“Looks like everything is correct and
that overall, the quite ugly picture of political reality in Russia is outlined
with high authenticity.
But why do I have such an unpleasant
feeling from what I’ve read?
As the patriots correctly noted, the
opinion of the reporter is too contemptuous, which is very close to America’s
and Americans’ foreign political views on the outside world.” mark_ars
“This can be a first pebble skipped on
the water, just to send out feelers and find a pretext to start a dialogue. Not
a dialogue between Bush and Putin, but between our peoples, who are neither
dumb nor bright, simply different.” falcon icp
After years of watching President Bush
ignore Congress, at best, or disdain it, at worst, there is relief in listening
to the British prime minister face questions in Parliament. As seen on C-Span,
these events feature literate parries and thrusts, complete sentences, artful
arguments, all to a chorus of noisy yeas and brays.
Senator John McCain, the presumed
Republican nominee for president, has now promised that if elected, he will
bring this hallowed British tradition to America.
This is a daring idea. The public
might learn a great deal about its leaders both in the White House and in
Congress. Of course, an American question time horrifies some politicians. Some
argue that America is different. Congress is not a parliament. Some even
contend that the president is elected to lead everybody, not just his or her
party — a quaint notion to anyone who has paid attention in the last seven
years. Mainly, the politically experienced say the idea is a death wish.
British experts like Peter Riddell of
The Times of London suggest that the real problem might not be the president’s
inability to answer questions, but getting members of Congress to ask decent
ones. British queries tend to be short, fast and bitingly to the point, a skill
set not widely available in Washington.
The high-wire displays required in the
British Parliament also display a leader’s debating prowess. Or not. Margaret
Thatcher was less than a natural but eventually she could show off better than
the best of them. Tony Blair played the verbal ping-pong like a professional.
Harold Macmillan once confessed that the thought of question time almost made
him sick.
If a president did have the gumption
to answer Congress face to face, there would certainly be rules. The prime
minister’s question time lasts for about 30 minutes on Wednesdays. Some
questions are submitted in advance, but the debate is often heated and
unpredictable. Fortunately, there are limits. Calling the prime minister a liar
(not an unknown event in the House of Commons) can earn a timeout. In Australia
recently, one member of Parliament was barred for a day after calling the prime
minister’s representative a “chicken man.”
Both sides would have to agree that
the goal is exchanging information, openly. That would mean minimal preening,
no long-winded questions or answers, and a dose of spontaneity. If that could
happen, it would be a boon for democracy, not to mention for YouTube.
Question: Is "First Do No
Harm" From the Hippocratic Oath? Myth vs Fact
Answer: A question was raised in the
Ancient / Classical History forum:
"Having just read the translation
to English of Hippocrates' oath, I was surprised to see that 'first do no harm'
did not appear in the text as is commonly quoted. Any idea where the quote
comes from?"
You're right, the dictum first do no
harm doesn't exactly come from the Hippocratic Oath, but it does come from the
Hippocratic Corpus, at least in esssence. A related section from the
Hippocratic Oath has been translated as
I will follow that system of regimen which,
according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my
patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give
no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in
like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With
purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art. I will not
cut persons laboring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by men who
are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into
them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of
mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males,
of freemen and slaves.
But while not harming the patient is
explicit, this section doesn't make doing no harm the first concern of the
Hippocratic physician. The Hippocratic writing Epidemics is considered the more
likely source:
5. With
regard to the dangers of these cases, one must always attend to the seasonable
concoction of all the evacuations, and to the favorable and critical abscesses.
The concoctions indicate a speedy crisis and recovery of health; crude and
undigested evacuations, and those which are converted into bad abscesses,
indicate either want of crisis, or pains, or prolongation of the disease, or
death, or relapses; which of these it is to be must be determined from other
circumstances. The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the
present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two
special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no
harm. The art consists in three things - the disease, the patient, and the
physician. The physician is the servant of the art, and the patient must combat
the disease along with the physician.
When Pure Digital Technologies Inc.
introduced its Flip point-and-shoot camcorder a year ago, it dramatically simplified
video recording. The Flip measured the size of a small digital still camera,
cost less than $150 and its videos could be emailed in one quick process.
Consumers gobbled up the tiny, nonintimidating device.
But to the style-conscious set, the Flip
looked like a clunky Fisher-Price toy -- especially when compared with a sleek,
new iPod or more-sophisticated digital cameras -- and was too thick to
comfortably slip into a pocket. Last fall, Pure Digital introduced an enhanced
version: the Flip Video Ultra, but its biggest aesthetic difference was new
orange, pink and green colors.
