NBC, Black History Month and a Racist Lunch?

What has the world come to? If you haven't heard, NBC is under fire for serving the "stereotypical racist" lunch that a Black woman worked so hard to create. From the New York Post,

A special NBC Black History Month lunch spread -- featuring fried chicken, collard greens and black-eyed peas -- sparked a commissary controversy yesterday, but the African-American chef who planned it doesn't understand the fuss.

"All I wanted to do was make a meal that everyone would enjoy -- and that I eat myself," NBC cook Leslie Calhoun told The Post last night.

Calhoun's proudly planned feast, which she began last year, hit a snag when Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the drummer for Jimmy Fallon's "Late Night" show band, The Roots, shot a photo of the menu outside the network's Rockefeller Center cafeteria and posted it on Twitter.

STEAMED: NBC cook Leslie Calhoun yesterday defends her Black History Month menu, which was removed by apologetic execs after "racism" complaints.
The menu quickly spread across the Internet and sparked a fury.

But Calhoun is confused.

"Questlove, who I serve every day and who enjoys my food, requested the neck bone [cooked in] the black-eyed peas and fried chicken, then got off the line, saying, 'This is racist,' " she said.

"The next thing you know, people were taking pictures of the sign and asking all the other black people in the cafeteria if this was racist. They said that it wasn't."

Thompson, who has 1.2 million Twitter followers, clearly realized he'd started a food fight.

An hour after he circulated the menu, he tweeted, "i think i need a twitter break. i done started something. and now i must put out fire."

An NBC Universal spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment.

But Kevin Goldman, NBC's vice president of communications, tweeted: "The sign in the NBCU cafeteria has been removed. We apologize for anyone who was offended by it."

A tale of two cities.

Actually, it's more like a tale of two countries. How will the story play out? If you've been watching how Greece has it rock-bottom, then you don't want to see America follow it's path. From Reuters New Service: TIMELINE-Greece's economic crisis. Please keep in mind that Greece's debt is 12% of GDP while the US is nearly 40% of GDP.

Greece has been in turmoil since then Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis called early elections in September, 2009 seeking a new mandate to deal with Greece's economic slowdown. He lost to his socialist opponents.

Following is a timeline of events since then.

Oct. 2009 - The snap election on Oct. 4 returns George Papandreou's socialist PASOK party to power with a comfortable majority. It will hold 160 seats in the 300-seat parliament. The new government discloses the 2009 budget deficit will be 12.7 percent, more than double the previously announced figure.

Nov. 2009 - The new government pledges in its 2010 draft budget to save Greece from bankruptcy by cutting the deficit while keeping electoral promises to help the poor amid the economic crisis. The final budget draft is submitted on Nov. 20 and is due for adoption on Dec 23.

-- Greece aims to cut its budget deficit to 9.1 percent of GDP in 2010 to assure EU partners and markets it is serious about restoring fiscal health, its final budget draft shows.

-- It also sees public debt rising to 121 percent of GDP in 2010 from 113.4 percent in 2009. EU forecasts on Greece for 2010 are worse, with the deficit seen at 12.2 percent of GDP and national debt rising to 124.9 percent of GDP, the EU's worst.

Dec. 2009 -- S&P on Dec. 7 puts the country's A- sovereign rating on negative watch. By 1215 GMT the next day, Greek bank stocks .FTATBNK shed almost 6 pct, extending the previous day's losses, as the S&P report said Greek lenders faced the highest risk in Western Europe. The broader Greek market .ATG falls 3.6 percent.

-- The same day, Dec 8, Fitch Ratings, which had cut Greece to A- when the government revealed the higher deficit, cuts Greek debt to BBB+ with a negative outlook, the first time in 10 years a ratings agency puts Greece below the A investment grade.

-- Shares in Greek banks deepen losses to fall almost 8 percent while the euro hit a day low after the downgrade. On Dec. 9, Papandreou says he is determined to win back the country's lost credibility.

