Rabbit Obsessed Woman WIll Not Stop

From http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rabbitobsessed-woman-sent-back-to-jail-1729987.html

Rabbit-obsessed woman sent back to jail

Associated Press

Friday, 3 July 2009

An Oregon woman obsessed with bunnies has been ordered back behind bars after police found her in a hotel room with more than a dozen rabbits.

Washington County Circuit Judge Gayle Nachtigal ruled yesterday that 47-year-old Miriam Sakewitz violated her probation by having the rabbits. The judge sentenced the woman to 90 days in the county jail.

Police arrested Sakewitz on 16 June after she called a maintenance worker to her room in the Portland suburb of Tigard to fix a broken television set. The worker saw and smelled the rabbits, some of them hopping free.

The woman's legal problems began in 2006 when police found more than 150 rabbits in her home and dozens more bunny bodies in freezers. She was arrested on accusations of animal neglect. After pleading no contest, she was placed on five years' probation, with one condition being that she stay away from rabbits.

Tigard Police spokesman Jim Wolf said Washington County animal control officers removed eight adult rabbits, five young ones and a dead one from the hotel room in the latest incident.

Washington County probation officer Bob Severe said Sakewitz had undergone a court-ordered mental evaluation but that no treatment was recommended.

Five Weeks in Mexico 2009

As many of you know I try to vacation at my home in Baja California as often as I can. I usually go in May as soon as school is out and there are times when I also go in December. For those of you who are interested my Baja Blog is at http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/mex/Blog/Blog.html and has a lot more detail.

This May's trip was super fantastic. There are a number of reasons for this:

• The stay was longer than usual, as I got there very early in May and stayed until 8 June. This was a great five weeks.
• The weather was awesome. Usually as the May-June stay gets longer the weather gets hotter and there are times when I have left a few days early for this reason. There can be some very warm days and then it can cool off a little but. But, this time there were two warm nights early on and then the rest of the stay was very cool, with weather in the high 80's most days. It was very, very nice.
• I had lots of time to just relax. I quite often will bring a major writing project with me and work on them for an hour or two a day. Several of my recent books have been written there. This time, I had no such big project, so I was able to really do whatever I wanted all day long.
• The books I took with me were paricularly excellent this time. They also seemed popular with my friends, with Bob taking two and Cliff taking one after I finished them. I really enjoy being able to sit on the porch, often in the sun, and read a great book. The ones I especially liked were reviewed here on this website.
• The new truck is excellent. I got a great deal, it really fits my needs and it is really nice to be able to haul things so easily. I am also glad to have made a good relationship with Victor Gomez through the purchase.
• There were very few people around. We were often the only people (or so it seemed) there. There were a number of days in which we saw no other human being.
• Bojana escaped injury this year. Last year she got stung by a ray in the bay and it healed very slowly. This time, she did not even get a hint of sunburn.
• The last week was the best as I had finally totally become mellow and could really enjoy myself.
• I have a small electric generator that I turn on to charge ipods, laptops and my XM satellite radio. In five weeks I used six gallons of gas. Wow.
• I ate well AND lost weight. Nice combination.
• I was very sad to leave. I could have easily stayed on for quite a while longer. I think I will be able to spend a lot of my future retirement time there when I finally do retire.

So, it was a great trip. I am extremely tan, relaxed and recharged for my next year.

BOOK REVIEW: Honor: A History, by James Bowman (2006: Encounter: New York)

BOOK REVIEW: Honor: A History, by James Bowman (2006: Encounter: New York)

As a professional debate coach I try to understand that the process of disagreement can be productive and I can learn from those I disagree with. This book was an opportunity for me to reinforce this idea.

I am very interested in “social history,” where you take one concept, idea or institution and follow it through a number of centuries and/or societies. I have always enjoyed the work of Philippe Aries (In the Hour of Our Death, Centuries of Childhood) as well as simple examples like salt (Salt: a history) and hygiene (The Dirt on Clean). This book claims to be a history of the concept of honor. I had assumed that it would cover more than just the west, but it did not.

The author’s main concept is that the idea of “honor” has seriously declined in the culture of the west. He goes through the period from the Middle Ages until the present, and monitors the reasons why honor has been eroded. The list was fairly compelling, including the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the individual, the way war has lost its glamour and glory, the emancipation of women, and a variety of other factors. His documentation of this process was very interesting, informative and entertaining. I found myself cheering at almost every step as honor declined, especially about the change in the way war is viewed and the decline in the need to defend the “honor” (willful subjugation) of women.

Now, as we are in a post-honor society, we find ourselves confronting very strong pro-honor societies (Islam is his example) and we will not be able to deal successfully with the challenge without a workable concept of honor. Therefore, we need to reconstruct and regain honor.

Huh? His analysis convinced me that the decline of honor has produced many benefits. Contrasting the silly ways in which honor is written about in the myth of King Arthur (where Lancelot feels he is true to his king if he defeats anyone who accuses him of sleeping with the queen in combat, even though he is guilty) to the way in which combat is seen by soldiers surviving the first world war is clearly many steps in the right direction. The question for me is, why would we want to go back?

Going back to the old days is very much what he proposes. He argues that what we need to do is to regain an appreciation of the role of the warrior, reinforce a spirit of aristocracy and social stratification, destroy the cult of celebrity and step back from the unqualified emancipation of women so that they can regain a status of submission and chastity.

This is the section that really needs elaboration, and yet he saves it for the last few pages of the book. He proves so compellingly that modern war is evil and dehumanizing, why would we want to try and glorify it? He talks about the evils of Islamic honor killings and veil compulsion, and yet he wants women to return to the background as cherished vessels of chastity and controlled reproduction.

One of the major reasons why this entire effort of reconstructing honor seems of little worth is his analysis that the west’s confrontation with Islam will result in a triumph of the west, while another is that he freely admits that the changes that need to come to regain honor will never come about. If we don’t need it and can’t do it, why yearn for it so passionately? He is very critical of various “utopian” approaches to social organization, yet he posits a similar solution to his honor quandary.

I found his use of different forms of media to be useful in illustrating his points, especially about the decline of honor, but he gets a bit selective at times. I understand that the works of Spencer were important in their time and that the Arthurian legend was important in the case of honor, but as we get closer to the present I find these media examples less compelling. He seems to be more self-serving in his choices as we get closer to the present. I was particularly disturbed by his use of a 1968 movie called “If…” in which school children gun down their schoolmates and teachers.

His analysis of the way in which western societies have evolved seemed to come back again and again to the concept of “power” being all important. I would have expected a discussion of Michel Foucault’s work but it was not to be found and is not cited in the bibliography.

