The Drone Hearings--Farea Al-Muslimi

Last week, I learned about a Senate hearing on drone warfare that I could watch live on my computer, and as it was my day off, and since I really have no sympathy for this whole program and even have a blog where I post news I glean from a few places, I thought I should walk my talk and watch it. I liked the tenor of the conversation as a whole, and found it quite different from the often fractious proceedings on the Senate or House floor. But I think many people would agree with me in saying that the most moving and compelling testimony came from a Yemeni citizen named Farea Al-Muslimi, who had come to school in the U.S., and loved this country, but had returned to find his own country to be a sanctioned drone target area. I think in that moment, he was the voice of his people, and I am so happy that Just Foreign Policy gave us a link to his part of the hearing.

 

If you would like to watch the hearings in their entirety, you can find them HERE.

Run For Boston

I'm not a runner, but I heard about this on Chris Hayes' show, All In, and thought my running friends might like this way of showing solidarity with the Boston Marathon runners. It's not a fundraiser per se. But as a poem by Rumi called "Things Are Such" that I picked up at our store today goes:

"Things are such, that someone lifting a cup,
or watching the rain, petting a dog,
or singing, just singing -- could be doing as
much for this universe as anyone."

Or running. Just running.

Ezra Klein on the Boston Marathon

I love the wonky Ezra Klein with his buoyant way of teaching us all about statistics and data. Still I don't normally think of him as the first person I'd turn to for moral uplift in a time of crisis. But I found his piece on today's Boston Marathon tragedy moving but also hopeful. Thus, I share it with you. 

Mantis shrimp

You may not have missed this, but I certainly did. If it wasn't for a friend at work, I never would have known about this shrimpy dynamo.

First, the cartoon.


Now, a short film:

 

This all came up because a couple of mantis shrimps seem to have found their way into the Monterey Bay Aquarium, just on the other side of the bay on which I live. My friend was highly amused that the best plan for catching this creature, which can punch through aquarium glass and devastate a fish tank, not to mention see a specturum of colors that is about five times what we humans can see, apparently involves using a set of tongs...