Military Covers Up More Fiascoes

Glenn Greenwald has a great post today called "How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan". In it he describes how the mainstream media covered an incident which took place on 12 February of this year in which Iraqi civilians were killed outside a home where the celebration of a new birth was ongoing. Two men, two women (both of whom were pregnant), and a teenage girl were all slaughtered.

The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were "insurgents" or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of "honor killings" by the Taliban militants killed in the attack. Fiascoes

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon's version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon's version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women…

This is the New York Times article which documents the Pentagon's 180. But, when the incident happened in February, the NYT simply echoed the official line of the Pentagon that the men who were killed were bad guys and the women their victims. Instead it was a NATO coverup and afterwards the United States offered the victims' families $2,000 per death. Is this how to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people?

For too many of us such incidents are simply what fellow Madisonian Gregory Humphrey calls "realities on the ground", a phrase steeped in that kind of political language which Orwell noted "makes murder respectable". They rally behind a daddy figures like Gen. Stanley McChrystal when he says we need to really hit the insurgents but ignore him when he notes that in regard to U.S. soldiers killing locals at checkpoints in Afghanistan "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."

Concomitant to this is a video from 2007 showing an Apache helicopter opening up on a group of ostensibly peaceful civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists. You can watch the realities on the ground as they are murdered in cold blood. And, of course, our government did its best to sell the story that it is blameless.



Again, way to win the hearts and minds over there. If you were a friend or relative of any of the above people who were killed would you be welcoming of our troops in your country?

Lastly, did anyone notice the flags around town at half-staff last Monday? They were that way in honor of this man:



Army Spc. Robert Rieckhoff of Kenosha was killed in Iraq last month. R.I.P.

ADDENDUM: From Boing Boing, a look at CNN's webpage v. Al Jazeera's when this story broke here. iPad vs. military cover-up. Guess who ran with the iPad.

African American Store Now Open

On a recent trek down E. Wash I noticed that a new store had opened in the Eken Park neighborhood - African American Store. It's at 2750 E. Johnson - the intersection with North Lawn Ave. Could it replace Chicago's Kukulu Market to satiate my chechebsa cravings?

Unfortunately, no. The African American Store is mostly devoted to clothing, jewelry, musical instruments, et al but also carries health care products, DVDs of African movies, and some grocery items.

As far as the foodstuffs go, there are tea, some snacks such as fried plantains as well as herbs/spices and lots of grains, many of which I'd never heard of and so have no idea how they're prepared. The store can also meet all of your palm oil needs. Fresh vegetables are limited to sweet potatoes, plantains, and another which I cannot remember. I'll add that staff were very friendly. Although they seemed to have emigrated here from Africa, they all spoke perfectly fine English.

I walked out with a bag of fried plantains, some jerk paste, and a sack of teff flour so I can try to make some injera bread at home.

Winging It With Nichole and JM

Last Thursday The Dulcinea and I joined Nichole and JM of Eating Madison A to Z at Quaker Steak and Lube. My meal is below. Keep an eye on their webpage for my erudite take on the wings.

I Am Inspired By the Devil!

Father Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist, blames Satan for all of Pope Fritzy's bad press.

“There is no doubt about it. Because he is a marvelous Pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the devil wants to ‘grab hold’ of him.”

Of course Satan is. It has nothing to do with Fritzy standing idly by as child rapists are sent from one group of victims to another. Nope. That can't be it. People can't legitimately be angry at someone who let paedophiles roam free in favor of trying to maintain the Church's image. It just has to be the Devil.

The Coming Olive Oil Crisis

We will soon reach peak olive oil and some salads will go undressed.

Ashes to Ashes Series 3 Preview

The Gene Genie returns tomorrow!

I Think the Starkweather-Moore Expedition Missed This

That's a 50' waterfall of crimson primordial ooze.

Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of "primordial ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

If you're planning an expedition to investigate the ooze, don't forget to pack lots of Cthulhu snacks. Dealing with all those Shoggoths and the Mi-go is tough work.