-- On Dec. 14, Papandreou outlines policies to cut the country's ballooning budget deficit and try to regain the trust of investors and EU partners. Papandreou announces a 10 percent cut in social security spending in 2010. Says he will abolish bonuses at state banks and slap a 90 percent tax on private bankers' bonuses. Vows a serious fight against corruption and tax evasion, calling them the country's biggest problems.

-- He announces a drastic overhaul of the pension system in six months and a new tax system that will make the wealthier carry more of the burden.

-- On Dec. 15, markets fall in reaction to Papandreou announcements and workers immediately protest the cuts in social security.

-- The next day Standard & Poor's cut Greece's rating by one notch, to BBB-plus from A-minus, saying austerity steps announced by Prime Minister Papandreou were unlikely to produce a "sustainable" reduction in the public debt burden.

-- On Dec. 19 with measures still failing to convince markets, they continue to sell Greek government bonds and stocks. Yield spreads between Greek and benchmark German 10-year bunds widened to an average 272 basis points on that day, the widest in more than 8 months. -- Moody's cuts Greece's debt to A2 from A1 on Dec. 22 over soaring deficits, the third rating agency to downgrade Greece, but still two notches above that of Fitch and S&P. The spread between 10-year Greek and German benchmark Bunds tighten after the downgrade.

Obama Cartoon Spoof About the Difficulties of Being President

Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers

Such is the title of a new Yahoo News story. I often wonder if female teachers have an effect on boys in such a way that boys learn reading anxiety from female teachers. Just a thought.

Little girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers. Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy. Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the answer: Female elementary school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the little girls they teach.

Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math may reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago.

Beilock and colleagues studied 52 boys and 65 girls in classes taught by 17 different teachers. Ninety percent of U.S. elementary school teachers are women, as were all of those in this study.

Student math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety at the start of the school year, the researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students — but not the boys — were to agree that "boys are good at math and girls are good at reading."

In addition, the girls who answered that way scored lower on math tests than either the classes' boys or the girls who had not developed a belief in the stereotype, the researchers found.

"It's actually surprising in a way, and not. People have had a hunch that teachers could impact the students in this way, but didn't know how it might do so in gender-specific fashion," Beilock said in a telephone interview.

Beilock, who studies how anxieties and stress can affect people's performance, noted that other research has indicated that elementary education majors at the college level have the highest levels of math anxiety of any college major.

"We wanted to see how that impacted their performance," she said.

After seeing the results, the researchers recommended that the math requirements for obtaining an elementary education teaching degree be rethought.

"If the next generation of teachers — especially elementary school teachers — is going to teach their students effectively, more care needs to be taken to develop both strong math skills and positive math attitudes in these educators," the researchers wrote.

Janet S. Hyde, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the study a "great paper, very clever research."

The Ununited States of Special Interest Groups

There are so many special interest groups that they defeat the purpose of their own existence. If there's no way possible please them all, why listen to any of them? Who cares what they think? Some one's going to mad no matter what you do, so you might as well do it anyway. From the New York Times, You Saw What in ‘Avatar’? Pass Those Glasses! If you're like me, you thought, "Gee, did I miss something?"

If you thought that “Avatar” was just a high-tech movie about a big-hearted tough guy saving the beguiling natives of a distant moon, you might want to check the prescription on your 3-D glasses.

Since its release in December, James Cameron’s science-fiction epic has broken box office records and grabbed two Golden Globe awards for best director and best dramatic motion picture. But it has also found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).

Over the last month, it has been criticized by social and political conservatives who bristle at its depictions of religion and the use of military force; feminists who feel that the male avatar bodies are stronger and more muscular than their female counterparts; antismoking advocates who object to a character who lights up cigarettes; not to mention fans of Soviet-era Russian science fiction; the Chinese; and the Vatican. This week the authorities in China announced that the 2-D version of the film would be pulled from most theaters there to make way for a biography of Confucius.