This book was interesting and well worth reading, but its conclusions were fairly vexing. I think he might have been better off to just stick with the social history and pass on the social recommendations. As a side note, I see that the book is dedicated to his father (who served in the military) and to his son (who serves in Iraq). This may explain why he feels that we must regain honor, perhaps because he has not experienced the “glory” or fighting for honor. He makes quite a point about those who did not get to fight feeling left behind and feeling like they “missed out” but he did not apply this concept to himself. He does note that his father and son can do more about honor than he does, which is only to write about it.

A post-honor society as described by the author seems just fine to me.

BOOK REVIEW: Cicero: the life and times of Rome’s greatest politician, by Anthony Everitt

BOOK REVIEW: Cicero: the life and times of Rome’s greatest politician, by Anthony Everitt (2001: Random House, New York)

I enjoyed this book or a number of reasons. While I knew of Cicero I did not have a very organized knowledge, and so it is good to read a biography. I am familiar with some of his works and theories about rhetoric and related subjects, but I did not know about the person Cicero. Finally, as a debate coach and a teacher of rhetoric I am also professionally interested. From all I can tell this is a balanced, well-researched and engaging history of an amazing life.

The source material provides considerable perspective here. One huge feature is the bulk of the letters that Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus, telling him the story of his life as he went along. His perspective of course, biased it, but it allowed one to get a real flavor for the person and how he thought. A wide variety of other materials are used, such as letters, plays, poems, ancient books as well as more modern sources. The research done by the author was excellent and displayed nicely.

As a debate coach it was interesting to read that most higher education at the time would be in rhetoric and public speaking (p. 30). An individual teacher (“rhetor”) would be engaged for this purpose, and such individuals had quite high standing in the community. It was also interesting to read about the way in which proceedings in the law courts were handled (pp. 32-33) in that they almost exactly outlined a debate the way that we would stage one today, especially a public debate. It is in both these fields that Cicero got a very fast start.

In the last days of the Roman republic public speaking skill was the key to success. It always helped to have some impressive military victories (Pompey) and it didn’t hurt to have lots and lots of money (Crassus), but ultimately to make things happen in the center of power public speaking skills, both in the senate and in the broader public assembly) were essential. Since Cicero did not have much military skill (shown during his governorship of Cilicia) and was always running a little low on money, his public speaking skills were hat he had plenty of and was able to deploy them. He practiced in the courts and made a name for himself, and then began rising through the ranks of various offices and duties. Often he was cursed for his speaking abilities, but more often he was sought as an ally because of them.

This book has indicated to me that I need to review some of his more common texts (Oratore and Inventio) but also that I should read some that I have not experienced (such as Good and Evil and the Nature of the State). He was a clever and highly strategic communicator, and I probably could learn some “old” tricks.

Cicero could tell a story and repackage a situation as well as anyone, but his supreme skill was the crushing put-down. During a discussion of some issue in response to another speaker he might insert jabs into that person’s past, the preferences for his dalliances, to whom he owed money as well as a reference to any number of mistakes that person had made. Cicero seemed to remember them all and deploy them with subtle glee. The audiences loved it, and often remain engaged with his discourse because one of these critical gems might be added ay any time.

The book also serves as a useful insight into others who were on the political battlefield with, against and perhaps with again Cicero. Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Caitilina, Marius, Sulla, Hortensius, Cato, Mark Anthony, Octavian and even Cleopatra were thrown into the mix and revealing points about them were made, often in Cicero’s own words. I especially apreciated the insight into Pompey and Caesar.

The life of Cicero is also a good timeline for the collapse of the old Roman republic. He was always it champion, and worked to bring people together for his dream of a republic within which many groups could participate. He valued the balance of powers, the veto system and the changing of offices hat tried to keep it a government of people and not of any one man. Ultimately, this struggle was lost to Caesar, Octavian and the tide of history as a vast empire called for a more efficient and centralized authority.

Two stories:

Caesar and Cato are debating in the senate about whether to give the death penalty or banishment to some who have conspired against the senate. Caesar is merciful, Cato wants them dead. Cato accuses Caesar of being in league with them. When a letter is delivered to Caesar during the debate Cato claims that this is a letter of instruction from the conspirators. Without looking at the letter, Caesar hands it to a senator next to him, who reads it aloud. It turns out to be a love letter to Caesar, and the audience explodes in laughter as the writer is named at the signing, and turns out to be Cato’s sister.

Cicero is fleeing Italy after having been put on the condemned list by Octavian (who not long before had asked Cicero to be his co-consul for the year). When you are on that list, the state will pay you if you kill or capture that person, and the state takes all their property (quite a “death tax”). Having been apprehended by some bounty-hunting soldiers, Cicero is proud as ever. Cicero stepped out of his litter, saying, “I am stopping here. Come here, soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly.” The soldier faltered, and Cicero made a jibe about whether he was his first such killing, and then the soldier slit his throat.

I really enjoyed this book and would commend it highly.

RATING: 4.75 stars out of 5

BOOK REVIEW: CHURCHILL‘S FOLLY: How Winston Churchill created modern Iraq, by Christopher Catherwood

CHURCHILL‘S FOLLY: How Winston Churchill created modern Iraq, by Christopher Catherwood

Great Britain and a few bit players met in Cairo in 1922 and carved up the southwest Asia. The ramifications of this event are still being felt today. This is a well-researched exploration of the subject, but it is a bit too narrow in its focus. The database covered (mostly Winston’s own correspondence and cables) is a bit narrow, and the attempt to integrate the perspectives of other sources is valiant but insufficient. Still, this is a fascinating read and the information gained from the, again, overused resources is quite good.

The book provides a non-lionized portrait of the man. He is not so much a dynamic world figure as he is an ambitious politician and a penny-pincher who simply wanted to get a job done (get Britain out of paying for this region) and not do the best job for the future. He is entertaining, though, as his individualistic streak does play havoc with people from time to time.

There are a lot of parallels to the 2003-05 period that the author makes but does not overemphasize. The conflicting motives of being where you are not wanted, minimizing damage to reputation and forces, and having to answer for the use of resources back home characterize this period for Britain as well as 2003-05 for the USA in Iraq.

Oil did not seem to be as important a factor. While it was mentioned a few times and Churchill was himself aware of the need for oil resources for naval superiority, it did not loom large in his decision calculus.

I enjoyed the relish that the author demonstrated when debunking the version of events from T. E. Lawrence’s Pillars of Wisdom, and he was specific about which “Lawrence of Arabia” myths to pop. As a boy who had been much moved by that movie it gave me some chuckles of regret.

The author does show some restraint when generalizing from this historical event to the present. As it was being released in 2006 events were still to unfold.

I had some problems with this book but that was mainly because I wanted to know more. However, I was very satisfied by what I learned and would commend it highly.

