October 2006

Happy Halloween

Halloween pumpkins

Halloween traffic got off to a slow start this evening; it may have been the rain that had been going on most of the day. But the rain stopped late in the afternoon, and we wound up giving out all of our candy; there were probably 200-300 kids who came by. A lot of young kids this year, which is nice, and some fairly elaborate costumes. None of the costumes were really inventive, though, and almost all were store-bought. Lots of superheros, princesses, bunnies and birds for the littlest kids. I was surprised that there were not very many pirates; would have thought that was a natural.

We had a lot of comments on the pumpkins this year, way more than in years past. I was particularly pleased that the kids got into the pumpkins. I’m used to compliments from the parents, but this year I got a fair number from the kids; they took the time to look really close, and the commonest response was “awesome.” Awesome.

I felt kind of sorry for the kids across the street. They’re evangelicals, who don’t hold with devil worship. In past years, they’ve been gone on Halloween, but this year they were home. The porch lights were off, of course, and they weren’t giving candy, but I could see the kids looking out the door, watching the action and listening to the excited chatter. I can’t imagine what they make of it all, but I think that it can’t be very happy.

live in Cincinnati
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

The First Nazi City in America

Where: Hazelton, PA.

Everyone will have to register their nationality with the government. No one will be exempt. People of certain nationalities will be targeted for removal. Those who look like they might be from those nations will be marked as suspects, constantly subject to harassment, official and unofficial.

Certain people, based on their nationality, will not be allowed to work. They will not be allowed to live in this place. They will be denied access to hospitals, to doctors. They will not be allowed to purchase medicine or food. Their children will be driven from the schools.

Every store clerk will become a race cop, compelled by law to check the papers of every customer they find “suspect.� Everyone who isn’t white will be challenged at the point of sale for any commodity they might need or want. The official language will be English: only. Those who try to shelter, clothe, feed, or give gainful employment or medical assistance to the targeted population will be punished.

According to the LA Times, when the law passed, white citizens burst into applause. The Times reported the reaction of one white woman to the news: "The only ones who are against it are the Hispanics," she said, "and that’s because it’s against them."

When: now.

clip
dread the rising dark
observe the passing scene

Comments (2)

Permalink

Just Like a Woman

Here’s how they set it up:

220 women were divided into 4 groups and given math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. The women were given a GRE (Graduate Records Exam)-like math test, then asked to read an essay, and then given a second math exam. Four different essays were handed out. These essays argued that gender differences in math performances were due to (i) genetic (G), or (ii) experiential (E) differences between the sexes, or (iii) employed standard sexual sterotypes without mentioning mathematical abilities (S), or (iv) argued that there are no gender related math-differences (ND).

And the results are here.

clip
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

Ohio has been hacked!

This is a report from someone who attended a meeting of moderate Ohio Republicans, who were bemoaning the polls that showed a probable Democratic sweep of the state…

Then, one insider, probably an extremist, but certainly very close to Mr. Ken Mehlman abruptly stopped the conversation. He told table that it was impossible they would lose either house. He also predicts an Ohio GOP sweep.

He informed the group that over the last year, in four critical states the GOP needs to hold huge purges of the voter rolls have just been finished.

The insider did not say which four states, but did say Ohio was among them.

His claim was a new Diebold voter registry system had been installed over the last year. The last week of July and the first week of August a "test run" was made of the systems ability to purge ineligable voters. The purge generated names and test letters sent out to 1.2 million Ohio addresses with a focus on University’s, Apartment addresses with high turnover. He claims they made the letters seem just functionary, but they have an action component to avoid being purged from the rolls.

The Insider warmed and said that Blackwell was brilliant in how he did this. The letter went on for a long time about changes in Ohio voting and security and suggested people who might have any concerns about their voting status could come by county offices and confirm their continued voting eligability before election day.

He further added, that since it was conducted as a "test" they only sent letters to a limited number of suspect addresses and "I suspect Blackwell chose criteria very very favorable for us."

