turtles for granted,” Mr. Cover said. “They have no idea how important
turtles are to the ecosystems in which they, and we, live.”

Researchers are also impressed by the turtle’s many sensory talents.
Box turtles and other forest-dwelling species can spot a lake or pond a
mile in the distance, possibly by detecting polarized light glinting
off the surface of the water. Female sea turtles migrate across entire
oceans every breeding season, unerringly making their way from
far-flung feeding grounds right back to the beach where they were born,
and where they are instinctively driven to lay their own eggs.

Instinctive does not mean inflexible, however. Should a weary wayfarer
arrive at her natal beach in the dead of night and find it has eroded
away, Dr. Pritchard said, she can adapt, swimming down the coast until
she locates a suitably sandy nesting site.

Turtles, it seems, are all ears, all the time. Dr. Ray Ashton, who runs
the Finca de la Tortuga biological preserve in Archer, Fla., has highly
preliminary evidence that some turtle species may communicate
subsonically, just as elephants do, transmitting and detecting ultralow
frequency sound waves as vibrations in the ground.

In their new book, “Turtles of the World” (Johns Hopkins Press), Franck
Bonin, Bernard Devaux and Alain Dupré seek to loft turtles into the
limelight by showcasing the group’s diversity — its beauties, its
goofies, its gargoyles.

There is the Indian star tortoise, its shell a vivid basket weave of
dark and light veins that dance like spattered sunlight as the tortoise
crosses the forest floor; and the Matamata turtle of the Amazon basin,
with a flattened, ragged head and neck that look like dead leaves and a
bumpy shell that mimics an old log — just try to spot that Matamata at
the bottom of a stream, awaiting passing prey; and the massive
alligator snapping turtle of the south-central United States, which
lures fish right into its open jaw with a red bleb of flesh on the
floor of its mouth that jiggles like a chubby worm.

Some turtles have serpentine necks twice the length of their shells;
others sport sweet little snorkeling snouts that look like
double-barreled cocktail straws; still others have beaks so fiercely
hooked their bearers could easily serve, in the authors’ words, as
“adornment of the upper reaches of Notre Dame.”

Among the most common questions leveled at turtle researchers is, What
is the difference between a turtle and a tortoise? It depends on where
you live, researchers reply. In the United States, any reptile with a
shell is referred to as a turtle, and the term tortoise is reserved for
those turtle species that have elephantine feet and live entirely on
land, like the desert tortoise of the American Southwest. In Australia,
by contrast, the word tortoise often applies to aquatic side-necked
species — bizarre beasts with necks that cannot be drawn into the shell
for protection but instead must be tucked on the side, under the
shell’s eavelike overhang.

Whatever their group identity badge, turtles vary considerably in size,
from the tiny speckled padloper tortoise of South Africa, which in
adulthood is no bigger than a computer mouse, to the great leatherback
sea turtle, which can measure seven feet long and weigh 2,000 pounds.

Menu plans vary as well. Many turtles are omnivores, happily consuming
fruits, leaves, insects, mollusks, fish, frogs, ice cream. Dr. Gibbons
told of a friend whose his pet box turtle would respond to the sound of
a spoon being tapped on a glass ice cream bowl by emerging from behind
the couch, walking over to its owner, rearing up on its hind legs and
waiting to be spoon-fed its just dessert. “Had I not seen this a few
times myself,” he said, “I would not have believed it.”

A few turtles have highly specialized palates. Green sea turtles prize
the tender tips of sea grass, and will clip away and discard tough,
older grass to stimulate the sprouting of fresh buds beneath.
Leatherback sea turtles dine only on jellyfish, or what they think are
jellyfish. “Plastic bags look like jellyfish,” said Dr. Joseph
Mitchell, an ecologist and turtle specialist in Richmond, Va., “and
quite a few leatherbacks have stomachs impacted with plastic bags.”

Some turtles, conversely, seek out the world’s detritus. Scavenger
turtles that live in the Ganges River devour human corpses, making it
possible for devout Hindus to deposit their loved ones’ remains in the
waters they deem sacred.

An Iconic Feature

Whether they wrest it from sea grass, shellfish or Häagen-Dazs, all
turtles need a substantial amount of calcium in their diet, to sustain
the structure that marks them as turtles and that remains among the
most extraordinary architectural achievements in vertebrate evolution:
the shell. A number of invertebrates have shells, of course, and so,
too, do a few vertebrates, most notably the armadillo. But whereas the
armadillo’s shell is built of bony segments slapped down over its
muscle tissue and is distinct from the mammal’s underlying skeletal
frame, in the turtle the skeleton has become the shell.

During embryonic development, the bones of the turtle’s rib cage grow
straight out, rather than curving toward one another as they do in
other vertebrates. Those ribs, spinal vertebrae and other skeletal
bones are then fused to form the upper shell, called the carapace, the
lower shell, or plastron, and the bony bridges that join upstairs with
down. In many turtle species, the bony shell is in turn plated over
with tough fingernail-like structures called scutes.

As a result of the osteotic overhaul, not only can a turtle not crawl
out of its shell, it has trouble crawling, period. “Its legs stick out
at bizarre angles, and the only reason it can walk at all is through
sheer strength,” Dr. Pritchard said. “The turtle has enormously strong
muscles and extremely thick leg bones.” A clumsy gait proved a small
price to pay, however, for the acquisition of body armor that protects
adult turtles against a panoply of jaws and claws.

Geneticists have proposed that the turtle shell may have appeared quite
suddenly in the distant past, rather than emerging slowly through
modest, mincing modifications of pre-existing structures. They suggest
that the dramatic innovation could have arisen from just a few key
mutations in master genes like the so-called homeobox genes, which help
specify an animal’s basic body plan. If the shell did burst on the
reptilian stage more or less fully formed, they said, that would
explain the lack of “intermediary” fossils or prototurtles in the
paleontological record.

The shell very likely helps explain the turtle’s elongated storyline.
It takes time to consolidate a large, thick shell, but upon reaching
adult stature, the turtle is close to invulnerable. At that point, it
can compensate for its Darwinically unproductive youth with a very
prolonged and zealously fecund adulthood. A female turtle will continue
laying eggs until she dies, and a male turtle will just as mulishly
pursue her.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company


====================
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12turt.html?
ex=1323579600&en=2bf77a3245365fbd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 12, 2006
All but Ageless, Turtles Face Their Biggest Threat: Humans
By NATALIE ANGIER

This was no euphemistic brushoff, no reptilian version of “Sorry, I’ll
be busy that night washing my hair.” Paddling around in a tropically
appointed pool at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the husky female
Gibba turtle from South America made all too palpable her disdain for
the petite male Gibba that pursued her. He crawled onto the parqueted
hump of her bark-brown shell. She shrugged and wriggled until he
slipped off. He looped around to show her his best courtship maneuvers,
bobbing his head, quivering his neck. She kicked him aside like a clot
of algae and kept swimming.

