Critic Boyd Tonkin had a piece in last week’s Independent recounting the sad fate of his local library, Friern Barnet Library, in the hands of the enlightened council of the London Borough of Barnet. In this case, a group of volunteers have invaded this local library, which was, along with a number of others, slated to be closed. The volunteers have taken on the role of squatters, and are keeping the library running. The Council is currently trying to decide whether to have them evicted–since it’s a public building, that can’t just happen, so the Council is trying to decide what to do next. In this case, the Council is dominated by Conservatives, so it’s easy to see this as a part of a pattern of Conservative budget cuts. That, however, would be misleading—everyone’s doing it. Full story »

If you ever want a good laugh, I highly suggest looking through the Google Analytics of yourself, to see what advertisers think of you. For example, mine says that I’m an 18-24 year old woman interested in politics and pop culture. The ads I usually get are to buy new seasons of House on DVD, to volunteer for Obama for America, and for some reason, to sign up for Christian Mingle (the Internet is now my mother).

The Analytics determine this based on the material you view online. It tracks what websites your IP address visits most often and a quick description of what those websites cater to. This tracking allows advertisers to find you where you live online and tailor their advertising campaign to their target audience.

Full story »

In case you don’t regularly visit the “Entertainment” section on the main Google News page, you may have missed the article published yesterday afternoon with variations on the headline, “A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife.” Harvard historian, Karen L. King, presented her findings yesterday at a conference in Rome. Dr. King has acquired a small piece of parchment containing Coptic writing. The crucial information is contained in the remains of lines four and five:

The fourth says: “… Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….”

The next line reads: “…she will be able to be my disciple.” (Boston Globe)

I stumbled across this article and stubbed my brain. “His WHAT?” King explicitly emphasizes that this piece of paper does not prove that Jesus was married. But the mere possibility is going to raise hackles and questions in near equal proportion. Full story »

On Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s personal tachometer of war, the needle is always at the red line.

Widespread in Washington is an assumption as implicit as it is unexamined that the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel, even though it hasn’t signed the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), is acceptable because:

1. It’s an ally.
2. It’s “rational.” Full story »

She puttered around the house until well after midnight last night, washing one more glass, folding one more t-shirt. Later, she found another to fold. She also found, like an afterthought, a half-full bottle of aspirin that she slid, rattling, into a box of other provisions she’d set aside for my daughter, now off at college. She’d stashed most of a stack of paper plates in there, and bales of napkins she’d not yet opened, and other things from the kitchen she didn’t want to go to waste. She checked each kitchen cupboard for anything forgotten, offered me a brief tour of the tool drawer I already knew well, found one more photograph she wanted to take with her.

I sat at the breakfast room table for most of this, my back to the kitchen, but I could hear her feet shuffling across the laminate. She’d pass through, off to the laundry room, back to the carpeted dining room that led to the rest of the house—my house, she’d been calling it for the past few days, not hers. Not any more. After sixty-one years of living here, she was trying to give it up. Full story »

Let’s see, suppose Mitt Romney is correct—people who don’t pay taxes are deadbeats who will vote for Obama no matter what. Who are these people? Well, since most people pay payroll and social security taxes, as well as state sales taxes, he’s probably not talking about them. So it must be the 47% who don’t pay federal income taxes. Lots of other bloggers are currently talking about the demographics of these people—they’re poor, they get child care credits, they’re on social security, that sort of thing. But what about where they live? Is there a pattern here? Full story »

So just what is it about Mitt Romney, who seems a devoted family man who loves his wife and clearly wouldn’t go around beating small children about the head, that makes him so tone-deaf? Once again, he’s in trouble for saying things that most of us find remarkably insensitive even for a politician, or just as a human being, if not downright stupid. So this time he’s on about the 47% of the country who think of themselves as victims. Before it was an extraordinarily insensitive and comically badly timed set of comments about Obama’s apology tour, or whatever, when the Village was in a state of shock over one of their own—a US Ambassador, no less. And before that it was lord knows. There have been so many of them that we’ve all lost count. And this doesn’t even include the outright lying—the mendacity of the campaign ads, the total fabrications about Obama, events that have or haven’t occurred, even about his own life. Is he mildly Aspergers? Is he a tool of the devil? What’s going on?

It’s actually simple. Romney is a finance guy. Full story »

This is just remarkable. And it may be the 7th Sign.

I try not to read David Brooks any more than I have to because every time I do I wind up wanting to throw things. Through the years he has established himself as one of the most reliably disingenuous, dishonest propagandists on the GOP payroll, a fork-tongued weasel who can’t say hello without lying. And BAM! Here, without warning or precedent, he smacks us in the lips us with the truest thing I’ve read in days.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor. Full story »

The Boy Scout Oath
On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; and to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

The Boy Scout Law
A Scout is: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. (source)

When I joined the Cub Scouts, I was in First Grade. Over the next eight years, I earned every Cub Scout rank and then worked my way up to being a Life Scout, the second highest rank, just below Eagle. Full story »

The man who translated and promoted “Innocence of Muslims” is a one-man anti-Islam P.R. firm.

Pastor Terry Jones — the man who gained infamy for threatening to burn the Koran — promised to promote Innocence of Muslims, the film that’s setting off sparks and lighting brush fires across the Middle East. But Morris Sadek is the man who, Daniel Burke at Religion News Service reports, “translated it into Arabic, sent it to Egyptian journalists, promoted it on his website and posted it on social media.” Full story »

I think some of us are so used to the frustrations of how local governments sometimes work that we’re shocked when a municipality gets one right. Here in West Denver, for instance, a lot of us have been incensed by the way our elected officials are siding with developers against the needs and express wishes of the people who put them in office.