Today, the company will begin sales of
its $180 Flip Video Mino (pronounced "minnow"), the hippest offering
yet from Pure Digital. This 60-minute Flip includes many firsts for the
company: rechargeable batteries; touch-sensitive buttons rather than
old-school, push-down buttons; and a thinner build that measures 40% smaller,
overall. The Flip Mino is also the first one in the family to enable publishing
to MySpace; prior software limited Web-site sharing to YouTube and AOL Video.
I've been using a glossy, black Flip
Mino (it also comes in white) for the past two weeks and it looks much cooler
than older models. Its newly positioned USB adapter pops up from the top of the
camera like something from a Swiss Army Knife. The Mino offers features such as
the ability to lock the delete button, so no one accidentally deletes your
videos, and mute all camera sounds, so as to record silently during quiet
moments like wedding ceremonies or speeches.
I brought it along with me almost
everywhere I went because of its small size and light weight, even fitting it
into a thin clutch purse with a cellphone and BlackBerry. I used the Mino in
various situations ranging from bright, scenic outdoor settings to indoors
while eating dinner in a candle-lit restaurant. Overall, I was pleased with the
sound and picture quality of the Mino, and I found its built-in software, which
automatically starts when the camera plugs into your Mac or Windows PC, to be a
pleasure to use.
Today, Pure Digital Technologies
introduced its $180 Flip Video Mino, a thinner, more stylish version of its
point-and-shoot camcorder.
It took just a few minutes to trim
excess footage from my videos before saving them to my computer or sharing them
with friends and family. Another way to share videos from the Flip Mino is via
Pure Digital's server, which sends emails with embedded video links, saving
upload and download time on both ends. Though I didn't publish any of my videos
on a public Web site, AOL, MySpace and YouTube were just one step away.
The Flip Mino's touch buttons, while
stylish, were difficult to use at first. I missed the tactile feel of physical
buttons as I tried to hold this small video camera and press the zoom buttons
using just one hand. The new, touch-sensitive buttons weren't as satisfying and
stable to use, and I pressed them accidentally more than a few times. For
instance, the Zoom Out button is directly below Record, making it easy to
mistakenly touch it. After about a week of using the Mino, I grew more
accustomed to using these new touch buttons, but it shouldn't take so long to
make the adjustment.
Just looking at the Flip Mino's fresh
new exterior makes it hard not to think about the things that this redesigned
camcorder is still lacking, like a larger viewing screen (the Mino screen is
1.5 inches, no larger than that of the Flip Ultra), high definition video and
wireless sharing capability. These features would likely raise the price and/or
tax the battery, and many users of the Flip flock to it for its low price and
simplicity. Still, Pure Digital says that it will offer HD video and a larger
screen on a product within a year, and is looking into features that might
include wireless transferring.
I grew fond of the Mino's rechargeable
battery. Whenever I plugged this gadget into my computer to transfer videos, my
Mino charged up via USB without me having to think about it. A full charge
lasts four hours and recharging a dead battery takes about three hours.
Pure Digital says that the sound
quality and lighting are improved in this model. Like previous models, this
Flip records in 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second.
The Mino didn't have a problem with
lighting in most situations; indeed it did a nice job of capturing images of my
family sitting around a table in a restaurant with little more than candlelight
to brighten the picture. It doesn't use a flash or a built-in light, but
instead uses automatic sensors to adjust to various levels of light.
This svelte camcorder seemed to handle
noise more evenly than I remembered in prior Flip models. It didn't make my
voice sound unbearably louder than everyone else's, even though I was closest
to the camera's microphone, yet it managed to detect voices across the room. I
did have some trouble on a windy day: While recording a quick video of a golf
course in San Diego, wind audibly muffled my voice during a few moments in the
video.
Along with the delete-lock and
sounds-off settings, this Mino has a few other tricks up its sleeve. Each of
the touch-sensitive buttons is designed to glow only when usable, so as to
better help people who might not know which buttons to press while using this
camcorder. For example, only the zoom buttons glow while recording since the
other buttons (volume, play/pause and delete) can't function in this setting.
Shortcuts built into each button
provide more functions: Holding the play/pause button down will set the
playback mode to play all videos on the Mino; holding the seek ahead or seek
back buttons while watching a video will fast-forward by seconds within that
video; pressing the record button as the camera starts up opens up the settings
menu.
In conjunction with the Flip Mino's
introduction Wednesday, prices of the former Flip Ultra model will drop to $150
for the 60-minute model. The Flip Ultra 30-minute model will be phased out, as
will the Flip Classic, which will cost $130 for a 60-minute unit.