Further the insider stated that Blackwell had only purged the lists after a full 60 days was given for people to respond. Which means even if a voter was on the "termination" list, they would still have been eligable to vote in the primary.

He told they table they believe the purge has probably caught up "hundreds of thousands of students, activists and wanderers with no real job" would show up at the polls and have to vote provisionally.

He predicted to the table that tens of thousands of voters will show up on election day, and once the provisionals are used up will simply not be able to at all.

The person who received the report went on to test it, in Lorain and Wayne Counties, sending friends from those counties to the Board of Elections to either vote early or get absentee ballots. In both cases, they found long lines of people, all Democratic voters, who were being informed that they were ineligible to vote. They either hadn’t brought the proper ID, or their street addresses did not match the address on their driver’s license, or, in one case, a college student had moved to a different dorm.

This is not something that’s going to happen. It has happened. We have been hacked.

live in Cincinnati
observe the passing scene
vote Democratic

Comments (0)

Permalink

Questioning

This needs no gloss:

Every time I see one of those insipid yellow-ribbon magnets now, I think of Charlie Anderson, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “I just want to ask those people,� says Anderson, referring to those who display the yellow-ribbon magnets, “when is the last time you wrote one of those soldiers? How many of them do you actually know? How many have really asked us, what did you do there? I wanna tell them, we don’t need your fucking ribbons. We need help and jobs.�

clip
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

Too Many Dead

Iraqi women mourning their deadThe first Lancet study on the number of dead in the Iraq war came out just about two years ago; the authors pioneered a very difficult technique, which relied on direct interviews of Iraqi households, asking about family members who have recently died and how they died. Death reports were documented by official death certificates. At that time, the study estimated that 100,000 Iraqis have died in that war, most of them as the result of actions by coalition forces. Our son Alex reported on that study for This American Life, the public radio show at which he is a producer; he did an excellent job of explaining, clearly and persuasively, the relatively difficult statistical methods that the researchers used.

Last week, the authors of the Lancet study released their follow-up study, which used the same techniques and a larger sample of Iraqi households. Their results, which have been widely reported, indicate that the total Iraqi death toll from the war comes to well over half a million.

The Lancet study has been widely criticized, of course, by apologists for the war. The IBC, the Iraq Body Count organization, is by no means an apologist for the war, but they have become the de facto independent source for body count statistics. Their numbers are compiled from official pronouncements and published news stories; while they are considerably higher than the ridiculously low, and constantly changing, numbers that the administration drops when it pleases them, the IBC numbers are still an order of magnitude smaller than the numbers in the Lancet study. IBC is not pleased with that study, and they’ve issued a press release challenging it. But, on careful reading, the IBC’s criticisms seem to boil down to “I can’t believe it; it can’t be that high!” Lenin, on the blog Lenin’s Tomb, has done a point-by-point analysis of the IBC press release, and summarizes his findings:

The whole thing [i.e. the IBC refutation of the Lancet study] is an enormous and misleading exercise in circularity, a massive raise of the eyebrow, a titanic exercise in obfuscation. They cannot touch the study for methodology, they cannot find anything in it that is badly done: not a single cluster wrongly placed, not a single false extrapolation, not a particle of evidence of any fraudulence or fecklessness. They hazily refer to possible bias, but on the basis of nothing more solid than that this would explain away the uncomfortable implications that they draw. As Daniel Davies points out, the chances of the Lancet authors obtaining the sample they did, if the facts were much closer to what the IBC records, are so low that it would have to be fraud. The IBC cannot and do not make this accusation….

To IBC’s credit, their press release concludes with the telling point that we should not need to know that 655,000 died, that even IBC’s own lower estimates are enough to provide “all the necessary evidence to deem this invasion and occupation an utter failure at all levels.”

