At Mother Fool's.

Although the podcast has me saying I'm off to Indie Coffee, it turned out we decided not to go there, because it's close enough to the stadium to make it hard to park on a football Saturday. So we went to Mother Fool's again. They had a new art display. Big paintings. Here's Tonya:



She got there first. When I got there, second, I caught her reading a magazine:

Audible Althouse.

That's what I'm calling my little experiment in podcasting. It's just me, no music, and the basic idea is to look back over some of the past week's topics on this blog, with full freedom to digress.

ADDED: It's about 26 minutes long.

MORE: A problem with a podcast is that you can't do updates and make corrections. I see that I quoted this line from a recent blogpost: "It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago." But for some crazy reason I said 500 instead of 50,000. Well, that's a slight discrepancy!

RFQ and The Red Shirts.

The Vermont Guardian reports:

[N]ew grassroots organizations have coalesced around the recovery effort. One, commonly known as The Red Shirts, came together as a band of 10 people who set out to clean the streets and administer first aid. This group continues to hit the streets wearing their trademark red and impressing many with their self-imposed 12-hour shifts. To date, their most impressive achievements were the cleaning the wrecked Jackson Square, and removing a fallen brick wall.

Another group, Restore the French Quarter (RFQ), came together shortly after the levies broke. RFQ, which includes 40 volunteers, has cleared their share of downed trees and rubbish. One of their fist acts was to make the Esplanade, a major street marking the border of the neighborhood, passable by vehicle.

The group has also built a public stockpile of necessary items that includes food, water, tools and clothing. The goods and the organization are housed in a makeshift headquarters on the corner of the Esplanade and Decatur — a 9,000 square foot three-story building owned by Harry Anderson of Night Court. It is equipped with generators, a fully stocked bar and a large gas grill. RFQ has gone the extra step of stenciling white “RFQ Volunteer” T-shirts and even printing ID badges for their members.

Standing in the courtyard of the headquarters, RFQ member “Steve,” who works in construction, declared that the group’s first action, shortly after the disaster struck, was to help distribute guns and ammunition to area residents to use for self-defense. Since then, they have turned their attention to fixing roads and keeping people fed.

Earlier this week, RFQ was in the process of gathering resources to repair area roofs damaged by Katrina’s winds, when a rumor stopped them in their tracks. On Thursday, word got around that either the local or federal government was about to begin enforcing the mandatory evacuation. Earlier in the day, a number of Louisiana State Troopers entered Johnny White’s and initially demanded that patrons leave with them. After some heated words, the troopers called their superiors for confirmation. As things went, the troopers left with no one in tow. Even so, the story and fear of looming forced removal spread like wildfire across the French Quarter.

“Is that stupid or what?” asked Steve. “There are hundreds, even thousands, of people right here that would be active volunteers. We know this city like the back of our hands. We are not driving around like Mississippi cops that don’t know this place. We know what we’re doing, where everything is, and how to get resources. We can get this place back up and running. They [the government] need to leave the French Quarter alone, and let us do this.”

And I'm also finding this, on a South African website:

Back in the French quarter RFQ leader Stephen James was printing up T-shirts bearing the ad-hoc group's logo.

"We should just let people help themselves and not have government do it all for them," said James to cheers of approval...

Where Gandhi advocated passive resistance, the French Quarter holdouts pledged to employ clean-up power.

James said he hoped a gang of 100 holdouts would be on the streets on Saturday morning with brooms and garbage bags.

"I don't think we are going to have any problem from the New Orleans police department," he said. "If we are helpful, maybe they will leave us alone."

Many of those at the meeting had seemed depressed and fearful in recent days, but seemed to find new strength and determination, perhaps from safety in numbers.

I wrote about my love for the holdouts yesterday. I was reading reports that portrayed holed-up individualists, and my response to them was sentimental. Today, I'm reading about people forming groups, articulating principles, and improving the community — the roots of civil society. Shouldn't the government work with these people?

The post-Woodstock Cavett show.

Last night, I watched another episode of "The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons" (a new DVD set). Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Joni Mitchell were there in Cavett's garish studio. Hippie "supergraphics" were painted all over the floor swirling up to little hassocks for the rock stars to perch on or lean against. Woodstock had just ended that morning. We're told Joni skipped Woodstock just to be on the show. Stills proudly points out the "Woodstock mud" on his jeans.

