In the run-up to Christmas this year, Trafalgar Square's Northern Terrace will play host to a life-sized ice sculpture of a hunting polar bear. Over 10 days the Bear in the Square will melt, leaving a skeleton, a pool of water and a powerful environmental message.
Sculptor, Mark Coreth will finish carving the bear from a huge block of white ice during the morning of Friday 11th December. After that, anyone who visits Trafalgar Square will be able to reach out and touch the melting bear and the skeleton as it emerges.
Most people miss the two bottom lines that I found engaging:
1. China's government is a screwed up bureaucracy with petty egos just like ours.
2. China produced moderate pragmatist Premier Zhao Ziyang, promoted him, and empowered him.
With all due respect to all those wailing and moaning about the years of house arrest, this book is phenomenal for documenting the above two points alone, and Premier Zhao Ziyang will stand in history as one of the greatest leaders along with Mao Zedong (their rendition, I always preferred Mao Tse-tung) and Deng Xiaoping.
Last week, the chairman of President Barack Obamaās Council of Economic Advisers — a position that carried the title āchief economistā until Larry Summers took up residence in the White House — testified to the Joint Economic Committee on the economic crisis and the efficacy of the policy response.
Hereās the executive summary in case you missed it:
Metadata in State Documents Is Public Record, Court Rules
Kim Zetter, 30 October 2009
Arizonaās Supreme Court, in a surprising but welcome ruling, has declared that electronic metadata is part of the public record under state law, in a case involving an Arizona police officer who suspects his superiors of backdating a document related to his work performance.
The city argued that metadata ā digital information that can reveal when a document was created and subsequently accessed or modified ā was not part of the public record. Releasing such information to the public would result in an āadministrative nightmareā and force public officials to spend ācountless hoursā trying to identify the metadata, the city claimed.
My good friend Werther had this to say about David Brookes' op-ed, “The Tenacity Question,” in the 29 October 09 of the New York Times, which argued that the solution to Afghanistan was a simple question of mustering willpower.
Full Story Online
Sola Fide
“The sleep of reason breeds monsters.”
Francisco Goya
By Werther*ElectricPolitics.com
As yet more evidence for why the newspaper industry is in an apparently terminal decline, yesterday the New York Times published neoconservative columnist David Brooks' justification for more quagmire in Afghanistan.
There are so many things wrong with his reasoning that we can only skim the surface.
Editorās Note: In this modern age ā and especially since George W. Bush declared the āwar on terrorā eight years ago ā the price for truth-telling has been high, especially for individuals whose consciences led them to protest the torture of alleged terrorists.
From the Story:
I tell you that partly because this whole question of personal morality is a complicated one. I would never, ever, no one would have ever pointed at me as someone likely to become or to be a person of conscience. And yet eventually I found myself on the outside and treated in a way that challenged my whole view of the world.
Phi Beta Iota: As we enter our third and last full life of public service, stories such as this are inspiring, not depressing.Ā The world is about to be flipped right-side up.Ā We will have no difficulty identifying those individuals whose integrity was sufficient unto the challenges we all face, every day, as a rotten system without honor seeks to treat individuals as cogs of the wheel rather than the central foci they should be.Ā Robert Steele signed the letter to Senator McCain against torture–no one now serving President Obama did so.
If one takes the “battlefield” to include all challenges, not just the challenge of a battle in a singular time and place, then this search is the mother of all searches.
We like to use the analogy of sailboat racing, something we learned from a video,Ā DVD: THE ART OF RACING SAILING.Ā This DVD begins with an inspection of the hull of the sailboat out of the water and the point is that the race is often won or lost BEFORE THE RACE EVEN BEGINS.Ā If you have failed to assure a correct hull; if you have failed to train, equip, and organize the right forces for the right mission, if you have failed to understand the historical, cultural, and geographical reality you are entering into a context with; then no amount of excellence on the field itself will prevail.
