Geography for TSA Agents: The District of Columbia (UPDATED)

Posted on July 18, 2014 by wellsdc

This is a service offered by Cryptic Philosopher, free of charge, for agents of the federal Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), due to recent reports of some confusion among TSA airport security screeners regarding certain areas of the United States. Today, we will be discussing the District of Columbia.

The District of Columbia (or “DC” for short) is a 68.3 square-mile district located on the north banks of the Potomac River. It is surrounded on three sides by the state of Maryland, and it borders the state of Virginia along the Potomac.
It is also known as Washington; Washington, DC; “the District;” or simply “DC.”
The District is divided into four quadrants: northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast, with the U.S. Capitol at the center of the dividing lines.
It is not part of any of the fifty U.S. states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and so on through Wyoming.) The United States Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, Clause 17, gives Congress authority over a federal district to serve as the “Seat of Government of the United States,” which can be no bigger than “ten Miles square,” or one hundred square miles.
Congress passed the Residence Act in 1790, which our first president, George Washington, signed into law on July 16 of that year. That law allowed the creation of a federal capital along the Potomac River, although President Washington got to decide exactly where.

Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, July 7, 2014

Posted on July 7, 2014 by wellsdc

Introducing TV’s Best Female Monster Yet, Lili Loofbourow, New York Magazine, July 3, 2014

In horror, once a person has been cast as a victim, a victim they remain — or at best, a deeply damaged survivor. In Orphan Black, the victim becomes the monster becomes the victim again with bewildering and humorous ease. Just when you think you’ve settled, the camera cocks its head, says “don’t be baby,” and refuses to let things be so simple. The camera confounds our relationship to Helena by seesawing the horror script, and in doing so, makes us rethink what a female monster can be. You’re forced to shift your sympathies on a shot-by-shot basis.

Judge says man who raped sleeping woman is not a “classic rapist,” just “lost control”, Katie McDonough, Salon, July 3, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, June 26, 2014

Posted on June 26, 2014 by wellsdc

How Did This Ancient Civilization Avoid War for 2,000 Years? Annalee Newitz, io9, June 24, 2014

Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults. Obviously people had conflicts, sometimes with deadly results — graves reveal ample skull injuries caused by blows to the head. But there is no evidence that any Harappan city was ever burned, besieged by an army, or taken over by force from within. Sifting through the archaeological layers of these cities, scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction. There are no enormous caches of weapons, and not even any art representing warfare.

How WW I, British Greed, and Oil Distorted Modern Iran, Farhad Malekafzali Informed Comment, June 24, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, June 18, 2014

Posted on June 18, 2014 by wellsdc

Erik Adam Klausz [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)], via Flickr The Truth About Pavlov’s Dogs Is Pretty Disturbing, Esther Inglis-Arkell, io9, June 17, 2014

When did Pavlov’s dogs start salivating? When they heard a bell, you say? Au contraire. Pavlov’s dogs started salivating when they saw lab coats. Workers at a lab that studied digestion noticed that the dogs used in the experiments were drooling for seemingly no reason at all.

It was only Ivan Pavlov, a scientist working at the lab, who made the connection between the lab coats and the drool. The dogs, Pavlov reasoned, knew that they were soon going to be fed whenever they saw a lab coat. What intrigued Pavlov was the fact that a physical response could be produced solely by way of a mental association. The dogs couldn’t drool on command consciously, but they could be trained to do so just the same.

Agriculture isn’t Natural, Keith Kloor, Collide-A-Scape, June 12, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, June 5, 2014

Posted on June 5, 2014 by wellsdc

Life in the Valley of Death, Scott Anderson, The New York Times Magazine, May 29, 2014 (h/t Lucy Kafanov)

Of all the atrocities committed throughout Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, the one that compels Masovic the most is Srebrenica. In some respects, this is hardly surprising: Srebrenica has come to symbolize the Bosnian war’s unspeakable brutality and the international community’s colossal failure when confronting it. Located in a tiny valley in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the site of one of the war’s most desperate contests, a marooned enclave in which a couple of thousand government soldiers, along with as many as 40,000 mostly Muslim refugees, held out for three years against a siege by Serb separatist fighters.

For more than half that time, Srebrenica was under international military protection, one of six United Nations-designated “safe areas” established throughout the country in 1993. That status proved meaningless when the Serbs launched an all-out assault in July 1995. Instead of resisting, the U.N. Protection Force in Srebrenica stood down, and over the next few days, the Serbs hunted and killed more than 8,000 men and boys, most of whom were trying to escape the enclave by foot. It was the worst slaughter, and the first officially recognized act of genocide, to occur on European soil since World War II.

Why does anyone care if celebrity gossip is ‘clickbaity’? Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, June 3, 2013

There is a strain of purists on the internet with a certain set of rules that they want people like me to abide by. One of which is that they want all headlines to give away all the pertinent information in the article so that they don’t have to “click” on it or, rather, read it, in order to know what’s going on. This is not always possible, if only because we just can’t actually make headlines that long. Which is why we write entire articles rather than just headlines. The point of the headline, truly, is to get you to read the article. This is not a big secret or conspiracy.

