POLITICS

A Pit Bull With Lipstick

Why the smiling, sudden, relentless Sarah Palin should scare Democrats.

By John Dickerson (SLATE)

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Drill, baby, drill. Sarah Palin was relentless in her speech Wednesday night. She drilled Barack Obama, elites, San Francisco, the press, and civil libertarians. She even went after Michelle Obama. And she did it all with a smile and a little mischief. Republicans have been flummoxed because Obama seems untouchable, but Palin may have found an effective way to criticize him—while becoming an elusive target in her own right. Want to call her shrill? Go ahead. There are a lot of women like her who vote and who might be listening.

For many months, Republicans have been warning us against candidates with thin résumés introducing themselves on the national stage. Ignore Barack Obama's lofty language, they've said. He's just offering words. And definitely don't pay attention to the screaming crowds. They're only proof that he's an empty-suit celebrity.

Never mind. On Wednesday night, the Republican Party tried to catapult Sarah Palin past her rocky rollout and into legitimacy in a single speech wrapped in thunderous applause.

Republicans are reacting to Palin the way Democrats do to Obama. The only difference is that, in the GOP, enthusiasm is measured in Reagan units. Party veterans called her a "female Reagan" and a "natural like Reagan." Their sustained applause at her introduction matched, and may have surpassed, that which greeted Bill Clinton at the Democratic Convention.

What got Republicans out of their seats is not just a desire to annoy the media they think are stacked against her. Palin gave them some of that old-time religion. I don't mean code words about abortion—she didn't touch the subject. She offered only glancing references to God. What got the women shaking their "Hockey Mom" signs and the Texas delegation waving their straw hats was the attack on their common enemies in elite circles and the press.

"I'm not a member of the permanent political establishment," she said. "And I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. But here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion—I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country."

It was clear Palin was having fun, and it's hard to have fun if you're scared or a lightweight. She had command, the same quality people attributed to Obama in 2004. Yes, she had speechwriters and she knows how to read a teleprompter. But there are plenty of politicians who've had great speeches and years of practice and still need lots of help. (One of them, actually, is Palin's running mate.)

The biggest target of Palin's succession of happy little kicks in the groin, of course, was Barack Obama. She painted him as a vapid, self-obsessed fog machine of words. He was on a "journey of personal discovery," whereas McCain was running for office to serve. She made fun of his presidential seal, his two memoirs, and, most pointedly, his remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser. "In small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening."

The message was clear: Who is this guy? When she said that people in small towns are "always proud of America," it was clear she was referring to Michelle Obama's claim that for the first time she was proud of her country. (Laura Bush let Michelle Obama off the hook, but Palin won't. That's the difference between first ladies and Iron Ladies, I suppose.)

John McCain will win by making Barack Obama look un-American. That's sensitive stuff. Hillary Clinton destroyed herself trying to use it. But Palin may know how to use it. Palin's attacks are potentially dangerous because they are aimed at the crucial voting bloc of women and middle-class voters who can see their lives in her life. Obama talked about coming from a middle-class life. Palin still lives one. She could improvise a joke about being a hockey mom—what's the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom? Lipstick—because she is one.

The secondary purpose of Palin's speech may be the most important in the long run. She wasn't just launching a new brand (her own). She was relaunching a whole new product: the McCain-Palin ticket. Experience is no longer the central argument. Reform is. McCain and Palin are presenting themselves as leaders who can deliver because they speak and act regardless of the political risk. "Here's how I look at the choice Americans face in this election," said Palin. "In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change."

It was a great act—but it was an act, a one-shot show. Palin will have to keep it up for the next nine weeks, when there won't be time to practice or the opportunity to sand down that line to keep it from sounding small and mean. This is a test Obama has already passed. And her sarcasm will wear thin quickly. Reagan could do it because he was a sunny optimist offering a vision of the future. Palin didn't do much of that, other than by offering platitudes (hey, she had a lot of ground to cover).

It's McCain's job to talk about the future Thursday night, say Republicans. He can feel happy that, for the moment, his judgment about his pick seems to have been vindicated. Now he better hope he can do half the job his new sidekick did.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent 

Bernie Ward Sentenced
(08-28) 15:53 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge decreed a prison term of more than seven years Thursday for Bernie Ward, whose 15-year career as a leading liberal voice on Bay Area talk radio disintegrated when he admitted downloading graphic images of child sex and distributing them on the Internet.
Ward's case is a "personal tragedy," and a prison term may not be the best way to help him or the children exploited by pornography, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said as he imposed the sentence in a San Francisco courtroom. But he noted that federal law requires at least a five-year sentence, and said some aspects of the case were disturbing.
Walker said Ward, a former Roman Catholic priest whose KGO broadcasts included the Sunday morning "God Talk" program, "had an opportunity to think long, hard and deeply about the problems of child abuse" in the Catholic Church. Why, the judge asked, "when he encountered his own predilection (for child pornography), didn't he seek treatment, seek help?"
Ward pleaded guilty in May to distributing child pornography and admitted sending between 15 and 150 pornographic images by e-mail, which he said were part of research for a book. At Thursday's hearing, attended by his wife and four children, he spoke briefly, telling the judge, "I regret my actions, the harm they caused my family, my friends and this community." He said he takes full responsibility for his conduct.
Walker said he would go along with a defense request that Ward serve his sentence - seven years and three months - in the minimum-security prison in Lompoc (Santa Barbara County). Prosecutors did not object. The judge gave Ward until noon today to turn himself in to federal marshals.
Ward's sentence could be reduced by about a year for good behavior in prison. After his release, he will be required for the rest of his life to register with police as a sex offender.
Ward holds a master's degree in theology and spent two years in the priesthood before leaving to get married. He worked for three years as a legislative assistant for then-Rep. Barbara Boxer before joining KGO in San Francisco as a reporter in 1985. He became a talk-show host in 1992 and held forth on news and politics for three hours every weeknight, while discussing religious issues on Sunday mornings.
The station, which nicknamed him the "lion of the left" for his outspoken manner and liberal views, fired him in December after his federal grand jury indictment was unsealed.
Ward was investigated after a woman in Oakdale (Stanislaus County) contacted police in 2005 and said a former priest, later identified as Ward, had been having sex chats with her by e-mail and had sent her a photo showing child pornography.
Police got a search warrant for the online account and found about 100 images showing minors, some as young as 2 or 3, engaged in sexually explicit conduct, prosecutors said. They said Ward exchanged the pictures with a group of 10 people for about a year.
Ward's lawyer, Doron Weinberg, described the conversations as role-playing. Ward said he had downloaded the images as part of his research for a proposed book on hypocrisy among Americans who preach morality. Transcripts of some of the messages quoted Ward as fantasizing about naked children, with no apparent connection to any research subject.
His motive and intent were irrelevant to his guilt under federal law, which makes distributing child pornography a felony punishable by at least five years in prison.
At Thursday's hearing, Weinberg said Ward's actions began as a "journalistic endeavor" but "ended in a dark place." They were an aberration in the life of "a very good man (who) has touched the lives of thousands of people" as a broadcaster and fundraiser for charity, Weinberg said.
He argued for a five-year sentence, the minimum required by law, while prosecutors and the court's probation office recommended a nine-year term.
"This is not an aberration. ... This is recurrent behavior," Justice Department lawyer Steven Grocki told Walker. Grocki said Ward "traded in the currency of human suffering" and that the victims of child pornography "are exploited again and again" when their images are exchanged on the Internet.
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

