@John Clancy: There seems to be a lot more here than "dumb and lazy." With regard to the poles of urban and rural: I tell nearly everyone I speak to that polar thinking exacerbates many contemporary problems, so I agree that we have to be more attentive to (and critical of!) the middle ground. But Kunstler (and others) make a compelling case that suburbia compromises the numbers of urban population with the car-based transportation of rural areas in a way that is clearly not sustainable.

I think he also recognizes that drawing a line around urban cores and declaring "Thou shalt not pass!" is overly simplistic. Vast, uninterrupted swaths of extremely dense and, yes, bleak cityscape are obviously not what he has in mind. Consider a number of very small, townish, walkable, urbanized "nodes" connected by public transit and surrounded by patches of farmland growing food, as Kunstler says, closer to where people live. These would have the same density as a modern suburb, but be much more livable.

TED | Talks | James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia (video)

Extraordinary Breastfeeding is a documentary that aired in England a few years ago and focused on the country's discomfort with breastfeeding. Issues raised in the film included the right to breastfeed in public, breastfeeding adopted children, and at what age children should be weaned off breast milk. (The average age around the world is four years old, and the World Health Organization recommends that children be breastfed until they are at least two and a half years old.) One woman in the documentary, Veronica, believes that children should decide for themselves when they want to stop. Her daughter is about to turn eight, still breastfeeds, and has absolutely no plans of stopping. Clip — which is somewhat NSFW — above.

wat

Food For Thought: At What Age Is A Kid Too Old To Breastfeed?

he suburban dream began, arguably, at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and ’40. “Highways and Horizons,” better known as “Futurama,” was overwhelmingly the fair’s most popular exhibit; perhaps 10 percent of the American population saw it. At the heart of the exhibit was a scale model, covering an area about the size of a football field, that showed what American cities and towns might look like in 1960. Visitors watched matchbox-sized cars zip down wide highways. Gone were the crowded tenements of the time; 1960s Americans would live in stand-alone houses with spacious yards and attached garages. The exhibit would not impress us today, but at the time, it inspired wonder. E. B. White wrote in Harper’s, “A ride on the Futurama … induces approximately the same emotional response as a trip through the Cathedral of St. John the Divine … I didn’t want to wake up.”

The suburban transformation that began in 1946, as GIs returned home, took almost half a century to complete, as first people, then retail, then jobs moved out of cities and into new subdivisions, malls, and office parks. As families decamped for the suburbs, they left behind out-of-fashion real estate, a poorer residential base, and rising crime. Once-thriving central-city retail districts were killed off by the combination of regional suburban malls and the 1960s riots. By the end of the 1970s, people seeking safety and good schools generally had little alternative but to move to the suburbs. In 1981, Escape From New York, starring Kurt Russell, depicted a near future in which Manhattan had been abandoned, fenced off, and turned into an unsupervised penitentiary.

The Next Slum?

Is Your Neighborhood Making You Fat?

By Freakonomics
Parkside MarketParkside Market in Astoria, New York.

The neighborhood grocery store is becoming an endangered species in many parts of the country, from New York to Seattle. Now, U.C.L.A. researchers have uncovered a link between the grocery gap and rising obesity, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The study found that neighborhoods with dramatically more fast-food restaurants and convenience stores than supermarkets also have significantly elevated rates of obesity and diabetes.

The relationship holds true across demographic lines and income levels.

But what’s driving grocery stores to close their doors?

Is Your Neighborhood Making You Fat? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Never before has the court system faced a situation wherein people are regularly transporting all of their worldly information with them every time they cross a border. That is not just like luggage. It is a fundamentally different situation, and the court ought to address it specifically, and explain why searches of all of this information are presumptively reasonable.

The Washington Post has already reported on corporations that have instructed their employees in response to this policy to maintain a special "travel laptop" which is not their normal computer, and is just like luggage, in that the information copied on to it prior to travel is only the information required on that trip. It seems perverse that in a "free society" people would be forced to go to the trouble of keeping a special laptop on which they place carefully selected scraps of information for no other reason than so that they can bring it through a legal black hole in which they are subject to nearly unconstrained searches.

The 4th amendment is intended to avoid creating situations wherein normal people have to act like criminals out of fear that a government fishing expedition will root through their property and all of their correspondence and find some reason to hang them. That is precisely what this policy does, and that is precisely why I think that these searches are not reasonable. The court system might disagree, but it is not responsible for them to do so without giving the matter due examination.

Re: The Volokh Conspiracy - Ninth Circuit Allows Suspicionless Computer Searches at the Border:

a dangerous energy drink

SpikeShooter.com

Clearly, the furor over illegal immigration has spread beyond places where jobs have been lost, wages reduced, and public services strained, to places where migrants have not disrupted the local economy. And, even in places like Iowa and South Carolina, the anger was never solely a function of disappearing jobs or overburdened social services; it has been about the use of Spanish on signs and ballots and even grocery lines, and about the spread of little Mexico Cities. Indeed, around the country, the furor is not simply about illegal immigration; it's more often about Latino immigration, legal and illegal--about what Pat Buchanan calls the creation of "Mexamerica." Which leaves us with something of a puzzle: How did so many Americans come to feel so vulnerable to what for many of them is merely a phantom menace? How did an economic problem that is concentrated in certain states and regions become a national Kulturkampf?

