HRC FamilyNet | How My Gay 'Brother' Helped Me to be a Better Man:I'll never forget walking to lunch with Bernhart Gearhardt Mingia. It wasn't unusual for women to stop and stare at him. Some would spin on their heels and say, right out loud, "Damn . . . he's fine." [...] He was a 6-foot-2 Ebony magazine cover: lean, athletic, caramel-colored, with thick and wavy black hair, a shiny black mustache, an easy and perfect smile. Bernhart was so magnetic to women, we nicknamed him "Heartburn." Besides those pretty-boy looks, he was charming and smart and funny and brutally honest - one of my best buddies at the paper. And he was gay.
He was the first gay man I'd ever called a friend. And because I'd gotten to know him, I could no longer harbor the hideous stereotypes I was weaned on and had clung to most of my life. Knowing him forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about black manhood. It's because of Bernhart that I'm a recovering homophobe to this day. While I'm a long way from cured, our friendship laid bare my irrational fears and suspicions about gay men for the ugly lies they always were. .....
..... Bernhart could not have completely avoided discussing his sexuality in America, particularly not in black America, where the concept is riddled with tricky, often perilous cultural land mines. History has left black men with more questions than most about their racial and sexual identity. Some are warped and painful to acknowledge, others encouragingly profound.
Are we Clifford Huxtable wannabes? Mandingo studs? Fearless freedom fighters? Emasculated and sometimes violent prisoners of racial circumstance? Icons of social conscience? Moet-swilling rappers? Zillionaire athletes? Absentee fathers? Up through slavery, the civil rights movement and the recent ascendance of the middle class, our collective experience has shown that black men can be anything they want - anything but gay.
CNN.com - U.N. to 'freeze' Iraq sites - Nov. 26, 2002: U.N. weapons inspectors preparing for their first day of work in Iraq after a four-year break say they will "freeze" the buildings they enter to prevent any evidence being smuggled out.
Well ... it's a nice concept, but how on earth can they possibly enforce this without sending the inspectors over with an entire armed brigade, unencumbered by typical UN orders such as, "Don't shoot anyone! Not even in self defense! No, we mean it! Just die if you have to!" 17 people, most of whom will be actual weapons inspectors, can't possibly restrict ingress and egress from a weapons facility or a presidential palace, even with "state-of-the-art" detection equipment. The US would, no doubt, be willing and perfectly able to monitor facilities and report on any people entering and leaving during the inspection time frame, but without troops on the ground, there's not a damn thing we could do about it.
Posted by iain at 01:48 PM
This has all become so utterly obscene that I honestly don't know what to say.
ABCNEWS.com : Nigerian Calls for Death of Writer: The deputy governor of a largely Islamic state in northern Nigeria has called on Muslims to kill the Nigerian writer of a newspaper article about the Miss World beauty pageant that sparked deadly religious riots. "Just like the blasphemous Indian writer Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed," Zamfara Deputy Governor Mahamoud Shinkafi told a gathering of Muslim groups in the state capital, Gusau, on Monday.
Author of blasphemous Miss World article flees Nigeria: The author of an article on the Miss World pageant considered blasphemous by many Nigerian Muslims has fled the country after a violent backlash, a senior source at her former newspaper told AFP. The source, who asked not to be identified, said: "I can confirm to you that she has left Nigeria." [...] Today the mainly Muslim state of Zamfara announced a fatwa calling Muslims to kill the reporter, Isioma Daniel.
I hadn't realized that the author was a woman. None of the previous articles I'd seen had mentioned her sex. That must make things even worse for her; not only did she make fun of Mohammed -- assuming, for some bizarre reason, that people would have a sense of humor about it -- but she's a blasphemous woman in a state where women get stoned for lesser offenses such as adultery (or being raped, as the case may be).
State's fatwa on journalist will not stand: Nigerian Govt: Nigeria's federal government rejected on Tuesday a "fatwa" announced by a mainly Muslim state in the north of the country which called for a journalist to be killed. Zamfara State had said it endorsed an Islamic decree calling for Muslims to slay Isioma Daniel, a fashion writer who offended some Muslims with an article on the Miss World beauty pageant. But Information Minister Jerry Gana, who acts as a spokesman for Nigeria's secular government, dismissed the decree as "null and void" and promised it would not be enforced.
Well, I suppose having the national government state that it wouldn't be enforced at least assures the world that the national government doesn't think this is a good idea. That said, it's a secular government with absolutely no power to enforce that statement. If some religious fanatic somewhere finds Ms Daniel, she will most certainly die.
And then there will probably be more riots.
Miss World chief blames press for Nigeria debacle: The president of the Miss World Organisation, Julia Morley, angrily blamed the international media on Saturday for the collapse of plans to host the pageant in Nigeria. "Quite honestly, you -- not individually -- but you as a group, you pulled Nigeria down and you allowed Nigeria to be humiliated," Morley told reporters at the pageant's Abuja hotel base. The Miss World party was due to leave the hotel later in the night to board a private charter plane to take it to London, the new venue of the show's December 7 grand finale, a Miss World spokeswoman Stella Din said. [.....] In particular, Morley took exception to stories which appeared in the international press about the use of amputation as a punishment by Islamic courts in northern Nigeria. At least three convicted thieves have had their hands cut off in northern Nigeria since the region began reintroducing the Sharia in 1999. Earlier this month rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim told reporters that 13 more people, including nine children under 18, were waiting in jails in Sokoto and Katsina state to have the hands chopped. Morley said this story had been "created" and demanded journalists apologise.
I see.
So apparently, it's the press' fault for reporting -- truthfully -- that Nigeria penalizes thieves by cutting off their hands. Apparently, it's the press' fault that Nigerians felt that the appropriate response to an admittedly ill-timed and poorly executed attempt at religious humor was to slaughter large numbers of fellow Nigerians.
What a grotesque idiot. Assuming that the pageant recovers from this to be held again next year -- one does wonder why they bother, but ... whatever -- they definitely need a new executive director. Preferably one with a brain.
Miss Canada re-enters world pageant: Miss Canada Lynsey Bennett has decided to re-enter the rescheduled Miss World contest, the 22-year-old announced today. Pageant officials said Monday they would allow Bennett to compete in London, where it has been moved after riots broke out in its original location of Abuja, Nigeria. Officials had originally told the Carleton University student that by leaving riot-torn Nigeria early, she had forfeited her right to continue in the pageant. [....] "The only reason why I boycotted going in Nigeria was the situation that we were in with the riots. I didn't agree with the violence that was taking place. I didn't want to be associated with that." Bennett returned to her Ottawa home on Sunday night having lost 12 pounds and plenty of sleep in Abuja, Nigeria, where the pageant was originally to be held.
No comment. Absolutely none. None whatsoever.
Although, you know, the dignified thing to have done would have been to simply cancel this year's edition of the pageant. I mean, how do you manage this? "Well, here we are in good old London, where we moved after Nigerians decided to slaughter each other! Let's celebrate by picking our new Miss World!" You can't mention it without highlighting the utter and absolute triviality of the pageant, and you can't not mention it without slighting the dead. What do you do? How do you finesse this issue?