“I feel sorry for the little guy,” said Jack Cover, a turtle specialist
and the general curator of the aquarium. “He’s making no progress,
she’s got zero interest in him, yet he just keeps coming back for
more.”

And why not? The male Gibba may be clueless, he may at the moment have
the sex appeal of a floating toupee, but he is a turtle, and, as a
major new book and a wealth of recent discoveries make abundantly
clear, turtles are built for hard times. Through famine, flood, heat
wave, ice age, a predator’s inspections, a paramour’s rejections,
turtles take adversity in stride, usually by striding as little as
possible. “The tale of the tortoise and the hare is the turtle’s life
story,” said Mr. Cover, who calls himself a card-carrying member of the
“turtle nerds” club. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

With its miserly metabolism and tranquil temperament, its capacity to
forgo food and drink for months at a time, its redwood burl of a body
shield, so well engineered it can withstand the impact of a stampeding
wildebeest, the turtle is one of the longest-lived creatures Earth has
known. Individual turtles can survive for centuries, bearing silent
witness to epic swaths of human swagger. Last March, a giant tortoise
named Adwaita said to be as old as 250 years died in a Calcutta zoo,
having been taken to India by British sailors, records suggest, during
the reign of King George II. In June, newspapers around the world noted
the passing of Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise that died in the Australia
Zoo at age 176 — 171 years after Charles Darwin is said, perhaps
apocryphally, to have plucked her from her equatorial home.

Behind such biblical longevity is the turtle’s stubborn refusal to
senesce — to grow old. Don’t be fooled by the wrinkles, the halting
gait and the rheumy gaze. Researchers lately have been astonished to
discover that in contrast to nearly every other animal studied, a
turtle’s organs do not gradually break down or become less efficient
over time.

Dr. Christopher J. Raxworthy, the associate curator of herpetology at
the American Museum of Natural History, says the liver, lungs and
kidneys of a centenarian turtle are virtually indistinguishable from
those of its teenage counterpart, a Ponce de Leonic quality that has
inspired investigators to begin examining the turtle genome for novel
longevity genes.

“Turtles don’t really die of old age,” Dr. Raxworthy said. In fact, if
turtles didn’t get eaten, crushed by an automobile or fall prey to a
disease, he said, they might just live indefinitely.

Turtles have the power to almost stop the ticking of their personal
clock. “Their heart isn’t necessarily stimulated by nerves, and it
doesn’t need to beat constantly,” said Dr. George Zug, curator of
herpetology at the Smithsonian Institution. “They can turn it on and
off essentially at will.”

Turtles resist growing old, and they resist growing up. Dr. Zug and his
co-workers recently determined that among some populations of sea
turtles, females do not reach sexual maturity until they are in their
40s or 50s, which Dr. Zug proposes could be “a record in the animal
kingdom.”

Turtles are also ancient as a family. The noble chelonian lineage that
includes all living turtles and tortoises extends back 230 million
years or more, possibly predating other reptiles like snakes and
crocodiles, as well as birds, mammals, even the dinosaurs.

The turtle’s core morphology has changed little over time, and today’s
250 or so living species all display an unmistakable resemblance to the
earliest turtle fossils. Yet the clan has evolved a dazzling array of
variations on its blockbuster theme, allowing it to colonize every
continent save Antarctica and nearly every type of biome nested
therein: deserts; rainforests; oceans; rivers; bogs; mountains; New
Brunswick, Canada; New Brunswick, N.J.

“Turtles can persist in habitats where little else can survive,” said
Dr. J. Whitfield Gibbons, a professor of ecology at the University of
Georgia in Athens.

Troubles Foreseen

The iconic turtle likewise has colonized the human heart. People may
despise cats or fear dogs, but practically everybody has a soft spot
for turtles. “Turtles are by far the most popular reptile,” said Peter
C. H. Pritchard, director of the Chelonian Research Institute in
Oviedo, Fla. “Unlike snakes, which may threaten you and which move like
a flash, turtles are benign and slow, and you can’t dislike or distrust
the clumsy.”

Yet such warm and fuzzy feelings have proved cold comfort for turtles,
and herpetologists fear that in humans the stalwart survivors from the
Mesozoic era may at last have met their mortician. Turtle habitats are
fast disappearing, or are being fragmented and transected by roads on
which millions of turtles are crushed each year. “There’s no defense
against that predator known as the automobile,” Dr. Gibbons said.

Researchers estimate that at least half of all turtle species are in
serious trouble, and that some of them, like the Galapagos tortoise,
the North American bog turtle, the Pacific leatherback sea turtle and
more than a dozen species in China and Southeast Asia, may effectively
go extinct in the next decade if extreme measures are not taken.
“People love turtles, people find them endearing, but people take
turtles for granted,” Mr. Cover said. “They have no idea how important
turtles are to the ecosystems in which they, and we, live.”

Researchers are also impressed by the turtle’s many sensory talents.
Box turtles and other forest-dwelling species can spot a lake or pond a
mile in the distance, possibly by detecting polarized light glinting
off the surface of the water. Female sea turtles migrate across entire
oceans every breeding season, unerringly making their way from
far-flung feeding grounds right back to the beach where they were born,
and where they are instinctively driven to lay their own eggs.

Instinctive does not mean inflexible, however. Should a weary wayfarer
arrive at her natal beach in the dead of night and find it has eroded
away, Dr. Pritchard said, she can adapt, swimming down the coast until
she locates a suitably sandy nesting site.

Turtles, it seems, are all ears, all the time. Dr. Ray Ashton, who runs
the Finca de la Tortuga biological preserve in Archer, Fla., has highly
preliminary evidence that some turtle species may communicate
subsonically, just as elephants do, transmitting and detecting ultralow
frequency sound waves as vibrations in the ground.

In their new book, “Turtles of the World” (Johns Hopkins Press), Franck
Bonin, Bernard Devaux and Alain Dupré seek to loft turtles into the
limelight by showcasing the group’s diversity — its beauties, its
goofies, its gargoyles.

There is the Indian star tortoise, its shell a vivid basket weave of
dark and light veins that dance like spattered sunlight as the tortoise
crosses the forest floor; and the Matamata turtle of the Amazon basin,
with a flattened, ragged head and neck that look like dead leaves and a
bumpy shell that mimics an old log — just try to spot that Matamata at
the bottom of a stream, awaiting passing prey; and the massive
alligator snapping turtle of the south-central United States, which
lures fish right into its open jaw with a red bleb of flesh on the
floor of its mouth that jiggles like a chubby worm.

Some turtles have serpentine necks twice the length of their shells;
others sport sweet little snorkeling snouts that look like
double-barreled cocktail straws; still others have beaks so fiercely
hooked their bearers could easily serve, in the authors’ words, as
“adornment of the upper reaches of Notre Dame.”