RATING: 4.5 STARS

Book Review: The Fatal Shore: the epic of Australia’s founding, by Robert Hughes

The Fatal Shore: the epic of Australia’s founding, by Robert Hughes (1986: Random House, New York).

This comprehensive history of the settlement of Australia as a penal colony is a fascinating read that I shall never forget. I am sure that I will be telling stories from it for the rest of my life.

The book has a unique voice, not just the voice of the author, which is done well, but also the voices of so many different people who are part of the story. Passages from letters, personal accounts, pleas for mercy, legal complaints, poems and even popular sons are used to help you hear he voices of those who are part of the drama. The author is also clear to indicate when there is silence or untruth in the tales these voices tell, as often documents did not exist (prisoners could be lashed for only having a piece of paper) and often people were asking for favors and obviously embellishing the truth. The result is not a cacophony, but a rich state of play in which many soloists come forward to provide their side of things.

The book is extremely comprehensive. It starts from the background in Britain, looks at the causes of crime and poverty, talks about the justice and law enforcement systems, discusses the lack of prison space for a spiraling crime problem, and then deals with the decision to send these people (this “criminal class”) to the other end of the world, probably never to come back. The picture painted of late 18th Century England was not a particularly good one, and one could come to understand that many of those sent to Australia in bondage ended up being better off.

Issues of gender, sex and identity were handled well in the book. The situation of women in England, the conditions and adventures of women on the long trip over, the rapacious environment they faced on arrival, the issues of separation between conjugal couples caused by transportation and the badge of “whore” and “prostitute” along with the casual nature of lower class marriages were also covered quite well. On the arrival of the first boat prisoners were finally unloaded and there were no quarters, so a flurry of spontaneous sexual activity took place that fist night, and Hughes notes that Australia’s sexual history got quite a first start that evening. Issues of homosexuality (both voluntary and imposed) along with the upper class horror at any thought of homosexuality were covered quite well. Many would use the existence of homosexuality among the convicts to justify more brutal treatment of them, even if it was no higher than the general population. The Irish were a group of prisoners that were even more victimized than the rest. They were discriminated against by the system and often by the other prisoners. Their religious needs were neglected but they tended to stick together and rarely informed on one another.

The author resisted the obvious temptation to talk about how the Australian “character” was influenced by the entire experience. Instead, he talked about how the artifacts of the system (like bushrangers) influenced the national character instead. He clearly does not belong to the genetic inheritance theory of crime (as did most contemporaries of this period) and showed very conclusively that a bunch of convicts became one of the most law-abiding societies in the world in fairly short order after many were set free and they started giving birth to new generations. There was some discussion of the need to stick together with your “mates” but I think that often comes out of any number of harsh frontier experiences. One of the points he does successfully make is that much of this era has been rubbed out and forgotten by Australians themselves, anxious to wash away the “convict stain.”

There is a string sense of “otherness” that he depicts, not so much from his perspective as the perspective of those who first came there. The countryside looked quite nice, but the soils were fairly unforgiving, the plants were often unfriendly and the animal life was a bit hard to understand. Huge quantities of whales and seals were slaughtered for fur and oil, and now most of those are gone from those regions. The enormity of the landscape was also an issue that stunned the settlers, and I think is still having an effect today.

No group was seen as “other” as much as the original population, the aborigines. Besides the obvious lack of technology that created a divide between the original people of Australia and the convicts and wardens that arrived, the major divide seemed to be over the issue of property. England at the time was all about property – it gave you status, class and privileges. The aboriginal peoples (there were many different groups and many different languages) had no sense of property and lived a nomadic wandering existence. This the arriving people could not understand, and the aborigines were treated as troublesome wildlife even though the official legal doctrine was that they had rights and should be respected. In places like Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) they were hunted down and exterminated in island-wide campaigns. Their story is, probably, the most tragic in this book.

If you do not like to read about suffering, then you should avoid this book. The conditions, punishments and procedures were cruel and excessive. Those controlling the convicts were quite often both sadistic and creative. This is especially true of the smaller “ultra punishment” colonies that were established for truly evil offenders and reoffenders. One of these, Norfolk Island, was a good 1000 miles from the mainland and served he purpose of scaring everyone who might be sent there. The descriptions of the floggings were especially horrible, but it seems as if no good history of this era could avoid those. The stories of the commandants of these ultra-prisons were also covered quite completely.

There are, of course, heroes. They take many forms: brave settlers who suffered to build a new life, prisoners who resisted sadism with courage, government figures who tried hard to reform a rotten system, newspaper writers who brought a free press to a new continent, aborigines who remained proud and independent, and many, many more. Hughes does a good job of telling their stories along with those of the cruel, heartless and predatory.

The book is large, small type and over 600 pages. Obviously, I have left much out of my review, but there is a lot more there. It is neither light reading nor textual drudgery, but a very engaging work of history that fascinated me.

I very much enjoyed this book. It will give me campfire stories and conversation sprinklers for years to come. I am not sure I can say that I better understand my friends from Australia, but I can say that I have a far better understanding of where they came from.

FIVE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
*****

BOOK REVIEW: Khartoum: the ultimate imperial adventure, by Michael Asher, 2005 (Penguin History: London).

BOOK REVIEW: Khartoum: the ultimate imperial adventure, by Michael Asher, 2005 (Penguin History: London).

This is a historical period that has long interested me. It covers the time between 1880-1898 in the Sudan. I remember that as a young boy fascinated by maps I had been curious at the designation of the “Anglo-Egyptian Sudan” on the map. It was huge and the Nile flowed right through it. I wondered how it had been both British and Egyptian. As a college student of Asian civilizations I had done a large research project on the Taiping rebellion in China in the 19th Century, and there found mention of a charismatic leader Charles Gordon who had helped end the conflict and seemed to be a principled and righteous British officer who often went against his orders and always did what he thought was right and usually acted to reduce the suffering of the people he was dealing with. There was a mention there that he had died defending Khartoum in the Sudan. My interest was raised, and when I saw a trashy paperback in a bookstore I bought it, and quickly read Gordon of Khartoum. It was quite a fanciful retelling of the story of how Gordon was governor-general of the Sudan when it was ruled by the Turks-Egyptians-British, how he had worked to end the slave trade and eventually was reappointed elsewhere. He was brought back to Khartoum to “rescue” the country from an Islamic fundamentalist leader, the Mahdi (“expected one”) who would purify Islam, or so the legend went. Gordon had died defending the city because the relief column sent to rescue him arrived about 18 hours too late. I knew it was largely history romanticized, but I enjoyed it. I certainly was not as aware as I am now, so the story of a righteous Christian imperialist dying defending his beloved people appealed to me. Later I saw the movie of the same name staring Charlton Heston, which I instantly sensed was entertaining but a load of tripe.

