Issue #1 for adan
com
Syria troops kill protesters in country's bloodiest
day of turmoil
(World news and comment
from the Guardian |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 6:21:46 PM
Dozens reportedly killed as live
bullets and teargas used against
rallies after Friday prayers
Syria endured its bloodiest day yet of
the Arab Spring as protests against
President Bashar al-Assad brought
turmoil to dozens of towns and cities
across the country and security forces
reportedly gunned down dozens of
people.
Despite a string of government
concessions earlier in the week,
including the lifting of the hated 48-
year-old emergency law, tens of
thousands of demonstrators
demanding greater political freedom
and an end to Ba'ath party rule took
to the streets after Friday prayers.
Security forces around Damascus
and other key cities ignored appeals
to eschew violence, opening fire with
live rounds and using teargas against
several pro-democracy protests,
activists and witnesses reported.
Although information was difficult to
obtain, at least 88 people were
reported killed, including two in
Douma, one in Homs, and at least six
in the southern town of Izraa, and
others in Moudamiya, outside
Damascus, the activists said.
With more casualties being reported
by the hour, there were fears the final
toll would be significantly higher.
The White House urged the Syrian
government to stop its violence
against demonstrators and called on
Damascus to follow through on
promised reforms.
Barack Obama called on the Syrian
government to stop using violence
against demonstrators and accused
Assad of seeking help from Iran.
"This outrageous use of violence to
quell protests must come to an end
now," Obama said in a statement.
"Instead of listening to their own
people, President Assad is blaming
outsiders while seeking Iranian
assistance in repressing Syria's
Hungry or guarded
(Seth's Blog)
Submitted at 4/21/2011 4:40:00 AM
The hungry person at the all you can
eat buffet is happy to take one more
item. She doesn't spend a lot of time
comparing this to that, or saying 'no
thank you' or avoiding certain items.
If it's interesting, "sure I'll try a little
bit. I can always come back."
The guarded person walking down
the street avoids eye contact with the
4/21/2011 at 12:00:00 AM - 4/23/2011 at 12:07:49 AM
citizens through the same brutal
tactics that have been used by his
Iranian allies."
More than 280 people are believed to
have been killed since the unrest
began six weeks ago. Twenty-one
protesters were killed this week in
Homs.
Activists and observersin Damascus
who described today's events as a
watershed moment, said their
impression was that protests had been
bigger than on the past seven Fridays
and more bloody.
The protesters' demands varied from
place to place. In Kisweh, near
Damascus, people called for freedom.
In the Mediterranean city of Banias,
they chanted: "The people want to
topple the regime." Other protesters
directed their anger directly at
members of the ruling family. "God,
freedom and Syria only. God is
greatest!" was another rallying cry. In
some Damascus neighbourhoods,
statues and posters of Assad and his
late father, the former president Hafez
al-Assad, were torn down, and there
was chanting against Maher al-Assad,
Bashar's younger brother, who
commands the army's elite 4th
division. Its soldiers, regarded by
many Syrians as a private militia,
have been reportedly responsible for
shootings in Deraa and elsewhere.
In the Damascus district of Midan,
2,000 people chanted: "Zanga zanga,
dar dar, Maher is a bigger moron than
Bashar!" Another Assad family
member, Rami Makhlouf, a business
tycoon who is the president's cousin,
was also a target of the protesters'
wrath.
Fulfilling an earlier vow to step up
the protests on what they called
"Great Friday", demonstrators also
rallied in the eastern towns of Deir al-
Zor and Qamishli.
In the city of Hama, where Hafez al-
Assad ruthlessly crushed an armed
Islamist uprising nearly 30 years ago,
a witness told Reuters that security
forces opened fire to prevent
protesters from reaching the Ba'ath
party headquarters. "We saw two
homeless person, doesn't answer a
request from the petition-signer and
certainly doesn't help a Boy Scout
with that old lady.
And this is precisely the dichotomy
every cause, every candidate and
every marketer faces.
Either you're selling to people who
are hungry for what you offer, who
are open to hearing what you have to
say, who are fans...
Or you're selling to people who are
snipers on the building. None of us
had weapons. There are casualties,
possibly two dead," the witness said.
After prayers finished in Deraa,
where the protests first began on 15
March, several thousand protesters
gathered, chanting anti-Assad
slogans. "The Syrian people will not
be subjugated. Go away doctor
[Assad]. We will trample on you and
your slaughterous regime," they
shouted.
Unrest was also reported in Raqqa,
close to Damascus, Sayda Zeinab,
Harasta and Barzeh in Damascus,
Tartous, a coastal town, the western
port city of Latakia, and the north-
eastern towns of Ras al-Ayn,
Amouda, and al-Hassakeh.
The scale and nationwide reach of
Friday's protests suggested Assad's
concessions, far from defusing
popular discontent, may have been
seen as a sign of weakness by
demonstratorsnow doubly determined
to achieve their aim. But there is as
yet no clear agreement on what their
aims are: accelerated democratic
reform, greater economic
opportunity, an end to corruption
among Syria's wealthy elite, or all-out
regime change.
In a sign of improving opposition
organisation, activists co-ordinating
the protests demanded the abolition
of the Ba'ath party monopoly on
power and the establishment of a
democratic system. They did not call
for Assad to stand down.
In their first joint statement, seen by
the Guardian, the self-styled "local co
-ordination committees", representing
provinces across Syria, said that
"freedom and dignity slogans cannot
be achieved except through peaceful
democratic change".
"All prisoners of conscience must be
freed. The existing security apparatus
has to be dismantled and replaced by
one with specific jurisdiction and
which operates according to law."
On Thursday, Assad signed a decree
lifting the emergency law, imposed
by his Ba'ath party when it took
power in a coup 48 years ago. He also
actively protecting themselves,
guarding against interruption or a
mistake or worse.
How can you possibly have a
strategy about what you're going to
do next until you determine which
mindset you're marketing to?
Here's the key truth: in any given
moment, in any given situation, a
person is either hungry or guarded.
You need to decide which sort of
person you'll be telling your story to,
feedjournal.
replaced the cabinet and approved
new rights of peaceful protest. But
other laws still give security forces
sweeping powers.
But the first application to protest
under the new law ended in the
temporary detention of the applicant.
Fadel al-Faisal from Hassakeh was
held for several hours after filing a
request to hold a demonstration.
Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch
said the reforms "will only be
meaningful if Syria's security services
stop shooting, detaining, and torturing
protesters". Syria officials have
blamed armed groups, infiltrators and
Sunni Muslim militants for provoking
violence at demonstrations by firing
on civilians and security forces.
Earlier, Reem Haddad,
spokeswoman for the ministry of
information told al Jazeera: "I think if
the people protest peacefully, if they
cause no harm, if they don't burn or
destroy, I think [security forces] will
allow them to do so [protest], and I
think after a certain time they will
actually disperse them, tell them to go
home."
Asked at what point forces would
open fire on protesters, she said: "If
they are shot at, which has been the
case previously."
While calling for an end to the
violence and democratic reform,
western and other Arab countries
have mostly muted their criticism of
the killings and repression in Syria
for fear of destabilising the country,
which plays a strategic role across the
Middle East.
Katherine Marsh is a pseudonym for
a journalist living in Damascus
• Syria
• Middle East
• Protest
Katherine Marsh Peter Walker
Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News &
Media Limited 2011 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
because one approach won't work on
the other type of person.
[PS the mindset can (and does)
change as people go through their
day. At the bookstore she might be
hungry for a new idea, and just a few
minutes later, at the bus stop, she
wants to be alone...]
2
What happens when you try to leave the Church
of Scientology?
(World news and comment
from the Guardian |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 6:24:30 PM
On 19 August 2009, Tommy Davis,
the chief spokesperson for the Church
of Scientology International, received
a letter from the film director and
screenwriter Paul Haggis. "For 10
months now I have been writing to
ask you to make a public statement
denouncing the actions of the Church
of Scientology of San Diego," Haggis
wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a
staff member at Scientology's San
Diego church had signed its name to
an online petition supporting
Proposition 8, which asserted that the
state of California should sanction
marriage only "between a man and a
woman". The proposition passed. As
Haggis saw it, the San Diego church's
"public sponsorship of Proposition 8,
which succeeded in taking away the
civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens
of California – rights that were
granted them by the Supreme Court
of our state – is a stain on
the integrity of our organisation and a
stain on us personally. Our public
association with that hate-filled
legislation shames us." Haggis wrote,
"Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse
to consent." He concluded, "I hereby
resign my membership in the Church
of Scientology."
Haggis was prominent in both
Scientology and Hollywood, two
communities that often converge.
Although he is less famous than
certain other Scientologists, such as
Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he
had been in the organisation for
nearly 35 years. Haggis wrote the
screenplay for Million Dollar Baby,
which won the Oscar for Best Picture
in 2004, and he wrote and directed
Crash, which won Best Picture the
next year. Davis, too, is part
of Hollywood society: his mother is
Anne Archer, who starred in Fatal
Attraction and Patriot Games.
In previous correspondence with
Davis, Haggis had demanded that the
church publicly renounce Proposition
8. "I feel strongly about this for a
number of reasons," he wrote. "You
and I both know there has been a
hidden anti-gay sentiment in the
church for a long time. I have been
shocked on too many occasions to
hear Scientologists make derogatory
remarks about gay people, and then
quote LRH in their defence." The
initials stand for L Ron Hubbard, the
founder of Scientology, whose
extensive writings and lectures form
the church's scripture. Haggis related
a story about Katy, the youngest of
three daughters from his first
marriage, who lost the friendship of a
fellow Scientologist after revealing
that she was gay. The friend began
warning others, "Katy is '1.1'." The
number refers to a sliding Tone Scale
of emotional states that Hubbard
published in a 1951 book, The
Science Of Survival. A person
classified "1.1" was, Hubbard said,
"Covertly Hostile" – "the most
dangerous and wicked level" – and he
noted that people in this state engaged
in such things as casual sex, sadism
and homosexual activity. Hubbard's
Tone Scale, Haggis wrote, equated
"homosexuality with being a pervert".
(Such remarks don't appear in recent
editions of the book.)
In his resignation letter, Haggis
explained to Davis that, for the first
time, he had explored outside
perspectives on Scientology. He had
read a recent exposé in a Florida
newspaper, the St Petersburg Times,
which reported, among other things,
that senior executives in the church
had been subjecting other
Scientologists to physical violence.
Haggis said he felt "dumbstruck and
horrified", adding, "Tommy, if only a
fraction of these accusations are true,
we are talking about serious,
indefensible human and civil-rights
violations."
Online, Haggis came across an
appearance that Davis had made on
CNN in May 2008. The presenter
John Roberts asked Davis about the
church's policy of "disconnection", in
which members are encouraged to
separate themselves from friends or
family members who criticise
Scientology. Davis responded,
"There's no such thing as
disconnection as you're characterising
it."
In his resignation letter, Haggis said,
"We all know this policy exists."
Haggis reminded Davis that a few
years earlier his wife had been
ordered to disconnect from her
parents, "because of something
absolutely trivial they supposedly did
25 years ago when they resigned from
the church". Haggis continued, "To
see you lie so easily, I am afraid I had
to ask myself: what else are you lying
about?"
Haggis forwarded his resignation to
more than 20 Scientologist friends,
including Archer, Travolta and Sky
Dayton, the founder of EarthLink.
"People started calling me, saying,
'What's this letter Paul sent you?'"
Davis says. A St Petersburg Times
exposé had inspired a fresh series of
hostile reports on Scientology, which
has long been portrayed in the media
as a cult. And, given that some well-
known Scientologist actors were
rumoured to be closeted
homosexuals, Haggis's letter raised
awkward questions about the church's
attitude toward homosexuality. Most
important, Haggis wasn't an obscure
dissident; he was a celebrity, and the
church, from its inception, has
depended on celebrities to lend it
prestige. To Haggis's friends, his
resignation from the Church of
Scientology felt like a very public act
of betrayal. They were surprised,
angry and confused. "'Destroy the
letter, resign quietly' – that's what
they all wanted," Haggis says.
Last March, I met Haggis, 57, in
New York. He was in the editing
phase of his latest movie, The Next
Three Days, a thriller starring Russell
Crowe, and preparing for two events
later that week: a preview screening
in New York and a charitable trip to
Haiti.
Haggis was born in 1953, and grew
up in London, Ontario, where his
father, Ted, had a construction
company. He decided at an early age
to be a writer, but after leaving
school, he drifted, hanging out with
hippies and drug dealers.
He fell in love with Diane Gettas, a
nurse, and they began sharing a one-
bedroom apartment. One day in 1975,
when he was 22, Haggis was walking
to a record store when a young man
pressed a book into his hands. "You
have a mind," the man said. "This is
the owner's manual." The book was
Dianetics: The Modern Science Of
Mental Health, by L Ron Hubbard,
which was published in 1950. By the
time Haggis began reading it,
Dianetics had sold about 2.5m copies.
Today, according to the church, that
figure has reached more than 21m.
Haggis opened the book and saw a
page stamped with the words "Church
of Scientology". He had heard about
Scientology a couple of months
earlier, from a friend who had called
it a cult. The thought that he might be
entering a cult didn't bother him. In
fact, he said, "it drew my interest.
I tend to run toward things I don't
understand."
At the time, Haggis and Gettas were
having arguments; the Scientologists
told him that taking church courses
would improve the relationship. "It
was pitched to me as applied
philosophy," Haggis says. He and
Gettas took a course together and,
shortly afterwards, became Hubbard
Qualified Scientologists, one of the
first levels in what the church calls
the Bridge to Total Freedom.
The Church of Scientology says its
purpose is to transform individual
lives and the world. "A civilisation
without insanity, without criminals
and without war, where the able can
prosper and honest beings can have
rights, and where man is free to rise
to greater heights, are the aims of
Scientology," Hubbard wrote.
Scientology postulates that every
person is a Thetan – an immortal
spiritual being that lives through
countless lifetimes. Scientologists
believe that Hubbard discovered the
fundamental truths of existence, and
they revere him as "the source" of the
religion.
In 1955, a year after the church's
founding, a publication urged
Scientologists to cultivate celebrities:
"It is obvious what would happen to
Scientology if prime communicators
benefiting from it would mention it."
