Undernews For July 14, 2009

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14 July 2009

FLOTSAM & JETSAM

NO STORY HERE

Sam Smith

Like any good lawyer, Sonia Sotomayor can take either side of a case - even when it's about something she said. Thus she excused her remark that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion" than a white male as a play on words that fell flat. She added: "It was bad because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that's clearly not what I do as a judge."

To a writer who is not a lawyer this is pure crap. On the other hand, it means she will get along quite well in Washington because as a wise lawyer with the richness of her experiences she knows how to speak in tongues.

After all, any potential justice who can get headlines around the country because she claims to believe in "fidelity to the law" doesn't have much to worry about. There was a happier time when that was taken for granted.

The truth is that Sotomayer - except for her ethnicity - is an absolutely mundane, even boring, centrist judge from whom no surprises should be expected. Like her appointer, she has been elevated to sanctified status simply because the elite - many decades late - decided it was okay to have someone of her background in such a high position. And she seemed safe.

She has thus benefited from a form of atomized affirmative action that fools a lot of people into thinking there's been a real change.

But as the cops say, that's it, folks. You can leave now. Clear the area. There's no story here.

PAGE ONE MUST

OUR DRYING EARTH

Guardian, UK - In Bhopal, and across much of northern India, a late monsoon and the driest June for 83 years are exacerbating the effects of a widespread drought and setting neighbor against neighbor in a desperate fight for survival.

India's vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut the water supply by 30% last week as levels in the lakes serving the city ran perilously low.

Across the country, from Gujarat to Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, the state that claims to be "the rice bowl of India", special prayers have been held for more rain after cumulative monsoon season figures fell 43% below average. . .

In Bhopal, which bills itself as the City of Lakes, patience is already at breaking point. The largest lake, the 1,000-year-old, man-made Upper Lake, had reduced in size from 38 sq km to 5 sq km by the start of last week.

The population of 1.8 million has been rationed to 30 minutes of water supply every other day since October. That became one day in three as the monsoon failed to materialize. In nearby Indore the ration is half an hour's supply every seven days.

The UN has warned for many years that water shortages will become one of the most pressing problems on the planet over the coming decades, with one report estimating that four billion people will be affected by 2050. What is happening in India, which has too many people in places where there is not enough water, is a foretaste of what is to come.

NY Times - The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled by the water policies of Iraq's neighbors, Turkey and Syria; a two-year drought; and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now.

The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, has left fishermen impoverished and has depleted riverside towns as farmers flee to the cities looking for work.

The poor suffer more acutely, but all strata of society are feeling the effects: sheiks, diplomats and even members of Parliament who retreat to their farms after weeks in Baghdad.

Along the river, rice and wheat fields have turned to baked dirt. Canals have dwindled to shallow streams, and fishing boats sit on dry land. Pumps meant to feed water treatment plants dangle pointlessly over brown puddles.

"The old men say it's the worst they remember," said Sayid Diyia, 34, a fisherman in Hindiya, sitting in a riverside cafe full of his idle colleagues. "I'm depending on God's blessings."

The drought is widespread in Iraq. The area sown with wheat and barley in the rain-fed north is down roughly 95 percent from the usual, and the date palm and citrus orchards of the east are parched. For two years rainfall has been far below normal, leaving the reservoirs dry, and American officials predict that wheat and barley output will be a little over half of what it was two years ago.

It is a crisis that threatens the roots of Iraq's identity, not only as the land between two rivers but as a nation that was once the largest exporter of dates in the world, that once supplied German beer with barley and that takes patriotic pride in its expensive Anbar rice.

Now Iraq is importing more and more grain. Farmers along the Euphrates say, with anger and despair, that they may have to abandon Anbar rice for cheaper varieties.

STUPID CORPORATE LAWYER TRICKS

San Jose Mercury News - The long arm of the Pez Candy Co. has reached all the way from Linz, Austria, into U.S. District Court, where it has slapped the tiny faces that fill Burlingame's Museum of Pez Memorabilia with a lawsuit.

The legal broadside, which was filed in San Francisco, singles out a 7-foot-10 snowman, built especially for the museum, that has been recognized by the Guinness record keepers as the world's largest Pez dispenser. Pez seeks to have the snowman melted down.

And, says the museum's newly hired lawyer, the company is demanding that the museum's "curators," Gary Doss and wife Nancy Yarbrough Doss, turn over all profits from the Pez shrine's 14 years in business.

