Slate: Diagramming Sarah
Can Palin's sentences stand up to a grammarian?
By Kitty Burns FloreyThere are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers but also amateur language buffs like me—who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator. The more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and twaddle.
I found myself considering this paradox once again when confronted with the sentences of Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. No one but a Republican denial specialist could argue with the fact that Sarah Palin's recent TV appearances have scaled the heights of inanity. The sentences she uttered in interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and Katie Couric seem to twitter all over the place like mourning doves frightened at the feeder. Which left me wondering: What can we learn from diagramming them?
One thing we can't learn, of course, is whether her words are true or make sense. Part of the appeal of diagramming is the fact that just about any sentence can be diagrammed, even when it is gibberish. Cats chase mice and Mice chase cats present the same kind of entity to the diagrammer. So does Muffins bludgeon bookcases. If it's a string of words containing a certain number of parts of speech arranged in reasonably coherent order, it can be hacked and beaten into a diagram.
Once we start diagramming political sentences, the diagram's indifference to meaning can be especially striking. Stirring words like "I have a dream," the magisterial Declaration of Independence (a staple of diagramming teachers), bald-faced lies ("I am not a crook"), and crafty shadings of the truth ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman") can be diagrammed with equal ease. But some politicians—our current president included—offer meanderings in the higher realms of drivel that leave the diagrammer groping for the Tylenol ("Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream") or the gin bottle ("I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office").
So let's take a crack at a few of Palin's doozies. From the Katie Couric interview:
It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?
A diagrammer doesn't care about who "they" are in that last stuttered question or fuss over the problem of the head-rearing Putin coming into our "air space." A diagrammer simply diagrams. I didn't have a clue about what to do with the question that ends it. Otherwise, in its mice chase cats way, the sentence is perfectly diagrammable.
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Other Palinisms are not so tractable. From the Charlie Gibson interview:
I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.
I didn't stop to marvel at the mad thrusting of that pet political watchword "families" into the text. I just rolled up my sleeves and attempted to bring order out of the chaos:
I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there's anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I'd be delighted to hear from you. To me, it's not English—it's a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases ("with that vote of the American people") be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.
Granted, diagramming usually deals with written English. We don't expect speech to reach the heights of eloquence or even lucidity that the written word is capable of. In our world, politicians don't do much writing: Their preferred communication is the canned speech. But they're also forced, from time to time, to answer questions, and their answers often resemble the rambling nonsense, obfuscation, and grammatical insanity that many of us would produce when put on the spot.
Yet surely, more than most of us, politicians need to be able to think on their feet, to have a brain that works quickly and rationally under pressure. Do we really want to be led by someone who, when asked a straightforward question, flails around like an undergraduate who stayed up all night boozing instead of studying for the exam?
In a few short weeks, Sarah Palin has produced enough poppycock to keep parsers and diagrammers busy for a long time. In the end, though, out of her mass of verbiage in the Sean Hannity interview, Palin did manage to emit a perfectly lucid diagram-ready statement that sums up, albeit modestly, not the state of the economy that she was (more or less) talking about but the quality of her thinking:
Kitty Burns Florey is the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, a history of diagramming sentences. Her new book, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, will be published in January.
The Guardian: You must be kidding
* Jim Holt
* The Guardian
* Saturday October 25 2008
'Do you believe in clubs for small children?' WC Fields was asked. 'Only when kindness fails,' he replied. Photograph: Ralph Crane/Time Life Pictures/Getty
A passage in a Bach fugue may fleetingly give you goosebumps. A line from Yeats might make you tingle a bit, or cause the little hairs on the back of your neck to stand up in appreciation. But there is one kind of aesthetic experience whose outward expression is grossly palpable, involving as it does the contraction of 15 facial muscles and a series of respiratory spasms. Healthful side effects of the experience are believed to include oxygenation of the blood, a reduction in stress hormones and a bolstering of the immune system. But if the experience is too intense, cataplexy can set in, leading to muscular collapse and possible injury. In rare cases the consequences are graver still. Anthony Trollope suffered a stroke undergoing this experience, while reading a now forgotten Victorian novel, Vice Versa. And the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, reacting to the portrait of a hag he had just made, actually died of it.
What I have been describing is, of course, laughter. It is our characteristic response to the humorous, the comical, the funny. What is it about a humorous situation that evokes this response? Why should a certain kind of cerebral activity issue in such a peculiar behavioural reflex?
While there can be laughter without humour - tickling, embarrassment, nitrous oxide and vengeful exultation have been known to bring it forth - there cannot be humour without laughter. That, at any rate, is what contemporary philosophers think. "The propensity of the state of amusement to issue in laughter is arguably what is essential to its identity," we read under "Humour" in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Laughter is physical. You have to have a body to do it. Mere possession of a body, however, does not guarantee that one will laugh with any frequency. Isaac Newton is reported to have laughed precisely once in his life - when someone asked him what use he saw in Euclid's Elements. Joseph Stalin, too, seems to have been somewhat agelastic (from the Greek a-, "not", gelastes, "laugher"). "Seldom did anyone see Stalin laugh," we read in Marshal Georgy Zhukov's reminiscences. "When he did, it was more like a chuckle, as if to himself." Other reputed agelasts include Jonathan Swift, William Gladstone and Margaret Thatcher.
Like love, its only rival as an inner source of pleasure for mankind, laughter bridges the realms of the mental and the physical: so observed the incomparable Max Beerbohm in his 1920 essay "Laughter". But, Beerbohm noted, whereas love originates in the physical and culminates in the mental, the vector of laughter points in the opposite direction. One might also draw a parallel with sex. The objective in sexual congress, according to the Marquis de Sade, is to elicit involuntary noisemaking from your partner - which is precisely the object of humour, even if the nature of the noisemaking is a bit different.
Nothing in the philosophical tradition has produced a sustained account of humour and laughter that bears comparison with Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud's interest in the problem of humour was not primarily philosophical. Rather, he was specifically attracted to jokes because of their many likenesses to dreams. In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner "censor". Yet there is a critical difference, Freud insisted. Jokes are meant to be understood; indeed, this is crucial to their success. The meaning of a dream, by contrast, eludes even the dreamer.
Freud was an avid collector of jokes, particularly Jewish jokes, and his book contains 138 specimens, by my count, some of which are excellent. ("A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: 'Was your mother at one time in service at the palace?' - 'No, your Highness,' was the reply, 'but my father was.'")
The very impulse to amass jokes can be given a psychosexual explanation. In a 1917 paper on "anal eroticism", Freud offered the following analysis: the infant is confused by his bodily products; his excrement seems to be of some value, since it issues from his body and attracts the interest of his parents (it's the infant's "first gift", Freud says); but this excrement is taken away and disposed of, so it also seems valueless. Gradually the child is weaned away from his normal curiosity in the waste products of his body by a series of drier and drier substitutes - mud pies, sand piles, and so on. Yet, among neurotics, the urge to hoard that which is disposable and of little intrinsic value - old newspapers, coasters, empty beer cans, money - remains. (The identification of gold with faeces, according to Freud, is behind such locutions as "filthy rich" and "a shitload of money".) And nothing is more disposable than a joke.
