Monday, May 5, 2008
When a girl loves a boy.
Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies
Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.
Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments.
The couple avoided a year in jail by agreeing to a sentence mandating that they immediately leave Virginia. They moved to Washington and launched a legal challenge a few years later.
After the Supreme Court ruled, the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their children Donald, Peggy and Sidney.
Richard Loving died in 1975 in a car accident that also injured his wife.
In a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to change history - she was 'just a girl who once fell in love with a boy.'
Seventeen Year Cicadas
I have lived through several of these, and the article is right. It’s creepy, noisy, crunchy, and strange.
“The 17-year cicadas are coming any day now. And there’s not much anyone should - or could - do about it, except hang on for a wild, eerie ride.”
[…]
“At night, they would be quiet, but when the sun would come up, it was like throwing a switch,” said Chief Eric Tinsley, of the Biltmore Forest Police Department, who was then a town patrolman.He also remembers the crunching sound of cars running over the dead cicadas left on streets. “It was like popcorn popping,” he said.”
[…]
“It’s a remarkable life cycle. They live many years underground. They have their last hooray, a mating frenzy. They lay their eggs and die very soon.”The show can be over in a week or two, depending on temperatures, he said.
[…]
“Imagine the sheer biomass. That’s a lot of nutrition being pumped into the ecosystem. The birds will have a field day.”Just be in the mountains during this time of year and the sound will make you think of every sci-fi film you ever saw ... and then there are the birds ...
Living On The Edge
Forum: The Middle Class on the Precipice
Rising financial risks for American families
During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair play to keep itself financially secure has been transformed by economic risk and new realities. Now a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a disappearing spouse can reduce a family from solidly middle class to newly poor in a few months.
Middle-class families have been threatened on every front. Rocked by rising prices for essentials as men’s wages remained flat, both Dad and Mom have entered the workforce—a strategy that has left them working harder just to try to break even. Even with two paychecks, family finances are stretched so tightly that a very small misstep can leave them in crisis. As tough as life has become for married couples, single-parent families face even more financial obstacles in trying to carve out middle-class lives on a single paycheck. And at the same time that families are facing higher costs and increased risks, the old financial rules of credit have been rewritten by powerful corporate interests that see middle-class families as the spoils of political influence.
Raising Incomes the Two-Worker Way
In just one generation, millions of mothers have gone to work, transforming basic family economics. The typical middle-class household in the United States is no longer a one-earner family, with one parent in the workforce and one at home full-time. Instead, the majority of families with small children now have both parents rising at dawn to commute to jobs so they can both pull in paychecks.
Scholars, policymakers, and critics of all stripes have debated the social implications of these changes, but few have looked at their economic impact. Today the median income for a fully employed male is $41,670 per year (all numbers are inflation-adjusted to 2004 dollars)—nearly $800 less than his counterpart of a generation ago. The only real increase in wages for a family has come from the second paycheck earned by a working mother. With both adults in the workforce full-time, the family’s combined income is $73,770—a whopping 75 percent higher than the median household income in the early 1970s. But the gain in income has an overlooked side effect: family risk has risen as well. Today’s families have budgeted to the limits of their new two-paycheck status. As a result, they have lost the parachute they once had in times of financial setback—a back-up earner (usually Mom) who could go into the workforce if the primary earner got laid off or fell sick. This “added-worker effect” could buttress the safety net offered by unemployment insurance or disability insurance to help families weather bad times. But today, a disruption to family fortunes can no longer be made up with extra income from an otherwise-stay-at-home partner.
Income risk has shifted in other ways as well. Incomes are less dependable today. Layoffs, outsourcing, and other workplace changes have trebled the odds of a significant interruption in a single generation. The shift from one income to two doubled the risks again, as both Mom and Dad face the possibility of unemployment. Of course, with two people in the workforce, the odds of income dropping to zero are lessened. But for families where every penny of both paychecks is already fully committed to mortgage, health insurance, and other payments, the loss of either paycheck can unleash a financial tailspin. Nor are such risks solely related to unemployment. Consider health-related exposures. Two wage-earners means either Mom or Dad could be out of work from illness or injury, losing a substantial chunk of the family income. Finally, the new everyone-in-the-workforce family faces higher risks for caregiving. When there was one stay-at-home parent, a child’s serious illness or Grandma’s fall down the stairs was certainly bad news, but the main economic ramification was the medical bills. Today, someone has to take off work—or hire help—in order to provide family care. At a time when hospitals are sending people home “quicker and sicker,” more nursing care falls directly on the family—and someone has to be home to administer it.
