Damnation

A thoughtful essay on western dams from Daniel McCool at High Country News:

We can always find another source of energy, a more sensible place to grow high-water crops, and a more efficient way to water our cities. But we cannot replicate Glen Canyon; we cannot genetically engineer a massive salmon run; we cannot invent a mountain canyon that funnels sand to the edge of a continent. We have great power to foul our own nest, but we have a commensurate power to mend that nest, and create a future of free-flowing rivers and deeply carved canyons.

This’ll work

From Knight Ridder via The Arizona Daily Star:

A pilot program to repatriate to the Mexican interior tens of thousands of illegal Mexican entrants will begin in two weeks, Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson said Tuesday.

The pilot program, which runs through Sept. 30, will cost an estimated $13 million to charter planes that Homeland Security officials say will return 300 migrants daily.

I don’t say the F word — and that includes “Fox”

Juanita has a solution:

By the way, the so-called Defense of Decency Act calls for a $275,000 fine for anyone in the media who uses Cheney verbs. I say let’s fix this national debt thing by applying that law to politicians, telling Cheney that Congress cut his Halliburton profits, and just standing back while …… well, cha-ching, cha-ching.

Lena Horne…

is 87 today. American Masters leads its essay on Horne with this:

Even in her eighties, the legendary Lena Horne has a quality of timelessness about her. Elegant and wise, she personifies both the glamour of Hollywood and the reality of a lifetime spent battling racial and social injustice. Pushed by an ambitious mother into the chorus line of the Cotton Club when she was sixteen, and maneuvered into a film career by the N.A.A.C.P., she was the first African American signed to a long-term studio contract. In her rise beyond Hollywood’s racial stereotypes of maids, butlers, and African natives, she achieved true stardom on the silver screen, and became a catalyst for change even beyond the glittery fringes of studio life.

Name game

From Morning Briefing:

A Texas couple decided two years ago to name their newborn son ESPN. This after another Texas couple had named their son Espn and a Michigan couple had named their son Espen.

ESPN, never one to miss an opportunity for self-promotion, is planning a special on the three youngsters.

“Not sure what the show will be called,” writes Greg Cote of the Miami Herald, “but I would suggest, ‘My Parents Are Idiots.’ “

And no cartoon

From Late Night with David Letterman:

Top Ten George W. Bush Complaints About “Fahrenheit 9/11″

10. That actor who played the President was totally unconvincing

9. It oversimplified the way I stole the election

8. Too many of them fancy college-boy words

7. If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported

6. Didn’t have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger

5. Of all Michael Moore’s accusations, only 97% are true

4. Not sure - - I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe

3. Where the hell was Spider-man?

2. Couldn’t hear most of the movie over Cheney’s foul mouth

1. I thought this was supposed to be about Dodgeball

The defenders

Reported by Dwight Perry in Sideline Chatter:

Greg Cote of the Miami Herald, with a legal update from Colorado: “There was a new motion by the defense Monday in the Kobe Bryant trial, but the motion was blocked by Detroit’s Ben Wallace.”

Yosemite

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Land Grant on this date in 1864. According to the Library of Congress:

The legislation provided California with 39,000 acres of the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”

The newly-appointed Yosemite Board of Park Commissioners confronted the dual task of preserving the magnificent landscape while providing for public recreation. With amazing foresight, board member and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted noted these goals could conflict. In his August 9, 1865 Draft of Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove, Olmsted warns “the slight harm which the few hundred visitors of this year might do, if no care were taken to prevent it, would not be slight, if it should be repeated by millions.”

A man of many interests

From Jack Balkin:

Putting together Justice Thomas’ opinion in Hamdi with his vote in ACLU v. Ashcroft, we may infer that the President can throw any citizen in a military prison indefinitely, but that the citizen has the right to view pornography while there.

Read about Hamdi and ACLU v. Ashcroft.

Best and worst

J.D. Power has released its latest survey of automobile dependability. For the tenth consecutive year Lexus lead the list; Buick, Infiniti, Lincoln and Cadillac were second through fifth. The five worst were Volkswagen, Isuzu, Daewoo, Kia and Land Rover (with 472 problems per 100 vehicles).

