I have a hard time understanding how we could suddenly talk about torture as one option for interrogation. What about universal human rights? What about American ideals of freedom, democracy and respect for life? What about 'end does not justify the means'?
Dahlia Lithwick writes about how we got 'there' from 'here': the Abu Ghraib scandal numbed our psyche to accept torture.
- Of course some of us cannot accept torture as a viable option ever. But some of us cannot accept the death penalty either.
How the Abu Ghraib images lost their power to horrify. By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
Friday, September 29, 2006
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Had Enough?
More disasters in Iraq: all the money that's been pouring in to rebuild a nation destroyed by our tanks and guns is going to waste by incompetence, greed and corruption. How much is too much? When do we say 'enough'? When do we stop paying taxes to support this lunacy? Is it not time to have another tea party?
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Crucial Iraq police academy "a disaster"
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Crucial Iraq police academy "a disaster"
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton is finally stepping out of silence and speaking out about the events prior to 9/11. He was interviewed on FOX news and he gave a spirited defense of his presidency; it was fun to watch. I miss his intellect and ability to debate.
"You Did Your Nice Little Conservative Hit Job On Me."
"You Did Your Nice Little Conservative Hit Job On Me."
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Friday, September 22, 2006
Television valta
Amerikkalaiset katsovat telkkaria yli nelja tuntia paivassa ja telkkari on paalla yli kahdeksan tuntia paivittain. Kodeissa on enemman televisioita kuin ihmisia; melkein joka huoneessa on vastaanotin. Ei ihme etta ne, jotka omistavat median, omistavat kansalaisten mielen. (Varsinkin, kun suurin osa ohjelmista on puppua ja tyhjan taytetta, jotta saataisiin mainokset nakyviin.)
TVs taking over in U.S. homes
By DAVID BAUDER The AssociatedPress
NEW YORK — The average U.S. home has more television sets than people.
That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.
Rick Melen, a facilities manager, has three sets in the Somers, N.Y., home he shares with his wife. That doesn't count the bathroom set that broke down and hasn't been replaced or the speakers installed near their hot tub, allowing them to watch a wide-screen set through a window.
"It's really just a matter of where your living takes place, what rooms you tend to spend your time in," Melen said Thursday. "Other appliances you can move from room to room, but if you have cable, you can't move a television."
Also, the popularity of flat-screen TVs makes it easy to put sets where they haven't been before.
Half of U.S. homes have three or more TVs, and only 19 percent have just one, Nielsen said. In 1975, 57 percent of homes had only one set and 11 percent had three or more, the company said.
David and Teresa Leon, of Schenectady, N.Y., and their 4-year-old twins have seven sets, plus an eighth they haven't set up yet. They include TVs in the parents' and kids' bedrooms, the family and living rooms and one in the kitchen that is usually tuned to a news station.
"No one ever sits down for more than a few seconds in this house," said Teresa Leon, a stenographer. "This way you can watch TV while you're moving from room to room, folding laundry or taking care of the kids."
In the average home, a television set is on for more than one-third of the day: 8 hours, 14 minutes, Nielsen said. That's an hour more than it was a decade ago.
The average person watches 4 hours, 35 minutes of television each day, Nielsen said.
One new Nielsen finding — that young people 12 to 17 watched 3 percent more television during the season that ended in May than they had the previous year — is a particular relief to TV network executives.
For a few years, Nielsen had found that TV viewing among teenagers was flat or declining, a trend blamed on the Internet or the popularity of electronic games and other devices.
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
TVs taking over in U.S. homes
By DAVID BAUDER The AssociatedPress
NEW YORK — The average U.S. home has more television sets than people.
That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.
Rick Melen, a facilities manager, has three sets in the Somers, N.Y., home he shares with his wife. That doesn't count the bathroom set that broke down and hasn't been replaced or the speakers installed near their hot tub, allowing them to watch a wide-screen set through a window.
"It's really just a matter of where your living takes place, what rooms you tend to spend your time in," Melen said Thursday. "Other appliances you can move from room to room, but if you have cable, you can't move a television."
Also, the popularity of flat-screen TVs makes it easy to put sets where they haven't been before.
Half of U.S. homes have three or more TVs, and only 19 percent have just one, Nielsen said. In 1975, 57 percent of homes had only one set and 11 percent had three or more, the company said.
