Since Dan Henniger wrote about Spirit of America in the WSJ and talked about them on PBS, they've raised $764,408 from 4,088 donors. Jim Hake writes:
Most of these funds are earmarked for the request made by the Marines for equipment needed to establish Iraqi-owned television stations in Al Anbar Province Iraq (described here). Our initial goal for this request was $100,000. The Marines are as stunned as I am. I'll remove the expletives of joyful surprise and forward some of their comments to you next week. They are also developing ideas for the expansion of this initiative. More on that soon.
There's lots more info on the SoA blog, including copies of Dan Henninger's articles and commentary. The TV project is its most ambitious undertaking, but SoA has a number of less sexy but equally worthy projects that deserve support.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 21, 2004 • Comments
Here's a new blog devoted entirely to stories about Wal-Mart. (Via Marginal Revolution, where Tyler Cowen does a little WM-blogging of his own.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 20, 2004 • Comments
In a pre-Movable Type post, from September 2002, I quoted Chris Matthews, writing on his bout with malaria:
I had the species of malaria, falciparum, which is the most aggressive. It kills you either by clogging up the arteries to your brain or by simply killing enough blood cells to cause extreme anemia.
Parasites had taken over 4 percent to 5 percent of my blood cells. A pathologist at Sibley told my wife Kathleen that he'd never seen so many parasites on one slide.
With all those rioting bugs racing through my brain, no wonder I was delirious. The bottom line is that I'm a very lucky fellow. I had great doctors. I was given quinine, antibiotics and that wonderful intravenous that kept running fluid into me. I was in an air-conditioned hospital so nice they call it "Club Sib."
I kept thinking, especially in those early days in intensive care, what it's like getting malaria for the average African. You're lying in some hut. It's 105 degrees. You're running a temperature almost that high. You have no quinine, no drugs whatsoever and no clean water. You just lie there sweating and delirious until the lights go out.
Millions of people die this way every single year because Americans disapprove of DDT.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 20, 2004 • Comments
Grant McCracken posts a couple of brief essays that demonstrate how the two fields complement each other.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 19, 2004 • Comments
David Frum sees the cunning hand of Prince Bandar behind the headline-grabbing leaks in Bob Woodward's book (see first and third items).
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 19, 2004 • Comments
Until recently, Rob Wagner was features editor at The Stockton Record. A week ago he started work as managing editor on Saudi Arabia's English language Saudi Gazette. His first report is not encouraging, though not terribly suprising:
I work 12-hour days, six days a week, and the paper is very unorganized. Reporters are pretty lazy and it's difficult to get work out of them. I'm trying to organize the national desk and get people to produce work. It's quite a job and I haven't had an opportunity to get out around town as much as I would like.
Part of the problem is the Saudi culture. People work from 9 a.m. to noon, do prayers, have lunch, take a nap, then return to work at 4 p.m. And work until 5. The mantra here is anything you can do today can be put off until tomorrow.
There are about five nationalities in the newsroom -- Saudi, Pakistani, Indian, Jordanian, American and a few others I can't identify. Understanding each other is a little difficult. And if you thought newsroom politics can be bad, just imagine a similar situation here, but with newspeople from five different countries trying to get along.
The women reporters work in a separate room on a different floor. I can only communicate with them by phone or e-mail. I'm not sure what the big deal is since they wear full black abayas. The other day I needed to give one of the women a news clipping. She had to go down to the lobby and I had a teaboy -- yes, we have teaboys -- deliver it to her. Teaboys are great, by the way, serving me tea, coffee and what-not at any given moment. They are very class and status-minded here. No need for these poor fellas -- all Indian -- but the Saudis insist that we should have teaboys. There must be about 10 of them on staff here.
The writing is extraordinarily bad. We have Saudis, Indians and Jordanians translating Arabic into English with that very formal, stilted, wordy way of talking. Nothing is conversational here in the writing. I spend a lot of time in rewrite. Teaching reporters to streamline their writing may indeed be impossible simply because they don't naturally form their thoughts as a native English speaker does.
Bush is hated here with a passion. A passion that borders on real fear. Saudis are completely mystified with Bush's foreign policy. And his recent shift over the Israeli issue is sending folks in the Middle East through the roof. I may be overstating things, but it's a real powder keg here. Peace in Iraq or a return to normal relations with any Middle Eastern country is remote at best. This is a long haul kind of thing. Things will get much worse before they get better. Then again I've only been here a week, so what do I know?
(Via L.A Observed.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 19, 2004 • Comments
Reader Edward Martin Schulze sends this link to Books for Soldiers, which gives troops and their friends a way to post requests for books, DVDs, mail, and supplies (socks, sports bras, Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, you name it). Go here to see how you can help.