At the end of the 60s, the church
established its first Celebrity Centre,
in Hollywood. (There are now
satellites in Paris, Vienna,
Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence,
London, New York, Las Vegas and
Nashville.) Over the next decade,
Scientology became a potent force in
Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis
was typical of the recruits from that
era, at least among those in the
entertainment business. Many of
them were young and had quit school
in order to follow their dreams, but
they were also smart and ambitious.
The actor Kirstie Alley, for example,
left the University of Kansas in 1970
to get married. Scientology, she says,
helped her lose her craving for
cocaine. "Without Scientology, I
would be dead," she has said.
In 1975, the year that Haggis became
a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high
school dropout, was making his first
movie, The Devil's Rain, when an
actor on the set gave him a copy of
Dianetics. "My career immediately
took off," he told a church
publication. "Scientology put me into
the big time." The testimonials of
such celebrities have attracted many
curious seekers. In Variety,
Scientology has advertised courses
promising to help aspiring actors
"make it in the industry".
Haggis and I travelled together to
LA, where he was presenting The
Next Three Days to the studio.
During the flight, I asked how high he
had gone in Scientology. "All the way
to the top," he said. Since the early
80s, he had been an Operating Thetan
VII, which was the highest level
available when he became affiliated
with the church. (In 1988, a new
level, OT VIII, was introduced to
members; it required study at sea, and
Haggis declined to pursue it.) He had
made his ascent by buying
"intensives" – bundled hours of
auditing, at a discount rate. "It wasn't
so expensive back then," he said.
David S Touretzky, a computer-
science professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, has done extensive
research on Scientology. (He is not a
defector.) He estimates that the
coursework alone now costs nearly
$300,000 and, with the additional
auditing and contributions expected
of upper-level members, the
cumulative cost may exceed half a
million dollars. (The church says
there are no fixed fees, adding,
"Donations requested for 'courses' at
the Church of Scientology begin at
$50 and could never possibly reach
the amount suggested.")
Haggis and I spoke about some
events that had stained the reputation
of the church while he was a member.
For example, there was the death of
Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who
died after a mental breakdown, in
1995. She had crashed a car in
Clearwater, Florida – where
Scientology has its spiritual
headquarters – and then stripped off
her clothes and wandered naked
down the street. She was taken to
hospital, but, in the company
of several other Scientologists, she
checked out against doctors' advice.
(The church considers psychiatry an
evil profession.) McPherson spent the
next 17 days being subjected to
church remedies, such as doses of
vitamins and attempts to feed her
with a turkey baster. She became
comatose, and died of a pulmonary
embolism before church members
finally brought her to the hospital.
The medical examiner in the case,
Joan Wood, initially ruled that the
cause of death was undetermined, but
she told a reporter, "This is the most
severe case of dehydration I've ever
seen." The state of Florida filed
charges against the church. In
February 2000, under withering
questioning from experts hired by the
church, Wood declared that the death
was "accidental". The charges were
dropped and Wood resigned.
Haggis said that, at the time, he had
chosen not to learn the details of
McPherson's death. "I had such a lack
of curiosity when I was inside. It's
WHAT page 3

WHAT
continued from page 2
stunning to me, because I'm such a
curious person." His life was
comfortable, he liked his circle of
friends, and he didn't want to upset
the balance. It was also easy to
dismiss people who quit the church.
As Haggis put it, "There's always
disgruntled folks who say all sorts of
things."
In 1977, Haggis and Diane Gettas
got married and, shortly after, they
drove to Los Angeles, where he got a
job moving furniture. In 1978, Gettas
gave birth to their first child, Alissa.
Haggis was spending much of his
time and money taking advanced
courses and being audited, which
involved the use of an
electropsychometer, or E-Meter. The
device, often compared in the press to
a polygraph, measures the bodily
changes in electrical resistance that
occur when a person answers
questions posed by an auditor.
("Thoughts have a small amount of
mass," the church contends in a
statement. "These are the changes
measured.") The Food and Drug
Administration has compelled the
church to declare that the instrument
has no curative powers and is
ineffective in diagnosing or treating
disease.
Haggis found the E-Meter
surprisingly responsive. The auditor
often probed for what Scientologists
call "earlier similars". Haggis
explained, "If you're having a fight
with your girlfriend, the auditor will
ask, 'Can you remember an earlier
time when something like this
happened?' And if you do, then he'll
ask, 'What about a time before that?
And a time before that?'" Often, the
process leads participants to recall
past lives.
Although Haggis never believed in
reincarnation, "I did experience gains.
I think I did, in some ways, become a
better person." Then again, he
admitted, "I tried to find ways to be a
better husband, but I never really did.
I was still the selfish bastard I always
was."
At night, Haggis wrote scripts on
spec. He met Skip Press, another
young writer who was a
Scientologist, and they started
hanging out with other aspiring
writers and directors who were
involved with Scientology. "We
would meet at a restaurant across
from the Celebrity Centre called Two
Dollar Bill's," Press recalls. Haggis
and a friend from this circle
eventually got a job writing for
cartoons, including Scooby-Doo and
Richie Rich.
By now, Haggis had begun
advancing through the upper levels of
Scientology. The church defines an
Operating Thetan as "one who can
handle things without having to use a
body or physical means".
"The process of induction is so long
and slow that you really do convince
yourself of the truth of some of these
things that don't make sense," Haggis
told me. Although he refused to
specify the contents of OT materials,
on the grounds that it offended
Scientologists, he said, "If they'd
sprung this stuff on me when I first
walked in the door, I just would have
laughed and left right away." But by
the time Haggis approached the OT
III material, he'd already been
through several years of auditing. His
wife was deeply involved in the
church, as was his sister, Kathy.
Moreover, his first writing jobs had
come through Scientology
connections. He was now entrenched
in the community and had invested a
lot of money in the programme. The
incentive to believe was high.
The many discrepancies between L
Ron Hubbard's legend and his life
have overshadowed the fact that he
was a fascinating man. He was born
in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911. In 1933,
he married Margaret Grubb, whom he
called Polly; their first child,
Lafayette, was born the following
year. He visited Hollywood, and
began getting work as a screenwriter,
but much of his energy was devoted
to publishing stories, often under
pseudonyms, in pulp magazines such
as Astounding Science Fiction.
During the second world war,
Hubbard served in the US navy. He
later wrote that he was gravely
injured in battle and fully healed
himself, using techniques that became
the foundation of Scientology. After
the war, his marriage dissolved, and
he ended up in Los Angeles. He
continued writing for the pulps, but
he had larger ambitions. He began
codifying a system of self-betterment,
and set up an office where he tested
his techniques on the actors, directors
and writers he encountered.
He named his system Dianetics.
The book, Dianetics, appeared in
May 1950 and spent 28 weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list.
Dianetics purports to identify the
source of self-destructive behaviour –
the "reactive mind", a kind of data
bank that is filled with traumatic
memories called "engrams". The
object of Dianetics is to drain the
engrams of their painful, damaging
qualities and eliminate the reactive
mind, leaving a person "Clear".
Dianetics, Hubbard said, was a
"precision science". He offered his
findings to the American Psychiatric
Association and the American
Medical Association, but was
spurned; he subsequently portrayed
psychiatry and psychology as
demonic competitors. Scientists
dismissed Hubbard's book, but
hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang
up across the US and abroad. The
Church of Scientology was officially
founded in Los Angeles in February
1954, by several devoted followers of
Hubbard's work.
In 1966, Hubbard – who by then had
met and married another woman,
Mary Sue Whipp – set sail with a
handful of Scientologists. The church
says that being at sea provided a
"distraction-free environment",
allowing Hubbard "to continue
his research into the upper levels of
spiritual awareness". Within a year,
he had acquired several ocean-going
vessels. He staffed the ships with
volunteers, many of them teenagers,
who called themselves the Sea
Organisation. Hubbard and his
followers cruised the Mediterranean
searching for loot he had stored in
previous lifetimes. (The church
denies this.)
The Sea Org became the church's
equivalent of a religious order. The
group now has 6,000 members, who
perform tasks such as counselling,
maintaining the church's vast
property holdings and publishing its
official literature. Sea Org initiates –
some of whom are children – sign
contracts for up to a billion years of
service. They get a small weekly
stipend and receive free auditing and
coursework. Sea Org members can
marry, but they must agree not to
raise children while in the
organisation.
As Scientology grew, it was
increasingly attacked. In 1963, the
Los Angeles Times called it a
"pseudoscientific cult". The church
attracted dozens of lawsuits, largely
from ex-parishioners. In 1980,
Hubbard disappeared from public
view. Although there were rumours
that he was dead, he was actually
driving around the Pacific Northwest
in a motor home. He returned to
writing science fiction and produced
a 10-volume work, Mission Earth,
each volume of which was
a bestseller. In 1983, he settled
quietly on a horse farm in Creston,
California.
In 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion,
the church faced two of its most
difficult court challenges. In Los
Angeles, a former Sea Org member,
Lawrence Wollersheim, sought $25m
for "infliction of emotional injury".
He claimed he had been kept for 18
hours a day in the hold of a ship
docked in Long Beach, and deprived
of adequate sleep and food.
That October, the litigants filed OT
III materials in court. Fifteen hundred
Scientologists crowded into the
courthouse, trying to block access to
the documents. The church, which
considers it sacrilegious for the
uninitiated to read its confidential
scriptures, got a restraining order, but
the Los Angeles Times obtained a
copy of the material and printed a
summary.
"A major cause of mankind's
problems began 75m years ago," the
Times wrote, when the planet Earth,
then called Teegeeack, was part of a
confederation of 90 planets under the
leadership of a despotic ruler named
Xenu. "Then, as now, the materials
state, the chief problem was
overpopulation." Xenu decided "to
take radical measures". Surplus
beings were transported to volcanoes
on Earth, and bombed, "destroying
the people but freeing their spirits –
called Thetans – which attached
themselves to one another in
clusters." The Times account
concluded, "When people die, these
clusters attach to other humans and
keep perpetuating themselves."
The jury awarded Wollersheim
$30m. (Eventually, an appellate court
reduced the judgment to $2.5m.) The
secret OT III documents remained
sealed, but the Times' report had
already circulated widely, and the
church was met with derision all over
the world.
The other court challenge in 1985
involved Julie Christofferson-
Titchbourne, a defector who argued
that the church had falsely claimed
that Scientology would improve her
intelligence, and even her eyesight. In
a courtroom in Portland, she said that
Hubbard had been portrayed to her as
a nuclear physicist; in fact, he had
failed to graduate from George
Washington University. As for
Hubbard's claim that he had cured
himself of grave injuries in the
second world war, the plaintff's
evidence indicated that he had never
been wounded in battle. Witnesses for
the plaintiff testified that in one six-
3
month period in 1982, the church
transferred millions of dollars to
Hubbard through a Liberian
corporation. The church denied this,
and said that Hubbard's income was
generated by his book sales.
The jury sided with Christofferson-
Titchbourne, awarding her $39m.
Scientologists streamed into Portland
to protest. They carried banners
advocating religious freedom and
sang We Shall Overcome.
Scientology celebrities, including
Travolta, showed up. Haggis, who
was writing for the NBC series The
Facts Of Life at the time, came and
was drafted to write speeches. "I
wasn't a celebrity – I was a lowly
sitcom writer," he says. He stayed for
four days.
The judge declared a mistrial, saying
that Christofferson-Titchbourne's
lawyers had presented prejudicial
arguments. It was one of the greatest
triumphs in Scientology's history, and
the church members who had gone to
Portland felt an enduring sense of
kinship. (A year and a half later, the
church settled with Christofferson-
Titchbourne for an undisclosed sum.)
In 1986, Hubbard died, of a stroke,
in his motor home. He was 74. Two
weeks later, Scientologists gathered
in the Hollywood Palladium for a
special announcement. A young man,
David Miscavige, stepped on to the
stage. Short, trim and muscular, with
brown hair and sharp features,
Miscavige announced to the
assembled Scientologists that for the
past six years Hubbard had been
investigating new, higher OT levels.
"He has now moved on to the next
level," Miscavige said. "It's a level
beyond anything any of us ever
imagined. This level is, in fact, done
in an exterior state. Meaning that it is
done completely exterior from the
body. Thus, at 20:00 hours, the 24 of
January, AD 36" – that is, 36 years
after the publication of Dianetics – "L
Ron Hubbard discarded the body
he had used in this lifetime."
Miscavige began clapping, and led
the crowd in an ovation, shouting,
"Hip hip hooray!"
Miscavige was a Scientology
prodigy from the Philadelphia area.
He claimed that, growing up, he had
been sickly and struggled with bad
asthma; Dianetics counselling had
dramatically alleviated the symptoms.
As he puts it, he "experienced a
miracle". He decided to devote his
life to the religion. He had gone Clear
by the age of 15, and the next year he
dropped out of high school to join the
Sea Org. He became an executive
assistant to Hubbard, who gave him
special tutoring in photography and
cinematography. When Hubbard went
into seclusion, in 1980, Miscavige
was one of the few people who
maintained close contact with him.
With Hubbard's death, the curtain
rose on a man who was going to
impose his personality on an
organisation facing its greatest test,
the death of its charismatic founder.
Miscavige was 25 years old.
When Haggis finally reached the top
of the Operating Thetan pyramid, he
expected that he would feel a sense of
accomplishment, but he remained
confused and unsatisfied.
He was a workaholic, and as his
career took off, he spent less and less
WHAT page 4
4
WHAT
continued from page 3
time with his family. He and his wife
began a divorce battle that lasted nine
years and, in 1997, a court
determined that Haggis should have
full custody of the children.
His daughters were resentful. "I
didn't even know why he wanted us,"
Lauren says. The girls demanded to
be sent to boarding school, so Haggis
enrolled them at the Delphian School,
which uses Hubbard's educational
system, called Study Tech. By the
time she graduated, Lauren says, she
had scarcely ever heard anyone speak
ill of Scientology.
Alissa found herself moving away
from the church and did not speak to
her father for a number of years.
When she was in her early 20s, she
accepted the fact that, like her sister
Katy, she was gay.
In 1991, as his marriage was
crumbling, Haggis went to a Fourth
of July party at the home of
Scientologist friends. Deborah
Rennard, who played JR's alluring
secretary on Dallas, was at the party.
