Too good not to front-page (h/t commentor Trollhattan). Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly got together with filmmaker Bill Simmon to remind us what’s at stake. Great clip for email forwarding to the faint of heart:
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This post is in: Election 2010, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Assholes, Bring on the Brawndo!, Clap Louder!, Flash Mob of Hate, Seriously
Too good not to front-page (h/t commentor Trollhattan). Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly got together with filmmaker Bill Simmon to remind us what’s at stake. Great clip for email forwarding to the faint of heart:
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This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Daydream Believers, Seriously
From the NYTimes, “Chinese Dissident Awarded Nobel Peace Prize“:
BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his writings, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of his pursuit of nonviolent political reform in the world’s most populous country.
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Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is currently serving an 11-year term on charges of “inciting the subversion of state power.” He is the first Chinese citizen to win the Peace Prize.
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In awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee delivered an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.
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The prize is an enormous boost for China’s beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Community Party. Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles at the ready.
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“If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4,” said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.
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This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Even the "Liberal" New Republic
The most unlikely people are outing themselves as DFHs. Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, dissects “The costs of rising economic inequality“:
… If you asked Americans how much of the nation’s pretax income goes to the top 10 percent of households, it is unlikely they would come anywhere close to 50 percent, which is where it was just before the bubble burst in 2007… Even within that top “decile,” the distribution is remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half – yes, you read that right, more than half – of the country’s economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that’s the kind of income distribution you’d associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world’s oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.
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There are moral and political reasons for caring about this dramatic skewing of income, which in the real world leads to a similar skewing of opportunity, social standing and political power. But there is also an important economic reason: Too much inequality, just like too little, appears to reduce global competitiveness and long-term growth, at least in developed countries like ours.
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People don’t work hard, take risks and make sacrifices if they think the rewards will all flow to others. Conservative Republicans use this argument all the time in trying to justify lower tax rates for wealthy earners and investors, but they chose to ignore it when it comes to the incomes of everyone else.
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It’s no coincidence that polarization of income distribution in the United States coincides with a polarization of the political process. Just as income inequality has eroded any sense that we are all in this together, it has also eroded the political consensus necessary for effective government. There can be no better proof of that proposition than the current election cycle, in which the last of the moderates are being driven from the political process and the most likely prospect is for years of ideological warfare and political gridlock.
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Political candidates may not be talking about income inequality during this election, but it is the unspoken issue that underlies all the others. Without a sense of shared prosperity, there can be no prosperity. And given the realities of global capitalism, with its booms and busts and winner-take-all dynamic, that will require more government involvement in the economy, not less.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads
I thought I might be the only person alarmed at Bob Woodward’s happy hints about his beloved “Company” getting back into the wholesale slaughter business, just because I’m old enough to remember when “an aerial campaign against [a] “neutral” [foreign nation] is a war crime and would have created a political firestorm in the US”. But Tom Scocca has a post up at Slate under the title “The World Is Flat and Full of Killing“:
The Central Intelligence Agency—not the United States military—is using remote-controlled weapons to kill people on the territory of Pakistan, a country where we are not even officially at war.
This post is in: Election 2010, Excellent Links, Yes We Did, Daydream Believers
From the Washington Post, “‘One Nation’ rally draws unions, progressives to Mall to counter tea party“:
Tens of thousands of people gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, part of the “One Nation Working Together” rally – an effort by progressive activists hoping to serve as a counter to the conservative tea party movement and energize the electorate amid fears that the Democrats could lose control of Congress.
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The four-hour event was the culmination of months of planning by civil rights organizations and labor unions. More than 400 supporting groups signed on for the four-hour rally that kicked off around noon and featured speeches, poetry and musical entertainment. The rally drew participants from the Washington area, but also from New York and Detroit.
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The groups behind the march – including the National Council of La Raza, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, USAction and the U.S. Student Association – hope to make a political statement in response to conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s rally in August. That gathering partly filled the Mall with tens of thousands of his supporters, and tea party groups across the country have held anti-tax rallies. But fewer people than in August gathered at this march.
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Many of the groups involved in Saturday’s event stepped outside their usual parameters. Socially conservative African American church groups joined with marchers that supported equality for gays and lesbians. A miners union endorsed the rally along with several environmental groups.
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In putting together the rally, the “One Nation Working Together” groups focused on three issues: jobs, justice and education. They define those in a set of principles that also laid out a list of causes largely supported by liberals, such as ending discrimination in the criminal justice system, protecting Social Security, spending federal money to create jobs and improving public education.