That so many groups have projected their issues onto “Avatar” suggests that it has burrowed into the cultural consciousness in a way that even its immodest director could not have anticipated. Its detractors agree that it is more than a humans-in-space odyssey — even if they do not agree on why that is so.

“Some of the ways people are reading it are significant of Cameron’s intent, and some are just by-products of what people are thinking about,” said Rebecca Keegan, the author of “The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron.” “It’s really become this Rorschach test for your personal interests and anxieties.”

The “Avatar” camp isn’t endorsing any particular interpretation, but is happy to let others read the ink blots. “Movies that work are movies that have themes that are bigger than their genre,” Jon Landau, a producer of the film, said in a telephone interview. “The theme is what you leave with and you leave the plot at the theater.”

Mr. Cameron might have opened the door to multiple readings with his declaration that “Avatar” was an environmental parable. In a news conference in London in December, he said he saw the movie “as a broader metaphor, not so intensely politicized as some would make it, but rather that’s how we treat the natural world as well.”

In a column for the Christian entertainment Web site movieguide.org, David Outten wrote that “Avatar” maligned capitalism, promoted animism over monotheism and overdramatized the possibility of environmental catastrophe on earth. At another site that offers a conservative critique of the entertainment industry, bighollywood.breitbart.com, John Nolte wrote that the film was “a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War.”

Not surprisingly, the religious overtones of “Avatar” were of interest in Vatican City, where the film was reviewed by Gaetano Vallini, a cultural critic for L’Osservatore Romano, the daily newspaper of the Holy See.

In his review, Mr. Vallini wrote that for all of the “stupefying, enchanting technology” in the film, it “gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Vallini said his widely reported review might have been overemphasized because of the publication it appeared in. His assignment to write about “Avatar” was not an attempt to advance a particular agenda, he said, but rather “a compulsory choice” given the anticipation surrounding the film.

Ultimately, Mr. Vallini said, “the movie doesn’t provoke many emotions,” and its observations about militarism, imperialism and the environment “are just sketched out as themes.”

“It is Cameron’s narrative choice,” he continued, “as he is aware of the fact that the visual aspect widely compensates for this lack.”

Other viewers say that issues of imperialism are central to the film. In a post on the science-fiction Web site io9.com, Annalee Newitz, the site’s editor in chief, wrote that “Avatar” depicted “the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare,” a dimension she said it shared with movies from “The Last Samurai” to “District 9.” (Critics have also said that “Avatar” copied story elements from the movies “Dances With Wolves,” “Pocahontas” and “Ferngully: The Last Rainforest”; the Poul Anderson novella “Call Me Joe”; and the “Noon Universe” book series by the Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.)

In movies like “Avatar,” Ms. Newitz wrote, “humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress,” until a white man “switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior.”

Ms. Newitz said in an interview that since publishing that post, she had heard from readers around the world who disagreed with her interpretation, which she appreciated. “Just the idea of whiteness is a local phenomenon,” she said. “It’s certainly not in parts of the world where white people are not dominant.”

In China, for example, the film’s imperialist themes have upset audiences who believe that the plight of the aliens, the Na’vi, who are forced from their home by human industrialists, is a parable for Chinese people whose dwellings have been forcibly razed by local governments to make way for new construction. As one pseudonymous commenter quoted on Chinasmack.com wrote: “China’s demolition crews must go sue Old Cameron, sue him for piracy/copyright infringement.”

There is, at least, consensus among “Avatar” critics that good science fiction operates on an allegorical level. In novels like “Dune,” films like “Star Wars” or television series like the recent “Battlestar Galactica,” Ms. Newitz said the fantastical elements of these works offer a place of “narrative safety” to contemplate real-life issues like environmental decay, totalitarianism and torture.

“There’s something very satisfying about being able to think through those issues without feeling you’re actually taking a political position,” she said. “Because you’re not – you’re just talking about stories.”

Over the breadth of Mr. Cameron’s career, he has been attracted to outsize themes. Ms. Keegan said that it was possible to read “The Terminator,” his breakthrough 1984 movie, as an anti-technology polemic, an anti-war film or a modern gloss on the birth of Jesus.

