Motley Moose – Archive

Yep.  We’re going home, at least for the year.  Found out last week that I scored a post-doc fellowship at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for next year.  Dr. Ms. Dr. Strum has a sabbatical coming, so we’re taking the kids and going.  Not sure if we can make ends meet yet, but we’ll figure it out.  Lots to figure out over the summer (sublet house, find apartment, schools, how to get my music gear there, how to set up for the following year, etc.).  But for now we’re psyched.  Can’t wait to get arrested for protesting housing demolitions and other outrages against my beloved city’s non-Jewish neighbors.  And I’ll be writing about early modern fantasies of Jerusalem…in Jerusalem.

I don’t quite know what this will mean for my engagements with this election (though I wonder if it’s too early to get a ballot now).  I’ll be up to my ears in a political environment that makes this one seem like romper room.  But I can promise a moose eye view on the ground there.

Anyone traveling must certainly look me up.

As we say at the end of the Passover seder: Next year in Jerusalem!

(crossposted from Green Mountain Daily)

Literally. For them, that is…

 New developments in the discrimination case against the owners of the Lyndonville bed and breakfast that’s facing legal action for refusing to host the wedding reception of two women from New York.

 The Caledonian Record (paywalled) today is reporting that the judge in the matter has denied a request to dismiss the case brought by the attorney for the inn’s owners. From my reading of the piece, it looks to me like Jim and Mary O’Reilly are trying to claim that the employee who sent the email apologizing to Katherine Baker and  Ming Lien-Linsley for the Wildflower’s discriminatory policies was acting on her own hook.

 However, that doesn’t change the fact that the policy of discrimination existed in the first place.

 The judge in the matter has also granted a motion that’s cleared the way for the couple to seek punitive damages beyond the symbolic dollar they originally sought, based on their allegation that “new information has come to light…suggesting that the defendant’s actions were more egregious than originally thought.”

 This oughta be good.

 More on the flip.  

MOOOOOSE!

I think you know I will see things on occasion and come running in here with a Moose call.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47…

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

Further, NASA doesn’t need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News.

“The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope – watch the bacteria move,” Miller said.

“On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there,” he added.

Wow!

Now that Mitt has been crowned:

I want Allen West

I fear Nikki Haley

You?

Many of you probably know much more about the truth behind free applications for smart phones, social network sites like facebook, and the all powerful Google.

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Rick Santorum is suspending his campaign so that he can spend more time with his family.

Rick Santorum is suspending his campaign so that he can spend more time with his family.

This is the first part in a series of posts examining how to create super-packed congressional districts of one race. The other posts in this series pack Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, and whites.

Packing Blacks

In drawing the districts that will elect America’s congressman and state legislatures, race is of paramount importance. This is because of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), a complicated piece of legislation which regulates how race is used in congressional redistricting. The VRA is supreme to almost every other consideration in redistricting, except the stipulation that districts must have equal population.

The VRA prohibits packing minorities. For instance, an 80% black district that weaves through unrelated areas, taking in only the black-majority parts, is illegal.

Let’s pretend, however, that the VRA doesn’t exist. For curiosity’s sake, what is the blackest district you can possibly make in the United States?

According to the Homer News, http://homernews.com/stories/0… during a radio interview, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) criticized Rush Limbaugh’s tirade against Georgetown University Law School Student Sandra Fluke.  The Senator was in Homer, Alaska on a one-day visit and appeared on a local AM radio station, KBBI, 890 kHz.

She also criticized the Republican candidates for President for standing in silence and not condemning Limbaugh’s rhetoric.