Trucks ferried bodies from hospitals in Nigeria's northern city of Kaduna for mass burials yesterday as calm returned after deadly riots over the Miss World beauty pageant. Human rights workers helping distraught relatives cope with Kaduna's latest sectarian conflict said Muslims had begun burying their dead as soon as the remains were identified among the more than 200 bodies. [.....] The pageant was hastily relocated to London, but there pageant organizers came up against more opposition, with some media and lobby groups accusing them of having blood on their hands. Glenda Jackson, the Oscar-winning actress turned Parliament member, led calls for the contest scheduled for Dec. 7 to be scrapped. ''The best thing to do after such fratricide and bloodletting is to cancel the competition,'' she said.
Posted by iain at 12:52 PM
Media Relations: bond-ing: it's a family affair/ November 25, 2002
Posted by iain at 07:49 PM
(LA Times, registration required)
High Court to Hear Miranda Challenge: Maybe you don't have a right to remain silent after all.
The Supreme Court in its landmark Miranda opinion ruled that police must respect the rights of people who are held for questioning. Officers must warn them of their right to remain silent, and, equally important, honor their refusal to talk further. But that widely known rule is about to be reconsidered in the high court in the case of a farm worker here who was shot five times after a brief encounter with police. Legal experts say the case has the potential to reshape the law governing everyday encounters between police and the public.
[.....] The Miranda decision grew out of the 5th Amendment, which says no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." This has long been known as the right against self-incrimination. The Supreme Court in the 1950s and '60s struggled in a series of cases to decide whether a person's confessions to the police had been voluntary or compelled. Often, a suspect claimed to have been beaten, but the police denied it. In one case, five members of a Los Angeles family had been held in jail for more than a week before one of them talked. In frustration, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced a broad new rule in Miranda vs. Arizona. He said that because police questioning is inherently coercive, officers must warn suspects of their rights before questioning begins. His opinion and others that followed it described the so-called Miranda warnings as limitations on the police.
But all along, some lawyers and law professors have questioned whether the Miranda warnings themselves are a constitutional requirement. [...] "Contrary to the 9th Circuit's conclusion, there is no 'right to silence,' " said Oxnard's lawyer Alan E. Wisotsky. Since Martinez was not prosecuted for anything he said, his rights were not violated by Sgt. Chavez, he concludes.
[.....] However, "the fact that a federal appellate court has allowed [a lawsuit] for Sgt. Chavez's brief, comparatively benign questioning demonstrates the need to clarify the law," said Charles Hobson of Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. Klein, of the University of Texas, filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the National Police Accountability Project. She argued that innocent people will be particularly vulnerable if the court rules the Constitution does not forbid coercive police questioning. Criminal suspects still can insist their incriminating statements not be used against them at trial. But an innocent person who is held for questioning would have no right and no remedy, she said.
Well, that will be interesting. If applied as the lawyers for Oxnard would have it, the result would be that only the guilty would have constitutional rights. As long as the state didn't actually charge someone, the police would be free to question someone as coercively as they would wish.
To be sure, the facts of the case do complicate the issue. On the one hand, given that the case is what it is, siding with Oxnard is tantamount to saying, "Yes, the police may torture people to get information from them, but they may not use that information at trial." Thus, you could get a full confession, which would then be suppressed, and the person would go free. All the fun of police brutality, with none of the nasty side effects ... as long as you make sure not to arrest the person you torture -- pardon me, the person that you coercively question.
Overruling Miranda might produce an interesting effect. Certainly, it would be more honest. But given that two or three generations of Americans have grown up with that encoded into their brain, not only might state legislatures feel the need to pass a state version of Miranda, but it's entirely possible that Congress might feel some pressure to pass an explicit constitutional amendment with those very words. Our Lord High Minister of Injustice would fight any such attempt, of course, as would, in all likelihood, Our Glorious Leader. And pretty much every single police department in the land would be against it.
... But.
Police associations, and individual police officers themselves, only contribute so much to campaigns. It would be an issue on which major corporations would probably take no position -- or even support a pro-amendment side. In short, it could actually be an issue in which Congress felt free to do as their conscience dictated. (Mind, I wouldn't give a plugged nickel for some of those alleged "consciences" ... but that's another issue.)
I suspect that a bare majority of the court may wind up supporting Miranda, and siding against Oxnard -- again, primarily because of the facts of the case. The Court surely cannot support the ludicrous contention that the Constitution only applies to those who are charged with crimes.
... Can it?
Posted by iain at 12:21 PM
And the world says: Well, DUH!
(NY Times, registration required)
Religious Violence in Nigeria Drives Out Miss World Event: After days of sectarian violence linked to the Miss World beauty competition in Nigeria, the organizers announced late tonight that the pageant would be moved to London "in the overall interest of Nigeria and the contestants." [.....] The Nigerian Red Cross said today that 500 people had been treated in hospitals and that more than 3,000 had been left homeless by the fighting, which began Wednesday.
The death toll remained uncertain because some bodies of people killed by civilians or security forces were thrown down wells or taken away and burned, residents told Reuters. Mosques and churches were said to have been burned to the ground. And today, a Reuters correspondent reported seeing 13 more bodies on the dusty streets of the city.
The persistent violence apparently deepened official fears that the Miss World contest could not continue without the risk of more strife and bloodshed.
What I'm wondering, frankly, is how on earth they plan to get the women out of the country. It certainly won't be safe to travel the streets in any vehicle for some time to come. It's very likely that the mere appearance of the women in public, unless they're fully covered in extremely conservative burqas so as not to be identifiable (92 women leaving that hotel all at once? yeah, right) will be seized as an excuse to start up with more violence.
Maybe they'll get lucky.
Posted by iain at 12:46 AM
ABCNEWS.com : White House Loosens Clean Air Rules: The Bush administration relaxed air pollution regulations and proposed other changes Friday to make it easier for older factories, refineries and power plants to modernize without having to install expensive new anti-pollution equipment.
Nice to see those 2002 campaign contributions paying off, isn't it? And so quickly!
And just think: if 35,000 voters in just three states had voted differently (or, you know, not at all), the administration wouldn't be doing this because it would almost certainly have been reversed by Congress.
Like they say, you get what you pay for.
Posted by iain at 12:37 AM
9-11 Hijackers: A Saudi Money Trail?: The FBI is investigating whether the Saudi Arabian governmen -- using the bank account of the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat -- sent tens of thousands of dollars to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers, according to law-enforcement sources.
But they're our friends!
No, really.
No. REALLY.
Just because all of the September 11 terrorists were from there, and they're funding all those madrassas and now it looks like they may have been funding the terrorists directly ....
... Oh, dear.
In any event, it looks like actions are beginning to have consequences ... sort of, anyway.
(Chicago Tribune, registration required)
Saudis face tough new visa rules: Getting permission to enter the United States can be tough if a person lives in one the seven nations the U.S. deems a "state sponsor" of terrorism. The same goes for visitors from 26 other countries who also can be subjected to "special processing" because of terrorism or other concerns. But it is would-be visitors from Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally and a nation that does not appear on either of those government lists, who are being singled out for special scrutiny in the sweeping new homeland security legislation passed by the Senate this week. Under the legislation, which is on its way to President Bush's desk, every visa application filed at the U.S. Embassy or Consulate in Saudi Arabia will be reviewed by an official there from the new Department of Homeland Security before it can be approved or rejected.
