Topic: Living

App makes boycotting companies as easy as scanning a barcode
NBC News USA May 16, 2013

This item links to the Apple App Store.

Let's say you really want to boycott Some Random Company because it opposes a cause dear to your heart. How do you get keep track of which products this company makes or who its partners are? You could do a lot of research and carry around long lists or you could simply use an app that spits out all the right info in an instant. All you have to do is scan a product's barcode.

The app's called Buycott and you can download it for free through the Apple App Store. The basic idea of it is ridiculously simple: You pick out causes you want to support and Buycott helps you figure out which companies are on the same side as the issue as you and which ones oppose your position. Armed with that info, you can avoid products made by the opposing companies and support the businesses which align with your interests.

Once you've selected your causes, you'll simply use your iPhone's camera to "scan" the barcodes of products you're thinking about purchasing in order to view its "ownership structure" and "trace it all the way back to its parent company," the app's instructions explain.

That's all there is to it. Boycotting has probably never been simpler.

Buycott app goes viral and is pulled. Traffic crashes website
Carole Di Tosti Technocrati Android USA May 20, 2013

Visit this page for its embedded links.

It's a dream come true. You develop an app that everyone wants and the traffic to use it is phenomenal. It's a nightmare come true! You receive tremendous media publicity, there's a rush for downloads but your app has to be pulled because it's not capable of dealing with mega-traffic.

The Android version of the new Buycott smartphone app even brought down the company’s website last week. [Note: The app is still available for iPhone.]

Initially, the free app was fine. Folks downloaded it so they could buy products in keeping with their principles. Buycott helped them find out which companies made products by scanning their barcodes. Buycott traced codes to their top parent companies and cross-checked them against social advocacy campaigns. Consumers could easily tell if the company was one they favored or one that was engaging in cruelty to animals or other negative behaviors. But then app users were looking to boycott the Koch brothers and Monsanto, so they were checking company affiliations with both and traffic grew.

After a media blitz about the app, Buycott's popularity skyrocketed. At its peak it reached No. 10 in the Google Play store and requests exceeded 100 downloads per minute. No one was ready for this cataclysm and they pulled the app. Developer, 26-year-old Ivan Pardo of Los Angeles explained on the company's FB page that they were working 24/7, moving to a server configuration that could deal with the traffic. ...

Since the app is not spun to a particular mind set, it can be used to patronize and promote companies that back GMO labeling or a company like Starbucks which has supported the LBGT movement. The empowering beauty of Buycott is that it gives information and allows users to make informed decisions about their choices. In effect, the app can strengthen consumer buying power to bend corporate accountability to consumer will. It may even level the playing field and bring greater competition to the market place.

But first it needs to straighten out the kinks in addition to dealing with mega-traffic. ...

Audio: How to use a barcode for a boycott
"The Current" CBC Radio One Canada May 21, 2013

You can listen to this exchange of ideas (27:29) from a pop-up link on the page.

A new App enables you to link the company behind any given product to the family tree of corporate owners behind the product. It is being heralded as a rapid-fire tool to know who to boycott or who is supporting the cause you support.

But those pushing for greater corporate accountability question whether the applause over the App hides a lag in legislation.

What is loneliness? It’s not solitude or what Kierkegaard called “shut-upness.” It’s an interior experience. And it can kill you.

The lethality of loneliness
Judith Shulevitz The New Republic USA May 13, 2013

Sometime in the late ’50s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann sat down to write an essay about a subject that had been mostly overlooked by other psychoanalysts up to that point. Even Freud had only touched on it in passing. She was not sure, she wrote, “what inner forces” made her struggle with the problem of loneliness, though she had a notion. It might have been the young female catatonic patient who began to communicate only when Fromm-Reichmann asked her how lonely she was. “She raised her hand with her thumb lifted, the other four fingers bent toward her palm,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. The thumb stood alone, “isolated from the four hidden fingers.” Fromm-Reichmann responded gently, “That lonely?” And at that, the woman’s “facial expression loosened up as though in great relief and gratitude, and her fingers opened.”

Fromm-Reichmann would later become world-famous as the dumpy little therapist mistaken for a housekeeper by a new patient, a severely disturbed schizophrenic girl named Joanne Greenberg. Fromm-Reichmann cured Greenberg, who had been deemed incurable. Greenberg left the hospital, went to college, became a writer, and immortalized her beloved analyst as “Dr. Fried” in the best-selling autobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (later also a movie and a pop song). Among analysts, Fromm-Reichmann, who had come to the United States from Germany to escape Hitler, was known for insisting that no patient was too sick to be healed through trust and intimacy. She figured that loneliness lay at the heart of nearly all mental illness and that the lonely person was just about the most terrifying spectacle in the world. She once chastised her fellow therapists for withdrawing from emotionally unreachable patients rather than risk being contaminated by them. The uncanny specter of loneliness “touches on our own possibility of loneliness,” she said. “We evade it and feel guilty.”

Her 1959 essay, “On Loneliness,” is considered a founding document in a fast-growing area of scientific research you might call loneliness studies. Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as Fromm-Reichmann said it was. It has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones.

In a way, these discoveries are as consequential as the germ theory of disease. Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people.

The psychological definition of loneliness hasn’t changed much since Fromm-Reichmann laid it out. “Real loneliness,” as she called it, is not what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the “shut-upness” and solitariness of the civilized. Nor is “real loneliness” the happy solitude of the productive artist or the passing irritation of being cooped up with the flu while all your friends go off on some adventure. It’s not being dissatisfied with your companion of the moment—your friend or lover or even spouse— unless you chronically find yourself in that situation, in which case you may in fact be a lonely person. Fromm-Reichmann even distinguished “real loneliness” from mourning, since the well-adjusted eventually get over that, and from depression, which may be a symptom of loneliness but is rarely the cause. Loneliness, she said—and this will surprise no one—is the want of intimacy. ...

Fiat currency; fractional reserve banking—the value of Canadian money is abstract, existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence. So why not digital 'cash'?

Digital cash replacement from Royal Canadian Mint in the works
Carys Mills Toronto Star Ontario Canada April 30, 2013


Marc Brûlé, left, chief financial officer for the Royal Canadian Mint meets with David Everett, the British technical architect of the "MintChip." Photo: Fred Chartrand for the Toronto Star

Secure chips have already made it into our credit and debit cards. Next up, they could replace pocket change.

The Royal Canadian Mint has been pushing forward with its “MintChip” prototype, a digital cash replacement aimed at transactions under $10, since it surfaced a year ago. The Crown corporation is factoring in developer feedback, hiring a product manager and consulting with the financial sector.

“I would look on it very much as an alternative, and hopefully a replacement, for physical cash,” said David Everett, the British cryptographic expert hired years ago to work on the MintChip. “Today, people obviously use coins. They use bits of metal and bits of paper. The future is obviously going to be much more electronic.”

Since 2009, funds have been put toward “improving the efficiency of Canada’s currency” and international expertise has been enlisted to develop an “eCoin” for Canada, according to internal documents, interviews and international patents.

MintChip, as envisioned, could enable paying someone back by tapping phones together, scanning a QR code to donate to charity, or clicking to spend cents on an online article.

However, it’s not known when — or even if — the MintChip will be released into circulation. A Finance Department official said the Crown corporation is consulting with the federal government on potential next steps, and currency changes can require legislative approval.

To even attempt to create such a system sets Canada apart from other countries, said electronic transaction specialist Dave Birch. “To the best of my knowledge, Canada is the only mint that’s seriously experimenting with this sort of thing,” he said. ...

The MintChip idea became public a year ago with the launch on a contest that asked app developers what they would do with digital currency.

Consultations are happening now with merchants, financial institutions and “all of the people we think would be interested in what this might mean,” said the Mint’s chief financial officer, Marc Brûlé. ...

Intro: Neo-liberalism, which was supposed to replace grubby politics with efficient, market-based competition, has led not to the triumph of the free market but to the birth of new and horrid chimeras. The traditional firm, based on stable relations between employer, workers and customers, has spun itself out into a complicated and ever-shifting network of supply relationships and contractual forms. The owners remain the same but their relationship to their employees and customers is very different. For one thing, they cannot easily be held to account. As the American labour lawyer Thomas Geoghegan and others have shown, US firms have systematically divested themselves of inconvenient pension obligations to their employees, by farming them out to subsidiaries and spin-offs. Walmart has used hands-off subcontracting relationships to take advantage of unsafe working conditions in the developing world, while actively blocking efforts to improve industry safety standards until 112 garment workers died in a Bangladesh factory fire in November last year. Amazon uses subcontractors to employ warehouse employees in what can be unsafe and miserable working conditions, while minimising damage to its own brand. - Henry Farrell, There is no alternative,
Aeon Magazine UK April 25, 2013

Items: Bangladesh rescuers dig deeper as death toll passes 300
The Associated Press/The Canadian Press/CBC News USA/Canada April 26, 2013

Includes a video report (3:24), a 15 photo slideshow and related links.

With time running out to save workers still trapped in a collapsed garment factory building in Bangladesh, rescuers dug through mangled metal and concrete Friday, finding more corpses that pushed the death toll past 300.

Wailing, angry relatives fought with police who held them back from the wrecked, eight-storey Rana Plaza building in the capital, Dhaka, as rescue operations went on more than two days after the structure crumbled.

Amid the cries for help and the smell of decaying bodies, the rescue of 18-year-old Mussamat Anna came at a high cost: Emergency crews cut off the garment worker's mangled right hand to pull her free from the debris Thursday night.

"First a machine fell over my hand, and I was crushed under the debris.... Then the roof collapsed over me," she told an Associated Press cameraman from a hospital bed Friday. ...