“Or,” she said, “ you could just watch it as a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stomps around like a robot.”

Paradoxically, the pileup of arguments surrounding “Avatar” might have made a sympathetic figure out of the outspoken Mr. Cameron, who now finds himself in the underdog position of having to account for every possible message in his ostensible popcorn film.

“Often to his detriment, he says exactly what he thinks,” Ms. Keegan said. “All of that makes him seem outside the Hollywood bubble, even though on paper he couldn’t be more of an insider.”

Ms. Newitz, however, was not sympathetic to Mr. Cameron, who wanted to make a singularly ambitious film, and may have gotten his wish. “It’s like, do you feel bad for Obama?” she said. “He’s the president — he kind of asked for it.”

Neo nazis adopt a highway in Colorado

 

Corporations Have Freedom of Speech

I'm not thrilled about this decision, but it was the right one. You can read the full text of the SCOTUS decision by clicking here. Before reading it, it may be helpful to look up a few terms: "juristic persons", "legal persons" and "natural persons."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Racist cameras

When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.


Wang, a Taiwanese-American strategy consultant who goes by the Web handle "jozjozjoz," thought it was funny that the camera had difficulties figuring out when her family had their eyes open. So she posted a photo of the blink warning on her blog under the title, "Racist Camera! No, I did not blink... I'm just Asian!" The post was picked up by Gizmodo and Boing Boing, and prompted at least one commenter to note, "You would think that Nikon, being a Japanese company, would have designed this with Asian eyes in mind."

Scott Brown for President

2012 is two years away and Scott Brown just won his senate seat last night, but already there is talk of a presidential run 2012. From the Atlantic Wire,

Republican Scott Brown has ten years experience in the Massachusetts state legislature and 12 hours experience as the Senator-elect waiting to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. This may not sound like the resume of a presidential candidate, but some see his upset victory in Tuesday's election as ample proof that Brown should run for the White House. It's not a prospect many now take seriously, but it's one receiving a surprising amount of attention.

Is GOP hyperventilation and liberal derision at the prospect of a Scott Brown presidential run inevitable? Or is it the 2012 campaign that's inevitable? After all, Brown's term, which only finishes out Ted Kennedy's six-year term, is up in 2012.

Marriage Economics

From the USA Today comes this story, Study: Marriage benefits men economically.

If you think women still reap more economic benefit than men do from marriage, you may be living in the past.

Today, men are better off economically because their wives are, too, suggests a new study on the economics of marriage by the Pew Research Center.

It shows women's education and earnings advancements are translating into overall improvement for men.

"Marriage is a different deal than it was 40 years ago," says Pew economist Richard Fry, a co-author of the study. "Typically, most wives did not work, so for economic well-being, marriage penalized guys with more mouths to feed but no extra income. Now most wives work. For guys, the economics of marriage have become much more beneficial."

Pew used Census data from 1970 and 2007 to compare U.S.-born married people ages 30-44 — ages when "typical adults have completed their education, gone to work and gotten married," the study says.

The data show more women than men today have college degrees. In 1970, 64% of graduates were men and 36% were women; in 2007, 53.5% were women and 46.5% were men. Also, women's earnings grew 44% from 1970 to 2007, compared with 6% for men. Although men, on average, still make more, women's sharper gains have narrowed the gap.

Now, more women marry men with less education and lower earnings, and more men marry women who are more educated than they are and may earn more, Fry says.

"Just as women are saying they want more from marriage than an economic security blanket, men are more open to marrying women with more education and earnings," says historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History.

But economist Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in Philadelphia, says Pew's analysis is too limited.

"What they're raising is really an important question: Who has benefited more from increasing earnings of women in the labor market?" But she says the study doesn't look at other benefits, including who spends more within families. "Simply comparing earnings and educational attainment is not a very illuminating way to answer that question."