Though the Flip Mino's touch-sensitive
buttons look great, they aren't as functional as they needed to be. But if you
really want a sleek, hip-looking gadget, you'll learn to adjust to these new
buttons. No matter which Flip you choose, Pure Digital's software changes the
way people capture and share videos, and that's a great thing.
There's something very English about
the way William Hague's eyes light up when he spies crab cakes on the menu at a
Midtown Manhattan bistro. Although they've lived with crabs for centuries, the
English have still not mastered the art of rendering them as patties, and I've
yet to meet a visitor from the scepter'd isle who will not eat a crab cake while
stateside -- given half a chance.
Distinctly un-English, however, is the
diligence with which he sticks to a single glass of wine through lunch. But if
there's one Englishman who can sparkle conversationally without the assistance
of alcohol, it is this very charming, very loquacious, very precocious
politician -- leader of Britain's Conservative Party at age 36, now its shadow
foreign secretary at a relatively creaky 47.
Mr. Hague is in town to promote his
book on William Wilberforce, the man who engineered the abolition of the slave
trade in 1807. This massive biography -- to be released in the U.S. on June 16
-- is his second, his first being one of William Pitt the Younger, published in
2005. Taken together, the two books amount to almost 1,000 pages of serious
text: How does he do it? Where on earth does he find the time?
"Well, I only found the time
after I was out of what we might call the front line of politics -- when I
resigned as leader of the party in 2001, after losing that election. I remained
a Member of Parliament, but suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands, and I
decided to do all the things I'd always wanted to do -- and that included
earning a lot more money than is normally possible as a politician, and writing
a book."
With a New Yorker's vulgarity, I ask
if he's made any money off his books. "It's not been anything like the
amount I've earned from after-dinner speaking, or my business activities. Let
me put it this way: I wouldn't want to live entirely off writing! Although I
also took up a weekly newspaper column in the News of the World."
That paper is arguably Britain's
lowest-brow tabloid. Is it safe to presume, therefore, that there's no overlap
between the readers of his books and those of his columns? "Probably none
at all," he says with a chirp. But as a politician, he's used to changing
gear: "You handle everything from a constituency surgery, where literally
one minute you're dealing with Mrs. Smith's drain -- it needs unblocking and
she's come to you to sort it out -- and the next minute you're on the phone
dealing with issues of Iranian nuclear weapons."
So why do politicians write
biographies? Are they identifying with their subjects, or claiming grandeur by
proxy? "A mixture of factors," says Mr. Hague, savoring his crab
cake, which is a plump little thing. "In Britain, there's a strong
tradition of politicians who have written works of history. Roy Jenkins [a
leading Labour MP, later president of the European Commission] is a part of it
. . . Winston Churchill was very much a part of it.
"But you make a good point about
identifying with one's subject, and in my case that did help start me off with
William Pitt the Younger. I really did feel I could be inside his mind, and
explain the way he did things and would have looked at things, having been a
particularly young politician myself. And Pitt is the ultimate young
politician, much more successful than me, having been prime minister at
24." Still there's one way in which Mr. Hague has had more luck than Pitt,
who served as PM for 19 years: Pitt never made it to Mr. Hague's current age.
"He died at 46," his biographer notes.
Here, as an uxorious aside, Mr. Hague
tells me that his wife, Ffion Jenkins, has just finished her own first book,
"The Pain and the Privilege," about the women in the life of David
Lloyd George, the only Welshman to have served as prime minister. "It's
not a scurrilous book; it's about Mrs. Lloyd George and his mistress in
parallel for 30 years, and his daughter and mother. As I did to the life of
Pitt, my wife brings something to this story, too. She's a native Welsh
speaker, and she's married to a politician . . . " A politician who, presumably,
does not have a mistress, I interject.
Mr. Hague laughs heartily.
"Definitely not! Let me make that very clear! And so, for her, this is a
great place to start. The mistress of Lloyd George was his private secretary,
and my wife was my private secretary, and private secretary to other cabinet
ministers, so she has a triple additional insight into the subject. So when you
start writing in an ambitious way, you have to bring something extra to the
party."
What drew Mr. Hague to Wilberforce?
"Doing Pitt introduced me to the friends of Pitt, and one of the great --
but contrasting -- friends was Wilberforce. Pitt was the ultimate career
politician, and Wilberforce the ultimate non-career politician, who never
sought high office other than being a member of Parliament. Yet he accomplished
-- through his eloquence and his morality -- much more than the vast majority
of politicians who have achieved high office."
William Pitt, William Wilberforce.
Will his next subject be yet another William? William the Conqueror, perhaps,
or William Jefferson Clinton? "No," he says, with jovial emphasis.
"I'm not writing now. I've gone back into the front line. I'm too busy.
You know, the plan is to help the Conservative Party be elected in the next elections,
and then to be in the next Conservative government."