Saudi Arabia is the only place in the world where hands-on scrutiny of visa applications by homeland security officials is mandated by the new legislation, which seeks to better protect Americans against possible terrorist attacks by consolidating 22 federal agencies. [...] But government officials who worked on the homeland security bill, and those at the State Department who deal with visas, say the legislation's special scrutiny of visas for Saudis is largely political and symbolic and will have little real impact.
Oh, I see.
Then why on earth are they bothering? If it's only meant to be symbolic, then as a symbol, it fools Americans into thinking that it means something, while making the Saudis feel insulted, thus accomplishing nothing useful at all. What's the bloody point?
One does wonder, though: exactly how symbolic will the provision remain if an actual direct link is found between the Saudi government and the terrorists? I should imagine that the Saudis would do something to punish those members of the royal family, in order to stay somewhere near our good graces ... but on the other hand, given the influence of radical clerics and their followers within that country, they can't be too harsh.
Eventually, of course, the Saudi family is going to be forced to choose to throw its lot in with the radicals in order to maintain its wealth and what power it has. After all, even though they might prefer to throw their lot in with the west ... well, we don't actually live in their country in any meaningful numbers, now do we? Mind, I don't imagine that throwing their support behind the radicals will help them all that long; at this point, pretty much everyone regards them as corrupt and ineffective -- the West considers the House of Saud to be corrupt and ineffective managers of their government, and the radicals consider them to be corrupt and ineffective guardians of the holy sites of Islam. Pretty much your lose-lose situation they've got going.
Posted by iain at 12:29 AM
Tavis Smiley
CP: What's the biggest difference between BET and NPR?
TS: My audience on BET was overwhelmingly African-American -- not exclusively, a lot of white people watched, but overwhelmingly African-American. At NPR, it's the exact opposite. At NPR, the demographics are very clear. They have the most educated listening audience of any radio network. They have the wealthiest audience per capita -- NPR listeners make more money than anybody in the country. So, that makes sense -- you got more education, you make more money. They have the whitest audience and so I have to do a show every day that is designed to bring in more people of color to the network and to raise those issues for those listeners of NPR who happen to be persons of color, who've not had a show that addresses their concerns. So, my mission and mandate is to bring in more people of color, but again, that means I have to be authentically black, but not too black.
... I don't even want to think about the mental conniptions you'd have to manage to do that over the air on a regular basis, especially coming from BET to NPR.
In any event he seems to manage it well enough.
Posted by iain at 03:14 PM
(NY Times, registration required)
Body-Conscious Boys Adopt Athletes' Taste for Steroids: They want to be buff. They want to be ripped. They want to glisten with six-pack abs and granite pecs like the hulks on Wrestlemania. But more than ever, American boys are trying to find designer bodies not just in a gym but also in a syringe of illegal steroids, or a bottle of the legal equivalent from a mall nutrition store, law enforcement officials, doctors and teenagers say.
[.....] it is in the high schools of middle America, and the gyms that cater to students off campus, where use of body-enhancing drugs has taken off — particularly among nonathletes. And for all the recent concern about an epidemic of youth obesity, the mania over instant bulk shows another side of the struggle for self-image. "Everybody wants to be big now," said Zeb Nava, a senior at Clearfield High School who has added nearly 50 pounds of muscle mass over the last two years by weight lifting, he said, adding that he had avoided all supplements. "The majority now are guys that don't do it for sports. They do it for girls. For the look."
Nearly half a million teenagers in the United States use steroids each year, according to the latest national survey done for federal drug agencies. While the use of other illegal drugs has fallen or leveled off, the number of high school seniors who had used steroids within a month increased nearly 50 percent last year, the survey found. Among high school sophomores, steroid use more than doubled nationwide from 1992 to 2000, according to the annual survey used by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. Another survey, done last year for Blue Cross Blue Shield, found that use of steroids and similar drugs increased by 25 percent from 1999 to 2000 among boys ages 12 to 17. This study, a national survey of 1,787 students, also found that 20 percent of the teenagers who admitted taking body-enhancing drugs did it because they wanted to look bigger, not because of sports.
Preston Alberts, a senior at Clearfield High who has been working with weights in the school gym for three years, said he had seen a different kind of lifter of late in the weight room: the vanity bodybuilder. "We notice a lot of kids now, they just want this certain type of body — with the abs and the ripped chest — and they want to get it quick," Mr. Alberts said.
Body image disorders: not just for women and gay men any more!
So in a few years, we can expect a truly unusual rash of shorter-than-expected men, sterility, interesting hormone induced cancers, lots of gynecomastia (heh. not quite what you meant by "big pecs", is it, guys?) and other fun medical conditions in the Youth of America! Joy!
Posted by iain at 02:41 PM
Disclaimer: although I visit Lakeview a lot, I don't actually live up there. That said ...
Gay aldermanic race looms (Chicago Sun Times, November 15, 2002): Chicago would have its first openly gay alderman under a political deal in the works that has touched off a civil war in the gay community. Ald. Bernard Hansen (44th), who has already announced his political retirement, is planning to resign from office before the Feb. 25 aldermanic election. That would pave the way for Mayor Daley to appoint Hansen's handpicked successor, Tom Tunney, and give Tunney, the owner of Ann Sather's Restaurants, a leg up on his opponents. The problem is, Lake View's gay activists have already pledged their support to another openly gay candidate, attorney Richard Ingram. They call the Hansen-for-Tunney swap a backroom deal that has the potential to divide and conquer gay voters and pave the way for a straight candidate to claim the 44th Ward seat. "He's being looked upon as an Uncle Tom,'' said Rick Garcia, political director of Equality Illinois, one of the largest gay and lesbian rights groups in the Midwest. "He's being appointed by regular Democrats when there's already a gay candidate in the race. That makes two gay candidates. That paves the way for, maybe, their real candidate. What the gay community needs is a strong, outspoken advocate with a proven track record. Tom Tunney has been gracious and generous, but he has never been on the front lines. He will do what he's told."
Since when did "the gay community" decide that not only did it need to speak with one voice, but it needed to make the same choice? When did we decide that we needed Equality Illinois (or anyone else, for that matter) to make up our minds for us? Did we somehow annoint them? Was there an election, and some of us just weren't told about it?
I certainly don't deny that all of these organizations have worked hard and long. I certainly don't deny that they're entitled to their own points of view on this matter.
Then again, so are the other residents of Lakeview, gay and straight. Leaving the value of relative gaiety aside for the moment, it's also possible -- just possible -- that a straight person might be a good representative for everyone. Or that Tunney might be. Or that Ingram might be. Surely the residents of the district are entitled to make their own judgements on this matter.
Disclaimer 2: I have met Tom Tunney, very casually. Nice guy. Frankly, my only concern about it, were it something that directly concerned me, would be where on earth he'd find the time to be an alderman. The man is run to a frazzle with the businesses he's got. His chain of restaurants is actually expanding. How on earth would he manage to fold in another nearly-full time job under that banner?
(NOTE: Sun-Times articles last on the server for only one week. Unfortunately, the article was removed from the Sun-Times public server the day after I found and posted the link.)