How many kinds of joke are there? There are classic jokes. ("Who was that lady I saw you with last night?" "That was no lady, that was my wife.") There are political jokes, such as Ronald Reagan's definition of liberalism: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidise it." The Iraq war has spawned an entire new category of neocon jokes: "How many neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb? None - President Bush has announced that in three months the light bulb will be able to change itself."
There are nice jokes that can be told in any drawing room. ("What does a snail say when riding on the back of a turtle?" "Whee!") And there are naughty jokes, such as the one about the woman who flies into Boston eager to enjoy a plate of the fish for which that city is famous. "Where can I get scrod?" she asks the driver as she gets into the cab. "Gee," he replies, "I've never heard it put in the pluperfect subjective before." Or the one about the successful diet Bill Clinton went on: "He's lost so much weight, now he can see his intern." And there are jokes that are inadvertent as well as jokes that are deliberate - and some that are, paradoxically, both at the same time, such as the London newspaper headline during the second world war: "British Push Bottles Up Germans".
Could any theory make sense of even this small sampling? There are three competing traditions, all a bit mouldy, that purport to explain how humour works. The "superiority theory" - propounded in various forms by Plato, Hobbes and Bergson - locates the essence of humour in the "sudden glory" (Hobbes) we feel when, say, we see Bill Gates get hit in the face with a custard pie. According to this theory, all humour is at root mockery and derision, all laughter a slightly spiritualised snarl.
The "incongruity theory", held by Pascal, Kant and Schopenhauer, says that humour arises when the decorous and logical abruptly dissolves into the low and absurd. "Do you believe in clubs for small children?" WC Fields is asked. "Only when kindness fails," he replies.
Why either of these perceptions - superiority or incongruity - should call forth a bout of cackling and chest heaving remains far from obvious. It is an advantage of the third theory, the "relief theory", that it at least tries to explain the causal link between humour and laughter. In Freud's version, the laughable - ideally a naughty joke - liberates the laughter from inhibitions about forbidden thoughts and feelings. The result is a discharge of nervous energy - a noisy outburst that, not incidentally, serves to distract the inner censor from what is going on.
For a scientist, choosing among competing theories generally means looking at how well they fit the data. And when the theories are about humour, jokes supply plenty of data. The superiority theory is well suited to jokes involving misfortune and deformity ("How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read a waffle iron"), jokes about drunkards and henpecked husbands and lawyers, jokes about ethnic and racial groups. It may well explain the pleasure some take in a joke such as this: "Angry guy walks into a bar, orders a drink, says to the bartender, 'All agents are assholes.' Guy sitting at the end of the bar says, 'Just a minute, I resent that.' 'Why? You an agent?' 'No. I'm an asshole.'"
With a bit of stretching, the superiority theory can be made to cover almost all kinds of jokes, even those where contempt for the object of amusement gives way to sympathy. Superiority might be interpreted as a sort of godlike perspective on human affairs, or on the universe itself. (Beerbohm, debarking at the Port of New York, was asked by a reporter what he thought of the Statue of Liberty. "It is very vulgar," Beerbohm said. "It must come down.")
But what of the pun, widely and perhaps justly regarded as the lowest form of humour? (Vladimir Nabokov, when told by a professor of English that a nun who was auditing one of the professor's classes had complained that two students in the back of the classroom were "spooning" during a lecture, remarked: "You should have said 'Sister, you're lucky they weren't forking.'")
Of the three theories of humour, it is the incongruity theory that is taken most seriously by philosophers today. Even if not all incongruities are funny, nearly everything that is funny does seem to contain an incongruity of one sort or another. For Kant, the incongruity in a joke was between the "something" of the setup and the anticlimactic "nothing" of the punch line; the ludicrous effect arises "from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing". Schopenhauer thought that at the core of every joke was a sophistical syllogism. But some jokes simply defy syllogistic analysis. (Lily Tomlin: "When I was young I always wanted to be somebody. Now I wish I had been more specific.")
Blasphemous jokes and certain kinds of lewd jokes are deplored on moral grounds by many people who have perfectly good senses of humour. Among the most religiously fraught jokes are those dealing with the charge of deicide historically brought against the Jews because of the crucifixion. "Yeah, we killed Christ, the Jews killed him," said Lenny Bruce. "And if he comes back, we'll kill him again." Or, in a later variant, attributed to the Jewish intellectual Leon Wieseltier: "What's the big deal? We only killed him for a few days." Atheist jokes, oddly, tend to be more offensive to the devout than to their nominal target - for example: "Why should we feel sorry for the atheist? Because he has no one to talk to while getting a blow job."
Can jokes be dangerous? Hitler thought so; "joke courts" were set up to punish those who made fun of his regime, and one Berlin cabaret comic was executed for naming his horse Adolf. The Puritans were notorious haters of jokes, a prejudice that can be traced all the way back to Saint Paul, who warned the Ephesians against fornication and jesting.
For purely intellectual purposes, the most devastating joke is what might be called the "spontaneous counterexample". It begins with a ponderous generality, which, willy-nilly, furnishes the setup. Then comes the punch line, which slays that generality the way David slew Goliath. The greatest is due to Sidney Morgenbesser. A few decades ago, the Oxford philosopher JL Austin was giving an address to a large audience of his fellow philosophers in New York. In the course of this address, which was about the philosophy of language, Austin raised the perennially interesting issue of the double negative.
"In some languages," he observed in his clipped Oxbridge diction, "a double negative yields an affirmative. In other languages, a double negative yields a more emphatic negative. Yet, curiously enough, I know of no language, either natural or artificial, in which a double affirmative yields a negative." Suddenly, from the back of the hall, in Morgenbesser's round Brooklyn accent, came the comment: "Yeah, yeah."
But if I had to award the laurel, it would go to Oscar Wilde, for a retort he made to a now forgotten minor poet, Sir Lewis Morris. The time was the 1890s, just after the death of Tennyson, and Morris was complaining to Wilde that his claims to succeed Tennyson as poet laureate were being neglected: "It's a complete conspiracy of silence against me," Morris said, "a conspiracy of silence! What ought I to do, Oscar?"
Wilde: "Join it."
• Jim Holt's Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes is published by Profile (£8.99)
Laura Erickson reminds us ...
We lost this great man six years ago today, not long after he gave this prescient speech saying why he was voting against going to war with Iraq.
I loved Paul Wellstone. When he was killed, I wrote this commentary.
Science of Small Talk: In Search of the "Real America"
By Sam Sommers on October 21, 2008 in Science Of Small Talk
"Specifically, I've been thinking about how just as some fish apparently doesn't taste like fish, some Americans apparently aren't really American. Or, at least, that's been part of the implied and explicit campaign rhetoric of the past several days:
• Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior McCain adviser, recently referred to Southern Virginia as the "real Virginia," as opposed to the Northern regions of the state, which are closer to Washington, DC and increasingly populated by Democratic voters.
• Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, speaking in a TV interview in support of McCain's candidacy, stated that "I'm very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views." She went on to suggest that an exposé was needed to determine how many of her fellow Representatives share such anti-American sentiment.
• Another Republican Representative, Robin Hayes of North Carolina, just reversed a previous denial and admitted that last weekend he told a crowd in his home state, "liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God."
• McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, also apologized this week for her previous comments regarding her preference for campaigning in small towns and other locales that are "pro-American" and have "real Americans" as residents.