Even the economic risks of divorce have changed. A generation ago, the end of a marriage was an economic blow, but a nonworking spouse usually took a job, bringing in new income to stay afloat. Now, whatever the two-income divorcing couple earns has to cover both their old and new expenses. Evidence mounts that post-divorce, both women and men are struggling to make ends meet as they try to support two households on the same combined income. A divorced woman with children, for example, is about three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than a man or woman, single or married, without children. And men who owe child support are about three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than men who don’t.
The news is even worse for single parents. They face all the difficulties of dual-income families—all income is budgeted, there is no one at home to work if the primary earner loses a job or gets sick, and no one to take over if a child gets sick or an elderly parent needs help—and they are trying to make it on a lot less money, competing with two-income families for housing, daycare, health insurance, and all the other goods and services. As one divorced, working mother put it, “With what my ex contributes and what I earn, I can just about match what a man can make, but I can’t match what a man and woman both working can make.” The two-parent families are struggling to swallow the risk, but their single-parent counterparts are choking.
Does this mean that middle-class women should return to the home in order to reduce their families’ risk? Before jumping to that conclusion, it is important to look at the expenses middle-class families face.
Soaring Expenses— and Risk
Why are so many moms in the workforce? Surely, some are lured by a great job, but millions more need a paycheck, plain and simple.
It would be convenient to blame the families and say that it is their lust for stuff that has gotten them into this mess. Indeed, sociologist Robert Frank claims that this country’s newfound “Luxury Fever” forces middle-class families “to finance their consumption increases largely by reduced savings and increased debt.” Others echo the theme. A book titled Affluenza (by John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor) sums it up: “The dogged pursuit for more” accounts for Americans’ “overload, debt, anxiety, and waste.” If Americans are out of money, it must be because they are over-consuming—buying junk they don’t really need.
Blaming the family supposes that we believe that families spend their money on things they don’t really need. Over-consumption is not about medical care or basic housing; it is, in the words of Juliet Schor, about “designer clothes, a microwave, restaurant meals, home and automobile air conditioning, and, of course, Michael Jordan’s ubiquitous athletic shoes, about which children and adults both display near-obsession.” And it isn’t about buying a few goodies with extra income; it is about going deep into debt to finance consumer purchases that sensible people could do without.
But is this argument true? If families really are blowing their paychecks on designer clothes and restaurant meals, then the household expenditure data should show them spending more on these frivolous items than ever before. But the numbers don’t back up the claim.
A quick summary of the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey paints a very different picture of family spending. Consider what a family of four spends on clothing. Designer toddler outfits and $200 sneakers are favorite media targets, but when it is all added up, including the Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts and Ray-Ban sunglasses, the average family of four today spends 33 percent less on clothing than a similar family did in the early 1970s. Overseas manufacturing and discount shopping mean that today’s family is spending almost $1,200 a year less than their parents spent to dress themselves.
What about food? Surely, families are eating out more and buying shopping carts full of designer water and exotic fruit? In fact, today’s family of four actually spends 23 percent less on food (at-home and restaurant eating combined) than its counterpart of a generation ago. The slimmed-down profit margins in discount supermarkets have combined with new efficiencies in farming to cut more costs for the American family.
Appliances tell the same picture. There is a lot of complaining about microwave ovens and espresso machines: Affluenza rails against appliances “that were deemed luxuries as recently as 1970, but are now found in well over half of U.S. homes, and thought of by a majority of Americans as necessities: dishwashers, clothes dryers, central heating and air conditioning, color and cable TV.” But manufacturing costs are down, and durability is up. Today’s families are spending 51 percent less on major appliances than their predecessors a generation ago.
This is not to say that middle-class families never fritter away money. A generation ago, big-screen televisions were a novelty reserved for the very rich, no one had cable, and DVD and TiVo were meaningless strings of letters. So how much more do families spend on “home entertainment,” premium channels included? They spend 23 percent more—a whopping extra $180 annually. Computers add another $300 to the annual family budget. But even that increase looks a little different in the context of other spending. The extra money spent on cable, electronics, and computers is more than offset by families’ savings on major appliances and household furnishings alone.
