Well, it would seem that Arthur Ochs "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, has been really wracking up the big bucks with his enormous business acumen! Why, his grand leadership has led the Times to post a decline in advertising revenue of 3.2% in August alone! That is some skill, that is! Hey, will the last investor leaving the Times please remember to flush? Thanks!
Media | Gaius Sunday, 16 September , 2007 | 
Comments (1)
All in all it was just a brick in the wall.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall."You! Yes, you! Stand still laddy!"
(Roger Waters (Pink Floyd), Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1)
You! With the knitting needles! Just stand still! In probably the most insane bit of bureaucracy run completely amok in Britain since the great mince pie caper, the "Safety Police" have taken away knitting needles from folks waiting in a hospital waiting room. Because those darned things might hurt someone. Or something.
For three years it has been a simple way for hospital visitors to make a difference while they wait.
Patients and relatives - indeed anyone handy with a pair of needles - have been asked to knit a small square to be turned into blankets for local charities.
But that was until the health and safety brigade heard what was going on.
Although no one has so much as nicked a finger as a result of the scheme at Congleton War Memorial Hospital in Cheshire, officials have decided the knitting needles are too sharp to be used safely.
Instead, anyone looking to while away a few minutes must ask permission at the hospital's reception before being handed the supposedly hazardous equipment.
Local people, knitting enthusiasts and campaigners against political correctness joined forces to condemn the unlikely crackdown.
Best of all is the response the Daily Mail got from the local idiots officials who banned the knitting:
Bernie Salisbury, director of nursing and operations at East Cheshire NHS Trust, said: "We believe this sensible and proactive measure will avoid preventable accidents."
Yep. There sure are a lot of tragic knitting accidents every year. Why the death toll is positively staggering. Why, it's almost like a Saturday Night Live skit. Oh, that's right. It is, you idiots. Why don't all of you go run with scissors or something?
The Crabitat has been under another very concerted siege by the spammers for a few days now. I have just had to change a few script permissions because they were managing to get through all the defenses. I'd appreciate it if any readers could try to comment on this post to make sure I only blocked the cretins and not the real people. If you cannot post a comment, shoot me an email at comments (the usual) bluecrabboulevard (dot) (the usual).
I figure real humans can figure that out.
Green acres is the place to be
Farm living is the life for me
Land spreading out,
so far and wide
Keep Manhattan,
just give me that countryside.
(Vic Mizzy, Green Acres Theme)
Well, it isn't exactly acres. Okay, it isn't even close to one acre. It was a whopping 800 square feet of land. A working "farm" built in a backyard in Brooklyn, New York by a man writing an article for New York Magazine. It was the ultimate experiment in trying to be a "locavore", or one who only eats food produced locally. All it cost for one month's worth of eating was about $11,000, untold hours of labor and worry since about March, 29 pounds of weight in a month and some real risk to his marriage. In the end, though, Manny Howard, a freelance writer, got his story.
At 6:40 a.m. on August 8, the tornado hit my house in Brooklyn. Most people viewed it as a snow day in summer, a meteorological oddity. Not me. After a sleepless night listening to the wind and the rain intensify, I watched the sky turn green, then heard the hemlock tree in the yard next door split in two, clip the gutter on the third floor of my house, and bounce off the roof of what used to be our garage and had come to be known as “the barn.” As the wind torqued up even further, the limb of an oak torpedoed the most productive quarter of my vegetable garden, smothering a thicket of tomatoes, snapping the fig tree, pulverizing the collard greens, burying the callaloo, and splintering the roof of my main chicken coop.
That’s right, my chicken coop, which happens to be in my tiny backyard farm—800 square feet of arable land.
A tornado hadn’t struck Brooklyn since 1889, when Flatbush was farmland; this one laid waste to the lonely little farm that I had planted in my backyard and that, within days, I planned to rely on as my sole source of food for an entire month.
I started my farm, hereafter referred to as The Farm, in March, with my eye on August as the month I’d eat what I had grown. It was, in original conception, equal parts naïve stunt and extreme test of the idea that drives the burgeoning “locavore” movement. According to this ethos, we should all eat food produced locally, within 100 miles—some say 30—of where we live, so as to save our planet and redeem our Twinkie-gorged souls. Now that the “organic” label has rapidly become as ubiquitous and essentially meaningless as the old “all-natural,” the locavores have established a more sacred code, one meant to soothe our anxieties about what goes into the food we eat.