What do these politicians and operatives mean when they talk about "real Americans"? It's hard to say for sure. At the very least, in the minds of these individuals, the phrase seems to be more applicable to Republican voters than to Democratic voters. This isn't particularly surprising. To be fair, I'd imagine that a fair number of Democrats might feel that the phrase is more applicable to their fellow party members than to Republicans, even if their righteous indignation over the above comments precludes them from admitting this fact for the time being.
But what makes these Republicans' comments so concerning is that a less generous interpretation is that there's more than simple partisanship going on here. Rep. Hayes didn't just suggest that liberals are not real Americans, he also stated that those of liberal ideology hate their country and he implied that they are lazy, inept, and godless to boot. It's bad enough for Democratic voters in Virginia to find out that they aren't "real" citizens of their own Commonwealth, but it's another thing altogether to learn that they're apparently harboring treasonous sentiment as well.
Read the rest of the article here: In Search of the "Real America" | Psychology Today Blogs
Addiction in Society: Paying Debts Prevents Addiction - Oops, we're in trouble
By Stanton Peele on October 22, 2008 in Addiction in Society
I explain in Addiction-Proof Your Child that teaching children basic values like responsibility to others -- such as paying debts - lessens their risk of addiction. Step 9 in AA's 12 steps asks recovering alcoholics to make amends to those they've harmed, including paying debts.
When people think: "I need to pay back the money I use for drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping. . . ," they are unlikely to reach the harrowing heights of all-out, abandoned addiction. They just can't keep consuming without regard for consequences - they are anchored by the reality of their finances and their obligations to others. My Life Process Program thus emphasizes people's duties to others as a way of helping people reorient their values and behavior.
In today's New York Times, the great Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood says: "We cannot recover from the crisis of 2008 simply by watching the Dow creep upward. To heal our wounds, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose." We must repay what we spend.
Atwood reviews what might be called moral economy. If someone you know lends you money, you have to pay them back. If you agree to a loan with interest, that's a contract you made. If someone gives you a loan with no interest and they're not a friend, then you must realize they want something from you. These things are true of human relationships now, they were true in the bible, they have been true throughout history.
But we are losing these truths, as most evidenced by the idea that people who made foolish loans to get things they wanted should have the rest of us pay up for them. I'm not going to argue whether some people have been cheated and deserve to be relieved of their obligation to repay usurious loans.
Read the rest of the article: Paying Debts Prevents Addiction - Oops, we're in trouble | Psychology Today Blogs
The Onion: Powerful Special Interest Group Momentarily Blanks On Agenda
October 21, 2008 | Issue 44•43
FAIRFAX, VA—After nearly 150 years spent unapologetically advocating for a single, unifying issue, the National Rifle Association—one of the nation's most influential special interest groups—momentarily blanked on its entire political agenda Monday. "I am here to tell you today that we really, really care about this subject, and that we'd probably be willing to die for it. Is it abortion? No, that's not it," spokesman Michael Loomis said during a rally held at the NRA headquarters firing range. "I am totally blanking here. It's, 'Something, something, cold dead hand,' right? Gah! It's on the tip of my tongue!" The NRA's memory lapse comes on the heels of last week's PETA march on Washington, during which the organization was briefly unable to recall its stance on the ruthless murder of helpless animals for their fur.
Fundraising snickers: from NPR - beware attempts at edgy humor
Blah blah blah: "Please send money, etc. etc. etc." iStockphoto.com
It's always extraordinarily hazardous to make a specific attempt to be edgily humorous, especially when you aren't well-positioned to pull it off credibly.
Just ask the fundraisers at Framingham State College, who recently sent out an appeal for donations that included 137 uses of the word "blah." You may have heard the story yesterday on All Things Considered.
How did it happen? Like this: "Today, the fact of the matter is that deserving students need help to finance their education. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah..." And it went on from there, covering the page with "blah blah blah" until the "and so, please send your money here" section at the bottom.
Blah blah blah, after the jump...
Those involved with the letter have been forced to apologize after alums complained, and perhaps rightly so. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that although it may have misfired, I do understand what they were going for. Recent college graduates are so stingy and so broke that I can imagine someone thinking, "We'll try to make them laugh, and what are they most likely to laugh at? The way fundraising letters always say the same thing.
In all honesty, perhaps it looks boneheaded now, but don't many of us, truthfully, treat fundraising mail as if it does say "blah blah blah" through most of the middle section?
It may be a simple matter of pop-culture-appropriate humor applied to a non-pop-culture situation. To a certain degree, you can stretch sarcastic, eye-rolling jokesterism -- the kind that has robbed the word "snarky" of all meaning -- to serious contexts: witness John McCain's recent appearance with David Letterman, for instance.
But there are places where people don't expect to see you trying to be funny, and perhaps an appeal from their alma mater is one of them. Perhaps we all need to believe that seriousness reigns somewhere, and if not in the alumni office, then where?
9:44 AM ET | 10-22-2008 | permalink
Otago Daily Times: Permafrost melt scarier than financial meltdown
By Gwynne Dyer on Wed, 1 Oct 2008
Opinion | Climate change
Scientists have their own way of putting things.
This is how Dr Oerjan Gustafsson, of Stockholm University, announced the approach of a climate apocalypse in an email sent last week from the Russian research ship Jakob Smirnitskyi in the Arctic Ocean.
"We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found.
"At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface."
Dr Gustafsson's preliminary report, published in The Independent of September 23, is a development far more frightening than the current financial crisis, although it will get only one-thousandth of the coverage.
The worst that the financial crisis can bring is some years of recession.
The worst that massive methane releases in the Arctic can bring us is runaway, irreversible global warming.
Molecule for molecule, methane gas is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a warming agent.
However, since methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long - about 12 years, on average, compared to 100 years for CO2 - and human activities do not produce all that much of it, concerns about climate change have mostly been focused on carbon dioxide.
The one big worry was that warmer temperatures might cause massive releases of methane from natural sources.
There are thousands of megatonnes of methane stored underground in the Arctic region, trapped there by the permafrost (permanently frozen ground) that covers much of northern Russia, Alaska and Canada and extends far out under the seabed of the Arctic Ocean.
If the permafrost melts and methane escapes into the atmosphere on a large scale, it would cause a rapid rise in temperature - which would melt more permafrost, releasing more methane, which would cause more warming, and so on.
Climate scientists call this a feedback mechanism.
So long as it is our emissions that are causing the warming, we can stop it if we reduce the emissions fast enough.
Once feedbacks like methane release start to drive the warming, it's out of our hands: we might even cut our emissions to zero, only to find that the temperature is still rising.
Fear of this runaway feedback is why most climate scientists (and the European Union) have set a rise of 2degC in the average global temperature as the limit we must never exceed.
Somewhere between 2degC and 3degC, they fear, massive feedbacks like methane release would take the situation out of our hands.
Unfortunately, the heating is much more intense in the Arctic region.
The average global temperate has only risen 0.6degC so far, but the average temperature in the Arctic is up by 4degC.
So the permafrost is starting to melt, and the trapped methane is escaping.
That is what the research ship Jakob Smirnitskyi has just found: areas of the Arctic Ocean off the Russian coast where "chimneys" of methane gas are bubbling to the surface.
What this may mean is that we have no time left if we hope to avoid runaway global warming - and yet it will obviously take many years to get our own greenhouse gas emissions down.