Tough Times in Brew City

It's been very depressing and worrying lately to read about Milwaukee. Last year the state assumed control of Milwaukee County's public assistance programs and now I read about some terribly disheartening studies. The one that seemed to get the most press showed that black fourth graders in Brew City have the worst reading scores in whole country.

Reading scores for Wisconsin's African-American fourth-graders trail those of their racial peers in every other state and the District of Columbia, according to a national government report that delivered dire news Wednesday about how Wisconsin prepares its students.

Further, fourth-graders as a whole in Wisconsin are losing ground in reading while other states make gains, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation's report card. Only 33% of the state's fourth-graders scored at a level considered proficient or advanced by the test; the rest scored at a basic level or lower.

This is an embarrassment. We are the richest country in human history yet here we are in the 21st century struggling with literacy and the state I call home is racing to the very bottom with black children essentially there already. While the majority of black children are in Milwaukee-Kenosha-Racine, I don't doubt that we face a similar problem here in Madison but with a smaller population.

Another study which I didn't discover until recently and doesn't seem have gotten any mention in Madison's newspapers was done on eviction in Milwaukee and it was carried out by a UW-Madison student named Matt Desmond. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a story about it but the timing was unfortunate as it hit the paper on New Year's Day. The results showed that eviction is to black women and prison is for black men. (Wisconsin has the highest percentage of black prisoners in the nation.)

The study found that one renter-occupied household in 20 is evicted each year in Milwaukee. In neighborhoods where blacks are the majority, the study found that number jumps to one in 10 renter-occupied households evicted every year.

The study was undertaken by Matt Desmond, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He analyzed court records and a did a year's worth of field work that included living in a south side trailer park and in a rooming house on the city's north side.

During his research, Desmond spent time with tenants fighting evictions and packing their belongings. He also spent time with landlords to get their side of the eviction story.

"This is a unique study because there's a lot of information about foreclosures, but not much on evictions," said Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty and a professor in UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs.

And to add Pelion upon Ossa, I have discovered a report which notes that single women of color are incredibly poor.

The study, "Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America's Future," found that while the median net worth of single white women ages 36-49 is $42,600 -- 61 percent of the median wealth for same-aged, single white men -- single women of color in the same age group have a median wealth of just $5.

Black and Hispanic women are also drastically worse off in a broader age bracket, with almost half of single black and single Hispanic women ages 18-64 reporting zero or negative wealth (46 percent and 45 percent, respectively), compared with 23 percent of single white women, according to the report.

Mind you, these are not Milwaukee-specific numbers but Milwaukee's black population is 35-40%.

Because Madison is largely white and comparatively well-off because we have a Big 10 university and the state government apparatus we don't see these conditions very much. A lot of people here tend to think of these problems as Milwaukee's problems but I have to wonder exactly how our state can prosper when its largest city is in such dire straits. And let us not forget that poverty is growing here in Madison as well.

How Is This Possible?

I.M. Pei on American Masters

Concomitant to my review of Iris Chang's The Chinese in America earlier this week, it is worth noting that the PBS show American Masters takes a look at Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei which airs tonight at 8 here in Madison.

I.M. Pei has been called the most important living modern architect, defining the landscapes of some of the world’s greatest cities. A monumental figure in his field and a laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, Pei is the senior statesman of modernism and last surviving link to such great early architects as Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. Entering into the twilight of his career and well into his eighties, Pei returns to his ancestral home of Suzhou, China to work on his most personal project to date. He is commissioned to build a modern museum in the city’s oldest neighborhood which is populated by classical structures from the Ming and Qing dynasties. For the architect who placed the pyramid at the Louvre, the test to integrate the new with the old is familiar but still difficult. The enormous task is to help advance China architecturally without compromising its heritage. In the end, what began as his greatest challenge and a labor of sentiment, says Pei, ultimately becomes “my biography.” 

Here's a preview:

Pope Fritzy's List of Victims Grows

We can now add another paedophile to the Vatican's roster - Father Ernesto Garcia-Rubio.

An investigation into a defrocked priest who ministered here in South Florida and allegedly preyed on young children from the Mariel boat lift, Nicaragua and El Salvador has reportedly uncovered documents that indicate his actions were acknowledged and covered up by the Vatican.

