Month: August 2011

Extraordinary Rendition

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by liberal japonicus The Guardian has a piece today about revelations about CIA extraordinary rendition network as revealed by recent court filings in upstate New York. This article (which confusingly has the same picture at the top and so could be confused with the previous one) gives more details while this companion opinion notes how the … Read more

View of an outsider

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by liberal japonicus

I mentioned that I was really attracted to the Guardian site after reading it quite a bit for the Murdoch phone hacking scandal. The paper has been, strangely enough, a thread for me in my wanderings. I remember getting it in the UK when I visited my uncle on numerous occasions and turning to it when I lived in Europe. When I first came to Japan, I got an international subscription, which would come on this incredibly, almost tissue like paper. But there were more substantive reasons that I put below the fold.

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Bunker Hunkering

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by Doctor Science

IncomingTideWinslowHomer
Incoming Tide, Scarboro, Maine by Winslow Homer, IMHO the greatest painter of the ocean in the canon of Western art.

We’re finishing up our Irene prep, so I’ll keep this short. We’re 30 miles from the ocean, so we don’t have to worry about storm surges and such. Using Hurricane Floyd as our baseline, we expect a power outage, a couple inches of water in the basement, and possibly the water treatment plant will fail again and we don’t have potable water for a few days. We have a gas stove this time, so I’m not too worried about not having food.

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Your conching Friday open thread

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by liberal japonicus If you are like me, you may have assumed that the conching in this title is another bizarre and short-lived stunt like planking or owling. It's not: Attention hipsters and other people seeking hipness: there’s a new fad catching on in Western Australia's Shark Bay, and you won’t want to be the last to … Read more

The Time of the Season

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by Doctor Science

In Why We Eat What We Eat, Raymond Sokolov wrote:

Real (as I will call vine-ripened, soft-walled, acid-flavored, summer-grown) tomatoes are an article of faith, a rallying point for the morally serious, a grail. And the real tomato’s acolytes are not some ragged band of malcontents. They are us, brothers and sisters in tomato-mania, converts to the first Western religion since the Stone Age to worship a plant. [p. 112; emphasis mine]

Sokolov’s book was published 20 years ago, but his remarks about tomatoes have only become more accurate with time.

On the one hand, we have what you might call Tomato Satanism, described by Brian Estabrook in Tomatoland: winter tomatoes from Florida, hard and tasteless, raised on chemicals and picked by workers who may be out-and-out slaves.

On the other, there’s this:

CherokeepurplebottomS

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Wow. Just wow.

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by liberal japonicus This news from the Electronic Frontier Foundation really has me wondering.  The “first sale” principle is what allows the purchaser of a copy of a book or CD or other copyrighted work to later resell that copy to someone else without infringing the copyright owner’s distribution right. It’s an important free-market limitation … Read more

your asynchronous Friday open thread

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by liberal japonicus Asynchronous because it's Sunday here. Whoops.  Working at a university means, at least for me, that when there are no classes, I really have no schedule. Lots of things to do, mind you, but not having the comforting rigidity of classes means that I don't pay much attention to what day it … Read more

the new normal

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by russell OK, here is some food for thought. My personal take on this: folks who are, say, younger than forty should not plan on living as well as their folks did. Sorry about that kids. Likewise, folks who are, say, fifty and over, and who got hit with big losses over the last couple … Read more

What if you weren’t you?

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by liberal japonicus This piece about Ralph Branca prompts that question. When I had phoned Branca and told him that his mother, Kati, was Jewish and that thus, according to traditional Jewish law, he and his 16 siblings were, too, the loud man was quiet. But when I had told him of the murder of his … Read more