Jefferson Airplane were doing tunes from "Volunteers," including "We Can Be Together." You know:

We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very proud of ourselves

The song ends with the prescient, Reaganesque repeated line "Tear down the wall." It was fun to see the Airplane in their prime again. I saw them myself a few times around that year, 1969. Maybe you younger readers don't realize how much we adored Grace Slick back in those days. And, I'll tell you, "Surrealistic Pillow" is one of the six album covers I have framed on my living room wall. On the show, Cavett asks Slick about her parents, and she says her mother is a housewife and her father is an investment banker. "All your private property is target for your enemy," indeed.

The other members of the Airplane are nearly catatonic, though Paul Kantner rouses himself at one point and says something either unmemorable or incoherent — I forget. David Crosby is the liveliest person in the group (for whatever reason), and while I'm working on the the theory that he's the smartest rock star in the room — and thinking that's good for Bailey and Beckett — he announces that he has an idea and, beaming with pride, lists the names of six large corporations and advises them to go out of business — as if that would save the world. There's some tedious patter about astrology, including the fact that Crosby is a Leo and looks like a lion.

The best person on the show is Joni Mitchell, who's wearing a bulky green velvet floor-length dress. She sings at least four songs, playing guitar, then piano, and finally going a cappella — for "Fiddle and the Drum":

And so once again
Oh, America my friend
And so once again
You are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall

Earlier in the show, she'd talked about how she writes about love and that she's a Canadian and Canadians are just not political at all. But she does say she would support Pierre Trudeau, after Cavett asks the assembled icons if any of them would support any political candidate and all the others say no — no one deserves it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Among other things, I'm asked what the other five album covers are. Instead of answering, I give hints. See if you can guess.

"He's just a terrible person."

Said the speaker, talking about John Roberts, at the anti-Roberts rally, here on the UW campus this afternoon. He seemed to be running out of steam as I passed by with my camera in hand.



He was saying that women are second-class citizens without the Equal Rights Amendment, which seems to have little if anything to do with John Roberts. But the theme of the half-hearted harangue was women, from what I heard. The signs scattered about were mostly abortion-related.



The crowd was tiny, and nearly all women, listening to the young man warn them of the great danger they faced if that terrible, terrible man, John Roberts, should become Chief Justice.

"They also have sex for pleasure but most of the time, it's a way of making peace. They are a bit the hippies of the forest."

Bonobos.

It's feeding time at the sanctuary, and with the distribution of papayas, bananas, sugar cane and other delicacies for the 43 residents, the excitement mounts; loud screams and, in front of the visitors' curious eyes, simulated sex.

"Do they do this all the time?" asked one surprised Tanzanian official.

"Only to relieve tensions and when negotiating for a perch or food, and then disinterestedly, whatever the sex or the age," said Andre.

Yes, you remember what it was like when you had hippies over to your last dinner party.

About that lawprof letter....

Iowa lawprof Tung Yin (who did not vote for Bush) is very critical of the lawprof letter that opposes the appointment of John Roberts:

From the perspective of the goal of advocacy, I also have a hard time seeing how asserting by fiat that President Bush should appoint someone whose views are consistent with those of persons that Kerry would have appointed is likely to persuade the undecideds that Roberts should be kept off the Court.

"I haven't even run out of weed yet."

Don't you kind of love the holdouts? Don't you feel as though you've already seen a movie about them?

MORE: Slate has a nice article about the holdouts. Among them:

One ponytailed guy in bedroom slippers tells me he has to skip town immediately because the city has completely run out of weed.

"It's an overwhelming expectation that I feel."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports on an overnight bus trip, bringing Katrina evacuees — "five single men, a family of five, and a mother and her two grown daughters" — to Madison:

[Dane County social workers Rita] Adair and her partner in this rescue effort, Jenny Grether, rode in the back of the quiet bus, fielding calls from volunteers with questions and making plans for the return to Madison, expected to be some time this afternoon.

Grether reflected on her hopes for the group.

"Most importantly, that people can find a sense of happiness, peace and hope within their families. Hopefully they'll be able to connect with one another in a way they haven't been able to at shelters. For the single men, who have lost everything, I hope they'll be able to connect to a neighborhood and a larger community that is willing to try to support and understands what needs to happen to rebuild lives."

Adair said the effort, while worthwhile, has been difficult because she doesn't want to let anyone down - neither those in need nor their supporters in Madison.