Among the most common questions leveled at turtle researchers is, What
is the difference between a turtle and a tortoise? It depends on where
you live, researchers reply. In the United States, any reptile with a
shell is referred to as a turtle, and the term tortoise is reserved for
those turtle species that have elephantine feet and live entirely on
land, like the desert tortoise of the American Southwest. In Australia,
by contrast, the word tortoise often applies to aquatic side-necked
species — bizarre beasts with necks that cannot be drawn into the shell
for protection but instead must be tucked on the side, under the
shell’s eavelike overhang.

Whatever their group identity badge, turtles vary considerably in size,
from the tiny speckled padloper tortoise of South Africa, which in
adulthood is no bigger than a computer mouse, to the great leatherback
sea turtle, which can measure seven feet long and weigh 2,000 pounds.

Menu plans vary as well. Many turtles are omnivores, happily consuming
fruits, leaves, insects, mollusks, fish, frogs, ice cream. Dr. Gibbons
told of a friend whose his pet box turtle would respond to the sound of
a spoon being tapped on a glass ice cream bowl by emerging from behind
the couch, walking over to its owner, rearing up on its hind legs and
waiting to be spoon-fed its just dessert. “Had I not seen this a few
times myself,” he said, “I would not have believed it.”

A few turtles have highly specialized palates. Green sea turtles prize
the tender tips of sea grass, and will clip away and discard tough,
older grass to stimulate the sprouting of fresh buds beneath.
Leatherback sea turtles dine only on jellyfish, or what they think are
jellyfish. “Plastic bags look like jellyfish,” said Dr. Joseph
Mitchell, an ecologist and turtle specialist in Richmond, Va., “and
quite a few leatherbacks have stomachs impacted with plastic bags.”

Some turtles, conversely, seek out the world’s detritus. Scavenger
turtles that live in the Ganges River devour human corpses, making it
possible for devout Hindus to deposit their loved ones’ remains in the
waters they deem sacred.

An Iconic Feature

Whether they wrest it from sea grass, shellfish or Häagen-Dazs, all
turtles need a substantial amount of calcium in their diet, to sustain
the structure that marks them as turtles and that remains among the
most extraordinary architectural achievements in vertebrate evolution:
the shell. A number of invertebrates have shells, of course, and so,
too, do a few vertebrates, most notably the armadillo. But whereas the
armadillo’s shell is built of bony segments slapped down over its
muscle tissue and is distinct from the mammal’s underlying skeletal
frame, in the turtle the skeleton has become the shell.

During embryonic development, the bones of the turtle’s rib cage grow
straight out, rather than curving toward one another as they do in
other vertebrates. Those ribs, spinal vertebrae and other skeletal
bones are then fused to form the upper shell, called the carapace, the
lower shell, or plastron, and the bony bridges that join upstairs with
down. In many turtle species, the bony shell is in turn plated over
with tough fingernail-like structures called scutes.

As a result of the osteotic overhaul, not only can a turtle not crawl
out of its shell, it has trouble crawling, period. “Its legs stick out
at bizarre angles, and the only reason it can walk at all is through
sheer strength,” Dr. Pritchard said. “The turtle has enormously strong
muscles and extremely thick leg bones.” A clumsy gait proved a small
price to pay, however, for the acquisition of body armor that protects
adult turtles against a panoply of jaws and claws.

Geneticists have proposed that the turtle shell may have appeared quite
suddenly in the distant past, rather than emerging slowly through
modest, mincing modifications of pre-existing structures. They suggest
that the dramatic innovation could have arisen from just a few key
mutations in master genes like the so-called homeobox genes, which help
specify an animal’s basic body plan. If the shell did burst on the
reptilian stage more or less fully formed, they said, that would
explain the lack of “intermediary” fossils or prototurtles in the
paleontological record.

The shell very likely helps explain the turtle’s elongated storyline.
It takes time to consolidate a large, thick shell, but upon reaching
adult stature, the turtle is close to invulnerable. At that point, it
can compensate for its Darwinically unproductive youth with a very
prolonged and zealously fecund adulthood. A female turtle will continue
laying eggs until she dies, and a male turtle will just as mulishly
pursue her.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Some of you will be amused ? by

Paper (*cross-listing*): gr-qc/0612045
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 14:53:08 GMT   (10kb)

Title: World-making with extended gravity black holes for cosmic natural
    selection in the multiverse scenario
Authors: A. Barrau
Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure
Report-no: LPSC-06.118
Subj-class: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology; Mathematical Physics
\\
    Physics is facing contingency. Not only in facts but also in laws (the
frontier becoming extremely narrow). Cosmic natural selection is a
tantalizing
idea to explain the apparently highly improbable structure of our
Universe. In
this brief note I will study the creation of Universes by black holes in
-string inspired- higher order curvature gravity.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0612045 ,  10kb)

jim

Neat stuff.

   Incidentally, he certainly looks Irish to me.

jim stasheff <jds@...> wrote:



COUNTDOWN 334 Days Until Election 2007!
A regular update from the Arab American Institute | Vol. 7, 42
| December 6, 2006
http://www.aaiusa.org/countdown




Accuracy in Media
Watching former President Jimmy Carter discuss his new book, Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid, has been both a breath of fresh air and a jarring
reminder of the inaccuracies that ordinarily permeate coverage of
Palestine and Israel. Take this exchange between Carter and CNN's Wolf
Blitzer regarding the wall:

Blitzer: The book jacket, the book cover, has a picture of you. It also
has a picture of the wall that Israel has constructed...along the West
Bank to protect itself, presumably, from terrorists coming into major
Israeli cities and towns.
Carter: Not along the West Bank, but inside the West Bank.
Blitzer: Inside the West Bank...
Carter: OK.
Blitzer: To separate, if you will, the Palestinian territories from
Israel, pre-'67 Israel...or close to those lines. Carter: As a matter of
fact, that's not correct, Wolf. What the wall does is separate
Palestinians from other Palestinians. This wall is not built between
Israel and Palestine. It's built between the Palestinians and other
Palestinians.
Blitzer: In terms of going a little bit further than the pre-'67 lines...
Carter: I wouldn't say a little bit.
Blitzer: You're right, it's all built on Palestinian-occupied territory.
Carter: And in some places, it goes much further than a little bit.

Who other than President Carter would be permitted not just to respond
to Blitzer's questions, but to challenge their premise?


