"Revoluton, Evolution, Masturbation, Flagellation, Regulation, Integrations, Meditations, United Nations, Congratulations..."

Following are some photos a friend of mine took at the January 27 anti-war protest in the District of Columbia.














Photos by Alex Barnard.
Lyrics by John Lennon, "Give Peace a Chance."

Mr. President?

John Edwards is pretty good looking. (As a matter of fact, in 2000, People magazine named Edwards the sexiest politician alive.)

He is also an incredibly attractive candidate and, this time around, he's packing quite a punch.

Following are three excerpts from his response to President Bush's State of the Union Address:

1. Instead of increasing the number of troops in Iraq, we should immediately withdraw 40–50,000 troops... Since the President refuses to change course, Congress must use its power of the purse and block funding for an escalation of war. Over 80,000 people from across the country have joined me in calling on Congress to stop President Bush's misguided plan to escalate the war. Congress has the power to stop this escalation — they should use it.

Well, I can't argue with that.

(Click here to see the note Edwards sent to Congress. If you look really closely, you will see my name.)

2. The time for patching up our health care system has ended. We need universal health care in this country and we need it now.

(Senator Clinton, on the other hand, has proposed "affordable" health care. Let me be the first to tell you: "Affordable" is not the same as "Universal.")

3. In order to curb our dependence on foreign oil and address global warming, the United States needs a major investment in energy innovation, on a scale that this President isn't talking about. We need to ask Americans to be patriotic about something other than war and involve everyone — government, industry, and individuals — in the solution.

He is back. And he's back with a vengance.


www.johnedwards.com

We Tell the World What Time It Is

On January 18, 2007, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists issued the following statement:

We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

In light of the current global climate, the Bulletin set its iconic "Doomsday Clock" two minutes closer to midnight:


To read the Bulletin's complete analysis, click here.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE "DOOMSDAY CLOCK"

On December 10, 1945, The Atomic Scientists of Chicago--an organization founded in September of the same year--published the first volume of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago (later shortened to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists). The organization’s primary objectives were:

1.To explore, clarify and formulate the opinion and responsibilities of scientists in regard to the problems brought about by the release of nuclear energy, and

2.To educate the public to a full understanding of the scientific, technological and social problems arising from the release of nuclear energy.

The Bulletin gained almost instantaneous notoriety; circulation rose from six hundred fifty copies in 1945 to ten thousand copies the following year. Appealing to scientists and laymen alike, the Bulletin established itself as the pre-eminent nuclear authority. In fact, in a series of 1947 advertisements, the Bulletin proclaimed to be “...the only publication which gives the informed citizen such complete, extensive and authoritative information on the greatest problem the human race has faced since the discovery of fire.” As such, the Bulletin played a consequential role in development of America’s atomic lexicon. (In fact, the Bulletin defined the phrase “fall out” some four and a half years before it appeared on the pages of the New York Times.) But the Bulletin’s most significant contribution to America’s nuclear cognizance--and subsequent anxiety--was the “Doomsday Clock,” an image that has dominated the cover of the Bulletin since its creation in June of 1947. In a matter of years, this clock became one of America’s most recognizable nuclear icons.

A note appeared on the last page of the April/May, 1947 Bulletin, which read:

TO OUR READERS
Within its next issue, the BULLETIN will adopt a new, expanded format designed for easier reading and more attractive appearance. The June issue will also bring another innovation – a cover designed to protect your copy in the mail and to preserve your BULLETIN for permanent filing.

Bulletin co-founder Hyman Goldsmith asked artist Martyl Langsdorf, the wife of a Manhattan Project physicist, to design the cover for the June 1947 issue. Langsdorf developed “the idea of using a clock to symbolize urgency.” She planned to repeat the image monthly, with different background colors. Although Langsdorf’s intention was to represent impending danger, her decision to place the minute hand seven ticks before midnight was a simply a matter of “good design.” Strange, no, that a (relatively arbitrary) artistic rendering has become such a prominent barometer of impending doom?


On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” Anxiety erupted: the United States was no longer the world’s only atomic superpower! The following month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists altered their cover image for the first time since the image’s creation two years earlier. The Bulletin repositioned the minute hand just three minutes before midnight, indicating a rapidly approaching apocalypse.


