UNDERNEWS: July 16, 2011

Pseudo Christian Bachmann doesn’t even belong to church

CNN - Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has long been a darling of conservative evangelicals, but shortly before announcing her White House bid, she officially quit a church she’d belonged to for years.

Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, and her husband, Marcus, withdrew their membership from Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minnesota, last month, according to church officials.

After declaring at the CNN/WMUR/New Hampshire Union Leader presidential debate that she would seek the nomination, Bachmann formally announced her presidential bid June 27 in Waterloo, Iowa.

The Bachmanns approached their pastor and verbally made the request “a few weeks before the church council granted the request,” Hochmuth said. He added, “they had not been attending that congregation in over two years.

Bachmann had listed her membership in the church on her campaign site for congress in 2006. She lists no church affiliation on her campaign website or her official congressional website.

The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod has come under criticism from some Catholics for its views on the papacy, an institution that the denomination calls the Antichrist. "We identify the Antichrist as the Papacy," the denomination's website says. "This is an historical judgment based on Scripture."

Federal court finds TSA groping, scanning more important than Constitution

Forbes - In the opinion from the D.C. Circuit Court, Judge Douglas Ginsburg writes that the advance imaging technology is not unreasonable given the security concerns on airplanes, and that people have the option to opt out for a pleasurable patdown. The court notes that some “have complained that the resulting pat down was unnecessarily aggressive,” but the judges don’t seem overly concerned about that. Ginsburg writes:

“On the other side of the balance, we must acknowledge the steps the TSA has already taken to protect passenger privacy, in particular distorting the image created using AIT and deleting it as soon as the passenger has been cleared. More telling, any passenger may opt-out of AIT screening in favor of a patdown, which allows him to decide which of the two options for detecting a concealed, nonmetallic weapon or explosive is least invasive.”

Good news for body scanner manufacturers Rapiscan and L-3. Bad news for those who don’t like having to choose between digital nudity and frisking. Legal scholar Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy expresses mild surprise at how easily the court dismissed privacy concerns with the TSA screens, as he regards the court as a Fourth-Amendment-friendly one.

Nearly two-thirds of debt ceiling rises in past 50 years have been under Republican presidents

Guardian, UK - According to the US Treasury, Congress has acted 78 times since 1960 to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit – 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents

Israel lobby hires U.S. political strategists

Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam - I reported here a few years ago about The Israel Project’s “Hasbara Handbook,” created for it by Republican master strategist, Frank Luntz. He was paid handsomely for his work, earning over $200,000 from the group in 2009. Apparently, TIP is strengthening its ties to the Republican far-right even farther. Think Progress reports that Ralph Reed has a $140,000 contract to consult in the field of “political affairs” for TIP.

It would seem that Reed’s main purpose as a paid consultant is to deliver the Christian Zionist community to TIP’s doorstep. I should note that TIP is “bi-partisan” in that sense, as it also contracts with Democratic flacks like Lanny Davis who no doubt was paid handsomely to defend the Israeli killing machine (1,400 Gazan dead) during Operation Cast Lead. Davis had the dubious distinction of accepting lucre from Laurent Bagbo, the butcher of Ivory Coast, who was recently overthrown in a peaceful coup by Alessane Ouatarra, who trounced him in the country’s most recent election. Another Democratic pollster and consultant, Stanley Greenberg, is being paid $300,000 by TIP for “research.”

I’ve noted in the past that TIP’s director of global affairs, Laura Kamm is married to the former deputy of mission of Israel’s embassy in Washington DC (and current deputy director general of the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs under Danny Ayalon), Jeremy Issacharoff. The web of influence between TIP and the Israeli government hasbara apparatus is seamless.

Guiding principles
Baseball players accused of lying before Congress get indicted. Politicians who lie in Congress get reelected. - Josiah Swampoodle

Word
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast -- Oscar Wilde

The Social Security Trust Fund con

Examiner - "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd," President Obama warned CBS Evening News viewers about Social Security . "There may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." But how can that be? Haven't Washington's professional politicians been telling us for decades that Social Security is in no danger of bankruptcy because of those trillions of dollars supposedly just sitting there in the Social Security Trust Fund? Why can't Obama use the money in the trust fund to cover the Social Security checks due to be sent out Aug. 3?