Rennard had grown up in a
Scientology household and joined the
church herself at the age of 17. They
became a couple, and married in
June, 1997. A son, James, was born
the following year.
Despite his growing disillusionment
with Scientology, Haggis raised a
significant amount of money for it,
and made sizeable donations himself.
The Church of Scientology had
recently gained tax-exempt status as a
religious institution, making
donations, as well as the cost of
auditing, tax-deductible. (Church
members had lodged more than 2,000
lawsuits against the Internal Revenue
Service, ensnaring the agency in
litigation. As part of the settlement,
the church agreed to drop its legal
campaign.)
Over the years, Haggis estimates, he
spent more than $100,000 on courses
and auditing, and $300,000 on
various Scientology initiatives.
Rennard says she spent about
$150,000 on coursework. Haggis
recalls that the demands for donations
never seemed to stop. "They used
friends and any kind of pressure they
could apply," he says. "I gave them
money just to keep them from calling
and hounding me."
Proposition 8 passed in November
2008. A few days after sending his
resignation letter to Tommy Davis in
February 2009, Haggis came home
from work to find nine or 10 of his
Scientology friends standing in his
front yard. He invited them in to talk
and referred them to the exposé in the
St Petersburg Times that had so
shaken him: The Truth Rundown.
The first instalment had appeared in
June 2009. Haggis had learned from
reading it that several of the church's
top managers had defected in despair.
Marty Rathbun had once been
inspector general of the church's
Religious Technology Centre, and
had also overseen Scientology's legal-
defence strategy, reporting directly to
Miscavige. Amy Scobee had been an
executive in the Celebrity Centre
network. Mike Rinder had been the
church's spokesperson, the job now
held by Davis. One by one, they had
disappeared from Scientology, and it
had never occurred to Haggis to ask
where they had gone.
The defectors told the newspaper that
Miscavige was a serial abuser of his
staff. "The issue wasn't the physical
pain of it," Rinder said. "It's the fact
that the domination you're getting –
hit in the face, kicked – and you can't
do anything about it. If you did try,
you'd be attacking the COB" – the
chairman of the board. Tom De
Vocht, a defector who had been a
manager at the Clearwater spiritual
centre, told the paper that he, too, had
been beaten by Miscavige; he said
that from 2003 to 2005, he had
witnessed Miscavige striking other
staff members as many as 100 times.
Rathbun, Rinder and De Vocht all
admitted that they had engaged in
physical violence themselves. "It had
become the accepted way of doing
things," Rinder said. Scobee said that
nobody challenged the abuse because
people were terrified of Miscavige.
Their greatest fear was expulsion:
"You don't have any money. You
don't have job experience. You don't
have anything. And he could put you
on the streets and ruin you."
Much of the alleged abuse took place
at the Gold Base, a Scientology
outpost in the desert 80 miles south-
east of Los Angeles. Miscavige has
an office there, and for decades the
base's location was unknown even to
many church insiders. According to a
court declaration filed by Rathbun in
July, Miscavige expected Scientology
leaders to instil aggressive, even
violent, discipline. Rathbun said that
he was resistant, and that Miscavige
grew frustrated with him, assigning
him in 2004 to the Hole – a pair of
double-wide trailers at the Gold Base.
"There were between 80 and 100
people sentenced to the Hole at
that time," Rathbun said in the
declaration. "We were required to do
group confessions all day and all
night."
The church claims that such stories
are false: "There is not, and never has
been, any place of 'confinement'…
nor is there anything in Church policy
that would allow such confinement."
According to Rathbun, Miscavige
came to the Hole one evening and
announced that everyone was going
to play musical chairs. Only the last
person standing would be allowed to
stay on the base. He declared that
people whose spouses "were not
participants would have their
marriages terminated". The St
Petersburg Times noted that
Miscavige played Queen's Bohemian
Rhapsody on a boom box as the
church leaders fought over the chairs,
punching each other and, in one case,
ripping a chair apart.
De Vocht, one of the participants,
says the event lasted until 4am: "It
got more and more physical as the
number of chairs went down." Many
of the participants had long been cut
off from their families. They had no
money, no credit cards, no
telephones. According to De Vocht,
many lacked a driver's licence or a
passport. Few had any savings or
employment prospects. As people fell
out of the game, Miscavige had
aeroplane reservations made for
them. He said that buses were going
to be leaving at 6am. The
powerlessness of everyone else in the
room was nakedly clear.
Davis told me that a musical chairs
episode did occur. He explained that
Miscavige had been away from the
Gold Base for some time, and when
he returned he discovered that in his
absence many jobs had been
reassigned. The game was meant to
demonstrate that even seemingly
small changes can be disruptive to an
organisation – underscoring an
"administrative policy of the church".
The rest of the defectors' accounts,
Davis told me, was "hoo-ha": "Chairs
being ripped apart, and people being
threatened that they're going to be
sent to far-flung places in the world,
plane tickets being purchased, and
they're going to force their spouses –
and on and on and on. I mean, it's just
nuts!"
The church provided me with 11
statements from Scientologists, all of
whom said that Miscavige had never
been violent. The church
characterises Scobee, Rinder,
Rathbun, De Vocht and other
defectors I spoke with as "discredited
individuals" who were demoted for
incompetence or expelled for
corruption; the defectors' accounts are
consistent only because they have
"banded together to advance and
support each other's false 'stories'".
After reading the St Petersburg
Times series, Haggis tracked down
Marty Rathbun, who says Haggis was
shocked by their conversation.
"The thing that was most troubling to
Paul was that I literally had to
escape," Rathbun told me. (A few
nights after the musical chairs
incident, he got on his motorcycle
and waited until a gate was opened
for someone else; he sped out and
didn't stop.) Haggis called several
other former Scientologists he knew
well. One said he had escaped from
the Gold Base by driving his car
through a wooden fence. Still others
had been expelled or declared
Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked
himself, "What kind of organisation
are we involved in where people just
disappear?"
At his house, Haggis finished telling
his friends what he had learned. "I
directed them to certain websites," he
s a i d , m e n t i o n i n g
Exscientologykids.com. The stories
on the site, of children drafted into
the Sea Org, appalled him. "They
were 10 years old, 12 years old,
signing billion-year contracts – and
their parents go along with this?"
Haggis told me. "Scrubbing pots,
manual labour – that so deeply
touched me. My God, it horrified
me!"
Many Sea Org volunteers find
themselves with no viable options for
adulthood. If they try to leave, the
church presents them with a
"freeloader tab" for all the
coursework and counselling they
have received; the bill can amount to
more than $100,000. "Many of them
actually pay it," Haggis said. "They
leave, they're ashamed of what
they've done, they've got no money,
no job history, they're lost, they just
disappear." In what seemed like a
very unguarded comment, he said, "I
would gladly take down the church
for that one thing."
The church says it adheres to "all
child labour laws", and that minors
can't sign up without parental
consent; the freeloader tabs are an
"ecclesiastical matter" and are not
enforced through litigation.
Haggis's friends came away from the
meeting with mixed feelings. This
would be the last time most of them
spoke to him.
In the days after, church officials and
members came to his office,
distracting his producing partner,
Michael Nozik, who is not a
Scientologist. "Every day, for hours,
he would have conversations with
them," Nozik told me.
"I listened to their point of view, but I
didn't change my mind," Haggis says,
noting that the Scientology officials,
"became more livid and irrational."
In October 2009, Rathbun called
Haggis and asked if he could publish
the resignation letter on his blog.
"You're a journalist, you don't need
my permission," Haggis said,
although he asked Rathbun to excise
p a r t s r e l a t i n g t o
Katy's homosexuality.
Haggis says he didn't think about the
consequences of his decision: "I
thought it would show up on a couple
of websites. I'm a writer, I'm not
Lindsay Lohan." Rathbun got 55,000
hits on his blog that afternoon. The
next morning, the story was in
newspapers around the world.
At the time Haggis was doing his
research, the FBI was conducting its
own investigation. Agents Tricia
Whitehill and Valerie Venegas
interviewed former church and Sea
Org members. One was Gary
Morehead, who had been the head of
security at the Gold Base; he left the
church in 1996. In February 2010, he
told Whitehill he had developed a
"blow drill" to track down Sea Org
members who left Gold Base. In 13
years, he estimates, he and his
security team brought more than 100
Sea Org members back to the base.
When emotional, spiritual or
psychological pressure failed to work,
Morehead says, physical force was
sometimes used. (The church says
that blow drills do not exist.)
Whitehill and Venegas worked on a
special task force devoted to human
trafficking. The California penal code
lists several indicators: signs of
trauma or fatigue; being afraid or
unable to talk; owing a debt to one's
employer. Those conditions echo the
testimony of many former Sea Org
members.
Sea Org members who have "failed
to fulfil their ecclesiastical
responsibilities" may be sent to one
of the church's several Rehabilitation
Project Force locations. Defectors
describe them as punitive re-
education camps. In California, there
is one in Los Angeles; until 2005,
there was one near the Gold Base, at
a place called Happy Valley. Bruce
Hines, a defector turned research
physicist, says he was confined to
RPF for six years, first in LA, then in
Happy Valley. He recalls that the
properties were heavily guarded and
that anyone who tried to flee would
be subjected to further punishment.
"In 1995, when I was put in RPF,
there were 12 of us," Hines said. "At
the high point, in 2000, there were
about a 120." Some members have
been in RPF for more than a decade,
doing manual labour and extensive
spiritual work. (Davis says that Sea
Org members enter RPF by their own
choosing and can leave at any time;
the manual labour maintains church
facilities and instils "pride of
accomplishment".)
Defectors also talked to the FBI
about Miscavige's luxurious lifestyle.
WHAT page 9

Cranking
(43 Folders)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 4:38:56 PM
1.
Nothing wrecks your living room
decor quite like a giant, rented
hospital bed.
The one my Dad laid in for a couple
months in the fall of 1974 was an
alarmingly stiff and sturdy affair, the
frame of which was forged of
impossibly heavy iron, with half a
dozen jaggy coats of putty-flesh latex
paint doing a shit job of concealing
the dings and dents kissed by dozens
of clutches of burly rental guys
trying to navigate unaccommodating
residential doors.
Jammed cattywampus between a
teddy-bear brown sectional, an
antiqued rococo credenza, and what
had until recently been my Father's
favorite armchair, the hospital bed
left little room for easy socializing,
let alone aesthetic speculation. This
was a living room where a very ill
person would mostly die soon.
The hospital bed's defining feature
was the theoretical ease with which
the human trunk slumped in its top
half could be raised or lowered by
turning a shitty little crank at the foot
of its lower half. Like the bed itself,
the shitty little crank was ugly and
obtrusive and hard to live with. Mom
and I tripped over the crank a lot.
The theoretically useful but
ultimately shitty little crank made the
hospital bed look like those old-timey
cars we'd see in the bad silent movies
they showed down at Shakey's Pizza.
Mom and Dad despised the saltines-
and-ketchup style of pizza served at
Shakey's. To them, LaRosa's over on
Cheviot had way better pizza plus a
pretty good jukebox. But, I really
liked Shakey's. They gave away cool
styrofoam boater hats with a red
paper band that said, "Shakey's Pizza
Parlor." Which I thought looked
smashing. So, they used to take me to
Shakey's.
In practice, the hospital bed's shitty
little crank functioned mostly as a
recalcitrant and pinch-inducing
mechanism for eroding my father's
dignity.
Dad would lay in the hospital bed
that filled our living room while my
Mom slowly cranked. He'd try to
make jokes. (Dad had always been
the funniest person any of his friends
knew.) The hospital bed creaked.
Mom cranked. Dad's tired upper half
would haltingly rise and bob with
reluctant help from the bed's upper
half. Mom sweated at the crank. Dad
laid there and watched. Dad couldn't
help. He watched. He was in the
hospital bed. Mom did all the
cranking. Dad watched. He watched
while his wife turned a shitty little
iron crank, trying impotently to make
her best friend just a tiny bit more
comfortable as his body worked to
finally finish eating itself. But, he
couldn't help out. I think he wanted to
help out. But, he couldn't help out.
She couldn't really help my Dad. My
Dad couldn't really help her. But they
sure tried.
She cranked and cranked.
I was seven. I didn't know how to
help anyone. 2.
The last time I saw my Dad, he was
in a different hospital bed. That one
was a much more functional and
aesthetically appropriate unit neatly
fitted into an overlit semi-private
room in the highly-regarded Jewish
Hospital located on E. Galbraith
Road. We weren't Jewish. We were
just sick.
Frankly, I forget what the crank on
the second hospital bed looked like,
but I seem to recall that it worked
just fine.
This was maybe a week before my
Dad died.
From what I can gather, he and my
Mom had wanted to time things so
that I could be with him as long and
as late as possible--but not so late that
I'd have to see him in the kind of
condition I have to assume he was in
during the full week he was too ill for
his boy to visit him. Pretty bad
condition, I'm guessing.
In the almost forty years since Dad's
last week in any hospital bed, my
Mom and I haven't talked much about
it. If there are things to say about that
week, I'm not sure even forty years is
long enough to prep for them. I know
I'm still not ready. I should ask my
Mom if she's ready. She was forty
then. Just under half her life ago.
What I do know is my Mom lived by
that second hospital bed most every
minute of Dad's last week. Just like
she'd been by the first hospital bed in
her living room for the months
before. Only now she was the one
sleeping on the wrong bed. There are
limits to the physical comforts you
can offer a woman who's determined
to stay by her husband's second
hospital bed until it's time.
But she was there that whole time.
Up to the last time my sweet Dad
ever said anything to anyone.
As he laid in that second hospital
bed, I'm told that the last thing my
Dad said to anyone was something he
said to my Mom. He told my Mom:
Take care of The Big Guy.
That was me. I was "The Big Guy."
My Dad always called me "Big Guy,"
and I always loved when he said that.
It made me feel strong. It made me
feel tall. It made me know that my
Dad and I were best pals.
I still love knowing I was my Dad's
best pal. 3.
I don't specifically remember the day
our particular clutch of burly rental
guys came out to remove the first
hospital bed from our living room. I
do remember thinking it was weird
how quickly the space filled with
huge floral arrangements, covered
dishes and casseroles, and a pack of
outdoorsy men with giant red hands
who were new to sobbing
inconsolably in front of each other.