According to child sexual abuse attorneys Stuart Mermelstein and Jessica Arbour, the documents reveal an international cover up of Garcia-Rubios's pattern of sexual misconduct. The Vatican, Archdiocese of Miami, and Garcia-Rubio's Cuban diocese all reportedly knew he posed a threat to children early in his ministry, yet each entity did nothing to warn the parishioners.

To add insult to injury, The Vatican is doing its best to avoid legal ramifications here in the States. Regarding a lawsuit filed against the Church in Kentucky:

Plaintiffs in the Kentucky suit contend that bishops are employees of the Vatican. That point is crucial to determining whether the Holy See can be held responsible for their behavior.

There's a general consensus among legal scholars that an employee is someone who works for the employer, who controls the details of the work. Attorneys for the Vatican are expected to argue that diocesan bishops do not work for the pope, and that the Holy See does not exercise the day-to-day control over their work necessary to create an employment relationship.

So the Pope doesn't exercise day-to-day control, eh? Am I to take it that priests raping children is such a quotidian event that the situation was beneath him? Exactly how heinous a crime would need to be committed for it to extend beyond the mundane daily routine of a church to get the Holy See's attention?

The Chinese in America by Iris Chang

Having had a friend who is an ABC (American-born Chinese) for nearly 33 years, I have always had glimpses into what's it like to be a Chinese American. There's the stereotyping and racism, the tension between growing up American and having parents who retain traditional Chinese values and expectations, et al. And so when I found Iris Chang's The Chinese in America, I thought it would be interesting to learn about the broader scenario from which my friend's tales emerge.

Chang begins her narrative by giving some background on 19th century imperial China before discussing the earliest Chinese immigrants who came to America. She makes a habit of giving the reader brief bits of Chinese history which I really appreciate as they explain from where in China the various waves of migrants came from but also provides some sense of their motivations. The first immigrants were mostly men from the economically depressed Guangdong region and they came here because they'd heard about "Gold Mountain", i.e. – California. These men were hard workers but they often found themselves the target of racism. This state of affairs changed little when the Gold Rush ended and thousands of Chinese immigrants found work helping build the Transcontinental Railroad. They often did the most dangerous work and received less pay than their white counterparts. During the 1870s, the United States suffered an economic depression that brought on even more and more vicious discrimination. The early history of Chinese Americans climaxed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which severely limited the immigration of Chinese citizens and made it impossible for many to return to the United States after visiting family in their homeland. It was not repealed until 1965.

Chang provides an endless stream of examples of discrimination and violence against Chinese Americans but, ever since the first Chinese stepped off the boat in the 19th century, Chinese Americans have contributed to America. In addition to laying track and prospecting, there are the countless stores and shops plus she points out notable people such as M.C. Chang, the co-inventor of the birth control pill, renowned architect I.M. Pei, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. But there's more to the book than simply being a catalogue of injustices and achievements. One of Chang's main arguments is that Chinese Americans are still outsiders in American society that have yet to be fully accepted. This notion can be traced all the way back to the first Chinese Americans in 19th century California where laws enshrined discrimination against blacks – but what about yellow people? I found sections discussing the lives of Chinese in the American South to be particularly interesting. There they straddled color lines. Chinese were acceptable to whites yet they saw their commonalities with the blacks as well and found themselves in the middle during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Chang argues that this middle position – where pale skin is accompanied by epicanthic folds – is where Chinese Americans are stuck. She further opines that the attitudes of the white majority in America towards Chinese Americans tend to mirror Sino-American relations. And so their skin color and small numbers make them acceptable under good circumstances but their eyes and the fact that China is not always on the best of terms with the United States can turn them into scapegoats very easily.

The book is written in an accessible style where Chang gives an overview and illustrates generalizations with quotes from individuals. On the one hand, this personalizes the history and keeps it from being a jumble of statistics and an overly broad picture. And having people talk about their experiences also allows her to cover territory that one couldn't if she didn't zero in on certain topics. One area served particularly well by this technique is when ABCs talk about their estrangement from older members of their community who still had ties to China. On the other hand, there are instances when Chang quotes a person or two and expects the reader to take it on faith that these views are representative of the larger group of Chinese Americans.