"Faux"to-Ops…
As the first American Muslim elected to Congress, Congressman-elect
Keith Ellison (D-MN) must have known he'd fascinate bigots everywhere,
but this is getting ridiculous. This week, Townhall's Dennis Prager
picks up were CNN's Glenn Beck left off, attacking Ellison's choice to
swear in on the Quran rather than the Bible as an act that "undermines
American civilization." We're not kidding. In fact, Ellison will take
the official oath of office with all other freshmen members of Congress
in a ceremony that doesn't include any religious text. The ceremony
Prager attributes as a foundation of American civilization is actually
an optional photo-op and Ellison would be following the tradition set by
many of his colleagues—including Jewish elected officials who regularly
use the Torah rather than the Bible. Perhaps Prager missed that line in
the Constitution that says, "...no religious Test shall ever be required
as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

What's In a Name?
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) might as well shelve his presidential
ambitions right now. Why? His middle name is…get ready for it…Hussein.
Republican strategist Ed Rogers revealed Obama's big secret this week
on MSNBC, saying, "Count me down as somebody that underestimates Barack
Hussein Obama." But is Rogers speaking too soon? Maybe Obama can win
if voters think he's Irish—O'Bama for President?

Genie in a Bottle…
Congratulations to Arab American filmmaker, Jehane Noujaim, who was
recently awarded Technology Entertainment Design's TED Prize. The award
is described as a $100,000 grant to help fulfill an individual's
world-changing wish. According to TED, "Our prize-winners may be very
different, but they will have this in common: They will be doing
something that has extraordinary potential. Something whose positive
influence could spread, transcending borders." Noujaim's wish is to
"bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film."
Most recently, Noujaim directed the acclaimed documentary, Control
Room, which examined the Iraq war from the eyes of both American and
Arab journalists. "It's important for everyone, simply as individuals,
to try to understand different people and different cultures, but it's
especially important for people in the United States because we affect
so much of the world beyond our borders," she said.

Did a friend forward this to you? Click here to receive Countdown in
your inbox each week!
To unsubscribe, click here.


Aram Grayson wrote:
> **
> *Henry,*
> **
> *The Patriots aren't doing very well this year. Did they lose some key
> people?*
> **
> *Aram*
>


====================
To post to this group, simply send email to: ThinkingMatters@...
may not send attachments to this discussion groups - but Yahoo!Group members may
add files to messages at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThinkingMatters/files/
If you have any questions, please e-mail the listowner: virkkala@....
ingMatters/files/
If you have any questions, please e-mail the listowner: virkkala@....

Yahoo! Groups Links






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

COUNTDOWN 334 Days Until Election 2007!
   A regular update from the Arab American Institute   |   Vol. 7,  42
|   December 6, 2006
http://www.aaiusa.org/countdown




Accuracy in Media
Watching former President Jimmy Carter discuss his new book, Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid, has been both a breath of fresh air and a jarring
reminder of the inaccuracies that ordinarily permeate coverage of
Palestine and Israel.  Take this exchange between Carter and CNN's Wolf
Blitzer regarding the wall:

Blitzer: The book jacket, the book cover, has a picture of you. It also
has a picture of the wall that Israel has constructed...along the West
Bank to protect itself, presumably, from terrorists coming into major
Israeli cities and towns.
Carter: Not along the West Bank, but inside the West Bank.
Blitzer: Inside the West Bank...
Carter: OK.
Blitzer: To separate, if you will, the Palestinian territories from
Israel, pre-'67 Israel...or close to those lines. Carter: As a matter of
fact, that's not correct, Wolf.  What the wall does is separate
Palestinians from other Palestinians. This wall is not built between
Israel and Palestine. It's built between the Palestinians and other
Palestinians.
Blitzer: In terms of going a little bit further than the pre-'67 lines...
Carter: I wouldn't say a little bit.
Blitzer: You're right, it's all built on Palestinian-occupied territory.
Carter: And in some places, it goes much further than a little bit.

Who other than President Carter would be permitted not just to respond
to Blitzer's questions, but to challenge their premise?


"Faux"to-Ops…
As the first American Muslim elected to Congress, Congressman-elect
Keith Ellison (D-MN) must have known he'd fascinate bigots everywhere,
but this is getting ridiculous.  This week, Townhall's Dennis Prager
picks up were CNN's Glenn Beck left off, attacking Ellison's choice to
swear in on the Quran rather than the Bible as an act that "undermines
American civilization."  We're not kidding.  In fact, Ellison will take
the official oath of office with all other freshmen members of Congress
in a ceremony that doesn't include any religious text.  The ceremony
Prager attributes as a foundation of American civilization is actually
an optional photo-op and Ellison would be following the tradition set by
many of his colleagues—including Jewish elected officials who regularly
use the Torah rather than the Bible.  Perhaps Prager missed that line in
the Constitution that says, "...no religious Test shall ever be required
as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

What's In a Name?
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) might as well shelve his presidential
ambitions right now.  Why?  His middle name is…get ready for it…Hussein.
   Republican strategist Ed Rogers revealed Obama's big secret this week
on MSNBC, saying, "Count me down as somebody that underestimates Barack
Hussein Obama."  But is Rogers speaking too soon?  Maybe Obama can win
if voters think he's Irish—O'Bama for President?

Genie in a Bottle…
Congratulations to Arab American filmmaker, Jehane Noujaim, who was
recently awarded Technology Entertainment Design's TED Prize.  The award
is described as a $100,000 grant to help fulfill an individual's
world-changing wish.  According to TED, "Our prize-winners may be very
different, but they will have this in common: They will be doing
something that has extraordinary potential. Something whose positive
influence could spread, transcending borders."  Noujaim's wish is to
"bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film."
   Most recently, Noujaim directed the acclaimed documentary, Control
Room, which examined the Iraq war from the eyes of both American and
Arab journalists.  "It's important for everyone, simply as individuals,
to try to understand different people and different cultures, but it's
especially important for people in the United States because we affect
so much of the world beyond our borders," she said.

Did a friend forward this to you? Click here to receive Countdown in
your inbox each week!
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Aram Grayson wrote:
> **
> *Henry,*
> **
> *The Patriots aren't doing very well this year. Did they lose some key
> people?*
> **
> *Aram*
>

I set up a b2evolution blog, at the place I worked between USTL and
moving back to Portland... It was indeed pretty easy to set up and use.

Looking at your new page, at first I thought the category lists were
randomly staggered -- until suddenly I realized it was all
hierarchical. Nice. And I like the background.

I've been planning to change my own blog to Wordpress for some time
now, but I want to try to customize it to the point that it will look
*exactly* the same as before -- just with better code undergirding
it. I haven't had time for that yet.

Eric

At 09:08 PM 12/8/2006, Virkkala wrote:
>I've blogged for years now. And . . . done it all from scratch,
>scripting the pages myself.
>
>But now I've caved in. Witness:
>
>http://wirkman.net/
>
>The software I'm using, b2evolution, is pretty easy to use and adapt.
>I've used it on a number of sites I host, actually.
>
>I have a lot of work to do to add old features to the blog(s), but tell
>me what you think even before I'm finished! (It might help me finish.)
>
>t

I've blogged for years now. And . . . done it all from scratch,
scripting the pages myself.