Interesting tidbit:Kevin Smith has a lot of fans in the military.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 19, 2004 • Comments
Andrea Yates and Deanna Laney murdered their children in response to voices in their heads that told them, quite convincingly, that they had to kill their kids to save them. Yates is serving life in prison, while Laney is in a mental institution, for legal reasons interestingly explained in this article in the Sunday Dallas Morning News: Yates knew she was doing wrong; she just thought it was necessary to save her children from hell. Laney thought God wanted her to kill her kids, making it the right thing to do.
Laney's story is particularly sad, because nobody around her knew she was having delusions. She interpreted her mental illness through her Penecostal faith, and neither she nor those around her found the voices she heard particularly crazy.
Mental health experts also found evidence that Mrs. Laney had been mentally ill for three years and had several earlier psychotic breaks that went unrecognized.
They said her problems went unnoticed and untreated because they seemed unremarkable to her and everyone around her, even when she frantically told relatives and tearfully testified in church about three years ago that God had told her directly that the world was ending and she needed to get her house in order.
Mrs. Laney, who home-schooled her children and rarely left Smith County, and her friends and family are lifelong members of a Pentecostal church. Their church, Tyler's First Assembly of God, teaches that God communicates directly with man, the Lord and the devil can test faith, and believers touched by the Holy Spirit can speak in tongues.
With the verdict, Mrs. Laney will be committed to a state psychiatric hospital until its experts convince state District Judge Cynthia Kent that she no longer is a danger to herself or others. Under state law, she could be kept there for life.
In her 6 ½-hour videotaped interview with prosecution psychiatrist Park Dietz, Mrs. Laney tearfully recounted the savage attacks and the torture that followed.
"I didn't want to kill my kids at all....I felt I like I had no choice," she said. "Because God told me to do that, and I was taught you obey God."...
Despite her turmoil, she said, she refused medication until after Joshua's birthday in late July.
She believed he'd be "raised up" from the dead on his ninth birthday, but began wondering if something was wrong with her when that didn't happen. So she finally told a psychiatrist who visited her weekly that she was smelling sulfur in her cell and believed it was a sign that the devil was near.
She said she did not mention it earlier, even when it became so intense that she couldn't sleep, because she believed everything happening to her "was spiritual warfare, and I didn't think he would understand any of it."
She said she was bothered four years earlier by a similar smell — which psychiatrists have now identified as an olfactory hallucination symptomatic of psychosis. "I just thought it was the Lord teaching me. I didn't think anything about it, that it could be some sort of a mental disorder. That never crossed my mind."
The smell vanished a few days after she began taking anti-psychotic medication and antidepressants, she said, along with racing thoughts that "everything meant something" and inner urgings that she believed were direct messages from God.
But she also lost her certainty that what she'd done to her three boys was the Lord's will and test. "I started realizing that he wouldn't do something like that," she said.
It's a terribly sad story. I can't help wondering, however, what pundits would say about similarly ill killers who interpreted their delusions through video games, pornography, comic books, shopping, or movies rather than religion. We don't blame Penecostalism for the deaths of Laney's children, nor should we. But the reason we don't is that there's (fortunately) no loud anti-religion lobby looking for any excuse to blame Penecostalism for all the troubles of the world.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 19, 2004 • Comments
Readers with an interest in Dallas might want to check out some of my recent contributions to D Magazine's Front Burner blog.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 19, 2004 • Comments
I read it a week late, but this Tina Rosenberg NYT Magazine article made my blood boil:
Yet what really merits outrage about DDT today is not that South Africa still uses it, as do about five other countries for routine malaria control and about 10 more for emergencies. It is that dozens more do not. Malaria is a disease Westerners no longer have to think about. Independent malariologists believe it kills two million people a year, mainly children under 5 and 90 percent of them in Africa. Until it was overtaken by AIDS in 1999, it was Africa's leading killer. One in 20 African children dies of malaria, and many of those who survive are brain-damaged. Each year, 300 to 500 million people worldwide get malaria. During the rainy season in some parts of Africa, entire villages of people lie in bed, shivering with fever, too weak to stand or eat. Many spend a good part of the year incapacitated, which cripples African economies. A commission of the World Health Organization found that malaria alone shrinks the economy in countries where it is most endemic by 20 percent over 15 years. There is currently no vaccine. While travelers to malarial regions can take prophylactic medicines, these drugs are too toxic for long-term use for residents.
Yet DDT, the very insecticide that eradicated malaria in developed nations, has been essentially deactivated as a malaria-control tool today. The paradox is that sprayed in tiny quantities inside houses -- the only way anyone proposes to use it today -- DDT is most likely not harmful to people or the environment. Certainly, the possible harm from DDT is vastly outweighed by its ability to save children's lives.
Two million people a year, most of them little kids, are dying because of the West's anti-DDT superstition. Two...million...people...a...year.
Anti-DDT taboos undoubtedly kill even more than that, since the debilitation caused by malaria helps keep Africa desperately poor. But, hey, they're Africans. We got rid of malaria here, so we don't give a damn. I bet the NYT Mag gets letters from people outraged at Rosenberg's audacity in pointing out the problem.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 19, 2004 • Comments