As I was browsing the bookstore shelves buying books for my trip to Mexico (a very serious undertaking) I saw this volume, inspected it, and bought it, hoping that I would now have a more historically accurate picture of the events.

As usual, I began by finding out more about the author. Some background information usually helps me ascertain my feelings about the text. He had been a British military officer in the SAS and then had become an author, achieving much success in many different types of writing. He also was fascinated by this region of the world and had won awards for desert exploration in the Sudan from the Royal Geographic Society. He lived in Sudan for ten years and spoke fluent Arabic. He now lives in Kenya with his Arabist wife and two children.

This txt is, in fact, a very detailed retelling of the entire story, from the original massacre of the Anglo-Egyptian force under Hicks in 1883 by the Mahdi to the fall of Khartoum to the Mahdi including Gordon’s death to the eventual capture of Khartoum by Kitchener in 1899. There are several interesting points about the text that are worth remembering.

First, it seems somewhat balanced. A European will always tell such a story from a European perspective, but he did try to balance the story. He was very critical of the British officer corps for its lack of military competence, its reward of “chumminess” over skill, the purchase of commissions and its indifference and hostility to those who were part of the British Empire. His indictment of many officers was specific and cutting. These elements were interesting to me as they showed the arrogance of the British forces in specific detail with stories of specific officers and how they behaved. He showed remarkable respect for the Sudanese people, their various cultures and their tremendous survival skills. He talks a lot about how the Beja, specifically, had been defeating invading armies since the time of the Pharaohs and had always been successful. He specifically praises the skills and cleverness of the Haddendowa leaders Osman Digna, a survivor who outlived it all. His salute to the Sudanese as fighters also seems sincere, whether for the courage of those fighting for the Mahdi and for the steadiness and reliability of the Sudanese and Egyptians who fought with the British. His strongest indictment comes of the Turco-Egyptian ruling class both in Sudan and Egypt as corrupt, cowardly and self-centered. He seems to agree with Gordon, that they were the roots of the problem there and that the people had good reason to rise up against them. Asher’s reliance on British sources is to be expected, but he also seems to have used many Arabic sources as well as oral histories in telling the story.

Second, he saw the conflict as not exclusively religious. The Mahdi provided a charismatic figure around which to rally, and while many did so for religious reasons, there were also many practical reasons to support this regime given the corruption and mismanagement of the Turco-Egyptian government. Many of the ethic groups had not rallied to the Mahdi, but when the existing government collapsed and Gordon was killed, they naturally rallied to the winning side. Likewise, when the Mahdi died soon after the fall of Khartoum, the Islamist state introduced by his successor was a bit too harsh for them and fractures began to develop along ethnic lines.

Third, the descriptions of the battles themselves are detailed and horrifying. I wish I had read this as a boy, and it might have cured me of some of the lingering military romanticism that it took me another ten years to eliminate. His descriptions of steel-on-steel battles (quite often the British steel failed) and the movements of troops were also gripping. The fact that many battles were over quickly but seemed like an eternity was fleshed out by substantial detail and comments written later by soldiers who survived. His strongest salute was to the individual soldiers who showed courage and determination in the face of tremendous adversity, both with the opponents and with the elements.

Fourth, water was often the key. Running around the desert with large military forces requires water, and it was often pivotal. British forces that came upon a watering hole defended by forces of he Mahdi had no choice but to attack, as did the Mahdi’s successor near the end of the conflict. The railroads that were built solved some of this problem, but even they had to carry huge amounts of water to power the steam engines, and at one point half of the train was carrying water for itself. One interesting story is how a surveyor and water diviner brought in by the British actually found two new water supplies that were critical in assisting them cross a route no native would think could be used.

Fifth, the book does a good job of setting the stage for the modern phase of Islamic fundamentalism without becoming too preachy. This was one of the first truly Islamic states established, and was the only colony to win independence by force of arms in Africa. The agenda of the Mahdi and his regime very much set the stage for future Sudanese politics and the rise of Bashir in 1989. Osama bin-Laden spent years in Sudan soaking up the teachings of the Mahdi and his modern followers. It also documented the severe ethnic divides in the country that are being played out today in the crisis in Darfur. I liked the way he made his point but let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

It was a very good read and I would commend it to all persons of a serious bent. Now that I have some additional solid information about the period I am perhaps ready to engage my colleague at the University of Vermont Darius Jonathan, who is from Sudan, as well as my friend Hassan Suleiman who I met in Qatar, also a Sudanese. Then I might really start learning.

Follow Me In Mexico

At

http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/mex/Blog/Blog.html

I Score a Vehicle for Mexico

It seems very dependable and it is what I want. Scott Sempsrott introduced me to a mechanic named Victor Gomez who had a truck that I might be interested in. I was very interested.

It runs well and I liked the feel as I took it for a spin. Features include:

• It has good storage space so I can take things down with me.
• It has good clearance, necessary for down in Mexico.
• The vehicle has a face connected to it. Victor is a mechanic and Scott verifies that his work is good, so now I can contact him if there is a problem and he can do any work on it I might need in the future.
• The price was right and I could afford it.
• It has the extra equipment I want, like a cassette player (better than a CD player for hooking up an ipod) and an air conditioner.
• It probably has 80,000 miles left in it, and I will need about 1200 a year for the foreseeable future.

So, tomorrow morning Victor will come and pick me up at my hotel, I will go to his place, load the truck up and then head for Mexico.

This is the part of the trip I have been dreading. I am not the best person to buy vehicles, being mechanically ignorant, and I am not good at bargaining. But, I think I survived this stage and feel good about it.

Panic, Hype and Warnings Aside, I Go to Mexico

Soon I will be in the water in front of my house again!

I have been planning this trip to my home in Baja California for a long time, in fact for a full year since I was last there. It is my scheduled vacation and healing time, and it will be five weeks.

Then this damn flu thing complicated everything. The media is full of hype, people are in a panic and policymakers are playing it up so that if it does get bad they won't look bad.

So, I am sitting here in JFK airport's terminal five typing this out. I am on my way. Here are my thoughts for those who are worried (hi Lori):

• I am going to Baja California, not Mexico City, and where I am going there are no people. It is many, many hundreds of miles from Mexico City.
• Information today indicats that the transmission rate is far less than expected.
• Those getting it outside of Mexico have had very mild versions and have healed.
• 13,000 people died of the normal flu in the USA so far in 2009 anyway.
• I will take precautions, avoiding crowds and lots of handwashing.
• My doctor told me I need a vacation badly and that with precautions I should be okay.

Hours before I left the University of Vermont cancelled all trips to Mexico on official business. Luckily, this is private.

Time to go get on my plane to San Diego. Then I am buying a used car and driving it 300 miles to my house. I will report from there.

