So, was it good for you?

Babel starts like this: “It’s almost new. Three hundred cartridges. The guy who gave it to me said you can hit as far as three kilometers.” Why? Because, on one level, Babel is about a gun. In this way, and in this way alone, Babel is a simple movie.

On another level, however, Babel is about Genesis 11:1-9. I’ll quote just a few portions:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel (confusion); because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

How is about this, this confounding of language? Babel has four settings — Morocco, San Diego, Mexico, and Japan — we weave between this locations not unlike Magnolia, Short Cuts, and Crash. The four story lines appear separate, but come quietly and violently together. In Morocco, we have a goatherder and his family, and we also have ?? and ?? (played by Brad Pitt, at his most powerful and vulnerable, and Cate Blanchett, respectively) on vacation, trying to resurrect their marriage. In San Diego we have ?? (played by Oscar-nominee ???), the live-in caretaker of two children. In Mexico, we have ??’s family, and the location of her son’s eminent(wc?) wedding. And in Japan, we have ?? (played by ??), a deaf student, pining for understanding, love, and a better sense of her own sexuality. I’d rather not write more than that for fear of spoiling the plot. I will tell you this: follow the gun.

The acting in Babel, top to bottom, is the best I’ve seen all year, and once again leaves me dumb-founded how, in the nam of that is holy and sacred, did Jennifer Hudson win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress? But how did Brad Pitt — vulnerable and enraged, weary and weeping — get ignored?

But back to the movie, a film about miscommunication, the problem with the exaggeration and fear-inducement of the news, the tragedies of lies, and the pining we share for understanding from our fellow earthlings. Babel, in short, reminds us that suffering and sorrow can be communicated regardless of language. But more importantly, we are reminded of this: kindness is too.

The problem of poachers is a constant, particularly in national parks located in the Republic of Congo, Costa Rico, The Galapagos Islands, and the Shavia Wildlife Refuge in Russia’s Altai Republic. So, those hired to protect the wildlife in those areas are going hi-tech.

According to a recent article The Economist, the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Congo is 4,200 square kilometers and has 14 park rangers. In the past year, they’ve caught no poachers. This isn’t because there’s no poaching. For example:

Last year poachers are estimated to have killed more than 23,000 African elephants. According to a study by the University of Washington, that is about one in 17 of the continent’s total.

So the good folks running the park are going to place special metal detectors and smoke detectors (poachers often smoke the meat) along trails and in trees. When a poacher trips a detector, a signal goes right to the rangers with exact coordinates. Many people in the Congo believe, quite strongly, in magic, and “local people will receive no explanation for the rangers’ new powers.” The hope is that this will both stop poachers in their tracks (or rather, the elephants’ tracks) and discourage poaching in the first place.

So what can you do from the comfort of your computer? We’ll give you three:

1. Sign the pledge from Wild Aid and the Active Conservation Awareness Program, urging world leaders to do their part in putting an end to poaching. They’re hoping to get 25 million signatures by 2008. Let’s be part of this effort.
2. Consider donating a measly five smackers to Wild Aid. Just click this sentence. Just so you know they’re as legit as it gets, you can click right here to go to a National Geographic article on the organization. And you can listen to the executive direction of Wild Aid on NPR by clicking here.
3. Tell a pal about Wild Aid. You can do this by clicking this sentence, or by clicking the “Share This” button at the bottom left of this post. This is a very important action because Wild Aid “guarantee[s] that 100% of donations from the public go straight to the field.”

The occupation of Iraq, besides taking the lives of 3, 511 American soldiers, besides taking the lives of Iraqi civilians, besides costing American taxpayers like you and like me $436 billion and climbing by $200 million each day, the occupation of Iraq might be boosting crime here. Read for yourself:

The prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have put pressure on the National Guard, whose citizen-soldiers can be called away from civilian jobs for months or years at a time to fight beside regular soldiers in war zones.

About 16 percent of the 182,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are members of the National Guard.

But here’s where we get to the smaller bite out of crime:

Communities across America have been especially hard-hit by the deployment of some 24,000 police officers since September 11, 2001. Police officers make up 5.1 percent of the National Guard and military reserve.

Repeated deployments to war zones do more than mess with police schedules — the loss of just one officer can devastate a small town, where police forces are shoestring operations and the jobs of the town’s “first responders” often overlap.

