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Book Cliffs

Book Cliffs, Flickr user trosier. East-Central Utah, south of the Uintas and north of I-70.

Enjoy the view.  The valley below is scheduled for fracking, which may not only impact the now-pleasant view, but contaminate the water in Lake Powell (and Lake Mead).  

Even More Book Cliffs photos.


JanF and I team up to bring you news.  Here is a big handful for Sunday evening.  See you with a fresh diary mid-week.  

notes: bombing in abbas, afghanistan? kenya elections?  

The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer

Rolling Stone; Sabrina Rubin Erdely

Blumer, a standout sailor with an unblemished record, was sure she could clear things up. She wrote a statement in the crowded office that described her suspicions about what had actually occurred, and her urgent need for medical attention. Then she obediently left the room so her superiors could discuss the matter. When she was allowed in a few minutes later, Blumer was told that she would be taken to the hospital – but with orders only for a toxicology report, to see if there really were date-rape drugs in her system. “Whether you get a rape kit is up to you,” the female JAG prosecutor cautiously told Blumer, who struggled to make sense of what was happening: The military she’d trusted to care for her wasn’t interested in caring for her at all. She was even more shaken by the JAG’s jarring question later on: “Did you inflict your injuries yourself?”

The implication floored Blumer. “How could anyone even think that I would do that to myself?” she says now. It was ­Blumer’s first glimpse of a hidden side of military culture, in which rapes, and the sweeping aside of rapes, happen with disturbing regularity. And it was her first sense of what lay in store after coming forward as a military rape victim: that she would be treated with suspicion by those charged with helping her, penalized by command and ostracized by her unit. “Once my assault happened,” Blumer says, “my whole future disappeared.”

It’s systemic.


Putin and the monk

Financial Times; Charles Clover


Father Tikhon Shevkunov looks a little too polished to fit the image of the Orthodox Christian monk branded into the western imagination by Dostoevsky. The beard is just unkempt enough, but his chin is a bit too sculpted, his mane of shoulder-length hair too full and flowing, and his TV delivery too flawless to belong to any crazed, self-flagellating anchorite from The Brothers Karamazov. Father Tikhon is a picture of movie-star self-assurance – with a passing resemblance to Russell Crowe.

While Dostoevsky’s monks stuck to their unheated monastic cells, Tikhon is no recluse. When I interviewed him in December, he was back from a visit to China and off soon to Latin America. The whitewashed walls and onion domes of Sretensky monastery, which he presides over in downtown Moscow, is not exactly an ecclesiastical island of contemplation, isolated from the modern world.

Call the monastery, for example, and you will get a switchboard operator. Need to use WiFi? No problem. Walk into an outbuilding and you will see the largest publishing house of the Russian Orthodox church and, since 2000, the best-known and most-used Orthodox website: Pravoslavie.ru.

On church-state relations in Russia – there’s something about Pussy Riot toward the end. h/t to Pastor Dan


Disney Stops Thinking About Tomorrow

New Geography blog; Zohar Liebermensch

ustified Pessimism? – Disney’s pessimistic attitude towards the rate of current advancement comes from a place of truth. New, revolutionary ideas were coming out on a consistent basis in the mid 1900s during Walt Disney’s generation, but near the late 1900s progress as a whole slowed down. Rather than innovating new and fresh ideas, the current generation fine-tunes the revolutionary ideas of their predecessors.

A kitchen today won’t differ too grandly from one in 1980. Although most appliances may be higher quality, they were still there in both eras. Comparing kitchens from 1980 and 1940 shows vast differences. Not only did appliances get sleeker, but you will also not find a microwave, a food processor nor Tupperware anywhere. These are only a few of the many kitchen changes that came to life in that time period. The kitchen only represents a small sector of technology and advancement, but the trend it represents stands.