Mexico Reading List

I went book shopping today to flesh out my reading list for my upcoming visit to Mexico. I love sitting on the porch in the sun and reading between swims. Here is what I have.

SERIOUS...

Michael Asher, Khartoum: the ultimate imperial adventure
British imperialism and Gordon’s doomed campaign in 1880-1890’s.

Christopher Catherwood, Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill created modern Iraq

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice

Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The epic of Australia’s founding

Anthony Everett, Cicero: the life and times of Rome’s greatest politician

Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity
A study of the personal, informal and vernacular in human civilization

James Bowman, Honor: A history
Social history of the role of the concept of “honor” at different times and in different civilizations

John Haywood, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings
Lots of fun here.

NOT SO SERIOUS...

I bought a bunch of new Doctor Who science fiction books. They mix in well with the kind of heavy stuff I have above.

Mark Michalowski, Shing Darkness (Doctor and Donna)

Mark Morris, Forever Autumn (Doctor and Martha)

Dale Smith, The Many Hands (Doctor and Martha)

Dan Abnett, The Story of Martha (Doctor and Martha)

Simon Guerrier, The Pirate Loop (Doctor and Martha)

Mike Tucker, The Nightmare of Black Island (Doctor and Rose)

There are some others I am also scraping up from previous months. I may even try to finish History of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Sunday, April 26, 2009

Obama's "Yes we can" is actually a Satanic Mantra

This has to be one of the strangest hings I have seen in a long time. I cannot embed the video but go to the link and watch and listen to it. It is especially clear when the crowd is chanting it.

Someone has too much time on their hands.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d79_1239121313

The Prisoner - 1967

A very importnt program for me while I was in high school. It merged secret agent stuff with science fiction and psychological drama. I knew someone who had written for the show and my late great friend and debate partner Bob DeGroff and I used to watch it when we could.

The original episodes are now available online and I plan to watch them all over again.

Episode One
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid2517767001/bclid6012619001/bctid6069547001

Others can be seen at
http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner-1960s-video/

New York Times Covers Lambsbread's Origins & Future

Great story in the New York Times about Bobby & Dannis Hackney, leading members of the Vermont reggae band Lambsbread that listeners of the Reggae Lunch are very familiar with.

This very interesting story talks about their musical roots in Detroit and speculates on an interesting future.

There is a link to a song there that is an excellent cut from their 1974 band, Death.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/arts/music/15rubi.html?ref=music

March 15, 2009
This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk

By MIKE RUBIN
Winooski, Vt.

ON an evening in late February at a club here called the Monkey House, there was a family reunion of sorts. As the band Rough Francis roared through a set of anthemic punk rock, Bobby Hackney leaned against the bar and beamed. Three of his sons — Bobby Jr., Julian and Urian — are in Rough Francis, but his smile wasn’t just about parental pride. It was about authorship too. Most of the songs Rough Francis played were written by Bobby Sr. and his brothers David and Dannis during their days in the mid-1970s as a Detroit power trio called Death.

The group’s music has been almost completely unheard since the band stopped performing more than three decades ago. But after all the years of silence, Death’s moment has finally arrived. It comes, however, nearly a decade too late for its founder and leader, David Hackney, who died of lung cancer in 2000. “David was convinced more than any of us that we were doing something totally revolutionary,” said Bobby Sr., 52.

Forgotten except by the most fervent punk rock record collectors — the band’s self-released 1976 single recently traded hands for the equivalent of $800 — Death would likely have remained lost in obscurity if not for the discovery last year of a 1974 demo tape in Bobby Sr.’s attic. Released last month by Drag City Records as “... For the Whole World to See,” Death’s newly unearthed recordings reveal a remarkable missing link between the high-energy hard rock of Detroit bands like the Stooges and MC5 from the late 1960s and early ’70s and the high-velocity assault of punk from its breakthrough years of 1976 and ’77. Death’s songs “Politicians in My Eyes,” “Keep On Knocking” and “Freakin Out” are scorching blasts of feral ur-punk, making the brothers unwitting artistic kin to their punk-pioneer contemporaries the Ramones, in New York; Rocket From the Tombs, in Cleveland; and the Saints, in Brisbane, Australia. They also preceded Bad Brains, the most celebrated African-American punk band, by almost five years.

Jack White of the White Stripes, who was raised in Detroit, said in an e-mail message: “The first time the stereo played ‘Politicians in My Eyes,’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. When I was told the history of the band and what year they recorded this music, it just didn’t make sense. Ahead of punk, and ahead of their time.”

The teenage Hackney brothers started playing R&B in their parents’ garage in the early ’70s but switched to hard rock in 1973, after seeing an Alice Cooper show. Dannis played drums, Bobby played bass and sang, and David wrote the songs and contributed propulsive guitar work, derived from studying Pete Townshend’s power-chord wrist technique. Their musicianship tightened when their mother allowed them to replace their bedroom furniture with mikes and amps as long as they practiced for three hours every afternoon. “From 3 to 6,” said Dannis, 54, “we just blew up the neighborhood.”

Death began playing at cabarets and garage parties on Detroit’s predominantly African-American east side, but were met with reactions ranging from confusion to derision. “We were ridiculed because at the time everybody in our community was listening to the Philadelphia sound, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers,” Bobby said. “People thought we were doing some weird stuff. We were pretty aggressive about playing rock ’n’ roll because there were so many voices around us trying to get us to abandon it.”

When the band was ready to record, David chose a studio by pinning the Yellow Pages listings to the wall and throwing a dart; it landed on Groovesville Productions, a company owned by Don Davis, a successful producer for Stax Records. Groovesville signed the band, and in 1974 it began work at United Sound Recording Studios in Detroit, where it shared space with Funkadelic, the Dramatics and Gladys Knight. At the time David was 21, Dannis was 19 and Bobby, still a student at Southeastern High School, was 17.

“They were just so impressive, and the sound was just so big for three guys,” said Brian Spears, who was director of publishing at Groovesville and oversaw their sessions. “I knew those kids were great, but trying to break a black group into rock ’n’ roll was just tough during that time.”

The apparent nihilism of the name Death was also out of step with the times. “Nobody could get past the name,” Mr. Spears said. “It seemed to be a real detriment. When you said the name of the group to anybody, it was like, ‘Man, why you calling the group Death?’ ”

The Hackneys said Mr. Davis brought a tape of Death to a meeting in New York with the record executive Clive Davis. Afterward Don Davis told the brothers that Clive Davis had liked the recordings but not the band’s name; there could be no deal unless they changed it. “That’s when my brother David got a little angry,” Dannis said. “He told Don Davis to tell Clive Davis, ‘Hell no!’ ”

Part of the reason David refused was because he was writing a rock opera about death that portrayed it in a positive light, Bobby Sr. said. “He strongly believed that we could get a contract with another record label,” he added. “We were young and cocky, but David was the cockiest of us all.”