Because so many of our brave boys and girls in blue are fighting unnecessarily in Iraq, police departments do less patrols and less community outreach. And because, “by law, employers must leave a Guard member’s job open while the worker is deployed,” police departments are struggling to fill slots temporarily. Why? Because the kinds of folks who become cops are also the kind of folks who join the military, and because training and recruitment take time, money, and people, and many of those people are, go figure, in Iraq.

So what can we do? We’re going to bring your attention to the Wednesday we wrote a while back called “Memorial Day, Everyday,” which includes five ways we can help bring a peaceful and successful end to the occupation of Iraq, convince others this can truly happen, and help our returning soldiers in the process.

We’ve dedicated two Wednesdays to the occupation of Iraq and the War in Afghanistan. One covered ways to support our troops in the field and those who have returned (see “Truly Supporting Our Troops”). The other firmly addressed ending the occupation of Iraq as soon as possible (see “Memorial Day, Everyday”). We’ve also shared the story of Bryan Anderson, a triple-amputee veteran, and the accessible and powerful poetry of Iraq vet Brian Turner.

So today we’re going to tackle a war that doesn’t exist yet, but unfortunately could. There are increasing reports that the feds are seriously considering attacking Iran if they develop nuclear weapons. We’ll file that one under “Worst Ideas of 2007.” Here’s how StopIranWar.com puts it:

All Americans want to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons and interfering on the ground inside Iraq. Yet President Bush’s saber rattling gives the US little additional leverage to engage and dissuade Iran, and, more than likely, simply accelerates a dangerous slide into war. The United States can do better than this.

Whatever the pace of Iran’s nuclear efforts, in the give and take of the Administration’s rhetoric and accusations, we are approaching the last moments to head off looming conflict.

Cannot the world’s most powerful nation deign speak to the resentful and scheming regional power that is Iran? Can we not speak of the interests of others, work to establish a sustained dialogue, and seek to benefit the people of Iran and the region? Could not such a dialogue, properly conducted, begin a process that could, over time, help realign hardened attitudes and polarizing views within the region? And isn’t it easier to undertake such a dialogue now, before more die, and more martyrs are created to feed extremist passions?

So we’re going to do our small part at Progressive Wednesday. You’ll notice there’s a new side-bar “ad,” this one linking you to StopIranWar.com, a website launched in conjunction with Wes Clark (and his PAC, Securing America’s Future) and VoteVets.org. By clicking the banner, you’ll be taken to a page where you can become the co-signer of a petition to President Bush, urging him to make every effort possible to avoid another very avoidable conflict.

If you click this sentence, you’ll be taken to a page where you can write to media outlets, write to your Representatives and Senators, and write to your pals about this important effort for peace.

Here’s a problem, courtesy of the Mayo Clinic:

The annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that about one-third of U.S. children are overweight or at risk of becoming overweight. In total, about 25 million U.S. children and adolescents are overweight or nearly overweight.

So what’s the big deal? Well, one of them is, of course, diabetes. According to the National Institutes of Health:

Diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases in school-aged children. About 75 percent of all newly diagnosed cases of type 1 diabetes occur in individuals younger than 18 years of age. Most children and adolescents diagnosed with type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese.

But today’s good news goes like this:

Kellogg Co., the world’s largest cereal maker, has agreed to raise the nutritional value of cereals and snacks it markets to children. The company said it won’t promote foods in TV, radio, print or Web site ads that reach audiences at least half of whom are under age 12 unless a single serving of the product meets these standards:

• No more than 200 calories.
• No trans fat and no more than 2 grams of saturated fat.
• No more than 230 milligrams of sodium, except for Eggo frozen waffles.
• No more than 12 grams of sugar, not counting sugar from fruit, dairy and vegetables.

Kellogg said it would reformulate products to meet these criteria or stop marketing them to children under 12 by the end of 2008. A third of the cereals it markets to children in the U.S. fall outside standards.

We fall on the side of social libertarianism, but there’s always a caveat: the protection of children. If adults (and adults includes companies) are harming children, the culture as a whole has an obligation to protect these children. This protection, of course, also includes protecting children from their parents and guardians. Now, we don’t believe the cops should show up at someone’s door if they serve their kids caramel apples and Twinkies for dinner. But we also have no problem forcing companies to stop marketing horrible food to kids or making the food to begin with. As a culture, we’ve already accepted this manner of treating children. That’s why there are social workers, mandatory physical education classes, child-protective services, foster families, age requirements for cigarettes, after-school programs, and The State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

You might be thinking: So Matt, or should I say Mr. Doom and Gloom, what’s a progressive to do? Well, thanks for asking other voice in my head. Some of the solutions are pretty obvious: encourage your children to exercise, steer them clear of television and video games, eat as a family, control their portions of food, feed them foods high in whole grains and protein, and low in sugars.