Maj. Gen. Chowdhury Hasan Suhrawardy told reporters that search-and-rescue operations would continue until at least Saturday, because "we know a human being can survive for up to 72 hours in this situation." ...

Police cordoned off the site, pushing back thousands of bystanders and relatives after rescue workers complained the crowds were hampering their work.

Clashes broke out between the relatives and police, who used batons to disperse them. Police said 50 people were injured in the skirmishes.

"We want to go inside the building and find our people now. They will die if we don't find them soon," said Shahinur Rahman, whose mother was missing.

Thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby areas marched elsewhere to protest the poor safety standards in Bangladesh. Local news reports said demonstrators smashed dozens of cars Friday, although most of the protests were largely peaceful. ...

Bangladesh's garment industry was the third-largest in the world in 2011, after China and Italy, having grown rapidly in the past decade. The country's minimum wage is now the equivalent of about $38 US a month.

Among the garment makers in the building were Phantom Apparels, Phantom Tac, Ether Tex, New Wave Style and New Wave Bottoms. Altogether, they produced several million shirts, pants and other garments a year.

Canada's Joe Fresh had some products made in the building.

The Canadian company expressed its condolences to the people affected by the collapse and said they and other apparel retailers are working to support "local efforts and provide aid and resources" in Savar. ...

Loblaw [Loblaw Companies Limited, a subsidiary of George Weston Limited, and parent company of Joe Fresh (launched in 2006)] said in the statement that it has vendor standards aimed at ensuring its products are made in a "socially responsible" way, but the company noted there are some gaps when it comes to building safety.

"Our audits align with those of industry around the world, but we recognize that these measures do not address the issue of building construction or integrity," the company said.

Loblaw was not yet able to offer specifics on how it plans to improve the manufacturing system, but it said it is "committed to finding solutions to this situation by expanding the scope of our requirements to ensure the physical safety of workers producing our products." ...

Wal-Mart said none of its clothing had been authorized to be made in the facility, but it is investigating whether there was any unauthorized production.

U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the collapse underscored the urgency for Bangladesh's government, as well as the factory owners, buyers and labour groups, to improve working conditions in the country. ...

This week's latest Bangladeshi garment factory disaster renews questions about 'ethical fashion'.

How can you tell if your shirt was made in a sweatshop?
Andre Mayer CBC News Canada April 26, 2013


The collapse of a garment building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 24 has raised concern about the safety of those who produce clothing for western retailers such as Wal-mart, Sears and Canada's Joe Fresh. Photo: Andrew Biraj/Reuters

The death of more than 300 people in a garment building collapse in Bangladesh has renewed concerns about the conditions of workers who make clothing for some of the biggest brands in the Western world, including Canada’s Joe Fresh.

But analysts say the supply chain of the modern garment industry makes it hard for consumers to determine whether the shirt or pair of pants they bought was the product of sweatshop labour.

“As a consumer, it’s really difficult to learn what were the conditions of the production of a specific garment,” says Adriana Villasenor, a senior advisor at the retail consultancy J.C. Williams Group.

In recent years, major brands such as Wal-Mart, the Gap and Canada’s Joe Fresh have outsourced the manufacture of clothing to cheap labour markets such as Bangladesh, where the national minimum wage stands at $38 US a month. According to the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, Bangladesh has the lowest labour costs in the world.

But there are concerns that in satisfying the demands for low prices from Western consumers, factory owners in Bangladesh are compromising the health and safety of workers.

More than 300 people died when the garment building collapsed in Savar, a suburb of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka. Officials said Thursday that police ordered the building evacuated on April 23 after discovering deep cracks in the structure.

Many factories in the building ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working on April 24, which is when the collapse occurred.

It is considered the deadliest incident for Bangladesh’s clothing industry, surpassing a fire in November that killed 112 people.

What consumers should look for

The issue for consumers who want to buy goods without exploiting foreign workers is that it's often very difficult to figure out where a piece of clothing came from and how it was made.

Buying a major brand or shopping at a well-known store chain, for example, is no guarantee that the item wasn't made under questionable working conditions. ...

Police state -- on the way or already here? Photo via War in Context

This is the modern manhunt: The FBI, the hive mind and the Boston bombers
Spencer Ackerman Wired, Danger Room blog USA April 19, 2013

Visit this page for its embedded links.

In an earlier era, law enforcement might not have identified the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing so rapidly.

When the smoke literally cleared on Monday, investigators had a huge problem and nearly no leads. No individual or organization claimed responsibility for the bombings that killed three and wounded more than 180. So they took a big leap: They copped to how little they knew, and embraced the wisdom of The Crowd.

Hiding in plain sight was an ocean of data, from torrents of photography to cell-tower information to locals’ memories, waiting to be exploited. Police, FBI, and the other investigators opted to let spectator surveillance supplement and augment their own. When they called for that imagery, locals flooded it in. They spoke to the public frequently, both in person and especially on Twitter. All that represented a modern twist on the age-old law enforcement maxim that the public’s eyes and ears are crucial investigative assets, as the Internet rapidly compressed the time it took for tips to arrive and get analyzed.

But the FBI and police have been reluctant to embrace what the hive mind can provide: it implies the authorities don’t always have the answers. Veteran law enforcement officers remember cases from the ’90s when the bureau clammed up to the public and local cops, at the expense of receiving greater public cooperation. “If law enforcement didn’t share any information — [as with bombers] Terry Nichols, Ted Kaczynski — if your intel is shared with no one, that is the consummate investigative challenge,” says Mike Rolince, a retired FBI special agent who set up Boston’s first Joint Terrorism Task Force. ...

“The great advantage here is the number of cameras out there,” Rolince says. “Without the cameras, I don’t know where we are.” The cameras were everywhere. It wasn’t just the surveillance cameras looming on the tops of buildings at Copley Square. Bostonians and out-of-towners who came to the Marathon, one of the most celebrated civic events in the city, pulled their phones out throughout the race to feed their Instagram addictions and keep their Flickr pages current. It would become a reminder that the public enthusiasm for documenting their lives can outpace even the vast surveillance apparatus of the government. ...

There was another element to the modern manhunt: the Boston Police’s social media presence.

All through the week, the @Boston_Police Twitter account has provided surprisingly rapid factual information about the manhunt. Yael Bar-Tur, a social media and law-enforcement consultant, says Boston bucked a trend among cop shops to shy away from the unfamiliar terrain of Twitter and Facebook. “It’s so unusual for police departments to do this,” she says. ...

And there are messy precedents emerging from mass photo and video data emerging from an era of ubiquitous cellphone cameras augmenting police surveillance: the ex-FBI technology official says that “legal and ethical questions” cause investigators to hesitate before launching big data-mining projects, even with all the broad leeway they have to violate citizens’ privacy. That hesitation doesn’t have to apply when citizens volunteer the data.

“Nothing has really changed,” Bar-Tur says, “just the medium has changed.” That might be enough for a new model manhunt to emerge.

Jim comment: The above piece by Spencer Ackerman brought back to the front of my mind the Department of Homeland Security's "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign launched in July 2010. In the words of DHS, "An alert public plays a critical role in keeping our nation safe." My long life experience has taught me to be concerned about what government bureaucrats, police or military might do to me, or what my neighbors could do.

The Boston bombs roused a monster
Patrick Cockburn The Independent UK April 21, 2013

The success or failure from the point of view of the perpetrators of an attack like the bombing of the Boston Marathon depends on the over-reaction of those targeted. The 9/11 attacks succeeded as an act of terror because it led to the US fighting disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and sanctioning the use of torture and imprisonment without trial. It turned the US into a more authoritarian state in which civil liberties are curtailed or discounted, and spawned an elephantine and costly security apparatus.

It was depressing to see heavily armed Swat teams with assault rifles and body armour debouching from armoured vehicles in Boston as they used to do in Belfast. Curfews, which people in Baghdad and Fallujah have become inured to, suddenly become acceptable in Massachusetts. In contrast to Northern Ireland and Iraq, this is done to the applause of local inhabitants. The reason for Swat teams and curfews is understandable, but measures like these get people cumulatively accustomed to accepting without protest an authoritarian government. ...

An outcome of the bombings will be an enhanced sense of public insecurity, and support for those who claim to be doing something about it. Before the Boston attack there were signs of restiveness in the US at the excessive size of the post-9/11 security bureaucracy at a time of budget cuts. ...

The worst damage stemming from the Boston bombing will be if the security behemoths created or enlarged after 9/11, whose effectiveness is in doubt, were rejuvenated and expanded.

How Boston exposes the frailty of American democracy
Paul Woodward War in Context USA April 22, 2013

... If two men could kill three people and shut down a major city, what would happen if eight men killed twelve people? Imagine if a Boston-type bombing was to happen in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles all on the same day.

America would shut down. Even if only briefly, martial law of some type would likely be imposed in most major cities. At least that’s the risk of a massive overreaction to what would objectively have been a series of minor acts of terrorism.

And if that’s the risk of what might be triggered by twelve deaths, then attacks that resulted in the deaths of two or three hundred Americans would pose a very real threat to democracy. The hysterical screams about the urgency of making America safe by all means necessary would drown out every voice of reason.

For those who are willing to pay attention, there’s a kind of Taoist principle that can be extracted from these observations: ...

Related: Since the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as ethnic Chechens, the US national conversation about the incident has focused on the connection between the violence and terrorism in Chechnya. Here's why that is the wrong model. Author Charles King is Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus.

Not your average Chechen jihadis
Charles King Foreign Affairs USA April 21, 2013


Law enforcement officials depart the search area for Dzhokar Tsarnaev. Photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Ever since the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as ethnic Chechens, the national conversation about the incident seems to have focused on the connection between the violence and Chechnya. The two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, certainly lived in two places at once: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in an imagined homeland in Chechnya and the North Caucasus more broadly. And although their ancestral land was something they knew mainly through family stories and nationalist mythology, they reveled in that part of their identity -- at least judging from their social media profiles and the other traces they left in the public domain. In other words, the Tsarnaevs seemed quintessentially American. Perhaps that is one reason their involvement in the Boston bombing is so horrifying. ...