The same offsetting phenomena appear in other areas as well. The average family spends more on airline travel than it did a generation ago, but less on dry cleaning; more on telephone services, but less on tobacco; more on pets, but less on carpets. When we add it all up, increases in one category are offset by decreases in another.
So where did their money go? It went to the basics. The real increases in family spending are for the items that make a family middle class and keep them safe (housing, health insurance), that educate their children (pre-school and college), and that let them earn a living (transportation, childcare, and taxes).
The data can be summarized in a financial snapshot of two families, a typical one-earner family from the early 1970s compared with a typical two-earner family from the early 2000s. With an income of $42,450, the average family from the early 1970s covered their basic mortgage expenses of $5,820, health-insurance costs of $1,130 and car payments, maintenance, gas, and repairs of $5,640. Taxes claimed about 24 percent of their income, leaving them with $19,560 in discretionary funds. That means they had about $1,500 a month to cover food, clothing, utilities, and anything else they might need—just about half of their income.
By 2004, the family budget looks very different. As noted earlier, although a man is making nearly $800 less than his counterpart a generation ago, his wife’s paycheck brings the family to a combined income that is $73,770—a 75 percent increase. But higher expenses have more than eroded that apparent financial advantage. Their annual mortgage payments are more than $10,500. If they have a child in elementary school who goes to daycare after school and in the summers, the family will spend $5,660. If their second child is a pre-schooler, the cost is even higher—$6,920 a year. With both people in the workforce, the family spends more than $8,000 a year on its two vehicles. Health insurance costs the family $1,970, and taxes now take 30 percent of its money. The bottom line: today’s median-earning, median-spending middle-class family sends two people into the workforce, but at the end of the day they have about $1,500 less for discretionary spending than their one-income counterparts of a generation ago.
What happens to the family that tries to get by on a single income today? Their expenses would be a little lower because they can save on childcare and taxes, and, if they are lucky enough to live close to shopping and other services, perhaps they can get by without a second car. But if they tried to live a normal, middle-class life in other ways—buy an average home, send their younger child to preschool, purchase health insurance, and so forth—they would be left with only $5,500 a year to cover all their other expenses. They would have to find a way to buy food, clothing, utilities, life insurance, furniture, appliances, and so on with less than $500 a month. The modern single-earner family trying to keep up an average lifestyle faces a 72 percent drop in discretionary income compared with its one-income counterpart of a generation ago.
Combine changes in family income and expenses, and the biggest change of all becomes evident—on the risk front. In the early 1970s, if any calamity came along, the family devoted nearly half its income to discretionary spending. Of course, people need to eat and turn on the lights, but the other expenses—clothing, furniture, appliances, restaurant meals, vacations, entertainment, and pretty much everything else—can be drastically reduced or even cut out entirely. In other words, they didn’t need as much money if something went wrong. If the couple could find a way—through unemployment insurance, savings, or putting their stay-at-home parent to work—they could cover the basics on just half of their previous earnings. Given the option of a second paycheck, both could stay in the workforce for a few months once the crisis had passed, pulling the family out of their financial hole.
But the position today is very different. Fully 75 percent of family income is earmarked for recurrent monthly expenses. Even if they are able to trim around the edges, families are faced with a sobering truth: every one of those expensive items—mortgage, car payments, insurance, childcare—is a fixed cost. Families must pay them each and every month, through good times and bad; there is no way to cut back from one month to the next, as can be done with spending on clothing or food. Short of moving out of the house, withdrawing their children from preschool, or canceling the insurance policy altogether, they are stuck.
In other words, today’s family has no margin for error. There is no leeway to cut back if one earner’s hours are cut or if the other gets sick. There is no room in the budget if someone needs to take off work to care for a sick child or an elderly parent. Their basic situation is far riskier than that of their parents a generation earlier. The modern American family is walking a high wire without a net.
The Rules Have Changed
The one-two punch of income vulnerability and rising costs has weakened the middle class, at the same time that the revision of the rules of financing delivers a death blow to millions of families each year. Since the early 1980s, the credit industry has rewritten the rules of lending to families. Congress has turned the industry loose to charge whatever it can get and to bury tricks and traps throughout credit agreements. Credit-card contracts that were less than a page long in the early 1980s now number 30 or more pages of small-print legalese. In the details, credit-card companies lend money at one rate, but retain the right to change the interest rate whenever it suits them. They can even raise the rate after the money has been borrowed—a practice once considered too shady even for a back-alley loan shark. When they think they have been cheated, customers can be forced into arbitration in locations thousands of miles from home. Some companies claim that they can repossess anything a customer buys with a credit card.