But, that hospital bed had been
heavy. Really heavy. And even
though the bed's wheels had been
thoughtfully nested in plastic casters,
the raw tonnage of the iron
motherfucker left permanent dents in
our ugly, broccoli-green carpeting.
Six breadplate-sized dents that were
still there a year and a half later on
the day my Mom and I moved out.
We didn't need a house that big for
just the two of us. Plus, the living
room wasn't much fun to hang out in
any more.
Way too big. Way too big. 4.
I don't currently have a hospital bed.
I have a modest but very comfortable
regular bed in a regular bedroom
where I sleep with my regular wife.
She's my favorite part of the bed.
To my knowledge, our modest but
very comfortable bed is not fitted
with a shitty little crank. Which is
nice for everyone.
And, every single morning at almost
exactly 6:00 AM Pacific Time, my
three-year-old daughter wakes up,
jumps out of her crank-free, regular,
big-girl bed, tears out of her regular
bedroom, and--even before she gets
her hot milk or takes off her pull-up
or tells us to turn on Toy Story 2--she
dashes into our regular bedroom, runs
up to our regular non-hospital bed,
and screams, " DAD-dy! DAD-dy!
DAD-dy!" until I wake up and say,
"G'mornin', Sweet Bug! Did you have
nice sleeps?"
Sometimes she tells me whether or
not she had nice sleeps. Often as not
lately, she tells me to make her hot
milk and turn on Toy Story 2. Both of
which I'm totally fine with.
Thing is, she screams " DAD-dy!"
like the most impossibly great thing
in the world has just happened. Every
single morning. Right by my bed.
Without a crank in sight.
And, you know what? Something
impossibly great has happened.
Because an annoying, rambling,
disagreeable little man like me gets to
have this alarm clock in piggy-
patterned footie jammies run up to a
regular, crank-less, healthy-Dad, non
-hospital bed and make him feel like
he's The Greatest Thing in the
Universe.
Just like I think she's The Greatest
Thing in the Universe.
Just like I thought my Dad was The
Greatest Thing in the Universe.
And, although I'm confident that I
will always think my daughter is The
Greatest Thing in the Universe, I'm
also all too aware that this feeling
will not always be reciprocated in
quite that same way or with quite that
same enthusiasm that we both enjoy
right now.
She won't always run to my bed in
footie jammies.
I'll only get that particularly noisy
and personalized wake-up call for a
little while. And, I only get a shot at it
once a day. At almost exactly 6:00
AM Pacific Time.
Then one day? I won't get it any
more. It will be gone. 5.
Many mornings over the past six
months or so, at almost exactly 6:00
AM Pacific Time, I was not in my
regular bed. I was not even at home. I
was sitting in another building, typing
bullshit that I hoped would please my
book editor. Who, by the way, is
awesome.
And, if I noticed what time it was, I'd
always wonder whether my daughter
had run into our bedroom yet.
I'd wonder whether she had seen my
side of the bed empty again. And,
when I thought about my empty spot
on the bed and how disappointed
she'd be to scream " DAD-dy! DAD-
dy! DAD-dy!" then see I'm not even
there, I'd die a little.
I'd die a little, because as I thought
about her, I'd think about my Dad.
And as I thought about my Dad, I'd
start thinking about hospital beds
with cranks--then on to dents, and
covered dishes, and rooms full of
sobbing outdoorsy guys, and so on.
But, by then it might be 6:10 am
5
Pacific Time. And I didn't have time
to think about my family. Not now,
right? No, I had to keep working. I
had to stay in that other building and
keep typing bullshit that I hoped
would please my editor. Who is
awesome.
So, I'd type and type. I'd crank and
crank. I'd try and try. I'd want very
much to go home, make hot milk, and
watch Toy Story 2. So much, I'd want
this. 6.
Anyhow, this has been my on-and-
off job for the past two years. I type.
And, I try to type things that will help
and comfort people, but mostly I try
to type things that will please my
editor. Who is awesome.
Sometimes I do my job at 6:00 AM
Pacific Time. Sometimes I do my job
at 5:30 PM or 11:30 AM or really any
time in between. Sometimes I do my
job while my family goes to birthday
parties and holiday dinners and a
couple vacations and I don't even
know how many (non-Shakey's)
pizza nights--all without me. Without
Dad.
In fact, a depressing amount of the
time--really up until this week--I
would do my job until I hadn't the
slightest idea what time it was or
what bullshit I was typing or what my
crank was ever meant to be attached
to in the first place.
But, even when my shitty little crank
was not attached to anything, I did
keep cranking. Because, Dads do
their job. It's what they do.
They crank. They crank and crank
and crank and crank.
Sometimes the cranking made
something special that will be really
useful to people who badly need the
comfort and help. But, a staggering
amount of the time, my cranking has
produced joyless and unemotional
bullshit that couldn't comfort, help, or
please anyone. Especially my editor.
Who is awesome. There's no point in
doing anything if it doesn't eventually
please my editor. Who is awesome.
This has constantly hung over my
head. For two fucking years.
But, this has been my job. It's a job I
often did late. It's a job I often did
poorly. And, it's a job where I often
didn't pull my load or live up to even
my own expectations and standards.
Which is far from my editor's fault.
She's been awesome. 7.
Anyhow, I've tried to do my job. But,
I've often failed.
I've sometimes failed to make things
that will help and comfort people.
And, God knows I've failed to please
my editor.
And, worst of all, more often than
my heart can bear at 2:34 pm Pacific
Time on Friday April 22nd, I know
I've failed to be home for several of
my daily shot at " DAD-dy! DAD-dy!
DAD-dy!"
It's now become unavoidably clear to
me that I've been doing each of these
things poorly. The job, the making,
the pleasing, and, yeah, the being at
home. And I can't live with that for
another day. So, I've chosen which
one has to go. At least in the way it's
worked to date. Which is to say not
working.
I'll let you guess which.
Because, that? That choosing? That's
what my book needs to be about. Not
about pleasing people. Not about
CRANKING page 12
6
Giving Nature Its Own Rights Might Avert
Future Oil Disasters
(Wired: Wired Science)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 3:37:05 PM
Hundreds of lawsuits have flowed
from the Deepwater Horizon
catastrophe, filed by citizens, states
and the federal government. And
someday, perhaps, the Gulf of
Mexico’s ecosystems will also file
suit.
Environmental philosophers and
other people say that biological
communities — ecosystems, habitats,
species and populations — have a
right to exist. They’re not just
valuable because they’re someone’s
property. Environmental lawyers say
courts should recognize this right, and
could allow people to represent
nature as legal guardians or trustees.
Were nature’s rights recognized
before the Deepwater Horizon
wellhead blew, the destruction might
have been avoided. In its aftermath,
future disasters might at least be
averted. If nothing else, pollution’s
toll would be fully acknowledged in
courts of law, not just public
conscience.
“There is room in our legal system to
expand the concept of guardianship,”
said Patricia Siemen, executive
director of the Center for Earth
Jurisprudence. “The inlets and the
marshes, the beaches that are
damaged, species of birds that are
threatened — each one may have its
own guardian, with a right to speak
for the interests of that being, and the
legal authority to speak for that
being.”
Legal recognition of ecological
rights was originally proposed in
1972 by University of Southern
California law professor Christopher
Stone, who floated the idea as an
academic exercise but became
convinced of its justification. To
Stone, arguments against the intrinsic
rights of animals and ecosystems to
exist were no more coherent than
historical arguments against the rights
of foreigners, children or women.
(Had Stone written a century earlier,
he would have found a sympathetic
ear in Charles Darwin, who in The
Descent of Man wrote that
humanity’s social impulses produced
an ever-expanding circle of empathy.
As mankind extended his regard “to
the lower animals, so would the
standard of his morality rise higher
and higher.”)‘The way our laws are
constructed, anybody in the
community can stand in the shoes of
the river, so to speak.’
Stone’s landmark essay “ Should
Trees Have Standing?” (.pdf), was
derided by some scholars. “Our
brooks will babble in the courts /
Seeking damages for torts,” chided
one attorney. Others embraced it,
including Supreme Court justice
William O. Douglas. It became an
environmental rallying point, and
influenced legal activism in the
decades to come.
In its modern form, natural rights are
not usually framed in terms of
individual creatures — though laws
against cruelty to animals implicitly
acknowledge their rights — but rather
populations and ecosystems. In many
ways, laws recognize those rights,
too: The Endangered Species Act
says that species have value. The Oil
Pollution Act, which will guide the
environmental assessment of
Deepwater Horizon’s damage(.pdf)
and ultimately determine what the
U.S. government asks BP to pay for
restoration, appoints various federal
agencies as trustees of damaged Gulf
habitats.
But there are important differences
between the trusteeship sought by
natural rights advocates and the
trusteeship of the Oil Pollution Act.
Under that law, only federal agencies
can represent the Gulf of Mexico’s
nature. Citizens and communities
cannot. Meanwhile, the OPA’s
trusteeship only kicks in after a
disaster.
“Where natural rights would have the
greatest influence in the context of oil
and oil spills is before oil spills occur,
when you’re trying to prevent
damages from occurring,” said
Kathryn Mengerink, director of the
Environmental Law Institute’s Ocean
Program.
A natural rights strategy for Gulf
citizens can be found in statutes
drafted by the Community
Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a
nonprofit group that’s worked with
dozens of Pennsylvania communities
trying to restrict natural gas drilling
and sewage sludge dumping. The
statues explicitly grant towns and
cities — most notably, Pittsburgh—
legal standing to enforce the rights of
ecosystems and natural communities.
“The way that environmental laws
work now, is that unless you
experience direct harm, you don’t
have legal standing,” said Mari
Margil, the CELDF’s associate
director. “The way our laws are
constructed, anybody in the
community can stand in the shoes of
the river, so to speak.”‘Nothing in the
text of Article III [of the U.S.
Constitution] explicitly limits the
ability to bring a claim in federal
court to humans.’
Similar statutes wouldn’t have
allowed Gulf communities to stop
deep-water oil drilling — indeed,
many Gulf communities wouldn’t
have wanted to stop it — but the
statutes would have given the public a
chance to participate in drafting
drilling regulations. BP might not
have been given a free pass.
“The guardian for fish, for seagrass,
for whatever might be granted, can be
at the table where those regulations
are drafted,” said Siemen.
“Obviously, it has to be someone
with a conservation biology
background, but they’d be there to
give input.”
If Gulf communities became legal
guardians for nature, they would also
have recourse should the
government’s estimate of Deepwater
GIVING page 9

Untangling the Huge Dodgers Mess
(The Daily Fix)
Submitted at 4/21/2011 9:24:12 AM
Pity Don Mattingly. There was little
time for cake on his 50th birthday
Wednesday for the Los Angeles
Dodgers manager. Instead he had to
field questions about Bud Selig’s
shocking decision to take control of
the storied franchise from owners
Frank and Jamie McCourt. Selig
announced that Major League
Baseball would appoint a
representative to take control of all
business and day-to-day operations.
This action came weeks after the
beating of a visiting Giants fan in the
parking lot of Dodgers Stadium, an
event that brought up the fact that the
Dodgers had let go of Ray
Maytorena, their head of security, in
December and never replaced him
with a full-time employee. On top of
all of this, the Los Angeles Times
reported that not only did McCourt
take a $30 million loan from Fox
Sports to meet payroll, but two
sources told the Times’s Steve
Dilbeck that McCourt would, in a
worst-case scenario, pay back the
loan with money he has yet to win in
a case against the lawyers at
McCourt’s former firm who crafted
his pre-nuptial agreement. That law
firm, Bingham McCutchen, is
currently suing McCourt in a sort of
pre-emptive strike before he sues
them. The prenup in question
allegedly failed to spell out who was
the real owner of the Dodgers, which
has come into play because of the
messy public divorce between
McCourt and his wife, Jamie (which
was kicked off by Frank McCourt
firing his wife as CEO of the team).
Adding to McCourt’s woes is an 11%
drop in attendance from 2010,
unprecedented backlash from fans,
and a failure to sign any marquee free
agents this past offseason (although,
to be fair, they did bring in Ted Lilly,
a two-time All-Star whose given
name is Theodore Roosevelt Lilly).
Associated Press Frank McCourt: one
lawyered-up individual.
McCourt decided to play the role of
the defiant owner and hint that he will
not go gently into that good night in
response to Selig. “Major League
Baseball sets strict financial
guidelines which all 30 teams must
follow,” McCourt said in a statement.
“The Dodgers are in compliance with
these guidelines. On this basis, it is
hard to understand the
commissioner’s decision today.”
Yahoo’s Tim Brown says that the
statement is somewhat worrisome,
and advises McCourt to cooperate
with Selig, as his ownership reign has
been a huge mess since he bought the
Dodgers from Fox (which, like the
Journal, is owned by News Corp.).
“Bad lawyers, bad divorce, bad
verdict, bad economy, bad
investments, bad Manny Ramirez
testosterone levels, Frank has had
them all,” Brown writes. “Dig a
pothole in the middle of your street,
‘The Cup Is Under the Bus!’
(The Daily Fix)
Submitted at 4/21/2011 11:15:05 AM
Real Madrid’s celebration of its
fill it with sewer water, and within
hours Frank McCourt would walk
along and step in it.”
The Dodgers players seemed mostly
unconcerned with the announcement,
beating Atlanta 6-1 Wednesday and
telling reporters that they’ll see
nothing different. “We’re not getting
a new manager, we’re not getting
new players, we’re not getting rid of
players,” catcher Rod Barajas told
Michael Martinez of Fox Sports. “It’s
basically going to be the same
product we’ve had.” General manager
Ned Coletti took it a step further,
reminding Martinez that MLB loaned
money to Texas last year, and the
Rangers still made late trades for
Cliff Lee and Bengie Molina that
helped them reach the World Series.
Conor Sen of Minyanville.com
likens the Dodgers situation—along
with that of the cash-strapped Mets
and NBA’s New Orleans Hornets—to
that of the failing Greek and Irish
economies. “ Money has dried up, the
teams are going through liquidity
crises, and in response they’re
scrambling for short-term loans and
looking to cut payroll in order to
maintain solvency,” Sen writes. “This
Copa del Rey victory over FC
Barcelona has turned into an internet-
age international joke thanks to
defender Sergio Ramos, who dropped
may look like a simple case of
billionaire owners getting in over
their heads, but it’s actually
representative of problems facing
wide swaths of society right now.”