So if all goes according to plan, I
observe, he won't be writing a book anytime soon. "Not for a few years!
However, I don't see myself as a career politician anymore. This is the nice
thing now: Although I've come back into politics, I don't need it. I know I can
live without it."
Is that liberating? "Yes! I don't
ever want to be the leader of the party, and therefore the PM, in the future.
And that allows me to approach politics on a completely different basis. As
long as I'm of use to David Cameron [leader of the Conservatives] and my
colleagues, I'll take part, but I don't want to be doing it all my life. At
some point I'll get back to writing, and the electorate can decide how soon
that is. And then . . . to answer your question -- will I do another William?
Well, I might do William Pitt the Elder." (Toward the end of lunch, he
ventures an interest, also, in Robert Clive and Warren Hastings --
"perhaps the two of them together, as a way of looking at a period of the
British Empire in India.")
Who taught Mr. Hague the art of
biography? "I had a wonderful lunch with Roy Jenkins," he says,
"a few weeks before he died [in January 2003]. And I was very lucky,
because he handed down, as it were, the tips for a politician writing a
biography. First of all, he said, 'Start tomorrow. . . . You will think you
have to get the whole structure of the book ready first. This is nonsense.'
"Roy said, 'Keep the artillery
barrage just in front of the infantry,' by which he meant just keep the
research ahead of where you are . . . so you're really immersed in whichever
part of the person's life you happen to be in. You need to read around the
whole subject and have a general view, but trying to understand the detail of
your subject's final few weeks at the same time as his early education just
won't work. Roy said, 'Just get going!' So I got going."
Mr. Hague reveals that Mr. Jenkins
also told him that "the publishers will tell you to write so many words,
but the first thing to know is to ignore them completely. If you're enjoying
it, it doesn't matter how long the book is. So both my books are twice as long
as had been asked for."
Is there anything, I ask Mr. Hague,
that he regards as the acme of the biographical form? "Yes, there
is," he says quite loudly, as if unable to contain himself. "And
through your columns, I want to send the author a message."
He then cites "The Years of
Lyndon Johnson," by Robert Caro, a three-volume biography -- so far.
"The last volume was 'Master of the Senate,' and to me these are the most
magnificent books about politics, of the biographical sort, that I've ever
read. Anyone who wants to understand politics needs to read Robert Caro's
books."
If you buy a new Windows Vista PC, it
comes with a decent built-in Web browser, Internet Explorer 7. If you buy a new
Macintosh computer, it comes with a decent built-in Web browser, Safari 3.0. So
why would you want or need a different Web browser?
That is the question that Mozilla, the
nonprofit organization that makes the leading alternative browser, hopes to
answer this month when it releases version 3.0 of its Firefox Web browser. In some
tech-industry circles, Firefox already is preferred over Microsoft's Internet
Explorer and Apple's Safari, but it still isn't used by most people, and
Mozilla is hoping to broaden its appeal.
The new version will be released
simultaneously for Windows and the Mac's OS X operating system, as well as for
Linux. While each of the three editions will have the visual style of the
operating system on which it runs, all three will have the same features.
I've been using prerelease versions of
Firefox 3.0 for months, and have recently been testing a near-final version and
comparing it closely to IE and to Safari. I have tested it on multiple Windows
PCs and Macs, on desktops and laptops, over slow connections and fast ones. I
have tried it with well over 100 Web sites.
My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the
best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of
both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and
easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user. It can be downloaded,
free, at mozilla.com1 by clicking on "Firefox 3 Sneak Peek."
This situation may change. Microsoft
is working on a new version of IE, scheduled to be unveiled later this year,
with some impressive new features. And Apple is always working on new
iterations of Safari, though it is secretive and hasn't disclosed its plans.
But for now, in my view, Firefox 3.0 rules on both Windows and Mac.
I couldn't find any significant
downsides to Firefox 3.0. Every page I tried rendered properly and rapidly on
both platforms. I ran into only one glitch, in a preference setting. That
problem appeared on only one of my four test machines and was fixable with the
help of Mozilla, albeit via a geeky method.
In the one or two cases where Firefox
lacked a feature I thought important, such as the "auto fill" feature
in Safari that can quickly fill out an online form, I was able to find an
add-on that did the trick from Mozilla's vast library of add-ons, which are
written by people all over the world. (One caution: Some existing add-ons won't
work with the new version until their authors update them.)
When Firefox first came out, it was
the fastest browser, but it lost that title over the years. However, in my
tests, this new third version of Firefox regained the speed crown. It beat IE 7
handily on my test Windows computers and edged Safari slightly on my test Macs.
