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POPSTennessee TV station airs "exposé" on local Muslims, but finds nothing remarkable; mosque vandalized a week later
It's a familiar and depressing story. A TV station (WTVF, a CBS affiliate in Nashville) decides to "investigate" a local community of Muslims, starting its program off with the usual crap: "Some say it's a training camp for terrorism. Others say it's not." Of course, they found that it wasn't. But of course, they want to attract viewers, so the report's tone was calculated to cast an ominous pall of suspicion over the community, even without any evidence that anything unsavory was going on. The report continually repeats the phrase "Homegrown Jihad," for example, and cites as evidence vague suspicions on the part of people who've never seen or researched this particular community. Well, surprise! One week after airdate, vandals spray-paint a Jerusalem cross (a Crusader symbol) on the wall of a Nashville mosque. All in a day's work, right, WTVF? Part two of story is here - http://j.mp/cDulkg . Part two is the one where a reporter actually goes out and, you know, reports. Part one just
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POPSWhat international marketing is doing to contemporary fiction Good piece by Tim Parks on how the need for English-language success is gradually sapping the distinctiveness of local literary traditions and substituting a kind of vaguely liberal aesthetic posturing for real literary creativity. I have been bothered by this for some time -- I think you see this pseudo-postmodern sensibility in English-language authors too, like Yann Martel, Zadie Smith, Angela Carter, and even T.C. Boyle. But postmodernism isn't the problem -- think Italo Calvino. And on the other hand, we still have talents like Jhumpa Lahiri writing in a related "global" idiom.
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POPSEthics, language and health-care reform: rationing and rights GetReligion's MZ Hemingway on a recent NYT editorial in the Times by Peter Singer. In the op-ed, Singer discusses the idea of "rationing" health care, saying that it is basically inevitable, whether the rationing is done by the government or by insurance companies. Hemingway identifies this, somewhat bizarrely in my view, with a new vogue for "eugenics." I find the post (like all Hemingway's posts) to be little more than a conservative opinion piece, and I don't get how it jibes with GetReligion's mission. But it's worth thinking about. I think that what Hemingway (and many other critics of the current health-care reform discussions) finds objectionable is the idea that the rationing process will be made visible and intentional, instead of being left to impersonal (and basically invisible) market forces -- or, more to the point, instead of being left to the fictional "individual" who supposedly is now in charge of his or her own care....
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POPSThe "seven habits of highly effective teachers" I think this is actually a pretty good summary of some important traits for teachers to cultivate. It's based on observations of a small group of award-winning primary teachers, but it has broad applicability, I think. Sure, it's a little vague, and it's kind of predictable, but sometimes bullet-pointed lists can be handy things anyhow. The source has more quotations and more detail.
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POPSFrom the horse's mouth: McCain's health-care advisor's personal blog McCain's health-care advisor, John Goodman, thinks we should deal with the problem of uninsured Americans by ordering the Census Bureau to stop calling people "uninsured." I kid you not. He says that since pretty much everyone ends up getting the medical care they need somehow or other, no one's really uninsured. If you read the whole post, you'll also see that Goodman is a little confused about how employer-provided health plans work in real life. This is also the same guy who recently said, commenting on health disparities between whites and nonwhites in the U.S., that "doctors just don’t control our over-eating, over-smoking, over-drinking, and shoot-outs in the hood." (http://snipr.com/3kuaa) Nice, dude. Nice.
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POPSA DIY tiny cabin for about $2000 From a blog on "tiny houses." The builder featured here designed and built his own 14'x14' cabin, including solar-powered water pump, composting toilet, and a propane-powered refrigerator and stove, for about $2000.
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POPSTorah Borntrager on "how I escaped the Amish" A young woman who was raised Amish, but who left the community at age 15, tells her story. This is an interview by Tim Ferris (the time-management guru) -- not what I expected to see at his blog at all, but I assume it's genuine.
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POPSOpenDNS for the non-technically inclined When I mistype a URL in the location bar, Verizon hijacks my request and sends me to a B.S. "search results" page (full of ads and spam). This post is a little starter for how to circumvent your ISP's DNS server with OpenDNS.
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POPSInnumeracy's John Allen Paulos on credulity and love A great post from 3quarksdaily (Feb. 2008) about the human desire to believe in something, even a fraud. Context: Paulos has put together a book debunking probabilistic arguments for God's existence. The clip doesn't do it justice -- RTWT ("read the whole thing").