So what can we do? There is a way to cheat, for a while.
Several techniques have been proposed for holding the global temperature down temporarily in order to avoid running into the feedbacks.
They do not release us from the duty of getting our emissions down, but they could win us some time to work on that task without running into disaster.
The leading candidate, suggested by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2006, is to inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere in order to reflect some incoming sunlight.
This mimics the action of large volcanic eruptions, which also lower the global temperature temporarily by putting huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.
Another, less intrusive approach, proposed by John Latham of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado and Prof Stephen Salter, of Edinburgh University, is to launch fleets of unmanned, wind-powered vessels, controlled by satellite, that would spray seawater up into low-lying marine clouds in order to increase the amount of sunlight they reflect.
These techniques are known as "geo-engineering", and discussing them has been taboo in most scientific circles because of the "moral hazard": the fear that if the public knows you can hold the global temperature down by direct intervention, people will not do the harder job of cutting their emissions.
But if large-scale methane releases are getting under way, the time for such subtle calculations is past.
Starting now, we need a crash programme to investigate the feasibility of these and other techniques for geo-engineering the climate.
Once the thawing starts, it is hard to stop, and we may need them very soon.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
His new book, Climate Wars, has just been published in Australia by Scribe.
BBC News: Pet appeal to help abuse victims
Abusers are said to often intimidate their victims by threatening pets with violence or injuring or killing them.
But the RSPCA's PetRetreat scheme finds pets safe homes away from this abuse and in the process helps their owners leave abusive relationships earlier.
As part of its domestic abuse inquiry, the assembly government has asked pet foster families to come forward.
The PetRetreat programme, formerly known as Petsafe, started in June 2002 as a pilot project working alongside domestic abuse refuges in the west of England and launched in Wales in 2007.
It helps break the cycle of violence and intimidation associated with abuse by taking pets away out of the domestic abuse situation.
| | By helping these pets, volunteers enable victims of domestic abuse to get help Social Justice Minister Brian Gibbons |
Officials say abusers frequently use pets to keep their victims from leaving them, threatening or using violence against their animals.
This frightens many abuse victims into staying put and in turn prolongs the violence against them.
Very few refuges also provide shelter for pets due to allergy concerns and health and safety regulations.
The call for pet-friendly families to come forward was made by Social Justice Minister Brian Gibbons ahead of the assembly's communities and culture committee hearing evidence on its inquiry into domestic abuse on Wednesday.
Abuse target
"Pets are often cherished by victims of domestic abuse, but this often makes the pet a target of abuse," he said.
"If the victim seeks help the abuser may threaten or hurt the pet. This is another barrier preventing them from escaping.
"A vital part of this scheme is the volunteer foster families. People are needed to open their homes to these pets while families are in transition.
"By helping these pets, volunteers enable victims of domestic abuse to get help."
Dr Gibbons urged anyone who had space for another pet in their home to contact the RSPCA's domestic abuse outreach service and said that in doing so they would help abuse victims start a new life.
The RSPCA's Claire Lawson, added: "With the assembly's inquiry into domestic abuse due to be completed, we would like to use this as an opportunity to highlight the variety of work undertaken in Wales to support the victims of domestic abuse."
Seattle Times: Should it be illegal to keep dogs chained?
It's dogs like Gus -- and their potential victims -- the Metropolitan King County Council had in mind when it took the first step Monday toward a possible prohibition on chaining dogs or holding them in small enclosures for long periods.
Gus, a 4-year-old German shepherd mix who was chained to his doghouse every day, was euthanized in 2005 after two attacks on people.
Prime sponsor Julia Patterson, D-SeaTac, said her effort to ban chaining was prompted in large part by two pit bulls' vicious attack on 71-year-old Huong Le outside her SeaTac home last month.
Although those dogs hadn't been chained, Patterson said that dogs chained for hours each day are more likely to attack people or dogs. Banning certain types of confinement, she said, "is not only a good idea for the animals' well-being, it's also a good idea for public health, welfare and safety."
The council took a preliminary vote, 8-0, Monday to direct County Executive Ron Sims to report by Feb. 28 on the feasibility and advisability of banning "continuous confinement" of dogs on chains or tethers or in small spaces. The motion may go before the council for a final vote next Monday.
The report would consider a ban in unincorporated King County and possibly also in cities that contract with the county for animal-control services.
Council Chairwoman Patterson said she also is considering legislation that would define "dangerous dogs," perhaps restricting certain breeds.
Leslie Kentor, one of several people who spoke in favor of a ban on chaining dogs, told council members the story of Gus. She adopted Gus from his Eastside owners after he broke loose from the doghouse he was chained to and bit a boy who had taunted him.
"They were not bad people," Kentor said of the owners. "They didn't know any better."
For weeks she took Gus to a trainer. On his last visit, the dog attacked the trainer and bit her in the abdomen.
Kentor reluctantly had the dog euthanized. "Gus very well could have killed a child," she told the council. "That's why I'm urging you to try to lead the way in our state so we won't have animals going through what Gus went through."
The Humane Society of the United States contends that tethering is inhumane and can lead dogs to become aggressive.
Julie Russell, of Families Against Breed Bans, said an analysis of 33 fatal dog attacks on people in the United States in 2007 showed that 10 were committed by dogs that had been tethered and 26 by dogs that hadn't been spayed or neutered.
Russell said her organization will propose to the County Council that the group send a volunteer to homes where a dog is chained up, to educate the owners on the dangers of the practice.
Councilmember Larry Gossett, D-Seattle, noting that some of his neighbors chain their dog during the day but also walk the dog twice a day, asked if that confinement would become illegal.
Legislative analyst Marilyn Cope said that depends on what, if any, legislation might be adopted after study by Sims' staff. She noted that the council on Monday referred to "continuous" chaining, and that some cities have specified the number of hours a dog can be chained.
Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com
PetPlace.com: Bizarre Dog Names: Low Jack, Touch and Pee, Wigglebutt and more
Dr, Jon writes in the Dog Crazy Newsletter:
Move over Max. Americans are putting more and more thought into their pet names and coming up with unusual names. Interesting names. Not just the ordinary Max, Buffy, Cody, etc. (although there is nothing wrong with these names either).
According to Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI), the nation's oldest and largest provider of pet health insurance, not all Americans have bought in to the concept of monosyllabic human names for their pets.
For some, the pet name trend is more toward the unusual - or just plain bizarre. After years of tracking the most popular names for pets, Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI), set out to find the most unusual dog names from among its more than 465,000 pets insured nationwide.
Here are the 10 most unusual dog names:
1. Rush Limbark
2. Sirius Lee Handsome
3. Rafikikadiki
4. Low Jack
5. Meatwad
6. Peanut Wigglebutt
7. Scuddles Unterfuss
8. Sophie Touch & Pee
9. Admiral Toot
10. Spatula
Makes you wonder how these dogs got their names, right? Here are a couple stories that VPI shared with us:
Lisa Lazzaro of Tampa, Fla., went with Low Jack for her corgi mix due to the dog's short legs and close proximity to the ground. Christine Edwards of Columbus, Ohio, named her dachshund Peanut Wigglebutt when she saw how the little puppy shook her tail so hard she would fall over. Bobbi Dobbler of Smock, Pa., didn't have to think too hard to come up with her golden retriever's name: Sophie Touch & Pee.