Other than this quibble, Chang has certainly constructed an engaging overview of the history of Chinese Americans and shed some new light on a decades old friendship.

Scarface: The School Play

Man, we'd never have been able to stage Scarface at school when I was a kid. Times have sure changed.


Scarface School Play - Watch more Funny Videos

Hitchens On Milwaukee Priest-Paedophile Scandal

It'd be nice to see Milwaukee in the national press for something other than 200 deaf boys being raped by a priest and having the whole thing washed over by Pope Fritzy.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

Also disgusting is how civil authorities failed in their duties.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

What the hell was wrong with the criminal justice system? After trotting out the, "Yeah, but other people did it too" defense, Archbishop Dolan of New York claims:

Because, as we now sadly realize, nobody, nowhere, no time, no way, no how knew the extent, depth, or horror of this scourge, nor how to adequately address it.

So, is he sincere in saying that dealing with child rapists is one of the great advances of only the last 50 years? What an asshole. Pope Pius V had it figured out back in the 16th century when he declared that priests who rape children would be defrocked and handed over to the courts for punishment. Local constabularies have been dealing with this stuff for centuries. Are any of the bishops who reported Murphy's paedophilial predilections to Fritzy still alive? If so, instead of suing to block health care form, perhaps our Attorney General can bring those douchebags up on charges of aiding and abetting a child rapist along with any living civil authorities that stood by and did nothing.

While ACORN goes out of business because of some video editing, the Catholic Church remains, as Matt Taibbi points out, a taxpayer-subsidized guardian of child molesters.

In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.

Madison Meet Milwaukee

Steve Jagler at OnMilwaukee has an article up there about how the business community is largely silent on the subject of the high-speed rail line between Milwaukee and Madison.

High-speed rail in Wisconsin may be an $823 million priority for the Obama administration, but from a public relations standpoint, it is an abandoned orphan.

At best, most business advocacy groups in Wisconsin are keeping the high-speed rail project at arm's length. In most cases, that's because their members are as divided about the issue as the public seems to be.

At the same time, I read that the Republican gubernatorial candidates are saying they'd 86 the railway if they get elected. In response, the DOT is working like mad to get contracts in place lest a Republican, i.e. – Milwaukee Co. Executive Scott Walker, take office.

I guess I've just been reading too much stuff about regional planning for the Midwest because it puzzles me that neither a Milwaukee official nor state business groups seem to be showing any interest in HSR. Milwaukee watches as its job base dwindles yet those who should be talking about a rail connection as having the potential to help draw Madison-Milwaukee-Chicago together as a regional economy aren't.

Again, perhaps I've just been reading too much Richard Longworth, but I think he and his ilk make good points. The Midwest is in decay. As the economy becomes ever more global, we have declining rural areas and a Rust Belt. The main point they make is that the Midwest has to strengthen itself and then unify to compete in the global economy. That means that Wisconsin will have to partner with the Flatlanders in Illinois, Iowans, etc. Closer to home Madison and Milwaukee are going to have to become conjoined and perhaps a rail line can be play a role in bringing our two cities closer together as well as creating ties between Madison and the Midwest's capital, Chicago.

We Madisonians spend a lot of time arguing over the Edgewater but our city's future lies with another building – the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery - and our ability to leverage what happens there in a global market. And we can't do it alone.

Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores

"The Midwest takes their drinking seriously."

Please Don't Play the Victim

Emily Mills has an op-ed in the latest issue of Isthmus in which she implores readers to "Keep up the fight on health care". In it she says:

I happen to be among the more than 40 million Americans who lack health insurance. If I get sick or injured, I would almost certainly go into serious debt and probably have to declare bankruptcy. I can't afford the medication I need for a chronic stomach condition, so I go without. It's ridiculous."