For example, using a new Dell XPS One
desktop, I opened identical folders containing the same 16 bookmarks on both IE
7 and Firefox 3.0. IE took 37 seconds to completely display the 16 pages, but
the new Firefox did it in just 23 seconds. On a new Apple iMac, I did a
similar, but more daunting, test -- opening identical folders containing 24
bookmarks. Safari rendered all of the pages in 36 seconds, but the new Firefox
finished the job in 32 seconds.
The latest Firefox has a number of new
and improved features. If you type any word or phrase into its address bar, the
browser instantly searches your history and bookmarks for a possible match, to
save you from typing or combing through your bookmark list.
The whole process of managing
bookmarks has been vastly simplified. Every Web address is accompanied by a
star icon at the right. To bookmark the site, you just click the star once. No
other action is required. To specify where to file the bookmark, you click the
star twice. You also can remove bookmarks by clicking the star. And you can tag
bookmarks with key words, to make it easier to find them.
There are also smart bookmark folders,
which gather your most visited sites, or most recently bookmarked sites,
automatically into folders. You also now can more easily back up and restore
your bookmarks, complete with tags.
Security is also improved. The old
version of Firefox would warn you when a site you were visiting appeared to be
a fake, designed to steal your identity. (IE has a similar feature, though
Safari doesn't.) But Firefox 3.0 now warns you about sites that are known for
trying to plant viruses, spyware and other malicious software on your computer,
a warning the other big browsers don't yet provide.
With one click, Firefox 3.0 also
provides details about who owns the site you're visiting, and whether it's
encrypted, if the site owner has adopted a special type of security certificate.
My bottom line: Even though you
already have a built-in browser, Firefox 3.0 can improve your Web experience.
A couple of years ago I received a
letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as
we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically
exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to
tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had
become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces
physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might
strike you as, well, odd.
But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the
powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same
time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to
believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows
students to integrate it into their lives.
Allow me a moment to explain.
When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones,
iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it’s easy to see how science (and
the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day
activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and
arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality
of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming
challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and
diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the
problems and find solutions. http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com
And when we look at the wealth of
opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing,
personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine
interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is
to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s
simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed
decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.
These are the standard — and
enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science
matters.
But here’s the thing. The reason
science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is
a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to
understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a
transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and
emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything
from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are
declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment
and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
As a practicing scientist, I know this
from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a
scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up
as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high
school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome
project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter
from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum
physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going
because it revealed a deeper reality of which we’re all a part.
It’s striking that science is still
widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated
body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world
in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a
language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the
imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.
If science isn’t your strong suit —
and for many it’s not — this side of science is something you may have rarely
if ever experienced. I’ve spoken with so many people over the years whose
encounters with science in school left them thinking of it as cold, distant and
intimidating. They happily use the innovations that science makes possible, but
feel that the science itself is just not relevant to their lives. What a shame.
Like a life without music, art or
literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience
a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.
It’s one thing to go outside on a
crisp, clear night and marvel at a sky full of stars. It’s another to marvel
not only at the spectacle but to recognize that those stars are the result of
exceedingly ordered conditions 13.7 billion years ago at the moment of the Big
Bang. It’s another still to understand how those stars act as nuclear furnaces
that supply the universe with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, the raw material of
life as we know it.
And it’s yet another level of
experience to realize that those stars account for less than 4 percent of
what’s out there — the rest being of an unknown composition, so-called dark
matter and energy, which researchers are now vigorously trying to divine.
As every parent knows, children begin
life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can
walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin
life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific
passion. And it’s a profound loss.
A great many studies have focused on
this problem, identifying important opportunities for improving science
education. Recommendations have ranged from increasing the level of training
for science teachers to curriculum reforms.
But most of these studies (and their
suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we
continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking
vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency
with science’s underlying technical details.
In fact, many students I’ve spoken to
have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try
to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does
the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its
students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the
great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make
students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”
In physics, just to give a sense of
the raw material that’s available to be leveraged, the most revolutionary of
advances have happened in the last 100 years — special relativity, general
relativity, quantum mechanics — a symphony of discoveries that changed our
conception of reality. More recently, the last 10 years have witnessed an
upheaval in our understanding of the universe’s composition, yielding a wholly
new prediction for what the cosmos will be like in the far future.
These are paradigm-shaking
developments. But rare is the high school class, and rarer still is the middle
school class, in which these breakthroughs are introduced. It’s much the same
story in classes for biology, chemistry and mathematics.
At the root of this pedagogical
approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A
before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long
climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the
technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the
discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.