Toyota, Honda, Porsche, GM and BMW were the best manufacturers, and the only manufacturers better than average.

The survey was based on 2001 models.

Out of bounds

Michael Bérubé on how to perfect soccer:

I have long thought that soccer– known in some parts of the world, namely, everywhere but here, as “football”– is almost the perfect sport. It involves intense, explosive large-muscle-group strength, incredible cardiovascular stamina, and stunning small-muscle-group finesse and coordination. It also has nearly-ideal combinations of individual virtuosity with team effort, skill with chance, and synoptic strategy with sudden bursts of impromptu brilliance. But unfortunately, the sport has deep structural flaws, the most notorious of which is its “offsides” rule, which prevents players from sprinting behind defenses. And don’t even try to defend the inane “shootout” as a means of deciding games: at the very least, the players should run in from midfield and/or shoot from outside the penalty area. Shooting from 11m out is a joke. The main problem, though, is that the scale of soccer is too big. The way I figure it, if soccer would just reduce the size of its field, reduce the number of players on the field, make the ball smaller and harder and flatten it on both ends, make the goal smaller, put up boards and glass around the boundaries, cover the field in ice, and give everybody sticks, then you’d have the perfect sport.

Couldn’t you just give me a pill?

From AP via Newsday:

The government has lent its seal of approval to a marketing an age-old medical device — leeches.

The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that Ricarimpex SAS, a French firm, is the first company to request and receive FDA clearance to market the bloodsucking aquatic animals as medical devices.

Leeches are already widely used in American hospitals, and companies that raised and sold them here before 1976 were allowed to continue doing so. However, the medical device law passed that year required newcomers to the field to seek approval.

Link via South Knox Bubba

Best line of the day, so far

“[P]eople who appear to be mentally unbalanced, and not always in a good way.”

Billmon talking about some of those making comments at Whiskey Bar.

Microsoft alternatives

Once again, NewMexiKen would like to encourage you to consider Mozilla Firefox (now version 0.9.1 of their newest browser) or Mozilla (version 1.7 of the browser) and Thunderbird (version 0.7.1 for mail).

Apple

NewMexiKen uses a relatively new and perfectly adequate Windows laptop, but the new Apple OS X v10.4 Tiger is looking mighty attractive.

Satire R Us

Brushback.com, The Onion wannabe for sports.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry…

was born on this date in 1900. In January 2003 Outside Magazine listed its 25 essential books for the well-read explorer. At the top was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

Like his most famous creation, The Little Prince, that visitor from Asteroid B-612 who once saw 44 sunsets in a single day, Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky. Killed in World War II at age 44, “Saint Ex” was a pioneering pilot for Aéropostale in the 1920s, carrying mail over the deadly Sahara on the Toulouse-Dakar route, encountering cyclones, marauding Moors, and lonely nights: “So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men. Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited out the night.” Whatever his skills as a pilot—said to be extraordinary—as a writer he is effortlessly sublime. Wind, Sand and Stars is so humane, so poetic, you underline sentences: “It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.” Saint-Exupéry did just that. No writer before or since has distilled the sheer spirit of adventure so beautifully. True, in his excitement he can be righteous, almost irksome—like someone who’s just gotten religion. But that youthful excess is part of his charm. Philosophical yet gritty, sincere yet never earnest, utterly devoid of the postmodern cop-outs of cynicism, sarcasm, and spite, Saint-Exupéry’s prose is a lot like the bracing gusts of fresh air that greet him in his open cockpit. He shows us what it’s like to be subject—and king—of infinite space.

Goooooaaaaal

“Officials at a prison in Thailand arranged a soccer game between inmates and elephants. The two teams played to a 5-5 tie, then the elephants were returned to their regular stamping grounds — the greens at Shinnecock Hills.”

Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle

Best line of the day, so far

“[A]nother NBA draft that should have been televised by Nickelodeon.”