Personally I find this statement to be disingenuous, to say the least. It's a ploy for sympathy that I will give no quarter because, as she has stated at her blog, she "cast off (her) full-time desk job on purpose" – emphasis hers. It's one thing to argue that health care should be a right for people in this country but it's something else to ignore reality and the reality is we don't have universal coverage. However things should be doesn't change the fact that Ms. Mills voluntarily rid herself of health insurance.

In speaking about the health care reform debate, she finds herself flummoxed and writes:

It baffles me that some of my fellow citizens have been so thoroughly duped by fear-mongering and false information that they now rage against their own self-interest."

Do you think that it might have been in Ms. Mills' self-interest to keep her insurance instead of putting herself in the position of not having medication and being one illness or accident away from bankruptcy? She made her choice and she chose to go without insurance to instead pursue her writing, musical, etc. endeavors full-time. But now that the die is cast, she has the nerve to turn around and use herself as an example of the problems facing our uninsured.

While I am in favor of health care reform (but have some gripes about the pending legislation), I would implore Ms. Mills to refrain from using herself as a poster child as she continues the fight because this is the message doing so gives off to many whose support we could use: Somebody wants to be an artist and thinks the world owes her.

I can barely muster any sympathy for her and instead am worried for people like my friend who hasn't been able to find construction work in ages and a co-worker who is certainly among the working poor as he lives in a trailer with no hot water and does a lot of his shopping out in the woods and at local streams & rivers.

I wish Ms. Mills all the luck in the world in her career and hope she is and remains as close to healthy as a horse as possible. But I also hope that she'll stop holding her own position up as an argument for health care reform. Life is about making choice amongst things that are, not as how we would have them be. And, if she must try to gain sympathy with her situation in future editorials, then I hope she'll at least tell people that she is going without insurance by her own choice as opposed to intimating that she's the victim of forces beyond her control.

Corned Beef Hitting the Big Time in Madison?

The Reubens at Cooper's Tavern are getting rave reviews.

I hear that one upshot of this is that the supplier of the beef they use for corning, Knoche's Butcher Shop, is seeing their brisket and corned beef sales go through the roof. Regarding the latter, this is despite the fact that folks behind the meat counter warn customers that their corned beef is not the same as that found at Cooper's.

Is this the start of a new food trend? We shall see.

Starring Werner Herzog As...The Plastic Bag

My skin against her skin...

A Festival of Foreign Films

I don't know about you, but I managed to get tickets for all the films I wanted to see at the Wisconsin Film Festival. It was a bit of a mad dash because, as noon Saturday loomed, I discovered that a few of the films I was keen on seeing were going to be coming to Sundance this spring so I decided to avoid those and go with some unknown propositions.

Firstly there's Joon-ho Bong's Madeo (Mother) which opens the week of the festival on 16 April.

The following week we get the Swedish thriller Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). Perhaps it will make a trend out of Scandanavian crime fiction.

7 May brings us the stop motion animated Panique au village (A Town Called Panic) from Belgium which is family-friendly and perhaps a good way to get your children into foreign cinema.

Although I wasn't planning on seeing it at the festival, The Art of the Steal hits Sundance on 14 May. It's a documentary about how a multi-billion dollar art collection was moved from a small, private suburban Philadelphia site to a grand public art museum in downtown Philly. I heard about it on NPR and it just sounded too biased and conspiratorial for my taste.

Although not playing at the festival, Nordwand (North Face) is coming to Sundance as well. It, along with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and another film at the festival, OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus (OSS 117: Lost in Rio) are distributed by a relatively new company in Chicago, Music Box Films. Newcity Film recently posted a profile of MBF which notes the outfit is mostly going after foreign films instead of American indie pics.

Andreotti says that going after micro-budgeted American independent films can be “tricky,” and it best suited the new company to focus on quality foreign films that have slipped through the cracks and haven’t received the attention they deserved. “In some ways, it’s, ironically, a safer bet to go after the foreign-language films,” he says.

Now, whether or not having MBF a relative hop, skip, and jump away will mean more for foreign films here in Madison or not, I don't know. But it is encouraging to see the films they're distributing showing up in our cinemas.