But now I've caved in. Witness:

http://wirkman.net/

The software I'm using, b2evolution, is pretty easy to use and adapt.
I've used it on a number of sites I host, actually.

I have a lot of work to do to add old features to the blog(s), but tell
me what you think even before I'm finished! (It might help me finish.)

t

http://johnsonpark.org/blogs/index.php/2006/12/08/
how_a_wahkiakum_county_commissioner_race

How a Wahkiakum County Commissioner race was decided

      The flip took time. Several people in the room were considered for
flipping but were passed over because of party affiliation or personal
reasons: Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Dan Bigelow volunteered and was
accepted.

      An acceptable quarter was found; Bigelow rolled up his sleeves to
acertain it wasn't switched by slight of hand. Linquist deferred the
call to Coons, who called tails. Bigelow flipped the coin; it landed on
the floor with the head side up, giving the victory to Linquist.

      Coons congratulated Linquist and left.

      Linquist received congratulations from his wife, Bonnie, and others
in the room.

from Rick Nelson, Coin flip decides election, The Wahkiakum County
Eagle, December 7, 2006, p. 1

Their tenacity for mischief is unbelievable!! I'm sending you this
message because I just urged Congress to block the unauthorized
construction of a "legal compound" for the trial of Guantanamo detainees
that could cost up to $125 million. The Department of Defense is moving
forward under emergency measures to build the compound without
submitting their request to Congress.

Building this compound is a terrible idea and a huge waste of taxpayer
money. And there is a decent change the contract will be awarded to a
subsidiary of Halliburton that just recently paid $8 million to settle
an overcharging claim by the Army on a separate project. There already
is a courtroom at Guantanamo Bay. And challenges to the Military
Commissions Act, which has numerous legal problems, are only beginning.

WhatÂ’s the point in building a massive courthouse in Guantanamo when the
law for conducting the trials will likely end up invalidated as
unconstitutional?

I hope you'll write your Members of Congress about this important issue.

*Take action now at:
**http://action.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=545&page=UserAction*

<http://action.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=545&page=UserAction&s\
_oo=evX-Gh2pH1S_8QWKGAfl6Q..&s_tlid=217241>

*Learn more at at: **http://action.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?id=545*
<http://action.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?id=545&s_oo=gjx4mofLgiUY_T8-sWccGw..&s_tli\
d=217241>

Click here to view a printable version of this eCard.
<http://action.aclu.org/site/Ecard?tl_id=IyxSP6OoiJFJESKIpO_LCw..&s_oo=3NE4dMrpK\
IZ7l16WRQMCHA..&s_tlid=217241>



Click here to send your own eCard.
<http://action.aclu.org/site/Ecard?ecard_id=3641&s_oo=JrE32gECfnJhrVSOWNm7jQ..&s\
_tlid=217241>

Dear jim,

We've collected 18,447 letters telling the FCC not to relax media
ownership rules, but you still haven't taken action!  Our deadline is in
two weeks - won't you *take 2 minutes to speak your mind*?

<http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M721122236037345237180865&af=y>

*CLICK HERE TO TAKE ACTION BEFORE THE 12/21 DEADLINE!*
<http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M722015826037345237180865&af=y>

*So what's the big deal about media consolidation?*  Is it really so bad
for one company to own lots of media outlets?

We think so.  Look at the cozy deal between O.J. Simpson and Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp.

<http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M722019146037345237180865&af=y>News
Corp., which owns Fox and HarperCollins, decided to publish O.J.'s
quasi-confessional "If I Did It, Here's How It Happened."  Why would
they take such a risk?  /Because *they own not just the publishing
company, but also cable networks, local television stations and
newspapers*/ - all of which they could use to promote the book and turn
it into a mega-story with *mega-profits for News Corp*.

We were days away from seeing this sleazy project on TV and in
bookstores.  News Corp. backed out because of intense public criticism.
That demonstrates that "*we the people" still hold the power over even
some of the biggest monopolies.  Let's use that power to stop the FCC
from allowing more media consolidation*.

*You have just 14 days to send your message to the FCC. We can't afford
to let big media become even more concentrated!*
<http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M722015886037345237180865&af=y>

We need a media with diverse ownership to ensure that all points of view
have a chance to be heard.  *Please send a message today that media
consolidation is dangerous for our democracy.*

*Click here to tell the FCC that big media is bad news!*
<http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M722015926037345237180865&af=y>

Thanks for all you do for Common Cause.

Sincerely,

The Common Cause Media Reform Team
Lauren Coletta, Celia Wexler and Dawn Iype

P.S.  *Don't forget to forward this message to your friends and family*
<http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M722016166037345237180865> and
encourage them to weigh in with the FCC.



Forward this email
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cool

   :-D

   what about that ice-hotel ?

   the lack of snow must be hard on the reindeer, btw.

   only four months ago I wrote a ten-minute screenplay in which the protagonist
looks at the arctic ocean on a balmy day in Norway.

   it turns out tho that the warming is the fault of the *gnomes* underground who
determine the weather (and most other things).

   
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
-----------------------------------------

   seriously, it's all Al Gore's fault.

   none of this would be happening if it weren't for his going around causing
global warming.

   !



VIRKKALA <virkkala@...> wrote:
   Two articles in a Finnish newspaper report that it's pretty warm this
winter in Finland. They are golfing again in Helsinki, and they are making
artificial snow in Lapland, just to appease the tourists!



http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Tourists+have+to+make+do+with+man-made+snow+in+\
Finnish+Lapland/1135223466097

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/The+greening+of+the+greens+-+golf+in+Helsinki+i\
n+December+anyone/1135223471943




====================
To post to this group, simply send email to: ThinkingMatters@...
may not send attachments to this discussion groups - but Yahoo!Group members may
add files to messages at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThinkingMatters/files/
If you have any questions, please e-mail the listowner: virkkala@....
ingMatters/files/
If you have any questions, please e-mail the listowner: virkkala@....

Yahoo! Groups Links






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Two articles in a Finnish newspaper report that it's pretty warm this
winter in Finland. They are golfing again in Helsinki, and they are making
artificial snow in Lapland, just to appease the tourists!



http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Tourists+have+to+make+do+with+man-made+snow+in+\
Finnish+Lapland/1135223466097

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/The+greening+of+the+greens+-+golf+in+Helsinki+i\
n+December+anyone/1135223471943

HELSINGIN SANOMAT
   INTERNATIONAL EDITION - FOREIGN


Finland is again one of world's least corrupt nations

Transparency International report indicates little or no improvement in
levels of corruption worldwide


       According to the annual survey by the Berlin-based Transparency
International, the three least corrupt countries on the planet are
Finland, Iceland and New Zealand. At the other end of the scale are
Haiti, Myanmar, Iraq, and Guinea, where corruption is apparently
endemic among officials.
       The thrust of the 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index was that
corruption and povery have a powerful linkage, and that much remains
to be done in the fight against systemic corruption, despite one or
two signs of improvement.