Update: Deltoid reports that the Senate has just passed a Congo relief bill that uses, in support of the need for such an effort, a mortality study that was also published in the Lancet and that uses the same cluster analysis technique as the Iraqi death toll study.

observe the passing scene
vote Democratic

Comments (0)

Permalink

Let them eat placebos

If you needed some reason to take control of government away from the BushCo management team, this is something to ponder:

Americans who are at least 65 and those with disabilities pay monthly premiums for the drug coverage under a U.S. program that started last January. Insurance companies last year charged as little as $1.87 for policies providing discounts on medicines. For next year, the cheapest plan will cost $9.50. Many of the 23 million people in the Medicare drug program pay premiums out of Social Security pensions, averaging $922.70 a month.

“Many people are going to feel that they are victims of a bait-and-switch tactic,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a Washington-based nonprofit group that studies health care, in an Oct. 3 telephone interview. “There’s no question that it will be an extraordinary disappointment.”

Now, to go along with that, two stories:

In New York last week, our friend John told us about a treatment he’s been getting for a rare skin disorder. He has to take a medication two or three times a day for a couple of weeks to sensitize his skin to UV radiation. Then the docs dose him all over with UV, and the symptoms go away for a month or two. John was surprised when his pharmacy told him that his prescription benefits had run out, and that he had fallen into the so-called “donut hole” (another story, told here); it turns out that the medication costs $18 per dose (times three times a day for two weeks, every couple of months). John checked into a Canadian supplier and found the identical drug (he’s a pharmacologist, and was quite certain that the Canadian and American pills came from the same manufacturing facility). Cost per pill from Canada: $.75. Note the decimal point.

Second story. Talking with another doc, this one a top pediatric health researcher, he told us about a study that he’d just read that looked into the provenance of 20 major new drugs that have been recently introduced to the market. Of those, just one had been developed by the manufacturer; all of the others came out of the research departments of large universities.

The truth, I’ve come to believe, is that they really truly would just as soon see us die, and the sooner the better. That will just leave more for them.

Bastards!

clip
vote Democratic

Comments (0)

Permalink

Kill your TV

After going for the past 30 years or so without any television whatever, except what we occasionally saw at a friend’s house, we recently took a major plunge and wound up with a big wall-mounted LCD monitor, HD digital cable, and a Mac Mini to play DVDs. We’ve lived for a few months now with that setup, and this story, from “The Frontal Cortex” science blog, does not surprise me.

After looking at the data, social scientists at The Johnson School at Cornell University noticed a striking correlation between exposure to television at an early age and rates of autism in three separate states. They concluded that their "findings are consistent with early childhood television viewing being an important trigger for autism"

Television is dreadful. There’s no other word for it. The shows are almost uniformly dreadful; the endless sequences of commercials coming at you like machine gun fire are dreadful; the sameness of thinking, of style, of narrative structure, amidst all that apparent diversity (200 channels!) is dreadful. The whole business of watching television induces slack jaw and slack mind. And now it seems likely that television has induced a plague upon our civilization in the form of a lifetime behavioral disorder that currently affects 1 in 166 children. Is there any way to stop it, short of the collapse of our technological infrastructure?

observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

“The Assassins of Truth”

Over at Information Clearing House, Charles Sullivan delivers himself of a fine rant on the devolution of our nation from its status as a beacon of enlightenment values to a new world model for evil. Nothing new here, not closely reasoned or rigorously edited, but deeply passionate, and, alas, almost entirely true.

I hereby assert that the hidden purpose of the U.S. government is not to serve the needs of the people or to make the world free and democratic, as it so boldly claims; it is to accrue ever more wealth to the obscenely rich, the global elite. Its intent is to do to the U.S. what it has done to Iraq; to revoke the Constitution and the rule of law; to bankrupt the federal treasury and to privatize everything that is publicly owned. Ultimately its objective is to pursue the religion of unregulated free market capitalism, and to establish global corporate rule.

I know nothing about Charles Sullivan but the bare details that I’ve found through a Google search, that he’s a furniture maker, a photographer, a resident of West Virginia. His voice is authentic, in a tradition that reaches back to Tom Paine. This piece should be posted on the doors of every church and courthouse in the country.

clip
dread the rising dark

Comments (0)

Permalink