The North Caucasus region has seen no shortage of bombs and assassinations, and people from the area have been responsible for spectacularly brutal attacks on civilians in other parts of Russia, including the 2004 hostage crisis at an elementary school that left 380 dead and the 2010 suicide bombings on the Moscow subway that killed forty.

So far, however, there is no direct information linking the North Caucasus to the attack in Boston; armed groups in the region, including the Dagestani branch of the so-called Caucasus Emirate -- the jihadist network in the North Caucasus headed by Chechen warlord Doku Umarov -- issued a formal statement denying any connection to the Tsarnaev brothers. The jihadists claimed instead that the brothers were pawns in an elaborate attempt by Russian security services to turn American opinion against the North Caucasus underground and against Muslims more generally. That might be far-fetched, but it would hardly be the line of argument the Emirate would pursue if it were suddenly using American operatives to expand attacks outside of Russia. The logical thing would have been for the Emirate to claim responsibility. ...

It may yet emerge that Tamerlan did, in fact, have some link to the North Caucasus jihadist scene, but even if he did, it would still do little to explain the involvement of his younger brother, Dzhokhar, who seems to have been as deeply American as Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger shooter in the Washington sniper attacks of 2003. Nor would it likely have any real impact on U.S.-Russian relations, other than convincing some American policymakers of the point that their Russian counterparts take for granted: that people from the North Caucasus, by their very presence, are somehow a security threat. That will be especially important in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics in 2014, when Moscow will be especially security-obsessed and will want to deepen its already tough surveillance of religious Muslims, especially young men, in the North Caucasus. The United States, convinced of the threat, will likely look the other way when it comes to ongoing human rights abuses in the region.

The brothers’ father and aunt, Anzor and Maret, who have both spoken to the media, seem to have understood this point intuitively. They have consistently maintained that the two brothers were set up and are wholly innocent of any role in the Boston bombing. This may sound like a bizarre conspiracy theory but from the perspective of people from the North Caucasus, scenes of armored vehicles on city streets, an entire neighborhood in lock-down, and a dramatic shoot-out between heavily armed federal police and alleged terrorists on the lam are familiar sights. Sons that fall to Russian bullets are consistently believed to have been innocent victims. And in fact, many of them are. When Russian federal forces begin an “anti-terrorist operation,” few of the targets exit alive. The Watertown, Massachusetts, operation was a different matter entirely, of course, but the optics were all too familiar. With the Tsarnaev family’s background, distrusting the state -- any state -- comes with the territory, and in the North Caucasus, that is never a bad rule of thumb to follow. ...

In 1967, Boston Marathon gave us all a glimpse of the possible. Today we saw not of the world we’d aspire to live in, but the one we actually inhabit. - Dave Zirin

The Boston Marathon: All my tears, all my love
Dave Zirin The Nation USA April 15, 2013


Kathrine Switzer found herself about to be thrown out of the normally all-male Boston Marathon when a companion threw a block that tossed a race official out of the running instead, April 19, 1967. Photo: AP

If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon.” – Kathrine Switzer

The dead. The injured. The anguish. All the result of bombs that were set to explode at the finish line just over four hours after the start of the Boston Marathon. Right now the sane among us will suggest caution. We’ll suggest restraint. We’ll suggest the giving of blood. There will be time to mourn. We will mourn the dead and injured. I also mourn the Boston Marathon and how it’s now been brutally disfigured.

The Boston Marathon matters in a way other sporting events simply do not. It started in 1897, inspired by the first modern marathon, which took place at the inaugural 1896 Olympics. It attracts 500,000 spectators and over 20,000 participants from ninety-six countries. Every year, on the big day, the Red Sox play a game that starts at the wacky hour of 11:05am so people leaving the game can empty onto Kenmore Square and cheer on the finishers. It’s not about celebrating stars but the ability to test your body against the 26.2 mile course, which covers eight separate Massachusetts towns and the infamous “Heartbreak Hill” in Newton. It’s as much New England in spring as the changing of the leaves in fall. It’s open and communitarian and utterly unique. And today it was altered forever. I spoke to my friend Jim Bullington who has ran in four Boston Marathons. He said,

For me and to any serious marathoner the Boston Marathon will always be the runner’s Holy Grail. Runners train and train and train for this race. If you qualify for the marathon you get the honor of running through all the beautiful outlying towns, you get to temporarily loose your hearing as you run by what seems to be thousands of deafening screaming women at Wellesley, you climb Heartbreak Hill, you run by all the college parties, you pass the CITGO sign and know you have one mile left, and finally when you make the final turn, you sprint by thousands of cheering people towards the finish line. Nothing is like it. Nothing. I just can’t imagine this. What is the most joyous occasion has turned into a tragedy of epic proportions.

Like a scar across someone’s face, the bombing will now be a part of the Boston Marathon, but also like a scar, we have to remember it’s only a part. If this bombing will always be a part of the Boston Marathon, then so is Kathrine Switzer. I want to tell the story of Kathrine Switzer because it’s about remembering the Boston Marathon as something more than the scene of a national tragedy.

Through 1966, women weren’t allowed to run the grueling 26-mile race. But in 1967, a woman by the name of Kathrine Switzer registered as K.V. Switzer and, dressed in loose fitting sweats, took to the course. Five miles into the race, one of the marathon directors actually jumped off a truck to forcibly remove Switzer from the course, yelling: “Get the hell out of my race!” But the men running with her fought him off. For them, Kathrine Switzer had every right to be there. For them, the Boston Marathon wasnʼt about exclusion or proving male supremacy—pitting boys against girls. It was about people running a race. Somehow Kathrine Switzer kept her pace as this mayhem occurred all around her. As she said, “I could feel my anger dissipating as the miles went by—you can't run and stay mad!” ...

Related: After Boston, one foot in front of the other
Chloe Angyal The Nation USA April 16, 2013


Runners compete in the 2013 Boston Marathon. Photo courtesy of Sonia Su, Wikimedia, CC 2.0.

In a few weeks' time, my friend Anthony is having a party. It's not his birthday, but he is celebrating the fact that he's alive. He and his friends will get together to mark the one-year anniversary of the day he almost died, but didn't: an Alive Day party. Among wounded vets, such celebrations aren't uncommon ("It sounds like pretty much every Jewish holiday," I joked to Anthony when he told me about his plan. "They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat").

Almost a year ago, Anthony stepped on an IED while out on patrol in Kandahar Province. Technically, he died that day: he flat-lined twice in the helicopter that lifted him out of the explosion site, but he came back. For that, I am profoundly grateful every day. He lost one of his legs below the knee in the blast, and has spent the last year in and out of surgery, learning to use a series of increasingly sophisticated prostheses, and building up his strength again.

Like most people who were fortunate enough to not have loved ones in harm’s way yesterday, I sat in shock at the news out of Boston. I scrolled through my Twitter feed with the kind of disgust and disbelief, that mingled fear and sadness that has become sickeningly familiar to Americans of late. I didn’t rage and I didn’t cry; I just sat there, reading and watching.

And then I heard the news of marathon runners sustaining serious injuries to their lower extremities, the report from Mass General that several amputations had been performed. People losing calves, and feet. Men and women who had just run a marathon, who run every single day, who have honed their bodies into world-class athletic machines, suddenly without feet, or living without a leg. For reasons I can't explain, it was that thought that broke my heart.

Perhaps it was because I grew up on the balance beam and at the ballet barre, reveling in the things my body could do. I've never run a marathon—never come close—but I know what it feels like to command your body to do something that seems impossible, to gradually, determinedly coax it, correcting an angle here and a foot placement there until finally, your body does what your mind has decided it will do. ...

Angst is on the rise, says Elaine Showalter. The distress is real, but so is the way an obsessive focus on it has created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Elaine Showalter is an emerita professor of English at Princeton University. Among her books is Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). She wonders "Is anxiety getting worse in the United States, or is that just a matter of terminology and a popular diagnosis? Would anxiety disappear in a social utopia? Or is it an indelible part of the human condition?" And she says "Perhaps we can get a little perspective by asking ourselves whether Americans are more anxious than Syrians, or more depressed than the British during the Blitz. ... American anxiety seems like a cultural chimera created by, yes, social and economic problems, and by personal crises, but also by media attention."

Our age of anxiety
Elaine Showalter The Chronicle Review USA April 8, 2013

In his controversial book American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881), the neurologist George M. Beard proclaimed that Americans in the 19th century led all civilized nations in their susceptibility to nervous, anxious, and depressive disorders. Beard named the mixture of negative emotions "neurasthenia" and attributed it to five developments in "modern civilization"—steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. In those major signs of modernity—and dozens of related ones, such as buying stocks on margin—the United States, he argued, was both "peculiar and pre-eminent" among advanced societies.

Beard claimed that American nervousness "is the product of American civilization," and that this "distinguished malady" was seen most often among the cultural elite and the "brain-workers." (Indeed, he had suffered from it as a student at Yale University.) Neurasthenia was strongly gendered, but it was an acceptable, even prestigious disease for male intellectuals, professionals, writers, and artists.

The physician Silas Weir Mitchell famously prescribed a "rest cure" for female neurasthenics, to slow down their dangerous mental activity and forcibly restore them to a traditionally passive feminine role. Neurasthenic men, however, were encouraged to steel their nerves and recover their masculine self-control through rugged exercise­—ideally the "West cure," of horseback riding, hunting, and camping in California or Colorado. Beard, like many of his contemporaries, was interested in solutions to the malady of modern civilization, which offered its most advanced form in the United States. As he concluded, "He who has solved the problem of nervousness as it appears in America shall find its problems in other lands already solved for him."