"So many people gave so much in so many ways, that that became a vehicle of what I am expected to do," she said. "It's an overwhelming expectation that I feel."

How many stories like this are there all over the country? What an unusual situation to break up a large urban community and have very small segments of it welcomed into communities all over the country, into places that are much different from New Orleans. It can't be easy for people to leave home and come to a new place, even when the people in the new place are full of altruism and eagerness to help. Thanks to the good people who make great efforts to help tiny groups of Katrina evacuees like this.

The evolving brain.

The human brain is evolving rapidly, some scientists think:

It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago.

The new finding, reported in today's issue of Science by Bruce T. Lahn of the University of Chicago, and colleagues, could raise controversy because of the genes' role in determining brain size. New versions of the genes, or alleles as geneticists call them, appear to have spread because they enhanced brain function in some way, the report suggests, and they are more common in some populations than others.

Oh, no. One dreads reading on. I like to read about brain research and am glad to see we are evolving better brains, but... Well, we all go anti-science at some point, don't we?

A murder trial in Madison: will the jurors understand the "culture" and "etiquette" of hunting?

The NYT reports on a murder trial in what it calls "this liberal bastion," my city of Madison, Wisconsin. Why does the NYT care about a murder trial and what is the significance of the liberal politics in the location of the courthouse? The accused is a Hmong immigrant and the killings took place in the context of hunting:

A jury was chosen in this liberal bastion on Thursday for the trial of a Hmong immigrant charged with killing six hunters, causing consternation in the North Woods, where the shootings took place.

Some residents of Rice Lake, where all the victims lived or grew up, said they were concerned that the jurors from Dane County, which encompasses Madison, might not grasp the nuances of rural life.

"They are not as rural, and their culture and their lifestyle is quite different from ours up here in the north," said Renee Gralewicz, an ethnic studies instructor at the Rice Lake campus of the University of Wisconsin. "So we might have some people who really don't understand the culture of hunting and the etiquette and the ethics and how all of that plays out on the jury."

Judge Norman L. Yackel of Sawyer County Circuit Court ruled in June that the jury for the trial of the immigrant, Chai Soua Vang, would be chosen from Dane County after the defense argued that publicity and strong emotions in the Rice Lake area jeopardized Mr. Vang's chances for a fair trial.

The concern about the composition of the jury stems in part from the racial overtones of the case. Mr. Vang, 36, a refugee from Laos who lived in St. Paul, Minn., told police that he had been sitting in a tree stand on private hunting land about 25 miles northeast of Rice Lake one Sunday last November when the hunters, who were white, swore at him and used ethnic slurs.

Mr. Vang said he shot at the hunters after someone shot at him first.

"The rest of the group scramble for something at the ATV so I shot them at the ATV and ran toward them because I thought that they will get something a gun to shoot me," Mr. Vang wrote in a letter from jail to a reporter for The Chicago Tribune. The letter has been admitted as evidence in the case. "I feel that this incident is happen because people are not able to treated others with respect like they want to be treated and hatred toward other people or race."

One survivor told the police that Mr. Vang fired first.

Hmong hunters have complained of harassment from white hunters, some of whom point to a different hunting culture as the root of the problem. Many residents in Rice Lake, which is 230 miles northwest of Madison and has a population of 8,300, dispute the claim that racial tensions have been high in the area.

Would it be fairer to have this trial in a place where jurors had pre-existing ideas about the "culture" and "etiquette of hunting"? If understanding the hunting milieu is relevant, can't the prosecutor prove it? Or is the concern that the people of Madison will not understand the victims' behavior and will be unusually sympathetic to the racism theme in the defendant's argument that he felt threatened?

When did you stop watching "The Daily Show"?

This week.

It was once your favorite TV show, wasn't it?

Yes.

IN THE COMMENTS: I explain my reason for drawing the line now:

This week's show, the first post-Katrina coverage, has been just blatantly telegraphing from the very first moment that the whole point of the show is to slam Bush. I'm upset about the hurricane and find it very off-putting to see political ideologues salivating over a chance to get Bush over this. I'm not even sure that's what the show goes on to do. I just can't bear to watch it. Instinctively, I don't want to watch.

ABOUT THE COMMENTS: Lorie Byrd reads this post and one of the comments and responds:

When one commenter said that The Daily Show and Jon Stewart only poke fun at the “people in power” and that is why they are spending so much time attacking Bush over the Katrina response, another responded with this:

"As such, they have done their job. Of course they’re poking fun at the administration. But you can bet it’s more towards the “people in power.” Simply put, that means that if Dems had been in power, i can assure you that the coverage would have been the same.”

