If 4000 people protest in Chicago, but the AP isn't around to hear it....

You can never be sure if you'll get decent media coverage.

Yesterday I linked to a decent news story about the Gaza protest in Chicago. It quoted some protesters saying basically reasonable things, and cited the city's estimate of the size of the protest: 4000 people.

"The news coverage so far has been all right", I said. I was hopeful. Since that article was by a Tribune writer, I sort of assumed it would be appearing in the Tribune.

But now I can't find it at the Tribune. Here is what I did find at the Tribune: a tiny story saying the protesters numbered in the "hundreds", with precious little background information; and this set of pictures, which is all right as far as pictures go, but not a real news story. Other local coverage was similarly dismal, like this TV segment which did not mention any statistics, but did feature rebuttals (both before and after the protest) by Jewish groups.

Meanwhile American protests are invisible in the major national media.

CNN covers the London protest, and that's it. This story is actually relatively defensible, since it was arguably the most visible protest -- although the 12,000 in London was smaller than the 20,000 in Paris, the London protest featured some big-name people, including Annie Lennox, who is awesome.

The NYT dittos a Reuters article which covers protests in Europe and parts of the Middle East. Some of those protests are smaller than the Chicago protest, but they get mentioned while the Chicago protest does not.

This CBS article is the worst. It copies an AP article describing protests only in Europe, and supplements it with some bizarrely chosen anecdotes of tiny protests here and there in this part of the world: 50 people in Sioux Falls S.D., a protest in Bogota (no number given), a small group (no number given) in Calgary which seems full of crazy people. Of course, by mentioning these protests going on in the Americas, the article implies that it has told you all you need to know about protests in the Americas. And meanwhile, at the very top of the article, the bit people actually read:

Meanwhile, thousands of Jews and Christians are expected at demonstrations to be held this weekend in New York, London, Toronto, Miami, Washington, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv to protest Hamas' rocket attacks from Gaza.

Some activists are billing the demonstrations as counter-rallies against what they call "assemblies of hatred for Jews and Israel."

Sunday's protest in Miami, to be held at the Holocaust Memorial, is billed as the Rally For Israel to Destroy Hamas.

And, finally, this interactive map from the AP, of protests all over the world. What is conspicuously missing from this map? The better part of the western hemisphere.

I found decent coverage of American protests in China, in Pakistan.... But in America, here is what the news coverage says: "Dear Americans. Here at home, no one really objects to the attacks on Gaza. Here at home, good Christians and Jews are rallying in support of the attacks on Gaza. With very few exceptions, only people in foreign places are against the attacks. These people are strange, they probably aren't members of reputable faiths like Christianity and Judaism, so you can dismiss their opinions with your usual prejudices."

So, WTF? Is this a media conspiracy? Well, maybe in part. Israel is waging a propaganda war, and doing it pretty well:

Israel appears to think its [PR] efforts are working.

One of its spokespeople, who has regularly appeared on the international media, Major Avital Leibovich, said: "Quite a few outlets are very favourable to Israel."

But I think the other side of this may be that the organizers of these protests are not doing the proper media liaison work. Jewish groups responding to the Chicago protest had proper press conferences in rooms with microphones and chairs; I don't think the protest organizers attempted any such thing. Nowadays the national news outlets mostly just ditto AP and Reuters, so you need to get the ear of those services in order to get heard, and I don't think this was attempted either. I might like to have a word with them about that -- except there were dozens of organizations "organizing" the rally, so who knows who was actually doing any real organizing at all. Maybe things could be better next time, but as things stand it looks like 4,000 people marched in the cold for next to nothing.

Gaza protest

A bunch of us grad students went to a protest today.

It was the first protest I'd gone to in a long time.

One of the problems with protests nowadays is that you can never be entirely sure what the protest is for. In this protest, as in so many, different protesters seemed to have vastly different messages. On the one hand, I saw people holding signs declaring themselves to be Jews opposed to the attacks on Gaza. On the other hand, I saw people holding signs reading "Gaza will never forgive", or equating the Star of David with a swastika. Still other signs said generic things about imperialism or racism -- not false, but, again, not helpful.

Some of the chants called for an end to the siege of Gaza, others called for a free Palestine, still others called Israelis (all of them, I guess) liars.

The speakers were a similarly mixed bag (there were too many, it was cold, and standing still is not good in the cold). The best was a woman from the Quakers (yay, Quakers). She said reasonable things, and voiced reasonable demands. She was the only one to acknowledge that were Jews standing in the cold among us. Meanwhile others seemed to think we were all filled with the spirit of Palestinian patriotism, or that we all spoke Arabic. One of the main organizers kept going on about "movements" and "mobilizations" and how the plight of all oppressed peoples (she tried to list all of them) are connected.