Neurasthenia peaked in the early 1900s, according to the literary critic Tom Lutz's fascinating cultural study, American Nervousness, 1903 (Cornell University Press, 1991). But a century later, we are in the midst of a new epidemic. Depression, angst, panic, stress—whatever you choose to call it, there is clearly a lot of it going around.

"It has not escaped many observers that today we are drenched in anxiety," says the medical historian Edward Shorter in his new book, How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (Oxford University Press). "Depression has become a mass illness." Shorter cites statistical evidence: "Within a given year, one in 10 Americans today will have a mood disorder, the great majority of them major depression." The psychiatrist Jeffrey P. Kahn sees an even worse trend in his recent Angst: Origins of Anxiety and Depression (Oxford), with "the commonplace anxiety and depressive disorders" affecting at least 20 percent of Americans. That's some 60 million people. ...

While Shorter crusades against the drug companies and the DSM, the Bryn Mawr College professor of social work Dana Becker, in her new One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble With Stress as an Idea (Oxford), is a social constructionist. She sees the discourse of depression as a reflection of "traditional American values of individualism and capitalism." Like Shorter, she is skeptical about the insistent marketing of antidepressant medication, but in her view the real source of the epidemic is "stressism." Popular books about stress and life events, stress and the heart, stress and the Type A personality, as well as products and therapies marketed to relieve stress, have made the disorder the default diagnosis for millions of Americans. Too many academic experts, as well as the mass media, send the message that the way to deal with stress is through individual adjustment to competition and ambition.

But stress and anxiety are also "tied to social, economic, and political processes in ways that many contemporary perspectives rarely touch," Becker concludes, "Now stress gives us a way to talk about unsettling transformations in American life: growing income inequality, tectonic shifts in gender arrangements, war in the age of terrorism. We call the plunge into poverty during recession 'financial stress'; we call the sometimes crushing responsibility for equal investment in work and family the stress of 'work-family conflict'; we call suicidal reactions to the unnameable horrors of war 'post-traumatic stress.'" She believes that we should accept our "universal vulnerability" to life's risks and dangers but work together to change "inequalities in our society." To contend with our "all-American stress," Becker argues, we need to face the real problems of our country in the 21st century. ...

The origins of applause. It’s a custom as old as man himself, with a history of political intrigue and cultural transformation.

A brief history of applause, the 'big data' of the ancient world
Megan Garber The Atlantic USA March 15, 2013

Visit this page for its embedded links.

And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties -- smiling, frivolous duties -- some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.
-- Vladimir Nabokov

In the seventh century, as the Roman empire was in the decline period of its decline and fall, the emperor Heraclius made plans to meet with a barbarian king. Heraclius wanted to intimidate his opponent. But he knew that the Roman army, in its weakened state, was no longer terribly intimidating, particularly when the intended intimidatee was a barbarian. So the emperor hired a group of men to augment his legions -- but for purposes that were less military than they were musical. He hired the men to applaud.

Heraclius's tactic of intimidation-by-noisemaking, the audible version of a Potemkin Village, did nothing to stanch the wounds of a bleeding empire. But it made a fitting postscript to that empire's long relationship with one of the earliest and most universal systems people have used to interact with each other: the clapping of hands. Applause, in the ancient world, was acclamation. But it was also communication. It was, in its way, power. It was a way for frail little humans to recreate, through hands made "thunderous," the rumbles and smashes of nature.

Applause, today, is much the same. In the studio, in the theater, in places where people become publics, we still smack our palms together to show our appreciation -- to create, in cavernous spaces, connection. ("When we applaud a performer," argues the sociobiologist Desmond Morris, "we are, in effect, patting him on the back from a distance.") We applaud dutifully. We applaud politely. We applaud, in the best of circumstances, enthusiastically. We applaud, in the worst, ironically.

We find ways, in short, to represent ourselves as crowds -- through the very medium of our crowd-iness.

But we're reinventing applause, too, for a world where there are, technically, no hands. We clap for each others' updates on Facebook. We share. We link. We retweet and reblog the good stuff to amplify the noise it makes. We friend and follow and plus-1 and plus-K and recommend and endorse and mention and (sometimes even, still) blogroll, understanding that bigger audiences -- networked audiences -- can be their own kind of thunderous reward. We find new ways to express our enthusiasms, to communicate our desires, to encode our emotions for transmission. Our methods are serendipitous and also driven, always, by the subtle dynamics of the crowd. We clap because we're expected to. We clap because we're compelled to. We clap because something is totally awesome. We clap because we're generous and selfish and compliant and excitable and human.

This is the story of how people clapped when all they had, for the most part, was hands -- of how we liked things before we Liked things. Applause, participatory and observational at the same time, was an early form of mass media, connecting people to each other and to their leaders, instantly and visually and, of course, audibly. It was public sentiment analysis, revealing the affinities and desires of networked people. It was the qualified self giving way to the quantified crowd.

It was big data before data got big. ...

Michelle Obama plants the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn of the White House April 4, 2013 in Washington, DC. For the fifth time, the first lady invited students from ‘schools that have made exceptional improvements to school lunches’ from Florida, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Vermont to help her plant the garden. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Iranian group wants to give Michelle Obama an award for proving oscars are ‘political’
The Journal Turkish Weekly Turkey April 4, 2013

An Iranian military commander says his group will give U.S. first lady Michelle Obama an award for revealing the "real nature" of Hollywood’s annual Oscar awards.

Commander Yaghoub Soleimani ... said on March 28 that the decision by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to have Mrs. Obama award the Best Picture Oscar to the "anti-Iranian" film Argo prompted some "supporters of the Islamic Revolution" to organize an "international congress" to give her a prize.

He was quoted as saying that the first lady deserves her own award for proving, albeit inadvertently, that the awards for such movies are based on political, not artistic, criteria. ...

Iranian officials criticized the movie before its February 24 win at the Oscars and then again after.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the Iranian government has hired a French lawyer to file a lawsuit against "Hollywood" over a series of movies, including Argo, that Iranian officials say distort the true image of the Islamic republic.

I shattered my leg at the NCAA Tournament and all I got was this lousy T-shirt
Dave Zirin The Nation USA April 3, 2013


Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware speaks to the press, April 3, 2013. Photo: Timothy D. Easley/AP. Visit this page for its embedded links.

There's been a river of ink already spilled over Louisville guard Kevin Ware's horrific leg injury during the Cardinals' Elite Eight victory over the Duke Blue Devils. Most, with some notable exceptions, have tested the bounds of hokey sentimentality: the classic story of an injured player inspiring his shaken team to victory. Now, however, we’ve reached the point where tragedy becomes farce. On Wednesday we learned that Adidas, in conjunction with the University of Louisville athletic department, will be selling a $24.99 t-shirt with Kevin Ware’s number 5 and the slogan “Rise to the Occasion” emblazoned across the back. His team will also be wearing warm-ups with Ware’s name, number and the slogan “All In." (This tragically is not a tribute to Chris Hayes.)

You almost have to tip your cap: no non-profit does buccaneer profiteering quite like the NCAA. What other institution would see a tibia snap through a 20-year-old's skin on national television and see dollar signs? In accordance with their rules aimed at preserving the sanctity of amateurism, not one dime from these shirts will go to Kevin Ware or his family. Not one dime will go toward Kevin Ware’s medical bills if his rehab ends up beneath the $90,000 deductible necessary to access the NCAA’s catastrophic injury medical coverage. Not one dime will go towards rehab he may need later in life. "Going forward, we don't know what's going to happen in terms of medical expenses," said Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, a group trying to organize NCAA athletes. "If Kevin has lifelong medical bills associated with his injury, he could be squarely responsible for this…These are things that are not guaranteed to players that are injured, and no matter how hard it might be for people to understand, that's the truth. And that should change."

Where will the t-shirt money go? Well, Coach Rick Pitino makes more than $4 million a year and will likely see his current five-year deal torn up and renegotiated following the season. The assistant coaches, trainers and support staff will also surely get a taste.*** The Final Four ratings boost spurred from the buzz surrounding Kevin Ware's story will also translate into quite the windfall for the NCAA. The multi-billion-dollar slop bucket of March Madness money, which makes up 96 percent of the NCAA’s operating budget, will pay organization president Mark Emmert's two million dollar salary as well as the paychecks for their 14 vice presidents, each of whom make at least $400,000 a year. They will also to be able to continue to pay off the mortgage on their new $50 million, 116,000-square-foot headquarters in Indianapolis.

The Kevin Ware story is why any person of conscience should support former UCLA player Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against the NCAA. ...

As for Kevin Ware, he returned to Louisville this week, his coach by his side. Coach Pitino announced that he is healthy enough to be in Atlanta for the Final Four, cheering on his teammates. Ware is now a newly minted media star: a 21st century George Gipp with the benefit of having a story that’s actually true. Unfortunately the school won’t even say publicly, if rehab doesn’t go as planned, whether he’ll still have a scholarship waiting for him when he returns in the fall. The official word from Louisville is that the question is irrelevant because “doctors are expecting a full recovery.” One thing is certain. At least he’ll get a lousy t-shirt.

Intro: You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it.... - Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, comments to Prof. David F. Boyd at the Louisiana State Seminary (December 24,1860); quoted in The Civil War: A Narrative (1986) by Shelby Foote, p. 58; also in The Civil War : A Book of Quotations (2004) by Robert Blaisdell. Two other famous quotes attrbuted to Sherman:

War is Hell!

It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

Jim comment: As a former combat infantryman the following item brought me near to tears—tears of recognition, tears of rage, tears of frustration....