The reality is that the Social Security Trust Fund is, and always has been, an accounting fiction. For almost all of Social Security's history, the amount of money the program received from payroll taxes has exceeded the amount of money it paid out in benefits. The excess revenues, by law, are "invested" in special-issue, nonmarketable Treasury bonds. These bonds are marked on the government's balance sheet as "assets" of the Social Security program, but they are also counted as debts owed by the U.S. government. In fact, $2.6 trillion of our $14.3 trillion debt consists of bonds owed to the Social Security Trust Fund.

So what did the professional politicians in both parties do with the trillions of dollars lent to it by Social Security over the years? They spent it. That money is long gone. In order to pay off its Social Security obligations and fund benefit payments, the federal government must either use general tax revenue or borrow more money. The latter option, however, will soon no longer be available, thanks to the debt ceiling crisis.

Department of hmmnn. . .

This chart, from Guardian Datablog, shows the national debt over the years.
Look what happened after Reagan economics took over

GOP platform
Making Obama a one-term President is my single most important political goal along with every active Republican in the country. - Senator Mitch McConnell

Problems we hadn't started worrying about yet

Seattle Times - The goat-goring death last fall of a man at Olympic National Park has prompted this warning to visitors: Don't urinate on trails.The warning is part of a new plan being instituted by park officials to avoid a repeat of the Oct. 16 death of Bob H. Boardman of Port Angeles in a goat attack, according to the Peninsula Daily News.Visitors to the park are being urged not to urinate along trails frequented by mountain goats to avoid turning trails into "long, linear salt licks" that attract goats. The plan also calls for one-week trail closures in areas where goats persistently follow people and enter campsites. In addition, there will be two-week closures in areas when mountain goats exhibit threatening postures, and if they will not leave an area without aggressive hazing, such as shouting, arm-waving and throwing rocks to keep them at a distance.

Pocket paradigms
In recent decades we have come to speak of public interest groups as non-profits and non-governmental organizations. This is like speaking of girls as non-boys or Presbyterians as non-Catholics. And suggests where the real power remains. - Sam Smith

Blackwater - aka XE - hires Bill Clinton's lawyer

Wired - Danger Room has learned the latest Washington greybeard hired to spruce up the image of the world’s most infamous private security firm is Jack Quinn, a top Washington lobbyist and former White House counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Now renamed Xe and owned by an investor consortium called USTC Holdings, the company is bringing Quinn onto its board as an “independent director.” He’ll focus on “governance and oversight,” keeping the company out of trouble, especially with the government.

Quinn is one of a string of board members and executives Xe brought on to draw a bright line between the old Blackwater and the new. All of them are powerful people, like ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Quinn’s lobbying clients include AT&T, old-folks association AARP and Visa.

But the real thread running through most of the hires is that they have experience dealing with scandal, like former AIG bigwig Suzanne Folsom, now Xe’s senior regulatory and compliance officer and new CEO Ted Wright, most recently of military services giant KBR.

GOP platform

Herman Cain believes that allowing a mosque to be built in Tennessee is "an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion."

Pentagon can't account for most of Iraq reconstruction spending

Reuters - The U.S. Department of Defense was unable to account properly for $8.7 billion of Iraqi oil and gas money meant for humanitarian needs and reconstruction after the 2003 invasion, according to an audit released on Tuesday.

The figure is nearly 96 percent of the $9.1 billion funneled to the Pentagon from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), said the audit report from the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR).

The report described lax management of some of the billions of dollars designated for rebuilding war-shattered Iraq, where residents routinely complain about lack of electricity and other basic services more than seven years after the invasion.

The DFI was established by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run body that took charge of Iraq following the invasion.

Poll: Bush blamed for bad economy

Raw Story - By a wide margin, more Americans blame former President George W. Bush for the national economic outlook than they do President Barack Obama, according to a new poll.

Numbers out of Quinnipiac University Thursday morning indicated that 54 percent of Americans say Bush is to blame for exploding the federal deficit and swelling unemployment, whereas just 27 percent believe it is President Obama's fault.

From Our Overstocked Archives: The Texas liberals

Sam Smith - By the late fifties, the hounds of change were on radio's traces. Television was seizing for itself the stories, the vaudeville and the sense of being there that had been the heart of radio. And into the void was moving a new kind of music called rock 'n' roll.