David and Teresa Leon, of Schenectady, N.Y., and their 4-year-old twins have seven sets, plus an eighth they haven't set up yet. They include TVs in the parents' and kids' bedrooms, the family and living rooms and one in the kitchen that is usually tuned to a news station.
"No one ever sits down for more than a few seconds in this house," said Teresa Leon, a stenographer. "This way you can watch TV while you're moving from room to room, folding laundry or taking care of the kids."
In the average home, a television set is on for more than one-third of the day: 8 hours, 14 minutes, Nielsen said. That's an hour more than it was a decade ago.
The average person watches 4 hours, 35 minutes of television each day, Nielsen said.
One new Nielsen finding — that young people 12 to 17 watched 3 percent more television during the season that ended in May than they had the previous year — is a particular relief to TV network executives.
For a few years, Nielsen had found that TV viewing among teenagers was flat or declining, a trend blamed on the Internet or the popularity of electronic games and other devices.
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Happy Reunion
This is a heart-warming story: family members, who have not seen each other for 65 years get reunited. It's also very sad: a lifetime of not knowing that your family was still alive.
When I traveled in Israel almost 20 years ago I met a friendly older woman who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in someone's attic. She was a teenager at the time. After the war she had moved to Israel and found some surviving family members. It was remarkable to hear a first-hand account of such a survival story.
Siblings reunited 65 years after being separated during Holocaust
By ARON HELLERThe Associated Press
JERUSALEM — Hilda Shlick thought she lost nearly all her family in the Holocaust — until her Internet-savvy grandsons located her brother in Canada.
"After 65 years, I have found the sister who I love," Simon Glasberg, 81, said Monday in heavily accented English, his eyes filling with tears. "I can't stop kissing her."
Using the database of Holocaust victims at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, two of Shlick's grandchildren, Benny and David, began unearthing a mystery spanning six decades.
While improved technology in recent years has made the task of tracking Holocaust survivors easier, fewer survivors remain as each year passes.
Scanning the database, the grandsons, both in their 20s, discovered an entry erroneously stating their grandmother had perished half a century earlier. That entry led them to other surviving relatives, who brought about the siblings' emotional reunion Friday.
When Glasberg, who lives near Ottawa, saw his gray-haired little sister for the first time, he recognized her immediately, he said.
"I felt I couldn't talk. I just cried," he said. "You don't understand, 65 years. ... " His voice trailed off.
Shlick, 75, said she too was overwhelmed by the discovery.
"For 65 years, I lived thinking I had no family besides one sister," she said.
Since Friday's reunion, the family bond has clearly been re-established, with the two elderly siblings playfully joking and reminiscing in a hearty mixture of Russian and Yiddish. Their large families have quickly become close.
The last time the two saw each other was in 1941, when the Glasberg family of Chernowitz, Romania, was separated after the Nazis invaded.
Hilda, then 10, escaped to Uzbekistan with her older sister Bertha. The rest of the family — parents Henia and Benzion, and brothers Simon, Mark, Karol and Eddie — stayed in Romania, finding refuge in a basement. The fate of one sister, Pepi, remains unknown. She disappeared and is presumed to have been killed by the Nazis.
Glasberg, his brothers and parents emigrated to Canada after the war ended. Shlick and her sister moved to Estonia, where Bertha died in 1970.
In 1998, Shlick immigrated to Israel. During a family conversation this summer, her grandsons learned her maiden name was Glasberg, and they began to investigate her past.
They logged onto the Yad Vashem Web site and found a page of testimony submitted in 1999 by her brother Karol, of Montreal, who wrote about his sister Hilda, who "perished in the Shoah [Holocaust]."
Karol died that same year, but further searches through the Web site of the Montreal Burial Society and online forums of survivors of Chernowitz, Shlick's grandsons were able to track down his son, who filled in what happened to the divided family.
Shlick's parents died in the 1980s in Montreal, living well into their 90s, as did her brother Eddie, who died in 2004.
Mark Glasberg lives in Ottawa, but was too ill to travel to Israel to meet his sister. His son Irving, however, lives in Israel, just half an hour away from his missing relatives.