Item: Darayya, Syria’s Stalingrad
Nadezhda Kevorkova RT Russia March 27, 2013


No fake cheerfulness, they bury comrades every day.

Damascus - Two years of ruthless warfare have transformed rookie soldiers of the Syrian army into battle-thirsty experienced veterans. Quiet confidence has replaced a gloomier outlook as soldiers expect to fight the war to the bitter victorious end.

After you leave the silk-stocking downtown of Damascus, passing by posh mansions, premises of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Government, driving past a bus stop and a taxi station where most people hire transport in order to get to Beirut, past endless food stalls and green grocers and turn left – right after the checkpoint - you'll find yourself on a highway that leads to Darayya.

This Damascus suburb is dubbed differently, depending on the life experience of the person describing it: the town of Zero, Syria’s Stalingrad, the city of the dead and so on. ...


Darayya used to be a rich suburb of Damascus with prosperous shops. The rebels were sure that local Sunnis would support them. But they simply left. Photo: Nadezhda Kevorkova/RT

Looking at this military unit one could say that a war serves an army well. Dress code is free: one is wearing a bright red belt with a huge buckle, another has a cowboy hat on his head and many are wearing baseball caps. They move quickly and deftly – professional machines of war with cat-like grace. They understand each other without words. There is no servility, neither is there the beadledom [Editor: That is, "stupid officialism"] that was so noticeable just two years ago. War creates the atmosphere of battlefield brotherhood and clears up the goals. ...

I can’t help making comparisons with those soldiers I saw in the summer 2011 – the very beginning of the events in Syria. Back then they looked like perplexed unskilled youngsters that had no idea of what they had to do and resembled live unarmed targets, put out across the country to be killed. Many of them are now bearded with long hair. You won’t see a tiny bit of that depression in their eyes that was there two years ago.

All those who hadn’t felt like struggling, escaped from the army during these hard two years. But those who have stayed are definitely ready to fight and give away their lives. ...

When talking to the officers and soldiers you don’t get the image you expected. For instance, the soldiers don’t think they fight for Assad or the Arab Socialist Baath Party, let alone the Alawites or power in general.

“We are not fighting for Assad or the Arab Socialist Baath Party. We fight for Syria, which they intend to change. We are against the presence of Qatar and other Gulf states here”, the commander says.

“We are fighting for Syria, for our way of life – when all the communities join hands. The other side only displays bigotry and is not looking for solidarity”, another officer announces.

“Why do they call us non-believers? We don’t meddle with each other’s religions, and treat one another with respect as is customary in Syria. There are Sunnis, Shia, Druzes, Orthodox believers and Maronites among us. One of my friends who was a Sunni and who was performing Salah five times a day died”, a young member of a tank crew says. A few days ago he managed to escape his burning tank and was shell-shocked. Although it was not a must, he returned to duty. ...

The head of the unit says that the Darayya operation started in November 2012. The population left back when the militants came. Now the government forces took back control over 75% of the area. Before the war 80 thousand people lived here. It was a rich town, famous for its trade in office supplies. The majority of the population was Sunni, but there were Christians, too.

It’s no accident that the rebels came to this area – they thought wealthy Sunnis would side with them. They killed the government officials and burnt the Mayor’s office. They distributed flyers. But the people started complaining, asking the government to protect them. Eventually, they left their homes. ...

How many militants were there in Darayya? Some say 1,500. Others said 3,000. One army officer said that 5,300 militants were killed here over the last six months.

How many are still out there? Some say a thousand... Others claim that militants keep coming here on a mission to die in combat...

The army believes that the Darayya operation became the first one where the army successfully managed to draw the noose tight around the enemy forces. Previously, the militants’ tactics were to use the local population as a human shield which forced the army to give them the opportunity to leave. This time, the locals had left and so the army had their hands untied. This way Darayya came to symbolize victory for them.

Just like Stalingrad in World War II – completely destroyed yet victorious.

“They want to turn all of Syria into a land of ghost towns like this. But we won’t let them!” says the commanding officer.

They say, in a war, it’s about perseverance vs. ideas. Darayya is definitely about perseverance.

As for the ideas, which one will prevail?

Related: It remains to be seen who disintegrates first: the regime or the main rebel groups opposing it. If a civil war of a type where everybody is fighting everybody else erupts, there may be no winners in Syria at all. - Victor Kotsev, a Bulgarian journalist and political analyst who lived, studied and worked in Israel for a number of years.

The Syrianization of Syria rolls on
Victor Kotsev Asia Times Online Hong Kong March 28, 2013

Visit this page for its appended links.

Perhaps years from now, a new term along the lines of "Syrianization" will take over the significance of the sweeping (and some say inaccurate) concept of Balkanization. The northern Levant is quickly overtaking every other part of the world as the paradigm of complete fragmentation of a geographic and political entity.

It is hard to tell who or what is falling apart more quickly: the regime, the opposition, or the possibility of reaching international consensus over the civil war which has killed at least 70,000 people so far, a figure that former United Nations secretary general and envoy to Syria Kofi Annan called in a recent Reuters interview "a gross under-estimation".

Shortly after a symbolic Arab League summit in which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's place was taken by a rebel leader (who had himself resigned from his position several days prior to the meeting), Annan said that it was "too late" for either a military intervention or arming the opposition. "My own view is that as late as it is we have to find a way of pouring water on the fire rather than the other way around," he added. ...

Nevertheless, the Arab League summit in Doha backed soundly weapons shipments to the rebels and a somber al-Khatib was shown opening the first opposition embassy in the Qatari capital on Wednesday. He refused to elaborate on his political plans, after resigning on Sunday, but the defiant tone he struck at the meeting-telling Arab rulers to "fear God in dealing with your people" and calling on them to free political prisoners-suggested he is not looking to patch up relations. ...

Rebel unity has always been a bit of a fiction. Al-Khatib, a moderate former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, sought to present himself as a conciliatory figure, but he also frequently drew criticism from different groups, for example for extending an offer of negotiations to the regime earlier this year.

Recently, however, things have gotten worse on the ground, to the point where different rebel groups are on the verge of an open war with each other. ...

Meanwhile, the rebels are certainly receiving weapons-and plundering them from captured army bases-and, according to some reports have managed to kill as many as 13,000 regime soldiers. ...

The invasion of Iraq (2003); the My Lai massacre (1968); the death of Rachel Corrie (2003); the NATO bombing of Libya (2011). Though Glaser doesn't mention it, March 10 was the 65th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in his 1966 introduction to the paperback edition of his novel Mother Night, originally published in 1961. In the novel, apolitical expatriate American playwright Howard W. Campbell, Jr. refashions himself as a Nazi propagandist in order to pass coded messages on to the U.S. generals and preserve his marriage to a German woman—their "nation of two," as he calls it. But in serving multiple masters, Campbell ends up ruining his life and becoming an unwitting inspiration to bigots.

A month of mournful anniversaries
John Glaser Antiwar.com Blog USA March 17, 2013

Visit this page for its multiple embedded links.

This month is chock-full of mournful anniversaries. ...

Jim comment: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. As a US Army private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944. Imprisoned in Dresden, he experienced the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in February 1945. Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. In his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (March 1969) he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them. Later, he said "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes." Vonnegut's well-known phrase "so it goes," used ironically in reference to death, originated in Slaughterhouse-Five. The phrase with its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue recurs throughout his following works. The folks at The Onion wrote in "15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Wil":

13. "So it goes."
Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn't notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion—and dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There's a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to."

Why cursive? Done well, it’s the pinnacle of elegant handwriting, a mark of sophistication. Too bad it’s rarely done well anymore. But Philip Ball says: "Were there to be a choice between cursive and manuscript, one can’t help wondering why we would demand that five-year-olds master all those curlicues and tails, and why we would want to make them form letters so different from those in their reading books."

Curse of cursive handwriting
Philip Ball Prospect Magazine UK February 20, 2013


Why do we teach children two different systems of handwriting?

There’s something deeply peculiar about the way we teach children to play the violin. It’s a very difficult skill for them to master—getting their fingers under control, holding the bow properly, learning how to move it over the strings without scratching and slipping. But just as they are finally getting there, are beginning to feel confident, to hit the right notes, to sound a bit like the musicians they hear, we break the news to them: we’ve taught them to play left-handed, but now it’s time to do it like grown-ups do, the other way around.

Alright, I’m fibbing. Of course we don’t teach violin that way. We wouldn’t do anything so absurd for something as important as learning an instrument, would we? No—but that’s how we teach children to write.

It’s best not to examine the analogy too deeply, but you see the point. The odd thing is that, when most parents watch their child’s hard-earned gains in forming letters like those printed in their storybooks crumble under the demand that they now relearn the art of writing “joined up” (“and don’t forget the joining tail!”), leaving their calligraphy a confused scrawl of extraneous cusps and wiggles desperately seeking a home, they don’t ask what on earth the school thinks it is doing. They smile, comforted that their child is starting to write like them.

As he or she probably will. The child may develop the same abominable scribble that gets letters misdirected and medical prescriptions perilously misread. In his impassioned plea for the art of good handwriting, Philip Hensher puts his finger on the issue (while apparently oblivious to it):

“You longed to do ‘joined-up writing,’ as we used to call the cursive hand when we were young… I looked forward to the ability to join one letter to another as a mark of huge sophistication. Adult handwriting was unreadable, true, but perhaps that was its point.”

The real point is, of course, that “sophistication.” When I questioned my friend, a primary school teacher, about the value of teaching cursive, she was horrified. “But otherwise they’d have baby writing!” she exclaimed. I pointed out that my handwriting is printed (the so-called “manuscript” form). “Oh no, yours is fine,” she—not the placatory sort—allowed. I didn’t ask whether all the books on my shelves were printed in “baby writing” too.