But science is so much more than its
technical details. And with careful attention to presentation, cutting-edge
insights and discoveries can be clearly and faithfully communicated to students
independent of those details; in fact, those insights and discoveries are
precisely the ones that can drive a young student to want to learn the details.
We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to
train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate
emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.
Science is the greatest of all
adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have
sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught
to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this
drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful
place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what
makes life worth living. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com
It’s the birthright of every child,
it’s a necessity for every adult, to look out on the world, as the soldier in Iraq
did, and see that the wonder of the cosmos transcends everything that divides
us.
How much Robert Vesco stole no one
knew for certain. America's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was after
him for more than $224m, or more than $1 billion in today's money, which was
then the biggest financial fraud in history. But oddly, once the crack teams of
lawyers and accountants were on the case, they recovered almost twice as much.
And they were still nowhere near the bottom of the schemes that brewed in Mr
Vesco's head, behind the pencil moustache, the slicked-back hair and the dark
glasses, the very essence of a Hollywood fraudster.
Money being such liquid, transient
stuff, it is hardly surprising that financiers should be fugitive. But Mr Vesco
capped them all. He was on the run for 35 years, sometimes in a million-dollar
yacht eluding the FBI in the blue seas between the Bahamas and Antigua,
sometimes in his own Boeing 707, the Silver Phyllis, steaming with a variety of
nymphs in the on-board sauna or gyrating in the on-board discotheque. He became
Tom Adams, a Canadian with four bodyguards and several addresses, and sported a
dyed beard. Meetings with Arthur Herzog, his biographer, were held in the dark;
once, Mr Vesco kept his back to him. For years only blurred telephoto shots
gave proof he was alive. And those were dubious. To some, Mr Vesco's ultimate
scam was to suggest that the emaciated man snapped last November in a coffin,
with his friends grieving round it, had something to do with him.
A few of the stories about him may
have been true. He was said to have poured $60m into the economy of Costa Rica,
to which he fled in 1973, propping up single-handedly its ranching, industrial
and oil sectors and being kicked out, in 1978, because he wanted to set up a
machinegun factory. He was said to have offered Billy Carter, the president's
brother, $10m in 1977 to persuade the Carter administration to sell C130
aircraft to Libya (which Mr Vesco could smuggle in on good terms, together with
cocaine and Howitzers). Fidel Castro allegedly received a hefty bribe for
sheltering him in Cuba after 1982, where he travelled in a convoy of Mercedes
from his yachting berth to the golf club.
As long as he had money Mr Vesco was
welcome all round the Caribbean, and extradition treaties with America were
hastily rewritten to keep him and his dollars in place. But the charges were
piling up and the money, after a while, ran out. In 1996 the Cubans sent him to
jail for peddling to investors a spurious wonder-drug, Trixolane, as a cure for
cancer and AIDS. The conman's patter could run out, too.
Crime, however, was not his whole
career. Playing the 1960s markets like a violin was no offence. A clutch of
failing machine shops in New Jersey were combined with a Florida public company
called Cryogenics to form the dodgy-sounding International Controls Corporation
(ICC) and take him public, in 1965, without an SEC filing; by the age of 30, Mr
Vesco was a paper millionaire. He perfected the art of the hostile takeover
when it was still new, spotting weak companies a mile off and gobbling up
shares almost before the victim was aware of it. His buying strategy, sketched
out in Magic Marker on flip-charts, was to borrow hugely in order to repay in
dollars devalued by inflation, and his sweetest hunting ground became the then
unregulated universe of offshore mutual funds.
The quarter-of-a-million dollars he
siphoned away at one swoop had originally been invested by thousands of small
depositors in Investors Overseas Services (IOS), owned by the arch-scammer
Bernie Cornfeld. Mr Vesco, on his hostile takeover of IOS in 1971, immediately
began to shift its assets into entities under his control. He meant to set up
an independent company somewhere in the Azores, or Morocco, or off Haiti, and
do lots of deals with the money; and he wanted to call it RPL, for “Rape,
Plunder and Loot”. This may have drawn the SEC's attention.
Under all the oversell, an inferiority
complex drove him. His background was poor, Sicilian-American in Detroit, his
father a car-worker. He dropped out of school, and fiddled round with
bricklaying and gaming parlours before starting to buy companies. On Wall
Street his small but ravenous ICC cut no ice with the Lehmans and the Loebs;
his rudeness and his loud jackets did not match the mahogany, and he was not
invited back.
His chips-on-shoulders and paranoias
made him more a potential soulmate of Richard Nixon, and when the SEC charges
began to bite in 1972 a cash contribution of $200,000, stuffed in a briefcase,
was handed over to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. It didn't work. Nor
could Mr Vesco persuade John Mitchell, then attorney-general, to take pity on
him. He sometimes interrupted meetings to take calls from him; but whether it
was actually Mitchell, no one knew.