Worst of all, we got handed a flier from ANSWER inviting us to a form where the following questions would be addressed: "What's behind U.S. & British attacks on Zimbabwe? What's at stake in struggle for an independent Africa?" I'm not sure what they're thinking of discussing there: perhaps Mugabe's theory that the cholera epidemic is actually a western conspiracy.

But it was not nearly as bad as it could have been. Considerably more focused and serious than the stuff you get back in Vancouver. The news coverage so far has been all right. And hopefully this will help correct some of the stories I've seen which mention the existence of protests around the world, but not in the US -- as if Americans could rest assured that only whacky foreigners are outraged by the attacks on Gaza. The crowd of 4000 people was really quite impressive considering how cold it was.

As for our little group, we had a pair of homemade signs, one calling for a ceasefire, one calling for immediate increased access to aid (because). This is a reasonable and feasible goal. If the White House decided it would happen (instead of making empty statements that in effect condone the attacks), then it would happen.

What's more, it's in the interests of everyone. Some of the media coverage called the protest a "pro-Palestinian rally", but I rather think that it would be pro-everyone to end the attacks on Gaza. On our way in, we passed a counter-demonstration, a "pro-Israel rally". I actually agreed with every one of the signs being waved at that rally.

Here is a pro-Israel stance: stop these attacks on Gaza and the blockades around Gaza, which are against long-term Israeli interests. Stop perpetuating the radicalization of Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. Stop undermining the popular support of those Arab leaders who are most cooperative with Israel. Listen to people who aren't at all crazy leftists, like the Economist, or Zbigniew Brzezinski:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

We left the protest a little early, came home, and ate sushi.

BOOM!

Are the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza are in response to escalating rocket attack from Hamas? So say all the articles on the events in all of the major news outlets I could find in American (and Canadian!) media.

Suppose we take this idea seriously, and suppose the media are taking this idea seriously. Why then can I not find a single mention anywhere of the Israeli death toll from these 300 rockets? Even if not a single Israeli died in those attacks, that would not excuse the attacks. But if the airstrikes are indeed a response, then there is a question of the proportionality of that response, and before that question can be addressed, we need some numbers.

I see that Hamas responded to the raids with dozens of rockets, killing one Israeli and wounding others (at least six) -- but that's it. No other Israeli casualties are mentioned. Have there been no other Israeli casualties, before the Israeli airstrikes? I would imagine so. So could we have a tally, please? I would like to be able to compare the figures: at least 230 Palestinian dead and 780 wounded, according to Haaretz (higher figures than the 225 / 400+ figures in the news over here), versus how many Israeli dead and wounded? (This site does not quite provide the right numbers, but could guide estimates.)

But this is a very silly line of inquiry, because the idea that this is a response to the rocket attacks is silly. It is not just false, it's not even trying to be true. For a clear hint at this in a major English-speaking media outlet, it looks like we have to go to the BBC:

So why is Israel acting now and with such force? Does it really believe it can stop the rocket fire from Gaza when previous Israeli governments have tried and failed, using every military means? Israel's prime minister says that is his objective: to protect Israeli citizens living close to the Gaza border. To achieve this, his defence minister, Ehud Barak, said Israel would continue, widen and intensify its Gaza operation.

But Israel's politicians are pursuing a parallel campaign, too - an electoral one. Israel holds parliamentary elections in just over a month's time. The Israeli public has a generally low opinion about how their government has handled what they call "Hamastan" - Hamas-controlled Gaza. Until it started talking tough, the hawkish opposition leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, was leading in the polls. Now the gap has narrowed.

(Netanyahu has some great talent there: causing military misadventures without even being in power.)

This is a scandalous idea -- perhaps it's not a focus of the American coverage because it's just so unthinkable in this country that military actions could be politically motivated. Still, I did find it mentioned in a single sentence buried at the end of this Time article. As for the rest of the article, it provides such gems as

Israel is prepared to ratchet up the pressure still further in the hope that it will force a workable ceasefire.

and

But Israel will need to move carefully. Air strikes that kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians are only likely to fuel support for Hamas, and ramp up international pressure to end the operation quickly.

Meanwhile the White House is blaming Hamas (which is almost half right), and sternly admonishes Israel to avoid civilian casualties, which is a bit like condoning the making of omelets so long as one is careful about the eggs.