Credit-card issuers are not alone in their boldness. Home-mortgage lenders are writing mortgages that are so one-sided that some of their products are known as “loan-to-own” because it is the mortgage company—not the buyer—who will end up with the house. Payday lenders are ringing military bases and setting up shop in working-class neighborhoods, offering instant cash that can eventually cost the customer more than a thousand percent interest.
For those who can stay out of debt, the rules of lending may not matter. But the economic pressures on the middle class are causing more families to turn to credit just to make ends meet. When something goes wrong the only place to turn is credit cards and mortgage refinancing. At that moment, the change in lending rules matters very much indeed. The family that might manage $2,000 of debt at 9 percent discovers that it cannot stay afloat when interest rates skyrocket to 29 percent. And the family that refinanced the home mortgage to pay off other debts suddenly faces escalating monthly payments and may find itself staring at foreclosure. Job losses or medical debts can put any family in a hole, but a credit industry that has rewritten the rules can keep that family from ever climbing back.
A Politics of Living on the Edge?
Every day, middle-class families carry higher risks that a job loss or a medical problem will push them over the edge. Although plenty of families make it, a growing number who worked just as hard and followed the rules just as carefully find themselves in a financial nightmare. The security of middle-class life has disappeared. The new reality is millions of families whose grip on the good life can be shaken loose in an instant.
Although my own work, on bankruptcy and credit, has focused on the specifics of families’ household finances, I cannot help but think that their changed circumstances during the past generation have larger echoes for public policy.
During the same period, families have been asked to absorb much more risk in their retirement income. In 1985, there were 112,200 defined-benefit pension plans with employers and employer groups around the country; today their number has shrunk to 29,700 such plans, and those are melting away fast. Steelworkers, airline employees, and now those in the auto industry are joining millions of families who must worry about interest rates, stock market volatility, and the harsh reality that they may outlive their retirement money. For much of the past year, President Bush campaigned to move Social Security to a savings-account model, with retirees trading much or all of their guaranteed payments for payments contingent on investment returns. For younger families, the picture is not any better. Both the absolute cost of healthcare and the share of it borne by families have risen—and newly fashionable health-savings plans are spreading from legislative halls to Wal-Mart workers, with much higher deductibles and a large new dose of investment risk for families’ future healthcare. Even demographics are working against the middle class family, as the odds of having a frail elderly parent—and all the attendant need for physical and financial assistance—have jumped eightfold in just one generation.
From the middle-class family perspective, much of this, understandably, looks far less like an opportunity to exercise more financial responsibility, and a good deal more like a frightening acceleration of the wholesale shift of financial risk onto their already overburdened shoulders. The financial fallout has begun, and the political fallout may not be far behind.Greedy Salmon Kills
Sea lions shot dead on Columbia River as salmon battle rages
For years, the sea lions lounging at the Bonneville Dam have had easy pickings from salmon waiting to go up fish ladders to upriver spawning grounds.
Over the weekend, the federally protected sea creatures were themselves easy prey for a gunman who shot and killed six of the sea lions as they lay in traps meant to humanely catch them.
State and federal authorities were investigating the shootings, which came less than two weeks after an appeals court issued a temporary injunction against authorities killing the salmon-gobbling mammals. Agents have been trapping them instead, but trapping will be suspended during the investigation, said Rick Hargrave, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Fishermen and American Indian tribes have pushed to protect the salmon and remove the sea lions, by lethal force if necessary.
The carcasses of the four California sea lions and two Steller sea lions were found Sunday around noon below the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River on the border of Oregon and Washington.
The six animals appear to have been shot by somebody on the Washington side during the night, said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Two open cages each contained the carcasses of two California sea lions and one Steller sea lion, he said.
Necropsies were planned for all the animals, and the area was being treated as a crime scene by state and federal agencies, Gorman said.
The discovery came one day after three elephant seals were found shot to death at a breeding ground near San Simeon in central California. Investigators will try to determine whether there is any link between the shootings, Gorman said.
Seven California sea lions were trapped on the Columbia starting April 24 after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved their capture. One died during a medical inspection before transfer to a Sea World park.
Washington and Oregon have been granted federal authorization to capture or kill as many as 85 sea lions a year for five years at the base of the dam.