Posted by iain at 12:44 PM
The Scientist :: Free databases targeted: Bowing to pressure from commercial publishers and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), the US Department of Energy on November 4 closed the PubScience database. Patterned after the National Library of Medicine's PubMed, PubScience had provided free access to research publications on the physical sciences, creating unfair competition for commercial databases, publishers argued.
"The introduction of a free product, even an inferior one, runs significant risk of driving out cost-based products and therefore eliminating competition, resulting in a lack of choice for users," according to David LeDuc, public policy director of the SIIA. LeDuc told The Scientist, "cost pressures were already there" for SIIA members because of PubScience.
SIIA says that PubMed is safe from their efforts, which are now focused on other federal databases in the fields of law and agriculture. The National Agricultural Library's AGRICOLA database is most likely next to be targeted, LeDuc said. "PubMed is more statutorily sound," he explained, because PubMed was created before more recent Federal regulations that require the government to back off if proposed projects compete with private sector offerings.
And if you believe that, I've got some swampland in Florida that you'll just love....
The plain fact is, AGRICOLA predates most of the commercial science databases, as well. It is, after all, more than 30 years old, although free access to it is more recent. However, it has been freely available for more than ten years; why did publishers only just notice it? For that matter, free access to MEDLINE (the database behind PubMed) is less than ten years old; it would make much more sense to target PubMed. According to their own arguments, they would be on considerably more sound legal ground; they can even demonstrate economic damage. Once free access to PubMed was available, other vendors had to lower their prices for what they charged for access to MEDLINE. (Institutions in particular are willing to pay for other ways to use MEDLINE because the PubMed interface and searching structure, from a professional viewpoint, are ... inefficient, to put it kindly.)
The reason the software and publishing industries went for PubScience and are heading for AGRICOLA is that they're both relatively obscure. PubScience was, yes, new, and AGRICOLA is agriculture-focused, so the public at large really won't care if you restrict them to some sort of paid access. After all, the people who will be using them primarily are scientists and other professionals. While it's true that the principal users of MEDLINE are doctors and other clinicians, it's also true that the government has made a concerted effort to market PubMed to the public, as a way of finding more, and more reliable, information about their own medical conditions. The public -- and by extension, Congress -- are likely to care a great deal if industry starts targeting their access to information regarding their health.
It will be interesting to see exactly how they target AGRICOLA. The National Agriculture Library, for reasons of their own, doesn't completely separate their online catalog from their journal article citation index. If the industry decides to go after the database as a whole, they may actually find themselves up against other industries, as well as most universities. They're unlikely to allow the industry to set a precedent that will say, in part, "you have no right to allow free public access to your online catalog" without some sort of fight.
Posted by iain at 11:08 AM
CTV.ca - More than 50 dead, 200 injured in Nigeria riots: More than 50 people have been killed and 200 injured in violent demonstrations in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna. Muslim rioters stabbed onlookers and torched churches in the protests, which were sparked by an article about the upcoming Miss World pageant. More than 50 people were stabbed, bludgeoned or burned to death in Kaduna's predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods and at least four churches were destroyed, Nigerian Red Cross President Emmanuel Ijewere told The Associated Press. [...] The riots were sparked by a newspaper article published in ThisDay newspaper, which questioned the reasoning behind Muslim groups' objections to the Miss World pageant, which is scheduled to be held Dec. 7 in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. "The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity. What would (the prophet) Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from among them," said the article, which appeared in the paper Saturday. The riots began Wednesday, when Muslims torched ThisDay's Kaduna office in retaliation.
Good grief. All of this over an article.
If a pageant had been protested here, it would only ever have been a protest by groups objecting that the pageant objectified women. And it would likely have only ever been a protest.
Apparently, to protect women from the effects of their vanity and to avenge the insult to the prophet, it's necessary to kill quite an astounding number of people who had nothing to do with the pageant or the article or anything else relevant. Some of whom were Muslim themselves, in all likelihood; the violence seems to have been thoroughly indiscriminate.
You know ... it's not even necessary to have a sense of humor about one's religion to realize that a reaction like this to an article is simply wrong. Of course, the article was, in all likelihood, just an excuse. According to the BBC (see the sidebar on Sharia), this is a region of Nigeria prone to sectarian violence -- more so than the rest of the country, even -- and many of these rioters were probably just waiting for a trigger, an excuse of any sort. And it is true that the area had been on a slow boil about the pageant for months, and the pageant had run into other difficulties as well.
But still ...
THISDAY (Nigeria) Online - An Apology to All Muslims...To all our Muslim brothers and sisters, Assalamu Alaikum Wa Rahamatul-Llahi Wa Barakatuhu. May the peace and blessing of Allah be upon you all. With all sense of responsibility, sensitivity and respect for all Muslims, the staff, management, editors and Board of THISDAY Newspapers apologise for the great editorial error in last Saturday's edition on Miss World Beauty Pageant. We are sorry that the portrayal of the Holy Prophet Mohammed (SAW) in a commentary written by one of our staff was not only unjustified, but utterly provocative. The supervising editor made an attempt to remove the offensive portion during the editing process. But we must say that this time, technology failed us, and gravely too. When we realised that the publication had gone to the market, we did not wait to be reminded. The Editor promtply issued an apology and retracted the story . This was published on the front pages of Monday and Tuesday editions. But many thought the apology was insufficient... We therefore seek the understanding of our Muslim brothers and sisters and sincerely hope that in the spirit of the Holy month of Ramadan, and in the interest of our beloved country, Nigeria, we would show forgiveness and understanding.
Unfortunately, a hope in vain.
UPDATE, 11:37am CST
Red Cross: About 100 killed in religious rioting sparked by Miss World article: Christian youths retaliated against Muslims in this northern city Friday in the third day of riots triggered by a newspaper article about the Miss World pageant. Red Cross officials said about 100 had died and 500 were seriously injured in the violence.
Protest Violence Spreads to Nigerian Capital: Violence in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna over the Miss World beauty contest has spread to the capital. Muslims took to the streets of Abuja following Friday prayers, setting cars and shops ablaze and erecting barricades. The French news agency reports paramilitary police are on the scene. The unrest took place not far from the hotel where beauty contestants are staying.
How nice. Waiting until after Friday prayers to go riot. Sets a lovely example, really.
Posted by iain at 01:40 AM
ABCNEWS.com : S.Africa Prison Gangs Use AIDS Rape as Punishment: South African prison gangs are using HIV infection as punishment, ordering gang members carrying the AIDS virus to rape disobedient inmates in a ritual known as "slow puncture," officials said Thursday. A spokesman for the Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons confirmed that the new practice first came to light about six months ago and was believed to be spreading.
The inspectorate's director Gideon Morris told a government commission on Wednesday that the rape would be carried out by one person, or sometimes several. "They give him a 'slow puncture', meaning he will die over a period of time," Morris said. "It's a new phenomenon." [...] Morris said it was difficult to say whether AIDS was now the chief cause of death in South African prisons, noting that many prisoners who die of AIDS are listed as dying of natural causes. He did note, however, that the number of inmates dying of natural causes in jail has risen sharply over the past seven years, jumping from 186 in 1995 to 1,169 last year.
Good grief.
I suppose, given the proportion of the overall population that's HIV positive or diagnosed with active AIDS, there's no economic or reasonable way to separate the positive prisoners from the others. That would especially be true if the disease biases downward economically and into the prison population in anything like the same ways that it does here.