To be sure rock 'n' roll already existed, but it was known as "rhythm 'n' blues" or "R&B." In the jargon of white broadcasters, it was "race music," although some white teenagers, myself included, listened almost surreptitiously to stations like Philadelphia's WDAS, where DJ Jocko Henderson proto-rapped the commercials:

Get a little cash from out of your stash,
And make like a flash in the hundred yard dash
Right down to my man John Koler at 4th & Arch
And tell him JOCKO sent you!

Years later Jocko Henderson would be recognized as one of the fathers of rap and hip hop.

It was not until the mid-decade triple explosion of Bill Haley & the Comets, The Blackboard Jungle and Elvis Presley, that young white America irrevocably entered the age of rock 'n' roll. Radio reacted to the new forces of music and technology by rapidly transforming itself from a ubiquitous stage for all the world into a collection of automated audio wombs for each of the country's proliferating demographic enclaves. It was on the cusp of this transformation, in 1957, that this 19 year old college student was hired for the summer as a news reporter for Washington's WWDC.

My bosses were two Texas liberals -- news director Joe Phipps and his assistant Bob Robinson. Short and bald, Phipps appeared a bespectacled and ambulatory small mouth bass. When excited his eyeballs almost rubbed against his glasses. His voice ebbed and flowed between 1950s broadcast fog and full-blown southern oratorical eruption. Robinson, on the other hand, had an unflappable Texas drawl. A tall man with white hair, Robinson was as imperturbable as Phipps was instantly reactive.

I already knew that Texas liberals were special people; Tom Whitbread, the poet and Harvard tutor, had introduced me to the Texas Observer, newly started by Ronnie Dugger. The Observer was a remarkable voice of sense and liberty in an era turning dogmatically dumb and mean. In the first issue, Dugger quoted Thoreau: "The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth."

Beyond their politics, I liked that Texas liberals seemed to enjoy themselves and that even the worst election brought a new batch of stories. Such as the one about the freshman state legislator being advised that the best way to stay honest was to sell out to one interest group fast; that way the rest would leave you alone. Or about the Texas trial lawyer who stole from the rich . . . and gave approximately half to the poor. I liked the tales of Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Yarborough -- the yin and yang of the Texas senatorial delegation. Even the names that cropped up -- like Creekmore Fath or Cactus Prior -- were fun.

Fath - both a character and a man of character - was in his 50s then; I was 19. Yet he was happy to help me discover the mysteries of the capital. When he died, the Washington Post wrote:

Twenty-three years old and unfamiliar with the ways of Washington, Mr. Fath didn't know that he had signed on to work for a select committee slated to disband when a new Congress convened in 1941. When he found out, he suggested asking first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to testify before the committee as a way to generate publicity and keep the committee in business. He reminded committee members that she had expressed concern in her newspaper columns for the Okies and other Dust Bowl migrant workers.

"Okay, Creekmore, you take care of that," Tolan said. The veteran lawmaker laughed, and his fellow committee members laughed with him. They knew, as Mr. Fath did not, that no first lady had ever testified on Capitol Hill.

The next morning, Mr. Fath called the White House and talked to Malvina Thompson, Mrs. Roosevelt's secretary. "I told her I desperately needed to use Mrs. Roosevelt at a hearing in December, that I wanted to use her as the gimmick," he recalled.

Mrs. Roosevelt invited him to tea at the White House the next afternoon, and, after clearing it with her husband, she agreed to testify. The panel stayed in business, in large part because of her endorsement of its work.

Later, Thompson told Mr. Fath that Mrs. Roosevelt agreed to meet with him because he was the only one who had ever admitted that he wanted to "use" her. . .

I didn't realize it then, but being a Texas liberal in the 50s could be hazardous. Folk humorist John Henry Faulk found that out when CBS fired him after he became a target of the red-hunters. Unlike a lot of eastern liberals at the time, Faulk struck back, suing the group that had accused him. Nonetheless, it still took years on the broadcast blacklist and the legal assistance of Louis Nizer to prove that he was a good American.

Through it all, Faulk kept his sense of humor, telling stories like the one about Totsie who was hit by the Katy Flyer express. Totsie's remains were so well distributed that the family rented 300 acres for the funeral -- just to be on the safe side. The minister said it was the largest funeral he had ever preached -- acreagewise.

