North Coast Cafe, South

Evil Defined

The BBC reports:

A jury in Texas has sentenced a man to 25 years in prison for severely burning his two-month-old daughter in a microwave oven last year.

If you can stand reading more go Here

Racists in South Carolina Attack TV Reporter

Despite the popularity of the USA's first ever black presidential candidate, as far as racism goes, it ain't over. 

Watch a black South Carolina TV reporter as she is  attacked doing her stand-up.

http://gawker.com/366823/tv-reporter-attacked-by-racist-crowd-in-south-carolina

CIA admits using torture

USA TODAY

PANAMA CITY — President Bush strongly defended U.S. interrogation practices for detainees held in the war on terrorism Monday, insisting, "We do not torture."


CIA Admits 'waterboarding' al-Qaida suspects

Generation Labels & Narcissistic Youth

U.S. Generations * = dates disputed This box: view • talk • edit
Term	Period
Puritan Generation	1588-1617
Puritan Awakening	1621–1649
Cavalier Generation Glorious Generation Enlightenment Generation Awakening Generation	1618-1648 1648-1673 1674-1700 1701–1723
First Great Awakening	1727–1746
Liberty Generation Republican Generation Compromise Generation	1724–1741 1742–1766 1767–1791
Second Great Awakening	1790–1844
Transcendentalist Generation Transcendental Generation Gilded Generation Progressive Generation	1789–1819 1792–1821 1822–1842 1843–1859
Third Great Awakening	1886–1908
Missionary Generation Lost Generation Interbellum Generation G.I. Generation Greatest Generation	1860–1882 1883–1900 1900–1910 1900–1924 1911–1924
Jazz Age	1918-1929
Beat Generation Silent Generation Baby Boomers Generation Jones	1914–1930 1925–1945 *1940s-1960s 1954–1965
Consciousness Revolution	1964–1984
Generation X MTV Generation Boomerang Generation	*1960s–1980s 1974–1985 1977–1986
Culture Wars	1980s–present
Generation Y Internet Generation New Silent Generation	*1970s–1990s *1980s-1990s *1990s or 2000s–?

Are today's youth narcissistic, viewing themselves as entitled and 'special.?  Yes, according to a recent study. The fault may be an over emphasis by parents and teachers on instilling self-esteem on  naturally self-centered children.

In their book about American demographic history Generations, authors   Neil Howe and William Strauss  propose New Silent Generation as  the label for this generation.   

Soma & Our Brave New World

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's dystopic novel of a quickly
nearing future in which society manufactures babies for specific roles
in life and people control and mellow their experience with the drug
Soma is at hand. 

This, from a recent entry on a listserv to which I belong:

"I teach at Michigan State and a colleague recently told me that 40% of
our incoming students are on some form of psychotropic medication."

Child Poverty in America

When Cheney rushed back to Washington from his dubious celebratory trip to Iraq following elections there the official reason given was so he would be available to break tie votes in Congress during the last minute push to pass controversial legislation before the holiday break.

The one tied bill needing his vote was a budget item in which deep cuts were made in Medicaid/Medicare, student loans and food stamps. These cuts were necessary,  claim opponents,  in order to afford tax cuts for the rich a target audience for the beleaguered Bush administration.

The wisdom of cutting programs for the low-income, poorest families remains a disturbing question.

A new study from Cornell University grapples with some of the larger issues:

“When young school-age children do not always have enough to eat, their academic development -- especially reading – suffers. "We found that reading development, in particular, is affected in girls, though the mathematical skills of food-insecure children entering kindergarten also tend to develop significantly more slowly than other children's," said Edward Frongillo, associate professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell.

The research provides the strongest evidence to date that food insecurity has specific developmental consequences for children.

Food insecurity is defined as households having limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate or safe foods.

Despite federal food assistance and private charitable programs, food insecurity is a persistent national problem affecting 12 percent of all households and 18 percent of households with children.

About one in five American children live in poverty, the highest level of childhood poverty among developed nations.

The study is published in the December issue of the Journal of Nutrition (135:12).

 

 

Historians Rate Bush

The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered.

These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding.

Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever.

This is what those historians said:

# He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;

# He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;

# He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;

# He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;

# He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign (
Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);

# He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;

# He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;

# He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Demonizing Anti-War Advocates

The London Review of Books has an article about how the American right constructed a mythology around Jane Fonda in order to delegitimize opposition to the Vietnam war.

the Nixon administration and its supporters engaged in a systematic campaign of misinformation to make Fonda and anti-war veterans into hate-figures. The urinal stickers would not be far behind. Every time Nixon ratcheted down the US commitment to the war, he launched an attack on the people who called on him to ratchet down the commitment. While the article doesn’t draw an explicit parallel with what’s happening today, it’s lurking just beneath the surface.   

The current efforts of various right wing propagandists to tar the anti-war left as traitors smack of Nixon’s smear campaign in the 1970’s.

Then, as now, there was a widespread perception on left and right that the war was a disaster. Nonetheless, Nixon succeeded in using it as a wedge issue to split voters from the Democratic party, and to generate a set of pernicious myths that last to this day (not only Hanoi Jane’s treachery, but bogus stories about anti-war protesters spitting on veterans.

From Crooked Timber :

Mass Hysteria & False Testimony

One of the more bizarre items in the annals of contemporary American history is hysteria surrounding alleged Satanic sexual abuse of day care children in the notorious Los Angeles McMartin Pre School child molestation case.

Now one of the "victims" has come forward to tell his story.  Kyle Zirpolo is now 30 years old but is still troubled by the impact his false testimony had on the owners and employees of the school.

Some 400 former McMartin children were interviewed and given genital exams, and many were diagnosed as abuse victims.

This LA Times piece by Debbie Nathan includes a first-person account by Zirpolo who describes how his 'story' was extracted from him by professionals clearly victims themselves of mass hysteria and questionable professional judgment.  Zirpolo also describes how his attempts at age 10 to confess his false statements to his mother were rejected and to this day his mother refuses to believe him when he says no one molested him despite having so testified in 1984.

A revealing, and damning transcript of a small part of his testimony is reproduced in the article.

Debbie Nathan was contacted by Zirpolo after he saw Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary in which she appeared, about a similar case of alleged child abuse on Long Island.  The film is well worth viewing too.

Bush Approval rating: 35%

As Drudge and others noted yesterday Bush has been joking about his staff members' outing of Valerie Plame as an undercoverd CIA agent.  The man just doesn't get it.

Now comes speculation in Washington and elsewhere that Bush plans to pardon "Scooter" Libby if he is convicted of the crimes for which he was just indicted.  The man just doesn't get it.

I wonder if he gets this:  A new CBS poll shows Bush has an all time low approval rating of 35%.