folo

Today’s Daily Journal quotes Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann as saying that he wants legislation that will give election commissioners two years to do a purge of the voting rolls. If they don’t get it done in two years, his proposal would then allow the secretary of state to take over the county’s rolls, purge them, and turn them back over to the county.

This raises more questions than it answers. I will say this: I sigh with relief that the voting rights act preclearance of any Hosemann-originating mischief will be from a Justice Department we can depend upon.

He’s also demanding that to get early voting, the state needs to pass a voter ID requirement. The Daily Journal article notes how far behind Mississippi falls on early voting and on liberality of absentee voting.

House elections chairman and Democrat Tommy Reynolds (who we can also depend upon to help protect us from Sec. of State Hosemann) doesn’t see how the two could be connected:

House Apportionment and Elections Committee Chairman Tommy Reynolds, D-Water Valley, said he also supports early voting. He said he has observed the process in both Tennessee and Arkansas, and believes it works.

But Reynolds said early voting should not be tied to an identification requirement.

“Those are separate issues,” he said. “You can find states that have both, but some states have one without the other.”

I’m with Rep. Reynolds on this one. H/t to Yallpolitics for the story.

[Read more →]

So he wants you to watch this. But I’ll warn you: do not attempt this video with hurt rib(s).

[Read more →]

Dr. X (who is also “been puttering around the subject of evil with posts on Hitler’s Missing Testicle, the deadly Wal-Mart stampede and the barbarism in Mumbai” and uses the occasion for a general meditation on evil from the point of view of a psychologist) has up as today’s vintage photo a Dorothea Lange photo that I can’t resist stealing. This a picture Lange took while working for the Farm Service Administration in 1935; it’s a relocated farm worker’s child in New Mexico.

[Read more →]

Well shucks, I’m sorry I missed this two days ago, but it sure is good to see anytime: Tyler Edmonds’ first Thanksgiving in freedom. He sounds great.

[Read more →]

* Not our fishwater, the real stuff. Here:

(h/t a gnostic)

Could you go for a bit of ingenious U.S. technology with the potential, scientists say, to power the world?

Drawing power, including electrical power, from water current is, of course, a very old idea. But existing technologies relying on waves, tides, or dams need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently (while most of the earth’s currents flow below three knots). Moreover, they’re hugely expensive and complex to construct, are useful only in very limited places, and always obstruct the river or other body of water where they’re placed.

Well, meet VIVACE — “Vortex-Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy” — a system conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan that, as UM professor of naval architecture Michael Bernitsas explains, is based on the changes in water speed due to a current’s flow past an obstruction. Eddies or vortices in water-flow, as you’ve noticed, move objects up/down or left/right. Aha:

“This is a totally new method of extracting energy from water flow,” said Mr Bernitsas. “Fish curve their bodies to glide between the vortices shed by the bodies of the fish in front of them. Their muscle power alone could not propel them through the water at the speed they go, so they ride in each other’s wake.”

Such vibrations, which were first observed 500 years ago by Leonardo DaVinci in the form of “Aeolian Tones”, can cause damage to structures built in water, like docks and oil rigs. But Mr Bernitsas added: “We enhance the vibrations and harness this powerful and destructive force in nature.

“If we could harness 0.1 per cent of the energy in the ocean, we could support the energy needs of 15 billion people. In the English Channel, for example, there is a very strong current, so you produce a lot of power.”

But VIVACE’s very best feature is that it can generate electricity in water flowing at less than one knot — about one mile an hour — so it can operate on practically all waterways and sea beds anywhere. Even in very sloooooow river currents, it’ll work. And because its oscillation is so small, VIVACE is unlikely to harm aquatic life; nor, because it’s positioned far below the surface, will it interfere with shipping, fishing, recreational boating, or tourism.

As you see in the photo, VIVACE is simply a system of cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow. As the water flows past, the cylinders create vortices that push and pull the cylinders up and down on attached springs — and the mechanical energy in their vibrations is then converted into electricity.