I did also once ask my daughter’s teachers what they thought they were doing by teaching her cursive. When they realised this was not a rhetorical question but a literal one, there was bemusement and panic. “It’s just what we do,” one said. “We always have.” Another ventured the answer I’d anticipated; that the children will be able to write faster, and then added that she thought she’d seen some research somewhere showing that some children find the flowing movements help to imprint the shape of whole words more clearly in their mind. This was evidently not a question they had faced before.

We tend to forget, unless we have small children, that learning to write isn’t easy. It would make sense, then, to keep it as simple as possible. If we are going to teach our children two different ways of writing in their early years, you’d think we’d have a very good reason for doing so. I suspect that most primary school teachers could not adduce one.

It’s not just about writing, but reading too. “As a reading specialist, it seems odd to me that early readers, just getting used to decoding manuscript, would be asked to learn another writing style,” says Randall Wallace, a specialist in reading and writing skills at Missouri State University.

There are, from time to time, proposals to stop teaching cursive, usually motivated by the conviction that handwriting is passé in the digital age. The outraged response is that handwriting is an art; there is an intrinsic value in beautifully formed script and to lose it would be a step towards barbarism.

Here, I’m with Hensher: we should value skill with a pen. Our handwriting is an expression of our personality and humanity—not in some pseudoscientific, graphological sense, but in the same way as our clothing, our voice, our conversation. Yet these arguments are usually about the good versus the indifferent in handwriting. It is implicitly assumed that the acme of good handwriting is beautiful cursive. ...

Below: This post on One of a Thai is a part of a series on Yellowknife’s street food. To read all the articles on the street vendors of Yellowknife click here. At the moment there is only one other vendor profiled, Wiseguy Foods, but YKOnline promises more will be added in the future.

Yk Street Food: One of a Thai
Kyle With Yellowknife Online Northwest Territories September 12, 2012

Contains a series of photos of the food, the people and the trailer itself.

One of a Thai

In a town of 20,000 people, in the middle of the Northwest Territories, in Canada’s North, would you believe you could get Thai food? Well the simple answer is: you can. To go one step further, you can get it right on the streets of downtown Yellowknife at lunch time. I don’t know much about Thai food and I don’t know much about One of a Thai but I do know they have become almost a weekly meal for me throughout the work week. In any business you should be known for at least two things: good customer service and consistency. One of a Thai gets gold stars on both accounts from me. Every time I wonder up to the trailer I am greeted with smiling faces and the girls in the window have even come to know my usual order.

...

Here we are at the end of the Summer of 2012 and soon Street Food will go into hibernation for the winter but normally, during the summer, one can find the One of a Thai Food Trailer parked in front of the Greenstone Building or Rio Tinto Diavik Diamond Mine Offices on Franklin Ave.

In the winter One of a Thai can often be found cooking out of the Yellowknife Curling Club.

...

Below: NWT News/North is circulated in all 33 NWT communities and reports on activities throughout the region. It is headquartered in Yellowknife, with other NWT bureaus in Inuvik, Simpson and Hay River and contributing writers from a number of communities . Published weekly on Mondays. NNSL Online offers breaking news, scrolling headlines, special reports on industry and content from six Northern newspapers in all three territories.

Food truck vendor profiled by national magazine
Lyndsay Herman Northern News Service Online Northwest Territories January 29, 2013

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
One of Yellowknife's popular food trucks will be featured in a high profile national magazine this spring.

One of a Thai was contacted by Canadian Living Magazine last week to ask if the local culinary attraction would be interested in being a part of a feature on Canada's most unique food trucks.

"I was like, 'Oh my god!" said Sousanh Chanthalangsy, One of a Thai's owner. "I replied right away and said I would be honoured."

One of a Thai, which operates out of the Yellowknife Curling Rink during the winter, was nominated by fans through Facebook and Twitter.

Chanthalangsy said she doesn't know who nominated the food truck, but is very grateful to whomever it was.

"It's pretty amazing that somebody really went above and beyond and did that for us," she said. "I didn't even know (the contest) was going on."

One of a Thai started as a project Chanthalangsy completed for a business course she took in town. She said she knew even then she wanted to run a small business and thought about centring a small restaurant around her mother's authentic Thai cooking. ...

One of a Thai launched the curling club location in February 2011. Customers lined up for the first dinner service, said Chanthalangsy.

When the curling season was nearing its close, Chanthalangsy decided to look for another approach and found a food truck in British Columbia that looked promising.

The truck made it to town in March 2011 and was serving the streets of Yellowknife by May.

"It was all bam, bam, bam," said Chanthalangsy, laughing. "It happened really fast."

This season, Chanthalangsy said she has her eye on a new, more manoeuvrable food truck from California and is considering selling the current trailer. ...

Oxfam is an international confederation of 17 organizations networked together in more than 90 countries, as part of a global movement for change, to build a future free from the injustice of poverty.

Behind the Brands: Food justice and the ‘Big 10’ food and beverage companies
Oxfam International International February 26, 2013

You can download a summary of the report (six-page PDF) and/or the full report (51-page PDF) from links on this page.

Author: Beth Hoffman, consultant and writer on food and agriculture

Over the past century, powerful food and beverage companies have enjoyed unprecedented commercial success. But these companies have grown prosperous while the millions who supply the land, labor and water needed for their products face increased hardship.

Now, a rapidly changing environment, affected communities and an increasingly savvy consumer base are pushing the industry to rethink ‘business as usual’.

In this report, Oxfam assesses the social and environmental policies of the world’s ten largest food and beverage companies and calls on them to take the critical next steps to create a just food system.

...

One of the report's recommendations relates to governments around the world.

Governments bear the responsibility for protecting their citizens’ rights, including the rights of male and female small-scale farmers and farm workers and ensuring that businesses do not violate these rights. Governments must ensure that citizens have access to effective judicial mechanisms to protect their basic rights.

Governments must also build a new global governance to avert food crises, and craft global agreements for a more equitable distribution of scarce resources.

Go behind the brands you buy
Oxfam International International February 25, 2013

Oxfam International's social media campaign.

... Here at Oxfam we’ve spent a good part of the past 18 months looking at how the world’s biggest food firms - household names like Nestle, Coca Cola, Pepsi and Kellogg - do business. While some are doing better than others, overall, the results are bad news. But the good news is that no brand is so big it can ignore its customers – and that’s where you come in. ...

Related: Behind the Brands: On food justice, Oxfam gives Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Nestlé & Pepsi failing grades
Democracy Now! USA February 27, 2013

"Democracy Now!" talks to Chris Jochnick, the director of private sector engagement at Oxfam America and a lead researcher for the report. You can watch an embedded video on this page.

Oxfam reveals global food firms' gaping ethical shortfalls
Damian Carrington Guardian UK February 26, 2013


Sugar cane-cutters in Siribala, Mali. Photo: Joe Penney/Reuters. Visit this page for its embedded links.

The world's largest food companies are failing to meet ethical standards, a report from Oxfam has warned. None of the leading global brands such as Nestlé, Mars and Coca-Cola were given good overall ratings on their commitments to protect farmers, local communities and the environment, while British food giant Associated British Foods (ABF), owner of brands including Kingsmill, Ovaltine and Silverspoon, received the lowest rating.

The charity's Behind the Brands report compiled a scorecard, rating the "big 10" food companies in seven categories: the transparency of their supply chains and operations, how they ensure the rights of workers, how they protect women's rights, the management of water and land use, their policies to reduce the impacts of climate change and how they ensure the rights of the farmers who grow their ingredients. ...

"It is time the veil of secrecy shrouding this multi-billion dollar industry was lifted," said Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking. "Consumers have the right to know how their food has been produced and the impact this has on the world's poorest people who are growing the ingredients. The hundreds of brands lining supermarket shelves are predominantly owned by just 10 huge companies, which have combined revenues of more than $1bn a day while one-in-eight people go to bed hungry every night." ...

Oxfam wants the public to use social media to put pressure on the food giants to improve their policies, and on Tuesday launches its Behind the Brands campaign in more than 12 countries including China, Mexico and Brazil.

The report was discussed with and made available to the companies covered ahead of its publication.

The ten largest food corporations’ socially harmful policies
Straight Goods Canada February 28, 2013

from Oxfam

The social and environmental policies of the world’s ten biggest food and beverage giants are not fit for modern purpose and need a major shake-up, says international agency Oxfam.

The “Big 10” food and beverage companies – that together make $1 billion-a-day – are failing millions of people in developing countries who supply land, labor, water and commodities needed to make their products.

Behind the Brands – part of Oxfam’s GROW campaign to fix the broken food system – for the first time ranks the agricultural policies, public commitments and supply chain oversight of Associated British Foods (ABF), Coca Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, Pepsico and Unilever. ...

“Some companies recognize the business case for sustainability and have made important commitments that deserve praise,” said Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director for Oxfam International. “But none of the ten biggest food and beverage companies is moving fast enough to turn around a 100-year legacy of relying on cheap land and labor to make mass products at huge profits, with unacceptably high social and environmental costs. No company emerges with a good overall score. Across the board all ten companies need to do much more. ” ...

From our desk dictionary:

universal (adjective)

1 : including or covering all or a whole collectively or distributively without limit or exception; ...

2 a : present or occurring everywhere

...

Below: A lonely struggle without much international attention. China touts the wealth and development it’s bringing to the Himalayan plateau, but Tibetans abroad see the hollowing out of their homeland, which faces a steady influx of Han Chinese settlers.

How many self-immolating Tibetans does it take to make a difference?
Ishaan Tharoor TIME USA February 13, 2013

Right: Tibetans in exile participate in a candle light vigil in solidarity with fellow Tibetans who have self-immolated, in Katmandu, Nepal, Feb. 13, 2013. Photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP. Visit this page for its embedded links.