Posted by iain at 10:32 PM
Budget Irony: And the Envelope, Please . . . (washingtonpost.com): The Bush White House has praised Congress's failure to pass new spending bills that would increase the federal budget. "There's a new sheriff in town, and he's dedicated to fiscal discipline," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. If you disagree with the new sheriff's budget maneuvers, however, you should probably let the White House know with a phone call rather than a letter. One victim of the president's fiscal discipline, it turns out, is the White House mail operation. Officials on the House Appropriations Committee say there are no fewer than 17 trailers storing unopened mail addressed to the White House. Those familiar with the problem say that in the absence of adequate funds to screen for anthrax, the mail is piling up.
... Well, that's a different type of excuse for not opening one's mail. Especially since there hasn't been a sign of anthrax in the mail for well over a year now.
I wonder if there are different addresses for White House mail. One address for personal mail, one address for political mail, one address for bills (hey, a physical plant that size takes money to run) .
It's also interesting to note that the praised fiscal discipline seems to apply to everyone but the White House itself. I mean, an $18 million dollar increase over base? Just imagine the really impressive budget deficit we'd have if all the different government branches made that sort of request. And if the White House really only needs $3.5 million for a permanent facilities improvement, what on earth is the other $15 million for?
(I'm not even going near the AmeriCorps pledge mess at the end of the above-linked article. I don't understand the reason you'd offer an optional pledge, if it's truly optional -- which I strongly doubt, in this political climate . The reasons for the textual changes however -- all of them -- are painfully obvious.)
Posted by iain at 04:11 PM
FindLaw's Writ - Cassel: The Shameful Treatment Of The Seventeen-year-old Sniper Suspect: The race is on to get capital murder convictions and the death penalty for the two Beltway sniper suspects, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. Indeed, in a blatant case of the cart driving the horse, the jurisdiction for their trials was chosen with the "ultimate sentence" (in Attorney General John Ashcroft's words) in mind (as recent columns for this site by Tobias Barrington Wolff and Mark Allenbaugh have detailed). By now, it seems certain that both will be tried in Virginia where, unlike Maryland or federal courts, juveniles can be sentenced to death. Considerations of how the two can receive a fair trial have given way to a rush to execute as soon as possible. While this is unseemly enough, it is even more troubling for the system to be treating seventeen-year-old Malvo the same---indeed, even worse than---forty-two-year-old Muhammad. [...] In short, Malvo has not been afforded the protections even the law of Virginia gives to juvenile defendants. For all the prosecution's invocation of "the law," they sure don't seem to be following it.
And I predict that the reaction of the peoples of Virginia to such violations of a person's legal rights will be: And we should care about this ... why, exactly? After all, he murdered some of us! he admitted it!
Well, yes, he does seem to have, doesn't he? Mind, under normal circumstances, I'd think that it would be likely that the fact that the police blocked Malvo's guardian ad litem's attempt to see him would be an absolute bar to admission of his statement into evidence.
Of course, as the writer points out, it is somewhat ... unlikely that things unfolded as Malvo seems to have indicated. The problem being, because of the way things were carried out, it's unlikely that evidence that either supports or contradicts his story actually exists. (I would dearly love to know if those cognitive and psychological tests mentioned by the author have ever been carried out on an adolescent not showing obvious signs of some sort of mental difficulties. I'd be willing to bet that the state would fight any such effort to the extremes of its abilities.)
I'm not saying that I think he's innocent. Or guilty for that matter. (Because, you know, an actual trial might be nice. Of course, he's not going to get anything pretending to be a fair trial in Virginia, in the counties in which all of those people were killed, in a region where literally everyone old enough to understand what was going on was terrified. Of course he's not.) Assuming that a fair trial can be held, if he's found guilty, then the law will do with him what it will.
But my goodness ... supposedly, under the laws of every state in this land, we're "innocent until proven guilty." If that's the official stance of the state, shoudn't the state at least pretend that it believes in it?
Posted by iain at 09:57 PM
Cost of cussing going up.... the cost of cussing is about to go up. Anyone caught swearing in public could face a fine up to $300.
Oh, no! Another story about the hell that is Zimbabwe. Mugabe is getting so picayune and paranoid about what he's allowing his people to do and .... oh. Wait. That's not about Zimbabwe. That's about Chicago.
Well, never mind, then.
THIS is the one about Zimbabwe:
New traffic law further hushes Mugabe critics: IT IS official: Zimbabweans are now not allowed to shout, gesture or move when President Robert Mugabe's motorcade passes by. In a measure widely seen as an intensification of repression, the government gazetted new road traffic regulations yesterday that state that when the presidential motorcade passes, anyone nearby "shall not make any gesture or statement within the view or hearing of the state motorcade with the intention of insulting any person travelling with an escort or any member of the escort".
They actually are trying to prevent people from moving whenever Mugabe's motorcade passes by. Well, that ought to be an interesting law to try to enforce. It's getting to the point where the people of Zimbabwe can't do much of anything.
Not that they could do much of anything if they were allowed to, what with the famine that they're having. And on top of that, what little food they are getting in Zimbabwe is being reserved for people with Zanu PF cards -- people of Mugabe's party -- and not being distributed fairly to all, despite government protests to the contrary. I suppose that's Mugabe's method of management now; starve everyone but your allies, and you won't have to worry about the opposition. They won't be strong enough to gesture at your motorcade anyway.
On the other hand, when he's not around, the people of Zimbabwe might actually be allowed to curse on public streets. Mind, most of them would probably be cursing him, so they probably don't get to do that, either.
(For what it's worth, assuming that anyone is minded to challenge it, I should imagine that the Chicago anti-cursing law would be ruled unconstitutional about two seconds after it reached a court. But still ... forced starvation vs stupid anticursing laws ... doesn't quite compare in the same way, does it?)
Posted by iain at 04:20 PM
OK. So, first, there's this.
Wired News: Brits Mull Chipping Sex Offenders: The British government acknowledged Monday that it would consider using implanted ID chips to track sex offenders, raising the specter of forced chipping. [...] Benn's letter said the British government was interested in the future potential of implants to track offenders' movements by satellite and measure their heart rate and blood pressure "to predict criminal activity." Home Office spokesman Matt Brook on Monday confirmed both the existence of the letter as well as its content. "Yes, we're looking at tagging as an option," said Brook. "All the letter is saying is that something like that would be worthy of consideration. Anything that will help us stop these people from re-offending would be welcome."
Sounds horrendous, doesn't it, even for sex offenders. I mean, say that someone committed some sort of violent offense, but has shown no signs of reoffending or violent behavior, served out their sentence, and has been released. All the websites have been updated to tell people that, yes, a sex offender has been released into the wild, but he has been tagged and is being followed by the government tracking service, so all will be well.
And then they discover that police are being called out because the sex offender has taken up jogging. Hey, consistent and elevated blood pressure and heartbeat always means that the person is sexually aroused, which means that they're committing a sex offense, right?