Faulk also told of being born in a village so small it only had four houses, and they weren't exactly downtown. He claimed to have been one of triplets and that his father had come to the hospital and asked his mother, "Well, which one you gonna keep?" "That," recalled Faulk, "is when I learned how to swim."

Word

Paul Krugman - What Obama has offered ¬ and Republicans have refused to accept ¬ is a deal in which less than 20 percent of the deficit reduction comes from new revenues. This puts him slightly to the right of the average Republican voter.

Note: Deficit cutting deals over the past 25 years have included revenue increases ranging from 33% to 82% of the total package.

Cliche challenge
The following overused words appeared between 100 million to 18 billion times on Google in the past month:

Facebook
Blog
Twitter
Google
Tweet
Center (+political or politics)
Embed, embedded
Fuck, fucked, fucking
Actually
Amazing
Awesome
Marketplace
Inappropriate
Absolutely
Empire, imperialism, imperial
Concerns
Shit
Enhanced
Guru
Bro

More cliches

A is biggest college grade these days

Washington Post - A new study by an outspoken critic of academic grade inflation finds that 43 percent of all letter grades issued by professors today are As.

Stuart Rojstaczer has spent years amassing evidence of grade inflation, an on-again, off-again trend he traces to 1940.
By Rojstaczer’s reckoning, the A has emerged in the new millennium as the most popular grade ¬ it eclipsed the B in prevalence around 1998.

Consider: In the World War II era, roughly 35 percent of grades were B, and an equal share were C. Just 15 percent were A. A slightly lower share were D, and 5 percent were F.

Report: American nuke plants not ready for Fukishima type event

Scientific American - U.S. nuclear plants should be hardened to better withstand earthquakes and other extreme emergencies that could lead to a radioactive release, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Japan Task Force has recommended.

The task force's 90-page report on the implications of Japan's nuclear disaster said that an accident involving damage to reactor cores and uncontrolled escape of radioactivity was "inherently unacceptable." It called for a dozen actions to improve plant safety and redefine NRC regulations governing severe emergencies. The report was delivered to commission members and key congressional committees yesterday and will be released to the public today.

"Continued operation and continued licensing activities do not pose an imminent risk to public health and safety," the task force of NRC experts said. "However, the Task Force also concludes that a more balanced application of the Commission's defense-in-depth philosophy using risk insights would provide an enhanced regulatory framework that is logical, systematic, coherent and better understood," according to a summary released by the NRC last night.

CIA running secret operation in Somalia

Citizens for Legitimate Government - CIA runs secret facility in Somalia' 12 Jul 2011 The US Central Intelligence Agency is using a secret facility as well as a prison in Somalia for the alleged purpose of fighting against al-Shabab militants, a report says. The facility is in a back corner of Aden Adde International Airport in the Somali capital Mogadishu and is protected by large walls which surround more than a dozen buildings, The Nation magazine reported on Tuesday. The site has its own airport, located next to the compound, in which there are eight metal hangars with CIA's aircraft at the place. The US intelligence agency also has a secret prison in the basement of Somalia's National Security Agency building.

Not taxing the rich doesn't help the economy

Business Insider – One of the contentions of today's Republican party is that high income tax rates are always bad for the economy, because they deprive people of an incentive to work hard, thus making us a nation of lazy good-for-nothings.

This argument has been repeated so often and for so long that it is now basically regarded as fact.

But, interestingly, the history of income tax rates in the US actually suggests that it may be b.s.

Some of the most prosperous periods in US history (1950s and 1960s) have come during periods of super-high marginal income tax rates. And some of the most disastrous periods in US history (1930s, 2010s) have come after periods of super-low income tax rates.

In the good periods, moreover, the middle-class boomed and inequality between the country's highest earners and everyone else shrank. In the bad periods, meanwhile, inequality soared, and the richest 1% of the population came to earn a staggering amount of the country's income.

Now, lots of other factors were at play during these "good times" and "bad times," so we obviously can't pin all of it on income tax rates.

But it is certainly interesting that the two biggest busts and eras of income inequality in US history in the past century have come right after periods with super-low marginal income tax rates--and that the economy boomed and the middle-class prospered in periods with super-high tax rates.