The Dems were in power. Which party are the mayor and governor from? There’s so much comedy material based on their performances, are you telling me they weren’t mocked mercilessly?

Katrina polls.

Yesterday, I blogged about a poll that showed a surprisingly low number of persons blamed Bush for the problems in New Orleans after the hurricane. Now there are more polls, and commenters say I'm obliged to update. I responded that I thought the new polls were asking a different question. It's different to ask the usual job approval question than to ask people to assign "blame." I'd answer those two questions differently. I wouldn't just "approve" of what any level of government did, but I'd also hesitate to assign "blame."

But let me turn to Mystery Pollster for an explanation of the different polls:

[B]y probing the dimension of blame and responsibility, this question applies a tougher standard than the job ratings summarized above. One may conclude the President or others are doing a "bad" or "terrible job," yet still not hold them "responsible" or "to blame" for the problems following the Hurricane.

Yeah, that's what I thought. And Mystery Pollster has two more posts on polls that came out today: here and here.

ADDED: I'm not one to follow the polls day by day. I blog when I find something striking or that I have something to add to. I'd hate to think that once I've blogged about something, I then have an obligation to blog about futher news stories on the subject, when they don't meet my normal blogging standard. An old blog post is what it is under its time stamp. I hope people understand that concept. I think they do, even when they decide to go ahead and attack you for having some inaccurate or incomplete old post. I can't monitor everything!

MORE: And I mean "inaccurate" in the sense of something becoming inaccurate because further news stories have come in. This was the case with an old post of mine about the London police shooting a man. There is also the problem of misreading the news in the first place, which I try not to do. I'd be most concerned about making corrections in that case. I'd like the think the posts are in good shape with respect to their original time stamps.

The new mystery.

The Piano Man's fifteen minutes of fame are over. It's time for the Unknown Woman:

She appeared from nowhere on a rain-tossed morning, sitting naked on the shoreline, unable to speak.

Now she sits in a hospital bed, staring into space, mute and expressionless, her charts naming her simply as “Unknown”.

The mysterious appearance of the Western woman, aged between 35 and 45, last week beside the runway of a disused airport has put Hong Kong authorities in a bind, the police chief handling the unusual case said on Wednesday.

“We’ve tried interpreters in many different languages and sign-language experts but none of them appear to get though to her,” chief inspector Victor Ng told reporters.

Boys and your ineffectual subtle cues.

They might not get them:

"If teachers attempt to control boys by subtle means, such as raised eyebrows, and the boys ignore these cues, it may be that they simply are not able to read them and decode them accurately," explained Professor David Skuse, whose team at the Institute of Child Health in London conducted the research.

"It's not that they are being wilfully oppositional," he told the British Association's Festival of Science, which this year is being held in Dublin, Ireland.

The study on 600 children between the ages of six and 17 was actually undertaken to investigate aspects of autism, a predominantly male condition.

The institute hopes eventually to find the genetic factors that lead more boys than girls into this disorder....

The differences at school-entry were specifically to do with the facial expressions tasks.

"At six years, 70% of boys are below the mean for girls; so in other words, 70% of boys are worse than 50% of girls," Professor Skuse explained.

"It means there are a lot of boys at school entry who are very poor at differentiating other people's emotions from their facial expressions.

Males eventually catch up with females, however, so, guys, don't try to use this as an excuse your adult relationship gaffes.

Having two mothers at the genetic level.

It has to happen sooner or later, right?

MORE: Here:

On June 20, at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) in Copenhagen, scientists announced a development in stem cell research that could allow gay couples to have children that share both of their genetic make-up, instead of just one partner sharing a genetic link.

Researchers discovered that they could develop primordial germ cells (PGC) from embryonic stem cells. Stem cells are the master cells of the body, appearing when embryos are just a few days old and developing into every type of cell and tissue in the body, including sperm and eggs.
PCGs are present during the fetal stage and then develop into either sperm or eggs. By gaining the ability to engineer changes in the PCGs, scientists could develop an egg from the PCGs of a man wishing to pair his genetic material with his partner’s sperm. Similarly, a woman’s PCG could be developed into sperm cells that could be used to fertilize her partner’s eggs. In either case, a unique embryo could then naturally form with the genetics of both same-sex partners.