The oldest members of today’s world lived through the invention or development of the airplane, skyscraper, suspension bridge, radio, television, antibiotics, atomic bombs, and interstate highways. The mid-life individuals went through the first moon landing, the popularization of personal computers and invention of search engines, biotechnology, and cellphones. Participants of the younger generation have seen much up- tuning of these devices, but are greatly lacking in brand new revolutionary inventions.


Happy 100th Birthday, Big Oil Tax Breaks

ThinkProgress; Rebecca Leber

The year 1913 marked the first time a Big Oil subsidy was written into the tax code. The Revenue Act of 1913 allowed oil companies to write off 5 percent of the costs from oil and gas wells beginning March 1 of that year. (For reference, see pages 172-174 of the Act.) A century later, oil companies can now deduct three times this rate, at 15 percent, although the very largest companies no longer qualify. The percentage depletion subsidy also increases when prices are high, at the same time that oil companies enjoy greater profit. It can even eliminate all federal taxes for independent producers.

A Center for American Progress report estimated that closing this tax break would save $11.2 billion over 10 years.


Joe Biden says Bloody Sunday was a moment of clarity for nation, but says fight is not over

AL.com; Kim Chandler

Vice President Joe Biden said that Bloody Sunday was a “moment of clarity” nearly 48 years ago for the entire nation.

“We saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination and violence that still existed in large parts of the nation,” Biden said at a speech at the Martin and Coretta King Unity Brunch at Wallace Community College.

Biden is in Selma today for the annual pilgrimage commemorating Bloody Sunday, the violent 1965 clash between law enforcement and protestors on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during a march for voting rights.


100 Years Of Women’s Rights

National Memo; Allison Brito

Sunday, March 3 will mark the 100-year anniversary of the Woman Suffrage March on Washington by brave women demanding the right to vote. The fight for women’s rights didn’t begin in 1913; in fact, the movement had over 50 years of history prior to this momentous event led by the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Two prominent women in American history-Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton-were introduced by abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson in 1851 during an anti-slavery gathering in Seneca Falls, and from there they began their friendship and partnership. At the Seneca Falls Conference in 1848, Stanton wrote in The Declaration of Sentiments, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice…”

In letters between Stanton and Anthony, Stanton described the challenges she faced in her personal life. Women’s suffrage weighed on these women; the political issue affected their everyday lives, and family and friends began opposing the movement. Nothing would stop them from moving ahead two decades to the founding of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, aimed at promoting amendments to the Constitution that would ultimately give women the right to vote.

Denise wrote an excellent fp post at the orange. I hope to link to a version here when I am done writing.  Auspicious Sunday.  


10½ Favorite Reads from TED Bookstore 2013

Brain Pickings; Maria Popova

A full-brain reading list of cross-disciplinary stimulation.

Once again this year, like last, I had the honor of curating a selection of books for the TED Bookstore at TED 2013, themed The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered. Below are this year’s picks, along with the original text that appears on the bookstore cards and the introductory blurb about the selection:

   ‘I feel…as though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger and larger, throbbing quicker and quicker with new blood – and there is no more delicious sensation than this,’ Virginia Woolf wrote on the mesmerism of books. Gathered here are books to make both hemispheres throb with boundless delight, stimulation, and deliciousness.


‘A concentration camp for little boys’: Dark secrets unearthed in KKK county

The Independent; David Usborne

For years, almost no one at the Dozier School even knew about the burial ground in a clearing in the woods on the edge of campus. It was forbidden territory. The soil here, churned in places by tiny ants, holds more than the remains of little boys. Only now is it starting to give up its dark secrets: horror stories of state-sanctioned barbarism, including flogging, sexual assault and, possibly, murder.

That the Arthur G Dozier School – a borstal for delinquent boys founded in 1900 – was not a gentle place was well-established. Boys as young as six were chained to walls, lashings with a leather strap were frequent and, in the early decades, children endured enforced labour, making bricks and working printing presses. When it was closed in 2011, it had already been the subject of separate federal and state investigations.

