small flowers crack concrete

Home safe after travels to NY and Philly. Soon I hope to write about who I met and what I did over the last week.

However, I am currently thinking that the best way to end 2004 and start 2005 is to brainstorm about ways we (bloggers and academics, everyday folks) might help alleviate some of the suffering taking place on the other side of our planet as the death toll passes 120,000.

Certainly we should not hesitate to donate to aid organizations. I’m also thinking, though, that we might initiate something involving people getting together in their local communities for events that raise money, supplies, and awareness…something that would set in motion long-term efforts to help because the necessary recovery is going to take a long, long time.

I don’t have a solid suggestion to make right now, but on the flight home last night I was thinking:

  • Musical performances in small clubs around the country involving local bands, proceeds to benefit relief efforts. Pick one night (or four, or more) in January and get bands in Kansas City, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, and Philadelphia (to name just a few places) to put on a simultaneous benefit show.
  • Readings in student centers, coffeehouses, bars, and clubs of the poetry, fiction, essays, or drama of writers from the countries affected by the earthquake and tsunamis. Charging money for admission or asking for donations.
  • Showing the work of filmmakers from these countries. Charging money for admission or asking for donations.

Click on those links that allow you to donate online, certainly, but let’s do more that involves getting people together in person at the grass roots level. I don’t have all the answers, obviously, and I encourage further suggestions from you. Do you know someone in a working band, someone who owns a coffee shop, someone who manages a movie theater, someone who owns a club or a bar? Let’s make something happen.

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beyond what words can express

Unbelievable tragedy on the other side of the world as an earthquake creates tidal waves that kill over 19,000 people. Here are links to the American Red Cross and the British Red Cross.

[Via Crooked Timber]

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widespread abuse in american detention centers

From Bill Tozier
Washington Post editorial
War Crimes
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A22

THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, thousands of pages of government documents released this month have confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA — truths the Bush administration implacably has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration’s whitewashers — led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false.

Continue reading

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the importance of peer review

Revisiting the FIPSE issue:
When politicians intervene in the awarding of grants for academic work, it’s never good news. Federal grant programs–which, in addition to FIPSE, include the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities–are usually competitive; grants are judged through a process called peer review (see Wikipedia entry) by volunteer scholars who are experts in the field. So if you submit a FIPSE application that is related to, say, environmental science, the program administrators try to get people who are experts in environmental science to review your proposal. These experts make their recommendation to the program administrators, who then make the decision on whether to fund your application.
You would think that someone with as much experience in the federal government as Ralph Regula (R-OH) would understand how the system works. But here’s what he says in the Chronicle of Higher Education article:

“Fipse doesn’t have all the knowledge in the world,” Mr. Regula said. “The bureaucracy in Washington doesn’t always have the last word on what is valuable to society.”

That’s right. That’s why FIPSE asks experts in the relevant field to review the applications. Regula is either ignorant or lying when he says he thinks “[t]he bureaucracy in Washington” is deciding whether to fund these projects.
This is where it gets really good: under the old system, bureaucrats in Washington did not judge the proposals. Under the new system, justified by Regula’s bureaucrat-bashing rhetoric, they do. Oh, irony, thy name is Republican Party!
This sets a dangerous precedent. FIPSE isn’t really that generously funded a program, but the NSF is, and the NEH is no small potatoes, either. Imagine what would happen if Congress gets used to the idea of taking over funding decisions–in other words, taking away the current, peer-reviewed process. Might we start to see funding dwindle even more for scientific research that contradicts conservative dogma regarding the origin of species or human sexual behavior? Perhaps the NEH will no longer support work on writers who don’t represent family values.

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