The Blog of Record

Poverty kills, and Chile has much less of it that Haiti:

Canadian aid groups say Chile is in a better position than Haiti was to weather an earthquake, despite the enormous magnitude of the quake that struck early Saturday.

While the Chilean earthquake was magnitude 8.8, 500 to 1,000 times more powerful than the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, Chile has strict building codes, better infrastructure and a stable government that make it able to manage an emergency.

The earthquake also struck deeper beneath the surface, meaning less damage than had it hit closer.

“The needs are not on the same scale at all,” said Jean-Pierre Taschereau, senior manager of emergency response at the Canadian Red Cross.

Taschereau, who has worked in Chile after previous natural disasters, said there’s a lot of infrastructure damage that will mean a “high material cost.”

“There was a lot of [loss of life] in Haiti but there’s not a lot in Chile because of good preparation, good risk reduction activities, solid building codes, a strong state apparatus.”

“Tesla, in short, is cool”, while “Edison is so 20th century”:

Decades after he died penniless, Nikola Tesla is elbowing aside his old adversary Thomas Edison in the pantheon of geek gods.

When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors, they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was a scientist and inventor who achieved fame and fortune in the 1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current work on a grand scale, electrifying the world. He created the first major hydroelectric dam, at Niagara Falls. He thrilled packed theaters with presentations in which he ran high voltage through his body to illuminate a fluorescent light in his hand. His inventions helped Guglielmo Marconi develop radio.

And his rivalry with Edison—called the Battle of the Currents because Edison had bet on direct current—was legendary. Tesla won the contest, when his AC equipment powered an unprecedented display of electric light at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Fifty years later, the 86-year-old Serbian emigré died in obscurity at a New York hotel, unmarried, childless and bereft of friends. Meanwhile, Edison was lionized for generations as one of America’s greatest inventors.

But Tesla has been rediscovered by technophiles, including Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, who frequently cites him as an early inspiration. And Teslamania is going increasingly mainstream.

An early hint was “Tesla Girls,” a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film “The Prestige,” alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as “more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way.”

Well, Edison’s name is synonymous with capitalism, and capitalism is way unhip these days:

“I can’t imagine writing a song about Edison…too boringly rich, entrepreneurial and successful!” said Andy McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, in an email. He calls Tesla “a romantic ‘failure’ figure.”

When my kids grow up, do I want them to be entrepreneurial, rich and successful, or do I want them to be approved of by Andy McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark? Hoooo boy, do I have a tough decision to make.

My brother, my keeper:

A scholar has found evidence that a distraught Vincent van Gogh slashed his ear after learning that his brother, Theo, on whom he depended financially and emotionally, was about to get married.

Martin Bailey, who has written a book on van Gogh and curated two exhibitions of his work, devised his theory after meticulous detective work on a letter in a painting that the artist completed soon after he injured himself.

Bailey concludes that this letter was written by Theo from Paris in December 1888 and contained news of his engagement. This, he believes, tipped Vincent, who was already psychologically disturbed, into self-harm.

“Vincent was fearful that he might lose his brother’s emotional and financial support,” writes Bailey in the January edition of The Art Newspaper.

You didn’t think that people whom the government is so generous to support with your money actually appreciate it, did you?

The operations manager at a grocery store told me a story last night.

That store carries several varieties of milk, including  local organic half gallons in glass bottles.  It’s fairly expensive, as milk goes, about $6 including the $2 bottle redemption fee attached to the glass bottles.  (I’m not fond of the glass bottles because they’re heavy to carry and don’t fit in my refrigerator door very well, but people like them because they cut down on waste and don’t use fossil fuels and appear prestigious.)

But what’s happening is that people are coming in and purchasing those glass bottles of milk with food stamps.  Food stamp laws requires that you not discriminate about what people can buy with them: they want the expensive milk, they’re entitled to buy it. 

Then they walk outside and dump the milk and come back in to cash in the bottle redemption, leaving with $2 in cash per bottle in their pocket.

(Via Joe Sherlock, Tom McMahon.)

From 4-Block World by Tom McMahon.

Just another double standard:

I must say that I do find it interesting that a few heated verbal exchanges and one guy carrying a gun peacefully somewhere near where the President was speaking is considered a looming threat from the right to civil society while lefties physically clashing with police and destroying property (again near the President) is treated as ho-hum, more leftish rioting.  The same bored reaction tends to result from union violence as well.  Is it bias, or have we just had years to get used to violence on the left?