Shlick said she plans to travel to Canada soon to see her other relatives and visit the graves of the parents she lost as a child.
Glasberg, though thrilled to find his sister, said the reunion was bittersweet because of the years the family was divided.
"My poor parents, they always said, 'We wish we would find all our kids,' " he said. "It is such a tragedy, but now I am so happy."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003265094_reunion19.html
When I traveled in Israel almost 20 years ago I met a friendly older woman who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in someone's attic. She was a teenager at the time. After the war she had moved to Israel and found some surviving family members. It was remarkable to hear a first-hand account of such a survival story.
Siblings reunited 65 years after being separated during Holocaust
By ARON HELLERThe Associated Press
JERUSALEM — Hilda Shlick thought she lost nearly all her family in the Holocaust — until her Internet-savvy grandsons located her brother in Canada.
"After 65 years, I have found the sister who I love," Simon Glasberg, 81, said Monday in heavily accented English, his eyes filling with tears. "I can't stop kissing her."
Using the database of Holocaust victims at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, two of Shlick's grandchildren, Benny and David, began unearthing a mystery spanning six decades.
While improved technology in recent years has made the task of tracking Holocaust survivors easier, fewer survivors remain as each year passes.
Scanning the database, the grandsons, both in their 20s, discovered an entry erroneously stating their grandmother had perished half a century earlier. That entry led them to other surviving relatives, who brought about the siblings' emotional reunion Friday.
When Glasberg, who lives near Ottawa, saw his gray-haired little sister for the first time, he recognized her immediately, he said.
"I felt I couldn't talk. I just cried," he said. "You don't understand, 65 years. ... " His voice trailed off.
Shlick, 75, said she too was overwhelmed by the discovery.
"For 65 years, I lived thinking I had no family besides one sister," she said.
Since Friday's reunion, the family bond has clearly been re-established, with the two elderly siblings playfully joking and reminiscing in a hearty mixture of Russian and Yiddish. Their large families have quickly become close.
The last time the two saw each other was in 1941, when the Glasberg family of Chernowitz, Romania, was separated after the Nazis invaded.
Hilda, then 10, escaped to Uzbekistan with her older sister Bertha. The rest of the family — parents Henia and Benzion, and brothers Simon, Mark, Karol and Eddie — stayed in Romania, finding refuge in a basement. The fate of one sister, Pepi, remains unknown. She disappeared and is presumed to have been killed by the Nazis.
Glasberg, his brothers and parents emigrated to Canada after the war ended. Shlick and her sister moved to Estonia, where Bertha died in 1970.
In 1998, Shlick immigrated to Israel. During a family conversation this summer, her grandsons learned her maiden name was Glasberg, and they began to investigate her past.
They logged onto the Yad Vashem Web site and found a page of testimony submitted in 1999 by her brother Karol, of Montreal, who wrote about his sister Hilda, who "perished in the Shoah [Holocaust]."
Karol died that same year, but further searches through the Web site of the Montreal Burial Society and online forums of survivors of Chernowitz, Shlick's grandsons were able to track down his son, who filled in what happened to the divided family.
Shlick's parents died in the 1980s in Montreal, living well into their 90s, as did her brother Eddie, who died in 2004.
Mark Glasberg lives in Ottawa, but was too ill to travel to Israel to meet his sister. His son Irving, however, lives in Israel, just half an hour away from his missing relatives.
Shlick said she plans to travel to Canada soon to see her other relatives and visit the graves of the parents she lost as a child.
Glasberg, though thrilled to find his sister, said the reunion was bittersweet because of the years the family was divided.
"My poor parents, they always said, 'We wish we would find all our kids,' " he said. "It is such a tragedy, but now I am so happy."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003265094_reunion19.html
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Easy Days Are Over
The days of cruising into high school graduation are finally over in Washington State. Now students have to pass WASL in order to graduate. Washington students are not used to having to perform at this level, and many are failing the test. What's most troublesome about the test is that minorities and students from poor families are doing much worse than average. Americans don't like to talk about race or class - that's so Old World - but it is very evident from the test scores that race and class have a lot to do with one's success.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003257791_wasl14m.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003257791_wasl14m.html
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Monday, September 11, 2006
Syyskuun yhdestoista
Tanaan tulee viisi vuotta siita, kun Yhdysvaltoihin hyokattiin neljan matkustajakoneen voimin. Muistan viela hyvin sen aamun: olin juuri lahdossa toihin kun aiti soitti Suomesta ja kaski laittaa telkkarin paalle, silla New Yorkissa on juuri tapahtunut jotain kamalaa. Sanoin etten ehdi, mutta panen autossa radion paalle. Vasta ajaessani toihin tajusin terroriteon vakavuuden.
