n2doc
n2doc's JournalChristopher Hitchens, 1949–2011: In Memoriam
By Graydon Carter
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say it, God. He died today at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, after a punishing battle with esophageal cancer, the same disease that killed his father.
He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.
Christopher was one of the first writers I called when I came to Vanity Fair in 1992. Six years before, I had called on him to write for Spy. That offer was ever so politely rejected. The Vanity Fair approach had a fee attached, though, and to my everlasting credit, he accepted and has been writing for the magazine ever since. With the exception of Dominick Dunne (who died in 2009), no writer has been more associated with Vanity Fair. There was no subject too big or too small for Christopher. Over the past two decades he traveled to just about every hot spot you can think of. He’d also subject himself to any manner of humiliation or discomfort in the name of his column. I once sent him out on a mission to break the most niggling laws still on the books in New York City. One such decree forbade riding a bicycle with your feet off the pedals. The photograph that ran with the column, of Christopher sailing a small bike through Central Park with his legs in the air, looked like something out of the Moscow Circus. When he embarked on a cause of self-improvement for a three-part series, he subjected himself to myriad treatments to improve his dental area and other dark regions. At one point I suggested he go to a well-regarded waxing parlor in town for what they indelicately call the “sack, back, and crack.” He struggled to absorb the full meaning of this, but after a few seconds he smiled a nervous smile and said, “In for a penny . . . ”
Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs.
more
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/christopher-hitchens/graydon-201112
Now I've seen it all: An anti-vaccine children's book
Posted on: December 14, 2011 3:00 AM, by Orac
I've been so busy writing about things like Dr. Stanislaw Burzysnki's highly exaggerated cancer claims, which have become a new favorite topic of mine despite the fact that Dr. Burzynski himself has been plying his "alternative" cancer treatments for over three decades, and one of my long time topics, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), that I actually missed a couple of vaccine-related posts that would normally affect me the way catnip affects cats. Also, after two days of doing even longer than the usual Orac-ian screeds, one of which required quite a bit of research, it's time for a bit of lighter fare.
And, again, the anti-vaccine movement provides.
It's always mildly embarrassing to me whenever bloggers whose usual areas of interest aren't the antivaccine movement pick up on a particularly loony bit of anti-vaccine hysteria and are all over it before I am, given that I tend to pride myself on having my finger on the pulse of the anti-vaccine movement to the point where I normally am among the first to pick up on these things. Whether or not that is, in fact, anything I should actually be proud of is, of course, another question. Very long time readers might recall that many years ago (well, more than six, to be precise), I came across a book by an anti-vaccine activist who apparently fancied himself a science fiction writer. I'm referring to the hilarious conspiracy novel The Vaccine Aliens by Ray Gallup, which tells the tale of a father whose child develops autism after (of course!) getting the MMR vaccine and then who later stumbles upon the reason why. It turns out that not only does the MMR vaccine cause autism, but that it's a plot by shape-shifting aliens to destroy the human race with vaccines. I kid you not. As I so frequently say about the loonier depths of the anti-vaccine movement, you just can't make this stuff up. At least, I can't, although apparently people like Ray Gallup can. David Icke, had he known of this novel, would have been proud.
However, camp like The Vaccine Aliens, as hilariously inept as it was, is far more amusing than it is dangerous. No one, not even anti-vaccine activists, takes it seriously, with the possible exception of David Icke, who is a crank that many other cranks like to look down upon in order to reassure themselves that, no matter how little respect they get, at least they're not as ridiculed as David Icke. What's not so amusing are books like this one, a children's book by Stephanie Messenger entitled Melanie's Marvelous Measles...
more
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/12/now_ive_seen_it_all_an_anti-vaccine_chil.php
Use of Chimps Halted in New U.S.-Funded Research
By JAMES GORMAN
Published: December 15, 2011
The National Institutes of Health on Thursday suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees and accepted the first uniform criteria for assessing the necessity of such research. Those criteria require that the research be necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it.
In making the announcement, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the N.I.H., said the agency was accepting the recommendations released earlier in the day by an expert committee of the Institute of Medicine and would establish a working group to decide how to carry out those recommendations. The decision by the N.I.H. and the recomentions from the Institute of Medicine, a expert advisory group, do not put an end to research on chimps, but were claimed as victories by animal rights groups that have been fighting for ban on such research for decades, arguing that research on chimpanzees was unneeded and cruel to the animal that is human’s closest relative. They said that the move was a step toward eventually ending chimp research, already a tiny segment of federal research.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/science/chimps-in-medical-research.html
The last thing a mouse sees....
Eagle owl at 1000 frames per Second towards a camera
full video at
http://www.dogwork.com/owfo8/
(Posted here because apparently the 'video and multimedia' forum is only for OWS related videos. Go figure. )
An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
CORD JEFFERSON
Senior Editor
One of the best parts about being an educator's son is getting to hear all the crazy things your parent has to deal with courtesy of the "bad kids." I was a relatively mild-mannered student, thanks in large part to the fact that my mother, a teacher turned school administrator, had raised me to be. Even when she wasn't verbally doling out conduct lessons, I saw how an interaction with a mean or violent student would leave her frazzled at the end of a long day, and I knew I never wanted to inflict the same kind of torment on anyone else's mom or dad. Nevertheless, a gut instinct of youthful rebellion underpinned by hip-hop and Propagandhi always led me to inquire about the wild kids at my mom's schools, the ones who didn't just listen to punk, but who acted it as well.
It was in pursuit of one of these vicarious thrills that I asked my mom why she was so upset one day when I was about 12 years old. "Just something from today with a student," she said. I pestered her for more details, and she told me the story. A kid at her school—a primarily low-income, high-minority middle school serving sixth- through eighth-graders—was acting out. His outbursts were not normal, especially considering how young he was: He was rude, aggressive, destructive, foulmouthed, so angry. I remember my mom saying she was amazed at how much rage could fit into such a tiny body.
At first, the student's teachers tried putting him in timeout. When that didn't work, they escalated to trips to the principal's office. When those didn't work, he got detention after school. And when that didn't work either, they started sending him home. But when he'd return from a couple of days at home and immediately start tearing his classrooms apart, the suspensions grew to a week, two weeks.
Still nothing worked, and one day things got scary enough that my mom, accompanied by a police officer, felt it necessary to escort the student home to speak with his parents. When they got to his apartment about a mile away from the school, the weeks of mystery surrounding the boys' behavior were replaced with instant clarity. His mother, his only guardian, answered the door ashamedly, and out scurried a man, her most recent john.
After some talking and crying, the truth surfaced: The reason the "problem student" behaved so badly is because he knew that if his tantrums were chronic, he'd be sent home. And that was a good thing, because when he was home, his mother couldn't work as a prostitute. He couldn't tell any of his teachers this, of course, because then he'd run the risk of child welfare services taking him away from his mother, and he needed to be there to protect her. The boy never hated school, he just loved his mom more. This is how you get so much rage into such a tiny body.
more
http://www.good.is/post/an-ode-to-a-poor-black-kid-i-never-knew-how-forbes-gets-it-wrong/
Abandoned (Family Farmers)
"Abandoned" and its accompanying soundtrack were commissioned by The Chipotle Cultivate Foundation to raise awareness about the economic hardship family farmers face in the increasingly industrialized American agriculture system.
The last thing you want to see if you are a mouse...
Eagle owl at 1000 frames per Second towards a camera
longer version at link:
http://www.dogwork.com/owfo8/
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