Saturday Breakfast RN - 14 January 2006 - The Hudson River
an Australian station
Tags: hudson_river, hudson_valley, new_york, history, interview, writer, war, wall_street, wealthy_and_decadent, bridge, poughkeepsie, landscape on 2008-10-28 -All Annotations (5) -About
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The Puritans actually landed in Massachusetts, and closer to another river which is the Connecticut River But the Hudson Valley and the Hudson River was settled initially by the Dutch, and the Dutch were very, very different stock in the 17th century, from a 17th century English Puritan. The Puritans of course had come to this country to establish a religion, and to practice their religion in relative freedom. In the case of the Dutch, they came to the Hudson Valley to make money. And so it's a very, very different attitude that they brought to the river.
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The Hudson was the scene of the two greatest battles of the American Revolution, and those were the first and second battles of Saratoga, a place not very far from where I'm sitting right now. And what happened in those battles was that the American Generals made use of the remarkable topography of the river at that place, to halt the British advance down river. And the British had no choice but to meet the American rebels at that place, and on two occasions they fought, and on both occasions the British withdrew, and ultimately lost, and ultimately surrendered.
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The houses after the American Civil War, 1865 to about 1890, those houses were extraordinary. We would call those people today nouveau-riche. They were people who'd made enormous killings in stocks and bonds on Wall Street in New York, and the houses that I have seen, and I've seen probably all of them, are opulent. One of the Vanderbilt houses, one of the Vanderbilts said, 'Make it like the Trianon', that is in Paris, Versailles, 'only larger.' So it was just be as opulent as you can. There was the notion that great wealth and displays of great wealth knew no bounds in the middle and late 19th century. And especially after the Civil War.
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major bridges there are I think about eleven. But there's some wonderful ones that are strikingly beautiful, and the ones that I particularly love and care for, are the great suspension spans, the George Washington bridge, which some of your listeners might be familiar with, the Bear Mountain bridge (I'm working up the river), which is near West Point United States Military Academy, and then working further up the river, the Mid-Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie. These are wonderful suspension bridges, graceful, with wonderful catenary curves. And the bridges, don't forget, are the creation of the 1920s and 1930s. The width of the Hudson made it impossible to span it reasonably up until really the 20th century.
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We take things for granted, in all of your listeners and certainly anyone I know, and even myself, we look around and we don't really see things. We take our natural landscape for granted. And our landscapes should not be taken for granted. They are places of civilisation, they are places of history, and if we don't know that history, we're not just professing ignorance, we're actually professing a kind of rudeness.
Chris Abani muses on humanity | Video on TED.com
ubuntu - "the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me"; "there is no way for us to be human without each other"
Tags: africa, nigeria, writer, story, ubuntu, family, women, feminism, religion, war on 2008-10-26 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Maya Jaggi on Colombia's contemporary art scene | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
Tags: art, colombia, south_america, drugs, war, terrorism, culture, history on 2008-10-22 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Americans stay away from bloody Juarez - Americas - MSNBC.com
Tags: el_paso, texas, mexico, border, terrorism, drugs, war, organized_crime on 2008-10-16 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Open-Source Thinking Revolutionizes Prosthetic Limbs: Scientific American
as with fuel efficiency standards, note market forces' downstream role as innovation inhibitor
Tags: engineering, innovation, entrepreneur, open_source, war, long_tail, interactive_graphic, collaboration, prosthetic on 2008-09-17 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (6) -About
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a relatively small market, and the resulting narrow profit margins, makes it unprofitable for most companies to invest in research and development of upper-arm prostheses. “Prosthetics is one of many underserved markets in which innovation has stagnated because the traditional incentives are lacking,” Kuniholm says. “The people who make innovations in this field are usually passionate users tinkering around in their garage.”
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Kuniholm and his partners have created a clearinghouse for prosthetic designs, an online consortium they call the Open Prosthetics Project (OPP), whose goal is to nurture useful ideas for innovations and then freely give the designs away. The idea is to benefit not only people such as Kuniholm, who already have the resources that come from living in a first-world economy, but also amputees all over the world.
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Because of tremendous advances in emergency medicine, as well as the use of such armor as Kevlar vests, the fighting has resulted in a far lower fatality rate among injured soldiers than it has in past wars. That’s the good news. The bad news is that many veterans whose wounds would have killed them in the past come home today with grievous injuries.
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As of the end of 2007, about 700 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are amputees, and of those about 150 have lost a hand or an arm (or, in some cases, both arms).
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“We have to think outside the U.S.,” Curran says. “We need to look at places like Saudi Arabia, India, China, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world where, unfortunately, some of the amputations are punitive.”