Cylinders arranged over a cubic metre of the sea or river bed in a flow of three knots can produce 51 watts. This is more efficient than similar-sized turbines or wave generators, and the amount of power produced can increase sharply if the flow is faster or if more cylinders are added.

A “field” of cylinders built on the sea bed over a 1km by 1.5km area, and the height of a two-storey house, with a flow of just three knots, could generate enough power for around 100,000 homes. Just a few of the cylinders, stacked in a short ladder, could power an anchored ship or a lighthouse.

Systems could be sited on river beds or suspended in the ocean. The scientists behind the technology … say that generating power in this way would potentially cost only around 3.5p per kilowatt hour, compared to about 4.5p for wind energy and between 10p and 31p for solar power. They say the technology would require up to 50 times less ocean acreage than wave power generation.

Now just imagine what this could mean not only for developed countries but for poor ones with no money and few natural resources. One of the real barriers to “emerging” nations is that there’s not enough fossil fuel left in the world to let them develop: the hard fact is that they’re just never going to “emerge.” BUT they all have rivers and/or coastlines. And if VIVACE is practical on, say, a 700-mile river like the Gambia, what a boon for local power production — heck, The Gambia might even become a net exporter of power to its neighbors.

The VIVACE project has already won a Department of Energy/US Office of Naval Research grant under which engineers are now deploying a prototype device in the Detroit River (which flows at less than two knots); the current issue of the Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering has a writeup. So maybe it won’t take much to get the Obama administration interested in perfecting, implementing, and disseminating this baby, hmm?

Mighty hard to locate a downside to that.

UPDATE: Cool video of Prof. Bernitsas explaining VIVACE in front of a working model.

[Read more →]

According to Jerry Mitchell, DoJ is finally having a new look at the “Mississippi Burning” case.

A department official recently contacted The Clarion-Ledger, asking questions about the 2,802-page transcript of the 1967 U.S. District Court trial that ended in the conviction of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, then-Deputy Cecil Price and others.

The Justice Department’s interest is a change of stance for the department, which previously had omitted the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney from its review of more than 100 killings from the civil rights era – despite the fact five suspects are still alive.

More fascinating details await there.

[Read more →]

. . . go to The New Yorker and read John le Carré on the madness of spies. (h/t Laura Rozen)

[Read more →]

Meet Anand Giridharadas. A columnist for the International Herald Tribune, he had a piece in last week’s NYT Week in Review titled India Calling. Reading it only yesterday, I considered how differently it might have impressed me if I’d seen it a week earlier. Before Mumbai, I couldn’t have counted it the elegy it seems now.

“My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure,” Anand wrote.

They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of Washington’s best schools.

It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.

My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.

“My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities,” he owned. “But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.” Five years ago, history swiveled Anand back to India, one of many transforming its “brain drain” into a “brain circulation.”

India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future. Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts.

Today from that frontier he reports The Special Sting of Personal Terrorism.

Desmond Boylan/Reuters
ANGUISH A woman evacuated from the besieged Trident-Oberoi Hotel peers from a bus.

While the hostage situation endured, more was unknown than known. Rumors flew, unconfirmed. Did you hear? They shot all the women at the hotel switchboard. Did you hear? They executed a young mother and her children. Did you hear? They sent a hostage out of the building to get food for their attackers. Truth was complicated; everything blurred.

But what slowly became clear was that this was an attack of especial barbarism, because it was so personal. It was unlike the many strikes of the last many months, bombs left in thronging markets or trains or cars: acts of shrinking cowardice. The new men were not cowards. They seemed to prolong the fight as long as they could. They killed face to face; they wanted to see and speak to their victims; they could taste the violence they made.

Last week, Anand’s narrative rippled with confidence:

We learned how to make friends here, and that it requires befriending families. We learned to love here: Men found fondness for the elusive Indian woman; women surprised themselves in succumbing to chauvinistic, mother-spoiled men.