"Every time you would touch her, she'd get so excited you had to watch your shoes," said Dobbler. "Her veterinarian has a bad habit of picking the pets up over his head when they come in for a checkup. I warned him about her, but he didn't listen and ended up paying the price. Everyone loves Sophie Touch & Pee, but most people keep their distance."
Does your dog have an unusual name? I would like to put their name and their picture up on the site. Please send me a picture of you precious dog, their name and how you came up with that name. Please take a moment today to send me an e-mail to editors@petplace.com. I will group them together for a slideshow for all to enjoy.
The Atlantic: First Person Plural
An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind” another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?
by Paul Bloom
Imagine a long, terrible dental procedure. You are rigid in the chair, hands clenched, soaked with sweat—and then the dentist leans over and says, “We’re done now. You can go home. But if you want, I’d be happy to top you off with a few minutes of mild pain.”
There is a good argument for saying “Yes. Please do.”
The psychologist and recent Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman conducted a series of studies on the memory of painful events, such as colonoscopies. He discovered that when we think back on these events, we are influenced by the intensity of the endings, and so we have a more positive memory of an experience that ends with mild pain than of one that ends with extreme pain, even if the mild pain is added to the same amount of extreme pain. At the moment the dentist makes his offer, you would, of course, want to say no—but later on, you would be better off if you had said yes, because your overall memory of the event wouldn’t be as unpleasant.
We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist. And it provides a useful framework for thinking about the increasingly popular position that people would be better off if governments and businesses helped them inhibit certain gut feelings and emotional reactions.
Read the full article here:
First Person Plural - The Atlantic (November 2008)
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Worm Grunting Mystery Solved: Discovery News
Jessica Marshall, Discovery News
Oct. 20, 2008 -- It sounds a little like snake charming. You drive a wooden stake into the ground and draw a flat metal rod across the top, creating an bullfrog-like grunting sound. Within minutes, hundreds of earthworms come to the surface, where they meet their doom in the buckets of fishing bait collectors.
Now, researcher Ken Catania of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. has an explanation for the worms' hightailing it to the surface: Worm grunting mimics the vibrations made by burrowing moles, a voracious worm predator.
Read the complete article here:
NPR: Discovering Heathcliff's E-Mail Address And More From Famous Lovers
Discovering Heathcliff's E-Mail Address And More From Famous Lovers
Computer love: What would Princess Leia write to Han Solo? iStockphoto.com
by Glenn McDonald
Word is getting around about Google's new Mail Goggles add-on, which is designed to prevent the drunken late night phenomenon known as the Instantly Regretted E-Mail. When activated, the Mail Goggles program requires users to answer a few math questions -- a kind of virtual sobriety test -- before any outgoing emails can be sent.
It's genius, frankly, and it inspired me to revisit something I wrote a while ago about what might happen if some of cinema's famous couples had had access to e-mail. Were all of these missives written sober? Would they survive the math-question test?
NPR: Discovering Heathcliff's E-Mail Address And More From Famous Lovers
Picket Fence Poodle Rescue: Puppies and Dogs Available
Adult Poodles Available
Updated: 10/18/2008
What happens when you are incarcerated and no one wants your Poodles?
They are also incarcerated until you are released.....
And what happens when you are released and you don't want your Poodles?
They remain in prison......
until they are rescued and sent to Picket Fence Poodle Rescue....
More information soon!
Wired.com: A Buyer's Guide to Geeky Pets
I’m not a dog person. In fact, our family always seems to head for pets that have a certain allure to them. Just like any inquiring minds we are interested in the more unusual pets, and I’m talking beyond sea -monkeys. And electronic pets.A Buyer's Guide to Geeky Pets, Oct 2008
Read the whole article.
Ambigamy: Nounism: Taking THINGS too seriously
By Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. on October 15, 2008 in Ambigamy
Last week New Yorker columnist George Packer noted that while Sarah Palin's syntax is mangled, more significantly it lacks verbs. It's mostly nouns. Maverick, hockey mom, Joe sixpack, elitist, terrorist, small-town people--lots of heavily loaded nouns.
Loaded nouns and the adjectives that modify them are part of everyone's vocabulary, but in recent decades--under the influence of Karl Rove and a general Republican emphasis on sounding practical--conservatives have leaned heavily upon them. This year's election is turning out to be something of a referendum on radical nounism, which looks to be going down if not out. In the current economic crisis people want to know what the candidates will do. For the first time in decades, noun-intensive rhetoric isn't winning votes.
We intuit that nouns are what practical people focus on. They're what make the world feel solid. Nothing is more solid than a thing. Feel that table in front of you. It's a hard thing, a hard truth.
Using nouns, especially loaded ones, to describe people is the simplest way to telegraph your view of which ones to trust and which not to trust A person is a thing, either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what nouns we assign. "Mavericks" are good things so you can trust anyone who is a maverick. That's being plainspoken, calling a spade a spade. "Elitists" and "talkers" are bad things, so you can't trust them. That's a solid hard truth too.
Noun-heavy communication tends to rely on passive verbs, "is, am, to be" chief among them. I'm reminded of the two versions of "is" in Spanish: "ser" and "estar." Both mean "is, are, am, to be" but the difference is for how long. I am Jeremy in the permanent sense, so to say that in Spanish I would use the verb "ser." I am at home in the less permanent sense. To say that I would use the verb "estar." How permanent is the "is" Palin uses to anoint the ones she likes and tar the ones she doesn't? She's talking permanent. A maverick is a maverick for life.
Think of how "is" plays out in love. Consider saying, "I love you," translated for the sake of this exercise as "This is love." Well, which "is" do you mean? The long-term version makes love as permanent a characteristic of your bond as Jeremy is a characteristic of me. The other "is" is more like my being at home. It's a declaration of the current state--in this moment I am feeling love for you. Much to the confusion of lovers, both meanings can be implied by "I love you." Love as a noun, a permanent good thing; love as a temporary state.
Lucky people (like me) tend to accumulate assumptions that we're a Special Protected Subspecies (n. somehow permanently immune to bad luck). During the recent economic shocks a lot of formerly fortunate Americans are experiencing a cosmic wedgie on those assumptions.
Conservatism, like progressivism, is at root an inescapably important half-truth. Conservatism, true to its nouny tendencies, is at core the argument for permanence--that "what is should be." Progressivism is the argument that "what isn't should be." Of course each is true, but not to the exclusion of the other. If conservatism were absolutely true nothing would ever change. If progressivism were absolutely true everything would change always. Enthusiasts for either half-truth sometimes argue in absolute terms, but in practice neither lives by those terms. Conservatives face the daunting task of selecting which of the many standards held at some place and time to argue must be conserved. Usually, it's whatever strategy is conducive to their preferred perma-good. Progressives likewise have to decide which change to advocate. They tend to emphasize the changes that would bring them closer to their preferred perma-good too.
Conservatism and nounism resonate with our quest for the permanently good. Post-9/11 studies by Dr. Sheldon Solomon and Dr. Tom Pyszczynski found that people became more supportive of Bush's conservative agenda when reminded that they will eventually die. They also found that people's confidence levels (their estimate of their likelihood of being right about some factual guess) go up in front of funeral homes. It's like that line from Dylan Thomas--"Do not go gently into that dark night. Rage rage against the dying of the light." How? By declaring things solid; by leaning into nounism.