Stevenson says the study does provide further evidence that one-breadwinner marriages are being replaced with marriages of "more equal market producers."

Racism, Lunch and Denver Public Schools

What's the difference between cultural heritage and a stereotype?

School Sorry For 'Insensitive' MLK Jr. Lunch.

Denver Public School officials are apologizing after a parent complained that a school lunch meant to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stereotypical and offensive, reported KMGH-TV.

The lunch, planned for Friday, was to include southern-style chicken, collard greens and a biscuit in honor of King.

Denver Public Schools spokesman Michael Vaughn released a statement that said: "The plan to serve a Southern-style meal in recognition of Martin Luther King Day was well intentioned but highly insensitive in light of certain hurtful cultural stereotypes still harbored in parts of our society."

Organizers of Denver's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Marade, a combination march and parade that honors King every January, did not consider the menu inappropriate, considering that King came from a southern background, but said there are other, more meaningful ways of honoring him.

"When you reduce it to the 'I have a dream' speech and a fried chicken and collard green lunch, you have just destroyed everything that Dr. King stood for," said Vern Howard, chairman of the Martin Luther King Jr. Colorado Holiday Commission.

But in barber shops and soul food restaurants in Denver's historic Five Points district, the tone was decidedly more relaxed.

"To me, I don't see that much wrong with this," said Franklin Stigal, owner of the Afro-Styling Barber Shop. "A lot of people are just griping to be griping."

A new Tiger Woods Video Game

And in poor taste.

The Mikulski Principle

The Mikulski Principle comes from a statement made by Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) when she said that,

"the middle class have no more to give. The poor have nothing to give. So, let's go and get it from those who've got it."

Tax, tax and tax...

Banks mount legal challenge to tax

Well, what's done is done. The banks were bailed out when they shouldn't have been and now the government wants to exercise punitive measures against them. The problem with the bank tax is that it really wont affect the banks. What ever taxes are levied will be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher ATM fees, credit card fees, loan fees, service fees, over-draft fees, under-draft fees, and more fees, fees,fees. From the New York Times Business Section,

Wall Street’s main lobbying arm has hired a top Supreme Court litigator to study a possible legal battle against a bank tax proposed by the Obama administration, on the theory that it would be unconstitutional, according to three industry officials briefed on the matter.

Wall Street PayIn an e-mail message sent last week to the heads of Wall Street legal departments, executives of the lobbying group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, wrote that a bank tax might be unconstitutional because it would unfairly single out and penalize big banks, according to these officials, who did not want to be identified to preserve relationships with the group’s members.

The message said the association had hired Carter G. Phillips of Sidley Austin, who has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, to study whether a tax on one industry could be considered arbitrary and punitive, providing the basis for a constitutional challenge, they said.

Police in China Close Gay Pageant

Police shut down what would have been China's first gay pageant on Friday an hour before it was set to begin, highlighting the enduring sensitivity surrounding homosexuality and the struggle by gays to find mainstream acceptance.

Organizers said they were not surprised when eight police officers turned up at the upscale club in central Beijing where the pageant, featuring a fashion show and a host in drag, was set to take place.

"They said the content, meaning homosexuality, there's nothing wrong with that, but you did not do things according to procedures," Ben Zhang said. Police told him he needed official approval for events that included performances, in this case a stage show.

Is Israel’s treatment of Ethiopians ‘racist’?

From The national news, Israel’s treatment of Ethiopians ‘racist’.

Health officials in Israel are subjecting many female Ethiopian immigrants to a controversial long-term birth control drug in what Israeli women’s groups allege is a racist policy to reduce the number of black babies.

The contraceptive, known as Depo Provera, which is given by injection every three months, is considered by many doctors as a birth control method of last resort because of problems treating its side effects.

However, according to a report published last week, use of the contraceptive by Israeli doctors has risen threefold over the past few years. Figures show that 57 per cent of Depo Provera users in Israel are Ethiopian, even though the community accounts for less than two per cent of the total population.