...

To understand that, you have to examine the movement's historical antecedents--a strain of political protest that begins in the late Jacksonian era with the Know-Nothings and continues through the Populists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to today's anti-immigration movement. It is based on the displacement--sometimes with cause, sometimes without--of deep-seated social and economic anxieties onto an "out-group," and it is voiced most often by the "intermediate strata," the social and economic classes most threatened by the development of capitalism. In the nineteenth century, the intermediate strata comprised urban artisans and small farmers; in the twentieth century, small businessmen, farmers, and craft workers undermined by industrialization; and, more recently, workers who lack adequate technical training or whose jobs are being sent overseas. These workers have seen themselves as "producers" victimized by "parasites"--by Wall Street and big business from above and by an underclass of African Americans and immigrants from below.

Today's anti-immigration movement is rooted in these intermediate strata and in this neo-populist ideology. According to an extensive 2003 survey sponsored by Hamilton College, opponents of immigration are particularly concentrated among those who have no more than a high school diploma, make less than $50,000, and live in small towns or rural areas. According to a poll conducted in December by Democracy Corps, those who believe that "immigrants take more from our country than they give" are strongest among men between the ages of 30 and 39 without a college degree. This is a rough approximation of those Americans who work at a lower--but not the lowest--rung of blue-collar or white-collar jobs, who own very small shops or businesses, and who are most susceptible to losing their jobs or income in economic downturns or through outsourcing.

Politically, these Americans are the heirs of the nineteenth-century Populists, but, more immediately, they are ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Phantom Menace: The Pyschology Behind America's Immigration Hysteria

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's there?" She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, "It's not your imagination."
No, he's not crazy: Our intrepid reporter Andrew Hampp ventures to SoHo to hear for himself the technology that has New Yorkers 'freaked out' and A&E buzzing.
No, he's not crazy: Our intrepid reporter Andrew Hampp ventures to SoHo to hear for himself the technology that has New Yorkers 'freaked out' and A&E buzzing.
Photo Credit: Yoray Liberman

Indeed it isn't. It's an ad for "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it's another story.

This is going to make people psychotically angry.

Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad - Advertising Age - News

But the part that gets me the most about Senator Clinton is the eager embrace of spinelessness. I don't get this in Democrats generally. I never have, but I especially don't get it after two defeats to the likes of George Bush (ok, one defeat, but let's put that aside for the moment). Our party seems constitutionally wedded to the idea that you wage a campaign with tiny speech. Say as little as possible. Be as uncontroversial as you can. Embrace the chameleon as the mascot. Fear only that someone would clearly understand what you believe. (Think of Kerry denying he supported gay marriage -- and recognize that the same sort of people who thought that would win him support are now inside the control room at ClintonHQ).

4Barack (Lessig Blog)

By ANDREW MIGA
Associated Press Writer
AP - Friday, October 12

WASHINGTON - Rep. Barney Frank, a leading gay rights champion in Congress, on Thursday urged fellow gay rights advocates not to let their dispute over protecting transgender workers doom a job discrimination ban that could mark a major civil rights advance for gays in the workplace.

The debate over including transgender people has sharply divided gay rights activists, many of whom are trying to kill a stripped-down bill without protections for transgender workers that Frank and Democratic leaders hope will win House passage this year.

"We're not going to be split off this way," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "We're driven by principle. No civil rights movement has ever left a part of its community behind - and we're not about to be the first."

Frank, D-Mass., one of two openly gay members of Congress, supports transgender protections, but said they don't have the votes.

"Politically, the notion that you don't do anything until you can do everything is self-defeating," he said.

Frank said the public has more awareness because gay activists began educating people about the unfairness of prejudice based on sexual orientation a long time ago.

"These things take awhile," Frank said. "The transgender issue is of relatively recent vintage."

Legislation banning workplace discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals _ but not those who have had sex-change surgery or cross-dressers _ has stalled after an outcry from the transgender community and its allies, including many gay rights organizations.

"Transgender" is an umbrella term that covers transsexuals, cross-dressers and others whose outward appearance doesn't match their gender at birth.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act would make it illegal for employers to make decisions about hiring, firing, promoting or paying an employee based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Churches and the military would be exempt.

But when Democrats took vote counts and realized the measure would fail, they substituted a new scaled-back version dropping transgender people from the bill. A second bill to ban workplace discrimination against transgenders was also drafted.

Gay rights groups that oppose a ban that leaves out transgender people have waged an aggressive lobbying campaign.

"Fighting your friends can sometimes be difficult," said Frank.

Foreman agreed.

"I never thought in a million years we would be on the opposite side of Barney Frank and it is painful," he said.

Federal law bans job discrimination based on factors such as race, gender and religion. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have laws against sexual orientation discrimination.

However, only nine states specifically protect transgender people from discrimination: New Jersey, Minnesota, Rhod... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Gay Rights Backers Split on Bias Bill