I think what's happened in the past few decades is that the natural human tendency to try to lock in the currently good as "perma-good" has found a new formula in a bastardization of conservatism. Conservatism has come to mean not that this or that tradition is good but rather that "I'm permanently good; I'm never wrong; I am a good thing." Nounism has become the conservative's easy formula for deflecting all criticism and amping up all self-affirmation. It's selective name-calling without regard to internal consistency. Call anyone opposes you a pejorative noun; call yourself and anyone who supports you a complimentary noun. Do it with enough certainty and conviction and it will stick. Permanently--after all, it's a noun.
Read more ...
NYT: Op-Ed Columnist - Amusing, but Not Funny
Sara Rimer of The Times wrote an article last week that gave us a startling glimpse of just how mindless and self-destructive the U.S. is becoming.
Consider the lead paragraph:
“The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.”
The idea that the U.S. won’t even properly develop the skills of young people who could perform at the highest intellectual levels is breathtaking — breathtakingly stupid, that is.
The authors of the study, published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, concluded that American culture does not value talent in math very highly. I suppose we’re busy with other things, like text-messaging while jay-walking. The math thing is seen as something for Asians and nerds.
Meanwhile, the country is going down the tubes. Felix Rohatyn, who helped lead New York City out of the dark days of the 1970s fiscal crisis, had an article in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books (with co-author Everett Ehrlich) lamenting the sad state of the U.S. infrastructure. Most Americans are oblivious on this issue. We’re like a family that won’t even think about fixing a sagging, leaky roof until it collapses on our heads.
New Orleans was nearly wiped from the map in the Hurricane Katrina nightmare, and 13 people were killed when a bridge in Minneapolis broke apart during rush hour, hurling helpless motorists 60 feet into the Mississippi River. Neither of those disasters was enough of a warning for us to think seriously about infrastructure maintenance, repair and construction.
Could these types of disasters happen again? They’re going to happen again. Mr. Rohatyn reminds us that nearly 30 percent of the nation’s bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”
We haven’t even got sense enough to keep an eye on the water we drink. Citing a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, Mr. Rohatyn and Mr. Ehrlich write: “Current funding for safe drinking water, amounts to ‘less than 10 percent of the total national requirement.’ ”
A country that refuses to properly educate its young people or to maintain its physical plant is one that has clearly lost its way. Add in the myriad problems associated with unnecessary warfare and a clueless central government that wastes taxpayer dollars by the trillions, and you’ve got a society in danger of becoming completely unhinged.
This is about more than the election of a president in a few weeks. The American people have to decide what kind of country they want.
Do they want one in which the top 1 percent hauled in more than 21 percent of all personal income in 2005? Do they want a country in which, as my former colleague at The Times, David Cay Johnston, has noted: the tax system “now levies the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich”?
Do they want a country in which their democratic freedoms are eroded by a deliberate exploitation of their fear of terrorism, and their earning power is diminished by a crippling dependence on foreign oil?
These are exactly the kinds of issues that could be thoroughly explored, argued about, even obsessed over in a presidential campaign. Americans could drag their eyeballs away from their flat-screen TVs and give serious thoughts to important matters if they wanted to. Instead, we get silliness.
The news media, especially the talking heads on television, are addicted to the horse race, focusing around the clock on wildly proliferating polling data that tell us basically nothing. No one knows who is going to win this election. So why not spend a little quality time on where the next generation of jobs might be coming from, and why it’s critically important to ease the burden of health insurance coverage being shouldered by strapped families and businesses alike?
An article in Monday’s Times spotlighted some of the serious problems that have emerged in the No Child Left Behind law. Among the law’s unintended consequences, as Sam Dillon reported, has been its tendency to “punish” states that “have high academic standards and rigorous tests, which have contributed to an increasing pileup of failed schools.”
Say what?
Surely this is a good issue for discussion and analysis in the presidential campaign. Let the candidates have at it in their final debate. Let the pundits weigh in. And why not interview a few teachers, principals and thoughtful citizens?
Don’t hold your breath. Neil Postman warned us years ago about amusing ourselves to death.
The end is near.
The Writer's Almanac: "Warnings" by David Allen Sullivan
Warnings
A can of self-defense pepper spray says it may
irritate the eyes, while a bathroom heater says it's
not to be used in bathrooms. I collect warnings
the way I used to collect philosophy quotes.
Wittgenstein's There's no such thing
as clear milk rubs shoulders with a box
of rat poison which has been found
to cause cancer in laboratory mice.
Levinas' Language is a battering ram—
a sign that says the very fact of saying,
is as inscrutable as the laser pointer's advice:
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Last week I boxed up the solemn row
of philosophy tomes and carted them down
to the used bookstore. The dolly read:
Not to be used to transport humans.
Did lawyers insist that the 13-inch wheel
on the wheelbarrow proclaim it's
not intended for highway use? Or that the
Curling iron is for external use only?
Abram says that realists render material
to give the reader the illusion of the ordinary.
What would he make of Shin pads cannot protect
any part of the body they do not cover?
I load boxes of books onto the counter. Flip
to a yellow-highlighted passage in Aristotle:
Whiteness which lasts for a long time is no whiter
than whiteness which lasts only a day.
A.A.'ers talk about the blinding glare
of the obvious: Objects in the mirror
are actually behind you, Electric cattle prod
only to be used on animals, Warning: Knives are sharp.
What would I have done without: Remove infant
before folding for storage, Do not use hair dryer
while sleeping, Eating pet rocks may lead to broken
teeth, Do not use deodorant intimately?
Goodbye to all those sentences that sought
to puncture the illusory world-like the warning
on the polyester Halloween outfit for my son:
Batman costume will not enable you to fly.
"Warnings" by David Allen Sullivan from Strong-Armed Angels.
© Hummingbird Press, 2008.
BBC News: Call for ban on primates as pets
Science and environment reporter, BBC News
A loophole in animal welfare laws that allows primates to be kept as household pets should be closed, an MP has urged.
Mark Pritchard, Conservative MP for The Wrekin, said the animals, such as small monkeys, were often housed in cramped cages, causing unacceptable suffering.
The RSPCA supported the call for a ban, adding that an estimated 3,000 primates were being kept as pets in the UK.
Mr Pritchard is calling on ministers to outlaw the breeding, sale or keeping of primates for the domestic pet market.
'Growing problem'
The Shropshire MP said he would use his Ten Minute Rule Bill, which he will present in the Commons on Tuesday afternoon, to highlight why the practice of keeping the animals had no place in modern society.
"Are we a modern country or are we a country stuck in Victorian times that likes to keep primates in confined spaces in order to entertain us," he told BBC News.
As well as welfare concerns, Mr Pritchard added that his proposals would also raise awareness of how the market for exotic pets could undermine global conservation efforts.
"Britain needs to lead the world on this issue and set a global standard in order that other countries follow and ban keeping primates as pets.
"The demand for so-called exotic pets is growing and the problem is getting worse rather than diminishing; and in my view there is a clear correlation between the scarcity of some of these species and the pet trade.
"Unless the government takes action to stop primates being kept as pets in the UK, their rhetoric on protecting forests and ecological habitats rings very hollow indeed."
Recently, the IUCN - also known as the the World Conservation Union - published its latest global assessment on the state of the world's primate species.