About 90,000 Ethiopians have been brought to Israel under the Law of Return since the 1980s, but their Jewishness has subsequently been questioned by some rabbis and is doubted by many ordinary Israelis.

Ethiopians are reported to face widespread discrimination in jobs, housing and education and it recently emerged that their blood donations were routinely discarded.

“This is about reducing the number of births in a community that is black and mostly poor,” said Hedva Eyal, the author of the report by Woman to Woman, a feminist organisation based in Haifa, in northern Israel. “The unspoken policy is that only children who are white and Ashkenazi are wanted in Israel,” she said, referring to the term for European Jews who founded Israel and continue to dominate its institutions.

Women’s groups were alerted to the widespread use of Depo Provera in the Ethiopian community in 2008 when Rachel Mangoli, who runs a day care centre for 120 Ethiopian children in Bnei Braq, a suburb of Tel Aviv, observed that she had received only one new child in the previous three years.

“I started to think about how strange the situation was after I had to send back donated baby clothes because there was no one in the community to give them to,” she said.

She approached a local health clinic serving the 55 Ethiopian families in Bnei Braq and was told by the clinic manager that they had been instructed to administer Depo Provera injections to the women of child-bearing age, though he refused to say who had issued the order.

Ms Mangoli, who interviewed the women, said: “They had not been told about alternative forms of contraception or about the side effects or given medical follow-ups.” The women complained of a wide range of side effects associated with the drug, including headaches, abdominal pain, fatigue, nausea, loss of libido and general burning sensations.

Depo Provera is also known to decrease bone density, especially among dark-skinned women, which can lead to osteoporosis in later life. Doctors are concerned that it is difficult or impossible to help women who experience severe side effects because the drug is in their system for months after it is injected.

The contraceptive’s reputation has also been tarnished by its association with South Africa, where the apartheid government had used it, often coercively, to limit the fertility of black women.

Traditionally, its main uses have been for women who are regarded as incapable of controlling their own reproduction or monitor other forms of birth control, and for women who suffer severe problems during menstruation.

Ms Eyal said she had been denied co-operation from government ministries, doctors and most of the health insurance companies while conducting her research.

Clalit, the largest health company, however, did provide figures showing that 57 per cent of its Depo Provera users were Ethiopian compared with a handful of women in other ethnic groups.

The health ministry was unavailable for comment.

When first questioned about Depo Provera in June 2008, the health minister of the time, Yaacov Ben Yezri, said the high number of Ethiopians in Israel using the drug reflected a “cultural preference” for injections among Ethiopians. In fact, according to figures of the World Health Organisation, three-quarters of women in Ethiopia using birth control take the oral pill.

“The answers we received from officials demonstrated overt racism,” Ms Eyal said. “They suggested that Ethiopian women should be treated not as individuals but as a collective group whose reproduction needs controlling.”

When Woman to Woman conducted an experiment by sending five non-Ethiopian women to doctors to ask for Depo Provera, all were told that it was prescribed only in highly unusual cases.

Ms Mangoli said it was extremely difficult to get immigrant Ethiopian families to speak out because they were afraid that their Jewishness was under suspicion and that they might be deported if they caused trouble.

However, women interviewed anonymously for the report stated that officials at absorption centres in Ethiopia advised them to take Depo Provera because there would be no funds to support their children if they got pregnant in Israel.

This policy appears to conflict with the stated goals of the country’s Demography Council, a group of experts charged with devising ways to persuade Jewish women to have more babies.

The council was established in response to what is widely seen in Israel as a “demographic war” with Palestinians, or the need to maintain a Jewish majority in the region despite high Palestinian birth rates. In a speech marking the council’s reconvening in 2002, the then social welfare minister, Shlomo Benizri, referred to “the beauty of the Jewish family that is blessed with many children”.