Rather than be a fugitive, which was
tiring, he wanted to be untouchable. In 1981 or so he tried to buy half of the
island of Barbuda, off Antigua, to set up “the Principality of the Sovereign
Order of New Aragon”. There, on the vast pink beaches swept by frigate birds
and scattered with the wreckage of other people's ships, the Feds could never
get a hand on him. And indeed, save for a not-quite-reliable death certificate,
they never did.
In 1997, a man's love for Julie
Couillard forced him to make a tough decision, choosing to marry her over his
successful career as a Hells Angels drug dealer.
It was a decision Stéphane Sirois
would later regret. But it also set off a chain of events that turned him into one of the best
witnesses to testify against the Hells Angels in Quebec.
Couillard has caused a storm on
Parliament Hill. While recently dating Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier,
the 38-year-old Laval resident drew public attention in August by wearing an
eye-catching dress to the ceremony at Rideau Hall where the minister was sworn
in. Now questions have been raised about her past relations with men in
Quebec's murky underworld.
But there was nothing mysterious about
the clear ultimatum Maurice (Mom) Boucher put to Sirois more than a decade ago.
With the biker gang war at its violent
peak in 1997, the Hells Angels leader was seeing potential police informants
underneath every rock.
So he wanted to be sure Sirois
understood he had to make a clear choice between marrying Couillard, who had
previously dated a man Boucher suspected was an informant, or continuing his
life dealing drugs in Anjou and Tetreauville as a member of the Rockers, the Hells Angels puppet gang.
Sirois chose Couillard and later came
to regret it. But, as he would later testify in court, it was also a choice
that ultimately turned his life around. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Sirois's marriage to Couillard lasted
only two years before the couple divorced. The marriage seemed doomed from the
start. Just hours before the wedding, members of the Rockers gang paid Sirois a
visit and claimed he owed the gang $5,000.
Feeling that his life was in ruins,
Sirois sunk into a deep depression in 1999 when he suddenly remembered the
business card a police investigator gave him just after he married Couillard.
The Wolverine Squad, a collection of
elite police investigators from various police forces assembled to target the
province's biker gangs, knew Sirois had fallen out of favour with the Rockers
by marrying Couillard and they took a chance and approached him about working
for them.
"I told them clearly that I was
not interested," Sirois would later say during a 2002 trial in reference
to the Wolverine Squad's initial approach.
"I was already married and had
been on my honeymoon. Two detectives from the Wolverine Squad approached me. I
told them no. I kept their card."
Then in 1999, with his life in an
mess, Sirois pulled out the business card and contacted Robert Pigeon, the
investigator who gave it to him. It was the first step on a path towards
becoming an undercover agent and one of the best witnesses used against the
Hells Angels during the trials that followed the 2001 roundup of Boucher's
monopolistic drug trafficking network. (By the time Sirois first testified
Boucher had already been convicted of ordering the deaths of two provincial
prison guards.)
Sirois signed a contract to work for
the police in June 1999. His mission was to get back into the good graces of
the Rockers by offering them his services as a drug dealer. Within months
Sirois was given back his Rockers patch while he secretly recorded his
conversations with fellow gang members and took careful notes on their
activities.
It was Sirois who gathered perhaps the
most damaging proof that the Hells Angels's Nomads chapter, run by Boucher, was
seeking to kill any members of their rivals in the Rock Machine. While wearing
a secret recording device called a bodypack, Sirois recorded a fellow Rocker
while they dined at a Montreal sushi restaurant. When Sirois asked what it
would take to impress their bosses in the Hells Angels, the Rocker revealed the
biker gang was willing to pay up to $100,000 to kill off a full-fledged member
of the rival gang.
Sirois would say in 2002, he rejoined
the Rockers with trepidation because of Couillard. André Chouinard was the
first Rocker to return Sirois's calls after he and Couillard split. Sirois
testified that he felt it was necessary to clear the air about Couillard. He said
he had confided a lot to her during their brief marriage and heard that she
might have betrayed those
confidences as their relationship fell apart.
"The contact went well.
(Chouinard) made small talk at first. After that we got on to important subjects,"
Sirois said.
"The important subject, firstly,
was about the person I had married. There were stories she had told certain
people in the milieu. I wanted to see how they had been perceived. (The
Rockers) told me to forget about them. They were the stories of a slut."
"I asked André Chouinard
questions about that subject in particular for several minutes. I also told him
I wanted to go back to work. I wanted to go back to the (Rockers). When I
married (Couillard) they told me I didn't have the right to work."