Photo credit: By Maurits90 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Monday Morning Cute: Memorial Day Edition

Posted on May 26, 2014 by wellsdc

I found this picture in an Imgur album, and tracked down photo credits at Retronaut:

“Marine First Sergeant Neil I. Shober of Fort Wayne, Indiana, shares the spoils of war bananas with a native goat, one of the few survivors of the terrific naval and air bombardment in support of the Marines hitting the beach on the Japanese-mandated island of Saipan.” – National Museum of the Pacific War

Saipan is a 12-mile-by-5.6-mile island in the Northern Marianas Islands. From June 15 to July 9, 1944, the U.S. fought to take control of the island from Japan, which had held it since 1914. 71,000 American troops met 31,000 Japanese. The U.S. suffered 3,426 killed and about 13,000 wounded. It was the most costly battle of the Pacific War up to that point for the U.S.

Of the 31,000 Japanese soldiers, only 921 were taken prisoner. The rest were either killed in action or committed suicide. Out of a civilian population of around 25,000 people, an estimated 22,000 died. Many of them committed suicide, allegedly with the encouragement of the emperor, who promised them “an equal spiritual status in the afterlife with those of soldiers perishing in combat,” according to a Wikipedia article citing a book by David Bergamini.

But this goat survived, and got some bananas. Whether this scene is more cute or horrific is up to each of us, I guess, but war is hell.

Photo credit: National Museum of the Pacific War.

The Pocahontas Argument

Posted on May 20, 2014 by wellsdc

The following argument was actually made, out loud, during proceedings before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Bostic v. Schaefer, a same-sex marriage case (the context is a comparison between anti-same-sex marriage laws and anti-interracial marriage laws struck down in Loving v. Virginia):

There is a history, prior to the Jim Crow era laws, the anti-miscegenation laws. The idea of interracial marriage was not prohibited. It still fit within the fundamental right of marriage, the idea of a man-woman marriage. Before Virginia passed those affirmative anti-miscegenation laws, it might not have been the social norm, but people certainly could have married, and indeed did marry, across racial lines. Pocahontas married John Rolfe in the early 1600s and their marriage wasn’t declared unconstitutional

David S. Cohen at Slate deconstructs some of the problems with this argument, although I suspect one could write a book detailing just the legal or historical problems with it. As Cohen notes: Continue reading →

When the Baby Kicks

Posted on May 7, 2014 by wellsdc

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has been in the news for his interesting take on freedom of religion under the First Amendment:

Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.

“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”

Thomas Gainsborough [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Yes, 21st-century America should totally take all of its cues from this cat.

He said something else interesting, though, that seems to have been largely overlooked:

Chief Justice Moore later defined “life” via Blackstone’s Law — a book that American lawyers have “sadly forgotten” — as beginning when “the baby kicks.” “Today,” he said, “our courts say it’s not alive ’til the head comes out.”

He is referring to the Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone, first published in 1766. I figured I’d see what Blackstone actually said about the issue, because that’s how I roll. In Book 1 (The Rights of Persons), Chapter 1 (Of the Absolute Rights of Individuals), Blackstone writes on pages 125-26: Continue reading →

It’s Not Just Crimea

Posted on May 6, 2014 by wellsdc

Russia isn’t just mucking about in Crimea. Foreign Affairs has an article reviewing the long-simmering conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that wants to join Armenia (h/t Doug):

The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan started on the eve of the Soviet breakup, as ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan’s province of Nagorno-Karabakh rallied to join Armenia. Moscow armed both sides and played them against each other, turning a local dispute over the status of a territory inhabited by 90,000 people into a regional war. For close to six years, the newly independent states of Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over the territory, leaving 30,000 dead and creating around a million new refugees. Eventually, Armenia was victorious, and it took control of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven other Azerbaijani districts. Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, April. 21, 2014

Posted on April 21, 2014 by wellsdc

Торжествуют (They are triumphant) by Vasily Vereshchagin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons The Lost Empire that Ruled the Silk Road, Annalee Newitz, io9, April 15, 2014

Today, the city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan is relatively remote, known mostly for its magnificent medieval ruins. But over a millennium ago, it was one of the richest cities on the infamous trade route known as the Silk Road. Back in the 600s CE, that route was called simply “the road to Samarkand.”

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The term “Silk Road” was popularized by European explorers in the nineteenth century. German scientist Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term in 1877, while attempting to follow its eroded pathways centuries after the world economy had come to rely on ocean shipping routes. Also, there is no evidence that anyone traveled along the entire route from Europe to China until Marco Polo wrote about his journey in the thirteenth century. (Polo probably wasn’t the first traveler to do this, but his account popularized the idea and led to many more journeys.)

But for most people the Silk Road was just a local highway system. They used the routes to go from one city to another, and more rarely to cross the borders between empires.

Bill Russell, Boston Celtics Veteran, Sounds Off On Gay Athletes, Jim Vertuno, AP, April 10, 2014

NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell said Wednesday that gay athletes’ current fight for equality and acceptance reminds him of some of the same struggles black athletes faced in the 1960s. Continue reading →

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