Pocket paradigms
All non profit boards will fail totally if the one great principle of board governance is ignored: success is directly correlated to the quality of the food served. This does not necessarily mean expensive food so much as attention to detail and taste. For example, many a worthy cause has foundered on an inadequate selection of donuts. Others have assumed, quite wrongly, that because their cause was noble and pure, their provisions should be likewise. A board meeting is no time for nutritional proselytizing. Or for skimping. Above all, the cookies should be fresh and the mayonnaise plentiful. I have watched once outstanding non-profits wither into obscurity for failing to observe these simple rules.- Sam Smith

Word
No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or Bible-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation-paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor -- John L. Lewis, 1937

Investigation ordered into administration cheating at 90 Pennsylvania schools

Notebook - The Pennsylvania Department of Education announced that it is ordering 40 districts and nine charter operators across the state to investigate possible cheating at 90 schools whose standardized test score results were flagged as suspicious in a recently surfaced 2009 report.

PDE is conducting an internal investigation into why the “Data Forensics Technical Report” and accompanying files, which were prepared by Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) and delivered to PDE in July 2009, were not acted upon at the time.

“It appears that when the report was received, nothing was done,” said Eller. “It only came to light to us through [the Notebook].”

Last week, the Notebook first reported on the DRC narrative summary, which used statistical analysis to try to ferret out possible cheating on the 2009 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exam. The report identified dozens of Pennsylvania schools that had some combination of statistically improbable schoolwide test score gains, unlikely jumps in student performance levels across years, and highly unlikely numbers of wrong answers that were erased and changed to the correct answer.

Immigrants being used to test high-tech ID databse of all Americans?

US News - Privacy advocates are growing increasingly worried that a system meant to identify illegal immigrants will morph into a Big Brother-style high-tech ID database of all Americans.

This "is part of a historical pattern in our country: We erode the civil and privacy rights of the most disadvantaged thinking there will be less push back," says Angela Chan, an attorney with San Francisco civil rights organization the Asian Law Caucus. "The next thing you know, though, those same rights are then taken away from all of us."

At issue is Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Secure Communities program, which involves the FBI sharing fingerprints with the Department of Homeland Security in keeping with a post-September 11 congressional mandate for data sharing among agencies charged with stopping terrorism. The program makes sense to proponents of illegal immigration control, but some privacy advocates are worried this is only the first step toward a comingling of personal information of everybody in the United States.

A joint FBI-DHS PowerPoint presentation-provided to Whispers by groups involved in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DHS-indicates Secure Communities is a test case for a larger FBI biometric database initiative called "Next Generation Identification," or NGI. It is being built to replace the FBI's current fingerprint database with more robust records like palm prints, photos of tattoos and scars, iris scans, and facial imaging. [See a gallery of immigration cartoons.]

Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, worries about a lack of transparency and oversight in implementing such a broad database. "It's not just about what it is that is private," Coney says. "It's the rules that are out there to protect the individual and the society from abuse and misuse of that information. We just don't have that."

Giving up on fiction

Laura Miller, Salon - A remark Philip Roth made in the Financial Times has provoked much comment: "I've stopped reading fiction," the 78-year-old author of "Portnoy's Complaint" and dozens of other novels said. Roth isn't alone; over the years, such writers as Cormac McCarthy, Will Self and William Gibson have made similar statements.

Some people don't like fiction and never have. That's quite different from having once read fiction avidly and then, in the fullness of time, giving it up. To judge informally (that is, according to what people tell me when they learn I'm a book reviewer), the latter is far from an uncommon experience. Many former devourers of novels haven't stopped reading, they've just come, like Roth, to prefer nonfiction books on history, science or politics.

Roth, when pressed by his interlocutor, didn't offer much of a reason for the change in his tastes: "I don't know. I wised up ..." he said rather enigmatically. It may be that he's determined that reading other people's novels impairs his ability to write his own. Most writers know what it's like to fall under the sway of a master's voice and to wind up unwillingly imitating it. Self told an interviewer that he couldn't enjoy other authors' fiction because "It uses the same muscles that I use to write with." Still, it's improbable that a writer with a voice as established as Roth would have this problem.

Perhaps, like McCarthy, Roth has simply lost interest. (McCarthy once said that he found reading fiction "a rather odd thing to do.") Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they've exhausted their patience for flagrantly "untrue" narratives. One blogger explained it thus: "I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal.". . . . .

One school voucher group admits its goal is to end public education

Think Progress - One group that has been influential in the school voucher push ¬ the Independence Hall Tea Party, which has run a major PAC that operates in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania ¬ is finally admitting that its true goal is to abolish public education.