The philosopher kings of this movement are Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a bracing look at how modern food production has become unmoored from anything natural or normal, and novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who earlier this summer published the best-selling memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family’s yearlong effort to eat only locally produced food in rural Virginia. “Our highest shopping goal,” Kingsolver wrote, “was to get our food from so close to home, we’d know the person who grew it.” Taking inspiration from Kingsolver, Adam Gopnik wrote a story for The New Yorker the week before last about assembling a diet of food produced within the five boroughs of the city. It turned out to be pretty salubrious fare that included neither pigeon nor rat. The city’s Greenmarkets have spawned a backyard industry; within the city limits, there are people raising chickens and growing lettuce and keeping bees for honey, as a way to make a living and feed the food purists.
It is quite a long article, but a fun read. Farm living is really not for everyone, after all. In the End, Howard admits that the "locavore" movement probably won't really go anywhere:
Few, if any, serious locavores would see my experience as having much to do with what they advocate: eating regionally and seasonally in order to save the planet. But I now better understand what will be needed to back up the slogans. Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. It requires a willful abstinence from convenience and plenty, a core promise of the modern world. Our bountiful era is predicated on the division of labor: We don’t sew our own clothes, we don’t build our own houses—and we certainly don’t farm—because we’re too busy doing whatever it is we do for everyone else.
Oh, and when his experiment ended, he sat down to a nice dinner: white wine, short ribs and Washington State oysters. I'll bet it tasted divine.
Environment, News | Gaius | Comments (1)
The French government has issued a warning to Iran and to the rest of the world that it should be ready for a war in the near future. France will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon and appears to be far along in planning to stop it by whatever means necessary.
PARIS (AFP) - The world should brace for a possible war over the Iranian nuclear crisis but seeking a solution through talks should take priority, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday.
"We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," he said in an interview broadcast on French television and radio.
"We must negotiate right to the end," with Iran, he said, but underlined that if Tehran possessed an atomic weapon, it would represent "a real danger for the whole world."
Calling the nuclear standoff "the greatest crisis" of present times, the minister said: "We will not accept that the bomb is manufactured," and hinted that military plans were on the way.
"We are trying to put in place plans which are the privilege of chiefs of staff and that is not for tomorrow," he said but stressed that although any attack on Iran was far from taking place, "It is normal for us to plan" for any eventuality.
In Washington, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates took a more muted approach on Sunday.
"I will tell you that I think the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat … through diplomatic and economic means is by far the preferable approach," he said.
Well, this ought to get the left in this country into full short-knotting mode. But the fact is that unless enough pressure is brought - quickly - on Tehran they will continue their plan to build a nuclear bomb. If they build it, they have made it quite clear that they will use it. If they use it the entire Middle East will be engulfed in a regional war. The people who have refused to face up to the Iranian threat are making war more likely, not less. France appears to have realized that, even at this late date.
Iran, World news | Gaius | Comments (8)
OJ Simpson has been arrested, apparently on armed robbery-related charges stemming from an alleged incident at a casino in Las Vegas.
LAS VEGAS - O.J. Simpson was arrested Sunday on charges related to an armed robbery involving sport memorabilia, police said.
Simpson was arrested shortly after 11 a.m. and is being brought to a police office, Capt. James Dillon said. Police are still determining charges against Simpson.
Several police officers were seen entering the hotel where Simpson is staying; a security guard said police took Simpson out a side door shortly after.
At least one other person has been arrested and police said earlier Sunday that as many as six people could be arrested in connection with the alleged armed robbery that occurred in a room inside the Palace Station casino-hotel on Thursday.
Police say they have recovered at least two firearms and other evidence in their investigation. Other reports indicate that nobody involved in this incident is a very appealing sort of person.
Crime | Gaius | Comments (1)
Hi again, loyal readers! I've been telling all my good fiends about what a blast I've been having getting the real word out to the world about Zimbabwe. (I suspect Kim and Hugo envy my mastery of the English language.) The last two letters have been very well received so I'll just keep writing them. Anyway, I have some more great news about my country I thought I'd share.