Tom Hayden Speaks!
DENVER -- Speaking at a luncheon hosted by the Denver Press Club at the Denver Athletic Club today, former California state legislator and '60s political activist Tom Hayden predicted that Barack Obama will lose the 2008 Election. "An African-American candidate talking about economics and a white war hero -- it's clear to me who is going to win," Hayden said. When one of the attendees at the small luncheon, attended mostly by Denverites, asked him to be more specific about why he thinks Obama will lose the race, Hayden replied, "You don't think McCain's gonna have a convention about his being an American." Hayden seemed to be referring to the fact that Barack Obama continues to introduce himself to the American electorate. Hayden elaborated. "I've known kookie Cokie, kookie Cokie Roberts for years, but when Obama vacationed in Hawaii, she said, "He shoulda gone to Myrtle Beach." Hayden turned out his hands, as if to say what're you gonna do?
Hayden went further. "[Obama's] problem is that he's lived in the world of beating the Democratic establishment for so long, it's hard to transition to being the Democratic establishment." Hayden is part of the group Progressives for Obama, but he has his issues with the candidate. "There's the pursuit of the last white man standing in Pennsylvania," he said, rather than a fierce pursuit of the Latino vote, which is what Hayden would like to see.
Given Hayden's history of confrontation with the police, famously at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, perhaps it's not surprising that Hayden has a generally dark view. Much of his talk, which was advertised as an introduction to his new book A Tom Hayden Reader, centered on the police presence at the convention in Denver. Since the 1999 Seattle protests against the WTO, Hayden said that there has been "a continuous police build-up that concerns me since then." The brother of an old friend who lives on Denver's 16th Street Mall told Hayden that "he had never seen anything like it before"--that the police presence there is overwhelming, intimidating and edgy.
Apparently, the police have said that they have hundreds of weapons stored next to the mall, and that they bring them out every night and return them to their secret cache in the morning. Or anyway that's what the brother has confided to Tom Hayden. "All these horses on the mall -- it's like St. Petersburg 1905," Hayden said. The Denver Police Department has received $50 million from the Department of Homeland Security, according to Hayden. What concerns him is not only the massive police presence at the convention (the cop who spilled the beans about the weapons cache is convinced that something is going to happen here) but also the newly purchased technology, which will be used "in the barrio" long after the Democrats are gone. When Hayden says that the police create "an imaginary argument with your mind and with your nervous system," he almost seems to have made the point.
There's no need for so many police in Denver, Hayden says. "With Obama having opposed the war, there's no real reason for demonstrations." Hayden also feels that the "radicals of the 60s don't get credit for what has happened for good in the Democratic Party." He thinks there's too much harkening back to 1968. "All this talk about '68 because we have a fascination with round numbers," he quips. "Our country is full of the wreckage of the 60s."
Hayden observes that "there is a new social movement on a vast scale" centered right now in the Obama Campaign. "These young people will plant seeds for the next twenty-five years." But they are "small-d" Democrats, Hayden says, and they are environmentalists and idealists. "They don't want a war in :Pakistan!" And "if Obama loses, which I think he might," Hayden says, nevertheless the Democratic Party will have grown bigger. As for Obama, "he is losing. He is gonna lose the electoral college."
Hayden does offer a taste of Obama hope. "He gets one more chance to reboot, re-orient, redeploy." He offers the example of the Obama ad campaign on the McCain houses as a primer on how rebooting works these days. According to Hayden, some young investigators financed by Brave New Films in Los Angeles went to Arizona and filmed all the McCain homes and put the video on Youtube. Although the video went viral, nothing happened politically until a reporter from Politico saw it and then had a chance to ask John McCain himself the now-famous number question. Only then, Hayden reminded us, did the Obama team jump on. "Outsiders triggering situations -- that's the only way to win."

Five-ring circus; Olympic-Sized Racism

By Nate DiMeo (Slate)
Remembering the 1904 games, where Indians, Pygmies, and other "savages" faced off in the interest of science.