Greg at the Sports Law Blog

A 2 by 4 rain

NewMexiKen’s father reports on the seasonal change in Tucson:

Those of you familiar with the desert know that after two or three months of no rain we expect thunderheads to build up every afternoon south east of us. These are the rain clouds from the Gulf of Mexico, pushing up into the Sierra Madres in Mexico. Day by day they creep closer to us.

Yesterday while reading I was surprised by a loud clap of thunder. Glancing out the window it was true….. Rain………

I raced to the kitchen to gather my rain gauges and ruler; ran out the door and proceeded to record the event.

Taking numerous measurements, I concluded the drops averaged two inches apart and the rain had lasted four minutes…..a 2/4 rain.

Passionate, clever, scathing, funny, snarky, brutal, sad, glib and at times superficial

From Editor & Publisher:

While the country as a whole appears split, along political lines, over the controversial Michael Moore documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” movie reviewers at U.S. daily newspapers are not.

An E&P survey of 63 daily papers that ran reviews, in “red” and “blue” states alike, finds that 56 gave the film a positive nod, with only seven abstaining, an almost 90% favorable rating.

The headline for this entry is from the review of Mary Pols in the Contra Costa Times.

The Treaty of Vesailles…

at the end of World War I was signed on this date in 1919, five years to the day after the assassination that sparked the war.

The United States Senate never ratified the Treaty, as much for political as diplomatic reasons.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand…

was assassinated in Sarajevo on this date in 1914, igniting what we know as World War I.

Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. After the Emperor’s son had committed suicide and Ferdinand’s own father had died, Ferdinand was first in succession to the Emperor. He was considered likely to be a reformer, which upset Balkan nationalists.

In all, there were seven assassins along the route of the Archduke’s car, all Bosnian Serbs. The third of the seven, Nedelko Cabrinovic,

threw a bomb, but failed to see the car in time to aim well: he missed the heir’s car and hit the next one, injuring several people. Cabrinovic swallowed poison and jumped into a canal, but he was saved from suicide and arrested. He died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916.

The seventh was Gavrilo Princip.

Princip heard Cabrinovic’s bomb go off and assumed that the Archduke was dead. By the time he heard what had really happened, the cars had driven by. By bad luck, a little later the returning procession missed a turn and stopped to back up at a corner just as Princip happened to walk by. Princip fired two shots: one killed the archduke, the other his wife. Princip was arrested before he could swallow his poison capsule or shoot himself. Princip too was a minor under Austrian law, so he could not be executed. Instead he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and died of tuberculosis in 1916.

It was the Archduke and Sophie’s fourteenth wedding anniversary. The Archduke’s last words were, “Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children.”

In the aftermath of the assassination, diplomatic efforts failed, perhaps because both Austria and Serbia feared loss of national prestige. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany sided with Austria; Russia supported Serbia as required by treaty. France was obligated to support Russia in any war with Germany or Austria-Hungary. Britain was obligated to support France in an any war with Germany.

Source for quotes and some background: The Balkan Causes of World War One

Bitter old man running for President

“Nader is a sixty-something year-old man raised in a household that trained him to revile the decadent pleasures that most of us enjoy.

The most famous story is that Ralph’s mother refused to serve him a frosted cake for his birthday, believing it unhealthy. After years of begging, Mrs. Nader agreed to bake the children such a delight. She constructed a beautiful cake, let the children see it, then removed all the frosting before allowing them to eat it. Parents take note: this is how to raise a bitter, twisted child.

Correspondent and Public Citizen alum Andrew Cohen writing at Altercation

Best line of the day, so far

“In fact, the most heartbreaking thing about F 9/11 is that we are now engaged in the national argument over a film that we should have had about going to war.”

