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).
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.
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