artappraiser's blog

The political version of Godwin's law,

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 05:55:16 -0700

the leftist gift that keeps on giving to the John McCain for president campaign:

One unhappy Republican: ....So there's the dilemma, fellow Republicans. Do we buy the pap Miss Rice dispensed and ignore the incompetence that sees Michael Chertoff.... Or do we gag, say enough, and demand that President Bush and Miss Rice begin telling Americans bluntly that their country is in a heck of a fix in the Islamic world made much worse by the Iraq war...

Fortunately for America, the Reid-and-Dean-led Democrats are irrelevant to our decision. They are too busy describing U.S. soldiers as Nazis and keeping the shackles on their slave empire of one-issue groups long enough to lose the presidency in 2008.

--Michael Scheuer.

[A 22-year veteran with the CIA, Scheuer created and served as the chief of the agency's Osama bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center. He is also the author of "Imperial Hubris."]

I don't think Marek should have apologized for this comment; I thought it was excellent.

The damage that kind of stuff sitting unchallenged on liberal websites does to the Democrats is inestimable. Here's another example. Don't think all out there aren't reading it and seeing it and seeing that no one challenges it. As a matter of fact, they label all of us with it because so few challenge it.

...and one otherlast thing, the nazi analog is especially idiotic. everybody's a nazi... my dog is a nazi for pissing loafers... the guy at the seafood counter a nazi for running out of tuna... your mom is a nazi for witholding the breast when you were hungry pnce in diapers. get over, por fa...

For Gandalf the cynic

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:37:36 -0700

Re: "A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation" now gone to archive.

See Hope for Hungry Children, Arriving in a Foil Packet
by Michael Wines from Maradi, Niger for the August 8 NYT:

....At this epicenter of Niger's latest hunger crisis, Plumpy'nut is saving lives....Plumpy'nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands, is 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, a beige paste about as thick as mashed potatoes and stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals. But that is akin to calling a 1945 Mouton Rothschild fortified grape juice. Since the packets came into the hands of relief organizations during the Darfur crisis in Sudan, they have been revolutionizing emergency care for severely malnourished children who are old enough to take solid food, by taking care out of crowded field hospitals and straight into mothers' homes.

"This product, it's beyond opinion - it's documented, it's scientific fact," Dr. Milton Tectonidis, a Paris-based nutrition specialist for Doctors Without Borders, said in an interview here. "We've seen it working. With this one product, we can treat three-quarters of children on an outpatient basis. Before, we had to hospitalize them all and give them fortified milk."

P.S. Graham_72 might like the story, too; serendipity included. More excerpts (and beautiful photo,) after the jump.

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

A mother feeding the food supplement Plumpy'nut to her child in Tibiri, Niger. It is distributed to mothers of severely malnourished children.>

...Traditional malnutrition therapy hospitalizes the tots, nursing them to health with steady infusions of vitamin-laced milk. Then they are sent home with powdered milk formula to complete their recovery. It works well, but milk is costly, must be mixed from water and is prone to spoiling.

And when mothers prepare the formula with the dirty water all too common in impoverished villages, babies get sick.

In comparison, Plumpy'nut - the name melds the words "plump" and "peanut" - costs less than the milk formula, has a two-year shelf life and need not be mixed with anything. Its sealed packaging and thick consistency make it a poor home for disease-causing germs that thrive in milk.

Perhaps most revolutionary, however, is that mothers, not doctors, can give it to their toddlers.

That not only reduces costs, but also frees the doctors to treat the sickest children, who often suffer not just from malnutrition, but also from diseases like malaria or dysentery.

The usual course of treatment is four weeks of Plumpy'nut, costing about $20, along with grain-based food like Unimix, a vitamin-packed flour that can be made into the porridge many Africans eat. But some children return to health in as little as two weeks.

The product is the brainchild of a French scientist, André Briend, who had labored in vain for years to concoct a ready-to-eat nutrition supplement, until serendipity - a bottle of the popular Nutella breakfast spread on his kitchen table - led him to try a paste instead using candy bars and other kinds of food. Later, Nutriset, a French company that specializes in making food supplements for relief work, began packaging the formula under the name Plumpy'nut....