Charles Pierce reviewing the film for Altercation

Running mate

As Dick Cheney becomes more and more unraveled, maybe it’s time to start speculating about who Bush’s running mate might be. NewMexiKen has come up with a few possibilities:

• Jeb Bush (what more could the family want?)
• John McCain (just like McCain to do this, if asked)
• Colin Powell (I don’t think so)
• Zell Miller (not really, but he might as well)
• Ralph Nader (truth in advertising)
• Mitt Romney (Massachusetts counter point)

Let’s keep giving them ideas

From Time:

Although there are no plans to raise the threat level from yellow to orange, a senior Justice Department official says, “there’s very serious intelligence that’s corroborated, that’s multiple sourced, that indicates that al-Qaeda is intent on hitting us and hitting us hard this year.” The official concedes, however, that “we don’t have specific information.”

Along with this now familiar general warning, the FBI has introduced the specter of a new terrorism threat: booby-trapped beer coolers. A lightly classified bulletin sent to 18,000 state and local agencies last week advised local authorities to look out for plastic-foam containers, inner tubes and other waterborne flotsam commonly seen around marinas that could be rigged to blow up on contact. Also, the bulletin warned, terrorists might attach bombs to buoys. FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials say no such devices have actually been discovered, nor is there any current intelligence that terrorists are hatching plots involving floating bombs.

My god, take a cooler and an almanac to the beach and you’re in big trouble.

Link via Eschaton.

Constitutional duty

Jon Stewart on Larry King discussing John Edwards as possible vice presidential candidate:

Yes. I hate to see a boy like that’s heart crushed when he gets to be the vice president and he realizes he has to tell Senators to f-off. That is actually a vice presidential duty within the constitution.

Albuquerque first family update

From the Albuquerque Tribune:

In Albuquerque, Mayor Martin Chavez and his wife, Margaret Aragon de Chavez, have kept any disagreement private since filing for divorce this month.

But in Boston, at a dinner for the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting Friday, a disagreement over crossing a picket line caught the attention of protesters and reporters.

Mayors arriving at the event faced a gauntlet of hundreds of jeering, chanting police officers and other city employees trying to embarrass Boston Mayor Thomas Menino over pending contracts with city unions.

Picketers chanted “Don’t go in!” and “Shame on you!” as buses ferried mayors and their families to the red-carpet event at the Boston Public Library.

Chavez, a Democrat, walked past protesters with his wife and daughter saying, “We’re going in. Tom Menino is a great friend and a great Democrat.”

But then Aragon de Chavez and their 13-year-old daughter, Martinique Chavez, pulled aside metal barricades and joined the union protesters, sparking cheers from the crowd. She was handed a Boston Fire Department T-shirt and a sign.

“There were all these union firefighters and police looking at all the people going into this extravagant party,” Aragon de Chavez said in a phone interview. “And they were saying `Don’t go in, don’t go in.’ I was raised in a blue-collar family. I looked into their eyes and I couldn’t do it. . . .

“I wasn’t trying to draw attention to myself. It just reminded me of my upbringing.”

Aragon de Chavez said her husband went into the dinner and that she encouraged Martinique to go in as well. But her daughter also decided not to cross the line of protesters.

Without knowing the issues in the Boston dispute, it still occurs to NewMexiKen that the wrong Chávez is mayor.

Link via Metaquerque.

The clueless

From William Powers in the National Journal, The Church of Best-Sellers:

More and more, the coverage of these massive cultural events is like absurd comic theater. Act 1: Long before publication, the media announce that the book in question will be simply huge, The Biggest Thing In Years, and the drumbeat continues right up to the day of release. Act 2: The public, eager to participate in this foreordained historic moment, dutifully lines up to buy the important tome. Act 3: The media marvel at the popular frenzy, as if it had happened quite spontaneously and they had nothing to do with it.

Link via Bookslut.

The Finger

According to this report from ABC News, The Finger has been with us since Greek tragedy.

Link via Dave Barry.

Unusual promotion

The Daytona Cubs give away an unusual item to the first 500 fans.

In another unique promotion by the Daytona Cubs, Friday night will be the first ever jock-strap give-away at Jackie Robinson Ballpark. The first 500 fans through the gates, will receive a FREE atheltic supporter courtesy of your Daytona Cubs.

Link via Dave Barry.