The Humane Society of the United States has gone to court to challenge the authorization, with another hearing set for May 8. Until a judge rules, no animals may be legally killed.
"We're really shocked," said Sharon Young, a Humane Society spokeswoman, who learned about the sea lion deaths from a reporter. "We're a nation of laws, and we should expect people to abide by them."
The fight is on at Gettysburg
Gettysburg park pulls plug on huge electric War Between the States map
For decades, visitors willing to shell out a few extra dollars at Gettysburg National Military Park could be entertained - or bored - by an electric light display showing troop movements in that pivotal of the War Between the States battle.
With the opening of a new museum and visitor center that offers a bigger "wow" factor for the park's nearly 2 million visitors each year, the National Park Service has decided that its 1960s-era electric battlefield map is obsolete.
As patrons of the new $103 million facility learn about the battle by immersing themselves in new technology, the old center stands vacant, awaiting demolition next year. Before that happens, the 30-by-30-foot electric map - embedded with more than 625 colored lights - will be dismantled and placed in storage.
At least a few people who believe the map still has educational value are urging the park service to find a way to keep the lights on.
One regular park visitor has created a Web site devoted to the cause of preserving it, http://www.savetheelectricmap.com. Jon DeKeles, 51, of Post Falls, Idaho, said he only learned of the map's pending demise during a visit in late March, and he started the site when he returned home.
"Does everything have to be multimedia, high-tech in this world?" DeKeles said.
Emily Rosensteel O'Neil, the daughter of map creator Joseph L. Rosensteel, would also like to see the map get a new home.
"The electric map is an artifact in and of itself," said O'Neil, 67, a retired teacher who lives in Guilford, Conn. "It was my father's masterpiece."
But from the earliest planning stages for the new museum, park officials had envisioned using new technology to give visitors a more vivid picture of how the battle unfolded, said park spokeswoman Katie Lawhon.
The new building, which opened April 14, features two film theaters that can also accommodate live performances and lectures, video and audio presentations scattered throughout the museum, and some computerized interactive exhibits.
The park service has not ruled out resurrecting the map in the future and is willing to turn it over to any nonprofit group that would use it for educational purposes, Lawhon said.
"We haven't had any really serious interest," she said, "but we have gotten a couple nibbles."
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Just the Facts, M'am
True fact.
The single exception occurred at the conclusion of World War II during the Truman administration and it was one predictable consequence of ending a war.
It was also the shortest, as well as the shallowest.
Contrast that with the fact that we are now enduring our SECOND recession due to the shrub thugs.
As BartCop is fond of saying ...
“It’s the Republicans’ job to crash
the economy so the super-rich can swoop in and buy companies and assets for pennies on the dollar.”
Now, this is a bit on the simplistic side, but in essence, it’s EXACTLY what they do!
And another one:
“Never trust a Republican. It’s their job to crash the economy so their billionaire friends can buy once-healthy companies for pennies on the dollar, fire the employees and sell the assets for profit.”
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Hunt for the "Kill" switch in microchips
Feeding those (fever) dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can contain an “insane number” of chips, says one semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward. The dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like China, has only deepened the U.S. military's concern.
Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military—and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F‑35—a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.
Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can't be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can't afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone's various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn't interfere with the chip's normal functions won't show up in these tests.
“You don't check for the infinite possible things that are not specified,” says electrical engineering professor Ruby Lee, a cryptography expert at Princeton. “You could check the obvious possibilities, but can you test for every unspecified function?”
Can you say Paranoia?
Ok, there can be legitimate concerns here, but come on - the solution is obvious ... manufacture your own microchips, DUH!
Wind in Your Face
Residential wind power is the too often forgotten little brother of the wind power industry that builds turbines on the scale of jumbo jets. But it's starting to grow up and come out of the shadow of its bigger sibling. "improved generator technology [lighter magnets in the generators, blades that adjust to wind conditions, and units that wirelessly report how much power they're making], more financial incentives, rising electric rates, and energy-security concerns have opened the way for small-wind power to bloom in unlikely places."
That's right, they aren't just for the farm anymore. You should see more and more small wind turbines in suburbs and urban settings as time goes on. Of course, we're still talking small potatoes compared to big wind power, on the order of only 3 megawatts in 2007 according to the American Wind En ergy Association (AWEA), but that's triple the generating capacity of 2006. A few more years of tripling and doubling, and the power of exponential growth will be felt.