But now let's look ahead to America's (and the world's!) glorious hope-filled future. Give us a taste of that magical hope dust, Barack!

"In terms of negotiations with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognize your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon, and is deeply influenced by other countries."

Oh, this is all going to get fixed like on January 21, I can feel it.

Journey to Indiana

The car is on its last legs. The plan for Christmas was: take it on one last trip back to Indiana, sell it back (for parts) to Dawn's old mechanic, and take Amtrak back.

There were two problems with the first part of that plan. First problem: we haven't used the car in months, so it's stuck in a bunker of snow and ice (see previous post). We failed to dig it out, and ended up borrowing a shovel from one of the nearby construction sites. Conveniently, the shovel came with a construction worker attached, who was very efficient. Merry Christmas to construction workers! Second problem: the car's battery and / or alternator is shot. But we jump start it, and we're on our way. About eight blocks away, we stop at a traffic light, and the car dies. We give it another jump, park it, and decide driving is a bad idea.

This is a really disheartening moment: getting the car out felt like such a triumph.

Anyway, we go back home and look up Amtrak. Amtrak in Chicago had just suffered massive delays, due to the weather (see previous post), and so there were no spaces left on any trains going out.

So we end up arranging to take a commuter train which can get us about half-way to our destination, with Dawn's mom driving us the rest of the way. The train is SRO (with the normal commuter crowd, plus a big holiday crowd), which is probably illegal, but there's no room for the conductors to walk through, and they never bother getting us to buy tickets. So we get a free ride.

The trip back from Indiana on Amtrak was comparatively uneventful. Of course, the trip took longer than scheduled--what's an Amtrak trip without some sort of delay? Our delay was due to problems with a whistle. Yes, a whistle. Apparently, a train has to whistle at every road crossing, or else it has to stop at every road crossing. This makes it really important to have a working whistle, but ours got frozen shut by the freezing rain which was pouring down at the time. A maintenance crew tried to get it working again, but they failed, and we ended up hooking up to the back end of another Amtrak train (with a working whistle) which had come along while we were sitting there. This took nearly two hours, I think. But, all things considered, it wasn't a big deal at all, since the freezing rain was doing much worse things to the roads. At one point, as we were coming into Gary, we saw a cluster of overpasses and whatnot decorated by stopped cars, some vehicles going backwards, a several-car pile-up, and a busted guardrail (no sign of what had happened to the car which had done the guardrail busting). We heard later from Dawn's mom that a bunch of the main roads along our usual Indiana route had been shut down; if we'd been driving, we would have been forced down a bunch of side roads (which probably would have been in even worse shape). Hurray for rail travel (and see previous post).

Christmas travel is stupid

Why does such a travel-heavy holiday have to occur in the depths of winter? This is the solstice. Winter doesn't get any deeper. It's the season for cold snaps, snow storms, freezing rain -- and everyone's got to get somewhere else right now. Whose bright idea was this?

The Museum of Science and Industry is a crock

So, we went to the Museum of Science and Industry with some out-of-towners. This place bills itself as the largest science museum in the western hemisphere. So, it has quantity, if not quality.

On the occasion of Christmas, there is this syrupy display, which also manages to be culturally insensitive -- possibly even to Americans. There are a whole bunch of Christmas trees decorated in the mode of different countries -- "beautifully decorated by members of Chicago’s ethnic communities", they say. Here's what that means: take the most obvious and stereotyped symbols of a place, and plaster them over an evergreen. Thus the Canadian tree is covered in maple leafs and hockey paraphernalia, and the American tree is covered in American flags (decorated by members of Chicago's American community). So, those are just silly, but it's starting to get a little tasteless when you get the Kenyan tree with a giraffe sticking out of it.

The museum has a whole exhibit devoted to petroleum and oil. Now you might think that this would be very topical right about now. Except it doesn't say a thing about climate change, or conflicts over oil, or the possibility that we could just plain run out. Why not? Well, a clue can be found in another exhibit, on nuclear energy. This exhibit features a map identifying different countries, and informing you how much of their energy comes from nuclear sources. Among the countries you get to learn about on this poster in the Museum of Science and Industry are the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic.

The damn thing hasn't been updated in two decades. That map was older than a solid majority of the people in the room.

Katrina's hidden race war

"My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

Fuck.

Reminder to self: watch Welcome to New Orleans.

The FU25 network

Blasphemy!