Theodore Bitangi, a 33-year-old nurse who oversees the Maradi feeding centers, says that the program is growing almost as rapidly as its patients.

"When they come in, the state they're in, they look like embryos. They're so small sometimes," he said. "And after taking Plumpy'nut, they look like real babies."

Mothers who have been feeding the paste to their babies would hardly disagree. "As soon as I got him home, he started eating it - every day, aggressively," Idrissa, 24, who has no last name, said of her 2-year-old son. "And after three days, I could see a big difference. The change was abrupt." Her son, who refused to open his eyes before starting the Plumpy'nut regimen one week ago, has added fat under his sagging skin and, when his packet is finished, cries for another.

"I don't know how to express it," Idrissa said. "I'm so happy."

Raham, 45, who has no last name, walks an hour each way to the clinic from her village, Madata, to pick up a weekly bag of Plumpy'nut for her year-old son, Safia Ibrahim. "It's no problem to walk that far," she said, "because it's for the health of my baby. And there's nothing to eat in our village."

One of the virtues of Plumpy'nut is that it can be made almost anywhere with local materials and a slurry of vitamins and minerals prepared by Nutriset....

Poll on Agonist tactics with members by your temporary volunteer ombudswoman

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 00:32:31 -0700

When an editor disagrees with, or would like to add to, something which a member has posted as a Diary entry or as a News Queue item or as a Comment....answer after the jump

Poll #2 on "what is news?"

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 00:09:49 -0700

This excellent original piece was placed in News Queue and elevated to the front page. Question on it after the jump.

Poll on "what is news?"

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 23:52:43 -0700

On the old Agonist Bulletin Board, there was sort of an unwritten rule for a while that everyone went along with, because they wanted their news "straight up" and it went like this: For the News Board, use the headline from the source; any comments you have, put them after the article citation.

Take a look at this item in News Queue which was elevated to the Front Page and then answer after the jump.

Building a bridge back away from the 21st century

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 22:48:32 -0700

'Bombers, racists, the law: they're all out to get Muslims'

The Observer July 24 - ...Almost one in four British Muslims sympathise with the motives of suicide bombers, according to a YouGov poll published in yesterday's Daily Telegraph. More than half say that, whether they sympathise or not, they understand why some people behave in the way they do.

The research also showed that nearly one in three thinks that Western society is decadent and immoral and should be brought to an end. Sixteen per cent of British Muslims told the survey that they do not feel loyal towards Britain and 6 per cent went as far as saying the London bombings were justified....

Strange thoughts on that: I believe that many of the 1/3 of American society that is conservative also believes that Western society is decadent and immoral, and that the world is going to hell on a handcart. (So do some of the more paranoid variety of liberals, who not coincidentally, think "old liberal" ways are best.) Conserve the old ways = fear of the future, fear of CHANGE....continued after jump

In cultural history, we have a phrase for when this happened the last time: fin de siecle madness. You also had it around 1848. Too much industrial revolution et. al., so little time to adjust.

I think all one really needs to win a few of all of these people over to sanity is an international leader who says: "don't worry, it will be O.K., we can fix this, this globalization thing/this terrorism thing/this immigrant thing, it won't be as bad as you think, (and immigrants: some assimilation is not death,) it's going to be great, here's how." The leader can even lie about it, believe it or not ;-), some people don't care about those kind of lies, they just want optimist leadership and reassurance.

Then they move on and do it themselves.

One thing that usually has disastrous consequences for everyone concerned when the world is like this: nattering negativity and demagoguery against "the other." "A chicken in every pot" is ok. So is "a rising tide lifts all boats." People appreciate the appearance of fairness, but they don't require the reality of fairness.

Yes, you can sign me,

Pollyana or Norman Vincent Peale,

on some things they were right.

Bringing the Hearings to Order

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 22:04:00 -0700

Senator Arlen Specter | Washington | July 24

NYT Op-Ed - What to expect when the Senate meets Judge John Roberts.

Note: Specter, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will be in charge of the hearings.