U.S. Consumers: "Get the cheap stuff"
Lambert, Getty Images
I had a faint hope that the rise in food prices might lead people to buy more carefully, perhaps cook more from scratch instead of buying prepared food, or even cut back on meat and eat more vegetables. No such luck; according to the IHT, Americans are just buying more crap, because the cheap calories come from the most processed, corn-based foods. My favourite quote:
"In Ohio, Holly Levitsky is replacing the Lucky Charms cereal in her kitchen with Millville Marshmallows and Stars, a less expensive store brand." Pizza sales at Domino's are down, while Wal-Mart says that sales of peanut butter and spaghetti are up. On the other hand, so are the sales of packaged food.
Donna Dunaway, a homemaker, used to splurge on the ingredients for homemade lasagna, her husband's favorite, before food prices began to surge this year."Now he's lucky to get a 99-cent lasagna TV dinner, or maybe some Manwich out of a can," she said. "I just can't afford to be buying all that good meat and cheese like I used to."
So much for hoping ...We don't forget.
Concentration camp doctor tops list of 10 most-wanted Nazis
Former SS doctor Aribert Heim tops a list released Wednesday of most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminals. He is a man so brutal that witnesses remember him as the worst they saw, though he was only at Mauthausen concentration camp for two months.
Heim would be 93 today, but "we have good reason to believe he is still alive," said Efraim Zuroff by telephone from Jerusalem. Zuroff is the top Nazi hunter for Simon Wiesenthal Center, which published the list.
Still, despite a $485,000 reward for Heim's arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria, he has managed to avoid capture for decades.
He is only one of hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals that the center estimates are still at large.
After Heim on the center's most wanted list are: John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the U.S., which says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps; Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia; Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to their death; and Soeren Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.
But the nature of Heim's alleged crimes are what catapulted him to the top of the list.
Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched Heim kill a man.
It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.
Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.
"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."
But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen.
The hunt for Heim has taken investigators from the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the world. Besides his home country of Austria and neighboring Germany where he settled after the war, tips have come from Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the Baden-Baden state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979.
Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by Germany.
He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941.
While there, witnesses told investigators, he worked closely with SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting various solutions into Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the fastest.
But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an American Military Tribunal in 1946 and sentenced to death, along with other camp medical personnel and commanders, Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.
Heim's file in the Berlin Document Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered to obliterate any mention of Mauthausen, according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the AP. Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration camp, he was listed as having a different SS assignment.
This "cannot be correct," the indictment says. "It is possible that through data manipulation the short assignment at the same time to the (concentration camp) was concealed."
There is no indication who might have been responsible.
The U.S. Army Intelligence file on Heim could shed light on his wartime and postwar activities, and is among hundreds of thousands transferred to the U.S. National Archives. But the Army's electronic format is such that staff have so far only been able to access about half of them, and these don't include the file requested by the AP.
Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, declined to comment through a spokeswoman.
"I don't believe there is anything appropriate for Mr. Rosenbaum to add," said Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney in an e-mail.
Heim was relatively well-known, however, having been a national hockey player in Austria before the war, and there were plenty of witnesses from his time at Mauthausen.
Austrian authorities sent the 1950 arrest warrant to American authorities in Germany who initially agreed to turn him over, then told the Austrians, in a Dec. 21, 1950, letter obtained by the AP, that they couldn't trace him.
What happened next is unclear, but in 1958 Heim apparently felt comfortable enough to buy a 42-unit apartment block in Berlin, listing it in his own name with a home address in Mannheim, according to purchase documents obtained by the AP. He then moved to the nearby resort town of Baden-Baden and opened a gynecological clinic - also under his own name, Heister said.
In 1961, German authorities were alerted and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him - he apparently had been tipped off.
Heim continued to live off the rents collected from the Berlin apartments until 1979 when the building was confiscated by German authorities.
Proof that he is alive may lie in the fact that no one has claimed his estate. Heim has two sons in Germany and a daughter who lived in Chile but whose current whereabouts are unknown.
Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, would not comment when telephoned at his Baden-Baden villa.
"All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my father, and that is absolutely false," he said. "The rest is speculation, and I can't enter into that.The neo-cons in this country would do well to remember the fact that we do not forget.