We forged dual-use accents. We spoke in foreign accents by default. But when it came to arguing with accountants or ordering takeout kebabs, we went sing-song Indian.

We gravitated to work specially suited to us. If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida’s phrase, there is also emerging what might be called a fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.

But this week has wracked India’s society-mediators:

A text-message moving among Mumbaikars expressed the uniqueness of the now: “Brothers and sisters, it’s time to wake up and do something for the country — however little — related to this or not — start today and continue it through the years — do not forget as easily as we are used to forgetting.”

Many told themselves and each other that this time would change things, just as Americans had told themselves after 9/11. But they knew their own history, and America’s, and they seemed, even as they spoke the words, to disbelieve them already.

Now I’m glad I didn’t find the first piece until a few minutes before the second appeared. If I’d seen it earlier, time and shock could have diluted the contrast between that proud tone of accomplishment and the run-over-by-history grief of an ancient yet brand-new society. Now, observing what a week has done to Anand — to Mumbai, to India, to all of us — I renew my grasp on what we’re up against in trying to make history bend, let alone swivel.

And yet, if it can be budged even a little, I think surely the Anand Giridharadases are the ones to determine that “yes we can” force the turn. So I wish them best strength to heal and reclaim their blossoming, for it is also ours.

[Read more →]

In April, New York Times investigative reporter David Barstow pulled back some rank enseaméd sheets, revealing how retired military officers pumped the Iraq war from their spots in bed with the Pentagon, cable and network TV, and companies in the defense industry. Within days of the Barstow exposé, the Pentagon stopped its program of feeding information to Rumsfeld’s-handpuppet “military analysts,” but the outcry in Congress and the blogosphere continued, and by late May, the Defense Department’s Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office had launched investigations.

Though the story went quiet for months, I’m guessing that the investigations’ fruits must be nearing harvest: David Barstow is again front-paging NYT today.

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey. …

Now to see what the new sheriff does about this whore and the johns he’s been servicing without telling about each other (DoD, Petraeus and other generals, DynCorp parent Veritas, Defense Solutions, NBC). He’s made more than one kind of killing and badly needs a calling to account.

[Read more →]

Sebastian D’Souza
A gunman walks at the Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal railway station in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008.

The fog of terrorism: Was it 40 gunmen or was it 10? Having heard both, I lean to 40 and wonder how this ever gets sorted out. From a photographer at the railroad station:

But what angered Mr D’Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”

In a story about how woefully unprepared local first-responders were for terrorist incidents (or “encounters” as India calls them), NYT reports 10 gunmen by “official estimate” (whatever that means) — while IBN says 12 men and places the blame on terrorists, a “gangster,” and the Pakistani ISI.

Well, I don’t know, but this incident seems mighty instructive: IBN reported that after one group of terrorists shot up the railway station, they repaired to a hospital nearby. The heat, including three of the city’s top police officials (one of them an “encounter specialist,” which I take to be something like a hostage negotiator or an incident commander), pursued them. And the three top cops drove up in a big vehicle like a Suburban and strolled into the hospital, where they immediately “encountered” the armed terrorists who shot the cops dead AND STOLE THEIR CAR. Then they roared away to the Taj in the stolen cop car, machine-gunning a bunch of news crews who filmed them even while being shot at.

All right, I suppose something similar could happen in any large city: heavily-armed men pop up in the midst of everyday life, shooting in all directions, and there’s little to stop them at first. But the Indian authorities seemed particularly inept. Apparently they needed hours to authorize the use of their equivalent of Delta Force and then more hours to muster the teams and fly them down from Delhi. In the meantime, all sorts of different uniforms were showing up on scene, firing away with all kinds of antiques — a friend of mine who knows guns swears he saw the good guys carrying World War I Enfield rifles and WWII Sten guns. And as you see above, the terrorists looked like college kids (with AK-47s).

I know not a word of Hindi, okay, but somehow I just have to think that the culture that gave us the Kama Sutra has a word for clusterf*ck.

[Read more →]