emjohnson | December 8, 2009
Maana (Now), Directed by Félix Pharand D.As part of the United Nations COP15 Climate Change Conference is the Indigenous Voices on Climate Change Film Festival. Included in the festival is this humorous story of one Inuk teenager who is disturbed by how the climate crisis is affecting his community and sets out to do something about it.
emjohnson | December 8, 2009What do the following countries have in common?
Bahrain, Burma, China, Iran, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan
If your answer is that they're some of the most corrupt, authoritarian nations in the world you'd be correct. If you associated them with significant human rights abuses, you would also be spot on. If you learned that they also reject the international convention that bans landmines, chances are you would not be surprised. Joining them, however, is none other than the United States.
In a recent press conference, State…
emjohnson | December 7, 2009The twice monthly premiere science blog carnival has just been posted at Mauka to Makai. Many of your favorite science bloggers have been included (as well as yours truly). Make sure to stop in and prepare to be amazed.
emjohnson | December 6, 2009Nonreligious Nerd is hosting the latest edition (we're up to #130 now) of the most ungodly carnival in the blogosphere. Take a moment in between hymns to check out the selections on your iPhone. Just tell the other parishioners that you're praying for them.
emjohnson | December 4, 2009 In the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, the cylons were a human creation who turned on their creator. Such a motif is a classic literary form and can be found in Shelley's Frankenstein, Goethe's The Sorcerer's Apprentice and in the 16th century Jewish folktale of the golem. In the latter, the golem is animated by a Rabbi when the word emeth (truth) is carved into the clay figure's forehead. The golem was initially a protector of the Jewish population, but, as a testament to human hubris, the golem broke free and began to wreak havoc. In an attempt to contain the golem the…
emjohnson | December 4, 2009
From the brilliant minds at ThankYouJennyMcCarthy.com. WTF, indeed. I got my vaccine, have you?
emjohnson | December 3, 2009
Okay, so this is actually from last year's anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. And it's not actually a representative from Dow, but Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. But wouldn't it be nice if the perpetrators of this tragedy actually had come clean?
emjohnson | December 2, 2009
Bill Moyer's Journal - LBJ's Road to War, Part 2November 20, 2009Part 1 / Part 2It is interesting to note that the suggestion I made earlier about creating "shovel ready" projects in Afghanistan was one of the key approaches that Johnson originally considered but was unable to adopt forty years ago. The reference made to a "Vietnamese New Deal" as a means to end the civil war was made impossible thanks to the US support for a series of corrupt client regimes in South Vietnam. Today, the Hamid Karzai government has made Afghanistan "the fifth most corrupt country in the world" according to…
emjohnson | December 2, 2009
Bill Moyer's Journal - LBJ's Road to War, Part 1Novemeber 20, 2009Part 1 / Part 2Bill Moyers has this brilliant piece of journalism pointing out the similar difficulties faced by President Johnson in Vietnam and President Obama in Afghanistan. Quite obviously there are important differences, but the basic issues are the same. Both inherited an unpopular war and were pressured by the Joint Chiefs and the Republican hawks to commit further troops to what everyone acknowledged could not result in victory. Political calculations took precedence over strategic wisdom.
In both wars the goal…
emjohnson | December 2, 2009
Take a good look at the chart above. This represents the increase in the number of troops in Afghanistan since 2001. The number of soldiers that are presently in country might be a little high on this chart, given that The New York Times estimates 68,000 soldiers currently in Afghanistan. However, this lower estimate is still more than double the number of soldiers that were in Afghanistan at the end of President Bush's term. With the additional 30,000 troops requested this would be three times what it was when Obama first stepped foot in the White House.
What hasn't been discussed is…
emjohnson | December 1, 2009
There are two fundamental misconceptions surrounding the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle ten years ago this week. One is that the protests represented a "riot" and that the majority of protesters were violent. The second is that the protests were counter-productive and actually hurt the cause of reform that would benefit poor countries trying to have their voices heard. Both of these are wrong and, in fact, are just the opposite.
Many of those who went to Seattle did intend to shut down the proceedings, which they did nonviolently by creating blockades and…
emjohnson | November 30, 2009This week, ten years ago, between 50,000 and 100,000 protesters from a wide variety of labor, environmental and global justice organizations descended on the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference being held in Seattle and prevented delegates from reaching the convention hall. This effectively shut down the talks and focused public attention on an undemocratic institution that had previously been little understood. Delegates from more than forty poor African, Caribbean and Latin American nations were united in opposition to their treatment by the wealthy countries and the public…
emjohnson | November 30, 2009The New York Times Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Thomas Friedman, by his own definition, is insane. Many understood this when he published The Lexus and the Olive Tree and asserted that military socialism was a good thing because it promoted American business:
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer…
emjohnson | November 26, 2009Huxley Laden has just entered the world at a whopping 7 lbs. 11 oz. Please head over to Greg Laden's blog and offer your congratulations.
As regular readers will know, my partner and I had our own primate in June (8 lbs. 6 oz.). Hopefully Sagan and Huxley will have the chance to play together in the virtual playground as they grow up.
emjohnson | November 23, 2009
David Rovics sings his song remembering the hundreds of Irish recruits in the US invasion of Mexico in 1846 that turned on their commanders and fought on the side of Mexico. While this event is little known in American history, what is even less known is that some of the soldiers in John O'Reilly's battalion were former slaves who escaped from their owners in the US army to fight alongside the Irish and Mexican San Patricios.
As James Callaghan wrote in American Heritage magazine:
Mexican sources state that O'Reilly quickly recruited forty Irishmen and four esclavos negros--slaves brought…
emjohnson | November 23, 2009The Freedom From Religion Foundation has a quiz to test your understanding of religion and politics in American history. I got 19 out of 21. How'd you do?
emjohnson | November 21, 2009Now that his plan has backfired drastically (his own website has removed the link to his "Introduction" of Darwin's book) and more people were offended by his distortions than anything else, let me briefly point out some useful information. Comfort makes the following assertions in his introduction:
Adolf Hitler took Darwin's evolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusions [and] the legacy of Darwin's theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion.
As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out:
This is simply hyperbole on Comfort's part.…
emjohnson | November 20, 2009Now that the Darwin Reclamation Project collage has been posted, I can confess that I have a few problems with the recent atheist action that sought to counter the dunderhead Ray Comfort and his Creationist propaganda ministry. I'm not sure who originally suggested this action, but I don't think it was well thought out. Having athiests systematically round up as many copies as they can of a work they disagree with (however ridiculous such a work may be) stinks of censorship and creates an impression in the broader public that Comfort's arguments are somehow threatening to evolutionary…