The Red List found that 48% faced extinction; a situation described as depressing by some conservationists.
"We certainly support Mark Pritchard's aims," said Rachel Hevesi of the Monkey Sanctuary Trust.
"We would like to see an end to the primate pet trade because it only causes suffering and, in the bigger picture, only damages the conservation of primates.
System failure
Although the vast majority of primates for sale in the UK - primarily small monkeys like marmosets, tamarins and capuchins - were bred in captivity, Ms Hevesi said the animals' exact trade routes were unknown.
"We know that there is a lot of legal and illegal trade coming out the native range countries into Europe," she told BBC News."By the time that the monkeys arrive in this country, the monkeys are claimed to have been captive bred.
"Therefore it is virtually impossible to know what direct and indirect links there are back to the native range countries.
"As long as there is a legal trade, it will feed an illegal one too."
One of the recent arrivals at the trust's sanctuary in Cornwall was a capuchin named Joey, who had been kept in a wardrobe-sized cage for nine years.
A vet's report said an X-ray revealed that the monkey showed "extensive boney deformation and generalised poor bone density" as a result of being kept in cramped conditions and not getting enough sunlight.It added: "New World primates, such as the capuchin monkey, are particularly susceptible (to bone disease), due to their specific requirements for vitamin D3."
Joey is believed to have been a wild animal, taken from a forest in Suriname, South America.
Although keeping many small monkey species, such as tamarins or squirrel monkeys, as a pet do not require licences, capuchins are covered by the Dangerous Wild Animals Act.
This legislation requires the animals to be licensed and to be examined by a vet once a year.
Yet an investigation should that Joey's owner's initial 12-month licence was never renewed.
'No restrictions'
Ros Clubb, scientific officer for the RSPCA's wildlife department, said a ban on keeping primates as household pets was something the society had been calling for over a number of years.
"The general public should not be able to keep them because the primates have such specialist needs that they cannot be met in a household environment," she told BBC News.
"They don't get the stimulation they need, they don't have the room they need. Often, diet is a problem as well.
"They are also not exposed to the level of sunlight they need and they often develop all sorts of psychological and behavioural problems because of the way they are being looked after.
"At present, there is virtually no restriction for keeping primates as pets."
Dr Clubb added that it was an issue that the government was looking to address.
Concerns about keeping primates as pets were raised during the formation of the Animal Welfare Act 2006, and the government established a working group to devise a code of conduct.
The government had indicated that it was preparing to reconvene the working group, of which the RSPCA is a member, in the coming months.
Dr Clubb said that the society had a very clear position: "What we have been calling for is for this restriction to be part of the legislation.
"That would mean that there would be a restriction on who would be able to keep primates in the first place.
She added owners should be limited to organisations or individuals who were part of a registered conservation programme or housed rescued animals.
The likelihood of Mr Pritchard's Bill making it to the statute books is remote, but he said that his goal was to get the issue back on the political agenda.
"It is putting down a marker that the government needs to take up the cause for itself. This Bill has cross-party support, including one of the most respected animal welfare supporting Members of Parliament, Elliot Morley.
"This is not a partisan matter, it is a matter about what does it say about our country."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7663939.stm
Chicago Tribune.com: Army blocks Minn. soldier from bringing puppy back
5:18 PM CDT, October 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - More than 10,000 people have signed an online petition urging the Army to let an Iraqi puppy come home with a Minnesota soldier, who fears that "Ratchet" could be killed if left behind.
"I just want my puppy home," Sgt. Gwen Beberg of Minneapolis wrote to her mother in an e-mail Sunday from Iraq, soon after she was separated from the dog following a transfer. "I miss my dog horribly." Beberg, 28, is scheduled to return to the U.S. next month.
Ratchet's defenders are ratcheting up their efforts to save him. On Monday, the program coordinator for Operation Baghdad Pups, which is run by Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International, left for a trip to the Middle East to try to get the puppy to the U.S. And last week, Beberg's congressman, Democrat Keith Ellison, wrote to the Army urging it to review the case.
Beberg and another soldier rescued the puppy from a burning pile of trash back in May. Defense Department rules prohibit soldiers in the U.S. Central Command, which includes Iraq, from adopting pets, but has made exceptions. Operation Baghdad Pups says it has gotten 50 dogs and six cats transferred to the U.S. in the last eight months.
"I'm coping reasonably well because I refuse to believe that Ratchet has been hurt," Beberg wrote in the e-mail to her mother, Patricia Beberg. "If I find out that he was killed though -- well, we just won't entertain that possibility."
"They knew about the regulation," Patricia Beberg said, "but excuse me, you're not going to throw the puppy back in the burning pile." She said Monday that her daughter sent another e-mail saying that she confirmed that the dog was still alive and doing OK. Apparently, someone had stashed him in a meat freezer.
Operation Baghdad Pups' program coordinator, Terry Crisp, left for a flight to Dubai on Monday and is scheduled to arrive in Baghdad on Wednesday. Crisp said it wasn't clear who put the puppy in the freezer, whether it was done to hide him or to freeze him to death, or whether the freezer was operational. Ratchet has since been taken out of the freezer.
Crisp said that the adopted dogs left behind face a painful death on Iraqi streets.
"Iraqis view dogs and cats as rats -- as nuisances, carriers of disease," she said. U.S. soldiers have rescued many of them from abuse, such as Iraqi men in a circle kicking a puppy or a boy pulling a puppy down the street with a rope tied around its neck.
Crisp said the plan for this week's trip is to take six dogs out of the country -- the maximum number allowed in the cargo hold -- keeping one slot open for Ratchet. If they can't get Ratchet on the plane, another dog on the waiting list will take his place.
One of the other dogs scheduled to be picked up, a puppy named Boo, belongs to Spc. Ashley Siwula, 21, of Antioch, Ill. Siwula's mother, Janet Sutton, of Trevor, Wis., said that her daughter has grown quite attached to Boo, and so far hasn't encountered any problems with the Army blocking the dog from leaving the country.
"The dog will be a comfort to her," said Sutton. "She said that dog is her heart."
Meanwhile, Crisp said her organization is working with Congress, the military and mental health workers to scrap the rule banning soldiers from adopting animals.
"These men and women have been helped by the cats and dogs -- both there and when they come home," Crisp said. Adopting a pet in the U.S. wouldn't be the same, she said.
"They have to go through that experience with them -- that's what the connection is," Crisp said.
Army spokesman Paul Boyce said in an e-mail, "Traditionally, the U.S. Armed Forces can only transport those items associated with the soldiers' personal belongings during official government transportation -- rather than living animals -- except for Military Police working dogs."
He also said that customs procedures often preclude foreign animals from entering the U.S. without shot records and other medical history documentation.
In June, a dog brought back to the U.S. by Operation Baghdad Pups tested positive for rabies after it was euthanized for other health concerns. That prompted a public health investigation, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended immediate vaccination and six-month quarantine for the other animals on the shipment.
SPCA International spokeswoman Stephanie Scroggs said that the group works closely with the CDC, and meets agency requirements calling for animals that have not been vaccinated for at least 30 days prior to entering the U.S. to be quarantined for at least 30 days.
