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Sanctorum 2012
by arc400 3/5/2012 - 3:24 pm
“President Obama once said that he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.” -- Rick Santorum - Troy, Michigan, Feb 25 2012
"The Latin phrase sanctum sanctorum is a Latin translation of the biblical term: "Holy of Holies" . -- Wikipedia [Read more]
Johnny Hacktotum, 1955-2011
by arc400 10/13/2011 - 12:44 pm
"[Steve's] dad, Paul -- a machinist who had never completed high school -- had set aside a section of his workbench for Steve, and taught him how to build things, disassemble them, and put them together. From neighbors who worked in the electronics firm in the Valley, he learned about that field -- and also understood that things like television sets were not magical things that just showed up in one's house, but designed objects that human beings had painstakingly created." (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/10/jobs/all/1)
The anecdote above is my favorite from the recent gush of biographical material regarding Steve Jobs. It gives us a picture of the young Jobs, encouraged by his adoptive dad to take gizmos apart and put them together again. (It even raises the question: If Jobs had grown up with his biological parents, would he have become a hacker?) [Read more]
Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching heels!
by arc400 9/27/2011 - 10:27 am
My generation came of age during Second-Wave Feminism. By the time we reached 18, the country was already entering its 'post-feminist' phase.
In these final years before the discovery of the AIDS virus, we were the direct heirs of the most recent Sexual Revolution. We enjoyed easy access to birth control and the knowledge that, if we did get pregnant, abortions were legal and affordable. Our spiritual forebears were slightly older women who still looked and acted like hippies, who went bra-less, who hitchhiked and camped alone, who didn't give a rat's ass about makeup (unless it was body paint), who lived in communal homes, and slept with anyone they wanted to. [Read more]
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Liberal Anthem for our Time
by arc400 4/27/2011 - 5:44 pm
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Liberal Anthem for Our Time
President John F. Kennedy defined the American Liberal as "... someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties" [cited by Eric Alterman, Why we're Liberals: a political handbook for post-Bush America, 2008] [Read more]
In the News
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Conversations with suicide bombers
By Elizabeth Weingarten, ForeignPolicy.com, May 23, 2012
It was 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Mossarat Qadeem was sitting on the floor of a house with about a dozen young Pakistani men -- some of whom had nearly become suicide bombers. Qadeem's goal: to undo the destructive brainwashing of the al-Qaeda and Taliban teachers who trained them in extremism, in part by asking the students to narrate their life stories.
"We were handling one of the boys, and he just came, put his head here in my lap, and he started crying and weeping," Qadeem recalls. "I was taken aback. It is very unnatural in my country that a man that tall can just sit at your feet and put his head here. [The other men] were all crying with him, and I was looking at him, and thinking, ‘my God.'"
All in a day's work for Qadeem. She's the national coordinator of Aman-o-Nisa, a coalition of Pakistani women that convened in October 2011 to combat violent extremism in Pakistan at the grassroots level. [....]
Read the article at http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/05/23/conversations_with_suicide_bombers- Add new comment
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For Native American Women, Scourge of Rape, Rare Justice
The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
.......
“We should never have a woman come into the office saying, ‘I need to learn more about Plan B for when my daughter gets raped,’ ” said Charon Asetoyer, a women’s health advocate on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, referring to the morning-after pill. “That’s what’s so frightening — that it’s more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women.”
The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.
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Doctor Who Helped Find Bin Laden Given Jail Term (for...
By Ismail Kahn, New York Times, May 23/24, 2012
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani doctor who helped the Central Intelligence Agency pin down Osama bin Laden's location under cover of a vaccination drive was convicted on Wednesday of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison, a senior official in Pakistan said.
A tribal court here in northwestern Pakistan found the doctor, Shakil Afridi, guilty of acting against the state, said Mutahir Zeb Khan, the administrator for the Khyber tribal region [....]
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Russia lawmakers advance bill on penalties for protesters
By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2012
MOSCOW — Stiff new penalties aimed at opposition protesters were given preliminary approval Tuesday by Russian lawmakers loyal to President Vladimir Putin, the target of mass rallies and demonstrations before his March election victory.
The bill, which opposition parliament members termed draconian and protested by threatening to file out of a legislative session, calls for fines of up to $50,000 and up to 200 hours of community service for organizers of rallies and demonstrations that grow violent or exceed the approved number of participants.
The sanctions were approved on first reading by parliament's lower house, which is controlled by Putin's United Russia party. They mark a return by the Kremlin to a tough stance against critics after concessions during the recent election campaign [...]
Also see:
Russians back Putin, strong leadership
Washington Post, May 22, 2012A Pew survey of 1,000 Russians found that President Vladimir Putin is well-liked by more than 70 percent of citizens, especially older adults.
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In Cuba, Mystery Shrouds the Fate of an Undersea Internet...
Associated Press, May 21, 2012
HAVANA — It was all sunshine, smiles and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro had hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age on the island.
More than a year after the February 2011 ceremony on Siboney Beach in eastern Cuba, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the project and the arrest of more than a half-dozen senior telecom officials.
Perhaps most maddening, nobody has explained what happened to the much-ballyhooed $70 million project....
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