During an Olympics marked by futuristic swimsuits, age-reversing super-pilates, and nationalistic razzle-dazzle on LCD screens of heretofore unimagined scope, it's helpful to remember that Olympic progress can be measured by more than falling records and technological innovation. Last Friday's parade of nations featured representatives from 204 countries and territories of varying degrees of sovereignty bearing 204 flags and wearing 204 outfits designed to reflect the essence of the folks back home. The parade is more than a quadrennial check-in on sociopolitical changes (welcome, Montenegro! Serbia and Montenegro, we hardly new ye) and fashion changes (nice to have you back, newsboy cap!), it is perhaps the most powerful symbol of actual progress the Olympics has to offer. That's especially true when you consider that people from several of those parading nations first competed in the Olympics at a bizarre, demeaning borderline-freak show designed to further racial pseudoscience.
The 1904 Olympics weren't supposed to take place in St. Louis. The International Olympic Committee had already awarded the first non-European games to Chicago, but St. Louis complained: It was already hosting the Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exhibition (aka the World's Fair) that summer, and there was no way it was going to let some upstart sporting event rain on its parade (or midway, or technological exhibits, or elaborate temporary architecture). Determined to thwart Chicago's plans, the exhibition's organizers threatened to out-Olympics the Olympics. They'd organize a bigger and better athletic competition that would put Chicago's little continental import to shame. Fearing a calamitous setback for his nascent movement, Olympics founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin backed down and gave St. Louis the third Olympiad.
It wasn't much of one. The prospect of an arduous trip to a second-tier city in the American Midwest kept almost all of the top European athletes away. Ultimately, fewer than half the events had even one non-American entrant. The Baron himself steered clear of the games, later recalling that he "had a sort of presentiment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of the town." Even in the U.S., the Olympics were seen less as an epochal sporting event than as yet another attraction at the World's Fair.
When Judy Garland's fictional family goes to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at the end of Meet Me in St. Louis, they say it's the most beautiful place on earth. It was pretty cool. Real visitors saw typical fair fare: industrial exhibits, the world's largest organ, Abe Lincoln's boyhood cabin, newfangled foods like cotton candy and peanut butter and waffle cones, and, of course, a human zoo. Like, well, the Beijing Olympics, World's Fairs of the time were a great way to demonstrate the host nation's various virtues (at best) and presumed cultural superiority (at worst). In 1904, America was in the process of stepping out onto the world stage as an imperialist power. One of the centerpieces of the fair was its Philippine village, featuring live specimens from America's newly acquired territory in a replicated "native habitat" that spread out over 47 acres. Smaller villages were constructed to house Pygmies from Central Africa, American Indians from Mexico, Syrians, Turks, and other "savages"; visitors could gawk at them as they simulated a normal day back home. The display was in the spirit of both turn-of-the-century colonialism and social science. World's Fairs were conceived, in part, as a strollable compendium of the world's knowledge. Its organizers wanted the paying customer to marvel at, say, a new wireless telegraph and a dog-eating member of the Philippines' Igorot Tribe and draw the same conclusion: White Americans are awesome.
The Olympics had their own role to play in this pageant of "progress." A man named James E. Sullivan brought the games to St. Louis. He was a celebrity of an utterly archaic type, nationally famous for sponsoring and officiating athletic competitions. In 1904, he was the head of the fair's Department of Physical Culture. Just as the Department of Exploitation (that's what they called the marketing department) was designed to promote the virtues of the fair's attractions, Sullivan's group was charged with extolling the virtues of American-style athleticism. If the display of "primitive" people from around the world (and even from St. Louis' backyard—there were many Plains Indian tribesmen on exhibit) was meant to show Anglo-America's cultural superiority, Sullivan saw an Olympic games dominated by American achievement as a demonstration of our physical superiority.
Here's where the fair's creepy, early-20th-century ideas about racial superiority reach their icky apogee. Throughout the fair, the so-called primitives participated in physical displays alongside cultural presentations; a visitor to the "Patagonian" display, for instance, might see native Argentines do a traditional dance and also perform some athletic feat. Sullivan subscribed to the view that the white, Anglo-American was at the top of the racial hierarchy in brains and brawn. Here, at his fair, was a chance to prove it once and for all. He talked to William McGee, his counterpart at the fair's Department of Anthropology, and proposed that they combine their efforts. They would hold a "Special Olympics" (Sullivan's phrase) during the plain-old Olympics in which the "savages" would mimic their white counterparts. For Sullivan, it would demonstrate the inherent inferiority of the world's indigenous peoples. For McGee, it would create a body of data that would help him make his mark in the emerging field of anthropology and help him develop his pet bit of quackery: a complete racial hierarchy.
The Special Olympics were harder to pull together than they expected. Despite the fact that the folks in the human zoo were in quasi-captivity, they were paid professionals. With agents and everything. Very few of the "primitives" had any interest in participating in an amateur competition: The Ainu people of Japan might have stooped to climb trees for fair-goers, but that was because they got paid for it. Some, too, seemed to balk because they thought the Olympic sports were ridiculous. Water polo—no joke—was quickly scratched from the program. But eventually, whether due to coercion or curiosity, contestants were secured and the bizarre games within the games began.
"Anthropology Days," as the event was called, took place on Aug. 12 and 13, 1904. The first day featured European-style competitions: the shot put, the high jump, the long jump, the mile, and others. It went poorly—the events had been pulled together very quickly, and there was no time to teach the participants. One strength event—throwing a 56-pound weight—apparently enticed only three competitors, all three of whom refused to try a second round of throws. The high jump was confounding. Even the 100-yard dash was problematic. With so many languages spoken, the starting gun concept was understandably lost on many of the participants. So, too, was the idea of breaking through the finish line: Many would stop short or run below the tape.
The second day featured what the organizers saw as more "savage-friendly" exhibitions: a tree-climbing contest, archery, fighting demonstrations, a Mohawk vs. Seneca lacrosse match, and mud throwing. But even these supposedly more culturally appropriate games didn't work out the way they'd hoped. Thinking that spear-throwing peoples would fare well, Sullivan and McGee were shocked to see that most participants had trouble with the javelin.
The Anthropology Days were seen as a near-total failure. With very little notice, the Department of Exploitation wasn't able to promote it; very few people were there to watch. William McGee's body of data never emerged, with the events so haphazard and poorly designed as to prove statistically insignificant (if we pretend to accept for the moment that such statistics could ever be significant).
For James E. Sullivan, however, the games were at least partially successful. They demonstrated that these savages couldn't even play a proper game of tennis, after all. Sullivan considered the natives' failure to beat the Olympic record for the javelin a sure sign of racial inferiority rather than an aversion to an apparatus never before encountered.
The Anthropology Days experiment was, thankfully, a one-shot deal as an Olympic event. McGee did go on to repeat the experiment that fall, however, this time giving the participants (mostly Native Americans) time to learn and practice the games. Thirty thousand spectators packed the bleachers. Taken together, McGee wrote, the two events proved that the course of human events marched on, inexorably toward the civilized, white-American ideal. His quackery had "proved" the physical inferiority of "primitive" peoples.
Despite the best efforts of James E. Sullivan, the first Olympics on U.S. soil weren't a total embarrassment. George Poage became the first African-American to win a medal, taking home the bronze in the 400-meter hurdles. Frank Pierce became the first American Indian Olympian, running in the marathon and setting the stage for Jim Thorpe to dominate the 1912 games, Michael Phelps-style. And two Zulus, working the fair as part of a big Boer War exhibit, asked whether they could run the marathon and wound up placing fifth and 12th. But Sullivan could take heart: a white American won.
For Nate DiMeo's roundup of the scholarship that's been done on the 1904 Olympics and Anthropology Days, click here.

Isaac Hayes, Deep-Voiced Soul Icon, Is Dead at 65
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- Isaac Hayes, the baldheaded, baritone-voiced soul crooner who laid the groundwork for disco and whose ''Theme From Shaft'' won both Academy and Grammy awards, died Sunday afternoon after he collapsed near a treadmill, authorities said. He was 65.
Hayes was pronounced dead at Baptist East Hospital in Memphis an hour after he was found by a family member, the Shelby County Sheriff's Office said. The cause of death was not immediately known.
With his muscular build, shiny head and sunglasses, Hayes cut a striking figure at a time when most of his contemporaries were sporting Afros. His music, which came to be known as urban-contemporary, paved the way for disco as well as romantic crooners like Barry White.
And in his spoken-word introductions and interludes, Hayes was essentially rapping before there was rap. His career hit another high in 1997 when he became the voice of Chef, the sensible school cook and devoted ladies man on the animated TV show ''South Park.''
''Isaac Hayes embodies everything that's soul music,'' Collin Stanback, an A&R executive at Stax, told The Associated Press on Sunday. ''When you think of soul music you think of Isaac Hayes -- the expression ... the sound and the creativity that goes along with it.''
Hayes was about to begin work on a new album for Stax, the soul record label he helped build to legendary status. And he had recently finished work on a movie called ''Soul Men'' in which he played himself, starring Samuel Jackson and Bernie Mac, who died on Saturday.
Steve Shular, a spokesman for the sheriff's office, said authorities received a 911 call after Hayes' wife and young son and his wife's cousin returned home from the grocery store and found him collapsed in a downstairs bedroom. A sheriff's deputy administered CPR until paramedics arrived.
''The treadmill was running but he was unresponsive lying on the floor,'' Shular said.
The album ''Hot Buttered Soul'' made Hayes a star in 1969. His shaven head, gold chains and sunglasses gave him a compelling visual image.
''Hot Buttered Soul'' was groundbreaking in several ways: He sang in a ''cool'' style unlike the usual histrionics of big-time soul singers. He prefaced the song with ''raps,'' and the numbers ran longer than three minutes with lush arrangements.
''Jocks would play it at night,'' Hayes recalled in a 1999 Associated Press interview. ''They could go to the bathroom, they could get a sandwich, or whatever.''
Next came ''Theme From Shaft,'' a No. 1 hit in 1971 from the film ''Shaft'' starring Richard Roundtree.
''That was like the shot heard round the world,'' Hayes said in the 1999 interview.
At the Oscar ceremony in 1972, Hayes performed the song wearing an eye-popping amount of gold and received a standing ovation. TV Guide later chose it as No. 18 in its list of television's 25 most memorable moments. He won an Academy Award for the song and was nominated for another one for the score. The song and score also won him two Grammys.
''The rappers have gone in and created a lot of hit music based upon my influence,'' he said. ''And they'll tell you if you ask.''
Hayes was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
''I knew nothing about the business, or trends and things like that,'' he said. ''I think it was a matter of timing. I didn't know what was unfolding.''
A self-taught musician, he was hired in 1964 by Stax Records of Memphis as a backup pianist, working as a session musician for Otis Redding and others. He also played saxophone.
He began writing songs, establishing a songwriting partnership with David Porter, and in the 1960s they wrote such hits for Sam and Dave as ''Hold On, I'm Coming'' and ''Soul Man.''
All this led to his recording contract.
In 1972, he won another Grammy for his album ''Black Moses'' and earned a nickname he reluctantly embraced. Hayes composed film scores for ''Tough Guys'' and ''Truck Turner'' besides ''Shaft.'' He also did the song ''Two Cool Guys'' on the ''Beavis and Butt-Head Do America'' movie soundtrack in 1996. Additionally, he was the voice of Nickelodeon's ''Nick at Nite'' and had radio shows in New York City (1996 to 2002) and then in Memphis.
He was in several movies, including ''It Could Happen to You'' with Nicolas Cage, ''Ninth Street'' with Martin Sheen, ''Reindeer Games'' starring Ben Affleck and the blaxploitation parody ''I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka.''
In the 1999 interview, Hayes described the South Park cook as ''a person that speaks his mind; he's sensitive enough to care for children; he's wise enough to not be put into the 'wack' category like everybody else in town -- and he l-o-o-o-o-ves the ladies.''
But Hayes angrily quit the show in 2006 after an episode mocked his Scientology religion.
''There is a place in this world for satire,'' he said. ''but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs of others begins.''
Co-creator creators Matt Stone responded that Hayes ''has no problem -- and he's cashed plenty of checks -- with our show making fun of Christians.'' A subsequent episode of the show seemingly killed off the Chef character.
Hayes was born in 1942 in a tin shack in Covington, Tenn., about 40 miles north of Memphis. He was raised by his maternal grandparents after his mother died and his father took off when he was 1 1/2. The family moved to Memphis when he was 6.
Hayes wanted to be a doctor, but got redirected when he won a talent contest in ninth grade by singing Nat King Cole's ''Looking Back.''
He held down various low-paying jobs, including shining shoes on the legendary Beale Street in Memphis. He also played gigs in rural Southern juke joints where at times he had to hit the floor because someone began shooting.
------
AP writers Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Ky., and Nekesa Moody in New York contributed to this story.

