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Jim Zellmer's View from Madisonen-us2011-06-22T05:25:23-06:00Iraq 2011: Jet skiing the Triangle of Death, listening to Bee Gee songs--and pondering what comes next
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021235.php
Emma Sky
The taxi driver to Beirut airport tells me that yom al-qiyama (the day of judgment) is approaching. There will be a big explosion soon -- a very big explosion. The revolutions sweeping the Arab World are not good. Islamic parties will come to power everywhere. There will be no more Christians left in the Middle East. Believe me, believe me, he insists. In anticipation, he will make the Hajj to Mecca this year, inshallah. I tell him that I am traveling to Iraq as a tourist. The look he gives me in the rear view mirror says it all: He thinks I am crazy.
I am heading back to Iraq nine months after I left my job as Political Advisor to the Commanding General of U.S. Forces Iraq. Earlier this year, a Sheikh emailed me from his iPad, "Miss Emma we miss you. You must come visit us as a guest. You will stay with me. And you will have no power!" I am excited and nervous. The plane is about a third full. I am the only foreigner. I look around at my fellow passengers. I wonder who they are and whether they bear a grudge for something we might have done.
The flight is one and a half hours long. I read and doze. As we approach Iraq, I look out of the window. The sky is full of sand and visibility is poor. But I can make out the Euphrates below. Land of the two rivers, I am coming back.
I do not have an Iraqi visa. Visas issued in Iraqi Embassies abroad are not recognized by Baghdad airport. I have a letter from an Iraqi General in the Ministry of Interior, complete with a signature and stamp. In the airport, I present my passport and letter, fill out a form, pay $80, and receive a visa within 15 minutes. I collect my bag. I am through. I want to reach down and touch the ground, this land that has soaked up so much blood over the years -- ours and theirs.
]]>Current Eventsjez2011-06-22T05:25:23-06:00US doctors braced for deep cuts in spending
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021224.php
Matt Kennard:
Doctors treating the poor in the US are braced for significant reductions to their services amid increased pressure from both the Obama administration and Republicans for deep cuts in health spending.
Twenty-nine Republican governors have called for greater flexibility in how states administer Medicaid programmes for the poor, a move which coincides with the Obama administration's withdrawal of stimulus funds used to pay for treatment.
Nearly 49m people in the US, or one in six Americans, were covered by Medicaid in 2009. The figure is thought to be higher today.
The federal government increased its subsidies to the states under the stimulus programme, spending $2.68 for every dollar a state spent on Medicaid, nearly twice as much as before the stimulus.
]]>Culturejez2011-06-21T21:20:27-06:00A look inside the Fed's Balance Sheet
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021220.php
Phil Izzo: Ahead of the Federal Reserve‘s policy-setting meeting tomorrow and the coming end this month of QE2, it’s worth taking a look at the latest figures from the Fed’s balance sheet.Assets on the Fed’s balance sheet sit at around...jimz2011-06-21T17:48:07-06:00Small Cities Feed the Knowledge Economy
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021219.php
Adam Davidson: Livable cities draw creative people, and creative people spawn jobs. Some places you’d never expect—small cities not dominated by a university—are learning how to lure knowledge workers, entrepreneurs, and other imaginative types at levels that track or even...jimz2011-06-21T17:45:48-06:00Indians work miracles on a shoestring
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021183.php
Ben Doherty: Tileshwar Prasad concentrates fiercely on every step, one foot in front of the other, staring at the wall ahead as he learns how to walk again.At the end of his careful parade, he is asked how he feels...jimz2011-06-17T15:29:16-06:00Life on the open road
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021181.php
The Economist:
My Cool Campervan. By Jane Field-Lewis and Chris Haddon with photography by Tina Hiller. Pavilion; 160 pages; £14.99.
THE classic VW camper van is a venerable vehicle on which rides--usually rather slowly--a carefree image of life on the open road. They can often be found in the narrow British lanes leading to the surfing beaches in Cornwall in the summertime. But as old ones in good nick can cost £20,000 ($33,000) or more, many of their owners are more likely to be trying to recapture their lost youth than hanging ten.
There are many variations of the VW camper van, not least because until 2005 Volkswagen never made a camper itself, but produced vans for transporting people and goods which others converted with the addition of caravan-style living accommodation. And it was not just VWs which received such attention, as "My Cool Campervan" shows in a collection of photo essays.
]]>Carsjez2011-06-16T22:04:36-06:00Doonesbury's take on the troubles of vets: A response from Garry Trudeau
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021150.php
Garry Trudeau: As I'm old enough to recall the stereotypes that formed around Vietnam veterans, I'm well aware of this danger. The purpose of my stories has been to participate in the national conversation about the costs of war. JPWREL...jimz2011-06-14T11:19:50-06:00Monday Evening Scene
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021149.php
]]>Culturejez2011-06-13T21:38:17-06:00Visualizing Historical Data, And The Rise Of "Digital Humanities"
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021131.php
David Zax
All historians encounter them, at some point in their careers: Vast troves of data that are undeniably useful to history--but too complex to make narratively interesting. For Stanford's Richard White, an American historian, these were railroad freight tables. The reams of paper held a story about America, he knew. It just seemed impossible to tell it.
