Civic engagement
revere | January 11, 2010Illinois is not a state I know well, despite having spent five terrifying days and nights in 1968 being chased around its major city by its (then) rabid constabulary and almost losing my life in the process. It was decades before I could bring myself to return there, but when I did I found a vibrant, electric city with some of the greatest food anywhere. Some things hadn't changed that much, though, and Chicago and Illinois politics have remained, well, "different." Think Rod Blagojevich.
Well, don't. He's not the Governor any more. After Blago's impeachment, his estranged Lieutenant Governor…
revere | September 23, 2009People complain that ministers in the cabinet Iran's recently selected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government will say things so outlandish no one else would even think of saying them, but Declan Butler over at the Nature blog, The Great Beyond, begs to differ. Take Iran's Science Minister, Kamran Daneshjou. Daneshjou's credentials had been questioned in an LA Times report in August, but Butler has found that a paper co-authored by Daneshjou contains genuine peer-reviewed science. The only fly in the ointment is that it doesn't seem to be Daneshjou's science:
Large chunks of text, figures…
revere | May 20, 2009We've talked a lot here over the years about preparing for a pandemic on a community level, not an individual level. Both are important, of course, but our interests here have always been on how neighbors can help neighbors and building strong communities to withstand all sorts of shocks, from recessions to pandemics. Our examples tended to focus on what we called the public health and social service infrastructure, but of course the principle went deeper. Unfortunately it was a message that fell on fallow ground during the Bush years.
There have been a lot of dismaying things about American…