Basic Human Decency
mikethemadbiologist | August 22, 2007The Anti-Defamation League reversed its previous position that held the genocide of Armenians wasn't genocide yesterday. Sort of, anyway:
The national office of the Anti-Defamation League reversed its long-held position today and acknowledged the Armenian genocide of 1915, saying in a statement that the mass killings of that era at the hands of the Ottoman Turks "were indeed tantamount to genocide."
However, the statement reaffirms the national ADL's belief that the legislation pending in Congress to recognize the genocide is "a counterproductive diversion."
From the ADL statement, the non-…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2007Last week, Joe Nocera had an excellent piece in the NY Times about how college loans became so exorbitant. Nocera first relates his own college loan experience--in 1974:
...I was constantly falling behind on my payments. The bank that administered my federally guaranteed loans would send a stern notice whenever I got too far behind, which would prompt me to cobble together a few payments by skipping some other bill. Then I would start falling behind again.
Though I found the situation onerous at the time, what strikes me now is how benign it actually was. My bank probably didn't make a dime…
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2007Thomas Bewick is best known as the eighteenth century's premier woodcut engraver and ornithologist. His ornithology books were so well-written that they were popular for a century after his death. However, he was also a passionate political activist, who had seen what war did to his country and his fellow citizens' liberties. Bewick wrote (italics original; from Nature's Engraver by Jenny Ungow):
One would think that the gaining of Worlds, would not compensate the misery & horrid waste of human life, which are the certain attendants of War, and one would wonder, what kind of materials…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2007I have no idea if Bush administration officials individually suffer from manifest antisocial personality disorder, but when you get enough of them together, they certainly do on an institutional level. Here's a relatively unremarked upon tidbit from the recent Surgeon General scandal:
And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization's longtime ties to a "prominent family" that he refused to name.
"I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said.
The…