DC United
My first ever soccer/football game.
Approaching the Stadium, Barra Brava drumming
How does more snow equal global warming?
Article published on GlobalPost.com on February 11, 2010.
by Tim Fitzsimons
BOSTON — You may not have heard of “Climategate” or the “hockey stick controversy.” But that doesn’t mean you haven’t found yourself thinking like a climate change skeptic lately.
Perhaps you’re reading from Washington, D.C., marooned at home by a second consecutive blizzard. Or maybe you’re in Scotland, which just recorded its coldest winter in more than a century. Maybe you’re just a little too cold to feel like the world is getting warmer.
"There’s nothing like a very cold winter to convince another percentage of the American public that global warming is not happening,” said American University professor Matthew Nisbet at Harvard University this week.
Indeed, the Republican Party in Virginia seized on the mid-Atlantic “snowpocalypse” to produce an advertisement criticizing Democrats in Congress who support "cap-and-trade" policies that provide economic incentives to reduce pollution emissions.
The ad advises viewers to call their representative and “tell them how much global warming you get this weekend. Maybe they’ll come help you shovel.”
(The ad has since been pulled from YouTube, possibly because of the highly negative coverage it generated.)
But weather hasn’t been the only thing raining on the climate change parade. A long list of setbacks have fanned the flames of climate gloom since the breakout 2006 Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” energized public attention toward the issue.
As China rose earlier than expected as the world’s top CO2 emitter, followed by a worldwide economic downturn, fewer people list climate change as a top priority.
Throw in the failure of the Copenhagen talks to produce a substantial climate agreement. The percentage of people worldwide who doubt the research backing climate change continues to grow.
Why such a change in the climate of public opinion?
The Road
The Pacific Coast Highway.
More to come soon from my drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in California!
Christmas Caroling in the Library
Some carolers just came into the library to break the monotony of my Logic study session. Fun!
Rebuilding Faith: The Iraqi Mandaeans of Worcester
Rebuilding Faith: The Iraqi Mandaeans of Worcester from Tim Fitzsimons on Vimeo.
Iraq's Mandaeans were targeted by sectarian violence following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Chased from their country, these refugees have scattered around the world in search of safety.
But the delicacy of their religion, which is closed, has presented serious challenges to its survival. A small group of Mandaeans is forming in Worcester, Massachusetts, where they hope to rebuild their community.
This is their story.
This movie was produced by Tufts University students in the Experimental College course "Producing Films for Social Change."
The filmmakers are:
Jess Bidgood
Kyle Chayka
Nora Chovanec
Tim Fitzsimons
and the fixer/translator is:
Aseel Maarij
Hey all, this is the production I have been working on for some time in my course Producing Films for Social Change at Tufts University.
It's a story I have touched on before in some work I did in Jordan. Please comment and let me know what you think.
Gold
Gold is the power of the history of the city. It has a golden age, a golden glow, and golden bodies. Gold is why people come, gold is why people return, gold is why Beirut exists. Its golden memories give the city its life. These memories are so pervasive and so convincing and so obscuring that everyone—everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest man—can recall the glory days as if they had lived them. Foreigners too recall their own glory days—the line of taxis waiting outside the Commodore, where correspondents would drink Black Label and wait for disaster to strike. The specter of Beirut’s formerly high caliber of war continues to lure journalists to this day.
They call the 1960s the "golden years," which fits. Photos from back then are sepia. The storytellers say that old Beirut imported more gold and jewels than any other foreign product. Its people tell stories of scents and sounds, carnal stories that fit our empty spaces like tailored puzzle pieces, tuned to our deepest and guiltiest wants.
We all know personally the qualities of the city’s modern gold: it’s the baking warm glow of the sandstone of the French Embassy, peeking distantly through the flowers bubbling over its walls. It is the glint of sunlight on the Mediterranean Sea and of excavated Corinthian columns. It is also the golden glow of burning phosphorous, the golden glow of whiskey, the golden glow of wealth and celebrity temporarily gracing its shores, the golden glow of stately homes and beautiful streets and distant mountains.
But its color has always just been a façade; it’s always been dirty. When the next war comes, the storytellers will look back at these years, our years, through the golden lens of optimism and see only the north side of Corniche al Mazraa, see only the 6 pm glow of the setting Mediterranean sun and hear only the soft, belly-shaking conversation of harmless men sitting on vegetable crates in Hamra’s endearingly dirty streets. They won’t remember the mountains of trash pushing into the sea, they will forget the unpleasantness south of the city. They’ll forget the bandanaed gangs of bored unemployed boys zooming around on their mopeds and causing occasional death. We’ll forget all that, too, because those too uneducated to write down bad memories will be the first to be killed or deadened, leaving this weighty task to the privileged few whose understanding of the city evolved from the commanding view from their twentieth story balcony gleaming shiny white tile from the sweat of seven Filipina maids.
Like a phosphorescent flare streaking down from heaven during an Israeli attack, Beirut glows gold. It is bedecked with gold like its women are with jewelry, like its buildings are with pockmarks, like its beaches are with trash.
So when all of what we know is gone, they will remember the golden time. They will remember themselves and how their hopes and dreams were right, and they will remember that everyone else fucked everything up because they just didn’t realize that it should have been done this way, and it will go on again and again.
(click "continue reading")