Jun 24 2009
∞
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Nice atmosphere
Jun 10 2009
∞
The huge sign in page on Tumblr
It’s great. Why don’t more sites do that?
Mar 27 2009
∞
Discussion about a gas tax.
I think it’s about time to have a significant gas tax. Not just 5 cents a gallon.
Mar 26 2009
∞
And here’s just Emily
+
∞
Another:
+
∞
Fam:
Mar 21 2009
∞
The torn fabric of humanity
Just hanging out at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth and came to realize that the fabric of our society is completely at odds with humanity. The breadth of the disfunction is profound. It crosses disciplines, media, indeed even life functions. It’s profound. So I had to write about it to remember.
Here are the triggers to this realization:
First, the profoundly awful space - the Hopkins Center. It is an absolutely abhorent fallacy of design and function. Pieced together by institutional architects of several generations who were or remain profoundly disconnected from the authentic human experience. There is hardly a single comfortable room or passage in this whole maze of a dungeon. There is the constant sound of HVAC, and one is surrounded by rock and tile and hideous random lighting.
The place doesn’t even work institutionially. I had to move from one part of the building to another with a kid on crutches and had to use six different lifts and elevators - it took four times the amount of time, and was as confusing as linear algebra to find spaces. There must be 20 different levels, fifty different stairwells here. The place is hideous to all of the senses and sensibilities.
Second, reading an article about the new Yankees and Mets Stadiums in NY (got me thinking about public and institutional architecture so that I noticed it here)
Three: Reading the Blue Sweater about a journey into Africa (and the obvious proximity there to basic life necessities, so distant here in pretentious, duplicitous Dartmouth).
Four: the hideous destruction of the world order promulgated by AIG and the other investment banks - while I may have to lay off a virtually homeless person living in a wreck of a trailer, AIG bonuses are equalling what I might earn after working for 180 years at my current salary.
Five: Comedy Central (I forget how, but comedy brings it all back, doesn’t it)
Six: Clothing: clothing in the West is profoundly innefficient and unattractive - suits, pants, shoes, zippers, plastic, ironing, to say the least.
Seven: The incredible amount of waste which we all both create and require to survive. Thinking about the sea of plastic in the pacific and then thinking about the contribution of the humble toothbrush. Argh.
This discord is profound in education, in our social fabric, in architecture, transportation, the food system, our economic system, climate science, medicine, our society of class and disparity, sexuality, the nuclear family, fashion, creativity, expression, celebrity, language - you name it.
My realization is one of those that hovers just out of intellectual grasp, or capacity to explain, but it appears to be part of the truth of the world.
Blech, or argh or gasp or something.
Mar 14 2009
∞
US treatment of prisoners. A vile chapter in our history
What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.
+
∞
AIG Financial Services division destroys the world economy, but decides it has to pay 165 Million dollars to those who did it. Tomorrow.
Oh, they’re afraid of a “brain drain.”
Just to elaborate a little bit: the smart people who destroyed the world economy by selling and reselling credit default swaps are needed to save AIG. Well, if they broke it, let’s pay them millions of dollars in bonuses to fix it.
I want to know who they are, and I want them to be in jail.
Mar 03 2009
∞
Urban Projections & Wind Generator
to watch
Feb 17 2009
∞
“
My Turn: Missing the lesson of priest trials
By Hal Cochran • February 17, 2009
Bernard Roque’s “Catholic Church 101 lesson” — his words — (Jan. 18) requires correction. Roque argues that the statewide Roman Catholic diocese should not be punished for the sins of “one priest.” This would be Edward Paquette, whose serial sexual molestation of altar boys has led to jury verdicts against the diocese totaling $12.3 million to date.
Sadly, it wasn’t just one priest. As this newspaper reported, a clerical psychotherapist testified “that celibacy was not strictly enforced among priests and his research of diocesan records found that 109 Vermont priests had engaged in child abuse over the past 50 years.” But the courts have punished not only the pedophile priests, but the diocese itself. Why? The answer is in the church’s own personnel files put in evidence in recent trials involving two priests. Here are the facts.
Advertisement
As the Rutland Herald reported, “church records showed the diocese had transferred Paquette to the plaintiff’s Burlington parish without telling anyone it knew the priest had molested boys first in Massachusetts, then in Indiana and the Vermont cities of Rutland and Montpelier.”
When Alfred Willis was caught molesting boys during postings in Burlington and Montpelier, the bishop transferred him to a Milton church without telling anyone, even the pastor, that he was sending them a pedophile. Secrecy was the rule. As Wendell Searles, the diocese’s former “point person” in sexual abuse inquiries, admitted, “Yes, we wanted to protect the priests’ privacy.”
The church administrators did not report accusations of child abuse to civil authorities — police, prosecutors, or child welfare agencies — and pressured parents not to go to such authorities. They mollified irate parents by sending offending priests to other parishes, but failed to tell the new parishes what they were getting. “The most disquieting element of all,” concluded the Rutland Herald, “was the lack of concern evidenced by the church hierarchy with the welfare of the children who were abused.”
The Vermont diocese is being called to account not for the behavior of its priests but that of its leaders who tolerated, covered up and facilitated the continuing sexual abuse of their parishioners’ children. These leaders knowingly exposed vulnerable, trusting children to an unreasonable risk of severe harm which inevitably materialized again and again. Juries are entirely justified in punishing the diocese for its reckless negligence in hiring and sheltering known pedophiles. No church is above the law.
Mr. Roque worries that the lawsuits — 25 pending cases involving eight priests — will bankrupt the diocese: “When a teacher… is convicted of sexual crimes, do we sue the whole school district?” Yes, we could. Legislatures waive sovereign immunity, which the church cannot claim in any event, and require governmental subdivisions including school districts to insure themselves against liability. “What will happen to … Catholic Charities?” Does Mr. Roque not know that the diocese has put Catholic Charities and every parish in Vermont into charitable trusts to shield their assets?
Mr. Roque devotes most of his “little Catholic Church 101 lesson” to the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. Such emphasis is unwittingly appropriate. The sacraments are the key to the scandal. Any historian of religion knows that the sacraments were not, as Mr. Roque claims, “instituted by Jesus himself.” They were imposed by the church over many centuries to justify the distinction between priest and layperson, to entrench the priestly class as divinely ordained, indispensable intermediaries between the laity and God.
Today’s church would look depressingly familiar to Jesus, a radical egalitarian who rebelled against the systemic corruption of the priesthood of his time, who admonished his followers to “call no one on earth your father, for you have one Father — the one in heaven.”
The New Testament church had no priests. Two thousand years later, the priestly class is a bureaucracy like any other, concerned first and foremost to protect its power, prestige, and perquisites. As G.K. Chesterton, a Catholic, said, Christianity has not failed; it has just never been tried.
Hal Cochran lives in Burlington.
Feb 05 2009
∞
Pilot: ‘We’re Going to Be in the Hudson’ (via AssociatedPress)
Feb 03 2009
∞
