Bird song

Enjoy this.  (Hat tip: Orion magazine’s tweet.)

Update: Sorry, tried to embed it, but WordPress seems unhappy with Vimeo code.  So just click on that link.

Arms Control

Yes, I’ve let this poor blog languish, unloved and untended, for months.  Mea culpas later.  For now, I’ve just got to get this off my… shoulders.  I’m talking about arms control.

I clicked on Huffington Post this morning – which I do less and less these days because their designers seem to have a real grudge against Firefox users (I can prepare a PBJ in the time it takes some pages to load) – and one of the most-viewed features is “Ripped, Striated and Defined Arms: Gone Too Far?“  The feature was prompted by a worldwide controversy that erupted last week when a UK paper published photos of Madonna looking unusually lean and “ripped” (and dehydrated, in my humble opinion).  The slide show is crazy: most of the women (key word WOMEN) are just plain skinny; the only thing making them look “ripped” is the absence of body fat.  A few others are snapped in action, so OF COURSE muscles and connective tissues are more prominently displayed than they would be at rest.

But that’s petty carping.  My larger question is, Are we REALLY having this discussion again?  Didn’t we pretty much beat it to death last winter after the White House released a stunningly gorgeous photograph of Michelle Obama wearing a sleeveless Michael Kors gown (the Irish Times bizarrely pronounced Michelle Obama’s arms to be “within the boundaries of acceptable female strength”)?  Whether Madonna’s arms look ugly or pretty to you is your aesthetic judgment and you are entitled to it.  Are we still debating, as we close out the first decade of the 21st century, how strong a woman is “allowed” to look?

Lolo Jones

P.S. Anyone care to join me in taking up the one-hundred-pushups-in-six-weeks challenge?  Useful training info here.

Don’t ditch the bookmark, yet…

Crazy couple of months.  We moved (again), I started a new job, and I’m prepping for a July 8 exam.  But I miss the blog, even when I’m ignoring it, and will attend to it shortly.  Among the attentions I intend to lavish upon it… IT might move, too.  WordPress is so maddeningly slow so often.  We’ll see.  I’ll keep you “posted.”

Transitions

Our dear old (16 years!) boy, Baxter has been slowly failing this year and late last – but has all the while shown such spirit and determination that we kept hoping he would decide when he was ready to move on.  We didn’t want to have to make “the decision” for him.  But the first week of March was especially difficult, and he took a sharp turn for the worst.  We had him euthanized on Saturday, March 7.  (In the process, I think we also found a very good and kind local vet, so that may have been Baxter’s gift to the rest of the nonhuman household.)  What a gaping hole he leaves behind.  We are going to miss him tremendously.

Baxter has appeared on this blog many times.  Here’s a little retrospective:

http://leftatthealtar.blogspot.com/2006/08/so-far-so-good.html
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2006/08/25/baxters-big-scary-day/
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2006/07/05/life-is-a-highway/
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2006/06/09/friday-desk-clearing/
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2005/10/10/blessing-of-the-animals/
http://leftatthealtar.blogspot.com/2004/07/baxter-his-right-eye-has-been.html

Seeing Nature

 At several points in my life, I wanted to be a “nature writer,” or as I thought of it in geekier moments, a natural history writer. The first time I considered it seriously was when I realized I was not going to be the next Jane Goodall (because Jane Goodall still has that pretty well locked up), somewhere in my early 30s. I toyed with it again before deciding to return to graduate school to study environmental ethics, and after that, well, just about every weekend since…

Nature writers like to talk about the landscapes that “shaped” them: the mountains, the forests, the deserts, the coastlines… I grew up in Ohio, as most of my dwindling readership knows. And in the flattest, dullest parts of Ohio to boot – areas where all the trees were cut down to grow soybeans, and then, once the soil was exhausted, to grow middle class housing subdivisions or long, flat, aluminum-sided industrial buildings. This birthright could be a near-fatal blow to the budding nature writer. (Quick! Name one from Ohio…) So the landscape of my imagination was shaped by Audubon magazine, Arizona Highways, National Geographic, and big scenic picture books like “Beautiful America.” I remember spending ninth grade study breaks in the high school library looking at college catalogs from Colorado, Montana, New Mexico – plotting my escape to a state with an actual topography. (But I stayed in Ohio and went to Wittenberg University.)

Though I was convinced that Ohio somehow lacked “nature,” I could always nonetheless find creatures to watch. If you grew up in suburban-outskirts Ohio, in the ’60s and ’70s, imagining yourself to be the next Jane Goodall or Jacques Cousteau, you learned to look creatively for the wildlife around you. You looked in the scrawny little stands of trees the developers left between subdivisions, you looked in culverts and drainage ditches beside the roads leaving town, you looked in the creeks that can always, always be found behind factories (because it would be a few years before you learned to worry about that water). You tried not to be too dismissive of the ubiquitous “LBJs” in the bushes outside your window. And let’s face it, Ohio’s Northern Cardinals and praying mantises are pretty awesome, period. Even a kid frustrated by Ohio’s total lack of mountains and grizzly bears can get into cardinals and praying mantises. Or was that just me?

Link Dumpage

Some of these items are getting cobwebs, so allow me to dump them forthwith, and then I’ll try to become a responsible blogger again.