moneybox (From Slate)
Always Dumb Politics. Always Wal-Mart.
The retailer's clumsy, self-defeating attempts to influence Washington.

By Daniel Gross
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that retailing giant Wal-Mart, concerned about a potential Democratic sweep this fall, has been not-so-subtly indoctrinating managers and department heads about the perils of an Obama presidency. The operating assumption in Bentonville seems to be that a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress would pass laws such the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize at Wal-Mart, thus hurting the company, its workers, and its shareholders. And while the executives running the meetings were careful not to instruct workers which lever to pull, the upshot was clear. "I am not a stupid person," a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor told the Journal. "They were telling me how to vote."
Wal-Mart denied that it was engaging in partisan politics. But, even so, these meetings are the latest in a series of clumsy political moves. Wal-Mart may be a master of many domains: global supply chains and logistics, local politics and zoning, anti-union warfare and branding. But on the stage of national politics, it has proved to be strikingly inept. Its executives seem to have a cartoonish understanding of the way Washington works, ascribing mythic powers to the nation's continually weakening private sector unions and misunderstanding the linkages between party control in Washington and its impact on the performance of the economy and individual companies.
For starters, Wal-Mart has pursued what would appear to be a self-contradictory political strategy. Clearly, Wal-Mart fears the prospect of unionization more than any other factor. Low wages, low benefits, and a generally supine workforce have been fundamental to its business model for decades. Wal-Mart clearly believes Democrats are more sympathetic to unions than Republicans. So one might think that the company would be doing everything in its power to help Republicans and hurt Democrats. That's certainly what it used to do. In the 2000 campaign cycle, its political action committee devoted 85 percent of its donations to candidates for federal office to Republicans; in 2004, the split was 78 percent to 22 percent. But with Democrats having resumed control of Congress, Wal-Mart has increasingly deployed corporate resources to help Democrats stay in power. So far in this cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wal-Mart has basically split its $884,700 in donations equally between the two parties (52 percent to 48 percent in favor of the Republicans). The list of recipients includes long-standing friends of organized labor such as Rep. Charles Rangel of New York and Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.
Wal-Mart seems to be trying to help Democrats in retail politics, too. In the fall of 2006, Wal-Mart, seeking to bolster its public image, kicked off a campaign to help its 1.3 million employees—whoops, I mean "associates"—register to vote. The company hasn't published results of this campaign. But given the demographic makeup of Wal-Mart's workforce, any such efforts would seem to help Democrats. As Wal-Mart's 2006 EEOC data shows, 61 percent of employees are women, including 75 percent of sales workers, while 17.5 percent of workers are African-Americans and 11.4 percent are Hispanic. So it has spent money and effort helping to register voters who are quite likely to vote for Democrats.
As it tries to scare managers and workers about the inevitable triumph of unions should the Democrats sweep this fall, Wal-Mart also seriously misreads recent political history. The company behaves as if private-sector unions are juggernauts gaining strength, enjoying enormous support in Washington, and bending the Democratic Party to their will. In reality, private sector unions are very weak and getting weaker. Data from the statistical abstract of the United States show that in 2006, just 8.1 percent of private-sector workers (7.4 million) were covered by unions, down from 9.8 percent in 2000 and 15.9 percent in 1985. Given the massive job reductions in the auto industry, the figures are almost certainly lower now. Yes, big unions such as SEIU and AFL-CIO spend money on (mostly Democratic) campaigns and help get out the (mostly Democratic) vote. But the long-term trend is against unions and has been so under all partisan combinations in Washington. While Washington Republicans are almost uniformly hostile to organized labor, Washington Democrats aren't exactly the second coming of Samuel Gompers. Remember that NAFTA, a piece of legislation that organized labor vociferously opposed, was passed in 1993, when a Democrat was in the White House and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. In today's enlarged Democratic tent—with its upscale constituencies on the coasts and newly flipped districts in places like Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas—unions just don't matter as much. (While this shift could explain Wal-Mart's increased willingness to fund Democratic candidates, it strikes me as too subtle a change to register with Wal-Mart's Manichean strategists.)
Finally, consider this. Wal-Mart's brass plainly believes—no, know—that a Republican president would be good for Wal-Mart, while a Democrat would be bad. Despite Clinton's Arkansas roots, most Wal-Mart executives probably opposed Clinton in both his successful campaigns. But during his presidency, Wal-Mart's stock more than tripled. By contrast, Wal-Mart executives polled in 2000 would have been exultant at the prospect of two George W. Bush terms, especially if they were to be coupled with mostly Republican control of the House and Senate. And yet this decade has been a lost one for Wal-Mart shareholders: In the Bush years, the stock hasn't budged at all.
Yes, politics matters. But in the end, the macroeconomic climate matters a lot more. Wal-Mart's success ultimately depends on whether the lower-income and middle-income customers on whom it depends are doing well or getting eaten up by stagnant incomes and rising costs for health care and gas. Here, again, the last two decades offer a pretty good contrast. In the 1990s, when a Democrat was in the White House, the rising economic tide lifted all boats (though not all boats equally), and Wal-Mart benefited. In this decade, the rising tide lifted only the yachts. The Bush years have been something of an economic disaster for people on the lower rungs of the income ladders. Census data show that household income in 2006 was below its 1999 peak and that the uninsured rate has steadily risen throughout the decade. Layer on soaring energy prices in the past couple of years, and you've got trouble. It's not all the fault of Bush or congressional Republicans, of course. But it's pretty clear that the dominant fiscal and economic policies of the past eight years—massive tax cuts for the wealthy, economic royalism, hostility to labor, and neglect on health care—haven't made things better for Wal-Mart customers.
Instead of asking whether a particular candidate or political party will be favorable to Wal-Mart's labor-relations policies, the executives in Bentonville, Ark., should be asking whether the candidate or party will be good for Wal-Mart's customers.Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek.