One of the areas we take very seriously here in Zimbabwe is the environment. It is one of the cornerstones of my regime, in fact. And I am proud to announce a grand, new initiative that is really helping to clean things up in the city of Bulawayo. You know, that city government has been taken over by opponents to my enlightened rule. But I am a big man and I hold no grudges. So when I heard they had a problem with raw sewage fouling the water table, I did something about it right away! And the cleanup is progressing really, really well. I must say, the residents of Bulawayo are really stepping up and drinking as much of the sewage as they can get since we cut off the other sources of drinking water! But see how twisted the reporting is on this popular and hugely successful environmental cleanup?
It did not smell too bad and her family had not become sick, even after drinking it for the past two months. “Some people say it is sewage, but they may be making it up,” she said as she heaved a 25 litre drum up the slope and into a wheelbarrow. In any case she, like many of the poorest people in Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo did not have a choice: no water has flowed through the pipes in some neighbourhoods since July. A water expert who accompanied The Times to one of several boreholes in the impoverished Cowdray Park area of the city said that the liquid at the bottom of the pit was indeed sewage that had seeped through the soil from a nearby treatment plant. As the level of ground water sinks, the thousands who come to find water are forced to dig their impromptu wells ever deeper. All around were puddles and holes.
Critics of President Mugabe say that he is using water as a tool of political repression. In the early summer heat of the semi-arid western provinces of Matabeleland, the city of about 800,000 people is fast running out of water. Three of its five main reservoirs have dried up. The fourth is expected to be empty next month and the last one will be able to supply only 16 per cent of the city’s already tightly rationed needs. “If we have even a mediocre rainy season this summer we are faced with the spectre of Bulawayo literally shutting down,” said David Coltart, MP of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
See all those false accusations? I told you I don't hold any grudge against those people or I would have cut off the sewage, too! Sometimes, I am just stunned by my own beneficence. I'm a regular prince. So, hey, pay no attention to that British archbishop when he starts whining. He's obviously mistaken about how good things really are here in my little worker's paradise. Well, all for now. I've got to get back to planning my next environmental initiative. We're making great strides in reducing the rodent population!
Yours in Socialist Solidarity,
Robert Mugabe
A British woman living in Hong Kong managed to thwart a plot by one of the reptile minions of the Animal Uprising™. The nefarious scheme involved a poppy-picking python in a local park. Which sounds kind of harmless until you realize that said poppy happens to be the woman's pet pooch.
A British woman fought with a 4.5 metre Burmese python to save her pet dog from being crushed to death on a walking trail in Hong Kong.
Expatriate Catherine Leonard, 41, kicked and punched the snake after seeing it wrap itself around her pet dog, a 20 kg mongrel called Poppy, near her home in the former British colony.
Ms Leonard was walking Poppy and two other dogs on a trail close to a family picnic area in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories last Sunday when the python pounced on Poppy, biting her and coiling itself around her.
After hearing what she described as “a yelping that was like a scream", Ms Leonard, a keen runner who organises amateur marathons, dashed to free the four-year-old dog, kicking and grappling with the snake.
“I’m not sure exactly what I did but I kicked it and I tried to pull Poppy free. The snake was twisted around her, that was the problem,” she said.
Actually, Ms. Leonard, you were lucky. Generally removing a python requires a special tool, the nine-iron. Tasers have also been known to work, but the Animal Uprising™ has been making strides in Taser-proofing their troops. There's always the old stand-by, too: tying the offending snake in a boa knot.
We were above
You standing underneath us
We were not yet lovers
Dragons were smoked
Bumblebees were stinging us
I was soon to be crazy
Eat, drink and be merry
For tomorrow we die
cause were tripping billies
(Dave Matthews, Tripping Billies)
Well, this should rightfully make you nervous. Hallucinating squirrels tripping about the forest. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Fairbanks reader Darleen Masiak recently saw a red squirrel carrying an Amanita mushroom across her deck, presumably to stash it in its midden for the winter. She wanted to know how such a small mammal could survive after eating a mushroom that is so toxic.
Fungus expert Gary Laursen of the University of Alaska Fairbanks confirmed that forest squirrels, both red and flying, cache Amanita mushrooms as well as other "psychoactive" mushrooms that affect the central nervous system. He has dug into squirrel middens in the boreal forest and has found many samples of the mushrooms.