"From a branding perspective, I think Pez should embrace the Dosses and the museum, instead of trying to attack them," said Roger Cole, the Mountain View-based trademark attorney from Fenwick & West LLP. .

The Burlingame museum features every one of the more than 550 Pez dispensers created over the years. . . The Dosses opened the place in 1995 as a small computer shop, but soon they began displaying their Pez collection on the hulking Ataris and Commodores, and within a year the miniature figures had taken over. Gary Doss added the only rarity missing from his collection - a Pineapple Pez worth $3,500 - in 2005, but his biggest prize is the Make-a-Face Mr. Potato Head Pez, worth an estimated $5,000.

The museum is packed with battalions of five-inch tall cartoon characters, Jedi knights and other objects of fantasy. The displays are neatly displayed and remarkably dust-free - no small feat considering the number of small feet. . .

"My feeling is that it's a piece of art," says Gary Doss, sounding frankly a bit huffy. "It is one of a kind. It is not for sale. And one of its main purposes as a piece of art is that it draws people into our store so we can sell Pez."

WHAT LIBRARIANS DO WHEN THEY'RE NOT BEING QUIET

Washington City Paper - When the American Library Association's annual conference kicked off in Chicago, some attendees wanted the world to know that librarian get-togethers aren't all about shushing and stacking: There's a lot of fucking, too.

The nearly week-long librarian meet-up, which began July 9, delivers "over 300 educational programs" to professional bibliophiles each year-including workshops like "Collection Development: Decision Making With Data" and "When Is Nice Too Nice? Strategies For Disengaging From the Talkative Patron." Some attendees, however, haven't been entirely satisfied with the ALA programming. So they launched a "secret" Twitter account for librarians to share more intriguing professional insights.

Some librarians are exhausted by the conference's material ("I have reached the point of the conference where I no longer give a damn about anything anyone is saying any more.") Others are inspired by a perceived lack of cultural acceptance for a librarian's sex life ("I am an adult. I am a librarian. I enjoy good sex. Including at this conference. What is the problem?"). Most of them, for whatever reason, are talking about fucking-that's the "sexy" part. .

According to the librarian-blogger at 'not all bits', ALA's first anonymous Twitter free-for-all, @alasecrets, was accessible via a username and password circulated among conference-goers. Less than two days into the festivities, however, the account was shut down by a fellow librarian. Writes 'not all bits:' "Well, it saddens me that a member of the library profession took exception to @alasecrets and shut it down by logging in and changing the password. . . You're going to have to pardon my language here but FUCK that. I despise censorship in any form and I especially loathe the idea that a librarian shut down that Twitter account. So I did something about it."

The sexy librarian gossip site has now been re-born in the form of @ALASecrets2009-and re-illustrated with an icon of a Naughty Librarian Halloween costume (pictured). Conference attendees can now only post to the new feed by e-mail, meaning that fun-hating librarians can't tinker with the account details to quiet the masses. For the less horny librarian, the #ala2009 hash tag still offers up plenty of non-sexual ALA chat fare.

WORLD LARGEST MAP CRACKED & ALMOST GONE

Strange Maps - When a 130 by 166 foot plot of polished terrazzo tiling was inaugurated at New York's 1964 World's Fair, it was the largest map in the world. A facsimile extrapolation of a New York State road map by Rand McNally, the half-acre-sized piece of cartography today would still be the world's largest map - if it had actually survived. But decades of human neglect and hard work by the elements have left their mark on the plywood tiles. .

The Texaco-sponsored map was one of the eyecatchers at the 1964 New York World's Fair, serving as the floor of the Tent of Tomorrow, which was later turned into a concert venue but fell into disuse by the late Sixties. By the early Seventies, the plywood tiles were covered with a layer of polyurethane and the area was used as a skating rink.

It now is part of the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. With Ozymandias-like predictability, the Tent of Tomorrow's 16 concrete pillars now support little more than sky. The only part of the New York State contribution to the Fair to survive unscathed is the Queens Theater in the Park, once the pavilion's Theaterama. . .

As the driving irony of heritage conservation dictates, the map wasn't deemed of value until it was nearly gone. . . As reported by the Times, a team of the University of Pennsylvania's graduate program in historic preservation has been trialing the preservation of four of the 567 4 foot panels that make up the map. They were replacing missing letters, numerals and symbols on the original map. It was estimated that conservation would cost about $1,100 per panel, bringing the total cost up to $623,700. However, no plans were made beyond the trial conservation, and I have no update on the current status of the project. In any case, the conservation process apparently would leave the map in dubious condition, rendering the purpose of a restored map rather unclear: the surface is so fragile and uneven that walking it, as back in the mid-Sixties, would be impractical at best, and probably quite dangerous.