Speaking of the Mets, they may be
next on Selig’s list. Bill Madden of
the New York Daily News wonders if
the Mets will be taken over by MLB
after Selig set the precedent with the
Dodgers on Wednesday. The team
has already gotten a considerable loan
from MLB and the owners are
currently being sued by Bernie
Madoff trustee Irving Picard for $1
billion. “The answer to that
undoubtedly lies in the Mets owners’
efforts to find an investor to pump
some $200 million into the
operation,” Madden writes, “which
presumably will enable them to
refinance and start paying down the
estimated $300 million team debt,
make their stadium bond payments
and cover all their operating costs,
most notably payroll.”* * *
On a much lighter baseball note,
Brian Cronin’s stellar series of Sports
Legends Revealed took a look at the
notion that Jack Norworth, the writer
of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,”
the actual cup under the team bus
during a post-game celebration.
Here’s a Spanish-language broadcast
of the incident, including a shocked
7
had never attended a game before
penning the tune in 1908. With some
research, Cronin determines the
legend to be fact, while reminding
readers that the popular seventh-
inning stretch refrain is just part of a
much longer ballad. “The actual
song,” Cronin writes, “is framed
about a young Irish woman, Katie
Casey, who doesn’t want to go to a
show; she wants to go to a baseball
game.”* * *
The NFL’s labor talks came to a halt
on Wednesday, with the appointed
mediator, U.S. Judge Magistrate
Arthur Boylan, telling both sides he
has other judicial matters to attend to
and will most likely not return to the
table until mid-May. In the meantime,
Judge Susan Nelson is expected to
issue a ruling on the players’
injunction against the owners’
lockout. If the players win the
decision, the owners are expected to
immediately appeal, dragging out the
legal process yet again.
But a weird development on
Wednesday may turn out to be a
game-changer for both sides.
According to Sports Business
Journal’s Daniel Kaplan, a group of
players unhappy with the negotiation
process have talked to lawyers in
Philadelphia about being represented
at the table alongside the big names
and owners. One of those lawyers
confirmed to the Associated Press
that they have “had discussions about
representing some additional players
who want to have a voice in the
matter.” Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel
believes that this represents a possible
break on the players’ side of
negotiations—perhaps pointing out
that some of the mid-level players are
concerned that the bigger names
aren’t looking out for them. “ This
isn’t going to end the lockout but it’s
a controversy that the owners will no
doubt enjoy and watch closely,”
Wetzel writes. “Eventually one side
was going to blink and break. The
smart money was the first signs
coming in July or August, not the
middle of April.”
No matter what happens with the
legal wrangling, the NFL Draft will
take place next week. And Peter King
of Sports Illustrated reports that TCU
quarterback Andy Dalton, a redhead,
may be facing an extra level of
scrutiny from potential suitors. “”Has
there ever been a red-headed
quarterback in the NFL who’s really
done well?” King reports that a coach
asked one reporter last week. “ It
sounds idiotic, but is there any way
that could be a factor? We’ve
wondered.”
Found a good column from the world
of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself —
w r i t e t o u s a t
dailyfixlinks@gmail.com and we’ll
consider your find for inclusion in the
Daily Fix. You can email Nando at
nandodifino@yahoo.com.
announcer exclaiming, “The cup is
under the bus!” as police and other
observers try to figure out what’s
happening:
8
Activists prevent Arctic drilling
(World news and comment
from the Guardian |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 6:09:04 PM
Environmental groups fear oil
industry is not prepared for
potentially catastrophic impact of oil
spills in the Arctic
The fight to stop the global oil
industry exploring the pristine deep
waters of the Arctic has been dubbed
the new cold war, and early on Friday
it escalated as environmental activists
from 12 countries occupied the
world's second largest rig on its way
from Turkey to Greenland to drill
among the icebergs.
The protesters found the 52,000-
tonne semi-submersible platform
Leiv Eiriksson at around midnight,
steaming due west at a stately six
knots in the sea of Marmara, heading
for the Dardanelle straits and the open
Mediterranean. It took four more
hours for Greenpeace to bring in its
inflatables and a further 50 minutes in
the choppy moonlit sea to intercept it.
Even from three miles away, the
Chinese-built mobile rig, which
specialises in drilling in extreme
environments, looks huge. From
100ft away in the pale dawn light it is
a 15-storey industrial castle, bristling
with cranes, derricks, gangways,
chains, spars, girders, pipes, helipads
and radar. Just 10 years old, it is
already rusting and its paintwork is
streaked from years of drilling in
harsh west African, north Atlantic
and Asian waters.
The Greenpeace boats approached
the vessel cautiously in the three foot
swell, like fleas to the backside of an
elephant. At exactly 5.31am, the 11
climbers began to leap on to its hull
and headed for a ladder. The plan was
to stop the vessel in its tracks not by
taking over the bridge, but by
radioing the captain and asking
politely. Fat chance.
Browsing through time and space with GigaPan
and Chrome
by A Googler (The Official
Google Blog)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 5:11:00 PM
From the presidential inauguration to
the World Series to gorgeous
cityscapes, for the past few years the
GigaPan team at Carnegie Mellon
University has been making it
possible to explore breathtaking
panoramic photos from around the
world. GigaPan pioneered the
hardware design that captures these
photos and used innovative rendering
techniques—similar to those of
Google Maps—to create seamless
transitions between photos, so people
can pan and zoom through the image
for an interactive and incredibly
detailed photo experience.
Yesterday, the GigaPan team took
their creative and technical skills to
the next level with the GigaPan Time
Machine, which brings this same kind
"This is Greenpeace, this is
Greenpeace. I'm informing you that
we have put climbers on your rig. I
ask you stop your vessel", asked
Korol Diker, a Turkish campaigner,
on a VHF channel.
But the elephant barely registered. "I
do not recognise you", came the
captain's cutting reply and the Leiv
Eiriksson steamed on.
Undaunted, the climbers made it to a
gangway 80ft over the vessel's
starboard stern. As four crewmen
peered over the side from 30ft above
them, and two more ambled over,
seemingly unconcerned, the climbers
made a cat's cradle of rope to hang
banners and a tent from.
You can understand why the captain
did not want to stop. The Scottish oil
company Cairn Energy has hired the
Leiv Eiriksson for around $500,000 a
day and the company, run by Sir Bill
Gammell, the former international
rugby player, plans to spend more
than $500m (£300m) in the next few
months looking for oil in some of the
most dangerous and coldest waters in
the world. Any major delay could
cost it millions and set back its plans
for the Arctic by a year, because
drilling is only possible in the July-
October "summer window" when the
ice has retreated.
Cairn, which will be the only
company to drill deep wells offshore
in the Arctic this year, holds 11
licences in Baffin Bay covering over
80,000 square kilometres. It plans to
drill four exploratory wells to depths
of around 5,000ft, the deepest ever
attempted in the Arctic.
It is taking the Leiv Eiriksson and the
Ocean Rig Corcovado – a drill ship
now stationed near Aberdeen – as
well as a fleet of backup vessels. Last
year the company claimed it had
discovered a "working hydrocarbon
system" or possible signs of oil in
Baffin Bay after drilling several 300ft
wells. But it later said that the oil was
of visual interactivity to video using
the power of HTML5 and modern
browser technology. Time Machine
works particularly well on Google
Chrome, thanks to its support for the
latest HTML5 features and its
stability architecture, which ensures it
can smoothly run complex web
applications without crashing. Time
Machine is featured on the gallery of
Chrome Experiments, a showcase of
creative web applications submitted
by developers around the world, and
built using the latest web
technologies.
The sophisticated cameras the
GigaPan team uses for their
photographs capture hundreds or even
thousands of digital pictures and
stitch them together to form an
interactive panorama. With Time
Machine, the cameras capture these
image mosaics at regular intervals to
create a video with hundreds of
not present in recoverable quantities.
Cairn Energy said in a statement:
"Wherever it is active, Cairn seeks to
operate in a safe and prudent manner.
The Greenlandic Bureau of Minerals
and Petroleum has established some
of the most stringent operating
regulations anywhere globally, which
mirror those applied in the
Norwegian North Sea. Cairn respects
the rights of individuals and
organisations to express their views
in a safe manner."
But the Arctic venture, say
environmentalists, is just the start of
what is planned to be a risky offshore
oil rush. Shell, Exxon Mobil,
Chevron and others have licences to
explore in Baffin Bay, mostly above
the Arctic circle. Others, including
BP and Rosneft, plan to extract oil
offshore from Siberia, Alaska and
elsewhere in the Arctic. The US
government estimates there are 90bn
barrels of oil, around 13% of the
world's undiscovered reserves.
But for Greenpeace and others the
risk of a devastating spill is too great,
raising the spectre of the Exxon
Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 when
more than 1m barrels of oil were
spilt, and the$40bn disaster in the
Gulf of Mexico last year. "Any Arctic
spill would be very difficult, if not
impossible, to contain and clean up.
The company has not released a
detailed spill response plan for the
Arctic waters. Its latest environmental
impact assessment says it has not
been possible to model oil behaviour
on ice. Failing to consider the impact
of ice on a potential Arctic oil spill
renders the EIA [environmental
impact assessment] unfit for
purpose," said Greenpeace
campaigner Ben Ayliffe.Other
leading environment groups,
including the respected US thinktank
Pew, plus NGOs Oceana and WWF,
have all said that the oil industry is
not prepared for a major pollution
millions or even billions of pixels in
each frame. The result is a video that
viewers have the ability to zoom in
on while it’s playing and see
incredible detail.
With Time Machine, watching paint
dry or grass grow is actually pretty
cool. Take a look at a table full of
potted plants grow and bloom into
flowers. Zoom in to examine a
specific plant or even a single leaf, or
watch a caterpillar bite off a leafy
green for lunch.
One of the critical elements of
making Time Machine work was
developing algorithms that allow the
site to shift seamlessly from one
portion of a video to another, to give
people the experience of zooming and
panning across a video of almost
limitless resolution. This is
particularly challenging because a
seamless transition between videos
requires starting a new video before
incident.
"This is the most controversial rig in
the world because it is the only one
destined to begin risky offshore
drilling in the very deep waters of the
Arctic this year. We have stopped it
because it's blazing a trail for other
major oil companies and sparking the
start of a dangerous new Arctic oil
rush."
Cairn says it has prepared
comprehensive oil spill plans, and has
put up a bond of $2bn.
Activists are now expected to dog
the progress of the slow-moving Leiv
Eiriksson as it passes Greece, Italy,
France and Spain on its passage
through the Mediterranean and into
the Atlantic. It is scheduled to stop in
Britain to pick up supplies before the
last leg of its journey to Greenland in
June.
Twelve hours after boarding the Leiv
Eiriksson, the 11 activists who had
occupied a gangway 80 ft above the
water were forced down by a gale as
the vessel entered Greek waters. No
arrests were made.
• Oil
• Energy
• Oil spills
• Fossil fuels
• Oil
• Greenpeace
• Activism
• Arctic
• Cairn Energy
• Energy industry
• Royal Dutch Shell
• Exxon Mobil
• Chevron
• BP
John Vidal
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News &
Media Limited 2011 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
the old one is finished, and then
queueing it to align perfectly in time
before the swap. The GigaPan
researchers were able to accomplish
this successfully using HTML5’s
video tag feature, as well as by taking
advantage of Chrome’s speed and
stability to render the content
smoothly as videos start and stop
dynamically.
While you can’t fast-forward to the
weekend (yet), head over to
GigaPan’s Time Machine to zoom
around in space and time with some
of the samples, or create your own
Time Warp by building your own
animated tour through any of the
sample videos.
Posted by Rachel Durfee, Google
Blog team

WHAT
continued from page 4
The law prohibits the head of a tax-
exempt organisation from enjoying
unusual perks or compensation; it's
called inurement. Davis refused to
disclose how much money Miscavige
earns, and the church isn't required to
do so, but Headley and other
defectors suggest that Miscavige lives
more like a Hollywood star than like
the head of a religious organisation –
flying on chartered jets and wearing
custom-made shoes. (The church
denies this characterisation and
"vigorously objects to the suggestion
that Church funds inure to the private
benefit of Mr Miscavige.") By
contrast, Sea Org members typically
receive $50 a week.
Last April, John Brousseau, who had
been in the Sea Org for more than 30
years, left the Gold Base and drove to
south Texas to meet Marty Rathbun.
He was unhappy with Miscavige, his
former brother-in-law, whom
he considered "detrimental to the
goals of Scientology". At 5.30 one
morning, he was leaving his motel
room when he heard footsteps behind
him. It was Tommy Davis; he and 19
church members had tracked
Brousseau down. Brousseau locked
himself in his room and called
Rathbun, who alerted the police;
Davis went home without Brousseau.
In a deposition given in July, Davis
said no when asked if he had ever
"followed a Sea Organisation
member that has blown [fled the
church]". Under further questioning,
he insisted that he was only trying "to
see a friend of mine". Davis now calls
Brousseau "a liar".
Brousseau says his defection caused
anxiety, in part because he had
worked on a series of special projects
for Tom Cruise. Cruise says he was
introduced to the church in 1986 by
his first wife Mimi Rogers (she
denies this), and Miscavige has called
GIVING
continued from page 6
Horizon’s environmental damage
prove low. This could happen if
there’s political pressure to settle with
BP, if the science becomes skewed by
corporate or political pressures, or if
some damages are simply
overlooked.
The spill’s deep-sea effects in
particular may be underestimated,
with assessments focusing on
wetlands, shallow-water fisheries and
other ecosystems that are both
commercially valuable and relatively
easy to study, said Cynthia Sartou,
executive director of the Gulf
Restoration Network.
Under the Oil Protection Act,
however, only state and federal
government agencies can represent
nature. People could hypothetically
sue the federal government to do a
better job, but it’s unlikely. “You are
very limited in your right to sue. You
are very limited in your right to even
comment on what they do,” said
Sartou.