"Many animals are known to go after the psychoactive 'shrooms," Laursen said.
Brian Barnes, a physiologist and the director of the Institute of Arctic Biology, said a squirrel's liver might be able to detoxify the active agents in the mushrooms, but he knows of no evidence for this.
Barnes studies Arctic ground squirrels on Alaska's North Slope. He thinks young male ground squirrels might be eating lots of fungi, including potent ones, as they stir in their dens from hibernation.
The squirrels often emerge from hibernation fatter than when they went in.
"I wonder if, while in their cold and completely dark hibernaculum, Arctic ground squirrels are eating psychoactive mushrooms and whether they respond by experiencing hallucinations, feelings of well being, and laughing fits, as do humans (or so I'm told)," Barnes wrote in an e-mail.
Gee, that's a cheery thought. The problem is that squirrels all share a single group consciousness. They have a hive mind, so to speak. So when one is tripping out, they all are. Which means that at any given moment, the odds of a squirrel being in a drug-induced haze approach unity. We're really going to be in trouble if they start lacing human's food with their stored crops of Amanita mushrooms. In large enough dosages, those are lethal. Squirrels with drug habits might also go a long way toward explaining a ravening case of the munchies.
Mark Steyn looks at the offensively lame speech by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick at the 9/11 commemoration ceremony last Tuesday. He is very amused, while not really being amused at all.
This year I marked the anniversary of Sept. 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn't exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio talk-show colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, "was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States."
"Mean and nasty"? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry's sent back the aubergine coulis again. But evidently that's what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days – the shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn't want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, "was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other."
I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel, and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I'm not sure I could learn to love him. Anyway, I drove on to Boston and pondered the governor's remarks. He had made them, after all, before an audience of 9/11 families: Six years ago, two of the four planes took off from Logan Airport, and so citizens of Massachusetts ranked very high among the toll of victims. Whether any of the family members present Tuesday were offended by Gov. Patrick, no one cried "Shame!" or walked out on the ceremony. Americans are generally respectful of their political eminences, no matter how little they deserve it.
As always, Steyn is worth a thorough reading. Patrick has been savaged by conservatives ever since he made his "all you need is love" speech. In a way he's right. There was a failure to understand. Folks like Patrick fail to understand that islamism is, like many things in the world, basically opportunistic. When they see weakness, they strike. Trying to love and understand them is the ultimate weakness in their world. Their hate is not a result of anything the West does, it is a result of us giving them the opportunity to hate us by failing to understand their evil. And it is, whether Patrick or his fellow travelers understand or not, evil. There is no negotiation, there is no reaching an accommodation. There is no way to get to mutual love.
Doctors do not negotiate with a cancer, they understand it, alright, and they kill it if they can. Because it will certainly kill its host if allowed to go unchecked. There is a failure of understanding here. It just isn't the one Patrick thinks it is.
Civilization, War | Gaius | Comments (1)
The Sunday Times is reporting that the Israeli raid into Syria earlier this month was a highly successful attack on a secret cache of nuclear material in that country. There is some indication that it may have been a nuclear device and that it may have come from North Korea.
IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.
At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.
Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.
The Israeli government was not saying. “The security sources and IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers are demonstrating unusual courage,” said Ehud Olmert, the prime minister. “We naturally cannot always show the public our cards.”
The Syrians were also keeping mum. “I cannot reveal the details,” said Farouk al-Sharaa, the vice-president. “All I can say is the military and political echelon is looking into a series of responses as we speak. Results are forthcoming.” The official story that the target comprised weapons destined for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’ite group, appeared to be crumbling in the face of widespread scepticism.
Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country.
A North Korean ship had discharged cargo labeled as "cement" in Syria only a few days before the attack. This is not an encouraging development. If North Korea is actually shipping nuclear material - bombs or not - to Syria, the Middle East could ignite into a general war sooner rather than later. The US negotiator in the North Korea talks is emphasizing that it is important to get North Korea out of the nuclear business as quickly as possible. That would be a really good idea at this point.
War, World news | Gaius | Comments (3)
US authorities report that they have captured a suspect in the murder of Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha in Iraq.
BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US military in Iraq said it has captured an insurgent believed linked to the killing of a Sunni tribal leader, as violence killed at least 20 people on Sunday after Al-Qaeda warned of a bloody Ramadan.
The suspected Al-Qaeda fighter was detained near Balad north of Baghdad on Saturday, two days after Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha was killed in a car bomb near his home in western Anbar province, a military statement said.
Abu Reesha, a Sunni sheikh, had spearheaded the fight against Al-Qaeda in Anbar and was a key ally of the United States in its battle against the Iraqi affiliate of Osama bin Laden's jihadist network.
The US military named the detained Iraqi man as Fallah Khalifa Hiyas Fayyas al-Jumayli and said he had also been involved in a plot to kill tribal leaders in Anbar.
"He is also reportedly responsible for car bomb and suicide vest attacks in Anbar province, and is closely allied with senior Al-Qaeda in Iraq leaders in the region," the statement said.
The Islamic State of Iraq, which is affiliated to Al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for Abu Reesha's killing in an Internet statement on Friday, and warned it would target all Sunni leaders who support US troops in Iraq.
It also vowed a new offensive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
These are acts of desperation on al Qaeda's part. In today's Opinion Journal, Fouad Ajami, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, has a short profile of a number of Iraqi leaders, including the late Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha.
BAGHDAD–"We liberated the Anbar, we defeated al Qaeda by denying it religious cover," Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha said with a touch of pride and impatience. This was the dashing tribal leader who emerged as the face of the new Sunni accommodation with American power, and who was assassinated by al Qaeda last week. I had not been ready for his youth (born in 1971), nor for his flamboyance. Sir David Lean, the legendary director of "Lawrence of Arabia," would have savored encountering this man. There was style, and an awareness of it, in Abu Reisha: his brown abaya bordered with gold thread, a neat white dishdasha, and a matching headdress. "Our American friends had not understood us when they came, they were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers."
We were in Baghdad, and the sheikh gave me his narrative. There was both candor and evasion in the story he told. Al Qaeda and its Arab jihadists had found sanctuary and support in the Anbar; they had recruited the "criminal elements" and the "lowly," they had brought zeal and bigotry unknown to the Iraqis. Initially welcomed, they began to impose their own tyranny. They declared haram (impermissible) the normal range of social life. They banned cigarettes, they married the daughters of decent families without the permission of their elders. They violated the great code of decent society by "shedding the blood of travelers on routine voyages." The prayer leaders of mosques were bullied, then murdered.
Ajami's article looks at several other important political leaders in Iraq. You might be more than a bit surprised by what you read.
My guess is that there will be more than a few politicians developing a severe allergy to Norman Hsu and the bundling tactics he used in the next few days. Because the Washington Post is now starting to run down Hsu's donor lists. And it is a very curious mix of people. Including complete strangers.
Some donors among the nearly 100 identified this week said they never met Hsu and did not know that their donations had been credited to his fundraising. Others had trouble explaining why they gave the funds to Clinton or could not recall the circumstances in which they met Hsu.
"He called me and asked me if I'd give $1,000. . . . I don't know how you'd say we struck up a relationship. I just knew him," said Henry Rosenberg, a New York City lawyer. Asked if he wanted Clinton, New York's junior senator, to be the next president, Rosenberg said: "I don't know. He just asked me to do it, and I did."
Nay Oo, another Clinton donor for whom Hsu claimed credit, was listed in the candidate's fundraising reports with an address in Daly City, Calif. The home's owner, Ellen Yee, said Oo used to rent a room in the house but hadn't lived there for years. A man who returned a call to Oo's phone and identified himself as Oo said he works in an auto-body shop and does not know Hsu. He said he donated $250 to Clinton at the request of a landlord. "I thought it was going to be a tax write-off," he said.
As the Post points out, none of the individuals is alleged to have done any wrong here. It is a good idea to keep that in mind right now. Because this will almost certainly continue to be looked at under some very bright light. The Post managed to track down about 100 of Hsu's donors so far. The Post is also, despite their resources, well behind Flip, who has been bulldogging this in the blogospere. He's asking questions about a certain investment firm and how it does business now. (We won't perform the obvious wordplay here on the title of Flip's blog!) By the way, if you wonder about Flip's credentials, here they are.
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