10 August 2003

California Reeling

[source]
In other California news today, the L.A. Times notes that California lost another 21,000 jobs last month, which is half the total nationwide job loss for the month. Someone in the White House ought to point out that job loss is worst where Democrats are in charge of things. Meanwhile, Davis has signed an ill-advised ban on PBDE's, a flame retardant popular especially with high-tech manufacturers in California (you all have them in your computers). The EU, naturally, banned PBDE's several years ago, and now has much higher rates of computer fires and injuries from other kinds of fires in products that used to have PBDE's.
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Big Media credibility watch

Media errors from Instantman.

  • Eric Muller points out that the NY Times claim that “Right now, individual [federal] prosecutors decide when to appeal a judge’s sentence” is factually wrong and destroys the entire point of the editorial in which it appears.
  • More lies by Paul Krugman about the rate of growth of per capita spending by the California state government. He claims “only 10%” while his data yields 13.4%. However, a more reasonable “peak to peak” measurement yeilds an increase of 25.9% from 1990 to 2001. Krugman uses numbers from 2003 by which point the budget crisis had already caused spending cuts.
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Sixth Republic watch

[source, source]
An unnamed 15-year-old girl is assaulted by 18 boys, most of them not much older than she is. Sonia, also 15, is raped by seven of her supposed friends in the basement of her apartment building. Sheherezade, 11, is beaten and raped repeatedly over the course of a year by 12 different boys. GRIM AS SUCH crimes may be, they’re becoming commonplace in the police ledgers of Paris, Lyons or Toulouse. The scene is almost always the same: the housing projects called cités on the outskirts of France’s major cities. Built by socially progressive governments in the 1960s, they’ve since been taken over by a generation of mostly Arab immigrants -- impoverished, cut off from their native lands and culture, ghettoized.
That's Europe, embracing the rest of the world like long lost brothers.
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The advantage of no math skills

[source, source]
A group of about 600 peace activists and veterans marched through the streets of San Francisco today demanding that the U.S. government pull all its troops out of Iraq immediately
Here are the two good quotes - put them together and ask, does this person comprehend numbers?
"It went great," said Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange. "We are rebuilding the anti-war movement into an anti-occupation movement." Today's rally was smaller than pre-war rallies before the Iraq War started. Benjamin said the movement is still rebuilding.
Yes, as the crowds get monotonically smaller, that's a clear sign of rebuilding.
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Afghani Girl Band

[source, source]
It began in Kabul as a joke, but with the help of a few German musicians Afghanistan's all-girl rock group "Burqa Band" was formed in the space of a day and has hit the airwaves and clubs in Germany. All that remains of the ephemeral alliance of the Burqa and rock is an amateur video clip and a song remixed by Berlin DJ Barbara Morgenstern which has become a modest summer-time favourite. The female trio appears on screen as three blue ghosts in a makeshift studio in Kabul; bound by their robes they nevertheless let it all hang out on the drums, electric bass and microphone
Despite the modest success in the West, the girls are still unwilling to be named due to fear of reprisal.
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