“In a system of natural rights, it
him "the most dedicated Scientologist
I know". When Cruise married Katie
Holmes in 2006, Miscavige was his
best man.
In 2005, Miscavige showed Cruise a
Harley-Davidson motorcycle he
owned. Brousseau recalls, "Cruise
asked me, 'God, could you paint my
bike like that?'" Brousseau also says
he helped customise a Ford Excursion
SUV that Cruise owned. "I was
getting paid $50 a week," he recalls.
"And I'm supposed to be working for
the betterment of mankind." Both
Cruise's attorney and the church deny
Brousseau's account.
Miscavige's official title is chairman
of the board of the Religious
Technology Centre, but he dominates
the entire organisation. His word is
absolute, and he imposes his will
even on some of the people closest to
him. According to Rinder and
Brousseau, in June 2006, while
Miscavige was away from the Gold
Base, his wife, Shelly, filled several
job vacancies without her husband's
permission. Soon afterwards, she
disappeared. Her current status is
unknown. Davis told me, "I definitely
know where she is", but he wouldn't
disclose where that is.
In late September, Davis and other
church representatives met with me.
In response to nearly a thousand
queries, the Scientology delegation
handed over 48 binders of supporting
material. Davis attacked the
credibility of Scientology defectors,
whom he calls "bitter apostates". We
discussed the allegations of abuse
lodged against Miscavige. "The only
people who will corroborate are their
fellow apostates," Davis said. He
produced affidavits from other
Scientologists refuting the
accusations, and noted that the tales
about Miscavige always hinged on
"inexplicable violent outbursts".
wouldn’t simply be the federal
government who has the opportunity
to support those rights,” said
Mengerink. “It would be the public. If
you don’t trust the government to do
its job, this would be added support.
Whether natural rights statutes will
hold up in court remains to be seen.
So far, judges have been inconsistent
in their treatment of the idea, which
has generally been advanced in
connection to individual animals
rather than ecosystems.
One promising sign came from the
federal Ninth Circuit court’s 2004
decision in Cetacean Community v.
Bush, in which the court had to
decide whether “the world’s
cetaceans have standing to bring suit
in their own name” in challenging the
Navy’s use of whale-harming sonar.
The court ultimately ruled against
recognizing the cetaceans’ standing,
but wrote that “nothing in the text of
Article III [of the U.S. Constitution]
explicitly limits the ability to bring a
claim in federal court to humans.”
Davis said, "One would think that if
such a thing occurred – which it most
certainly did not – there'd have to be a
reason."
I had wondered about these stories as
well. While Rinder and Rathbun were
in the church, they had repeatedly
claimed that allegations of abuse
were baseless. Then, after Rinder
defected, he said Miscavige had
beaten him 50 times. Rathbun has
confessed that in 1997 he ordered
incriminating documents destroyed in
the case of Lisa McPherson, the
Scientologist who died of an
embolism. If these men were capable
of lying to protect the church, might
they not also be capable of lying to
destroy it? Davis later claimed that
Rathbun is in fact trying to overthrow
Scientology's current leadership and
take over the church. (Rathbun now
makes his living by providing
Hubbard-inspired counselling to other
defectors, but says he has no desire to
be part of a hierarchical organisation.
"Power corrupts," he says.)
Twelve other defectors told me that
they had been beaten by Miscavige,
or had witnessed Miscavige beating
other church staff members. Most of
them, such as John Peeler, noted that
Miscavige's demeanour changed "like
the snap of a finger".
At the meeting, Davis and I also
discussed Hubbard's war record. His
voice filling with emotion, he said
that if it was true that Hubbard had
not been injured, then "the injuries
that he handled by the use of
Dianetics procedures were never
handled, because they were injuries
that never existed; therefore,
Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore,
Scientology is based on a lie."
He concluded, "The fact of the matter
is that Mr Hubbard was a war hero."
After filing a request with the
National Archives in St Louis, we
But Siemen warned that laws alone
aren’t enough. “For a natural rights
movement to be successful, there has
to be a huge shift in our
consciousness,” she said. “If we
adopt more environmental laws, and
there hasn’t been a shift in the value
system of humans toward caring and
protecting, then those laws won’t be
enforced.”
Images: 1) Striped dolphins
swimming through oiled water
(NOAA). 2) Community of creatures
around a “cold seep” on the Gulf of
Mexico seafloor (Derk Bergquist/
Marine Resources Research Institute,
South Carolina Department of
Natural Resources).
See Also:
• Nature to Get Legal Rights in
Bolivia
• Pennsylvania Towns Give Legal
Rights to Mother Nature
• Gulf Coast May Be Permanently
Changed by Oil Spill
9
obtained what archivists assured us
were Hubbard's complete military
records – more than 900 pages.
Nowhere in the file is there mention
of Hubbard's being wounded in
battle.
Since leaving the church, Haggis has
been in therapy, which he has found
helpful. He has learned how much he
blames others for his problems,
especially those who are closest to
him. "I really wish I had found a good
therapist when I was 21," he said.
On 9 November, The Next Three
Days premiered in Manhattan. After
the screening, I asked Haggis if he
felt that he had finally left
Scientology. "I feel much more
myself, but there's a sadness," he
admitted. "If you identify yourself
with something for so long, and
suddenly you think of yourself as not
that thing, it leaves a bit of space." He
went on, "It's not really the sense of a
loss of community. Those people who
walked away from me were never
really my friends."
I once asked Haggis about the future
of his relationship with Scientology.
"These people have long memories,"
he told me. "My bet is that, within
two years, you're going to read
something about me in a scandal that
looks like it has nothing to do with
the church." He thought for a
moment, then said, "I was in a cult
for 34 years. Everyone else could see
it. I don't know why I couldn't."
• This article first appeared in the
New Yorker.
• Scientology
• Religion
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News &
Media Limited 2011 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
Improving the
trains
(Seth's Blog)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 4:31:00 AM
While making the trains run on time
is a good thing, making them run
early is not.
If you define success as getting
closer and closer to a mythical
perfection, an agreed upon standard,
it's extremely difficult to become
remarkable, particularly if the field is
competitive. Can't get rounder than
round.
In general, purple cows live in fields
where it's possible to reinvent what
people expect.
10
Boston Preps for Sports Nirvana
(The Daily Fix)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 9:51:16 AM
Patriots Day, the Boston Marathon
and morning baseball have all passed,
but the eyes of a sporting nation are
again on Boston, a city whose NHL
and NBA teams are locked in playoff
matchups against two storied rivals,
producing playoff battles that are
worthy of much more than just first-
round billings. While much of North
America braces for one of the lower-
stakes sports weekends in a while,
Boston sits happily in a state of
Sports Def Con 2. EPA Kevin
Garnett leads a Celtics team whose
fans call its successes and failures
“wicked” more than any other fan
base.
Take the playoff matchup between
the Bruins and Montreal Canadiens.
The rivalry goes so far back that 93-
year-old former players are asked to
reminisce over it by local
newspapers. Back in March, Bruins
bruiser Zdeno Chara broke the back
of Montreal’s Max Pacioretty with a
hit against the boards. Montreal took
the first two games of this month’s
series before Boston came roaring
back, evening things with a 5-4 win
Thursday night. Neither team has
won a home game in the series, and
there is still some bad blood lingering
between the clubs over the hit that
ended Pacioretty’s season. Bruins
defenseman Andrew Ference
reminded Montreal fans of that
Thursday night, as he flipped off the
crowd at the Bell Centre in the
middle of the game. The rivalry is so
intense that the Bruins opted to house
the players outside Canada— opting
to stay Lake Placid, N.Y., instead of
Montreal—because of the rabid
nature of Canadiens fans. With at
least two more games to be played,
this first-round series should be one
of the more intense in recent history.
“Whoever locates the purpose for
their rage, whoever best disguises
their treachery, whoever is the bigger
man and manages to play the best
hockey – not even necessarily the
most emotional hockey, but the best –
will win this round,” Bruce Arthur of
the National Post writes. “ That’s
revenge.”
On the hardwood, the Celtics and
New York Knicks have played two of
the closest games in the NBA
playoffs, with Boston winning by a
combined five points. It’s been
heartbreaking for the Knicks and their
fans, as the games haven’t just been
close—they’ve both been decided in
the final 30 seconds of regulation.
The Journal’s Jason Gay says that this
is what the Celtics do: thrive on
pressure situations. “These guys
won’t board a flight until they’re
being paged on the airport intercom,”
Gay writes. “ The last minute of a
Celtics game is like watching a
groom throw on his jacket and knot
his tie as he’s sprinting down the
church aisle.” Coach Doc Rivers has
set that tone. He’s seen his share of
highs and lows with New England’s
fans and press, but he comes off as an
always-on, Type A planner in the
telling of the Boston Herald’s Dan
Duggan.
The series moves to Madison Square
Garden tonight, after two games in
Boston, and New York is expecting,
according to Frank Isola of the Daily
News, a standing-room only crowd
for its first home playoff game since
2004. In fact, the series between
Boston and New York has produced
higher ticket prices than any other
playoff matchup. Using data from
SeatGeek, NESN’s John Beattie
writes that the games have
commanded an average of $287 per
ticket, beating out Pacers-Bulls,
which commanded $271 per ticket.*
**
One Boston team enjoying itself less
is the Boston Red Sox. At 7-11, the
team is in the American League
East’s basement. But surpassing the
indignity of a slow start is a
revelation that came to light this week
thanks to the Chicago History
Museum, which posted a deposition
from Eddie Cicotte, one of Chicago’s
notorious “Black Sox” players who
was implicated in the throwing of the
1919 World Series. In the documents,
Cicotte hints that the team wasn’t the
first to be offered money to throw the
World Series, saying that he had
heard some Cubs players were
offered $10,000 to lose to the Boston
Red Sox in 1918. Before winning the
World Series in 2004, that 1918 win
had marked the last time the Red Sox
took home a title. Don Babwin of the
Associated Press says that the
contention may hold some merit,
especially in the case of Cubs
outfielder Max Flack. In a story that
involves even Babe Ruth, Babwin
says that Flack was picked off twice
in the fourth game of the series, and
turned a catchable ball into an error
that gave the Red Sox a 2-1 win. In
another instance, when Ruth—then a
Boston pitcher—came to bat, Flack
was waved back by pitcher Lefty
Tyler. “ Flack just stood there,”
Sporting News reporter Sean
Deveney told Babwin. “Sure enough,
Babe hit one over his head for a triple
that scored two runs.”* * *
There’s been an unusually strong
crop of stellar stories to have popped
up in the last few days to take you
into the weekend:
* ESPN the Magazine’s editors
instructed Wayne Drehs to find the
puck from last year’s Stanley Cup
final, which the Chicago Blackhawks
won. What he found was that nobody
could find the pucks from the last few
Stanley Cups. But the Chicago puck
hunt created an especially weird
labyrinth of dead ends. It still hasn’t
been located, even with the help of
the FBI. “Maybe it’s buried in a box
in someone’s basement. Maybe it’s
framed as the centerpiece on
someone’s fireplace mantel. Maybe it
got scooped up that night and ended
up in a box with other used pucks and
is now used in some rec league in
Manitoba,” Drehs writes. “ Or maybe
we’ll just never know.”
* The 2008 Gay Softball World
Series ended with the Las Vegas
Vipers defeating D2, a team from San
Francisco, 31-28. But the final score
was just the beginning of a case that
has reached federal court, as the game
was played under protest after D2
was accused of cheating … for
having too many heterosexual
players. (The limit was two per team.)
Eli Sanders of Seattle’s alt-weekly
the Stranger brilliantly chronicles the
federal case that this has become,
which involves the first time the
National Center for Lesbian Rights
advocacy group has ever sued another
pro-homosexual organization.
* Keenan Cahill gained Internet fame
for lip-synching popular songs and
posting them to YouTube. This isn’t
the first time he’s been joined by a
celebrity, but his “Dynamite” cover,
featuring Brian Wilson and Cody
Ross of the San Francisco Giants,
might be the greatest thing you’ve
seen this week.
Found a good column from the world
of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself —
w r i t e t o u s a t
dailyfixlinks@gmail.com and we’ll
consider your find for inclusion in the
Daily Fix. You can email Nando at
nandodifino@yahoo.com.

Misrata rebels strike back against Gaddafi
snipers
(World news and comment
from the Guardian |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 6:08:56 PM
Libya rebels seize tallest buildings,
favoured by pro-Gaddafi snipers
Rebel fighters in the besieged city of
Misrata have won a significant
victory by retaking key buildings that
had been occupied by Muammar
Gaddafi's forces for more than a
month.
The Tameen office block, the city's
tallest building, with a view across
Misrata, was captured after
bombardment by rebel forces.
Numerous snipers were either killed
or captured. Several other buildings
nearby were also cleared, leaving the
rebels in control of the northern end
of Tripoli Street, the city's main
thoroughfare, which Gaddafi's forces
have been desperate to capture.
Snipers had caused havoc in the city
after they were sent in on 19 March,
picking off civilians and rebels at
will, as well as firing missiles from
the roof of the buildings into civilian
areas.
On Friday morning, rebel forces
were moving freely around the area
near the Tameen building, which is
littered with abandoned tanks.
Firefighters were cleaning the streets.
"In this area, all the families had to
leave because of the threat of the
snipers," said Hadi Tantoun, a
journalist and rebel. "Capturing this
building was very important."
The snipers had been cut off from the
rest of Gaddafi's forces for a week or
more, unable to receive supplies.
Entering the Tameen building
through the reception, strewn with
debris, it was possible to get a
Jason Kidd’s Statistical Oddities
(The Daily Fix)
Submitted at 4/21/2011 5:03:32 PM
Point guard Jason Kidd is an integral
part of the Mavericks’ push toward
the franchise’s first NBA title. He’s
also a bit of a statistical oddity.
Reuters Kidd handles the ball as well
or better than he did in his first go-
around with Dallas.
Kidd, three seasons into his second
go-around with Dallas since playing
two seasons and part of a third with
the Mavs at the beginning of his
career, remains a talented ballhandler
and playmaker. In fact, he’s even
better in that department than he was
earlier in his career, averaging the
same number of assists per minute
while turning the ball over at a rate
33% lower than when he was a young
20-something in Dallas.