In a series of e-mails and interviews, Teri Adams, the president of the Independence Hall Tea Party Association, explains that her organization is involved in its voucher advocacy because it believes “public schools should go away.” Adams said that their ultimate goal is to “shut down public schools and have private schools only“:

U.S. building more prisons in Afghanistan

Wired - The U.S. military is supposed to turn its massive jail on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field over to the Afghan government this year. But the U.S. is going to keep holding detainees in Afghanistan for a long, looooong time to come ¬ as new military construction contracts reveal.

One of the big unanswered questions of the plan to give the Detention Facility at Parwan to the Afghans is what happens to insurgents U.S. troops detain in the future. Rumors abound about secret, off-the-books jails kept by Special Operations Forces, but those are supposed to be only for insurgents suspected of possessing high-level intelligence. Where will the rest go?

Here’s a clue. The Army Corps of Engineers is just hired an Afghan contractor to build a new “U.S. government controlled detention facility.” The lockup has to include “4 Modular Detention Housing Units, 1 Special Holding Unit, guard towers, to include utilities, communications, fencing and related site work.” It’s got to be built fast ¬ as in, by November ¬ and so the Afghan firm got a no-bid contract of unspecified value.

That’s just for starters. After that facility goes up ¬ and it’s unclear where it’ll be built ¬ the Army will hold an open competition for an even larger detention center, awarding a contract worth $46 million. That facility will consist of seven modular detention units and a “Special Holding Unit.”

Confessions of a former British journalist

In view of the recent Murdoch scandals, I thought it might be good to revive this piece, which lends a somewhat - albeit not totally - more positive view of British journalism.

Sam Smith

I lay claim to be the only person to get the word "fuck" into the Illustrated London News, which was - until it collapsed on the muck of media modernity - the second oldest continuously published magazine and which for more than 150 hundred years served the cause of empire and the better English classes. I was, during its declining era, its Washington correspondent as part of a futile effort to give rebirth to a publication so fusty that, according to my editor, the gardening correspondent had actually died in 1929, but the news had been successfully concealed from readers unaware that they were reading recycled columns well into the 1980s.

It wouldn't have been the first time the ILN had lagged behind reality. For example, on Saturday, December 21, 1861, it declared:

"Last week it seemed difficult to obtain attention for any subject save that of the American crisis . . . President Lincoln's Message, as a composition, is conceived in the same low moral tone and executed with the same maladroitness which have characterized the preceding State Papers of his Government . . . The North, in its excess of zeal for civilization, is also elaborately destroying harbors' in the South, thus by savage acts giving the lie to the profession of belief that the territory to which the harbours belong will ever again be a portion of the Federal dominions."

The ILN's view of its readers was well stated in the July 22, 1848, edition and did not change markedly over the years:

"As a people, it may be truly said of us that we are pre-eminent among the nations of the earth. our spirit rules the world. Our wisdom enters into the composition of everyday life and half the globe. Our physical as well as intellectual presence is manifest in every climate under the sun. Our sailing ships and steam-vessels cover the seas and rivers. Wherever we conquer, we civilize and refine. Our arms, our arts, our literature are illustrious among the nations. We are a rich, a powerful, an intelligent, and a religious people."

The top editor's view of me fit this paradigm well. The closest he ever came to a compliment was when he told my boss, "I didn't know Americans knew how to write."

My view of "fuck" was that it was a word like all words, to be used in the proper place and the proper way, particularly not to be reduced to a hackneyed phrase. One of those proper occasions occurred in an article I had written for ILN, and to my pleasure the associate editor left it in.

The top editor did not discover the affront until after publication when he demanded of my boss, "how the fuck" the word had defaced his jewel in the crown.

It wasn't the first time he had missed the boat. When a competing publication celebrated its 2,000th issue complete with a well publicized party and a program on the BBC, the editor told his associate that the ILN ought to consider something like that. "When's our next big issue?" he asked. My boss said he wasn't sure. The editor pulled out the current edition only to find it was number 5,000.

When my editor departed this strange corner of the empire, he left me with a year's worth of assignments. On completion, I sent the editor-in-chief a dozen ideas for stories. He wrote that he would be back to me but never was. Sometime later, I mentioned this to my former editor. "You should never have sent him a dozen ideas," he scolded. "It was clearly too much for him to handle. You should have sent him one good idea and one terrible idea and hoped he made the right choice."