WHY WE'RE NOT CHANGING EDUCATION

Ira David Socol, Change - If education in the United States of the 21st Century is failing, that failure has been built over a very long time. And I do not think that it can be "fixed" in any meaningful way unless people understand that the failures we see today are our system working exactly as it was intended to. . .

Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating "winners" from "losers" and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. It was designed to enforce White, Protestant, middle-class, "typically-abled" standards on an increasingly diverse American population. A few blessed children in each generation who met those standards might move up in society. The rest would be consigned to low wage manual labor. It was designed to ensure that the children of the elites had the opportunities they needed to remain the elite. Everything about the system - from the way schools are funded, to the way standards are created, to the system of tests, to our peculiar form of college admissions, to our notions of disability - was created to meet the employment goals of the United States from the mid 19th Century to the mid 20th Century.

Unfortunately we are 50 years past that historic moment, and we are no longer happy with the results.

But if you want different results you will not get there through changing teachers, or changing managers, or expecting more from students. You can only change the results by changing the system itself.

That means changing everything, from the buildings to the timetable, from the calendar to the notion of age-based grades, from the idea of classroom competition to the furniture, from the accepted sense of "paying attention" to the purpose of teachers. All of that contributes to the "failures" we see today because all of that was designed from the start to create those failures. . .

If we want a different result, it is the system - not the students, not the teachers - not even really the management – which must change. These groups, after all, are just humans, humans responding to the system they are forced to survive in.

MUCH MORE

BREVITAS

ECO CLIPS

Tree Hugger - According to new data from the Energy Information Agency, for the 12 month period ending in April low-carbon electricity set a new record: nearly 10% of overall generation, a figure that rose sharply in the beginning of 2009. In fact in April of this year renewable energy contributed 13% to total US electrical generation. Hydropower made up the majority of that (as it historically has) at 9%; non-hydro renewables (wind, solar, biomass & geothermal) made up 4%, another new record. Keep in mind that all of this is framed in the context of net electric generation dropping 5% over the past year.

CHINA

McClatchy - All but invisible in Latin America a decade ago, China now is building cars in Uruguay, donating a soccer stadium to Costa Rica and lending $10 billion to Brazil's biggest oil company. It's supplanted the United States to become the biggest trading partner with Brazil, South America's biggest economy. China has moved aggressively to fill a vacuum left by the United States in recent years, as the U.S. focused on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the global economic crisis sapped its economy. "China is rising while the U.S. is declining in Latin America," Riordan Roett, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, said by telephone while visiting Sao Paulo. "China is all over this region. They are following a state-driven policy to expand their peaceful presence."

WAR DEPARTMENT

LA Times - Late-night military helicopter flights over downtown Los Angeles this week are part of training exercises to familiarize military personnel with urban settings and prepare them for future assignments overseas, authorities said. The Black Hawk helicopters, which have appeared nightly for almost a week, have attracted the attention of residents as they hovered over downtown landmarks like City Hall, or maneuvered quickly between office skyscrapers on Bunker Hill. A brief notice saying the Los Angeles Police Department would be supporting an urban military exercise was posted on the department's official blog.

POLICE BLOTTER

Press of Atlantic City - 91 lobster tails got an Atlantic City man four years in prison Friday. Anthony Jones, 38, admitted in May that he hid the frozen delicacies in his backpack and jacket, then tried to sneak them out of the Bally's Atlantic City kitchen. But a security worker with his eye on the surveillance camera noticed something wasn't kosher. "His clothing was very bulky and he appeared to be concealing items beneath his clothing," police relayed at the time of the arrest. Jones was quickly stopped and "he and the lobsters were escorted to the security holding facility to await the arrival of the police," according to the police report. . . As for the stolen seafood: "The lobster was destroyed," Bally's spokeswoman Alyce Parker confirmed.

FURTHERMORE. . .

BBC - A Japanese rail firm has introduced a system to check that staff are smiling enough at all times. Computerized scanners around 15 Tokyo stations will measure the smile's curvature to ensure it is broad enough.
Those failing to measure up - literally - will be advised to look less serious and more cheerful.

HOW TO BAKE COOKIES IN YOUR CAR

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