------
On the Web:
Ratchet petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/clemency-for-ratchet
GetReligion: Bringing the corporate culture to churches
Posted by MollieBack when I worked in retail management, secret shoppers were the bane of our existence. The corporation would hire people to come in and rate our service, orderliness, appearance, etc. You never knew when they were coming and their results seemed to vary wildly. You’d be praised on a day when you knew you and your team weren’t giving their best and rated viciously on another day when you were slammed and keeping everything going despite numerous obstacles.
It’s hard for companies to have effective oversight of their regional outposts but I’m not sure how much the secret shopper programs helped.
In any case, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the secret shopper program has been adopted by churches. The Wall Street Journal’s Alexandra Alter had an absolutely fascinating look at Thomas Harrison, a former pastor and now professional “mystery worshipper.”
Mr. Harrison — a meticulous inspector who often uses the phrase “I was horrified” to register his disapproval of dust bunnies and rude congregants — poses as a first-time churchgoer and covertly evaluates everything from the cleanliness of the bathrooms to the strength of the sermon. This summer, Mr. Harrison scoured a megachurch in Cedar Hill, Texas, and jotted down a laundry list of imperfections: a water stain on the ceiling, a “stuffy odor” in the children’s area, a stray plastic bucket under the bathroom sink and a sullen greeter who failed to say good morning before the worship service. “I am a stickler for light bulbs and bathrooms,” he says.
Mr. Harrison belongs to a new breed of church consultants aiming to equip pastors with modern marketing practices. Pastors say mystery worshippers like Mr. Harrison offer insight into how newcomers judge churches — a critical measure at a time when mainline denominations continue to shed members and nearly half of American adults switch religious affiliations. In an increasingly diverse and fluid religious landscape, churches competing for souls are turning to corporate marketing strategies such as focus groups, customer-satisfaction surveys and product giveaways.
I’ve never gone so far as to become one of the Ship of Fools mystery worshippers but there have been a few times I’ve visited houses of worship where I’ve been horrified. And sometimes you need a fresh pair of eyes to see what a first-time visitor might be turned off by.
But already the story is asking for some balance — something that doesn’t really ever show up. Having been on a national church board that wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants, I’m a bit suspicious. The corporate culture had completely overtaken my board and instead of being concerned about fidelity to God’s word or some other non-corporate concept, the executives cared about these really bizarre and arbitrary metrics and models that had nothing to with our board’s purpose. It means something if you think there’s a product giveaway better than the Gospel and that is an issue that just isn’t even broached here.
Still, Alter tries to show how widespread the practice is, looking at both the church marketing firms and secular secret-shopping firms seeking a toehold. Churches spend up to $2,500 to get their blunt advice. This one secular firm, which has 260,000 secret shoppers, has sent some of them to Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist and Unitarian churches. It seems to me that if the shoppers are evaluating water stains and clean bathrooms, that it’s a completely separate issue than evaluating the theology of the music and the quality of the sermon. If you think that church is all about getting people in the seats no matter what, then that’s one thing. If you think that there is a different standard for quality — say, spiritual growth of your congregation or fidelity to doctrine — you might not get much from a random, one-off visit.
Much of Alter’s piece looks at the service Harrison provides and the experiences he’s had:
Mr. Harrison has had far worse experiences as an undercover worshipper. He’s been knocked out of the pew — twice — when someone scooted over too quickly. Once, a woman reached right over him to shake a friend’s hand without excusing or introducing herself, he says. And on more than one occasion, Mr. Harrison says he’s caught congregants complaining about the pastor. “I’ve had people tell me, ‘You’ve come to the wrong service. Our pastor is speaking today; the associate pastor is much better,’ ” Mr. Harrison recalls. “I was horrified.”
I’ve been going to church an average of once a week for 34 years and I’ve never seen anyone get knocked out of their pew. I feel like there must be something I’m missing about the mechanics here.
Here’s another paragraph that begs for a response:
Ron McCaslin, pastor of Cathedral of the Hills in Edmond, Okla., hired Mr. Harrison because his church was struggling to attract members even though the surrounding neighborhood was bustling with new residents. Mr. Harrison suggested changing the church’s name and its billboard — a 25-year-old wooden sign with Old English-style lettering. He also recommended changing the worship music to make the early morning service traditional, with well-known hymns that appeal to an older crowd, and the later service more contemporary, with a lively band. The church now draws about 500 people to its weekend services, up from about 350.
Okay, so I realize not everybody thinks worship style is theological issue but the idea that a one-time visitor could seriously recommend changing the liturgy of the service is just shocking to me. I imagine that there are theologians who feel the same way. And yet they are only mentioned in one paragraph — the second to last one. And it’s not very meaty of a response. It’s almost an afterthought. As if an editor tried to get some balance in:Some theologians warn that mystery-worshipper services will drive “spiritual consumerism.” Evaluating churches as if they were restaurants or hotels might encourage people to choose their church not according to its theology, but based on which one has the best lattes or day care, says Paul Metzger, professor of theology at Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Ore. “We tend to look for religion or spirituality that will give us what we want, when we want it,” Prof. Metzger says. “There’s a pressure for the church to be something that the church is not.”
I’m just as concerned about the supply curve as the demand curve, though. And there’s no mention of whether such an approach is damaging to the church itself. There’s no mention of negative repercussions. There’s no disagreement theologically about whether a consumer-based approach is appropriate to even embark on. And I think that would be a fascinating discussion. I’m sure that we’ll see an outcropping of stories about mystery worshippers in the coming months. Hopefully other stories will have a bit more balance than this one.
Coincidentally, the Christian satire site Lark News has a story this month about mystery church shoppers.
So much possible sarcasm ... so little time ...
Dogs and men play same game to woo their women
10 Oct 2008, 1525 hrs IST,ANI
WASHINGTON: Just like men, dogs too know how to win ladies' hearts - and that too from a young age.
According to a new study, while playing, young dogs let the female pups win, even if the males have a physical advantage.
They might lose the game in the short run, but they could win at love in the future.
The experts found that male dogs place themselves in potentially disadvantageous positions, which could make them more vulnerable to attack, and researchers suspect the opportunity to play may be more important to them than winning.
Infact, the gentlemanly dog behavior is even accompanied with a bow.
"We found that self-handicapping tends to occur in conjunction with play bows," the Discovery News quoted lead researcher Camille Ward, as saying.
"A play bow is a signal that dogs use when they want to communicate playful intentions to a potential play partner," added Ward, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan and director of About Dogs LLC. She is also author of the forthcoming book, Relationship-Based Dog Training.
"We know that in feral dog populations, female mate choice plays a role in male mating success. Perhaps males use self-handicapping with females in order to learn more about them and to form close relationships with them -- relationships that might later help males to secure future mating opportunities," the expert said.
To reach the conclusion, the experts studied puppy litters from four dog breeds: a shepherd mix, Labrador retriever, Doberman pincher and malamute. Play data was collected when the pups were between three and 40 weeks old.
The scientists examined how the puppies played with members of their own sex as well as with the opposite sex.
Females were more likely than males to initiate play with their own sex, but that may be to stave off more vicious behavior later.
"Because adult female-female aggression, when it occurs, can generally be more intense than female-male aggression, we suggest that females may use play with other females as one way to practice threat and appeasement signals that may serve to ritualize aggression and limit overt aggression later on," said Ward.
The study has been published in Animal Behavior.
While males were less likely to initiate play with other males, they seemed eager to play with females, and would go to all sorts of lengths to keep the play going.
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