But, as suspicions deepen about how the boys in the burial ground died, pressure is growing again on the state to shine new light into the darkest days of the school in Marianna, a Florida Panhandle town that once was a bastion of the KKK and the site of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal. The pressure is coming from some of the school’s survivors, from relatives of boys who died here, and from Florida’s top US Senator, Bill Nelson.


Uranium mining companies descend upon Navajo Nation

The Daily Times; Jenny Kane

“As you can guess, there is opposition. There is a legacy issue. There’s no doubt about that,” said Albuquerque’s Mat Leuras, vice president of corporate development for Uranium Resources Inc.

The tribe still is reeling from the nearly 30 years that the federal government allowed uranium mining on and around the Navajo Nation. Between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s, about four million tons of uranium were extracted from the Navajo Nation.

At the time, uranium was mined to produce nuclear weapons for World War II and the Cold War.

The ore was removed via conventional underground mining, a practice that allowed uranium to seep into the land and water in the surrounding area.

Several environmental studies have suggested that elevated levels of uranium in and around the mines caused health problems for the people working in and living around them.

h/t to John Flecke


Was Syria ever the secular, non-sectarian state we are led to believe it was?

The Telegraph; Richard Spencer

In Aleppo a few months ago, we asked the driver ferrying me and a couple of other journo types around what the city was like before the war. “Well,” he said, “I lived here, as I had a job here, but I’m not actually from here. I’m from the countryside, so the locals used to call me and the people where I lived X.” X was an Arabic word none of the foreigners recognised, but its meaning was pretty clear. When someone finally checked, its closest English version was something like “blockhead”, but as someone who grew up in Somerset I had already substituted my own version – bumpkin, or bog-dweller, or (showing my age) wurzel.

He wasn’t a rebel, but he was friends with some of them from his home town, which was how we came to hire him. Now I’m not the first person to point out that there is a rural-urban divide in the Syrian civil war, but it’s worth a reminder. When rebels moved in and took half of Aleppo in July, they took the poorer, lower-middle and working-class districts, those where jobseekers like our driver lived. The more sophisticated northern parts remain in regime hands to this day. There is the same divide in Damascus, where most of the city itself is in regime hands while the outer suburbs and country areas are controlled by rebels. Both in Aleppo itself and across the country the rebels are more likely to come from the provinces, villages and small and medium size towns, than the sophisticated metropolises, and some rebel leaders are openly contemptuous – perhaps in revenge for never forgotten “blockhead” taunts from the past – of the city slickers who failed to join the uprising in outrage at the Assad regime’s brutal response to protests.

The author gets some criticism in comments; I included because the questions needs to be asked.



Polls open in tense Kenya presidential race

Al Jazeera; Wire Services

The 2007-2008 violence exposed widespread disenchantment with the political class, deep tribal divisions and shattered Kenya’s image as a beacon of regional stability.

More checks are in place this time to limit vote rigging, while a new constitution devolves powers and has made the poll less of a winner-take-all race.

Kenya’s neighbours are watching nervously, after their economies felt the shockwaves when violence five years ago shut down trade routes running through east Africa’s biggest economy. Some landlocked states have stockpiled fuel and other materials.

The United States and other Western states are worried about the conduct of a poll in a state seen as a vital ally in the regional battle against militant Islam.

Adding to election tensions, al-Shabab militants, battling Kenyan peacekeeping troops in Somalia, issued a veiled threat days before the vote.


Blast ravages Shia neighbourhood

Dawn.com; “Our Staff Reporter”

At least 45 people, many women and children among them, were killed and over 135 injured in a massive bombing in the city’s Shia-dominated neighbourhood of Abbas Town on Sunday evening.

The explosion took place at the time of Maghrib prayers between two apartment blocks at the entrance to Abbas Town.

A blast had taken place on November 18 last year at almost the same place. It was caused by explosives tied to a motorcycle.