• I’ve been admiring almost all of Obama’s various nominations so far.  Clever, creative, open-minded.  But where the hell did this come from?   Truly, madly, deeply disappointing.  Breath-takingly bad.   (For those of you who don’t know who Rick Warren is, scroll down this post for a painful reminder.) (Update: for an even better field guide to Rick Warren, take a look at this.)
• I wanted to follow Cristina and Duff’s inspiring examples and write my own “vision statement” to submit to Obama’s transition team.  It would have been about the US Department of Agriculture, and it would have urged policies and leadership committed to humane and sustainable farming.  Basic reforms in USDA culture would go light-years toward reducing environmental destruction, worldwide hunger, and grotesque abuses of “food animals.”  But I can’t make the case any better than Michael Pollan or Nicholas Kristof.  (I can, however, urge you to sign this petition.)
• Newsweek’s Lisa Miller makes a biblical case for gay marriage.  Not surprisingly, it caused enough of a freak-out that Newsweek had closed the online comments section when I first read the article.  But I loved it.  Loved it.  Wish I’d written it.
• While we’re on the topic, the now-former head of the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik, “came out” in favor of same-sex civil unions.  (Hence the “former” title…)  Wow.
• The median lifespan of African elephants in zoos is 16.9 years.  In the wild, the median lifespan is 56 years.  Not surprisingly, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums takes issue with the findings.  But others have been sounding the alarm for several years.
• While other nations work to reduce the use of primates in biomedical research, the US is actually using more of them.
• Jon Katz on what his steer taught him about faith.  (Hat tip to “Lee” of A Thinking Reed.  I don’t know “Lee” but judging from his prolific book synopses, we’re often reading the same books at the same time, and I’ve noticed that many of the same articles that grab my attention catch his also.  A crucial difference is that he actually updates his blog.  So when you find dead air over here, I encourage you to go check him out.)
• Deep Snark:  See Josh Marshall’s “deep thought” for the day.   I guess I’m not the only one wondering if every single item covering the Great Shoe-Throwing Incident must include an explanation that “shoe throwing is the ultimate insult in the Arab world.”
• I love this picture.  F-stop Marin is one of my favorite weekly blog stops, and I always like at least one photo.  But this one deserved a “grab” as my desktop “wallpaper” (I hope she doesn’t mind).  Yes, doors leading to doors leading to doors threatens to be a bit of a photographic cliche.  But the colors and lights and textures in this one…  Just gorgeous.

“Psyops on steroids”

Late Saturday night I checked one of my regular blog stops, Talking Points Memo, and clicked through an “absolute must read” link to this story in the New York Times.  It won’t surprise you, but it should still raise your ire and disgust.  The Pentagon has been conducting a domestic psychological operations (psyops) campaign with a small army of carefully prepped and scripted “military analysts” whose job was to snow the American public into supporting Bush’s illegal war.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis. …

Of course, they and their business associates were handsomely rewarded for their “access”:

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Heckuvajob by the “message-force multipliers”:

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts. …

Really… you need to read this.

On second thought…

…maybe it’s not “that time” after all. I’ve been missing posting on “Left at the Altar” lo these 16 months. After nearly a year of abstinence, I tried getting another, slightly different kind of blog going (Mental Map, which will soon be a dead link), but we just never really clicked. I’ve pulled some of those posts over to a separate page on this site, just in case there were some useful links. But I think “Left at the Altar” and I are ready to reconcile. There will undoubtedly be some dry spells — I’m co-teaching a course this spring and that will be my primary focus. But there’s just too much happening in the world, and too much work to do, to leave any medium unexploited.

Welcome! … or welcome back!

(I have no idea where this image comes from, but if it belongs to someone, I’ll take it down.  Unless they let me use it! )

It’s that time

Folks, it is that time. I believe – and co-blogger abc agrees – it is time to close up “Left at the Altar.” I am delighted and honored that people read this blog – that many have even bookmarked it and make it a regular weekly stop. But it’s time to re-direct the hours and energy that goes into the search for bloggable material. (Even when I’m updating this site with the minimal and unsatisfying “regularity” that has characterized the past year or so, I still spend more hours than I care to count “surfing” other blogs and news sites.) Other bloggers and activists are doing this much better, more resourcefully, and with greater reach and impact than I have the time or talent to cultivate. We’re quite small, and have stayed pretty small. I know that some people are going to miss us, and I know I (I won’t speak for abc) will miss blogging.

Don’t ask…

…about the comprehensive exam. It wasn’t pretty.

You CAN ask about Baxter, on the other hand. He is doing quite well! He had those gnarly stitches removed yesterday, and the biopsy report came back Saturday with a good news/bad news aspect to it. The bad news: the tumor was malignant. The good news: it’s a non-fatal type of cancer that likes to recur in the same location, and doesn’t spread. So we will need to remain vigilant in order to catch it earlier if it returns (and sadly, there’s a good chance of that: the vet was not able to “take anything extra” around the tumor to leave super-clean margins). The cancer has such a long and bizarre name, even the vet stumbled as he read the report to us. If I can figure out how to spell it, I’ll link to a description later.

A few items:

San Francisco and Oakland are having a disturbing increase in violent crimes this year, but it turns out that’s happening all over the U.S. Still feeling safer under the Tough on Crime/Tough on Terror Republicans? Check out this report by the Third Way Strategy Center for Progressives. I love the title, “The Neo Con: The Bush Defense Record By the Numbers.” The reality is this: while the BushCo NeoCons waste billions of dollars and thousands of lives on an illegal and unwinnable war over there, our national resources and preparations for violence and disaster are rapidly deteriorating. Sleep tight!

Oh, you meant those secret prisons?

A more constructive link: I buy and sell quite a few used books from Amazon’s “Marketplace.” Recently, several of my textbook purchases came from a dealer called “Better World Books,” and arrived with the claim that my purchase was helping send books to Africa. Sounded pretty cool, so I finally checked out the organization and discovered I can order books directly through their web site. Please take a look and throw them some business!

Next time a wingnut tells you conservation projects don’t work, show them this study!

(A Bali starling, one of the species saved from extinction.)

(If this post appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in your “feeder,” it’s because Blogger only published 3/4 of it the first time, and momentarily lost all the sidebar links, etc. So I deleted the original post and “re-published” it.)