This is something I've complained about before. I'm not going to link there myself now, but the first hit on google for "Matthew 25" is the website of a pro-Obama PAC: the "Matthew 25 Network". The front page features a big smiley picture of Obama and Biden, next to a big friendly message: "Congratulations President-Elect Obama!".

Above all of that is an actual quote from Matthew 25:40: "I tell you the truth, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me."

From which we can only assume that Obama is "one of the least of these", and that by "did it" Jesus meant "voted into the office of the President of the United States"; as such, America basically just elected Jesus president.

Eviscerating the gospel with no sense of irony: it's not just for the Christian right any more. I'm guessing crap like this gives Jesus a headache, no matter who's doing it.

Syrian lingerie

This is one of the awesomest articles I've read in a while.

Forthright displays of the some world's kinkiest "leisure wear" have long been a feature of Syrian souks.... It stems from the Syrian tradition for brides-to-be to be given a trousseau of exotic underwear - sometimes dozens of items - usually by girlfriends, aunties and cousins, to add spice to their wedding nights, honeymoons and beyond.

The article also says that foreplay is commanded in Islam (thou shalt get kinky), which got me googling my way to this essay. There's a reference there to Al-Ghazali, a medieval Islamic philosopher and theologian. I recognized the name because I read his argument against causation in a medieval philosophy class (he scooped Malebranche and Hume by several centuries). But henceforth I will also know him for his declaration that "Sex should begin with gentle words and kissing".

One degree of separation from shattered dreams

A student I TA'ed this fall got a mention as an anecdote in the national news. His mother is in the real estate business, and, well, business is not so good. Plus the family got hit by medical bills (mutter health care mutter). So now he might not be coming back after the new year, unless he can independently scrounge together enough funds to pay the $50,000 a year it takes to live and study at the college here. He's got loans and some free money covering a good chunk of that, but not nearly enough. Where's he going to find a summer job that can cover the remaining 30K?

And $50,000? Really? I knew this place was expensive, but that is absurd. Expensive American colleges are such a scam... and so expensive (44K just for tuition at Bates, WTF?). I think the college here can (can) be a good place, but I don't see how it warrants a 50K / year price tag.

Bad grad week =

Exam + dissertating + grading + tutoring

Today I found myself attempting to explain to some undergrad why it might be a good idea to follow up an argument in a paper by considering how someone else might object, and then responding to that objection. The student thought this was a crazy thing to do. I failed to change the student's mind. Not my best moment ever. Not a particularly good testament to whoever was supposed to have spent the past few months teaching this student how to write.

My American Thanksgiving

This is a little early, but for American Thanksgiving this year, I would like to give thanks for my Canadian citizenship, which releases me from an enormous amount of anxiety--for example, the anxiety which results from the possibility of losing your private employer-based health insurance. As it turns out, this might happen even if you're not personally caught up in the tide of rising unemployment. Even if you keep your job, there's still a chance of a total collapse of the American private health care "system".

What a country.

I'll be telling my grandkids I lived here

On my way to Greek class I noted that there were dozens of cop cars, one after another, parked in a line all the way along University Drive.

Sure enough, when I mention this to Dawn, she says that Obama dropped his kids off at the Lab School in person today. (How did she know? Because pictures of the "event" were in the "news".)

If only I'd stuck around, maybe I could have gotten a picture of his silhouette through the tinted window of his armoured SUV.

Confusion

Dawn and I know two couples: Nate and Jen, and Nathan and Jenny. We also know (not in a couple) a Nat and a Jenn.

And then, just recently, I met a married couple: Nathan and Jen.

Dawn has decreed that we're not allowed to be friends with that last pair. It's just too much.

The bible vs. the traditional conception of hell

With respect to the interpretation of the bible, the term "literal" is often used more or less interchangeably with "traditional". (Or, sometimes, maybe "extreme", or something like that--the "literal" account of the "end times", for example, is (a) not in the bible and (b) a very recent invention.) So people talk about a "literal hell", by which they seem to suggest that they're talking about a doctrine of hell which is right there in the bible, in black and white, and anyone who doesn't think it's in there must be reading the text in some terribly loose and metaphorical way.

But, as it turns out, it's awful hard to find traditional notions about hell in the bible. In fact, I'd say that the more literally you interpret it, the harder it is to support the traditional conception of hell.

A nice friendly run-through is provided by RLP in a new series of videos (plus a nifty .pdf). I agree with the vast majority of what he says.

The traditional doctrine of hell is a problem. It strikes a good many people as morally repulsive. It has caused Christians to leave the faith. But it's not to be found in the bible.