But here’s another way — pressure companies to do what’s right instead of what’s good for the stockholders. How can we do this? Well, since it’s the American pastime, we can always sue. We can write letters to our government officials and the companies themselves. Or, we can do the easiest thing possible: we can boycott. Whether or not we have kids of our own, door number three is always the most powerful, the most potent, and, in this case, the most immediately healthful for our American children. As progressives, let’s not forget the discerning power of our pockets and purses.

Shot of Apple Jacks by this find photographer.

Let’s rack this one up as “Not the Dandiest News for Our Avian Friends.” According to Live Science:

The populations of nearly two dozen common American birds — the fence-sitting meadowlark, the frenetic Rufous hummingbird and the whippoorwill with its haunting call — are half what they were 40 years ago, a new analysis found.

Twenty different common bird species — those with populations more than half a million and covering a wide range — have seen populations fall at least in half since 1967, according to a study by the National Audubon Society.

And why is this happening? It probaby won’t come as a shock:

Many of the species in decline depend on open grassy habitats that are disappearing because of suburban sprawl. Climate change and invasive species are to blame, too.

But why is this so significant? Birds are central to the homeostasis of our ecosystems. They do all of the following and more:

• Spread the seeds of trees and grasses.
• Pollinate flowers.
• Eat dead animals, essentially cleaning the land.
• Gobble insects.
• Keep down the populations of mice, rabbits, and squirrels.

But aren’t they even more than that? They sing — what better way to wake in the morning? They’re gorgeous in flight, defying the laws of the landlocked, increasing the overall beauty of our already beautiful world. So we owe it to the birds, to the rest of the natural world, and to ourselves, to do something about this problem.

On three previous Wednesdays, we shared ways in which we can all be better stewards of the environment and help reduce our carbon footprints on the earth (see “Saving the Planet from the Comfort of Our Homes,”The Grandeur of Earth Day,” and “I See Trees of Green“). As for suburban sprawl? Well, if you’re thinking of moving, consider buying instead of building, consider moving closer to your job in the city instead of further away. But back to the birds…. Here are three simple actions we can all take:

Add plants native to your area that help common birds. The National Audubon Society has specific suggestions depending on where you live (just click right here).

Change your light bulbs. You read that right. Since global climate change is hurting common birds, just change your regular incandescent light bulbs and replace each of them with a compact florescent light bulb.

Sign this electronic letter to your Senators and Representatives to restore the protections of the Clean Water Act to include wetlands (just click right here). Please consider personalizing the letter a bit as these tend to work a bit better.

Let’s end a bit of interesting wisdom from aviator Charles Lindbergh, shortly before his death: “I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.”

Last week we mentioned the addition of a new swap and replace: each month we’ll pull four of our “16 Daily Reads,” and replace them with four more. When we do this, we’ll give you a pithy primer about the new sites, so you’ll know what they’re up to and why we dig on the sites.

And now here’s the newest improvement — we’ve got a new sidebar item: a text-message sign-up tool. All you’ve got to do is …. .

Trust us when we say these two things: 1. We won’t share your information with anyone. Not even the feds. 2. We won’t inundate you with text-messages. We’ll only send a message on Wednesdays, and every once and a while about other important changes, improvements, or contests on the site.

Thanks again for all your support.

Since we launched Progressive Wednesday that fateful Groundhog’s Day this past February, we’ve maintained a list of our “16 Daily Reads” on our sidebar. Despite all the changes and additions to the site since 2/2/07, we haven’t changed our sidebar blog-roll/link-list. So, we’ve decided that every month we’ll pull four sites, add four more, and give you a little primer about each of the newbies so you can see why we dig on them like we dig on chocolate-covered pretzels, tunes by Anathallo, small dogs, and the city of Buffalo.

So say goodbye, arrivederci, and sayounara to Stefan G. Bucher’s Daily Monster, Off Wing Opinion, Boing Boing, and A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania. They remain quality websites, and they might be back one rainy day, but we’re all about bringing a variety of progressive and interesting sites your way. And now, for the hellos….