Really bad day for Greyhound and passenger!

Man charged in decapitation aboard Greyhound bus

Travelers in Canada armed with tools keep suspect at bay until police arrive

PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, Manitoba —(AP)
A 40-year-old man who witnesses said stabbed and beheaded the man sitting next to him on a Greyhound bus in Canada has been charged with second-degree murder, police said Friday.
Vince Weiguang Li, of Edmonton, Alberta, was due to appear in court later Friday, said Sgt. Brian Edmonds.
Authorities have not released the victim's name but The Canadian Press said friends had identified him as Tim McLean, a 22-year-old carnival worker.
William Caron, 23, said McLean was quiet, though he liked to socialize with friends. He was small -- about 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds -- and tended stayed away from a fight, Caron said.
"From what I hear, this other guy is three times his size," Caron said. "All the time I've known Tim, he's never been the type of guy to get into a fight with. He always kept to himself when there's strangers around."
Witnesses said the victim was stabbed dozens of times in the Wednesday night attack aboard the bus as it traveled a desolate stretch of the TransCanada Highway about 12 miles from Portage La Prairie, Manitoba.
They said the attacker then severed his seat mate's head, displayed it and then began cutting up the body.
Garnet Caton, who was sitting just one seat in front of them, said the suspect had been on the bus about an hour. He initially did not sit near the victim but changed seats after a rest stop. Caton said he did not hear the two speak to each other before the attack.
"We heard this bloodcurdling scream and turned around, and the guy was standing up, stabbing this guy repeatedly," Caton said.
Caton said the driver stopped the bus when he became aware of the attack and passengers raced off. A short while later, Caton said he re-boarded along with the bus driver and a trucker who had stopped to see what was happening.
He said the suspect had the victim on the floor of the bus and "was cutting his head off" with a large hunting knife.
"When he was attacking him, he was calm," said Caton. "There was no rage or anything. He was just like a robot stabbing the guy."
The attacker turned toward them and the three men quickly left the bus, blocking the door as the attacker slashed at them through an opening. Caton said the driver disabled the vehicle after the attacker tried to drive it away.
As the three guarded the door with a crow bar and a hammer, the attacker went back to the body and calmly came to the front of the bus to show off the head, Caton said.
Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said there had been 37 passengers aboard, many watching a movie when the violence erupted. She called the attack tragic but isolated.

Mars' two-faced riddle 'solved' From BBC
The puzzle of why the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars look so different may now have been solved.
Mars' crust is thicker in the southern hemisphere, and magnetic anomalies are found in the south but not the north.
New studies in Nature magazine suggest that a massive space rock smashing into the planet could have created an abrupt disparity between the two halves.
This asteroid would have been close to the size of Earth's moon and hit Mars' northern regions, scientists say.
According to one group of researchers, the rock struck with an energy equivalent to a quadrillion atomic bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
Mars' northern hemisphere is an enormous lowland basin which might once have held a mighty ocean.
It's a very old idea, but nobody had done the numerical calculations Francis Nimmo, UCSC
The southern hemisphere, on the other hand, comprises rugged, crater-pitted highlands with an altitude up to 8,000m (26,000ft) greater than the north.
The new research suggests Mars bears the largest impact scar known anywhere in the Solar System.
It challenges an alternative theory which proposes that the "two faces" of Mars are the result of enormous volcanic disruption 3.8 billion years ago.
Deep impact
The scientists on the latest work used data from two Mars-orbiting spacecraft: Reconnaissance Orbiter and Global Surveyor.
Researchers led by Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, US, carried out computer simulations to show that an impact with particular conditions could produce the present-day appearance of Mars.
These conditions indicate a space rock about one-half to two-thirds the size of Earth's Moon, striking the Red Planet at an angle of 30 to 60 degrees. This would have produced an elliptical crater.
"It's a very old idea, but nobody had done the numerical calculations to see what would happen when a big asteroid hits Mars," said the associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UCSC.
The team's findings are corroborated by another study in Nature led by Oded Aharonson, associate professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), also US.
"The dichotomy is arguably the oldest feature on Mars," Dr Aharonson explained. The feature arose more than four billion years ago, before the rest of the planet's complex geological history was superimposed."
This was about the same time that a much bigger object slammed into the Earth, throwing material into orbit around our infant planet. This material is thought to have coalesced to form the Moon.
Indeed, the coincidence in timing of the formation of our Moon and the Mars dichotomy is probably not coincidental at all.
Tail end
"It happened probably right at the end of the formation of the four terrestrial planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars," said Craig Agnor, a co-author on the Francis Nimmo study.
He told BBC News: "We think the planets formed out of a disc of rocks. As the rocks collide, you get bigger rocks and so on. Eventually, you end up with four planets and a lot of rocks - of various sizes.
"In terms of the process of the planets sweeping up the last bits of debris, this could have been one of the last big bits of debris."
Shock waves from the impact would travel through the planet and disrupt the crust on the other side, causing changes in the magnetic field recorded there.
The predicted changes are consistent with observations of magnetic anomalies in the southern hemisphere, according to Dr Nimmo.
In a third study published in Nature, Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna and Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and Bruce Banerdt of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, provide impact evidence from gravitational and topographical signatures on Mars.

Science
TV Really Might Cause Autism
A Slate exclusive: findings from a new Cornell study.