Yali Hashash, a researcher at Haifa University, said attempts to restrict Ethiopian women’s fertility echoed practices used against Jewish women who immigrated to Israel from such Arab countries as Iraq, Yemen and Morocco in the state’s early years, in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many, she said, had been encouraged to fit IUDs when the device was still experimental because Israel’s leading gynecologists regarded Arab Jews as “primitive” and incapable of acting “responsibly”.

Allegations of official racism towards Ethiopians gained prominence in 2006 when it was admitted that for many years all their blood donations had been discarded for fear that they might be contaminated with diseases.

There have also been regular reports of Ethiopian children being denied places in schools or being forced to attend separate classes.

In November a survey of employers in the main professions showed that 53 per cent preferred not to hire an Ethiopian.

Ruth Sinai, an Israeli social affairs reporter for Haaretz newspaper, wrote recently that the discrimination faced by the country’s 120,000 Ethiopians reflected in particular “doubts on the part of the country’s religious establishment about their Jewishness”.

The Tel Aviv Cluster

An interesting article by David Brooks of NYT.

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.
Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.

Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.

No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.

Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.

But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.

Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.

As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.

Because of the strength of the economy, Israel has weathered the global recession reasonably well. The government did not have to bail out its banks or set off an explosion in short-term spending. Instead, it used the crisis to solidify the economy’s long-term future by investing in research and development and infrastructure, raising some consumption taxes, promising to cut other taxes in the medium to long term. Analysts at Barclays write that Israel is “the strongest recovery story” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.

This shift in the Israeli identity has long-term implications. Netanyahu preaches the optimistic view: that Israel will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, with economic benefits spilling over into the Arab world. And, in fact, there are strands of evidence to support that view in places like the West Bank and Jordan.

But it’s more likely that Israel’s economic leap forward will widen the gap between it and its neighbors. All the countries in the region talk about encouraging innovation. Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money. The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity.

For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.

The tech boom also creates a new vulnerability. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has argued, these innovators are the most mobile people on earth. To destroy Israel’s economy, Iran doesn’t actually have to lob a nuclear weapon into the country. It just has to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them already have contacts and homes. American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.

During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one.

KFC and racist advertising?

From CBC News in Canada,

KFC pulls ad over racism complaints
Fast-food giant KFC has pulled an Australian television advertisement after it was branded racist in the United States.

The commercial depicts a white Australian cricket fan subduing boisterous black West Indian fans by sharing his fried chicken.

"Need a tip when you're stuck in an awkward situation?" the Australian asks. "Too easy," he adds after the West Indian supporters surrounding him give up their celebrating to eat his KFC.

The spot, which foreshadows a much-anticipated clash between the two fiercely competitive cricketing nations, ran for three weeks without raising a ripple of complaint in Australia.

But when the ad spread via the internet to the United States, some people complained it played on a derogatory stereotype of black Americans. Minstrel shows, which portrayed demeaning caricatures of blacks in the 19th and early 20th centuries, often portrayed them eating fried chicken. There is no such association in Australia.

"These people, they're so unruly and uncivilized and so rowdy, jumping up and down," U.S. radio announcer Ana Kasparian said in her criticism. "They just can't sit down unless you give them some ... fried chicken."

KFC, a sponsor of cricket in Australia, stated Thursday that the ad was meant "tongue-in-cheek."

"We have been made aware that a KFC commercial being shown on Australian television has apparently caused offence, particularly in the United States, after a copy of the commercial was reproduced online without KFC's permission," the Louisville-headquartered subsidiary of Yum! Brands said.

"While we believe this light-hearted commercial has been well understood by Australian cricket fans, to avoid the possibility of any further offence being caused by the advertisement either here or online overseas, KFC will cease running the commercial immediately."

Obama, Healthcare and the C-SPAN promise

Looks like Obama promised to have health care negotiations televised on CSPAN, but that didn't happen. Negotiations are happening behind closed doors. And now, the finger pointing begins.

Thorium: The Green Nuclear Energy

Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.

At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

Today, however, Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he’s not at his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — or wrapping up the master’s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the University of Tennessee — he runs a popular blog called Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the site’s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.