Mystery Solved
DNA confirms IDs of czar's children
DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that bone fragments exhumed last year belong to two children of Czar Nicholas II, putting to rest questions about what happened to Russia's last royal family, a regional governor said Wednesday.
Bone fragments dug up near the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg are indeed those of Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Maria, whose remains had been missing since the family was murdered in 1918 as Russia descended into civil war, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region.
"We have now found the entire family," he told reporters in Yekaterinburg, 900 miles east of Moscow.
The confirmation could bring the tortured history of the Russian imperial family closer to closure and end royal supporters' persistent hopes that members of the czar's immediate family survived the massacre.
Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. The czar; his wife, Alexandra, and their son and four daughters were fatally shot on July 17, 1918, in a basement room of the merchant's house where they were being held in Yekaterinburg
The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of their daughters were unearthed in Yekaterinburg in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. After genetic tests convinced forensics experts of their authenticity, they were buried in 1998 in a cathedral in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg.
The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas and his family in 2000, even as it expressed doubts that the remains were indeed those of the czar's family.
The remains of Alexei and Maria, however, had never been located, leading to decades of speculation that perhaps one or both had survived.
Last summer, researchers dug up the bone shards near Yekaterinburg and enlisted Russian and U.S. laboratories to conduct DNA tests.
"The main genetic laboratory in the United States has concluded its work with a full confirmation of our own laboratories' work," Rossel told reporters. "This has confirmed that indeed it is the children.
It was unclear which laboratory Rossel was referring to but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process.
The press service for Russian Orthodox Church said no one could comment on the discovery.
As hippies mourn world wide ...
"I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild." -- Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)
Hard Lemonade Debacle
7-year-old boy removed from father and placed in state custody over mistaken order of hard lemondade
Christopher Ratte took his 7-year-old son to a baseball game at Comerica Park. He ordered a lemonade from a vendor and gave it to his boy. Unbeknownst to Ratte (a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan) it was "hard" lemonade, meaning it contained alcohol. When a guard spotted the boy sipping from the bottle, the police were called in, the boy was taken from his father, driven by ambulance to the hospital, and put into foster care.The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114."I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."
But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.
"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.
"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.
... it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.
*****
Ok, the vendor should be hung for not specifying that the "lemonade" contained alcohol in the first place. Secondly, the over reaction on the part of the officialdom was not warranted if the prof was truly unaware of the very existence of hard lemonade - something I doubt, given the bombardment of advertising for it (I am an Archeaologist as well and even I know it exists), but I can believe he had no clue that the lemonade he was getting for his son was just such a lemonade ... the thought of an alcohol laced lemonade would not have crossed his mind when getting a 'soda' for his child.
However, if he deliberately got a alcoholic drink for his 7-year-old son ... let me know where the you want the hole dug to bury him in - alive!
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The RNC Can't Handle The Truth
This is really is too rich.
The Republican Party, who has spent years either sponsoring or cheering on ads that relied on distortions or outright lies to win elections, are outraged that the Democratic National Committee dares to use facts in an ad about John McCain.
Here are a few excerpts from the cease and desist letter that the RNC is sending out to various television station managers.
It has come to our attention that your station is currently or will soon begin airing a false advertisement sponsored by the Democratic National Committee ("DNC"). The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously accuses Senator McCain of stating that prolonging the Iraq war for "100 years" would be "fine" with him.Actually, the ad doesn't accuse John McCain of anything. But one must wonder if it occurred to the RNC that if they think John McCain's own words imply that he's fine with war in Iraq for 100 years, then they've just endorsed what the DNC ad shows.
But it's not just the words coming out of John McCain's mouth that has the RNC frothing at the mouth, it's:
...the accompanying visual images in the advertisement, which show explosions, burning military equipment, and on-screen text stating "Over 4,000 Dead."This of course clashes with the RNC version of war, which features freshly painted schools and waving purple fingers, rather than its ugly realities.
But this has to be my favorite line:
...the DNC has no right to knowingly and willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.You can almost hear them screaming, "That's our job!"
For the love of Pete!
Shelby County, TN Sheriff: watch out for photographers and radical greens, they might be terrorists
The Sheriff's Office in Shelby County, Tennessee, is warning locals to turn in anyone who takes too many pictures of bridges or shopping malls, because they might be scouting for Al Qaeda, who are clearly slavering at the opportunity to make a gigantic media splash by getting up to some serious naughtiness on the "iconic Hernando DeSoto Bridge."The Sheriff also asked environmentalists to look out for anyone "a little bit radical" who might be a terrorist provocateur hoping to exploit the trusting, gentle hippies to turn them into deep green Unabombers.