Retaining this extent of point-guard
skills is unusual for a player of
Kidd’s age. Kidd was 37 on Feb. 1
and turned 38 last month. Just one
player had more assists than Kidd in a
season in which he was 37 or older on
Feb. 1: the NBA’s all-time assists
leader, John Stockton; Kidd is second
glimpse of how they had been living.
Mattresses and blankets indicated
that several snipers had been sleeping
in the stairwell on the first floor,
relatively safe in the centre of the
building. Their cooking pots still
stood in the atrium area nearby. The
once-smart offices on the sides of the
building, whose tenants were mostly
insurance agents, had been trashed by
the snipers, with files on the floor and
upturned sofas. In some offices,
cabinets had been pushed against
windows for protection. Many glass
panes had been shattered by rebel
fire.
"Every night we attacked them with
our RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]
and Kalashnikovs," said Abdullah
Hafiz, 24, a member of the "City
Centre" rebel cell that finally
liberated the building. "They killed a
lot of civilians." On higher floors
there were empty tins of tuna and
tomato paste, blankets, mattresses and
sandals, and a few discarded green
uniforms.
According to rebel fighters, the few
dozen snipers that still occupied the
building this week had changed into
civilian clothes before trying to
escape down Tripoli Street on
Thursday, towards their main base in
the vegetable market. A sniper's chair
had been placed under a small
window, which offered a view down
the main street. Dozens of spent
bullet shells and cigarette butts
littered the floor around the chair.
In an office that had belonged to an
architect there were graffiti written in
green ink-– Gaddafi's colour – in
Arabic. It read: "If we survive, we
are warning you gays and dogs. We
will not forgive anybody from
Misrata. We will fuck your daughters
on that list.
While Kidd fills his basic point-
guard duties even more efficiently
than he did as a young Mav, his
scoring style has changed markedly.
He had the lowest field-goal
percentage this season of any NBA
regular, 36.1%. That’s primarily
because Kidd was taking more of his
shots than any other NBA player
and your wives." One of the rebels
had already penned a riposte:
"Misrata is strong. We will win in the
end."
On the top floor, several Gaddafi
soldiers had been sleeping on dirty
mattresses next to the elevator works.
A torn photograph of a woman – a
wife of one of the snipers perhaps –
lay on the floor. On the roof there
were thousands of spent bullet shells,
and numerous discarded cases of anti-
tank missiles that had been fired into
the city.
Up here the snipers would have had a
clear view of the city, and everything
that moved down below. They would
have seen the destruction in the area
nearby – buildings pockmarked by
gunfire, featuring gaping holes where
shells had struck, blackened by
smoke. Glass and tyres and twisted
metal on the streets.
At the foot of the building lay the
body of a sniper, covered with a
blanket. It had been burned. One of
the rebels said that if Gaddafi's forces
could not get their dead back to base,
they set them on fire.
A few civilians ventured cautiously
on to Tripoli Street, which housed
some of the city's best coffee shops,
several banks and the Italian-built
hotel where Mussolini once stayed.
A rebel with a loudhailer warned
them not to try to enter any of the
shops: "This is not your property.
Even if it is government property, it is
for all the people."
He then cleared the area, saying it
was still dangerous. The rebels had
learned their lesson on Thursday
night.
After taking over the Tameen
building, they dropped their guard
while celebrating.
from three-point range, nearly two-
thirds. (In his first go-around with
Dallas fewer than one-third of his
field-goal attempts were from behind
the arc – his jumper was so iffy his
critics used to call him Ason Kidd,
because he had no J.) In fact, the
proportion of his field-goal attempts
from beyond the arc was one of the
six highest in any single season since
11
Several fighters were killed,
prompting scenes of grief at the main
hospital, where brothers, fathers and
colleagues of the victims wept and
swore to avenge them.
In a sign that the regime was giving
up on Misrata, the Libyan deputy
foreign minister, Abdul Ati al-Obeidi,
said yesterday that the army may
withdraw and let surrounding tribes
deal with the rebels. He also said the
use of Predator drones – announced
by US defence secretary, Robert
Gates, on Thursday – would be a
crime against humanity.
John McCain, the US senator who
arrived in Benghazi yesterday to meet
rebels, called for increased military
support for the opposition, including
weapons, training and stepped-up
airstrikes, in a full-throated
endorsement of the opposition in its
fight to oust Gaddafi. A day after the
US began flying armed drones to
bolster Nato firepower, the top
Republican on the Senate armed
services committee said the US and
other countries should recognise the
opposition's political leadership as the
"legitimate voice of the Libyan
people".
The White House disagrees, saying it
is for the Libyan people to decide
who their leaders are.
• Libya
• Middle East
• Muammar Gaddafi
• Arab and Middle East unrest
Xan Rice
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News &
Media Limited 2011 | Use of this
content is subject to our Terms &
Conditions| More Feeds
the NBA introduced the three-point
shot.
His stats this season make a good
case for true-shooting percentage as a
better shooting stat than field-goal
percentage. Since Kidd takes so many
3s and hits a respectable 34% of
them, and is also accurate from the
free-throw line, he’s scoring a point
per possession used by a shot, for a
true-shooting percentage of 50%.
That’s not great, but coupled with his
other skills it makes him an above-
average player in terms of win shares
per 48 minutes, a stat that takes into
account all facets of the game and
usually dings players severely for
missing many of their shots. Coaches
usually do, too, so it’s rare for a
player who misses so many to have
had as many seasons as a regular as
Kidd has had. He has five of the 76
worst seasons in terms of field-goal
percentage since the 1979-80 season.
Yet in all but three of his 17 seasons,
including this one, Kidd has been an
above-average player — even if his
stat line wouldn’t suggest it.
12
CRANKING
continued from page 5
cranking on bullshit. Not about
abandoning your priorities to write
about priorities.
My book needs to be about choosing
a hard thing and then living with it.
Because it's your thing.
But, that part's gone missing for just
a little too long now. Certainly not
missing from my handsome and very
practical rhetoric--it's been missing
from my actual life and living. In a
quest to make something that has
increasingly not felt like my own, I've
unintentionally ignored by own
counsel to never let your hard work
fuck up the good things. Including
those regular people. Including,
ironically, the real work. Including
any good thing the crank is supposed
to be attached to.
So, I'm done fucking that up. I'm
done cranking. And, I'm ready to
make a change.
I'm not sure precisely what that
change will look like, but, at the risk
of invoking Godwin's Law, I have a
pretty good idea that this particular
performance of "Edelweiss" you're
enjoying right now may immediately
be followed by a dramatic chase, a
hopeful escape attempt, and only if
I'm extremely lucky, maybe an
eventual stride over the Alps.
As I'll explain in a minute, it most
likely means I don't have My Book
Contract any more.
Who knows? We'll have to see. 8.
All I know is tonight's Friday. And,
that's Daddy-Daughter Night.
And, my book agent says my editor
(who is awesome) will probably
cancel My Book Contract if I don't
Oklahoma, where the wind comes
sweepin’ down the plain
by A Googler (The Official
Google Blog)
Submitted at 4/21/2011 10:20:00 AM
Rodgers and Hammerstein weren’t
kidding when they wrote what is now
Oklahoma’s official state song. The
gusts on the plains are fierce, which
makes the Sooner State a great place
to harness clean, renewable wind
energy. Our commitment to greening
our energy supply is also strong,
which is why we’ve just signed a
power purchase agreement (PPA) for
wind energy—our second in less than
a year—in Oklahoma.
The purchase is similar in size and
structure to the agreement we signed
last July for wind energy in Iowa, but
this time we will be applying the
power to our Mayes County, Okla.
data center, which will be fully
operational later this year. We’ve
agreed to purchase all of the energy
from NextEra Energy Resources’
Minco II wind facility in Oklahoma
for the next 20 years, through Google
send her something that pleases
her…today. Now. By tonight.
Theoretically, I guess...uh... this.
See: my agent very helpfully
suggested I send my editor a chapter
full of "email stuff." My editor really
likes "email stuff." And, it was
theorized by my agent that sending
this "email stuff" might please my
book editor just enough that she
might not cancel My Book Contract.
For now.
Well. If you've made it this far, you,
like my editor (who is awesome), will
have realized that this is not a chapter
of "email stuff."
It's a very long, wooly, histrionic,
messy and uncomfortable story about
hospital beds, piggy jammies, and
styrofoam hats. I seriously doubt it
will please my editor. Who is
awesome.
So, no, I really hope she doesn't
cancel My Book Contract. But, it
does occur to me that said contract is
the last and only thing my publisher
has to intimidate me into doing things
I don't want to do. Things I think will
harm my book, my integrity, and my
life.
Once that threat is made good, the
game ends. They can sue me and yell
and stuff. Which would suck, but at
least no one would be demanding my
book have fucking pussy willows on
the cover. Which, as I sit here, feels
more and more unbearable to me.
In any case, I don't control anything
that anyone does. It took a long time
for me to really get that.
It's such a funny thing. Threats--like
hurricanes and rectal exams--are only
Energy LLC, an entity that enables us
to participate in the wholesale energy
market. This 100.8 megawatt facility
will be built as a direct result of our
financial commitment and should be
operational in late 2011.
We’ve made the commitment to be a
carbon neutral company, and this
purchase is part of our effort to
minimize our impact on the
environment. We’ve managed to
reduce our energy consumption by
over 50 percent by building highly
energy-efficient facilities, but we
know that efficiency alone isn’t
enough to eliminate our carbon
footprint. We’ve been exploring
ways, such as this PPA, to reduce
emissions further by increasing the
amount of renewable energy we use
to power our operations; we purchase
high-quality carbon offsets for any
remaining emissions.
If you’re interested in learning more
scary until they arrive. Once they're
over, they're just the basis for funny
stories. But, you do nearly always
survive them. And, if you didn't
survive? It wasn't because of a lack of
fear. Like I say, the universe doesn't
particularly care whether you're
scared.
Oh, well. I like my editor. She's
awesome. I hope she doesn't cancel
My Book Contract. I hope we keep
working together.
But if it goes away today, tomorrow
or further on? Well. As a favorite
novelist of mine used to say: " So it
goes."
I'll figure this out tomorrow. Or
Monday. Or later. Tonight is Daddy-
Daughter Night. And, no fucking way
am I missing two in a row. 9.
Now, as far as My Goddamned
Book? Truthfully? Wanna hear the
really complicated part?
This is not me quitting the book. No
fucking way. This is me doubling
down on the book--on my book.
I will finish my book very soon. Not
because of (or in spite of) any
contract, and not because of (or in
spite of) any editor, and certainly not
because of (or in spite of) any tacit
demand for empty cranking.
I will finish my book because I want
to finish it. Because it is very, very
important to me to finish it.
But, again, let's be clear-- what I
finish will be my book. And, it will
be done my way. And, yes--you Back
to Work fans knew this one was
coming--my book will have my cover
that I choose. It will not have fucking
pussy willows or desert islands or
about the whys and wherefores of our
renewable energy purchases, we’ve
just published a white paper(PDF) on
the topic. Our hope is that by laying
out our reasoning and methods we’ll
make it easier for others in the
industry to explore similar
arrangements.
These purchases represent long-term,
meaningful actions to reduce our
carbon footprint and power our
operations with clean electricity. Our
infrastructure team will continue to
seek similar opportunities globally as
Google’s businesses continue to
grow. As a company we hope that
purchases like these, plus the
additional $350 million we’ve
invested in renewable energy
projects, support the market and drive
down the cost of clean energy. This
will enable even more companies to
invest in sustainable energy solutions.
Posted by Gary Demasi, Global
Infrastructure team
third-rate kerning. It will be, to quote
my editor (who is awesome), "
messy."
My book will help and comfort the
people that I want to reach. And, yes,
much like my editor, my book will
be awesome.
I truly hope my book pleases her. 10.
So, there you have it. An article
that's clearly not a chapter of "email
stuff."
Me? I'm off to prep for "Daddy-
Daughter Night."
And, tomorrow morning, unlike last
Saturday morning and countless
other days before it, at the crack of
6:00 am Pacific Time, I will be
available in my regular crankless bed
to ask my daughter whether she had
nice sleeps. And I will tell her and my
regular wife that I think they're the
Greatest Things in the Universe.
And, maybe after I make hot milk
and watch Woody worry about
cowboy camp, I may even think to
myself about how proud my funny
Dad would be of his pal, The Big
Guy. For doing what needed to be
done. To be someone special's Dad
for as often and as long as he can.
Just like he did. Even when it gets
hard.
Even when it gets really hard.-- 30 --
Thanks for listening, nerds. You'll
hear more when I hear more.
” Cranking” was written by Merlin
Mann for 43Folders.com and was
originally posted on April 22, 2011.
Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin
Mann and licensed for reuse under
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. " Why a footer?"

Happy Easter: Pygmy Rabbits
Reintroduced to Wild
(Wired: Wired Science)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 10:00:02 AM
By Alice Vincent, Wired UK
Rare pygmy rabbits are being
reintroduced to their native Columbia
Basin in the United States, bringing
them back from the brink of
extinction. It will be the first time that
the endangered species has been seen
in the wild since 2004, after a mere
16 of the remaining little fluff balls
were taken into captivity in an
attempt to save their species in 2001.
With adults weighing in at under
500g, the pygmy rabbits don’t share
the same reputation as their larger
cousins: Pygmies do not breed
capriciously in the wild. That’s one of
the reasons why bringing them back
from the extinction feared in the
1990s is such an achievement for the
Washington Department of Fish and
Wildlife.
Conservation biologists within the
department found that the rabbits’
breeding difficulties were down to a
vicious cycle of dwindling numbers.
Fewer rabbits caused a level of
inbreeding within the species, which
resulted in a lack of genetic diversity
which subsequently lowered
reproductive rates and increased the
rabbits’ susceptibility to parasites.
Fortunately, the rabbits had southern
cousins in Idaho that belong to the
same species — although they are
genetically distinct and have shown
to be separated for more than 10,000
years by fossil and genetic evidence.
Like the Columbia Basin pygmies,
the southern rabbits have also been
enlisted as endangered but their
numbers have improved in recent
years. By cross-breeding the Idaho
pygmies with the Columbia species
the resultant offspring have had better
health and their numbers have
increased to around 100 rabbits.