That defiance has become central to Death’s underground legend: what could be more punk rock than telling the suits to take a hike in the name of artistic integrity, even if punk didn’t quite exist yet? But separating fact from lore is tricky after three decades. The Hackneys remember Clive Davis’s label affiliation as Columbia Records, but Don Davis — who initially didn’t recall working with a band called Death — said in a phone interview that Clive Davis was with Arista Records, although he couldn’t remember the specifics of the meeting and if the group’s name was an issue. A spokeswoman for Clive Davis said he had no recollection of the group or of any meeting concerning it.

Death and Groovesville parted ways in 1976. Don Davis produced two No. 1 hits that year, one of which was Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady.” The Hackneys, meanwhile, pressed 500 copies of “Politicians in My Eyes,” backed with “Keep On Knocking,” on their own Tryangle label but found it nearly impossible to get radio play in Detroit. Disco had begun to dominate the marketplace — thanks in part to “Disco Lady” — and control of radio playlists was shifting from local disc jockeys to corporate consultants. Bobby said 1976 “was really a tough year for us,” citing “the disco ebb tide” with particular chagrin. “We just figured nobody wanted to hear rock ’n’ roll anymore.”

As their disenchantment grew, the brothers were invited by a distant relative to visit Vermont. “So we came up here to clear our heads for a couple of weeks,” Bobby said with a laugh. “That was like 30-something years ago.”

“We’re still clearing our heads,” Dannis said.

Settling in Burlington, the brothers released two albums of gospel rock as the 4th Movement in the early 1980s. David became increasingly homesick and moved back to Detroit in 1982, continuing to make music until his death. In 1983 Bobby and Dannis formed a reggae band, Lambsbread, which became a familiar presence during Vermont’s late-1980s jam-band boom; eight albums later Lambsbread is still active on the New England college circuit. The two brothers bought a house together east of Burlington in Jericho, built their own recording studio there and raised families. Bobby Sr. and Dannis each have five children.

Bobby’s children were crucial to Death’s resurrection. The Hackneys had never shared the details of their Death experience with their kids. “We had moved on in our lives and thought that chapter was over because we went through so much rejection with that music,” Bobby said. “We just didn’t want to relive it, and I especially didn’t want to relive it again with my children.”

But last year Julian heard the Tryangle single at a party in San Francisco and recognized his father’s voice. Soon after, Bobby Jr. did a Google search that revealed the Holy Grail status of the band’s only release. This news astounded Bobby Sr., who dug the master tapes out of storage last May for the first time in three decades and sat down with Dannis for a listen. The music “literally took our breath away,” Bobby Sr. said.

“We looked at each other, and we said: ‘This is truly some of the best rock ’n’ roll we ever heard. Wow, David was right.’ David knew it, and always believed it, much more than we did.”

Bobby Sr.’s sons were equally impressed. Bobby Jr., a veteran of several Burlington hardcore bands, formed Rough Francis with two brothers and two friends to play Death’s music as a tribute to his family. (The band’s moniker comes from his Uncle David’s nickname.)

“We were just trying to find ways to inform people” about Death’s music, Bobby Jr. said. “When I first heard it, I thought: ‘This can’t be real. People have to know about this. This is crazy!’ I felt like I had found Jimmy Hoffa or something.”

The young Hackneys weren’t the only Death enthusiasts. In August 2007 a record collector named Robert Cole Manis, having heard “Keep On Knocking” on a 2001 bootleg compilation of obscure punk singles, found a copy of the Tryangle single on eBay and acquired it for $400 and $400 worth of rare records.

“It was true love when I first heard it,” Mr. Manis said. “I think the record is just phenomenal. It’s timeless. It’s an amazing document.”

While surfing the Internet last summer, Mr. Manis saw a posting from a friend of Bobby Jr.’s on a punk message board announcing the rediscovery of the Death tapes. Mr. Manis excitedly tracked down the Hackneys in Vermont and helped put them in touch with the Chicago indie label Drag City, which he had worked with on a previous reissue project.

The music is an “undeniable combination of classic and punk rock elements,” said Rian Murphy, a spokesman for Drag City. “You can put the needle down on that record in any given place and just be completely transported.”

The Hackneys and Drag City are discussing reissuing the 4th Movement records too, and Bobby Sr. and Dannis are considering playing some live shows as Death, with the Lambsbread guitarist Bobbie Duncan taking over on guitar.

Death’s newfound acclaim has surprised the Hackneys but, Bobby Sr. said, David had predicted that Death would find fame one day. “David came to me right before he died, and he had some master tapes of ours,” he said. “I jokingly said to him, ‘David, I have enough of our stuff, man, I’m running out of room.’ And he said, ‘Bob, you’ve got to keep all this stuff, the world’s going to come looking for it one day, and when the world comes looking for it, I’ll know that you’ll have it.

“You can only imagine the emotions that I go through in my quiet moments when I reflect on that.”

Swank Haile Selassie Video

I love this one. Check it out.

Climate Change Castastrophe, "It's too late"

I used to joke in the 1980's that we would probably move straight from "climate change isn't real" to "it's too late." Now it is no longer a joke.

From http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_2476202,00.html

'Life doomed by climate woes'
26/02/2009 08:23 - (SA)

London - Climate change will wipe out most life on Earth by the end of this century and mankind is too late to avert catastrophe, a leading British climate scientist said.

James Lovelock, 89, famous for his Gaia theory of the Earth being a kind of living organism, said higher temperatures will turn parts of the world into desert and raise sea levels, flooding other regions.

His apocalyptic theory foresees crop failures, drought and death on an unprecedented scale. The population of this hot, barren world could shrink from about seven billion to one billion by 2100 as people compete for ever-scarcer resources.

"It will be death on a grand scale from famine and lack of water," Lovelock told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. "It could be a reduction to a billion (people) or less."

By 2040, temperatures in European cities will rise to an average of 43°C in summer, the same as Baghdad and parts of Europe in the 2003 heatwave.

"The land will gradually revert to scrub and desert. You can look at as if the Sahara were steadily moving into Europe. It's not just Europe; the whole world will be changing in that way."

'Doomed to failure'

Attempts to cut emissions of planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) in an attempt to reduce the risks are probably doomed to failure, he added.

Even if the world found a way of cutting emissions to zero, it is now too late to cool the Earth.

"It is a bit like a supertanker. You can't make it stop by just turning the engines off," he said before the release of a new book on climate change.

"It will go on for a long, long time. If by some magic you could suddenly bring the C02 down, it wouldn't suddenly cool off."

Campaigns to promote recycling and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are a waste of time, Lovelock adds, although he concedes that nuclear power will help meet growing demand for energy.