A police official initially said the bomb blast had taken place not far from an Imambargah.

But the brunt of the attack was borne by two adjoining blocks of Rabia Flowers and Iqra City. The ground and first floors in both the blocks were badly damaged, exposing the living rooms of apartments. Some flats were reduced to rubble.



 


33 comments

  1. dear occupant

    suppressing women’s voting rights, bigotry, torturing and murdering young boys…there are days that i’m downright embarrassed to be a white male. what a terrible legacy we have in this country.

  2. I read this story late last week: National Review: Victims Of Violent Military Rapes Struggle In Life Because Of ‘Their Own Bad Decision-Making’

    In Thursday’s paper, the New York Times ran the harrowing story of Tiffany Jackson, a female veteran grappling with the effects of military sexual trauma. Jackson had been violently raped while deployed overseas at the Suwon Air Base in South Korea, and upon her return to the states had difficulty finding and keeping a job, struggled with drugs and alcohol and fought uphill battles to keep her anger at bay. All of which, according to a growing consensus of researchers and psychologists, are common manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder brought about by M.S.T.

    But expert opinion is not enough to convince the scribes at National Review Online, which issued its own rebuttal to the Times piece and proclaimed – without a shred of evidence – that the hardships befallen upon Jackson and as many as 1 in 5 of all female servicemembers are attributable to their upbringing in underprivileged communities and not to their sexual assaults.

    So not only do they have to deal with the rape and all the red tape involved with that but they come home and have serious PTSD from their traumas … and their troubles are attributed to their “poor lifestyle choices”. Yes, they chose to join the military and maybe even expected that they would not be brutally raped. Foolish women!!

  3. Warning: Canard Alert!!

    Romney: ‘Obamacare’ Was Attractive To Minority, Low-Income Voters

    Mitt Romney stood by his belief that President Obama was aided in his re-election by giving gifts to minority voters, during an interview that aired on “Fox News Sunday.”

    “The president had the power of incumbency, ‘Obamacare’ was very attractive, particularly to those without insurance, and they came out in large numbers to vote,” Romney said. “So that was part of a successful campaign.”

    Romney first made comments to this effect on a conference call with donors after the November election, when he said Obama had been “very generous” in doling out “big gifts” to “the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people” as well as women during his first term.

    Republicans attributing the “loss” of the votes of minorities, women and youth to something other than the fact that their policies are unattractive is good news for us. Keep thinking that, GOP, and continue to push your policies designed to appeal to the privileged and you will continue to lose elections!

    For the record, rich voters would NEVER EVER vote for someone who promised them a tax cut or reduced regulations for their businesses. No gifts there!!

  4. It is depressing to read. Discourages one from trying to keep up with the news. That’s why I rely heavily on Rachel. She adds some light hearted attitude sometimes to make some stories more palatable. But, there are many that cannot be lightened.

  5. Napolitano Says Sequestration Already Causing Long TSA Lines (VIDEO)

    “The big airports, for example, some of them had very long lines this weekend,” Napolitano said at Politico’s Playbook breakfast. The lines, she said, are “150 to 200 percent as long as we would normally expect.”

    Republicans are accusing the administration of making stuff up just to scare people. That is because they have deluded themselves into thinking that government really and truly is not needed for anything. Maybe the sequester is a good idea in that it will finally kill that meme once and for all. Or at least give us things to point to when tea partiers start ranting about “gubmint spending”.  

  6. League Of Conservation Voters Hails New EPA Director McCarthy

    Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, issued a statement praising the pick:

       “Gina McCarthy cares about progress not partisanship. She’s worked for administrations from both parties and made extraordinary progress protecting the air we breathe and defending public health. Republicans and Democrats easily confirmed Gina McCarthy as head of the EPA’s clean air division, and we hope they move swiftly to confirm her as head of the agency. We look forward to working with her to combat the climate crisis, protect our air and water, and advance chemical policy reform.”