Note: Nowhere in the October 1949 issue of the Bulletin, do the editors address the clock’s time change. In fact, out of eighteen time changes, this is the only one that goes unmentioned. It did not, however, go unnoticed.

On August 12, 1953 the Russians exploded their first thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb), closely following America’s detonation of thermonuclear devices. This nuclear evolution prompted a second "Doomsday" time change. The Bulletin advanced the clock to 11:58, just two minutes before midnight.


This issue featured an essay entitled "The Narrowing Way," in which Bulletin co-founder Eugene Rabinowitch wrote:

The hands of the clock of doom have moved again. Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization.

January, 1960 brought about a favorable change. After six and a half years of sitting two minutes away from the end of the world, mankind was granted a reprieve. The editors of the Bulletin reset the clock to its original time: seven minutes before midnight.

Rabinowitch explained the nature of this change in an essay entitled “The Dawn of a New Decade”:

In recognition of these new hopeful elements in the world picture, we are moving the ‘clock of doom’ on the Bulletin’s cover a few minutes back from midnight. In doing so we are not succumbing to a facile optimism, engendered by a change in the climate of our diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union... We want to express in this move our belief that a new cohesive force has entered the interplay of forces shaping the fate of mankind, and is making the future of man a little less foreboding...

Between 1960 and 2007 the Doomsday Clock changed an additional fifteen times. (For a comprehesive timeline, see below.) In 1991, the world saw its most favorable hour in 44 years: the big hand was set a comfortable seventeen minutes before midnight. But the honeymoon was shortlived, and in 1995 our sense of global security was, once again, on the decline. Since that time, the Doomsday Clock has only moved closer and closer to the witching hour...

As the Bulletin's January 18 analysis reminds us:

The Clock is Ticking.

***

Doomsday Clock Timeline

Madame Speaker, The President of the United States....

From HARPER'S WEEKLY REVIEW, 1.23.07:

The United Nations announced that 34,452 civilians were killed in Iraq last year, a number nearly three times higher than previous estimates by the Iraqi interior ministry. "I think," said President George W. Bush, "the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude."

Yes, George, you're right.


you fucking moron.

Typewriters

Throughout the twentieth century, a number of prominent authors have demonstrated steadfast loyalty to their chosen typewriter make and model.

Following is a list of authors and the typewriters they favored:

Arthur C. Clarke, b. 1917
(2001: A Space Odyssey)


Remington Noiseless Portable, 1940s


Agatha Christie, 1890-1976
(Agatha Christie's books have sold over one billion copies (in English alone). She wrote 79 novels and short story collections and is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.)


Remington Portable, 1920s


Note: This machine is the first portable to use a 4-bank standard keyboard. Previous portable models featured a 3-bank keyboard:


William Faulkner, 1897-1962
(Although Faulkner normally wrote by hand, he wrote so quickly that he often typed up his day's work, in order to read it the following morning.)


Underwood Standard Portable, late 1920s


Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."


Remington Rand No. 5, 1930s


That's a pretty handsome machine, Mr. Ginsberg.


Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961


Royal Quiet DeLuxe Portable, early 1940s


John Irving, b. 1942
(The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany)


IBM Selectric, 1970s


Tennessee Williams, 1911-1983

Olivetti Studio 44, 1950s



Here is the model I use:

Smith-Corona Sterling (featuring "Floating Shift"), late 1940s
(It works like a charm!)

For more typewriters, click here.

Check out "Authors A to Z" to see a list of more than fifty authors and the typewriters they favored.

January 18

1778--Capt. James Cook is the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he names the "Sandwich Islands."



1896--The X-ray machine is exhibited for the first time.



1912--British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrives at the South Pole only to discover that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen has preceded him by just over a month.



1916--A 611 gram chondrite type meteorite struck a house near the village of Baxter in Stone County, Missouri.



1919--Bentley Motors Limited is founded.



1944--The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City hosts its first jazz concert; performers include Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Roy Eldridge and Jack Teagarden.



1964--Plans are revealed for the World Trade Center in New York City.



1964--The Beatles appear on the Billboard magazine charts for the first time.



1993--For the first time, Martin Luther King Day is officially observed in all 50 US states.

Dear Congressman

In response to my January 11 post, George II and George III, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson alerted me to the following story:

Rocky Anderson calls for Bush impeachment*

This is, of course, brilliant.

But it's not enough to cheer from behind a computer screen. Contact your congressman, refer her to Article I, Sections 2 and 8 of the United States Constitution and implore her to prevent the deployment of 21,500 additional troops to Iraq.

As of yet, congress has failed to exercise any constitutional leverage--and they have quite a bit. (Like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution is a pretty sharp document.)

We have a responsibility to make sure our representatives accurately represent us. Get your asses in gear!


Here is how you contact your congressman:

1. Determine who your representative is. (If you don't know, slap yourself on the wrist, and then click here.)

2. But let's not mess around on the Capital's website. For detailed contact information (including phone, fax, and e-mail) click here.

Call today!

---

*Mac users, if you have trouble viewing ABC 4's video, please run Flip4Mac. Go to system preferences, click the "Plug-In" tab, and check the box that reads "Launch Quick-Time."

In God We Trust

I would like to recommend Sam Harris's book Letter to a Christian Nation.

Swift, well-reasoned, and suasive, this book unearths a series of unfortunate and alarming realities concerning our country's enduring allegiance to God. Whatever your religious persuasion, Letter to a Christian Nation book is guaranteed to enlighten.

Below, you will find several excerpts from Harris's book: compelling facts and figures that, I can only hope, will move you to read this book from cover to cover (a mere 91 pages).

According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12 percent of Americans believe that life on earth has evolved through a natural process, without the interference of a deity. Thirty-one percent believe that evolution has been "guided by God."

The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists. This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect our presidents and congressmen--and many who themselves get elected--believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the earth, and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hands of an invisible God (x - xi).

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality... Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious (43 - 44).

ABOVE: The percentage of people in European countries who responded "I believe there is a God" in a 2005 Eurobarometer poll. (The two darkest countries are Turkey and Romania. The lightest are the Czech Republic and Estonia.)

In 2005, a survey was conducted in thirty-four countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked thirty-third, just above Turkey. Meanwhile, the high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math. These data are unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance (70).

Competing religious doctrines have shattered our world into seperate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continual source of human conflict.

In response to this situation, many sensible people advocate something called religious tolerance. While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its problems. Our fear of provoking rligious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous (80).

GO BUY IT!

Harris, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

George II and George III

Following President Bush's unsurprisingly deplorable speech to the Nation delivered on Wednesday evening from the White House library, I happened to read our country's Declaration of Independence (for the first time in at least ten years).

For those of you who have not encountered this treatise since your days in middle school, you owe yourself a reunion. In an age dominated by bullshit rhetoric and political spin, this elegantly composed, well-argued, and appropriately concise document will (almost certainly) provide (the proverbial) breath of fresh air.

The Declaration of Independence contains a very specific list of grievances directed at King George III in particular, and to the English Crown in general.


Five of these grievances caught my attention, and I have listed them below. (While you will not observe a series of direct parallels--the political climate has changed a bit in 231 years--you may find some unsettling similarities. I certainly have.)

I remind you: the following injustices galvanized the birth of our Nation, and our Constitution (completed eleven years later), was specifically designed to ensure that such injustices were never again perpetrated against the people of this sovereign State.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of People.

He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws.

He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.

Following these (and other) grievances, is this assertion:

A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.

Meet Amy

From an interview with Saturday Night Live cast member Amy Poehler, featured in the October/November 2006 issue of BUST Magazine.

Poehler: We were just talking about those American Apparel ads. They're fucking gross, man. Look, I love beautiful girls too. I think everyone should be free to have their knee socks and their sweaty shorts, but I'm over it. I'm over this weird, exhausted girl. I'm over the girl that's tired and freezing and hungry. I like bossy girls, I always have. I like people filled with life. I'm over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.

Parenthetically--American Apparel's CEO, Dov Charney, has been accused of conducting job interviews in his underwear, giving his employees vibrators, masturbating (on multiple occasions) in front of a reporter from Jane Magazine, and engaging in a variety of sexual activities with employees at his corporate office.