These new rabbits, with a genetic
makeup of three-quarters Columbia
Basin genes and one-quarter Idaho
genes, are being gently re-established
into the area. Biologists are wary of
following the failure of an
experimental reintroduction in 2007,
when raptors (the bird, not the
dinosaur) and coyotes killed rabbits
let into the wild.
Instead, a “soft release” strategy is
being adopted. First, captive-bred
rabbits will be moved to a six-acre
enclosure to develop the foraging and
burrowing habits needed to survive in
the wild while protected from hungry
predators. Step by step, the rabbits
will move to smaller enclosures while
they adjust to the wild, with
individual rabbits being released as
they become acclimatised.
Newborns will be better-equipped to
deal with the wild than their parents
raised in captivity, so those pygmies
that give birth in the enclosures will
have their offspring released before
they adapt to human interaction.
Paws’ crossed, the Columbia Basin
will soon once more be home to a pile
of mini-bunnies.
Image: lauredhel/Flickr
Source: Wired.co.uk
See Also:
• 10 Critical Endangered-Species
Battles
• 8 Most Overlooked Endangered
Species Candidates
• Oil Disaster Shows Need for
Endangered Species Act Overhaul
• To Save Animals, Put a Price on
Them
• DNA Testing Finds Endangered
Whale Meat in Restaurants
• See Them While You Can:
Endangered Butterfly Gallery
• A Third of ‘Extinct’ Mammals May
Still Be Alive
13
Celebrating
Earth Day
by A Googler (The Official
Google Blog)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 11:33:00 AM
Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day
with an animated, interactive doodle
on our homepage and events at
Google offices around the world. At
our headquarters in Mountain View,
Calif., we’re holding an
environmental fair for Googlers,
complete with speakers and contests
to strengthen Googlers’ green
acumen, and a cookout using—what
else— parabolic solar cookers(don’t
worry, we’ll compost the leftovers).
Our campus garden in Mountain
View
We’ve been carbon neutral since
2007 and—Earth Day or not—we’re
always asking ourselves what we can
do to make the world greener today
than it was yesterday. This week, we
launched a new website with many of
the questions we’ve been asking over
the years that have inspired our
environmental initiatives. What can
we do to make renewable energy
cheaper than coal? How can we run a
data center using 50 percent less
energy? And what does it take to
green our energy supply?
It’s questions like these that led us to
install solar panels on our Mountain
View campus in 2007—at the time,
the largest corporate solar installation
in the U.S. They’re also what made
us decide to donate to Googlers’
favorite charities based on how often
they self-power their commute,
whether by bike or by pogo stick. We
hope the new website helps you start
asking bold questions that lead to
innovative solutions to make the
world a greener place.
In addition to our new site, we’ve
had a busy few weeks continuing our
green streak. We doubled down on
greening our energy supply with our
second power purchase
agreement(PPA) in less than a year
and made several new investments: at
a solar photovoltaic plant in
Germany(our first in Europe), and
others in the largest wind farm and
solar project in the world, bringing
our total invested in clean energy to
more than $350 million. While the
investments won’t supply our
operations with energy, we believe
they make business sense and will
spur development and deployment of
compelling clean energy
technologies.
This Earth Day, we’ll continue to ask
ourselves what else we can do to
bring us closer to true sustainability.
We hope that you, and companies
across the world, will be doing the
same.
Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Enegy
Czar
14
This week in search 4/22/11
by A Googler (The Official
Google Blog)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 4:01:00 PM
This is part of a regular series of
posts on search experience updates
that runs on Fridays. Look for the
label "This week in search" and
subscribe to the series. - Ed.
This week, we sped up search by
bringing more predictions to
autocomplete and enabling Google
Instant in the new Google Toolbar 7
for Internet Explorer. You’ll also find
more personalization for the tools you
use most in this new version of
Toolbar, as well as in Google News,
which we updated with new features
to help you find more articles on
topics you’re interested in.
More predictions in autocomplete
One of the main ways autocomplete
predicts searches while you type is by
looking at the most popular searches
on Google. This week we improved
autocomplete for less common,
longer and more complicated queries
so that now we make predictions
based on the last word or words of
your search, getting you results even
faster.
Best Sun Images From Solar Space
Telescope’s First Year
(Wired: Wired Science)
Submitted at 4/21/2011 2:06:53 PM
| Next >>
• "This magnificent observatory is
• exceeding expectations," said former
• SDO project manager Elizabeth
• Citrin of NASA's Goddard
• Spaceflight Center. "The images of
• the sun are spectacular and the
• scientific value of data is immense."
NASA's Solar Dynamics
Observatory, a space telescope
charged with watching the sun in
unprecedented detail, revealed its first
look at the sun to the world one year
ago today.
Since then, the telescope has
watched the sun shift from its quietest
period in years to the beginning of a
new, active solar cycle. It's seen loops
of plasma that dwarf the Earth tracing
the sun's magnetic field, early stages
For example, previously you
wouldn’t have gotten a prediction for
[online store with underwater
gadgets] since few people have
searched for that exact query. But
many more have searched for
[underwater gadgets], so by looking
at just the last part of what you’ve
typed into the box, we can now
generate a prediction for “gadgets.”
You’ll see a dropdown box below the
end of your search with predictions
for just that word. This change is
currently available for all google.com
users in English.
Google Toolbar 7 with Toolbar
Instant
We continued to bring the speed of
Google Instant to more places with
this week’s launch of Google Toolbar
7 for Internet Explorer 8 and 9. Once
you enable Instant under “Toolbar
Options,” you’ll see search
predictions and results appear as you
type in the Toolbar search box. The
new Toolbar also sports a cleaner
look, and is more
personalized—showing you only the
tools you use the most. It’s currently
available in English, but we’ll be
bringing it to other supported
of massive explosions that send hot
charged material ripping through
space, and sunspots dancing across
the solar surface.
"The SDO mission is turning out to
be our Hubble for the sun," said
NASA solar physicist Madhulika
Guhathakurta. "It is already
transforming heliophysics (the
science of space weather) in the same
way the Hubble Space telescope has
transformed astronomy and
cosmology."
In this gallery, we look back at the
mind-blowing sun photo factory's
greatest hits. Above: First Light
SDO saw its first erupting solar
languages over the next week. Visit
www.google.com/toolbar to
download the new Google Toolbar 7.
Automatic personalization and
Recommended Sections in Google
News
Yesterday, the U.S. English edition
of Google News got two new
features: automatic personalization
and a recommendations gadget.
When logged into your Google
account, you’ll now see stories based
on your news-related web history. For
instance, if you click on a lot of
articles about baseball, we’ll make
sure you get a chance to see breaking
baseball news. In the new
Recommended Sections in the right-
hand column, you’ll see suggested
topics to follow based on stories
you’ve clicked before. Learn more
about personalization features in the
Help Center.
Finally, before you head off for the
weekend, don’t forget to test your
search skills and try solving today’s
A Google a Day question at
www.agoogleaday.com:
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google
Fellow
prominence on March 30, 2010. Solar
scientists think the eruption was
triggered by a twist in the sun's
magnetic field. When flares like this
are directed at Earth, they can wreak
havoc with satellites and power
grids.| Next >> View all
Images: NASA/SDO
See Also:
• New Space Telescope Delivers
First Mind-Blowing Video of the Sun
• Spacecraft Sees Earth Eclipse the
Fiery Sun
• Sun Video Shows New Solar Cycle
Is Far More Active
• Cute Little Spacecraft Will Take
Amazing Pictures of the Sun
• Video: Magnetic Twister Erupts on
Sun
• Huge Magnetic Filament Erupts on
the Sun
Could the iPhone 5
look like a beveled
iPod touch?
(Engadget)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 6:53:00 PM
See that up there? That could be your
next iPhone-- or it could be a tear-
shaped dream. It's a mock-up of what
is said to be the iPhone 5, according
to anonymous sources quoted by
Joshua Topolsky. A continuation of
the concepts laid out in our post-CES
look at what's next for Apple, the
design here is said to be thin, metal-
backed, tapered, and sporting a 3.7-
inch display with the same 960 x 640
resolution in the iPhone 4's retina
display -- resulting in a slight drop
from that phone's vaunted 326ppi
density. The home button is quite
obviously enlarged, possibly adding
some thumbable gestures into the
mix. Internals are said to include a
"swipable" area, possibly meaning
NFC, along with a Qualcomm Gobi
chipset with support for CDMA and
GSM, so this could be the one phone
to rule all the carriers. Or, it might
wind up only ever having domain
over a single .PSD file. To us, well, it
looks a little too thin to be packing all
that and a bag of antennas as
suggested and, with all the weight at
the top, we can see this things flying
out of hands left and right. But, we're
certainly willing to be surprised.
Place your bets in comments below.
Could the iPhone 5 look like a
beveled iPod touch? originally
appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Apr
2011 19:53:00 EDT. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Permalink|
This is my next| Email this|
Comments
Video: Robo-Camera
Rig Animates
Under cover of night
VIDEO:
the
for15
page three weeks
Night
in SkyApril, farmer Randy
March and
Halverson trudged
(Wired: Wired out to his South
Science)
Dakota fields to make this video of

VIDEO:
continued from page 14
the evening sky.
The montage is one of several the
amateur astronomer has created,
combining off-the-rack equipment
and patience to great effect. His
motivation to brave chilly evenings is
simple.
“I like to be outside, I like to see the
stars, and I like to take photos then
see the results,” Halverson said. “It
all just goes together really well.”
A star-tracking mount for a telescope
allows Halverson’s still camera to
pan and tilt with the stars. It not only
prevents blur, but also gives a walk-
about motion to his videos.
A motorized rail creates the zooming
effect; a computer controller that
moves the mount and snaps the
camera’s shutter. Each scene in the
montage represents about 300 still
photographs taken over a period of
several hours.
“It takes a lot of trial and error to get
right, but it’s worth it,” he said. “It
shows motion into the stars you don’t
normally notice. When you look up at
them, you often don’t realize how
much they’re moving.”
Halverson tries to achieve a different
theme with each montage. “ Orion”
(above), filmed March 20 through
April 10, features the famous
constellation tracking across his
family’s land, starting in an old grain
distillery. His favorite work to date is
“Sub Zero,” which was filmed at
temperatures as low as -25 degrees
Fahrenheit (video below).
“In that one, I filmed some parts from
the house my parents used to live in
60 years ago,” he said. “It has a
special meaning to me.”
This spring and summer, Halverson
hopes to shoot from South Dakota’s
badlands and the Rocky Mountains.
15
Videos: Randy Halverson/
Dakotalapse.com
Image: Halverson’s slow-moving
robotic rig. (Copyright Randy
Halverson)
See Also:
• Amateurs Find Hidden Gems in
Space Photo Contest
• Zoom In on Top 8 Ultrahigh-
Resolution Science Panoramas
• Cheap DIY Camera Systems
Perform Amazing Photographic Feats
• Reader Photo Gallery: More
Stunning DIY Astrophotos
• Amateur Astrophotographers
Unwittingly Help Scientists Track
Comet
• Photo: Mad Dash to Catch Space
Shuttle Crossing the Sun
• Best of a New Trove of Mind-
Blowing Space Photos

DirecTV's iPad, iPhone, Archos 7c tablet with

Android apps will also have
HBO Go streaming May 2nd
(Engadget)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 5:47:00 PM
Just like the web versions of HBO
Go and Max Go are accessible both
through their own sites and various
provider portals, DirecTV has
announced it will include access to
them in its own apps on iPad, iPhone
and "select Android devices" at the
same time native Go apps launch.
There's no word on what restrictions
may be placed on Android, if it's just
Froyo or higher hardware with Flash
accessibility, then that's one thing,
but Netflix-style DRM tie ups could
prove to be much more frustrating to
our Game of Thrones streaming
plans. The announcement came from
DirecTV's official Twitter account
which indicated the apps would
progress beyond mere remote control
and DVR scheduling on the same
May 2nd date previously teased in
HBO's YouTube trailer -- we'll wait
and see how long it takes to be
integrated into similar apps from
competitors like Comcast and
Verizon FiOS.
DirecTV's iPad, iPhone, Android
apps will also have HBO Go
streaming May 2nd originally
appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Apr
2011 18:47:00 EDT. Please see our
terms for use of feeds.
Permalink|@DirecTV (Twitter),(2)|
Email this| Comments
Eclair, kickstand now
shipping for $220
(Engadget)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 4:08:00 PM
Well, isn't today our lucky day? Just
a week after debuting on video, the
Archos 7c Home Tablet is shipping in
the US for $220 -- more than a month
ahead of its expected June arrival. As
a refresher, this 7-inch tablet offers a
capacitive (800 x 480) display,
Android 2.1 ( Eclair), and a Cortex
A8 processor-RK2918 chipset combo
that promises smooth 720p video
playback. Other specs include 8GB of
internal storage, a microSD card slot,
two built-in speakers, and that
kickstand you see in the photo above.
Of course, you'll also have to forgo
niceties like wireless-N, cameras, and
access to Android Market. Are those
trade-offs worth the dirt-cheap price?
That's a decision you're going to have
to make for yourself.
[Thanks, Elliott]
Gallery: Archos 7c Home Tablet
Archos 7c tablet with Eclair,
kickstand now shipping for $220
originally appeared on Engadget on
Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:08:00 EDT.
Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink| Archos| Email this|
Comments

Karotz to start shipping, Nabaztag to return from

dead for Easter
(Engadget)
Submitted at 4/22/2011 4:51:00 PM
Cadbury aside, nothing says Easter
quite like a good resurrection tale,
and this story's got it -- starring a
rabbit, no less. Owners of Nabaztag,
the email-reading / weather-
forecasting / and generally adorable
WiFi-enable desktop buddy, have
been reporting a massive die-off of
their beloved ambient bunnies, a
tragic end due to a recent server
move. The rabbits' manufacturer tells
us that the network issues should be
resolved by next week -- something
of a belated Easter celebration. The
rebirth is also perfectly timed to
welcome Nabataztag's second coming
as Karotz-- those who pre-ordered
Karotz to start shipping, Nabaztag to
return from dead for Easter originally
appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Apr
2011 17:51:00 EDT. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Permalink|
Karotz| Email this| Comments
should start seeing the glowing
woodland creature in their mailboxes
next week.
16