Football

I gotta say, I'm not a fan.

Title of "Featured Video" on Yahoo Canada

"Family of man beheaded on bus calls for tougher laws"

I concur. Increase the sentence for stabbing a stranger dozens of times, hacking off his head, slicing off bits of his face and putting them into your pocket in a plastic bag, and then eating other bits of him! Because we really need a stronger deterrent against that sort of thing.

Faint praise

Over the weekend we went to Boystown, probably our favourite neighbourhood to visit in Chicago. We mostly go for the second-hand clothes, and the vegetarian food (the Chicago Diner does very convincing fake meat), but the flaming gayness is also pretty cool.

When I informed an acquaintance of ours about this, he praised us for being "open-minded".

I had a hard time figuring out what he could have meant by that. If you're a graduate student in the humanities, it doesn't seem like you should get any credit at all for being happy visiting the city's gaybourhood (ha!). In general, you can pretty much take that for granted in our little sub-culture. But Dawn came up with what has got to be the right explanation: if you're a graduate student in the humanities and also Christian, you might be expected to fear the gay. And if you don't, then maybe that qualifies you as "open-minded".

That was a weird thought to get used to.

The meat industry is full of shit

According to a report just released by the US Government Accountability Office, a large factory farm can produce 1.6 million tons of shit a year, more than the 1.4 million tons produced by the entire city of Houston, the fourth largest city in America (see here and here).

So, it's no news that factory farms are awful polluters. But it turns out that I had no idea just how awful they really are. 1.6 million tons of shit every year from just one farm. More shit than all the inhabitants of Houston combined. That is a lot of shit.

Consider the case of poor North Carolina:

In one example, GAO said that five contiguous North Carolina counties in 2002 had an estimated 7.5 million hogs that could have produced as much as 15.5 million tons of manure.

15.5 million tons of manure is equivalent to 11 Houstons.

The state of North Carolina has 100 counties. The entire state of North Carolina has a population of 9 million, which is less than 4 Houstons worth of people. Meanwhile 5% of its counties are producing 11 Houstons worth of shit.

What are they doing with all that shit? What could they possibly do?

All that shit poisons the soil and poisons the water; meanwhile, fumes poison the air. (It should come as no surprise that the EPA is doing a shitty job of regulating all that shit.)

The moral of the story: factory farms are poison. To eat factory farmed meat is to contribute to the production of poison. Dinner for you could mean poison for a North Carolinian. So please don't eat meat unless you've verified that it's not from a factory farm (if you must eat meat at all).

Alberta

In Alberta we saw more family, a volleyball tournament, and lots more rocks and trees and water, and also ice, of even more impressive sorts than you get in Vancouver. We started a fire. We went to West Edmonton Mall, the largest and possibly also most absurd shopping mall in North America (unless there is some other mall out there which contains an amusement park, working submarines, a full-sized pirate ship, and a metal whale). We saw a black bear having dinner at the side of the highway, and a truly magnificent elk in Jasper Park. No northern lights, but Dawn got her first clear look at the Milky Way (the stars don't get much clearer than in Jasper).

Pictures:


Lake Abraham.


Peyto Lake. It's gorgeous, and tourists love it, so shots like this are a dime a dozen. But I think the play of shadow and reflection here puts this picture in the top quartile of Peyto Lake pictures.


The other end of Peyto Lake. It is currently being fed by a tiny trickle of glacier melt water. I hear that trickle has been getting smaller, so Peyto might not be sticking around for too long.


The Athabasca Glacier. It would have come right up to the bottom of that picture just 20 or so years ago.


Dawn looking proud because she's standing on the glacier. Well, actually only about a foot onto it. The glacier was surrounded by hilarious warning signs concerning the risk of falling into crevasses.


The planet is getting warmer and the glacier is crumbling away. Just one tiny part of the approaching environmental apocalypse. It sure looks pretty inside, though.


I wish I'd got more pictures of warning signs.


By Siffleur Falls. My mom demanded that we sit on this tree.


Dawn is looking down at a slightly angry river flanked by treacherous cliffs. It's hard to make out the gap, isn't it? Well, it was just a few metres. I dared Dawn to jump across, but she chickened out.


At the top of the Falls, the rocks have been worn into the shape of waves.


My mom irresponsibly doing a jig at the top of a waterfall.


The water here is a quite a few feet deep. It only looks really shallow because of the crystal clear water.


Canada is really big (Dawn used for scale).


Rockies, there's a decent chance I won't be visiting you ever again, but, just so you know, you are way cool.