And then one finds the original source material, and realizes that it is, in many ways, quite a bit less than Wired makes it out to be:
Surgical tags plan for sex offenders: Britain is considering a controversial scheme to implant surgically electronic tags in convicted paedophiles amid fears that the extent of the abuse of children has been massively underestimated. Documents obtained by The Observer reveal the Government could track paedophiles by satellite, with a system similar to that used to locate stolen cars. The tags can be put beneath the skin under local anaesthetic and would also be able to monitor the heart rate and blood pressure of the abuser, alerting staff to the possibility that another attack was imminent.
So on the one hand ... it's just convicted pedophiles that they're considering tracking. The program is, therefore, considerably less intrusive than Wired makes it seem.
Nonetheless, it's really an outstandingly stupid use of technology, if they're truly considering using it that way. I'm not even going to argue that pedophiles are technically entitled to their human rights -- for one thing, I don't know British law well enough to know whether or not it's true. I'm only stating that if they do anything more than low level tracking, they're going to discover that it's going to be a massive waste of manpower and resources, because they will be sending people out Every Single Time the person does anything that elevates their heart rate. Running. Walking briskly. Receiving bad news, such as learning that their parents have died. Having technically allowable sex. (Hey, once they're out of prison, they're actually allowed to have sex with other consenting adults of legal age. Who knew? Clearly not the people who put together this program.)
That said, I should imagine that our Lord High Minister of Injustice is looking at that and trying to figure out how he can shoehorn some such program into the "War on Terror." Perhaps tagging all Arabs and Arab Americans in the US....
Posted by iain at 03:51 PM
OK, I do understand the application of this technology. I just don't understand why they're trying to sell it to producers as something that a consumer would actually like -- especially since they specifically talk about the people who pirate movies. I mean, it's not as though such people are thinking, "Hmm ... you know, getting a self-destructing but clearer version would be better than pirating it myself! Why doesn't someone out there make something like this? There's a consumer market for that!" This is clearly aimed at the RIAA and television and movie producers and the like.
It would be fascinating to see if the consumer would be willing to tolerate this, though. Planned obsolescence in something like an automobile is one thing; after all, that simply wears out through use. Buying a DVD and then having it suddenly say, "Nope. Sorry. Your time is up. Go away now," is something altogether different, especially since people are used to something else.
The industry will, of course, try to present this as the same thing as a subscription, but it's not remotely the same. After all, with the subscription to a journal, or even the Columbia House video club, or the like, you still have all the old issues to which you subscribed, if you like. You can read or watch them at any time. If they wear out through the process of time or use, that's one thing, but you don't wake up one day to find a time lock on your magazine.
(via Utopia with Cheese)
Media Relations: craig david and eminem/ November 18, 2002
Posted by iain at 12:29 PM
Now, before I wade into this again, I would like to make a few things absolutely and utterly clear: (1) I am not a member of Augusta National. I don't live in Georgia, I don't make unspeakable amounts of money as do, apparently, most of their members, I'm not a corporate president or CEO that they would invite to become a member. In short, I have nothing to do with them. (2) I don't support their position. I do think that they have a LEGAL right to hold their position, but I happen to think that they're utter nimrods for doing so, especially in this particular way. (3) I am not a member of, nor do I support, the PGA Tour in this matter. As opposed to Augusta National, I do happen to think that the PGA Tour is being entirely hypocritical, purely because they can.
OK? Have we got all that straight? Are ya on mah BEAM, as they say?
Poll shows support for Augusta's right to choose membership - PGATOUR.COM: A majority of the respondents in a national opinion poll commissioned by The Augusta National Golf Club and released Wednesday expressed support for the private club's right to choose its own membership. [...] The poll, released to the media Wednesday by Augusta National, was conducted by the polling company/WomanTrend, a Washington D.C.-based research firm that specializes in studying issues of interest to women. When asked whether -- like single-sex colleges, the Junior League, sororities, fraternities and other similar same-sex organizations -- "Augusta National Golf Club has the right to have members of one gender only," 74 percent of respondents agreed.
Complete poll results: Augusta National poll
A few comments: (1) The poll was paid for by Augusta National, regardless of who carried it out, and quite clearly, the company was directed to produce a poll that would produce results favorable to Augusta National. Let's face it: in this day and age, if the only question asked was "Do you think that Augusta National should admit women to its membership?" it's not terribly likely that the club would be happy with the results, now is it? (2) The phone poll, I suspect -- and it's only a suspicion -- must have been geographically targeted in some way. After all, how likely is it that you would find 200 people who play golf in a random sampling of 800 people? It's a sport with a fairly sharp upward income bias in a country with a fairly sharp income divide. The pool of respondents is odd in many ways, really. 40% of respondents labeled themselves as "conservative", 78% were white, and 10% had an income of $90,000 or above. Now, really, in a theoretically random sample of 800 people, how likely is it that you would get a sample that looks like that? (If nothing else, it would seem a little odd, just because they managed to find 800 people who would actually participate in a very odd 50-plus question phone poll about golf. A poll that not only must have taken a fair amount of time to get through, but one that started out with constitutional questions, for heaven's sake.)
PGATOUR.com Golfweb - Is the Augusta National poll misleading?: ..... As the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, Johnson knows that, above all, golf is a game of integrity. So it is astonishing that Johnson would stoop to commissioning and touting a poll that is such a blatant effort to con the public as the one released Wednesday in support of his stand against opening Augusta to women members. [...] For starters, more than half of the 800 people surveyed nationwide could not remember seeing, reading or hearing anything about Augusta National in the past four months. [...] Kellyanne Conway, president of WomenTrend, defended the poll's validity. "I'm not going to risk my reputation because a certain client wants a certain result," she said. But others viewed the poll skeptically. "This was a survey to support the views of the people who paid for it," said Nye Lavalle, president of the Sports Marketing Group in Atlanta. Harry O'Neill, chairman of the polling review board of the National Council of Public Polls, said Johnson and Augusta would have served themselves much better "without any questions that were obviously biased or loaded in their wording. They didn't do themselves any favors."
No, they certainly didn't. In fact, it could be reasonably said that by conducting this poll, Augusta National made themselves look like complete idiots. (And regardless of what Ms Conway thinks, WomanTrend looks like total tools -- and I don't even want to think about the sort of mail she'll be getting for participating in this type of ridiculous poll. I wonder what their normal client list looks like, anyway.)
ESPN - Defiant Johnson says Masters will go on no matter what: ..... Johnson said Augusta National might some day admit a woman, but he wouldn't be forced into it. [...] ''This woman portrays us as being discriminatory and being bigots. And we're not,'' Johnson said. ''We're a private club. And private organizations are good. The Boy Scouts. The Girl Scouts. Junior League. Sororities. Fraternities. Are these immoral? See, we are in good company as a single-gender organization.''
Oh, yeah. Because the Boy Scouts and sorororities and fraternities have never been portrayed as exclusionary or discriminatory or bigoted organizations, right?
Good land, the man has his foot so deep in his mouth, he might as well be eating his own kneecap.
What I truly do not understand is why, having taken their completely legal if somewhat backward stand, Augusta National and Hootie Johnson don't just shut the hell up. Yes, it is difficult to stand there and see your name dragged through the mud. (Mud which you yourself created, to strain a metaphor, but I digress.) Yes, the natural urge when people attack you in public is to snap back.
Nonetheless.
Neither side will convince the other that it's got right on their side. One side may have the law, and the other side may have recent history, but neither side will convince the other that it's right. At this stage, Augusta National can gain nothing by engaging in this debate. They've punted all the sponsors to spare them the controversy; CBS and the PGA Tour have shown that they don't give a good goddamn about the controversy and will stand with the club, and they don't really need anyone else at the moment. Why on earth don't they just disengage?
Posted by iain at 11:46 AM
Media Relations: full moon o'er the mpaa/ November 13, 2002
Posted by iain at 01:01 PM
Media Relations: mr and mr nash/ November 13, 2002
Posted by iain at 12:59 PM
Why gay rams are caught on the horns of a dilemma: The ram, symbol of male virility, has been outed by scientists who have shown that it has a gay side to its nature. Studies of sexual preferences in sheep found that between 6 and 10 per cent of rams were attracted to other males rather than to ewes, according to researchers at Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland.
Moving from the popular news to a somewhat more scientific approach ....
In the first ever collaborative effort between Oregon State University, Oregon Health and Sciences University, and the U.S. Sheep Experimentation Center in Idaho, the researchers have made several discoveries about sexual preference in the animals. It began, Stormshak said, when he read research papers done at the SEC concerning rams that preferred males. [...] The experiment focused on a section of the brain referred to as the anterior preoptic area of the hypothalamus. This small section of the sheep's brain, located directly above the optic nerve, seemed to correlate with the sexual preference of the ram. [...] Charles Roselli, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at OHSU, headed up the dissection aspect of the experiment. The sheep sent to him were chosen specifically. "They don't court or mate with females. They only court and mate with males," Roselli said. The hypothalamus has been shown to be important to sexual behavior. "If you destroy that area, you can completely alter their behavior," Stormshak said. What they found when studying this area is that the nerve bundle is much smaller in the rams which prefer males. The nerve bundles being studied were about 1.8 cubic millimeters in the rams that preferred females, and .44 cubic millimeters in the rams that preferred males. An important aspect of the study is that homosexuality does not produce offspring, so researchers believe it is not a genetic trait, but a physical one.
And thence to a certain perspective ...
Kay Larkin and colleagues from Oregon Health and Science University found the difference was in a particular region of the hypothalamus - the preoptic nucleus. The region is generally almost twice as large in rams as in ewes. But in gay rams its size was almost identical to that in "straight" females. [...] The differences are almost identical to those identified by the neuroscientist Simon LeVay in his studies of the brains of gay men. His work has always been considered controversial, partly because the brains he studied were mostly from men who had died of AIDS. So it was not clear whether the differences were related to the disease or to sexual preferences.
At OHSU, according to the above article, they'll start giving pregnant sheep a drug that will prevent "masculinization" of the fetal brain, to see if doing so at an early enough stage will produce more gay sheep. (When done later in fetal development, the brain is apparently too far along for what they do to have any effect.)
I'd imagine that if this does pan out, there will be calls from all sorts of interesting quarter to start giving women drugs that enhance the action of aromatase during pregnancy. (One wonders if that would result in a larger lesbian population. But one digresses.) And within a decade or two, it will become a standard pregnancy supplement, like vitamins or some such. The only people who would then give birth to gay males would be the poor and the odd.
Assuming, of course, that such development in sheep really is a reasonable predictor, and that any such supplement could be made inexpensively, and that it doesn't harm pregnant women and that it doesn't otherwise harm fetal development, and so on, and so on.
Posted by iain at 05:23 PM
-- Discovery Health Channel -- coffee, diabetes: People who drink lots of coffee run a far lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, the disorder that has reached epidemic proportions in the industrialised world, a study says. Individuals who drink seven or more cups of coffee a day are 50 percent less likely to develop this form of diabetes than counterparts who drink two cups or less.
I'm guessing that's because after seven or more cups, you're alternately vibrating your way through the day and making extraordinarily frequent trips to the toilet.
Granted, coffee cups are measured differently than liquids of any other type. For pretty much every other liquid substance in the US, 1 cup equals eight ounces. But for coffee, for some reason that totally passeth all understanding, 1 cup equals six ounces. Thus, instead of 56 or more ounces of coffee per day, you need only drink 42 ounces per day to achieve maximum diabetes benefits.
I think.
Then again, the study was done in the Netherlands. What, one wonders, constitutes a metric cup?
Posted by iain at 12:47 PM
aidsmap - Oral sex has near-zero HIV risk according to new San Francisco study: The risk of a gay man acquiring HIV from oral sex is extremely low according to a US study published in the November 2002 edition of the journal AIDS. [...] On average, the men in the study had had receptive oral sex with three different men in the past six months (range 0 – 400). The overwhelming majority, 98%, of oral sex was without a condom and 35% of men reported getting semen in their mouths, 70% of whom swallowed. None of the men in the study tested HIV-positive, meaning that the individual risk of being infected with HIV by oral sex was zero. As the average number of oral sex partners in the past six months was three, the investigators also calculated the population attributable risk percentage for men with one, two and three partners. Although the population attributable risk percentage increased with the number of partners, it remained extremely low, at 0.18% for one partner, 0.25% for two partners and 0.31% for three partners. [...] The authors of the new San Francisco study conclude that "it is important that health professionals…have valid information to impart to their sexually active clients ... acquiring HIV through fellatio is significantly less risky than from anal sex, and therefore one’s choice of sexual practices do matter."
Nice to know that something that most people do anyway is actually not as high risk as previously believed.
Not for AIDS, anyway.
Posted by iain at 12:23 PM
So it turns out that there's a sport with a competition round that's actually more pointless than the National Hockey League's regular season -- a regular season in which, one notes, eliminates only 14 of the NHL's 30 teams from the playoffs. And what, you might wonder, is the sport with that more pointless competition round?
Sailing, as it happens. Specifically: The Louis Vuitton Cup 2002. The Louis Vuitton Cup is the challenger elimination section of the America's Cup sailing races. (Said cup currently held by New Zealand, I believe.) In any event, the Louis Vuitton Cup starts out with two round robin sections, in which all of the challengers race against each other. And that recently completed round robin eliminated ... one team.
Yes, that's right. They ran two sets of races, all so that they could eliminate Mascalzone Latino, one of the Italian entries.
Having done that all so that they could determine the rankings of the various syndicate teams, from 1-8, you would think they would then send everyone into the bracketed best-of-seven series by using either traditional inverted seeding (1 vs 8, 2 vs 7, 3 vs 6, 4 vs 5) or the less frequently used but still well-known paired seeding (1 vs 5, 2 vs 6, 3 vs 7, 4 vs 8).
No. Of course not. After all, that would make sense, right?
The seeds were separated into groups ranking 1-4 and 5-8, the so-called "Double Chance" and "Single Chance" groups. The #1 and #5 teams, as the leaders of their groups, then get the chance to choose their opponent from those in their group. Given this "choice", top ranked Alinghi had to pick either second ranked Oracle, third ranked One World or fourth ranked and defending champion Prada (each of whom had beaten Alinghi in one or the other of the round robins -- although their loss to Prada was a default because they neither needed nor wanted to run the race) for their quarterfinal opponent. Eighth-ranked Le Defi wasn't even an option.