Yeah, you never hear about right-wing protesters clashing with police and destroying property. But it’s still the Right who are fascists.

This list, however nasty, is just scratching the surface, I’m sure.

Without a caring government gently stepping in every inch of the way to protect them from everything when they were kids, that is.

Give thanks, for such an age will never occur again.

Sad but true.

Mark Steyn:

At some point we will come to see that the developed world’s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It’s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized—like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter “I did it My Way!”

As any other column by Mark Steyn, this must be read in full. Even if only for the meaning of LGBTTIQQ2S.

Why is the good stuff often hidden from white Americans but available to Chinese? Jason Kuznicki tries to explain this:

I love Chinese food. I always have. And I mean the authentic dishes, not the made-for-Americans glop that they try to fob off on us.

So why is it that these superior dishes are always hidden away on a secret, Chinese-only menu? I recently went to Chinatown Express, my favorite local restaurant, with a group of friends, including one from Taiwan.

Naturally, he ordered in Chinese, and he received a dish I’d never seen at that restaurant before. (I hadn’t even known that they had a secret Chinese menu.) It was a plate of crispy fried egg noodles with mixed seafood and vegetables in a clear, Cantonese-style sauce.

It was delicious. And, naturally, it wasn’t on the American menu.

I’ve even gotten the same treatment at a dim sum restaurant, which is harder to pull off. After all, we could see and smell dozens of wonderful plates of marinated tofu skins, salted pork ears, tiny whole squid, and other forbidden delights… as they passed by on their way to nearby Chinese patrons.

They had a different dim sum cart for the white folks. If it had been a soul food restaurant, we’d have had grounds for a lawsuit.

Here are my questions:

1. Do any other types of ethnic restaurants routinely hide the good stuff?

2. Do Chinese places realize that at least some white diners would eat there more often if they had access to more variety and authenticity?

3. As it is, I go to Chinatown Express so often that they recognize me immediately when I walk in the door. I’m proficient with chopsticks, and I obey the basics of Chinese table manners. What else does it take, people???

Jason and his readers have some interesting theories.

(Via Linkfilter.)

Which is a big increase over a short time:

The figure for the US capital is up 20% over two years.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth tested notes from more than 30 cities worldwide.

They say the rise observed in the US may be due to increased drug use caused by higher stress levels linked to the global economic downturn. 

I don’t know – cocaine use seems like a rather expensive way to fight stress over a lack of money. But hey, it’s Washington, D.C., where spending money you don’t have is the way of life.

Some people get paid thousands of dollars per hour to have their hands photographed:

Ashly Covington is the kind of top model who doesn’t lift a finger. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t clean and she avoids anything that could ruin her manicure.

But if your hands could earn $1,200 in a day, you’d think twice before scrubbing down the bathroom, too.

As one of the few full-time body parts models, Covington thinks about her hands “every minute of every hour of every day,” because for the past seven years, her hands (and, occasionally, her legs and feet) have been her sole source of income. She can earn anywhere from $300 a day to a couple thousand per hour.

“Most people can walk away from work when they’re done with a job, but parts models can’t, because [our parts] have to be flawless. I moisturize 20 to 30 times a day, and wear gloves 90 percent of the time,” she said. “When it’s your livelihood, you’ve got to think hands first.”

A medical doctor describes what exactly happens in the body of a crucified man, up to the moment of death.

Proving that the founder of Scientology was a fraud is like proving that night follows day (see here, for example), but this is still interesting:

THE founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was exposed as a fraud 30 years ago by British diplomats investigating his qualifications, according to newly declassified documents.

The science fiction writer, who invented a religion now followed by celebrities such as Tom Cruise, awarded himself a PhD from a sham “diploma mill” college he had acquired, the diplomats found.

Such was the climate of fear and paranoia surrounding Scientology that the US believed the sect had sent bogus doctors to declare a high-ranking legal investigator mad and then taken his papers relating to the case.

Scientologists threatened to sue the British government for libel after it acted in 1968 to ban followers from entering the country to visit the sect’s world headquarters in East Grinstead, West Sussex, southern England.

To defend itself, Britain needed to establish whether Lafayette Ron Hubbard was a charlatan.

And that’s what it did.

(Via The Macho Response.)

 Pedophile until proven otherwise:

I’m not saying that there are absolutely no evil folks in the world today who wish harm upon children. But to imagine them everywhere, ever poised to snatch children, is to see the world through Salem eyes. Eyes blinded by hysteria. And yet look what is happening in England. 