Right now this story is at the top of the “Most Read” box. There’s also a photo gallery. (And 1,170+ comments, which I have no intention of looking at, because I’m not gonna spoil my good mood.)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Pet Rescue
Thanks to commentor Siubhanduinne for the link to the NYTimes‘ upcoming article on “The BP-Spill Baby-Turtle Brigade“:
Loggerhead nesting season started this year, as usual, in May. Across the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, female sea turtles began plodding out of the water and up the beach, each burying a clutch of a hundred or more leathery eggs beneath the sand. The eggs incubate for about 60 days. Then a throng of tiny black loggerhead hatchlings, each only about two inches long, frantically boils out of the ground, all paddling clumsily with their outsize, winglike flippers. They scuttle down the beach en masse, capitalizing on a one-time frenzy of energy to rush into the water and push past the breakers into offshore currents. Once they make it there — if they make it there — they typically find their way onto mats of seaweed called sargassum. The hatchlings will drift passively around the ocean on this sargassum for the first several years of their lives, like children inner-tubing in a swimming pool. It’s a life raft from which, conveniently, they can also pluck snacks…
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The hatchlings from this season’s first nests, however, were on schedule to scramble into the Gulf of Mexico only a few months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, at what looked to be the height of one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history. By June, the sargassum in that part of the gulf was heavily oiled. Soon, it appeared to be largely gone: incinerated in controlled burns, maybe, or hauled up by skimmer boats. And so state and federal wildlife agencies came up with a radical plan. Sea-turtle eggs laid on beaches in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle would be dug up during their very last days of incubation, packed into Styrofoam coolers and shipped to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center on the opposite coast of Florida. There, after hatching, the baby turtles would be released into the oil-free Atlantic. When I arrived in Alabama in late July, tens of thousands of turtle eggs, from hundreds of nests, were already in the process of being relocated — all during a point in their development when even a slight jolt to the egg could be lethal. In short, America was orchestrating the migration of an entire generation of sea turtles, slow and steady, overland, in a specially outfitted FedEx truck.
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The government called this effort a set of “extraordinary measures being taken in direct response to an unprecedented human-caused disaster.” And as one U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist told me, “We immediately knew it was more work than we could do on our own.” Fortunately, a vast and well-organized infrastructure of volunteers was already in place: people who, for years, happened to have been honing some of the very skills that the survival of these imperiled animals suddenly hinged on — not because they saw such a crisis coming, but basically because they really loved turtles.
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What I found in Alabama was a classic story of ordinary people called to do extraordinary things. But the extraordinary things were so eccentric, and the ordinary people were so unassuming, that it took me a while to realize that. In the middle of an environmental emergency that seemed to demand dispassionate and scientific decision making, it was an emotional connection to turtles — and, in some cases, a slightly overemotional one — that wound up making certain people indispensable…
Always nice to start the weekend with a happy ending. Great anecdotes and “squee-worthy” pictures at the link.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Science & Technology
There’s a couple of cool posts on terraforming appeared in io9 recently, telling me all sorts of things I did not know.
Part I: “How to Wreck A Planet in 3000 Years”:
… The term “terraforming” was invented by author Jack Williamson in his 1942 short story “Collision Orbit,” published in Astounding Science Fiction. In the intervening decades, its literal meaning (“Earth forming”) has shifted. It still commonly refers to the speculative act of altering non-Earth planets to make them habitable by humans. But anything that drastically changes geography to suit human interests can be called terraforming, even if it happens here on Earth. If only we all had the same interests…
Part II: “The Law of Unintended Consequences”:
Humans can rearrange the shape of our planet almost as easily as the furniture in your living room (or the deck chairs on the Titanic). Of course, it doesn’t always work out as planned…
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The earliest artificial islands are Neolithic in origin. Scots were building crannógs 5,000 years ago. These small islands were built up with timber, stone and earth until a stable, round structure suitable for building a house upon was formed. 20th and 21st-century artificial islands are much larger. They can be tourist destinations (Montreal’s Île Notre-Dame), urban neighborhoods (San Francisco’s Treasure Island), industrial centers (Seattle’s Harbor Island), or even entire provinces (Flevoland in the Netherlands)…
(Before the CEO took advantage of 9/11 security theatre to shut it down, there was an observatory on the 60th floor of the Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston. One of the exhibits was an old-fashioned tabletop diorama showing how Boston looked at the time of the Revolutionary War… and in the center of the much-larger Boston Harbor, there was a tiny lucite brick about the size of a matchbox. That brick, of course, represented the Hancock Tower. A certain percentage of visitors would predictably freak out when the canned voice droning on about Paul Revere and Evacuation Day did the big reveal.)
Best of all, to my biology-biased mind, is the post on “How Salmonella Terraforms Your Intestines“: “The bowels are a difficult place to live. It’s damp and crowded and the landlord keeps trying to kick you out. Find out how salmonella uses the body’s immune response to transform the inside of your body into someplace liveable….” You’re gonna have to click through to read the Firefly joke in context.