"You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we'll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing," said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.Shelby County sergeant Larry Allen warned attendees at the meeting to look for people who appear to be doing surveillance outside public buildings, such as shopping malls.
"One of the things discussed in the al-Qaeda manual is conducting surveillance of your target," added Eric Jackson with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. "That could mean looking at a building to see how security is established."
Malware gets EULA
Symantec security researcher Liam OMurchu has details on this latest development. The help section of the latest version of the Zeus malware states that the client has no right to distribute Zeus in any business or commercial purpose not connected to the initial sale, cannot examine the source code of the product, has no right to use the product to control other botnets, and cannot send the product to anti-virus companies. The client does agree to "give the seller a fee for any update to the product that is not connected with errors in the work, as well as for adding additional functionality." Modern license agreements take a great deal of (deserved) fire for being absurdly draconian, but even the likes of Adobe and Microsoft don't claim that purchasing a version of their respective products locks the user into buying future editions.It's obviously difficult for the manufacturers of an illegal product to threaten legal sanctions against an infringer, but the Zeus authors give it their best shot. According to the EULA, "In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies." Frankly, "We'll blow your kneecaps off and feed them to you," might be a bit more effective as a threat, but I suppose it's a bit hard to carry out that threat over the Internet.
Squid Again?!
New Zealand scientists thaw 1,000-pound squid corpse
Marine scientists in New Zealand on Tuesday were thawing the corpse of the largest squid ever caught to try to unlock the secrets of one of the ocean's most mysterious beasts.
No one has ever seen a living, grown colossal squid in its natural deep ocean habitat, and scientists hope their examination of the 1,089-pound, 26-foot long colossal squid, set to begin Wednesday, will help determine how the creatures live. The thawing and examination are being broadcast live on the Internet.
The squid, which was caught accidentally by fishermen last year, was removed from its freezer Monday and put into a tank filled with saline solution. Ice was added to the tank Tuesday to slow the thawing process so the outer flesh wouldn't rot, said Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa.
After it is thawed, scientists will examine the squid's anatomical features, remove the stomach, beak and other mouth parts, take tissue samples for DNA analysis and determine its sex, Diebel said.
"If we get ourselves a male it will be the first reported (scientific) description of the male of the species," Steve O'Shea, a squid expert at Auckland's University of Technology, told National Radio. He is one of the scientists conducting the examination.
The squid is believed to be the largest specimen of the rare deep-water species Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, or colossal squid, ever caught, O'Shea has said.
Colossal squid, which have long been one of the most mysterious denizens of the deep ocean, can grow up to 46 feet long, descend to 6,500 feet into the ocean and are considered aggressive hunters.
At the time it was caught, O'Shea said it would make calamari rings the size of tractor tires if cut up - but they would taste like ammonia, a compound found in the animals' flesh.
Fishermen off the coast of Antarctica accidentally netted the squid in February 2007 while catching Patagonian toothfish, which are sold under the name Chilean sea bass.
The squid was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep. Recognizing it as a rare find, the fishermen froze the squid on their vessel to preserve it. The national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, later took possession of it.
The previous largest colossal squid ever found was a 660 pound female squid discovered in 2003, the first ever landed.
Researchers plan to eventually put the squid on display in a 1,800 gallon tank of formaldehyde at the museum in the capital, Wellington.
Colossal squid are found in Antarctic waters and are not related to giant squid found round the coast of New Zealand. Giant squid grow up to 39 feet long, and are not as heavy as colossal squid.
This is a follow up to the blog I posted last year on this Squid.
Psych Exam
S.C. teen accused of school bomb plot may get psych exam
A Florence, South Carolina teen accused of plotting to blow up his high school may have to undergo a psychological exam.
Prosecutors plan to argue in federal court Tuesday that 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger (pronounced: SHALL'-ehn-burger) should be checked for mental problems that could prevent him from helping his lawyers defend him.
Schallenberger was arrested April 19. Authorities say he bought materials to make several bombs and had written a journal detailing his plans to attack Chesterfield High School.
The teen faces several state and federal charges, including attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. That charge carries a possible life sentence if he is convicted.
Like Duh!? Psych exam, phooey, the kid's nuts!