When Sirois testified at a later trial
in 2003 he elaborated more on what he told Couillard when they were married. He
alleged that Boucher was so suspicious of Couillard he once had a contract out
on her. Sirois said Couillard went around asking people tied to the Hells
Angels if this was true.
Boucher's problem with Couillard
apparently had to do with the fact she had previously dated Gilles Giguère, a
close associate of Robert Savard, a notorious loanshark who operated in
Montreal with Boucher's blessing.
Giguère was shot to death in April
1996 and his body was left in a ditch next to a road in L'Épiphanie. Although
the slaying remains unsolved the Sûreté du Québec has long believed Giguère was
killed by someone he knew.
In 1995, Giguère, Savard and lawyer
Gilles Daudelin were arrested along with Couillard after the Wolverine Squad
investigated alleged threats and the attempted extortion of a Montreal real
estate agent.
Couillard was quickly released without
being charged and reportedly filed a complaint to the provincial police ethics
commissioner. According to a representative at the commissioner's office the
complaint never made it to the hearing stage.
The charges against Savard, Giguère
and Daudelin in the extortion case were eventually dropped. But Giguère was
still in trouble.
It was later revealed in court that
the Hells Angels thought Giguère turned informant while he was facing a
possible trial for illegally possessing firearms and marijuana.
Sirois testified that when he started
dating Couillard, shortly after Giguère's death, the relationship clearly
bothered the Hells Angels. Eventually the issue was brought to Boucher.
"The choice was imposed on me by
Maurice (Mom) Boucher," Sirois said during a 2002 trial. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com
The choice meant Sirois had to turn
over his drug trafficking business to another Rocker. By his own estimate,
Sirois was making between $8,000 and $12,000 in profits per month selling
cocaine and marijuana for the Rockers.
The movie title: "Another Harvest
Moon."
The movie plot: Four elderly friends
living in a nursing home struggle with the issues of quality of life versus
quantity of life after one of the characters suffers a series of strokes.
The cast: Academy Award winner Ernest
Borgnine, Doris Roberts, Anne Meara, Piper Laurie and Cybill Shepherd.
The location: Harrisburg State
Hospital.
An action-packed summer blockbuster in
the making? Hardly.
"There's not going to be a boat
chase on the Susquehanna or any skydiving," said Camp Hill native Greg
Swartz, the director, who on Tuesday stood before a two-story brick building
being primed for shooting. "This film sinks or swims on this cast more
than anything else."
"Another Harvest Moon," to
be filmed starting Monday, joins the growing roster of films being shot in
Pennsylvania as movie producers take advantage of friendly tax laws.
In July, state legislators approved a
tax credit for productions spending 60 percent of their budgets in-state. Those
productions are eligible for a 25 percent refund.
"All of us that are doing this
are really trying to bring films to where we're from," Swartz said.
"This area is underrepresented in film. There are stories to be told
here."
"Another Harvest Moon" is
not the first movie to be shot on the former state hospital grounds. The 1999
film, "Girl, Interrupted," which starred Angelina Jolie, Winona
Ryder, Clea DuVall and Whoopi Goldberg, was filmed there. Jolie won an Academy
Award for best supporting actress for her role.
This current production features a
more experienced cast.
Borgnine, 91, has a lifetime of film
and TV work that includes an Academy Award for his 1955 portrayal of the title
character in "Marty."
Spending time in Russia is a bit like
taking the psychotropic anti-malarial drug Lariam: anyone with a propensity to
anxiety should probably avoid it. Jonathan Dimbleby, an accomplished British
broadcaster, was by his frank admission in a state of considerable emotional
turmoil when he travelled from the Arctic city of Murmansk to Vladivostok. The
overwhelming landscape and the people who were often so rude did not help his
mood, but his responses—awe, horror and frustration—were perhaps more acute as a
result.
The ugly authoritarianism of Vladimir
Putin's Kremlin and Russia's hydrocarbon-fuelled diplomatic bolshiness are now
well documented. There are fewer worthwhile accounts of ordinary life across
the vast, eccentric Russian continent in the Putin era. Mr Dimbleby's
perceptive travelogue is one of them. He describes the spookiness of St
Petersburg; the micro-cultures (and pointy shoes) of the Caucasus; the
desolation of Beslan; the magic of Tolstoy's country estate; the ludicrously
dangerous roads and dreadful hotels. He captures the way Russians are
transformed by toasts, the romance of long-distance train rides and the squalor
of train stations. He encounters a Karelian witch, a Siberian shaman and wild
horses in the Altai mountains. He visits a plush Moscow banya. He drinks a lot
of vodka.
Louis Sheehan
No comments:
Post a Comment