By Gregg Easterbrook (Oct 2006)
Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.
Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.
The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate. "We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we're saying we have found a critical piece of evidence," Cornell researcher Michael Waldman told me. Because autism rates are increasing broadly across the country and across income and ethnic groups, it seems logical that the trigger is something to which children are broadly exposed. Vaccines were a leading suspect, but numerous studies have failed to show any definitive link between autism and vaccines, while the autism rise has continued since worrisome compounds in vaccines were banned. What if the malefactor is not a chemical? Studies suggest that American children now watch about four hours of television daily. Before 1980—the first kids-oriented channel, Nickelodeon, dates to 1979—the figure is believed to have been much lower.
The Cornell study is by Waldman, a professor in the school's Johnson Graduate School of Management, Sean Nicholson, an associate professor in the school's department of policy analysis, and research assistant Nodir Adilov. "Several years ago I began wondering if it was a coincidence that the rise in autism rates and the explosion of television viewing began about the same time," Waldman said. "I asked around and found that medical researchers were not working on this, so accepted that I should research it myself." The Cornell study looks at county-by-county growth in cable television access and autism rates in California and Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1989. The researchers find an overall rise in both cable-TV access and autism, but autism diagnoses rose more rapidly in counties where a high percentage of households received cable than in counties with a low percentage of cable-TV homes. Waldman and Nicholson employ statistical controls to factor out the possibility that the two patterns were simply unrelated events happening simultaneously. (For instance, petroleum use also rose during the period but is unrelated to autism.) Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth in cable television."
But the fact that rising household access to cable television seems to associate with rising autism does not reveal anything about how viewing hours might link to the disorder. The Cornell team searched for some independent measure of increased television viewing. In recent years, leading behavioral economists such as Caroline Hoxby and Steven Levitt* have used weather or geography to test assumptions about behavior. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies have found that when it rains or snows, television viewing by young children rises. So Waldman studied precipitation records for California, Oregon, and Washington state, which, because of climate and geography, experience big swings in precipitation levels both year-by-year and county-by-county. He found what appears to be a dramatic relationship between television viewing and autism onset. In counties or years when rain and snow were unusually high, and hence it is assumed children spent a lot of time watching television, autism rates shot up; in places or years of low precipitation, autism rates were low. Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "just under 40 percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching." Thus the study has two separate findings: that having cable television in the home increased autism rates in California and Pennsylvania somewhat, and that more hours of actually watching television increased autism in California, Oregon, and Washington by a lot.
Research has shown that autistic children exhibit abnormal activity in the visual-processing areas of their brains, and these areas are actively developing in the first three years of life. Whether excessive viewing of brightly colored two-dimensional screen images can cause visual-processing abnormalities is unknown. The Cornell study makes no attempt to propose how television might trigger autism; it only seeks to demonstrate a relationship. But Waldman notes that large amounts of money are being spent to search for a cause of autism that is genetic or toxin-based and believes researchers should now turn to scrutinizing a television link.
There are many possible objections to the Cornell study. One is that time indoors, not television, may be the autism trigger. Generally, indoor air quality is much lower than outdoor air quality: Recently the Environmental Protection Agency warned, "Risks to health may be greater due to exposure to air pollution indoors than outdoors." Perhaps if rain and snow cause young children to spend more time indoors, added exposure to indoor air pollution harms them. It may be that families with children at risk for autism disorders are for some reason more likely to move to areas that get lots of rain and snow or to move to areas with high cable-television usage. Some other factor may explain what only appears to be a television-autism relationship.
Everyone complains about television in a general way. But if it turns out television has specific harmful medical effects—in addition to these new findings about autism, some studies have linked television viewing by children younger than 3 to the onset of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—parents may urgently need to know to keep toddlers away from the TV. Television networks and manufacturers of televisions may need to reassess how their products are marketed to the young. Legal liability may come into play. And we live in a society in which bright images on screens are becoming ever more ubiquitous: television, video games, DVD video players, computers, cell phones. If screen images cause harm to brain development in the young, the proliferation of these TV-like devices may bode ill for the future. The aggressive marketing of Teletubbies, Baby Einstein videos, and similar products intended to encourage television watching by toddlers may turn out to have been a nightmarish mistake.
If television viewing by toddlers is a factor in autism, the parents of afflicted children should not reproach themselves, as there was no warning of this risk. Now there is: The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends against any TV for children under the age of 2. Waldman thinks that until more is known about what triggers autism, families with children under the age of 3 should get them away from the television and keep them away.
Researchers might also turn new attention to study of the Amish. Autism is rare in Amish society, and the standing assumption has been that this is because most Amish refuse to vaccinate children. The Amish also do not watch television.

The Frog Theory

If you drop a frog in boiling water he will leap right out. If you slowly heat the water he will be content until it’s too late to get out. That is exactly how history works. It moves slowly and we never really see any danger until it’s too late.
Remember how suppressed workers were before unions came along? The unions leveled the playing field. Unfortunately, over a long period of time the pendulum swung too far. Slowly, businesses and factories closed and jobs left the country. We were comfortable and didn’t see the change coming. We blamed everyone except ourselves for what happened. We weren’t alert to how slow things change over time.
World War II, and the Korean War, demonstrated how powerful a united nation could be. Our nation, and our families, were united. The father was the head of the family and the President was the head of the nation. Both were highly respected. We were content and happy.
We were good at fighting a hot war but we were unprepared to fight a cold war with the communists in the 50’s. They knew they couldn’t change us but they didn’t care. Their philosophy was to wait it out and capture the minds of our children. They loaded our colleges with many of their professors and waited. It didn’t take long to see the results.
The 60′’s ushered in the radicals, drug culture, student protesters, and the Vietnam War. The aim of the cold war was to divide and conquer. They divided our families and the nation. The secret to defeating a polite and respectful people is to scream. The louder and longer you scream the better your chance of winning. Radicals are masters at this form of attack. They know if you constantly scream and repeat a lie it will eventually become the truth.
The media, and Hollywood, hammered us with hate America themes and stories. Our service men, and women, were jeered, cursed, and spit on. Even the people, who latter wanted to become their President, thrashed them. We lost our first War in history. There was no hero’s homecoming for our fighting men and women.
The Reverend King, who was raised in the old school, peacefully changed the race issue and united the people. When he died the new breed of leaders like the Jesse Jackson’s, Lewis Farakon,’s Al Sharpton’s, and Rev. Wright’s put a lid on his efforts and turned racism into a money making machine.
Corporations were green-mailed by threats of protests, product boycotts, or endless lawsuits. Every issue, large or small, became a race issue. The public recoiled in fear of being called a racist. Their voices were silenced because one word could cost you a career, get you fired, or get you sued.
Even politicians buckled under to the pressure. The Florida legislature issued a formal apology for having slavery 200 years ago. They were thanked by being asked for compensation. There is no end in sight for this kind of nonsense. America didn’t capture slaves and bring them to America. Their own people sold them to slave traders from several nations. This knowledge doesn’t stop the screamers. History is what it is and you can’t change it. There have been many tragic events in history. You acknowledge them and move on.
They divided our nation into two separate Americas. We now have Americans, and African-Americans, although Africa has nothing to do with being an American. You can be one or the other but not both. You are what you were born to be. You do not subordinate our country to any foreign nation. It’s equivalent to flying the African flag above the Stars and Stripes. If you hyphenate two countries America always comes first.
This election year could be the turning point in our history because the frog theory has come into play. It’s time to step back and look at how the country has slowly changed since the cold war started. Don’t get caught up in all the hype.
George McGovern was the first Presidential candidate to test the waters with college students. The Clinton’s played a big role in his campaign. It was the worst campaign ever run. He was crushed in the election.
Step two was to infiltrate all the information vehicles such as radio, newspapers, magazines, TV and movies. They were quite successful at that. Jimmy Carter was the first President to demonstrate the leadership skills of the far left. Weak military, high taxes, runaway inflation, 19% mortgage rates, and plain incompetence ended his career in Washington. Iran, a small country at the time, took American hostages and kicked sand in our face. By negotiating from weakness Carter could not get the hostages released.
The big benefit of the Carter years is that they were followed by the Reagan years. The nation got a clear look at the difference between a weak nation and a strong nation. Every student should know this difference. When Ronald Reagan took over the hostages were quickly released, taxes were lowered, inflation dropped, mortgage rates dropped, and the military was strengthened. Russia quickly waved the white flag and waited for another Democrat term.
Clinton took over Carters uncompleted social programs. He weakened the military and tried to pass large government programs. An Intern derailed his Presidency. While he was tied up with his personal problems his lawyers ran the country. He passed up three opportunities to take out Osama Bin Laden. This eventually cost us the loss of our Twin Towers, thousands of American lives, and got us involved in a war with Iraq.
By the end of his term the left had captured a large share of the media and it flexed its muscle in 2000. The hate Bush campaign got off to a roaring start. The brainwashing theory of repeating the same story over and over again was launched.
There were endless stories about our evil nation and its President. Top-secret plans were leaked to the press and printed for the entire world to see. Hollywood cranked out documentaries about the evil Bush administration and our evil military. They laid the groundwork for the next election. The ACLU flooded the courts with lawsuits and the Democrat party became a law firm. Almost every incumbent, or his or her spouse, is a lawyer.
They now have the perfect candidate because they can squash criticism by playing the race card. If you don’t like Obama, or criticize him, you are a racist. They can hide his inexperience and background by turning him into a rock star and singing change and hope. They don’t tell us what kind of change, or how it will be done, only that you should hope for the best. By keeping the hype going they don’t have to put anything of substance on the table.
The only thing we really know about Obama is that his wife has never been proud to be an American. They want us to believe that his liberal college professors, Rev. Pfleger, his ties to radicals Bill Ayer and Lewis Farakon, and listening to the Rev. Wright’s hate talks for 20 years, had no influence on his thinking. If they didn’t, then who did? He wasn’t in business and didn’t see fit to serve his country. These people launched his political career and their organizations received earmarks in return for their campaign donations and political help. They must have had some influence. Rev. Wright’s church received over $15 million. That’s only one small local church. Think on a national scale.
The change being promoted is a change back to the Carter years. It started in 2006 when the lawyer party took over. There have been endless lawsuits and investigations in retaliation for the Clinton years. It keeps the lawyers busy but does nothing for the economy. The economy has been in a downward spiral since they took over.
Returning to the Carter years of high taxes, high inflation, and a weak military is not the change we are looking for. We cannot cower to a bunch of crazies whose only goal in life is to kill us.
The old sage’s (over 50) will have to play a big role in this election. The young people simply don’t know what the aged know. The advantage of aging is the knowledge you accumulated. You know what United States means. You know what the seldom-heard word respect means. You know how wonderful freedom and independence is. You know the difference between a strong and a weak nation; and you know what it takes to keep it strong. You know history because you have lived it.
Although the old guard is dying off, and getting to tired to fight, they have to muster one more charge. If they don’t, our children, and grandchildren, will never know the joy and freedom that is the bedrock of our country. The heat is slowly being turned up and the water is getting hot. The old frogs better start jumping before it’s too late.