My advisor was an improbable New Zealander by the name of Des Wilson. After dropping out of school at 15, Des arrived in England as a young man with only a few pounds and a lot of ideas. He subsequently started a housing program called Shelter; written for a number of publications; run for Parliament; and headed campaigns to get the lead out of gas, the secrecy out of information and the Liberal Democrats into office; chaired Friends of the Earth; and written numerous books including a couple of novels in one of which I appear as a harried homeowner in council housing and, in another, my wife is an environmental activist in Portland, Maine. Once, at Buckingham Palace, Des stepped on one of Queen Elizabeth's corgies. I suspect he said, "Bugger off," but he has never admitted it.

In 1970, I heard Des speak about Shelter at a meeting of a housing and planning group on whose board I sat. I invited him over for a drink afterwards and -- with a few interruptions for campaigns of one sort or another or for gainful employment - he never left. He has advised, entertained, employed, and insulted me in no predictable order and I have tried to return the favor.

Among his gifts was to guide me in the way of British journalism, which still regards power with proper skepticism, the media as a lusty trade rather than a pompous profession, and words as something to be enjoyed and not merely processed. Thus it was that when a British hack filed from Africa word of a colleague's demise, "Headley dead in uprising," his editor, with an eye on circulation, fired back a telegram: "Why you undead?"

Des knew a reporter for the Observer by the name of Fergie who frequently vanished for lengthy periods, wiring repeatedly for more expenses. Once he wired to London to say he had information about a tribe of 100-year-olds in Ecuador but needed funds to travel there. He received the money and disappeared. Weeks later he wired for more funds. Reply: "What about tribe of 100 year olds?" Fergie wired back: "Alas, died of old age."

Des was once in Ayachucho in the Andes waiting for his plane to Lima. The plane finally appeared but kept flying on without landing. "What the hell...?" snorted Des. "Its OK," said an Ayachuchoan, "It does that sometimes. It'll stop tomorrow." So Des re-booked into the hotel, returning the following day. The same. "Most unusual," said the local. He re-re-booked into the hotel and returned the following day. The plane finally landed. As the pilot stepped off the plane wearing 1930s style headgear, a crowd gathered around him and began arguing. Explained the Ayachuchoan, "Problem not over yet. Now it has to decide where it's going next." The ever resourceful Wilson plowed into the crowd waving his passport, pointing to the imprimatur of the Queen and her demand that her subjects be well treated by all and sundry. The pilot, impressed, announced that the plane would be going to Lima.

His later work led to a lot of speeches. Once he was speaking to a club in Lincolnshire. Before introducing him, the chairwoman bemoaned the small crowd and chastised the program committee saying, "We'll never get better speakers until we improve attendance."

On another occasion he was invited to speak to a dinner of county estate agents. The dinner dragged on and Des noticed that not only was a front table of agents getting drunk but they were betting among themselves on something.

Des finally got up to speak to a crowd that was half asleep and half inebriated. He was only a few minutes into his talk when one of the men at the front table held up a sign that read, "Please stop talking or I will lose my bet."

Finally, he reached what was, in his mind, a true pinnacle of achievement. He was named to the English and Wales Cricket Board.

Cricket, it has been noted, is the game in which "you have two sides: one out in the field and one in. Each man that's on the side that's in goes out and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out. When both sides have been in and out, including the not outs, that's the end of the game."

But it is serious business. Here is an actual quote from Sourav Ganguly during the 1991 test match between India and Australia: "This was the greatest Test I have played in. To come back and win after being asked to follow on is what dreams are made of." Harold Pinter even rated cricket ahead of sex among God's great gifts, although he admitted that sex wasn't all that bad.

Given my indifference, I was hardly prepared to deal with an early morning's call from Des announcing that he had resigned from the England and Wales Cricket Board over its planned Zimbabwe tour and that the decision was splashed all over the British media.