While financial markets and politicians promote carbon emissions trading schemes to reduce emissions and help the environment, Lovelock says they, too, will have little effect.

"I don't see the efforts of governments around the world succeeding in doing anything significant to cut back the emissions of carbon dioxide," he said.

Creating safe havens

Efforts should instead be focused on creating safe havens in areas which will escape the worst effects of climate change.

In his book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he adds: "We have to stop pretending that there is any possible way of returning to that lush, comfortable and beautiful Earth we left behind some time in the 20th century."

The destruction of natural ecosystems for farmland, deforestation and the rapid growth of the human race and livestock have all exacerbated the problem, he added.

Scientists should not underestimate the crucial role of the oceans as an indicator of rising temperatures and tool for reducing carbon dioxide, Lovelock argues.

"Most of the Earth's surface is the ocean. That holds 800 times more than the atmosphere or the land. And there is no question that the ocean is steadily warming," he said.

Public's 'lack of urgency'

A former sceptic of doom-laden predictions, Lovelock admits he is not entirely comfortable with his role as a modern-day Cassandra, the cursed prophetess of Greek mythology whose counsel was ignored.

However, he says the scale and speed of the looming crisis are so great he must speak out. He is still struck by the public's apparent lack of urgency about the problem.

"Don't blame me for the terrible predictions," said Lovelock, a sprightly, trim figure with silver hair who looks younger than his age and was soberly dressed in navy jumper, tie and casual trousers.

"The UN's IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) even in its 2001 report was suggesting temperatures by 2040 and 2050 that were devastatingly hot. All I'm doing is drawing people's attention to it."

- Reuters

Sarah Jane has a Birthday

To My Dearest Daughter,

Happy Birthday. You were born February 27, 1979.

You have so much to be happy about, and that makes it easy for me to be happy for you.

You have a wonderful partner, a fantastic young son with another on the way, a beautiful home in a friendly community, loads of adoring friends, maximum professional respect for what you do for a career, an adventurous nature, a loving spirit and a willingness to speak out in the presence of injustice.

As you know, I am a professional critic. I criticize all around me and everything I encounter.

No criticism for you.

I would not want you to be any different than you are. I am prouder of you than anything else I know of in my life. My life has meaning because it contributed to the existence of you.

I strongly believe that you have a destiny. My only advice for you on this day is to appreciate what you have and what you have accomplished. My advice for the future is to keep on keeping on, when you see your destiny, grab it, pursue it, don't give up and make it real. Only you can define what that destiny is. You are the captain of your soul.

Sail on.

Your Dad

Mobile blogging is here

Now with my iPhone and a little bit of effort I can post from just about anywhere.

Now there is no refuge from blogmania.

-- Post From My iPhone

My Websites - An Index

Many of my friends have found various websites that I am involved with, and now a couple have asked me to put out a list of them. So, that is what I am going to do today. Perhaps this will convince me to shut some of them down.

PERSONAL WEBSITES

ALFRED SNIDER
http://alfredsnider.blogspot.com/

This is the one you are looking at now. It has little to do with debate and everything to do with me. It has random postings about myself, my adventures, my feeling and some of the events of my life. You probably need to know me to understand it. It is a blogspot site, so it is not very fancy.

MY HOUSE IN MEXICO
http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/mex/Welcome.html

This website is all about my house in Mexico. In 1960, my father started work on a piece of beach property in Baja California. It was on a small bay and the village was called Puetecitos. It is 52 miles south of San Felipe, a small port city at the northern end of the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). I have kept the place in the family and use it as my escape vacation home. I try and go there each May and December.
We have no telephone service, electricity when we run a generator to recharge laptop & ipods, no running water, and a flush toilet that operates on sea water you carry up from the beach right in front of the house. The house is a three bedroom model built out of beautiful natural stone, and features a huge porch. The name "Snider's Snare" was given to it some 25 years ago, and seems to have stuck.
This website will have a blog that updates while I am there and when I am missing the place. Nice Google map that allows you to actually see the house on the beach from space.

DOCTOR WHO THEATER
http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/dw/

I am a huge Doctor Who fan. I started hosting Doctor Who Theater on Monday nights back in 1989. The new episodes that had been produced were just ending and I wanted to keep viewing and enjoying Doctor Who. People were invited and we picked an episode from my (fairly) vast collection and watched it.
It became a real tradition and has gone through some changes at the same time. We used to draw episodes out of a hat, we went through a streak where we watched every episode over a period of years, we strung them together into "themes," and a lot more. We have had as many as 25 and as few as 1 person show up. When I am out of town there may not be a screening but often I appoint a guest host.
Now that there are fabulous new episodes (four seasons worth and two spin-off shows) there is a lot of new stuff to watch.
The viewing group has been dubbed "The High Council" and we have a lot of fun. Because of the nature of Doctor Who there is a lot of room for talking back to the screen, either about bad effects, flubbed lines, clever lines and a number of specific things we look for, such as "hiding in plain sight" or "HIPS" and the ever-popular refrain, "I hate it when that happens."

COLLEGE OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE
http://collegeofmusicalknowledge.blogspot.com/
REGGAE LUNCH
http://reggaelunch.blogspot.com/

You will will find mp3 copies of my many radio shows, the COLLEGE OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE (experimental music) and the REGGAE LUNCH (roots reggae radio). I did radio programs on WRUV-FM Burlington, Vermont 90.1 for eighteen years. These archived shows are made available to those interested. Download the MP3 file, load it into your MP3 player, and ENJOY. There may be a slight pause between side A and side B of the original cassette tape, so be patient. These files are legal to download and listen to.
A complete archives of my radio programs can be found at
http://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/listen

MY PICTURE ALBUMS
http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/travelpix/Welcome.html

I travel a lot. Here are some photo albums of various trips I have taken. I do not have them all in here because I do not have time, but a lot of them are here.

MY CALENDAR
http://debate.uvm.edu/tunacalendar.html

Yes, I have a calendar that reaches three years into the future. This is what I use at the end of the year to count up how many travel days I have had. Last year, 132.

MY NEWS WEBSITE
http://debate.uvm.edu/news.html

Where I go to check the news each day. Lots of links.

===================================

OLD AND DISCONTINUED PERSONAL WEBSITES

OLD MEXICO WEBSITE
http://debate.uvm.edu/tunamexico.html

OLD DEBATE TRAVELS WEBSITE
http://debate.uvm.edu/travel/travel.html

=====================================

GENERAL DEBATE WEBSITES

GLOBAL DEBATE
http://globaldebateblog.blogspot.com/

All the news about debating. Competition and educational debating are only a part of what we cover, as we also feature stories about debate in other and often wider societal contexts. This is a branch of the Debate Central website, on the web since 1994. Check out the history of the project.
This blog is a continuation of the original Global Debate Blog established at http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/.