Impossible to tell in a traditional way, that is. White is the director of the Stanford University Spatial History Project, an interdisciplinary lab at the university that produces "creative visual analysis to further research in the field of history." (The images in this post are taken from the project's many visualizations.) Recent announcements on the project site announce "source data now available" (openness is one of the project's tenets) on such topics as "Mapping Rio," "Land Speculation in Fresno County: 1860-1891," and "When the Loss of a Finger is Considered a 'Minor' Injury."
]]>Artjez2011-06-11T16:52:40-06:00Invasion of the body hackers
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021128.php
April Dembosky:
Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that's been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph of his deep sleep, light sleep and REM. He strides to the bathroom and steps on his digital scale, the one that shoots his weight and body mass to an online data file. Before he eats his scrambled egg whites with spinach, he takes a picture of his plate with his mobile phone, which then logs the calories. He sets his mileage tracker before he hops on his bike and rides to the office, where a different set of data spreadsheets awaits.
"Running a start-up, I'm always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going," he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. "That's under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analysing different data points. So I started doing that with myself."
His weight, exercise habits, caloric intake, sleep patterns - they're all quantified and graphed like a quarterly revenue statement. And just as a business trims costs when profits dip, Galpert makes decisions about his day based on his personal analytics: too many calories coming from carbs? Say no to rice and bread at lunchtime. Not enough REM sleep? Reschedule that important business meeting for tomorrow.
The founder of his own online company, Galpert is one of a growing number of "self-quantifiers". Moving in the technology circles of New York and Silicon Valley, engineers and entrepreneurs have begun applying a tenet of the computer business to their personal health: "One cannot change or control that which one cannot measure."
]]>Culturejez2011-06-11T16:46:13-06:00America's Hottest Investment: Farmland
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021087.php
Stephen Gandel:
This is usually a slow time of the year for farm sales. It's past prime planting season. Yet, Sam Kain, Des Moines area manager for land sales at Farmers National, is busy. He has 3 auctions this week. Most of the 30 or so bidders who show up will be farmers. But an increasing number of people buying land these days have no intention of planting seeds, at least not themselves. They are investors and a growing number of them are getting interested in farmland.
Just how hot is American farmland? By some accounts the value of farmland is up 20% this year alone. That's better than stocks or gold. During the past two decades, owning farmland would have produced an annual return of nearly 11%, according to Hancock Agricultural Investment Group. And that covers a time period when tech stocks boomed and crashed, and housing boomed and crashed. So at a time when investors are still looking for safety, farmland is becoming the "it" investment.
]]>Culturejez2011-06-05T16:10:56-06:00The Dilemma
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/021047.php
Ed Wallace:
If there is one most frightening thing that war always exposes, even if one is on the winning side, it's weakness in the supply logistics. While most never consider it, official policy often changes during a war because supplies that are critical to the war effort seem in danger of being disrupted. Such jeopardy, moreover, forces the accountants, economists and politicians waging the conflict to start thinking about how the world will be changed once the fighting has ended.
Few today appreciate the fact that our foreign policy, particularly as it is tied to the Middle East, came about because of just such concerns in the first years of the Second World War. As one might expect, that official policy was based on real fears that America would one day run out of oil.
"The European War"
It was the summer of 1941 and the State Department had requested that the White House include Saudi Arabia in our Lend Lease program. It wasn't because the Saudis were going to become a direct ally against the European Axis Powers, but because we were about to embargo U.S. oil shipments to Japan. Many believed - correctly, as it turned out - that this would probably lead to hostilities with Japan that would draw us into the war.
Standard Oil of California, which had been drilling for oil in Bahrain for over a decade, now had oil concessions granted by King ibn Saudi. The first six wells Standard drilled into the Arabian desert were nothing to write home about, but when Well No. 7 came in on March 4, 1938, the engineers and wildcatters all knew that Saudi Arabia was going to be an oil bonanza.
Yet on July 18, 1941, Roosevelt refused the request for Lend Lease for Saudi Arabia. He saw no immediate benefit to diverting U.S. dollars overseas simply because Standard had oil concessions there. In any case, the outbreak of the European War in 1939 had reduced oil production in the Kingdom to an insignificant volume -- a trickle, considering that American oil amounted to 60 percent of the world's crude at the time. Instead Roosevelt asked Federal Loan Administrator Jesse Jones to look into the possibility of having England deal with the Saudi King's pressing needs.