On Wednesday morning in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, a Tibetan monk drenched in gasoline appeared in front of a Buddhist stupa popular among Tibetans and set himself aflame. At the time of writing, the young man, thought to be in his early 20s, is in critical condition. According to some reports, his fiery protest marks a grim milestone: it’s the 100th such self-immolation by a Tibetan to happen since 2009 (others suggest it’s the 99th or the 101st).

Whatever the ghastly metric, the act has become the signature tactic in recent years of Tibetans voicing their frustrations with Chinese rule. It carries a haunting moral cry no suicide bomber can match. When one downtrodden Tunisian set himself alight in December 2010, the spark of his despair and anger kindled uprisings that swept across the Arab world. Yet, 100 Tibetan self-immolations — and many deaths — later, little has changed.

Part of the problem is where these protests occur. The overwhelming majority takes place within the borders of China, either in Tibet proper or in Tibetan areas of neighboring Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces. Media access is heavily controlled and much of what we know comes from advocacy groups based outside. A white paper titled “Why Tibet Is Burning,” released last month by an institute affiliated with the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, identifies by name 98 Tibetans who carried out self-immolations in China since February 2009. Many of those choosing to set themselves on fire are young teenagers and 20-somethings. They are farmers and aspiring clerics, nomads and students. In a foreword to the study, Lobsang Sangay, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Tibet’s exiles, urges Tibetans to “not to resort to drastic actions, including self-immolations, because life is precious.” But the study goes on to point the finger at Beijing:

The reason [for all the self-immolations] lies in China’s massive policy failure in Tibet over the course of more than 60 years of its rule. The revolution that is brewing in Tibet is driven by political repression, cultural assimilation, social discrimination, economic marginalization and environmental destruction.

China, of course, doesn’t see it this way. The likelihood of a Tibetan revolution — or even the rioting of not so long ago — is dwarfed by the specter of a Beijing crackdown. ...

Related: Tragedy is in the stories of ordinary lives everywhere. Here's just two related examples of besieged people—one small, the other large. There are many more around the world.

"Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in." A human story
Salt Spring News British Columbia Canada February 10, 2013

One link.

Soviet geologists came upon a family of six in remote Siberia. They had lived off the land, undetected, for 42 years. Then civilization had its way with them. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Lykovs' strange story was the rapidity with which the family went into decline after contact with the outside world was re-established. As one of them said on his deathbed, "A man lives for howsoever God grants."

For 40 years, this Russian family was cut off from all human contact, unaware of WWII
Mike Dash Smithsonian Magazine USA January 29, 2013


The Siberian taiga in the Abakan district. Six members of the Lykov family lived in this remote wilderness for more than 40 years—utterly isolated and more than 150 miles from the nearest human settlement. Photo: Wiki Commons. Visit this page for its embedded links.

Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world—not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.

Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors' downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.

It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.

The four scientists sent into the district to prospect for iron ore were told about the pilots' sighting, and it perplexed and worried them. "It's less dangerous," the writer Vasily Peskov notes of this part of the taiga, "to run across a wild animal than a stranger," and rather than wait at their own temporary base, 10 miles away, the scientists decided to investigate. Led by a geologist named Galina Pismenskaya, they "chose a fine day and put gifts in our packs for our prospective friends"—though, just to be sure, she recalled, "I did check the pistol that hung at my side." ...

Canada's inconvenient Indians: What do Indians want?
Salt Spring News British Columbia Canada February 10, 2013

Two links. What do Indians want? Thomas King begins his commentary:

Great question. The problem is it’s the wrong question to ask. While there are certainly Indians in North America, the Indians of this particular question don’t exist. The Indians of this question are “the Indian” that Canada and the United States have created for themselves. And as long as the question is asked in that way, there will never be the possibility of an answer.

Soviet geologists came upon a family of six in remote Siberia. They had lived off the land, undetected, for 42 years. Then civilization had its way with them. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Lykovs' strange story was the rapidity with which the family went into decline after contact with the outside world was re-established. As one of them said on his deathbed, "A man lives for howsoever God grants."

For 40 years, this Russian family was cut off from all human contact, unaware of WWII
Mike Dash Smithsonian Magazine USA January 29, 2013


The Siberian taiga in the Abakan district. Six members of the Lykov family lived in this remote wilderness for more than 40 years—utterly isolated and more than 150 miles from the nearest human settlement. Photo: Wiki Commons. Visit this page for its embedded links.

Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world—not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.

Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors' downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.

It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.

The four scientists sent into the district to prospect for iron ore were told about the pilots' sighting, and it perplexed and worried them. "It's less dangerous," the writer Vasily Peskov notes of this part of the taiga, "to run across a wild animal than a stranger," and rather than wait at their own temporary base, 10 miles away, the scientists decided to investigate. Led by a geologist named Galina Pismenskaya, they "chose a fine day and put gifts in our packs for our prospective friends"—though, just to be sure, she recalled, "I did check the pistol that hung at my side." ...

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. - Ancient Greek proverb

It is impossible not to notice the stacks of wood for sale all over Athens this year. Not far from Ms. Pantelemidou’s place is a wood lot run by Valantis Topalis, 44, who used to own an interior design company. He started selling wood last year, eager to have a business that was not reliant on people paying their bills. Last year, he made some money. But this year, he said, everybody is selling wood — some of it stolen from national parks — and business is not so good. Even in this wealthy area, a lot of the customers come in for only 20 euros, or $27, worth of wood on colder days. “The worst part is not the lack of money,” Mr. Topalis said of his life today. “The worst part today is the mood that people are in.” - Suzanne Daley reporting

Tree believed to have lent its shade to Plato destroyed for firewood
Kathimerini English Edition Greece January 17, 2013

The remaining parts of an olive tree under which the ancient Greek philosopher Plato is said to have sat to teach and debate with his pupils were found on Thursday to have been forcibly removed, possibly for firewood.

Passers-by noticed that the tree, located near Iera Odos, had been severely damaged and its roots pulled from the earth. It appears that it had been hacked away during the night. There have been reports of numerous trees in Athens being chopped down illegally as residents try to obtain firewood. Many Athenians have turned to wood-burning stoves and fireplaces to keep warm due to a rise in the tax on heating oil.

The tree, thought to be more than 3,000 years old, had been nurtured back to life after being hit by a bus in 1976. At the time, its gnarled trunk had split into four pieces. The largest of these was taken to the Agricultural University of Athens, where it has been on display ever since.

The Iera Odos (Sacred Way) lies on the ancient route between Athens and the town of Elefsina (Eleusis). The remains of Plato’s Academy lie near the tree, giving the area the name Akadimia Platonos.

Illegal loggers clear 50 hectares on slopes of Mt. Olympus
Kathimerini English Edition Greece January 18, 2013

Conservation groups in Pieria, northern Greece, have reported widescale illegal logging near the mountain village of Palaios Panteleimonas on the slopes of Mount Olympus, it emerged on Friday.

The unidentified loggers have cleared an area of more than 50 hectares of trees which could cause soil corrosion, according to conservationists who have lodged complaints with local forestry authorities and police.

Just over a year ago, two forestry employees in Katerini, near Thessaloniki, were hospitalized after being attacked by a gang of illegal loggers bearing iron bars.

According to Environment Ministry figures, more than 2,400 tons of wood has been seized from illegal loggers in the region of Thessaly and mainland Greece.

Rise in oil tax forces Greeks to face cold as ancients did
Suzanne Daley New York Times USA February 3, 2013

ATHENS — Even in the leafy northern stretches of this city, home to luxury apartment buildings, mansions with swimming pools and tennis clubs, the smell of wood smoke lingers everywhere at night.

In her fourth-floor apartment here, Valy Pantelemidou, 37, a speech therapist, is, like many other Greeks, trying to save money on heating oil by using her fireplace to stay warm.

Unemployment is at a record high of 26.8 percent in Greece, and many people have had their salaries and pensions cut, but those are not the main reasons so few residents here can afford heating oil. In the fall, the Greek government raised the taxes on heating oil by 450 percent.

Overnight, the price of heating a small apartment for the winter shot up to about $1,900 from $1,300. “At the beginning of autumn, it was the biggest topic with all my friends: How are we going to heat our places?” said Ms. Pantelemidou, who has had to lower her fees to keep clients. “Now, when I am out walking the dog, I see people with bags picking up sticks. In this neighborhood, really.”

In raising the taxes, government officials hoped not just to increase revenue but also to equalize taxes on heating oil and diesel, to cut down on the illegal practice of selling cheaper heating oil as diesel fuel. But the effort, which many Greeks dismiss as a cruel stupidity, appears to have backfired in more than one way.

For one thing, the government seems to be losing money on the measure. Many Greeks, like Ms. Pantelemidou, are simply not buying any heating oil this year. Sales in the last quarter of 2012 plunged 70 percent from a year earlier, according to official figures.

So while the government has collected more than $63 million in new tax revenue, it appears to have lost far more — about $190 million, according to an association of Greek oil suppliers — in revenue from sales taxes on the oil.

Meanwhile, many Greeks are suffering from the cold. In one recent survey by Epaminondas Panas, who leads the statistics department at the Athens University of Economics and Business, nearly 80 percent of respondents in northern Greece said they could not afford to heat their homes properly.

The return to wood burning is also taking a toll on the environment. Illegal logging in national parks is on the rise, and there are reports of late-night thefts of trees and limbs from city parks in Athens, including the disappearance of the olive tree planted where Plato is said to have gone to study in the shade. ...

Greeks forgo winter heating after jump in fuel tax
Karolina Tagaris Thomson Reuters Canada/UK February 7, 2013

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek cleaner Eleni Daneel's family spends evenings in their Athens home bundled up in coats after a steep rise in fuel prices made heating their apartment an unaffordable luxury this winter.