“One quarter of the adult population will require criminal records checks under the new child protection system coming into force next year, according to a report criticising the scheme,” wrote The Times, a British newspaper.

That’s right: One-fourth of all adults in Britain will be forced to undergo background checks to determine whether they ever have been convicted of crimes related to pedophilia. The basic assumption being: Anyone who has any contact with children should be considered a pedophile until proved otherwise.

And it’s starting to happen in the United States, too. I’ve heard from parents in a handful of states who say their local public schools are requiring something similar. One Texas mom was barred from her daughter’s kindergarten Christmas party because her background check hadn’t cleared yet. (Eventually, the teacher relented, but the mother had to stand at the very back of the classroom and could not interact with any child except her own.)

You can imagine that this type of law makes adults less eager to volunteer for schools, Scouts or any other activity with kids involved because they have to undergo (and often pay for) security checks first. But what’s worse is that in this suspicious climate, adults grow wary of any involvement with kids. Frank Furedi, author of “Paranoid Parenting,” cites the story of a 2-year-old who wandered away from her nursery. A man driving by noticed her on the street, but (as he later testified at an inquest) he didn’t stop to help for fear he’d be accused of trying to abduct her.

She ended up at a pond. And drowned.

If we have reached the point in society where basic adult concern for children is mistaken for evil, we’re back in Salem, 1692. The next “witch” could be you, comforting the kid who fell off her swing or volunteering for the school dance without a background check. Or, of course, letting your children go “free-range” and being accused of depraved indifference to all the black magic swirling around them.

I hope that Texas mom sued the pants off the kindergarten for her humiliation.

Chicagoans are unhappy with their landmark having sold its naming rights to a British tenant.

A good article by a British professor of influenza virology.

Marty Nemko describes a type of people he has observed in his career counseling practice – people afflicted with what he calls the Parasite Syndrome:

Here’s how the Parasite Syndrome prototypically plays out:

1. After graduating from a brand-name college, the parasites in-training go abroad, for example to India or France, to “find themselves.” They return a month or year later, no clearer, although perhaps more desirous of a pleasant and fulfilling life.

2. They take a pleasant and/or fulfilling but low-paying job. (Most pleasant and fulfilling jobs pay poorly–supply and demand.) But because of a desire to live a middle-class lifestyle, the person mooches off parents or romantic partner.

3. At this point, many of the female parasites-in-training think guys who don’t make good money are losers. Most males don’t think that way of educated low-income women, and so are more willing to marry them. And so, many more female than male would-be-parasites find a host.

4. Sometimes, the income-generating spouse prefers that his spouse not work, but that’s uncommon except among the wealthy. More often, the income generator (or his or her parent) asks the spouse to try harder to land a professional-level job so she can contribute to the family income she’s good at spending.

So, the non-earner makes a half-hearted failed effort after which she or he rails, for example, “You don’t understand how tough the job market is, especially for a woman, and especially with a liberal arts degree.”

Few husbands or parents have the guts to tell the non-earner, “Then why did you major in art history?! (or French literature, sociology, women’s studies, etc.)” They fear the onslaught of fury, tears, or retaliatory accusations likely to follow.

[...]

11. Women live much longer than men, in part because of the stress of an out-of-home job, so it is likely that women non-earners will bury a beast-of-burden husband or two and go to her grave having taken far more from family and society than she has given. She has been a parasite.

The saddest part is that these people–both the women and men–who are afflicted with the Parasite Syndrome are so capable; they could so abet society.

Alas, they choose to have hurt the society they could have helped. They take up slots at prestigious colleges having written application essays asserting that they want to do important things to improve society. (I’ve never known of a successful application essay to Brand-Name U whose admission essay said, “I aspire to be a stay-at-home parent.”) They then freeload off parents and spouse, and later, often squander yet more societal resources by going back for another degree without ever making much use of it. They certainly never come close to living up to their potential. You don’t need a brand-name degree or two to be a good stay-at-home parent, let alone a stay-at-home childless wife, which, as reported in a recent study, is a growing group.

(Via Tom McMahon.)

Well, some of these parasites - those with degrees in feminism, peace studies, etc. – may actually be doing society a great favor by never making much use of their education.

With 40 photos. You’ll probably get hungry before you finish scrolling.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is now after YouTube users – those of them who embed music videos from YouTube on their own sites or blogs, unless these sites are “purely” non-commercial.