The Question of Rescue

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 21:48:11 -0700

Matt Steinglass | July 24

NYT Magazine- The leading advocate for prostitutes in Cambodia has little patience for aid groups that seek to liberate them from their work.

The Rabbi Who Loved Evangelicals (And Vice-Versa)

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 21:45:55 -0700

Zev Chafets | July 24

NYT Magazine - Yechiel Eckstein is an Orthodox rabbi and a registered Democrat, so why has he built an empire for Jewish causes on the contributions of Red State born-again Christians? The Christian Right's favorite rabbi.

'War Reporting for Cowards': Scoop

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 21:41:08 -0700

Gary Shteyngart | July 24

NYT Sunday Book Review - In his memoir of his experience in Iraq, (War Reporting for Cowards, Atlantic Monthly Press,) Chris Ayres revives the tradition of comic war reporting.

Note that a link to the first chapter of the book is available.

P.S. The author of the review appears to be an interesting humorist himself: Gary Shteyngart is the author of ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook.'' His second novel, ''Absurdistan,'' will be published next year.

Bad News

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 21:33:41 -0700

Richard A. Posner | July 31

NYT Sunday Book Review Essay - Consumers' limited interest in the truth is the key to understanding why both left and right can plausibly denounce the same media for being biased in favor of the other.

Photo caption: HURTING AMERICA? Tucker Carlson, right, James Carville, left, and Paul Begala on CNN's "Crossfire."

No my date's not wrong; Posner must have turned it in early so they put it up on the website even tho it's for next week's paper.

For you bird lovers out there

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 14:33:33 -0700

more on the ivory-billed woodpecker sighting story.

Doh! How to make text links easily on Agonist Scoop

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 10:02:32 -0700

Now that many of us finally got that a href html code thingie down, after a year or so, I found this on Daily Kos' instruction page:

Type a left bracket: [
Paste or type the text you want to use for the link.
Type one space.
Paste the url.
Type a right bracket: ]

Voila, Scoop's auto format will make you one of them fancy text links like those hoity-toity editors and regulars do.

Mini-rant: Why don't those frigging software writers and sellers know how to say this somewhere where someone selecting the software for use will notice it? Grrrrrrrrr. Why is it always a secret that one has to find out somewhere on the internet? Grrrrrr. How can nerds be trained to understand the rest of the human race? Grrrrrrr. Maybe something like this would work: hey techies: you want to be like Microsoft all your life?

Dean Urges Dems to Court Pro-Life Voters

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 20:20:53 -0700

Devlin Barrett | Washington | July 22

AP - Democrats need to reach out to voters who oppose abortion rights and promote candidates who share that view, the head of the party said Friday. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told a group of college Democrats that their party has to change its approach in the debate over abortion.

"I think we need to talk about this issue differently," said Dean. "The Republicans have painted us as a pro-abortion party. I don't know anybody in America who is pro-abortion." Dean's approach echoed similar arguments advanced in recent months by former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

"We do have to have a big tent. I do think we need to welcome pro-life Democrats into this party," said Dean. Still, he added, "I think that we must be absolutely firm in being the party of individual freedom and personal freedom, which means that in the end the government doesn't get to decide, we do."

Comment: I hope hope hope that they are headed in this direction with this meme because I think that would resound right now. It all depends on how its handled. It's going to be scary for a while....

Don't Get Fresh With Me!

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 13:33:12 -0700

Julie Powell | July 22

NYT Op-Ed - Local-food devotees mistake good eating for good ethics:

....The first and most dangerous aspect is the temptation of economic elitism. Of course, food has always been about class....What makes the snobbery of the organic movement more insidious is that it equates privilege not only with good taste, but also with good ethics. Eat wild Brazil nuts and save the rainforest. Buy more expensive organic fruit for your children and fight the national epidemic of childhood obesity. Support a local farmer and give economic power to responsible stewards of sustainable agriculture. There's nothing wrong with any of these choices, but they do require time and money. When you wed money to decency, you come perilously close to equating penury with immorality....

Powell is the author of the forthcoming "Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen."