Buttermilk & Molasses

THANK YOU FOR THE 13 CENTS

Link: Reuters News

It's not often that I get really, genuinely peeved at the Bush administration, but the $35,000,0000 that has been tossed to the victims of this week's tsunami is "stingy", as described by a UN official this week.

As a percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, the U.S. contribution to the victims is 0.000003%. If your annual salary is $40,000 and you send 13 cents to UNICEF, you've exceeded the U.S. government's relief contribution.

Granted, the U.S. will be contributing far more in the weeks to come -- in terms of money, supplies and manpower -- but the administration's slow, stunted response to this global catastrophe speaks volumes about the second term of our compassionate President. (Not that we've had time to finish digesting the implications of his first-term.)

HELPING THE VICTIMS

Link: How best to help tsunami victims

KnightRidder Newspapers provides a short list of reputable agencies currently at work in south Asian and the Indian Ocean regions impacted by this week's tsunami. Top among the recommendations -- send money, not food or clothes.

I'll be targeting the UN Children's Fund and Doctors Without Borders -- more than a third of the victims are children, and the biggest concern at the moment is the threat of starvation and disease.

IT'S A WORLD-WIDE SMASH

Link: Beatles Mash-up Medley - Hank Handy.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)

I've never really been interested in Mash-ups -- taking two or more songs and digitally blending them to create a new tune -- but this Mash-up of about 40 Beatles songs into one jangly medley is something else. Thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing for a series of links to various mirrors.

MISPLACED PRIORITIES

Link: The Failed and Failing State and the Bush Administration

The Center for Defense Information's Rachel and Michael Stohl argue that the Bush administration's obsessive focus on Iraq and al Qaeda since September 11, 2001, has shifted foreign policy priorities away from the problem of failed and failing states -- which ultimately create significant global destabilization, as well as risks for the United States.

The issues of terrorism and failing states are inextricably linked. Failing states represent the ultimate disintegrative force – the inability of the state to provide for the needs of it citizens. From an international security standpoint, such states often threaten their neighbors and regions, not as classic military enemies but rather as the source of instability. Through the refugees they foster, the spillover of ethnic, religious or ideological conflicts, the potential for the spread of disease, and the potential to overwhelm the capacity of their neighbors to care for the disasters they spawn, weak and failing states present both a security and foreign policy challenge. Often weak states become safe havens for terrorist networks – allowing the flow of weapons and the unhindered training and indoctrination of a frustrated population.

The Stohls don't go into great detail around specific states and the risks surfaced by their continued faltering, but they provide a good contrast of the Bush and Clinton administration approaches to the problem.

THE BIG WAVE

Link: DigitalGlobe Imagery

Digital Globe has posted a series of natural color, high-resolution satellite images of the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka -- just before and just after the tsunami struck. Nowhere near as heart-wrenching as the countless images of the utter devastation that struck the entire region, but truly awe-inspiring and frightening to see at such a broad scale the impact.

EARS ACROSS THE GLOBE

Link: BBC - Radio 3 - Awards for World Music 2005 - Nominees

The BBC list of nominees for this year's World Music Awards is out, and includes profiles, pictures and music of all the artists. Voting starts January 1.

WELCOME TO SIN CITY

Link: Apple - Trailers - Sin City

Frank Miller redefined -- or perhaps fully refined -- comic noir, the genre of dark, gritty storytelling and inking that kicked the primary color, muscle-bound superhero strips of the 1970s and early 1980s squarely in the butt. Under Miller's guidance, Batman become Gotham's Dark Knight, Daredevil and Elektra created comic book history and Sin City brought edgy pulp to the local comic store.

Now Miller and director Robert Rodriguez are bringing Sin City to the big screen, and from the looks of the trailer they've done a bang-up job of translating Miller's unique style into celluloid. A hot title, a hot cast. Perhaps there is hope for Hollywood after all.

DO THEY KNOW IT'S BOXING DAY?

If it's the day after Christmas, I must be sorting books.

Yesterday, Angie and I exchanged packages of equal size and heft. She paused, held them together, wrapping against wrapping -- she suspected. After almost 19 years of friendship, it's not only amusing but unsurprising that we would eventually buy each other the same gift -- in this case Nick Hornby's <i>The Polysyllabic Spree</i>, a collection of essays outlining the books he's bought and read month to month.

I didn't collect many books this holiday season -- the Hornsby book, Jon Stewart's <i>America</i> and a few gardening tomes -- but as I sorted the shelves today, I found myself staring at a three-foot pile of unread books. Aeschylus, Donna Tartt, Romeo Dalliare. Books on organization culture and business. Reams of poetry, and essays on poets. Massive tomes unveiling the lives of Thurgood Marshall, Desmond Tutu. I try not to tell myself that I will breeze through any of them in the coming week away from work, but perhaps...

What has captured my attention in December, as far as books are concerned, is an odd melange of material -- Kenneth Pollack's <i>Persian Puzzle</i>, <i>How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work</i>by psychologist Robert Kegan, Sheryl Nissinen's <i>The Conscious Bride</i> and a new Star Trek novel by Peter David. I've been tackling these, and the Hornby essays, amidst a scattered magazine or three -- the new Paste (worth purchasing just for the DVD of short films and music videos), the annual end-of-year Economist (the least interesting such volume they've produced in a decade), Newsweek, Poet & Writer, the Utne Reader and Cooking Light.

Pollack and Kegan have been the most interesting of the batch -- one an exploration of the on-again, off-again U.S./Iran relationship and its consequences for national policy, and the second a guided exploration of how the ways we engage problems and hold contradictions can be transformational.

The challenge of the coming week will be the avoid the growing list of new books scribbled on scraps of paper around the house, and focus on trimming away at the existing stack. Or to tackle any of the many other lists scattered about -- pieces of poems, small repair jobs around the house, winter landscaping duties, work-related projects. Or, perhaps, to begin a new list of things I've chosen not to do this last week of 2004.

DO THEY KNOW IT'S BOXING DAY?

If it's the day after Christmas, I must be sorting books.

Yesterday, Angie and I exchanged packages of equal size and heft. She paused, held them together, wrapping against wrapping -- she suspected. After almost 19 years of friendship, it's not only amusing but unsurprising that we would eventually buy each other the same gift -- in this case Nick Hornby's <i>The Polysyllabic Spree</i>, a collection of essays outlining the books he's bought and read month to month.

I didn't collect many books this holiday season -- the Hornsby book, Jon Stewart's <i>America</i> and a few gardening tomes -- but as I sorted the shelves today, I found myself staring at a three-foot pile of unread books. Aeschylus, Donna Tartt, Romeo Dalliare. Books on organization culture and business. Reams of poetry, and essays on poets. Massive tomes unveiling the lives of Thurgood Marshall, Desmond Tutu. I try not to tell myself that I will breeze through any of them in the coming week away from work, but perhaps...

What has captured my attention in December, as far as books are concerned, is an odd melange of material -- Kenneth Pollack's <i>Persian Puzzle</i>, <i>How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work</i>by psychologist Robert Kegan, Sheryl Nissinen's <i>The Conscious Bride</i> and a new Star Trek novel by Peter David. I've been tackling these, and the Hornby essays, amidst a scattered magazine or three -- the new Paste (worth purchasing just for the DVD of short films and music videos), the annual end-of-year Economist (the least interesting such volume they've produced in a decade), Newsweek, Poet & Writer, the Utne Reader and Cooking Light.

Pollack and Kegan have been the most interesting of the batch -- one an exploration of the on-again, off-again U.S./Iran relationship and its consequences for national policy, and the second a guided exploration of how the ways we engage problems and hold contradictions can be transformational.

The challenge of the coming week will be the avoid the growing list of new books scribbled on scraps of paper around the house, and focus on trimming away at the existing stack. Or to tackle any of the many other lists scattered about -- pieces of poems, small repair jobs around the house, winter landscaping duties, work-related projects. Or, perhaps, to begin a new list of things I've chosen not to do this last week of 2004.

LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY

Don't mind me. I'm getting my brain shredded at Georgetown this week, along with various pieces of my ego. Feedback is the new black.

(P.S. Back in a few days. Just drop the mail on the counter and water the plants.)