  7. Jeb Bush’s Book Rules Out Citizenship For Illegal Immigrants – Period

    Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) surprised immigration observers by reversing his own recent position and coming out against a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. According to excerpts of his new book, obtained by the Huffington Post, Bush’s position is a hard “no” on citizenship, except for certain undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country before they were 18.

    He knows he can’t get the nomination without embracing the nativist wing of his party. But embracing that wing will make it impossible to win the presidential election … sounds like he is willing to try.

    Who’s left who can win the nomination without running up against the demographics?  

  8. The White House Agrees: It’s Time to Legalize Cell Phone Unlocking

       The White House agrees with the 114,000+ of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties. In fact, we believe the same principle should also apply to tablets, which are increasingly similar to smart phones. And if you have paid for your mobile device, and aren’t bound by a service agreement or other obligation, you should be able to use it on another network. It’s common sense, crucial for protecting consumer choice, and important for ensuring we continue to have the vibrant, competitive wireless market that delivers innovative products and solid service to meet consumers’ needs.

       This is particularly important for secondhand or other mobile devices that you might buy or receive as a gift, and want to activate on the wireless network that meets your needs – even if it isn’t the one on which the device was first activated. All consumers deserve that flexibility.

    They can’t change the law (Digital Millenium Copyright Act – DCMA ) but coming out in favor of allowing unlocking is a good first step.

  9. GOP Congresswoman: I Opposed Domestic Violence Bill Because It Protected Too Many Groups

    In an appearance on MSNBC, Blackburn pointed out that the latest iteration of the law protects “different groups” and thus dilutes funding for straight, non-Native American women with the proper documentation:

       

    When you start to make this about other things it becomes an “against violence act” and not a targeted focus act… I didn’t like the way it was expanded to include other different groups.

    Well, there you go! Republicans cannot be for an “against violence act” because surely many of those people deserve the violence they are subjected to. Congresswoman Blackburn should get together with NH State Rep. Mark Warden who believes that some people like domestic abuse. Add “people who like to be abused” to Native American women, LGBT and undocumented women … and set up a way to test for these and you have a perfect Republican law: one that excludes instead of encompasses.

  10. Bonus! Girl children will no longer be promiscuous!!

    GOP Lawmaker: We Must Make It Harder To Divorce Or Teenage Girls Will Be ‘More Promiscuous’

    On Monday, the Iowa state House moved out of committee a bill that would make no-fault divorces illegal. That’s a huge relief for one state legislator, who fears that no-fault divorce will turn his 16-year-old granddaughter into a harlot.

    “This basically is an attempt on my part to keep fathers in the home,” [Iowa State Representative Tedd] Gassman said. “I sincerely believe that the family is the foundation of this nation and this nation will go the direction of our families. If our families break up, so will this nation.”[…]

    No-fault divorces allow unhappy couples to put an end to their marriages, so it is not at all clear that they are worse for a child than continuing a marriage where parents resent the kid for keeping them together against their will.

  11. File this under “who could have predicted this?” (other than every sentient being who read the Republican Budgets for 2012 and 2013)

    Ryan: New Medicare Plan Won’t Affect Americans ‘In Or Near Retirement’

    “With respect to Medicare, Chairman Ryan will again put forward a real solution to protect and strengthen Medicare for current seniors and future generation,” a Ryan spokesman told TPM. “His reforms ensure no changes for those in or near retirement, a sharp contrast to the real harm inflicted on seniors by the President’s health-care law.”

    The question is what age constitutes “near” retirement – and whether it might this time be higher than 55.

    Ryan, who is mum on the details of his upcoming budget, is facing cross-pressures – from conservatives who want him to apply his Medicare changes to Americans older than 55 on the one hand, and seniors, whom he’s vowed to insulate from Medicare privatization on the other. The proposal, versions of which the House has passed twice, would replace seniors’ Medicare guarantee with a limited subsidy to buy private insurance.

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