DEBATE CENTRAL
http://debate.uvm.edu/

This is the largest and most complete debate training website in the world. It connects you to sample debates and extensive video libraries of lectures for all formats of debating. It accesses older and new material and creates a continuity of debate instruction. As of March 1 2009 a Google search for "debate training" brings up this website first. Almost any variation in the word "debate" beings it up in the first five. The few links on the front page can be useful as well. This is the one that started it all in 1994.

DEBATE VIDEO BLOG
http://debatevideoblog.blogspot.com/

Here you will find a wide assortment of debating related videos, including debates, lectures, discussions, speeches and other material dealing with debating in all different styles and formats. This site handles podcasts delivered from our server as well as Google, Vimeo and YouTube videos. Many other debate videos can be found at Debate Central at http://debate.uvm.edu/watch.html . Other videos can be found of the Flashpoint Television website.
A raw archive of debate videos for download is at http://www.uvm.edu/~debate/watch/?M=D

NEWS FOR DEBATERS
http://debate.uvm.edu/newsfordebaters.html

This page is a collection of links for debaters to use to quickly pursue information about any current event. I designed this for some of the debate workshops I taught at when discussing how to prepare to show them how I become prepared to deal with current news issues.

WORLD DEBATE INSTITUTE
FOR NEWS http://worlddebateinstitute.blogspot.com/
TO REGISTER http://learn.uvm.edu/wdi/

"A boot camp for the brain, and for free speech as well." -New York Times
For over 25 years the World Debate Institute (WDI) has been offering the best in debate instruction to an increasingly international audience.
Each summer there is the WDI main program held at the University of Vermont for high school and university debaters as well as for high school and university teachers and instructors. Contact Janet Nunziata at janet.nunziata@uvm.edu.
Each November there is the International Debate Institute held in Europe for one week, along with an additional tournament, for university debaters. You can get information about it at http://internationaldebateacademy.blogspot.com/ . Contact Bojana Skrt at bojana.skrt@siol.net.

INTERNATIONAL DEBATE ACADEMY SLOVENIA
FOR NEWS http://internationaldebateacademy.blogspot.com/
FOR REGISTRATION http://debate.uvm.edu/idas.html

It is the most international WUDC Format Debate Training in the world with a distinguished training group. Attendees have come from over 29 different debating nations. The program involves a rigorous combination of lectures, skill exercise sessions and two practice debates per day. A major tournament will take place at the end. This year the tournament at the end of the Academy is open to all interested university debaters, so everybody who does not have time to come for the whole week can join us only for the tournament.
Sat 21 November 2009 arrival, finish on 29 November 2009 at tournament.
Once again it will be in Ormoz, tournament will be in Ljubljana.

WORLD SCHOOLS DEBATING CHAMPIONSHIPS, WASHINGTON, DC, USA 2008
http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/wsdc/Welcome.html

This is the website I built for the WSDC tournament 2008n where I worked as the director of tournament operations under convener Phyllis Hirth. I had a good time, learned a lot about WSDC and produced this booklet-like website.

THINKING & SPEAKING A BETTER WORLD -- INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ARGUMENTATION, RHETORIC, DEBATE AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/better/Welcome.html

I have been involved in organizing this conference for the last two times that it met. Here is the new website for the conference.

USUDC RESULTS
http://debate.uvm.edu/usudc/usudctab0809.html

Here I try and gather together all results from WUDC format tournaments in the USA. This is the one place where you can track results. I may or may not continue this beyond 2009.

=======================================

VERMONT DEBATE WEBSITES

LAWRENCE DEBATE UNION
http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/LDU/The_Team.html

This is quite an involved website with a lot of stuff that changes. The newsletter, THE VOICE OF EDWIN is the centerpiece here, as it goes out every week to a huge mailing list of alumni and supporters. There are also photo galleries and a new video arcade where you can watch various LDU events.

FLASHPOINT TELEVISION
http://flashpointtv.blogspot.com/

Flashpoint is the regular television program of the Lawrence Debate Union at the University of Vermont. The program now has over 375 shows to its credit. Flashpoint is a program of issues and ideas. Debaters and coaches from the LDU pick a topic and research it intensively before the program.
The program consists of a fast-paced discussion of the topic and its related issues. Experts are not sought for the program, because it attempts to show that intelligent citizens can learn about an issue for themselves and then have informed and logical opinions -- which is what citizens should do. If you have comments about our program, please contact us at debate@uvm.edu.
The program has been filmed at UVM and around the world, but is mostly filmed at the studios of Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM) in Burlington. It is aired on Burlington cable channel 15 three times a week. It is also available through Burlington Telecomm. Selected programs can also be viewed online as streaming videos at this and other sites. Older programs can be seen at http://debate.uvm.edu/flashpoint.html.

US UNIVERSITIES DEBATING CHAMPIONSHIP
http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/usu/Welcome.html

This website was constructed to publicize our bid to host this tournament. After we got the bid it turned into our information website for the tournament. After the tournament it will probably become a website to promote the WUDC format in America. It already has a section where I post all of the invitations I know of for such tournaments. It has a team list for the tournament already and registration is open.

=======================================

ACADEMIC WEBSITES

CAMPAIGN RHETORIC
http://spch214camprhet.blogspot.com/

I am teaching a seminar on the rhetoric of the 2008 presidential campaign. This website is just to keep my students up to dates and organized as we move through he course week by week.

BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
http://debate.uvm.edu/~asnider/busandprofcomm/

This is a new online course I am working on. It will run from March-May and then again for the summer and the fall. It is strictly a survey course and does not get that much into depth, but I think it covers some areas that a lot of students need work in.

OLDER CLASS WEBSITES
http://debate.uvm.edu/tunaclasses.html

Here are some links to some older classes. The pages are now stale but might be of interest.

=======================================

SUMMARY:

Too many, too fragmented, but I enjoy them. Some are updated daily, like GLOBAL DEBATE, while others are updated infrequently.

Now you know my secret sin - I am a compulsive blogger.

Mexico House Website Updated

It is at http://debate.uvm.edu/debateblog/mex/Welcome.html

Photos, video and a cool map where you can actually see my house in the satellite photo.

In 1960, my father started work on a piece of beach property in Baja California. It was on a small bay and the village was called Puetecitos. It is 52 miles south of San Felipe, a small port city at the northern end of the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). I have kept the place in the family and use it as my escape vacation home. I try and go there each May and December.

We have no telephone service, electricity when we run a generator to recharge laptop & ipods, no running water, and a flush toilet that operates on sea water you carry up from the beach right in front of the house. The house is a three bedroom model built out of beautiful natural stone, and features a huge porch. The name "Snider's Snare" was given to it some 25 years ago, and seems to have stuck.