1. Live Science — Imagine Discover Magazine, only a little hipper, and easier to understand — that’s Life Science. It’s less about feature-length articles, and more about pithy pieces that reveal interesting info about animals, the environment, health, history, space, “the strange,” and technology.
2. 3191 a year of mornings — Much like the aforementioned A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania, 3191 is a daily photo based on location. The difference here is that the site shares two pictures every day taken by two friends — Stephanie and Mav — who live 3191 miles apart. The photos, juxtaposed as they are, make for an interesting work of conceptual and visual art. To learn more about it, just click this sentence.
3. Mashable — Mashable.com is my new favorite site to learn about Web 2.0, and the comings and goings of new Internet start-ups (like VuMe, Reactee, and Snooth) and Internet mainstays (like MySpace, Firefox, and Flickr).
4. Sabres Report — Okay, we know the NHL hockey season just wrapped in, of all un-hockey places, Anaheim (it honestly hurts to type that). But here’s the deal — we Western New Yorkers… well, a little slice of our hearts lives by the Sabres, and a little slice of our hearts dies by the Sabres. There is no such thing as the “off-season” to us.

A faithful (and I do mean faithful) reader of Progressive Wednesday recently brought Regina Spektor to my attention, and I’ve been “in like” with this singer ever since. Her voice is unusual, but in a great way: it’s baby-doll cute at times, and at others, it’s purely angelic. To be honest, I’m not really sure how she pulls it off, let alone how some stuffy, starched-shirt of a record exec actually had the guts to think Spektor would be able to pull it off commercially, which she has.

Below, you’ll find a video that I oooh and ahhh over ever time I give it a spin. The tune’s called “Fidelity,” and the song breaks the tried-and-true rules of most pop music: 1. It’s instrumentally spare; 2. The chorus is shifting and delightfully unique; 3. It’s not the bridge that leads us to the climax.

And the video? The video plays like they dipped the song into Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art — it’s gloriously quirky, confounding, and explosive. It can be neither easily explained, nor, as is the case with most MTV junk, easily explained away.

For these reasons, and more, I give you “Fidelity.” As the opening words gently command, “Shake it up.”

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Editor’s Note: While researching Spektor, I stumbled on the song “Us.” “Us” is like David Bowie’s “Heroes” mixed with classical music. It is, in a word, lovely.

Dear Readers,

Our apologies for a Thursday full of technical glitches. First the site was up. Then the site was up but messed up like a pug’s mug. Then the site was down. Then sort of up, the way Congress is sort of useful. Now we’re back, after 18 hours of putting the Humpty that is Progressive Wednesday back together again. (All the king’s horses actually came in handy, by the way, but man, they leave a stinky trail.)

Thank you for hanging on with us. We’d have you send letters of complaint to our web-hosting provider, but we’re afraid they’d all but shut us down again.

XOXO,

Matt and Eric

Touch of Sound is one of those under-the-under-the-radar films. It’s a film that shatters your notions of documentary film-making, the concept of sound, the limits (or lack thereof) of disabilities, and music, in this case, percussion. The spine of Touch the Sound is Evelyn Glennie, “first person in musical history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist.” She’s worked with top-notch musicians like Bela Fleck, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Bjork, Bobby McFerrin, and Sting. She gives over 100 performances with orchestras and musical artists each year. She’s won two Grammy Awards. Oh, and one other thing — she’s deaf.

How does she explain her talents in spite of what most would call a “disability?” As Glennie reminds us, sound is all about physical space being altered, and we experience sound by way of a physical reaction to waves. For most of us, this occurs through our ears. For Glennie, it’s a whole body experience. We see this played out in the film in many ways — through her jaw-dropping-gorgeous improvisational recording sessions with Fred Frith, through her tapping of random objects on her family’s farm, through her practices with traditional Japanese percussionists, through her teaching session with a hearing-impaired teenager.

To demonstrate how important the “location” of sound and movement of particles can be for us, the gutsy-as-hell Glennie sets up a snare drum right smack in the middle of Grand Central Station, and plays one of the most impressive drum solos I’ve ever heard. The people in the station end up looking at the ceiling because the echo is smacking them in the ears. Glennie puts it this way: “Hearing is a form of touch. You feel like you could almost reach out to that sound and feel that sound. You feel it through your body and sometimes it almost hits your face.”