My initial response was, so this is how Tony Blair gets away with it, but after further inquiry and a little multitasking at my computer as Des spoke, I came up with the Guardian's lead:

"English cricket's attempt to adopt an ethical stance over the proposed tour of Zimbabwe was in tatters last night after the resignation of Des Wilson, the former Liberal Democrat party president hired by the England and Wales Cricket Board to develop a 'moral' policy over the scheduled tour. Mr Wilson resigned citing 'profound differences' with the other members of the ECB's management over the tour, which is scheduled for October. The ECB has come under considerable political and public pressure to cancel the tour because of human rights abuses by Robert Mugabe's regime."

My respect for the man soared. Who else would think of using cricket as a weapon of mass destruction against the egregious Mugabe? Come to think of it, who in America would leave any board anymore because of a moral issue?

I had to hand it to Des. After all these years, he had finally come up with a good reason for the existence of cricket.

American journalism died when it began to take itself too seriously. Des has helped me keep in mind that it doesn't have to be that way. It also helps to have someone in your life who, when you write or say something about which you should have thought more, puts down his glass of Scotch and says, "Good God, Smith, have you gone completely mad?"

[Des Wilson’s latest book: Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure is available through Amazon UK and is well worth reading, even if it does mention your editor]

Great moments in anthropology
“We report on postcoital penis cleaning in chimpanzees. In penis cleaning, leaves are employed as ‘napkins’ to wipe clean the penis after sex. Alternatively, the same cleaning motion can be done without leaves, simply using the fingers. Not all chimpanzee communities studied across Africa clean their penes and, where documented, the behaviour is rare. By contrast, we identify postcoital penis cleaning in Budongo Forest, Uganda, as customary.”

Cities may do better with carbon emissions than thought

Tree Hugger - Except in the most concrete of the concrete jungles of cities, our urban centers probably absorb far more carbon emissions than current calculations assume. That's the word from a new study examining the carbon storage potential of cities in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Researchers looking at the city of Leicester in the UK found that the city's parks, gardens, golf courses, etc absorbed 231,000 tons of carbon emissions, 10 times more that expected. Currently urban land in the UK is assumed to have zero biological carbon density.

The study recommends planting more trees on lands currently maintained as lawns. Doing this on just 10% of lawn space would increase carbon storage by 12%.

Language update: Facebook minute
Urban Dictionary: Facebook minute

(n) an elongated and obscure period of time spent distracted on Facebook when the original intent was to merely check your messages.

Dude, where’s Mark?

Oh, he just ran inside to check his messages really quick. He’ll back in a Facebook minute.

Fuck, we’re never gonna eat now.

Austrian Atheist Wins Right To Wear Spaghetti Strainer As Religious Headgear

Harvard researchers want fat kids taken away from their parents

Atlantic Wire - A pair of Harvard scholars writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association advocate stripping away the custody rights of parents of super obese children. . .

"Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child," said Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health. The study's co-author, David Ludwig, says taking away peoples' children "ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible."

In response to the JAMA article, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan is pushing back in a column for MSNBC. Here are his sticking points:

Legality "Our laws give enormous authority to parents and rightly so," he writes. "The only basis for compelling medical treatment against a parent’s wishes are if a child is at imminent risk of death ¬ meaning days or hours ¬ and a proven cure exists for what threatens to kill them. Obesity does not pass these requirements. The risk of death from obesity is real, but it is way down the road for kids."

Practical issues "The number of kids involved ¬ an estimated 2 million children with body-mass index above the 99th percentile ¬ would quickly swamp already overwhelmed social service departments," he writes. "And, no matter what you do with overweight children, sooner or later they are going back home where their often overweight parents will still be."

It's the wrong focus "Before we start grabbing porky youths out of their homes and sending them off to government fat camps, might we try to change our food culture?
Thirty percent of Americans believe Bible is literal truth

Huffington Post - A new Gallup poll reveals that three out of ten Americans believe the Bible to be the actual word of God, to be interpreted literally, word for word. These results are relatively consistent with recent results, but down from the peak levels in 1980 and 1984 when 40 percent of Americans said they took the Bible literally.

Respondents to the poll were given three options as responses to the poll:

- The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.

- The Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally.

- The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts.

While 30 percent responded that the Bible is the actual word of God, a clear plurality of 49 percent preferred the second interpretation, and 17 percent believe the Bible to be a book of fables and legends.

Summer reading on court innovation

Obama disses Elizabeth Warren

74% of Republicans Think Some Tax Increases Are Necessary To Lower Deficit

Religious left becomes a bit more active

Should math be taught in schools?

America's only personal rapid transit

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