On the one hand, doing things this way should, in theory, make for more competitive quarterfinals and semifinals. On the other hand, just running with the probabilities and past results, the LV Cup final ought to be an outright humiliation of the team coming out of the "single chance" group. Granted, you can never be sure of results; after all, that's why you actually play the game. But you'd think that the organizers' interests would be better served by aiming for a stronger challenger final, and not stronger early rounds. After all, this is scarcely a major spectator sport; it's not as if you've got paying people in the stands whom you've got to keep happy.
(Who the heck does watch this stuff, anyway?)
And as long as I'm on the minor sports thing, let's gore our own ox, shall we? Let's shall.
I trust that it's no great secret that I'm a figure skating fan, right? I like watching competitions. I like trying to understand what planet the judges have just sailed in from. It's all fun.
But ... well ... No. Just ... no. Never. Please. Enough is WAY too much already. (What sane people would be trying to do something like this in the current economy, anyway? Where would you find the sponsors?)
Posted by iain at 12:53 AM
Democrats ponder lessons of defeat | csmonitor.com: As demoralized Democrats struggle to come to terms with their losses, and begin looking ahead to the 2004 campaign, the challenge they face can be boiled down to two key points: (1) In a post-Sept. 11 environment, President Bush's popularity is a powerful asset to his party, capable of energizing GOP voters and pushing Republican candidates to victory in close states. (2) Aligning themselves with Mr. Bush doesn't do Democrats much good.
I can't imagine why any Democrat would think that aligning themselves with the president would be at all productive. If you've got a choice between someone aligned with the president who is likely to be obstructionist on certain policies as a matter of partisan politics, and someone aligned with the president who is likely to go along with his partisan politics, why on earth wouldn't you pick the second person, just to make the government function better?
That said, I would submit that the Democrats have two problems, neither of which is immediately soluble: (1) as the article notes, the "vision thing" (although that's not quite what they call it) -- Democrats need to articulate a reasoned, sensible opposition position that people can understand and relate to, and (2) the Democrats need A Politician at the head of the party.
The Democrats had, for eight solid years and four consecutive election cycles, one of the best politicians ever created as the head of their party in Bill Clinton. He understood how to articulate policy and how to present it to people. (The fact that he actually liked dealing with policy was just the lagniappe.) He understood the value of taking the message to the people to enable them to understand it at a more personal level, to give the policy not only a face but a personality. This is what the Democrats lack, and what the Republicans almost, but not quite, have. (A reasonable facsimile will, as it seems, do.)
One of the reasons that the Democrats never quite realized what they had is that for both of his midterm elections, Bill Clinton had problems that obscured his value. In 1994, he was pulling out of all sorts of actual political errors, the sort that a new and inexperienced president can make. He tried to push policies through Congress before he managed to get the American people completely on his side, which allowed the opposition to determine many of the terms of debate. For example, the plain fact is that he and his team were absolutely right about the changes that needed to be made to health care in this country. The plain fact is also that you can get a policy through, if the business interests involved are unremittingly hostile -- as they were -- only with overwhelming public support. When the Republicans were able to take control of the terms of that debate, they were not only able to diffuse public support, but to paint the centrist Bill Clinton as a flamingly leftwing liberal, which the country did not want. Thus, Congress was shoved hard to the right ... which the country discovered that it didn't want, either.
During the 1998 midterm elections, l'affaire Monica was reaching its fulminant peak, again apparently diffusing the ability of Clinton to campaign. That said ... it allowed the Democrats to run against the Republicans as the party that forced an inquiry into the president's private life that the public did not want. The Democrats articulated two -- and really only two -- positions: (1) the extremist Republicans needed to be controlled, and (2) the economy was going well, so why would you want change? And it succeeded ... but it allowed the Democrats to dodge the whole "vision" issue one more time.
In the 2000 election, the Democrats chose, once again, to run on those twin positions, especially the economic one (although as we now know, the economy had already started to tank -- however it wasn't apparent at the time). Because of the damage done by the impeachment (and because he personally loathed the man), Gore chose to campaign without Clinton's help, even when the party realized that it was possible to use Clinton selectively in ways that would limit the direct association with Gore. More damaging, Gore chose not to use Clinton's knowledge of campaigning and politics. That said ... it's hard to know what exactly Gore could have done with them. The man will never be good at Clinton's form of gladhanding; he's not comfortable with people in that way. In any event, again, even with no real articulated policy positions, the Democrats won the popular vote, although they lost the electoral college in part through the Supreme Court's fiat.
During the 2002 elections, the situation was extraordinarily difficult in some ways. It's difficult to run against a popular war leader, as Our Shrub is at the moment. It's difficult to run on the economy as your major issue when the party you're running against keeps drowning it out with war talk. And yet ... and yet ... a personable and articulate leader could have done just that. Zogby notes that the Democrats could have used the war as a wedge issue ... but how, exactly? "War vs peace" doesn't exactly get you anywhere with a public that not only wants someone to pay and keep paying for the September 11 attacks, but is not exactly particular about who pays. The only way that would have worked is to emphasize that according to Shrub's own intelligence sources, Iraq seems to not only have had nothing to do with the attacks, but to be actively hostile to those responsible. That's actually a rather sophisticated message to try to get through during a sound-byte campaign. It's an especially difficult issue to win with when you've been blocking the homeland security bill in the name of federal unions, of all things; the Democrats were vulnerable to the charge that they didn't take domestic security seriously, and it was used against them. (Although, that said ... all of these elections seem to have been unusually local. National party ads played up the security issue, but local ads tended to focus on local issues. Bush's 17-day sprint across the country seems to have provided bounce by allowing politicians to associate themselves with him personally, but it's unclear that any of them associated themselves with his policy positions ... or even wanted to.)
In any event, by the next election, the Democrats will need to figure out exactly who they are, what they stand for, what the difference between themselves and the Republicans is ... and how to get that across to the public. (Preferably in a split-15 or a 30-second commercial sound-byte.) And they will need someone at the head of the party who can get all that across, and doesn't mind doing it.
Hope they can find someone.
Posted by iain at 11:10 PM
The Indy Channel - Teen Claims Officer Paid Him $5 To Test Taser Gun: A Morgan County teen claims a police officer paid him $5 to get shocked with a Taser gun. The guns are a new weapon the Brooklyn Police Department has recently acquired, RTV6's Sy Jenkins reported. The incident allegedly happened Oct. 18 at the police department. Ryan Henden (pictured, right), 16, said he has a scar on his stomach that is still visible from the taser shock. [...] Hendon said his bruises are starting to heal and that he now regrets his decision to act as a $5 guinea pig. "No, I don't think so (that it was worth it). Maybe for 10 (dollars)," Hendon said.
How charming. Police brutality in aid of weapons evaluation, with a nice little (and I do mean little) payoff of sorts for the brutalized.
That said .... well, put it this way: I can't say as I knew a single 16-year-old, when I was that age, that would have thought that a tazer burn was worth only $10.
Posted by iain at 12:32 PM
Forbes.com: Bush, Harken board told of insider risks - paper: A week before President Bush sold $848,000 in shares of his former oil company in 1990, lawyers for the firm told directors that insider-trading risks might accompany such sales, the Boston Globe reported on Wednesday. The warning to Harken Energy
Our Shrub: all the business ethics of a rabid squirrel.
Posted by iain at 12:43 AM