Kun tulin tyopaikalle olin jo tosi jarkyttyneessa tilassa kuunneltuani radion lahetysta; yhdessa eraan tyokaverin kanssa lahdimme tuttavan luokse katsomaan telkkarista koko tapahtumaa. Pian molemmat tornit hajosivat silmiemme edessa ja tuhannet ihmiset juoksivat pakoon ympari kaupunkia. Monta paivaa iskujen jalkeen kuuntelin radiosta itku kurkussa uutisia ja silminnakijoiden kokemuksia tuon paivan tapahtumista. Kaikki tuntui liian laheiselta; olin valmis lahtemaan kostoretkelle.
On vielakin vaikea uskoa syyskuun yhdennentoista tapahtumia todeksi. Mutta on viela vaikeampaa (ja surullista) todeta miten paljon elama Yhdysvalloissa on muuttunut viiden vuoden takaisten tapahtumien vuoksi. Totta on, etta hyokkays oli kammottava ja ihmishenkien menetys raskas, mutta mita onkaan saavutettu kaikella sotimisella ja uholla?
Syyskuun yhdennestatoista on tullut politiikan pelinappula. Kaikella siihen liittyvalla manipuloidaan kansalaisia tarrautumaan mahdottomalta tuntuviin uskonkappaleisiin ja hylkaamaan kaiken sen, mika on tehnyt Amerikasta uniikin: vapauden olla ja elaa omaa elamaansa niin kuin haluaa.
Kun tulin tyopaikalle olin jo tosi jarkyttyneessa tilassa kuunneltuani radion lahetysta; yhdessa eraan tyokaverin kanssa lahdimme tuttavan luokse katsomaan telkkarista koko tapahtumaa. Pian molemmat tornit hajosivat silmiemme edessa ja tuhannet ihmiset juoksivat pakoon ympari kaupunkia. Monta paivaa iskujen jalkeen kuuntelin radiosta itku kurkussa uutisia ja silminnakijoiden kokemuksia tuon paivan tapahtumista. Kaikki tuntui liian laheiselta; olin valmis lahtemaan kostoretkelle.
On vielakin vaikea uskoa syyskuun yhdennentoista tapahtumia todeksi. Mutta on viela vaikeampaa (ja surullista) todeta miten paljon elama Yhdysvalloissa on muuttunut viiden vuoden takaisten tapahtumien vuoksi. Totta on, etta hyokkays oli kammottava ja ihmishenkien menetys raskas, mutta mita onkaan saavutettu kaikella sotimisella ja uholla?
Syyskuun yhdennestatoista on tullut politiikan pelinappula. Kaikella siihen liittyvalla manipuloidaan kansalaisia tarrautumaan mahdottomalta tuntuviin uskonkappaleisiin ja hylkaamaan kaiken sen, mika on tehnyt Amerikasta uniikin: vapauden olla ja elaa omaa elamaansa niin kuin haluaa.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Muuttotouhut
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Muutamme uuteen kotiin syyskuussa. Kuvassa meidan rivitalo. Tanaan menee vanha talo myyntiin. Olemme raataneet niska limassa viimeiset kaksi viikkoa: siivonneet, maalanneet, kitkeneet rikkaruohoja, pakanneet laatikoita ja korjanneet kamoja pois silmista. Selkaa sarkee, mutta olo on hyva.
Toivottavasti talo saadaan pian myydyksi, ettei tarvitse maksaa kahta lyhennysta. Seattlessa asuntomarkkinat ovat edelleen hyvat, vaikka muualla maassa on jo alkanut taantuma.
Friday, September 01, 2006
The Scream
The Scream is back! Edvard Munch's most famous painting was stolen two years ago but has been returned to the museum in Oslo. This is good news indeed - what would we do without the image of the best crazy scream in the world?
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