Daneel is one of a growing number struggling to keep warm after a fuel tax hike aimed at curbing smuggling and boosting revenues for the cash-strapped state sent heating oil prices up 40 percent.

With Greeks already struggling under wage and pension cuts imposed by the foreign lenders that bailed their country out, many have stopped using heating oil altogether, pushing consumption down 70 percent in the last three months of 2012 from a year earlier.

"Some cry, others swear. I've never experienced anything like this before, not being able to keep warm," said Daneel, 57, who supports her unemployed children and bed-ridden husband with her 400-euro monthly salary.

"Why aren't we allowed to live a dignified life?" ...

Higher fuel prices have helped spawn a set of unintended consequences - from illegal logging for firewood in the countryside to a wood-smoke smog appearing over Athens. ...

... [I]n a residential suburb of Athens, Apostolos Mastouropoulos has turned to his largely decorative fireplace to keep warm. But it is so poorly constructed that most of the smoke fills his apartment.

"I'm outraged," said Mastouropoulos, complaining it would cost 200 euros a month to heat his home with oil but only 40 euros with firewood.

"I'm finding it very hard to adapt to this reality, just because some politicians decided it for us," said Mastouropoulos, whose wife and two adult sons are unemployed.

So dramatic is the surge in the use of wood stoves and poorly functioning fireplaces that a hazy blanket of smog has crept up over the city's skyline, and the smell of ash hangs in the evening air. ...

For a growing number of Greeks, buying firewood, which can cost 260 euros to get an average household through three months of winter, is difficult, is also more than they can manage, even if it is a quarter of the equivalent heating oil bill.

That has meant a surge in illegal logging in areas like the rugged forest on Mount Egaleo in western Athens, where environmentalists have started patrols in search for offenders.

Clad in bright orange vests, a team of about 15 men, often volunteers, drive jeeps across the mountain, seeking potential loggers and listening for the sound of electric chainsaws.

"Ninety percent of the time it's people who are suffering from the economic crisis who need to keep themselves and their families warm," said Grigoris Gourdomichalis, head of an environmental group run by municipalities.

"I can see where they're coming from. You can't let your small child, or a sick person, or the elderly, go cold," he said, flashing his torchlight on the stumps of three pine trees cut down earlier in the day.

Without powers to arrest, the patrols are largely aimed at preventing illegal felling and can sometimes turn dangerous when loggers turn on the patrollers with knives or guns, he said.

"It's a bit like the Wild West here," Gourdomichalis said. "There's just such poverty and misery and unemployment."


Jim comment: My hope for a return to more sane societies—faint at times, I admit—perhaps lies in the old Malay proverb:

Though a tree grows so high, the falling leaves return to the root.

Within the sacred precincts, the profane world is transcended. - Renowned anthropologist and historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, in his book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1987). During the course of his monograph, Eliade shows some of our soul-dead contemporary society's complete misunderstandings. In The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade observes that while contemporary people believe their world is entirely profane, or secular, they still at times find themselves connected unconsciously to the memory of something sacred. It's this premise that both drives Eliade's exhaustive exploration of the sacred—as it has manifested in space, time, nature and the cosmos, and life itself—and buttresses his expansive view of the human experience.

Just as post offices are being phased out of all but the most densely populated areas, so too are rural phone booths. There’s no money for them. And yet, as my parents could tell you, they perform a service that is more than nostalgic. Even in urban areas phone booths are still of practical use, although only by the “poorest of the poor.” Except, of course, in times of disaster. After Hurricane Sandy, not only did much of New York go dark, so too did cellular networks. Surprisingly, the city’s few remaining pay phones still worked. A tweet to The Daily Beast reported a long line to use the pay phone on St. Marks Place, beside which a homeless entrepreneur was charging “two dollars for a dollar in change.” - Ariana Kelly

Jim comment: Here on Salt Spring Island, we have only one pay phone left. It is a kiosk on an outside wall of the iconic Mouat Trading Co., General Merchants building. We have only one rural post office left (in Fulford Harbour). It has been under threat of closure for more than a decade. Many islanders bypass the centralized, modern Ganges Canada Post and travel the length of the island to keep the Fulford P.O. open and to enjoy the experiences still to be shared in this beloved relc of our island's culture.

The phantom phone booth
Ariana Kelly Los Angeles Review of Books USA January 9, 2013

Visit this page for its embedded links and photos.

In the summer of 1999, the Holy Spirit directed Rick Karr, a 51-year-old Texan, to answer the calls made to a phone booth located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, 15 miles from a highway. He spent 32 days camping beside the phone booth on the desert playa in scorching heat. During that time he answered over 500 calls, many of which came from someone named Sergeant Zeno, who said he was phoning from the Pentagon.

What was there was only a ghost of what had been there, a phone booth installed in the 1960s for volcanic cinder miners and the few other domestic residents of the area. By the time Rick Karr arrived, the glass casing had been shattered, and what remained of the interior was lined with candles, license plates, rosaries, and other votives.

Karr was only one in a long line of pilgrims to the Mojave Phone Booth. A Los Angeles resident was incited to visit by seeing a telephone icon on a map of the Mojave, and it was his description of the trip published in an underground zine that catalyzed Godfrey Daniels, a computer programmer and entrepreneur, to build a website devoted to the phone booth. That the internet made the Mojave Phone Booth famous is, of course, ironic: the very technology that had rendered the phone booth obsolete acting as the agent of its resurgence.

Between 1997 and 2000, when Pacific Bell retired the number at the request of the Mojave Forest Service, the phone received thousands of calls, dozens each day. When asked why they called, most of the callers’ answers could be distilled to this: “Because there was a chance someone would pick up.”

The first American phone booth was patented by William Gray in 1889 for a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. It replaced real people who would sit in a quiet area of a public space beside a telephone and collect money from people who wanted to use it. The first phone booths, like the first movie theaters, were acutely beautiful examples of craftsmanship. A phone booth was not just a convenient place to have a conversation — it was a significant place.

By 1904 there were over 3 million phones and 81,000 phone booths across America. By 1946, only half of American homes contained phones; consequently, pay phones were nexus points for communities. For traveling salesmen and other insolvent entrepreneurs, telephone booths in the lobbies of public buildings were the only affordable places to do business. For these itinerant people, described by A. J. Liebling as the “Telephone Booth Indians,” the phone booth was of material and emotional relevance, providing “sustenance as well as shelter, as the buffalo did for the Arapahoe and Sioux.”

Phone booths helped facilitate a growing belief among urban Americans that privacy was both necessary and desirable. They carved out a private space in the public sphere, allowing us to do for the first time what most of us unwittingly now do every day when we speak absorbedly into our personal devices or simply into the air, behavior that we once characterized as insane. Yet almost as soon as they were constructed, phone booths began to be deconstructed. In the 1950s the wood was exchanged for glass, and the booth itself, in many cases, was replaced by a kiosk that set the phone apart but left the caller exposed, and in some ways more vulnerable, to the world.

Phone booths and kiosks have been quietly disappearing for the past 25 years, ever since the advent of the cellular phone in 1973. Most of those that remain stand as symbols of other eras, overrun with graffiti, sticky with secretions. Others have been resurrected, repurposed by needs as much spiritual and aesthetic as practical. In Japan and France phone booths have been transformed into aquariums; in New York they have been made into lending libraries and art galleries. In Leverick Bay some phone booths are now showers, and in Finland a few have been remodeled into bathrooms. Many have been transformed into free WiFi hotspots. In Santa Cruz a former phone booth is now a fountain, and in Vancouver some have been converted into homeless shelters of one — first come, first served. ...

For brevity of wit, read cheese labels in New York: “This firm Sardinian sheep has the cool unaffected strut of Mick in his prime”.

In the dairy case, ripe prose
Jeff Gordinier New York Times USA January 22, 2013

They can tell you about torment. They can describe long, frustrating hours sitting in dark, stinky basements and caves, pen in hand, trying to get the flow of the words just right.

They can tell you, too, about how it feels to be engulfed in a blaze of inspiration. They’ll describe the delirium of bliss when the right lines come. Like all writers, they are keenly aware of the competition, and envy eats away at them when they detect, in one of their comrades, a candle-flicker of genius.

We speak, naturally, of cheesemongers.

Although not universally acknowledged as members of New York’s creative class, the people who sell cheese arguably deserve a place of recognition alongside the poets and the playwrights, the folk singers and the indie screenwriters.

In case you haven’t noticed, some of the most amusing and captivating writing in the city is being produced in the service of cheese. ...

Hallelujah! (Hr. 2)
"Sunday Edition" CBC Radio One Canada December 23, 2012

You can listen to this radio documentary from a pop-up link on this page.

Everybody's talking Hallelujah. Yes, the book and music worlds are all atwitter about The Holy or The Broken, Alan Light's new history of the Leonard Cohen song, "Hallelujah".

The word, of course, has a much bigger story.

Next time you holler "Hallelujah!" because you lost weight or nabbed the last cab in a snowstorm, you'll be shouting out a word that echoed in the hills of ancient Israel. After almost 3,000 years, "Hallelujah" is still a great way to express joy and exuberance. And at Christmas, the word is enthroned in all its glory in Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

"Hallelujah" first made its appearance in the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament - a combination of two Hebrew words: "hallel", meaning praise, and "yah" meaning God.

But it's in Christianity that "hallelujah" - or the Latinized "alleluia" - became best known as a word of great emotional energy.

This morning, a look at the strength and mystery of this wonderful word ... equally powerful at times of happiness and pain. "Hallelujah" links us to generations past who faced hard times, but had faith that light would eventually conquer darkness. Knowing this, what else can we shout?

Our documentary, Hallelujah People, was produced by Frank Faulk. It first aired in 2006.