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“Many prosthetics manufacturers are subject to the same one-size-fits-most economics as mass-market consumer goods,” Kuniholm says. But in prosthetics, he adds, “each person’s needs and capabilities are unique.”
Photo Journal : Pictures of the Day
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North Koreans celebrated their country’s 60th anniversary
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George Hussein Onyango Obama, 26, the youngest half brother of U.S. presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama sat outside his Nairobi
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A Colombian woman displaced by the country’s violence was controlled by police
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An Afghan boy played on a destroyed Russian tank
DAVID FRUM: Palin's Working Class Appeal - THE WEEK
2 very fine examples of why comments stink
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George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were and are all wealthy and successful men. But not one of them owed his wealth and success primarily to his education.
Compare that list to Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and John Edwards. For almost all these Democrats, the decisive event of their lives was the letter admitting them to an elite university -
In non-college America, however, it’s still the 1970s. The odds of divorce remain as high as ever, and the rate of out-of-wedlock births among white women has jumped past 25 percent - higher than it was among blacks when Daniel Moynihan diagnosed the crisis of the black family in the 1960s. For many in this group, the Palin story will read like the story of their own families.
Over 150,000 march in Mexico against crime | Reuters
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Mexico is one of the worst countries in the world for abductions, along with conflict zones like Iraq and Colombia.
11 headless bodies found in Mexico - Americas- msnbc.com
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Don't Make Afghanistan the Democrats' War
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In his convention speech Wednesday night, Vice-Presidential nominee Joe Biden sounded hawkish notes --not only in flagrantly misrepresenting the Georgia-Russia crisis but in talking about Afghanistan. (This holds true not just for the two Senators, but for too many Democrats in Washington who argue, mantra-like, that we need to leave Iraq in order to free additional troops to serve in "the right war.)
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Rand Corporation concluded in an important report that the very notion of a "war on terror" is counterproductive, and that intelligence and police cooperation should be the centerpiece of our strategy
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If elected, Senator Obama has the possibility of re-engaging with a world repulsed by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. His election, allied with smart and more just policies, could turn a page on the reckless and destructive policies of mad men. But extricating the US from one disastrous war to head into another will endanger that possibility --while posing grave risks to the domestic agenda he has laid out.
7 Mexican officers killed in drug raid - CNN.com
Tags: drugs, war, terrorism, mexico, guns, organized_crime on 2008-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About
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small arsenal of confiscated arms
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Some 300 tons of cocaine are estimated to pass through Mexico to the United States each year, and Mexico is considered the largest foreign supplier of crystal methamphetamine to the United States.
Timeline - The FARC and Colombia - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
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FARC commander gives up, calls for dialogue
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Police chief resigns in Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez amid wave of killings - International Herald Tribune
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Murder rates have spiked this year in this city across from El Paso, Texas, and at least seven city police commanders were killed by hit men believed to be linked to drug cartels.
Hitmen assassinate a top Mexican policeman - International Herald Tribune
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Last year, there were more than 2,500 drug killings across Mexico and over 1,100 people have died this year as the drug gangs fight each other and the security forces.
Earlier this week, drug hitmen killed Saul Pena, a senior police officer in Ciudad Juarez, even though the army had deployed troops in the violent city across the border from El Paso, Texas.
The Long War of Genaro García Luna - NYTimes.com
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“narcotunnels,” elaborately engineered smuggling passages that run as deep as 100 feet below the fence that separates Tijuana from the United States. Stash after stash of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana was seized in town or intercepted at the border.
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Since the end of 2006, the Calderón government has sent more than 25,000 soldiers and federal police on high-powered anti-drug “operations” to combat drug cartels. It has initiated sweeping plans for judicial and police reform. It has extradited several top cartel figures to the United States, earning praise and a package of anti-drug aid from the U.S. government. Yet this year is on pace to be the bloodiest on record for Mexico’s drug war, surpassing by almost 50 percent last year’s toll of more than 2,500 deaths.
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militarization carries risks. The military worries about increasing corruption and a growing number of soldiers deserting their units to join the traffickers; others have warned that militarization will lead to major human rights violations.
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Local police forces — which make up the vast majority of police in Mexico — are the “Achilles’ heel of Mexican security
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Mexican security experts were talking about “Colombianization” or “the Pablo Escobar effect” — the idea being that, as with Escobar in Colombia in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the cartels were responding to the crackdown with a no-holds-barred assault on the state.
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Until quite recently, however, pacts between the government and the cartels, spoken or unspoken, were the norm. For most of the 20th century, Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The P.R.I. was authoritarian and corrupt, but these traits offered certain advantages when dealing with the drug trade.