Sound — the film reminds us, again and again — surrounds us: footsteps, construction sites, cars whizzing and honking, cell phones, blaring headphones, air conditioners, birds, suitcases being dragged, the chatter and babble of those nearby, babies crying. We forget it or ignore it most of the time. But — just as feelings linger, inspiration lingers, childhood lingers, and tragedies linger — sound lingers.

And in Touch the Sound, we also get to experience, not just Glennie’s phenomenal talents, and not just her wisdom on the subject of sound and percussion, but we hear the differences of place. Through the movie, we travel to Japan, New York City, Scotland, Santa Cruz, and Germany, hearing the different tones of each of those locations, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t stay with me.

Remember, Glennie is almost completely deaf, but she adds this toward the end of the movie: “The opposite of sound definitely isn’t silence. I wonder if it’s something more static. It’s the closest thing I can imagine to death.” If she’s right, and I’m willing to wager she is, then that means music, well, that means music is life.

Listen (and see) for yourself:

Editor’s Note: This is the first winner of our best photo of the week, as chosen by our photo staff. Winners get highlighted here and on our MySpace page, and also receive a special prize in the mail.

If you’re a photographer and you’d like to be considered for our daily, weekly, and monthly photos, just click on the Flickr icon on our right sidebar (or right here), and sign up (which you can learn about by clicking here).

You can check out other pictures by this fantastic photographer, by clicking the photo below.

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This Week’s Best Photo of Our Beautiful World

(as featured on June 5, 2007)

Picture clicked by This Fantastic Photographer.

For those of you keeping score at home, 9 lives in dog years would equal 1.285714 repeated.

Problem:

I write about this issue with a degree of expertise that is unmatched by any other topic. I had no pets growing up. Well, that’s if you don’t count the newt I had when I was ten that crawled out the tank and went missing, only to turn up two months later alive and well, swimming in our basement that was flooded with two feet of water. (“This is the happiest day of my life!” I yelled, as my mother wept for the destruction of all the furniture in the basement.)

Then I married a vet student; that was the end of that. Three rabbits, a parrot, two tortoises, two terrapins, a saltwater fish tank, a dog, and countless hours helping my wife study for exams later, to say that I know a thing or two about animals and pet ownership is like saying Wayne Gretzky was a good goal scorer. (Did I just compare myself to Wayne Gretzky? Oh well.)

Needless to say, or perhaps not so needless, our animals get great care. Having a live-in vet doesn’t hurt anything. But many pets get neglected, abused, abandoned, and thrown in shelters at the rate of 8 million per year. People are forced to put animals down because they lack the funds for proper veterinary care. They can�’t give their animals the lives they deserve. We can help change that.

.

Make Progress:

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

We’ve domesticated these animals; we have an obligation to provide the highest level of care possible. By Gandhi’s standards, it follows that we have an obligation to make our nation greater. Here’s how we can do that.

• Donate
• Contribute or Apply
• Visit
• Adopt
• Report

For those of you keeping score at home, 9 lives in dog years would equal 1.285714 repeated.

Problem:

I write about this issue with a degree of expertise that is unmatched by any other topic. I had no pets growing up. Well, that’s if you don’t count the newt I had when I was ten that crawled out the tank and went missing, only to turn up two months later alive and well, swimming in our basement that was flooded with two feet of water. (“This is the happiest day of my life!” I yelled, as my mother wept for the destruction of all the furniture in the basement.)

Then I married a vet student; that was the end of that. Three rabbits, a parrot, two tortoises, two terrapins, a saltwater fish tank, a dog, and countless hours helping my wife study for exams later, to say that I know a thing or two about animals and pet ownership is like saying Wayne Gretzky was a good goal scorer. (Did I just compare myself to Wayne Gretzky? Oh well.)

Needless to say, or perhaps not so needless, our animals get great care. Having a live-in vet doesn’t hurt anything. But many pets get neglected, abused, abandoned, and thrown in shelters at the rate of 8 million per year. People are forced to put animals down because they lack the funds for proper veterinary care. They can�’t give their animals the lives they deserve. We can help change that.

.

Make Progress:

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

We’ve domesticated these animals; we have an obligation to provide the highest level of care possible. By Gandhi’s standards, it follows that we have an obligation to make our nation greater. Here’s how we can do that.

• Donate
• Contribute or Apply
• Visit
• Adopt
• Report