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POPSTo the victor belong the spoils: Iraq's oil deal Andrew Sullivan reminds us that one of the Bush administrations official "benchmarks" for measuring progress in Iraq was the drafting of legislation to distribute Iraqi oil. Well, surprise, surprise, that legislation's been drafted, and the oil's been handed over to foreign companies with no bidding.
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POPSGoogle Health, HIPAA, and privacy A short post from Profy.com reminding us that Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are not covered by HIPAA privacy regulations. Sure, they have strict privacy policies, but -- as the post asks -- what about the first time an insurance company subpoenas your records trying to fight a workers comp claim?
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POPSFile-hosting and -sharing resources Orli Yakuel, the co-creator of the Go2Web20 directory, offers a current list of promising file-hosting services. Some are well-known, others less so. I can't tell if she's recommending them or only linking to them.
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POPSNew Facebook ads: privacy concerns not just alarmism Security researchers at CA have found that Facebook is now collecting information about your activities on partner sites regardless -- this is important -- regardless of whether you have opted out or even whether you are logged in to Facebook . Also see the linked follow-up post (slightly more technical, http://snipr.com/1utzp). I am not usually really worried by advertising-related privacy issues, but the fact that Facebook now tracks you when you're logged out of the site -- and the additional fact that they are publicly misrepresenting this capability -- is a little unnerving.
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POPSDo you know where that crucifix comes from? Via http://snipr.com/1u90g. The Association for Christian Retail (over $4 billion in business annually), following in Wal-Mart's footsteps, uses Chinese sweatshop labor to make crucifixes and sells them with the label "Made in Italy."
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POPSOld-school journalism + blogging, social networks: synergy? Linked from Dave Winer's blog, I think. A cool, experimental idea: connect beat reporters with an online circle of stakeholders joined by modern net-based social-networking tools. In this scenario, the "new" "Web2.0" model of information distribution doesn't kill old-school journalism but reinvigorates it.
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POPSCartoon: varieties of hijab on the Syrian street A cartoonist calling herself "Puppeteer" drew this amusing catalogue of the varieties of hijab she encounters walking to work each day in Damascus. To see the cartoon at full size, click the link at the very bottom of the clip.
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POPSFeast of Fools interviews Chocolate Rain's Tay Zonday This is why I gotta love the Internet. You don't just get Tay Zonday's wacky YouTube video. You get the video, plus the online conversation around it. Turns out he's an Am Civ grad student with interesting things to say about race and GLBT issues.
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POPSA student blogger on why active learning matters A student responds to one of Gardner Campbell's blog posts (http://snipr.com/1pavi). The point, in a nutshell: many students don't work hard in college because the "content" of each course seems to exist in a vacuum; thus, there's no reason to reflect deeply about it, aside from the desire to simply pass the course.
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POPSDave Winer: the problem with conferences Dave Winer's reflections on why traditionally-structured conference formats don't seem very productive, and what might work better -- free-form, small-scale conversations among smart people who really care about things.
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POPSPalestinian blogger: Hamas & Fatah, go to hell! The title says it all. He, too, sees Western support of Fatah as a treacherous and cynical way of prolonging intra-Palestinian conflict and sacrificing Palestinian lives. Palestinians, he says, want the PA and Fatah -- both corrupt -- and Hamas -- equally brutal and dangerous -- dismantled and an international peacekeeping force sent in to keep order. PS If you're interested in this kind of thing, and you don't read http://globalvoicesonline.org, check it out!
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POPSA Palestinian blogger's disgust at factional fighting A Palestinian student blogger observes that the factional violence in the Palestinian territory is all the more absurd because the PA itself has zero power. Not surprisingly, she blames Israel and the U.S. for building up Fatah's military power and thus for stoking the conflict, but she also blames Hamas.
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POPSOnline graphics generators for your site: roundup Pete Cashmore of Mashable posts a roundup of tools for automating the design of your site. Emphasis is on sleek CSS layouts, pale gradients, and faux-3D reflection effects, so you get a nice Web 2.0 look overall. Can't imagine I'd ever need to use this, but I think I will probably get stuck redesigning my department's website, so ... maybe I will after all.
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