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In the latter half of the ’90s, Mexico’s one-party political system started to open up, and in the 2000 presidential election, the P.R.I. lost power to Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive running under the banner of the National Action Party. The transition to democracy was a moment of great hope for Mexico. But it also undermined the system of de facto regulation of the drug trade.
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Rather than destroying the cartels, the government’s high-level strikes transformed the cartels from hierarchical organizations with commanding figures at the top to unruly mobs of men vying for power.
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the vast majority of weapons in the cartel’s arsenals (80 to 90 percent, according to the Mexican government’s figures) are purchased in the United States, often at loosely regulated gun shows, and smuggled into Mexico by the same networks that smuggle drugs the opposite direction
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“the most important thing is co-responsibility” — an acknowledgment that the United States owes Mexico its support in a long and difficult war.
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The cartels seem to understand this way of thinking, and they try to send the opposite message: the bad guys will never back down, either. In 2005, they started posting videos of gangland executions on YouTube.
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In a single day, thousands of cars and trucks enter the United States from Tamaulipas alone. Enough cocaine to supply American demand for a year, a market worth some $35 billion, might fill a dozen or so tractor-trailers.
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I asked García Luna if this was an acceptable definition of success in the war on drugs: violence down, the police seemingly in charge, the cartels operating less conspicuously and less violently. He ducked the question but did not dispute the implication. “Given the temptation,” he said, “there are people who are always going to play the game, whether by airplane or helicopter, by land, by sea, because there is a real market. ... There is no product like it in the world.” (When I asked David Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, about the reason for mounting drug violence in Mexico, he said, without prompting, “In significant measure, it grows out of violent people taking advantage of the continuing strong demand in the United States.”)
MotherJones.com | Commentary
Tags: africa, women, photography, civil_liberties, violence, war on 2008-05-22 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Digital cameras are the tool. I arrive with them and lend them to women, most of whom have never seen a camera before. I teach them to point and shoot—only that—and then I turn them loose to snap what they will. I ask them to bring me some photos of their problems and their blessings. They work in teams, two or three women sharing a camera and very nervous at first. (Some women actually shake.) It takes the whole team to snap the first photos: one holds the camera, another points, another shoots. The teamwork they build is a step to solidarity.
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Even many men will admit that they've made a terrible mess of things. In all these lands, when armed men stopped shooting and called it "peace," they continued to assault and rape and murder women.
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Outsiders often draw broad generalizations about foreign "cultures" as if they were all of a piece. In fact, African cultures are in flux and often dramatically varied. Old traditions may be belligerently defended by one chief, while repudiated by another in a village just down the road. African "cultures" rest on the conservatism or courage of such men—and on the rising voices of women.
America’s Guardian Myths - New York Times
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In the weeks and months after 9/11, many commentators described the “dream-like” mindset that the disaster had induced. They attributed our fugue state to the “unimaginable” unreality of the event. Nothing like this had ever happened before. But essential to our understanding of what that attack means to our national psyche is a recognition that it did happen before, over and over. And its happening was instrumental to the formation of the American character. The nation that recently imagined itself so impervious to attack at home was gestated in a time when such attacks were the prevailing reality of American life.
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Even our amnesia is evidence of this haunting, because the amnesia was not natural. It was intentionally induced by the creation of a myth, a fable of national invincibility on the American frontier. Beginning in the 18th century and culminating in the Victorian era, journalists, novelists, artists and sculptors concocted a fantasy that supplanted memories of vulnerability and terror on the Northeastern borderlands with tales of conquest and victory on the Great Plains.
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In response to this shame, the new model exaggerated iron-clad valor on the part of white men and crinoline helplessness on the part of white women.
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Unfortunately, by replicating the Colonial war on terrorism, 9/11 invited us to re-enact the post-Colonial solution, to bury our awareness of our vulnerability under belligerent posturing and comforting fantasy.
The Mystery of Gulf War Syndrome
Tags: AchEi, Gulf_War_Syndrome, acetylcholine, brain, cancer, health, neuro, soldier, war on 2008-03-22 -All Annotations (0) -About
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patients with a low level of occupational exposure to acetylcholinesterase inhibitors in agriculture--for example through sheep-dipping or work in greenhouses--report symptoms that mirror those of sick veterans. Taken together, she argues, the evidence suggests that AChEis do have a role in the chronic illnesses experienced by many veterans.
The Wire's War on the Drug War
Tags: baltimore, david_simon, drugs, poverty, the_wire, tv, urban, war on 2008-03-15 -All Annotations (0) -About
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we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented.
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