The top three countries scored 9.6 on a scale of ten, indicating that
there was little or no perceived corruption present. Down at the bottom of
the pile, Haiti scored just 1.8 on the same scale. According to the index,
more than 100 of the 163 countries surveyed had serious corruption
problems, while in half of them corruption runs rampant.
       Whilst most will look at placings on the league table and treat the
CPI as an annual beauty or beast contest, it is perhaps more
significant to measure whether corruption is moving forward
worldwide, or whether legislation is helping to restrict the taking
of kick-backs and the routine payment of officials to secure
services.
       In Brazil, Cuba, Israel, Jordan, Laos, The Seychelles, Trinidad and
Tobago, Tunisia, and the United States, things worsened over the
last 12 months.
       On the brighter side, countries such as Algeria, the Czech Republic,
India, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Mauritius, Paraguay, Slovenia,
Turkey, and Uruguay all took steps to tighten laws against
corruption.

As in previous years, the countries of the Nordic region performed best
among EU and Western European nations.
       This is not to say that Transparency International has nothing to
complain about in this part of the world, however: scandals that
have surfaced in recent years indicate that there are no completely
corruption-free zones in the world.
       On the other hand, TI does note the positive impact that EU
membership has had on the recent intake of primarily former Eastern
European states. Only Poland has slipped down in the rankings, while
Estonia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic have all improved their
status.
       Transparency International makes its classifications based on the
input of business executives and local analysts. All those countries
scoring lower than a five had serious perceived levels of
corruption. A score below three indicates that corruption is
pervasive.
       Finland also came out top of the TI listings in 2004 and was second
with New Zealand (behind Iceland) in 2005. Most of the countries at
the bottom of the pile are also familiar names from previous
surveys.

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Finland+is+again+one+of+worlds+least+corrupt+na\
tions/1135222826369

As I recall, Shelby Foote is himself a southerner

jim


Byron wrote:
>
>
> I share with you some of your doubts about Lincoln. (Maybe it's just
> because i'm a Southerner. :-))
>
> Of course, Lincoln is a fascinating person and was also very funny. This
> makes him appealing. The "story" of his becoming President from studying
> in a backwoods cabin by the fire is also very attractive. So it's easy
> to see why he has been rated highly. Anyone who provides so many good
> quotes tends to be esteemed.
>
> And for those who make the simple equation that the only way to stop
> slavery was to launch a terrible war - or to not stop the war - then he
> is on the side of the angels. That he didn't free the slaves immediately
> shows his complexity, or his tragic situation. And so on.
>
> But it was a terrible war. And apparently, towards the latter part of
> it, he began to believe that God was personally intervening - it was
> God's will that so many Americans should die. It was some kind of
> punishment.
>
> Certainly not reassuring in a man who has been rated as America's greatest.
>
> That fellow Foote, as I recall, in his "respected" PBS documentary on
> the Civil War - or the small part of it I saw - so I'm no reliable judge
> - seemed to feel that the Civil War was worth it because it so changed
> the country into a true nation.
>
> ( ! ) (Perhaps I got the wrong impression of a positive take on the
> savage slaughter and the impoverishment of the South - and it wasn't
> what was meant. I hope not.)
>
> Virkkala <virkkala@... <mailto:virkkala%40wirkman.com>> wrote:
> I submit that this is a goofy article:
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/>
> AR2006120101475.html
>
> Why? Because I tend to like a few of the presidents Lind says are worse
> than GWB.
>
> Mainly, his argument about James Buchanan strikes me as crazy. Lind
> basically blames Buchanan for the Civil War. Buchanan should have acted
> immediately. But Buchanan merely noticed the Constitution, and it
> provided the federal government with no powers to prevent secession.
> His comment that states didn't have a RIGHT to secede was odd, at best,
> considering that all previous presidents who expressed an opinion on
> the subject, save Andy Jackson, had supported such a right AS OBVIOUS.
>
> Buchanan cannot be blamed for the war. The South had every right to
> secede. And the North had every right to undermine slavery in the South
> by opening up its borders to fugitives, and to declaring that a slave
> rebellion was justified.
>
> Instead of doing such things, Lincoln engaged in an unConstitutional
> war against the South for doing THE VERY SAME THING THE STATES HAD DONE
> in 1776, secede.
>
> Of course, mainstream ideology worships at the altar of Lincoln, and
> cannot conceive an any alternative means to free slaves than the
> bloodiest war in American history.
>
> See Lind, below.
>
> t
>
> He's Only Fifth Worst
>
> By Michael Lind
> Sunday, December 3, 2006; B05
>
> It's unfair to claim that George W. Bush is the worst president of all
> time. He's merely the fifth worst. In the White House Hall of Shame,
> Bush comes behind four other Oval Officers whose policies were even
> more disastrous: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and
> James Madison.
>
> What makes a president horribly, immortally bad? Poor luck is not
> enough. Some of the greatest presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln and
> Franklin D. Roosevelt, have inherited crises and risen to the occasion.
> The damage must be largely self-inflicted. And there's another test:
> The damage to the nation must be substantial. Minor blunders and petty
> crimes do not land a president in the rogues' gallery.
>
> Doing nothing can be even worse than doing something wrong. Take the
> worst president of all time, Buchanan. In office when Lincoln's
> election in 1860 triggered the secession of one Southern state after
> another, Buchanan sat by as the country crumbled. In his December 1860
> message to Congress, three months before Lincoln was inaugurated, he
> declared that the states had no right to secede, but that the federal
> government had no right to stop them. By the time he left office, seven
> states had left the Union, and the Confederates had looted the arsenals
> in the South. If Buchanan had exercised his powers as commander in
> chief, the rebels might have been stopped at far less than the eventual
> cost of the Civil War -- more than half a million American dead and the
> ruin of the South for generations. (After he left the White House,
> Buchanan explained that he did not stop secession for fear that hostile
> blacks would overrun the North.)
>
> The Civil War era also gave us the second-worst president: Johnson,
> Lincoln's vice president and successor, a Tennessean who vetoed civil
> rights acts and blocked the 14th Amendment because he didn't like
> blacks, of whom he declared, "It is vain to deny that they are an
> inferior race -- very far inferior to the European variety." Johnson's
> policies led to his impeachment and forced the Republicans in Congress
> to create a quasi-parliamentary system marginalizing the president.
> While Lincoln had his own racial prejudices, he was a model of
> enlightenment next to Johnson and Buchanan.
>
> The third-worst president is Nixon, a criminal in the White House who
> is still the only commander in chief ever to resign. Many presidents
> have abused their power, and the "imperial presidency" existed long
> before Nixon. But he was the only president to run a criminal gang out
> of the Oval Office engaging in spying and burglary while he sought to
> corrupt the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA. (By contrast,
> Bush's misguided authorization of torture, secret CIA prisons and
> illegal eavesdropping were at least directed at suspected terrorists,
> not at his personal and political opponents.)
>
> The damage Nixon inflicted might have endured had he established the
> principle that the president is above the law. As he told David Frost
> in a famous 1977 television interview, "Well, when the president does
> it, that means that it is not illegal." Because of the exposure of
> Nixon's criminality during Watergate, we still live in a constitutional
> republic rather than a banana republic with an elective dictatorship.
>
> Refusing to enforce the law while the country disintegrates, trying to
> re-enslave emancipated blacks, and doubling as chief magistrate and
> gangster -- what could rival these presidential misdeeds? Well, how
> about unnecessary and catastrophic wars?
>
> To qualify a president for the Worst of All Time list, a war must be
> catastrophic as well as unnecessary. Ronald Reagan's invasion of
> Grenada, George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama and Bill Clinton's
> invasion of Haiti don't cut it -- they were unnecessary, but minor. And
> presidents can be forgiven costly wars that were necessary or hard to
> avoid, such as Harry S. Truman's stalemated war in Korea and Lyndon B.
> Johnson's failed war in Vietnam, each of which was a Cold War battle
> more than a separate conflict. After 1950, U.S. strategy required
> Washington to go to war to prevent Soviet bloc proxies from taking over
> South Korea, Indochina and Taiwan -- the amazing thing is that the Cold
> War ended without a battle for Taiwan, too. Future historians are
> likely to be as kind to LBJ as they have been to Truman.
>
> The two big, unjustified wars on my list are the War of 1812 and the
> current conflict in Iraq, and the first was far worse than the second.
> Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was a great patriot, a
> brilliant intellectual -- and an absolutely abysmal president. In his
> defense, the world situation during the Napoleonic Wars was grim. The
> United States was a minor neutral nation that was frequently harassed
> by both of the warring empires, Britain and France. But cold
> geopolitics should have led Washington to prefer a British victory,
> which would have preserved a balance of power in Europe, to a French
> victory that would have left France an unchecked superpower. Instead,
> eager to conquer Spanish Florida and seize British Canada, Madison
> sided with the more dangerous power against the less dangerous. It is
> as though, after Pearl Harbor, FDR had joined the Axis and declared war
> on Britain, France and the Soviet Union.
>
> It might have been worse. In 1812, Madison wrote Thomas Jefferson to
> ask what the former president thought of waging war simultaneously
> against Britain and France. Alarmed, Jefferson replied that this was "a
> solecism worthy of Don Quixote." Instead, the United States fought only
> the British, who torched Washington, D.C., while Madison and first lady
> Dolley fled to Virginia. Gen. Andrew Jackson's victory in the Battle of
> New Orleans (waged two weeks after the United States and Britain,
> unknown to Jackson, had signed a peace treaty) helped Americans pretend
> that the War of 1812 was something other than a total wipe-out.
>
> By contrast, George W. Bush has inadvertently destroyed only Baghdad,
> not Washington, and the costs of the Iraq war in blood and treasure are
> far less than those of Korea and Vietnam. Yet he will be remembered for
> the Iraq conflict for generations, long after tax-cut-driven deficits,
> No Child Left Behind and comprehensive immigration reform are
> forgotten. The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan,
> which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will
> puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had
> bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on
> Argentina.
>
> Why did Bush do it? Did he really believe that Hussein had weapons of
> mass destruction? Was it about oil? Israel? Revenge for Hussein's
> alleged attempt on Bush's father's life? The war will join the sinking
> of the USS Maine and the grassy knoll among the topics to exercise
> conspiracy theorists for generations, and the photos of torture at Abu
> Ghraib will join images of the napalmed Vietnamese girl and executed
> Filipino rebels in the gallery of U.S. atrocities.
>
> Like all presidents, George W. Bush wants to be remembered. He will get
> his wish -- as the fifth-worst president in U.S. history.
>
> lind@... <mailto:lind%40newamerica.net>
>
> ====================
> To post to this group, simply send email to:
> ThinkingMatters@...
> <mailto:ThinkingMatters%40yahoogroups.comYou> may not send attachments
> to this discussion groups - but Yahoo!Group members may add files to
> messages at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThinkingMatters/files/
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThinkingMatters/files/>
> If you have any questions, please e-mail the listowner:
> virkkala@... <mailto:virkkala%40wwest.net>.
> ingMatters/files/
> If you have any questions, please e-mail the listowner:
> virkkala@... <mailto:virkkala%40wwest.net>.
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>