The Known World

NewMexiKen read Edward P. Jones’s The Known World this past week. The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and that The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley called “the best new work of American fiction to cross my desk in years” is — obviously — excellent and I highly recommend it. It’s available in soft cover.

Set in Virginia in the decades before the Civil War, the novel’s primary characters are members of the extended Townsend family, including slaves owned by the freed-Black Townsends. This mix makes for a rich and complex tapestry of racial-relations — black, mulatto, white and Indian. Indeed, more than any one individual, it is slavery that is the main character. As Yardley wrote:

More than anything else, Jones is concerned with the relationship between master and slave, and with the wholly unexpected permutations this acquires when both master and slave are black. Jones cuts right to the core when he writes: “Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.” A master is a master is a master, and it doesn’t matter whether the master is white or black.

What else is new?

Ralph tells us the Western Shoshone Get Screwed in Nevada.

The Western Shoshone Land Distribution bill passed Congress today [Friday]. It effectively steals the land of the Western Shoshone, paying pennies on the dollar to close out land claims…

The Smithsonian Institution

• African Art Museum
• Air and Space Museum and Udvar-Hazy Center
• American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery
• American History Museum
• American Indian Museum
• Anacostia Museum (African American history and culture)
• Arts and Industries Building (Discovery Theater)
• Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
• Freer and Sackler Galleries (Asian art)
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (modern and contemporary art)
• National Zoo
• Natural History Museum
• Portrait Gallery
• Postal Museum
• Smithsonian Institution Building (the Castle)

James Smithson…

died on this date in 1829.

Smithson’s will left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford. But should his nephew die without children—legitimate or illegitimate—a contingency clause stated that the estate would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge…”

Source: The Smithsonian Institution

The nephew did indeed die without children and in 1838 approximately $500,000 in gold was brought to the United States. After a decade of indecision and debate about how best to carry out the bequest, the Smithsonian Institution was created by Act of Congress (1846).

An aside: According to the Smithsonian:

Senator John C. Calhoun opposed acceptance of the Smithson bequest, largely on the grounds that to do so on behalf of the entire nation would abridge states’ rights. He maintained that Congress had no authority to accept the gift. He also asserted that it would be “beneath [U.S.] dignity to accept presents from anyone.”

Who’s the bigger cheater?

Go read the whole column by Sally Jenkins on the “run-amok investigation of U.S. track and field athletes,” Due Process? Not For Track Stars. An excerpt:

Here is an example of the kind of job USADA is doing in its inquiry into Jones’s ties to BALCO. Several weeks ago, Jones met with a trio of USADA officials, including Madden. They presented her with a calendar that purported to be her BALCO doping schedule. It bore several notations and the initials MJ.

“That’s not my calendar,” she said.

“Then why does it have your sprint times on it?”

Jones replied evenly, “If those are my sprint times, then I just shattered the world record by a second.”

The sprint times on the calendar could not have been those of Jones, or of any woman. They were too fast. The USADA representatives didn’t even recognize the difference between the sprint times of a male and a female.

You get an uneasy feeling from watching USADA’s bumbling zealots. You get the feeling they’d waive the U.S. Constitution if they could — which is a pretty unsettling thing to feel about an organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars and a grant from the White House.

Jenkins points out that while taking performance enhancers may be cheating, it isn’t a crime. Leaking grand jury testimony is, however, and that has happened in this case.

Cool sounds

The world’s most eco-friendly ice-cream freezer — from Popular Science.

And we think we’re so smart

The eighth grade final exam from Salina, Kansas, 1895.

Why I like Costco and not Sam’s

From AlterNet:

Indeed, Costco’s pay is much, much, much better — a full-time Costco clerk or warehouse worker earns more than $41,000 a year, plus getting terrific health-care coverage. Wal-Mart workers get barely a third of that pay, plus a lousy health-care plan. Costco even has unions!

Yet, Costco’s labor costs are only about half of Wal-Mart’s. How’s that possible? One reason is that Costco workers feel valued, which adds enormously to their productivity, and they don’t leave — employee turnover is a tiny fraction of Wal-Mart’s rapidly revolving door.