You Are How You Camped!

What your enjoyment of sleep-away camp, or lack of same, says about your character.

By Timothy Noah (Slate)
It's the dog days of summer, and thousands of kids across the country are off at sleep-away camp. In 2006, Timothy Noah noticed that the degree to which you enjoy summer camp as a kid informs the personality you adopt as an adult. The article is reprinted below.
If there's a more reliable

Rorschach than sleep-away camp, I'd like to see it. How you responded to being shipped off (often at an appallingly tender age) to a cluster of cedar cabins beside a mountain lake; to being taught Native American crafts, chants, and songs of dubious authenticity; and to being subjected to various painful hazing rituals—many of them involving underwear—reveals an awful lot about your fundamental character. If, as the Duke of Wellington claimed, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then the psychotherapy bills of our own great nation were run up on the tetherball courts of Camp Weecheewachee (or whatever the hell your summer camp was called).
Let's begin with the people who didn't like camp
I was one such person. The first camp I got sent to was Camp Lenox, an establishment in the Berkshires that is still in business. During my summer there, in 1966, it was run by and for males who thrived on athletic competition. I did not. My older brother was an enthusiastic jock, and it was his love for the place that landed me there. I don't remember seeing much of him after we got off the bus—he was seven years my senior—but he'd occasionally appear in the distance, wearing the black beret that marked him as my enemy in Color War. I was assigned to the orange team; our symbol was a baton. To this day I shake my head in disbelief that a responsible camp director would set brother against brother in the name of competitive sport. Perhaps you find my thinking on this point a little rigid. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not the sort of person who can alter his loyalties so easily, even within such a character-building realm. (I would have made a terrible Kennedy.)
Observing my perplexity with mild concern, my parents shipped me off to a different camp the following summer. This was Camp Arcady, in the Adirondacks. Now defunct, it was co-ed and less single-mindedly dedicated to sports than Camp Lenox had been. Arcady had other advantages over its predecessor, the most memorable being a waterfront counselor named Doreen who had once been a Mouseketeer on The Mickey Mouse Club. Visions of Doreen (who in the decade since her TV stardom had filled out quite satisfactorily) haunted my prepubescent dreams. Even now, in my mind's eye, I see Doreen emerging, like Botticelli's Venus, from a clamshell perched on the shores of Lake George, a whistle nestled chastely in her cleavage. It was probably because of Doreen that I learned to water-ski. Water-skiing is the only camp sport I remember enjoying. Otherwise, I was pretty miserable. For the evidence, click here (center row, fifth from the left).
People (like myself) who didn't enjoy camp tend to have a problem engaging in organized activities of all kinds. Later in life we often become criminals or sociopaths. The more respectable among us often become journalists. If we're extremely bright or creative (or aspire to be), we may become writers or scholars or artists. The common thread is an outsider mentality. A self-flattering analysis, I know, but such is my privilege as author of this article.
Some people hated camp so much that they made their parents bring them home. These people should not be confused with the outlaws described above. There is nothing outré about not being able to endure summer camp. The come-and-get-me set grow up to be neurotic and needy. These are people who can often be heard on C-SPAN's early-morning call-in program Washington Journal, filibustering from a time zone still blanketed in predawn darkness, until the host says, "Please state your question."
Some people enjoy camp. These people grow up to be normal. My own two children, I'm pleased to report, belong to this category, assuming the blasé letters I'm receiving ("Pringles would taste pretty good right about now") reflect sincere contentment.
Some people really, really enjoy camp. I wish I could tell you that these people grow up to be really, really normal, but they don't. You know who I'm talking about. These are the ones who wept uncontrollably when the papiermâché numbers spelling out 1967 were set ablaze on a little raft that a camp counselor, under cover of darkness, towed stealthily to the middle of Lake Weecheewachee on the evening of the last group sing. These are the people for whom childhood represented the zenith of human existence and everything that followed an anticlimax. The women—they're mostly women—usually end up in abusive relationships with pathologically angry men who eventually abandon them and pay child support erratically, if at all. If the person who really, really enjoyed camp is a man, then he is unlikely ever to develop an intimate relationship and on occasion may be spotted in the back of a police cruiser speeding away from a grade-school playground.
The final category is people who really, really, really enjoy camp. These are the camp cultists. You probably expect me to say that these campers grow up to be utterly incapable of functioning in a noncamp environment, and end up sleeping on the streets in cardboard boxes. In fact, the opposite is true. Camp cultists grow up to be chief executive officers of major corporations, name partners in Wall Street banking firms, Cabinet secretaries, governors, and presidents of prestigious foundations. Their universities invite them to serve on their boards. Their home towns name schools after them. They are the Establishment. Longtime Disney CEO Michael Eisner is a camp cultist, having published, in 2005, Camp, a memoir of his bygone days at Vermont's Keewaydin Canoe Camp, which bills itself as the nation's oldest continually operating summer camp (it was founded in 1893), and whose Web site invites alumni to donate securities to something called the Keewaydin Foundation. I haven't read Eisner's book, but according to Amazon.com, its "statistically improbable phrases" include "winds ceremony" and "Indian circle."
For camp cultists, summer camp is an experience that lasts a lifetime. When they're too old to be campers, they come back as counselors. When they're too old to be counselors, they send their children in their stead. When their children eventually succeed (on the third or fourth try) in getting themselves thrown out of Camp Weecheewachee, for infractions too ghastly to contemplate, camp cultists send money. Lots and lots of money. If it weren't for camp cultists, half the summer camps in the United States would be forced to close their doors, depriving today's campers of this essential early exercise in psychological sorting.
Or perhaps not. Montana Miller, a folklorist who teaches a class called "Summer Camp Ethnography" at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, insists that even children who don't attend summer camp subject themselves to the same psychological sorting process by imagining that they did. In an e-mail to me, she elaborated:
There have been so many movies and books and TV shows—not to mention the stories told by friends who return from camp—that kids internalize whether or not they went to camp themselves. … I had [my students] do an in-class writing assignment in which they recounted an anecdote from camp—presenting it as a personal-experience narrative, but not necessarily real. It could be fictional or something that happened to someone they knew. They read their anecdotes out loud to the class and we tried to guess whether these were real experiences they had had themselves, or constructions from their imaginations and their pop culture educations. You know what? In almost every case, it was impossible to tell.
The summer-camp ink blot, then, is universal. You are how you camped, even if you never went.