There have been talks of a firmware update that will support more
formats, but I don't think anything like that has come along yet.

But really, I don't see the players as a permanent storage device. If
I want to archive music in digital format, I back it up in FLAC
format on an external hard drive. Creative's players are just for
portability, so I don't mind some loss with MP3s. Most of the time I
don't notice loss with a bitrate as low as 128 kbps, so I figure 256
kbps is a safe enough bitrate for listening to just about anything.
And I still have the lossless version for use elsewhere.

Eric

At 04:29 PM 12/3/2006, Virkkala wrote:
>A friend has a Zen . . .
>
> > Personally, I'm a fan of Creative's line:
> >
> > http://www.creative.com/products/welcome.asp?category=213
>
>
>. . . but he doesn't like the loss in MP3, WMA is not much better (if
>at all), and WAV, the only other files allowed on his Jukebox Zen Xtra,
>is not file compressed at all, right? Is there a way to squeeze a
>non-proprietary lossless onto this Zen?
>
>Some lossless is better than just Windows software's lossy options.
>
>t

I share with you some of your doubts about Lincoln. (Maybe it's just because i'm
a Southerner. :-))

   Of course, Lincoln is a fascinating person and was also very funny. This makes
him appealing. The "story" of his becoming President from studying in a
backwoods cabin by the fire is also very attractive. So it's easy to see why he
has been rated highly. Anyone who provides so many good quotes tends to be
esteemed.

   And for those who make the simple equation that the only way to stop slavery
was to launch a terrible war - or to not stop the war - then he is on the side
of the angels. That he didn't free the slaves immediately shows his complexity,
or his tragic situation. And so on.

   But it was a terrible war. And apparently, towards the latter part of it, he
began to believe that God was personally intervening - it was God's will that so
many Americans should die. It was some kind of punishment.

   Certainly not reassuring in a man who has been rated as America's greatest.

   That fellow Foote, as I recall, in his "respected" PBS documentary on the
Civil War - or the small part of it I saw - so I'm no reliable judge - seemed to
feel that the Civil War was worth it because it so changed the country into a
true nation.

   ( ! ) (Perhaps I got the wrong impression of a positive take on the savage
slaughter and the impoverishment of the South - and it wasn't what was meant. I
hope not.)

Virkkala <virkkala@...> wrote:
   I submit that this is a goofy article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/
AR2006120101475.html



Why? Because I tend to like a few of the presidents Lind says are worse
than GWB.