But by golly, it looks like we can put one in the win column for common sense. Like many cities, Denver has an ordinance aimed at keeping places that serve alcohol away from schools. The thing is, these regulations can result in some utter silliness once you get past the philosophy and begin examining the specifics. Since you can’t very well force existing businesses to close when you pass a new ordinance or when a new school opens nearby, you wind up with a situation like we have in my neighborhood. Full story »

A pretext for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in European states is to free them from the need to develop nuclear weapons.

Recently we posted about the little brother of The Bomb (strategic nuclear weapons): tactical, or lower yield, nukes. We cited a number of reasons that tactical pose as much of a threat as strategic. Among them are the exorbitant cost — modernizing the B61 tactical nukes in the U.S. stockpile will cost $10 billion. Another: they blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons, as can be seen in the instance of Pakistan, which may be developing them for use against India. Full story »

I opened my eyes and stared up at the tee-peed mosquito net that surrounded me. It was 7:30a.m., and I was in Africa.

My flight from Istanbul, Turkey landed fewer than eight hours earlier. Darkness filled the city of Kigali at that time, so I drew back the curtains of my room and peeked into the new day. A peaceful landscape of red roofs and rolling hills stared back at me. Good morning, Rwanda.

I had deplaned on the runway of a visibly sleeping city the night before and walked toward the building that read “Kigali International Airport.” No lights or lanes guided me. Few airport staff members even looked my way as I meandered alone toward the “ARRIVALS” door. Only a small number of passengers exited the already half-filled plane, as the aircraft still had another late-night stop to make in Kampala, Uganda.
Full story »

Lately I’m working not only on my actual camera ability, but also on better understanding the technology of processing images. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours in the DaVinci Machines Exhibit in Denver working on both composition and technical skills (shooting in lower light, for instance) and doing so with an eye toward how I’d be outputting the images later. Interesting results.

I bracketed everything I shot (three exposures: -3, 0 and +3) to enable composite High Dynamic Range processing. Here’s one series that emerged. This is obviously several different versions of the same raw shot. First, the basic image, fine tuned a bit in Photoshop.

Full story »

Buzzfeed just dropped a gold nugget of pure, observational journalism on the Internet just a little bit ago:

Rick Santorum: Conservatives Will “Never Have The Elite, Smart People On Our Side”

Here is a perfect case of Rick Santorum doing an exemplary job of illustrating exactly what it is that drives me berserk about these crafty, manipulative, deceitful bags of shit cloaked in spurious piety.

“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country,” Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

Full story »

If I could be someone else, who would I be? Oh, I don’t know, how about someone brilliant—say, someone who grew up poor, but through sheer brilliance and effort got himself to Duke, say, on full scholarship, and then Harvard Medical School. But I’d also want to be someone who wanted to, say, do good works, maybe even save the world, since I had bumped into liberation theology along the way. So I would spend most of my time at Medical School, not in Cambridge taking courses, but rather in Haiti; pretty much my entire first year, in fact, building and funding a clinic when I was supposed to be taking classes. And then ace my exams anyway. Full story »

Imagine you are a freshman member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Unless you’re an idiot, you want to be re-elected. It’s a cushy gig — it pays $174,000 a year. It’s likely you already have a net worth in the high six figures — nine times that of the your constituents — so you’re not hurting for coin of the realm. In debates, the moderator calls you “Congressman” and your opponent “Mister” or “Ms.”

People line up to give you the $1.3 million that you, on average, need to spend to get re-elected. How cool is that?

Re-election rates to the House are high — at or above 90 percent 18 times in the last 24 election cycles. But in 2010, when you washed ashore on the congressional beachhead in that tea-party wave of slash-government insolence, the re-election rate fell from 94 percent in 2008 to 85 percent. Full story »

What’s Tehran’s reaction to the United States treating Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s war fever with a cold compress?

At the Daily Beast, Ali Gharib quotes from a letter that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I am stunned by the remarks that you made this week regarding U.S. support for Israel. Are you suggesting that the United States is not Israel’s closest ally and does not stand by Israel? Are you saying that Israel, under President Obama, has not received more in annual security assistance from the United States than at any time in its history, including for the Iron Dome Missile Defense System. As other Israelis have said, it appears that you have injected politics into one of the most profound security challenges of our time—Iran’s illicit pursuit of nuclear weapons. Full story »

Part IV of a series.

Today my ever-so-patient readers get off easy. Why? Because as cynical as I am, I simply am not psychic.

The fourth commandment (as per the previous posts, as reckoned by Catholicism) is:

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you.
Exodus 20:12 (NASB) 

Simply, I fail to find anything that would indicate that the parents of either Governor Romney or President Obama ever commanded them to govern or campaign as they do, or otherwise. Full story »

I grew up in the South. I have lived roughly 33 of my 51 years below the Mason-Dixon and past the occasional trip for business or to visit friends and relatives I shan’t be going back. The reasons are numerous, but the one I’m concerned with today involves that most sinister of myths. I’m referring, of course, to Southern hospitality. To the idea that Southerners are so damned nice. Polite. Friendly. Cordial. Welcoming.

This is great as marketing and ideology. The reality of things is somewhat more…complex. Full story »