Ore. man completes flight of fancy - in lawn chair
By KEITH RIDLER – 10 hours ago
CAMBRIDGE, Idaho (AP) — Using his trusty BB gun to help him return to Earth, a 48-year-old gas station owner flew a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled balloons more than 200 miles across the Oregon desert Saturday, landing in a field in Idaho.
Kent Couch created a sensation in this tiny farming community, where he touched down safely in a pasture after lifting off from Bend, Ore., and was soon greeted by dozens of people who gave him drinks of water, local plumber Mark Hetz said.
"My wife works at the City Market," Hetz said. "She called and said, 'The balloon guy in the lawn chair just flew by the market, and if you look out the door you can see him.
"We go outside to look, and lo and behold, there he is. He's flying by probably 100 to 200 feet off the ground.
"He takes his BB gun and shoots some balloons to lower himself to the ground. When he hit the ground he released all the little tiny balloons. People were racing down the road with cameras. They were all talking and laughing."
Couch covered about 235 miles in about nine hours after lifting off at dawn from his gas station riding in a green lawn chair rigged with an array of more than 150 giant party balloons.
Sandi Barton, 58, who has lived her whole life in this town of about 300, said she and her brother-in-law were the first ones to reach Couch and shook his hand.
"Not much happens in Cambridge," she said, adding that about half the town turned out.
"He came right over our pea field," she said. "He was coming down pretty fast."
She said Couch gave some of his balloons to local children.
It was not clear where Couch went after he landed.
It began after Couch, clutching a big mug of coffee, kissed his wife and kids goodbye, then patted their shivering Chihuahua, Isabella, on the head.
After spilling off some cherry-flavored Kool-Aid that served as ballast, Couch got a push from the ground crew so he could clear light poles and soared over a coffee cart and across U.S. Highway 20 into a bright blue sky.
"If I had the time and money and people, I'd do this every weekend," Couch said before getting into the chair. "Things just look different from up there. You've moving so slowly. The best thing is the peace, the serenity.
"Originally, I wanted to do it because of boyhood dreams. I don't know about girls, but I think most guys look up in the sky and wish they could ride on a cloud."
Couch's wife, Susan, called him crazy: "It's never been a dull moment since I married him."
This was Couch's third balloon flight. He realized it would be possible after watching a TV show about the 1982 lawn chair flight over Los Angeles of truck driver Larry Walters, who gained folk hero fame but was fined $1,500 for violating air traffic rules.
In 2006, Couch had to parachute out after popping too many balloons. And last year he flew 193 miles to the sagebrush of northeastern Oregon, short of his goal.
"I'm not stopping till I get out of state," he said.
To that end, he ordered more balloons. Dozens of volunteers wearing fluorescent green T-shirts that said "Dream Big" filled latex balloons 5 feet in diameter, attached them to strings and tied clusters of six balloons each to a tiny carabiner clip.
Each balloon gives four pounds of lift. The chair was about 400 pounds, and Couch and his parachute 200 more.
"I'd go to 30,000 feet if I didn't shoot a balloon down periodically," Couch said.
For that job, he carried a Red Ryder BB gun and a blow gun equipped with steel darts. He also had a pole with a hook for pulling in balloons, a parachute in case anything went wrong, a handheld Global Positioning System device with altimeter, a satellite phone, and two GPS tracking devices. One was one for him, the other for the chair, which got away in the wind as he landed last year.
For food he carried some boiled eggs, jerky and chocolate.
Couch flew hang gliders and skydived before taking up lawn-chair flights. He estimated the rig cost about $6,000, mostly for helium. Costs were defrayed by corporate sponsors.
Associated Press writer Jeff Barnard contributed to this story from Bend, Ore.
On the Net:
Kent Couch's flight: http://www.couchballoons.com
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New Map IDs The Core Of The Human Brain
The first complete high-resolution map of the human cerebral cortex identifies a single network core that could be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain. (Credit: Indiana University)
ScienceDaily (July 1, 2008) — An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex -- the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking -- connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
The work by the researchers from Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Harvard Medical School marks a major step in understanding the most complicated and mysterious organ in the human body. It not only provides a comprehensive map of brain connections (the brain "connectome"), but also describes a novel application of a non-invasive technique that can be used by other scientists to continue mapping the trillions of neural connections in the brain at even greater resolution, which is becoming a new field of science termed "connectomics."
"This is one of the first steps necessary for building large-scale computational models of the human brain to help us understand processes that are difficult to observe, such as disease states and recovery processes to injuries," said Olaf Sporns, co-author of the study and neuroscientist at Indiana University.
Until now, scientists have mostly used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to measure brain activity -- locating which parts of the brain become active during perception or cognition -- but there has been little understanding of the role of the underlying anatomy in generating this activity. What is known of neural fiber connections and pathways has largely been learned from animal studies, and so far, no complete map of brain connections in the human brain exists.
In this new study, a team of neuroimaging researchers led by Hagmann used state-of-the-art diffusion MRI technology, which is a non-invasive scanning technique that estimates fiber connection trajectories based on gradient maps of the diffusion of water molecules through brain tissue. A highly sensitive variant of the method, called diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI), can depict the orientation of multiple fibers that cross a single location. The study applies this technique to the entire human cortex, resulting in maps of millions of neural fibers running throughout this highly furrowed part of the brain.
Sporns then carried out a computational analysis trying to identify regions of the brain that played a more central role in the connectivity, serving as hubs in the cortical network. Surprisingly, these analyses revealed a single highly and densely connected structural core in the brain of all participants.
"We found that the core, the most central part of the brain, is in the medial posterior portion of the cortex, and it straddles both hemispheres," Sporns said. "This wasn't known before. Researchers have been interested in this part of the brain for other reasons. For example, when you're at rest, this area uses up a lot of metabolic energy, but until now it hasn't been clear why."
The researchers then asked whether the structural connections of the brain in fact shape its dynamic activity, Sporns said. The study examined the brains of five human participants who were imaged using both fMRI and DSI techniques to compare how closely the brain activity observed in the fMRI mapped to the underlying fiber networks.
"It turns out they're quite closely related," Sporns said. "We can measure a significant correlation between brain anatomy and brain dynamics. This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do."
Sporns said he and Hagmann plan to look at more brains soon, to map brain connectivity as brains develop and age, and as they change in the course of disease and dysfunction.
The study was supported in part by the J.S. McDonnell Foundation, the University of Lausanne, Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM) of the Geneva-Lausanne Universities, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the National Institutes of Health.
Journal reference:
Hagmann et al. Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex. PLoS Biology, 2008; 6 (7): e159 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060159
Adapted from materials provided by Indiana University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Need to cite this story in your essay, paper, or report? Indiana University (2008, July 1). New Map IDs The Core Of The Human Brain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 2, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­