Mainly, his argument about James Buchanan strikes me as crazy. Lind
basically blames Buchanan for the Civil War. Buchanan should have acted
immediately. But Buchanan merely noticed the Constitution, and it
provided the federal government with no powers to prevent secession.
His comment that states didn't have a RIGHT to secede was odd, at best,
considering that all previous presidents who expressed an opinion on
the subject, save Andy Jackson, had supported such a right AS OBVIOUS.

Buchanan cannot be blamed for the war. The South had every right to
secede. And the North had every right to undermine slavery in the South
by opening up its borders to fugitives, and to declaring that a slave
rebellion was justified.

Instead of doing such things, Lincoln engaged in an unConstitutional
war against the South for doing THE VERY SAME THING THE STATES HAD DONE
in 1776, secede.

Of course, mainstream ideology worships at the altar of Lincoln, and
cannot conceive an any alternative means to free slaves than the
bloodiest war in American history.

See Lind, below.

t

He's Only Fifth Worst

By Michael Lind
Sunday, December 3, 2006; B05

It's unfair to claim that George W. Bush is the worst president of all
time. He's merely the fifth worst. In the White House Hall of Shame,
Bush comes behind four other Oval Officers whose policies were even
more disastrous: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and
James Madison.

What makes a president horribly, immortally bad? Poor luck is not
enough. Some of the greatest presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln and
Franklin D. Roosevelt, have inherited crises and risen to the occasion.
The damage must be largely self-inflicted. And there's another test:
The damage to the nation must be substantial. Minor blunders and petty
crimes do not land a president in the rogues' gallery.

Doing nothing can be even worse than doing something wrong. Take the
worst president of all time, Buchanan. In office when Lincoln's
election in 1860 triggered the secession of one Southern state after
another, Buchanan sat by as the country crumbled. In his December 1860
message to Congress, three months before Lincoln was inaugurated, he
declared that the states had no right to secede, but that the federal
government had no right to stop them. By the time he left office, seven
states had left the Union, and the Confederates had looted the arsenals
in the South. If Buchanan had exercised his powers as commander in
chief, the rebels might have been stopped at far less than the eventual
cost of the Civil War -- more than half a million American dead and the
ruin of the South for generations. (After he left the White House,
Buchanan explained that he did not stop secession for fear that hostile
blacks would overrun the North.)

The Civil War era also gave us the second-worst president: Johnson,
Lincoln's vice president and successor, a Tennessean who vetoed civil
rights acts and blocked the 14th Amendment because he didn't like
blacks, of whom he declared, "It is vain to deny that they are an
inferior race -- very far inferior to the European variety." Johnson's
policies led to his impeachment and forced the Republicans in Congress
to create a quasi-parliamentary system marginalizing the president.
While Lincoln had his own racial prejudices, he was a model of
enlightenment next to Johnson and Buchanan.

The third-worst president is Nixon, a criminal in the White House who
is still the only commander in chief ever to resign. Many presidents
have abused their power, and the "imperial presidency" existed long
before Nixon. But he was the only president to run a criminal gang out
of the Oval Office engaging in spying and burglary while he sought to
corrupt the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA. (By contrast,
Bush's misguided authorization of torture, secret CIA prisons and
illegal eavesdropping were at least directed at suspected terrorists,
not at his personal and political opponents.)

The damage Nixon inflicted might have endured had he established the
principle that the president is above the law. As he told David Frost
in a famous 1977 television interview, "Well, when the president does
it, that means that it is not illegal." Because of the exposure of
Nixon's criminality during Watergate, we still live in a constitutional
republic rather than a banana republic with an elective dictatorship.

Refusing to enforce the law while the country disintegrates, trying to
re-enslave emancipated blacks, and doubling as chief magistrate and
gangster -- what could rival these presidential misdeeds? Well, how
about unnecessary and catastrophic wars?

To qualify a president for the Worst of All Time list, a war must be
catastrophic as well as unnecessary. Ronald Reagan's invasion of
Grenada, George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama and Bill Clinton's
invasion of Haiti don't cut it -- they were unnecessary, but minor. And
presidents can be forgiven costly wars that were necessary or hard to
avoid, such as Harry S. Truman's stalemated war in Korea and Lyndon B.
Johnson's failed war in Vietnam, each of which was a Cold War battle
more than a separate conflict. After 1950, U.S. strategy required
Washington to go to war to prevent Soviet bloc proxies from taking over
South Korea, Indochina and Taiwan -- the amazing thing is that the Cold
War ended without a battle for Taiwan, too. Future historians are
likely to be as kind to LBJ as they have been to Truman.

The two big, unjustified wars on my list are the War of 1812 and the
current conflict in Iraq, and the first was far worse than the second.
Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was a great patriot, a
brilliant intellectual -- and an absolutely abysmal president. In his
defense, the world situation during the Napoleonic Wars was grim. The
United States was a minor neutral nation that was frequently harassed
by both of the warring empires, Britain and France. But cold
geopolitics should have led Washington to prefer a British victory,
which would have preserved a balance of power in Europe, to a French
victory that would have left France an unchecked superpower. Instead,
eager to conquer Spanish Florida and seize British Canada, Madison
sided with the more dangerous power against the less dangerous. It is
as though, after Pearl Harbor, FDR had joined the Axis and declared war
on Britain, France and the Soviet Union.

It might have been worse. In 1812, Madison wrote Thomas Jefferson to
ask what the former president thought of waging war simultaneously
against Britain and France. Alarmed, Jefferson replied that this was "a
solecism worthy of Don Quixote." Instead, the United States fought only
the British, who torched Washington, D.C., while Madison and first lady
Dolley fled to Virginia. Gen. Andrew Jackson's victory in the Battle of
New Orleans (waged two weeks after the United States and Britain,
unknown to Jackson, had signed a peace treaty) helped Americans pretend
that the War of 1812 was something other than a total wipe-out.

By contrast, George W. Bush has inadvertently destroyed only Baghdad,
not Washington, and the costs of the Iraq war in blood and treasure are
far less than those of Korea and Vietnam. Yet he will be remembered for
the Iraq conflict for generations, long after tax-cut-driven deficits,
No Child Left Behind and comprehensive immigration reform are
forgotten. The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan,
which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will
puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had
bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on
Argentina.

Why did Bush do it? Did he really believe that Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction? Was it about oil? Israel? Revenge for Hussein's
alleged attempt on Bush's father's life? The war will join the sinking
of the USS Maine and the grassy knoll among the topics to exercise
conspiracy theorists for generations, and the photos of torture at Abu
Ghraib will join images of the napalmed Vietnamese girl and executed
Filipino rebels in the gallery of U.S. atrocities.

Like all presidents, George W. Bush wants to be remembered. He will get
his wish -- as the fifth-worst president in U.S. history.

lind@...



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