B4B – NY Times Feb ’09

Bush’s Exit Leaves Satire at Wit’s End
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: February 16, 2009

You’ve already heard more than enough about collapsed stock portfolios, vanished fortunes, disappearing jobs and consumer confidence that is fading faster than the Knicks’ playoff hopes. Let’s focus instead on a different crisis. What do you do when your raison d’être starts looking more like a raisin d’être — kind of shriveled?

If you’ve asked yourself that very question, then you know what life is like these days for a band of political satirists who have gone by the name of Billionaires for Bush.

For most of this decade, they sallied forth in tuxedos and tiaras for street theatrics about protecting developers from predator environmentalists and shielding the wealthy from money-crazed politicians who would have them pay more taxes. For some in the group, the holiday observed on Monday was known as Buy Your Own President’s Day.

They were getting along just fine, these Billionaires were, when a terrible thing happened.

George W. Bush left office.

It’s hard to be a Billionaire for Bush when there is no Bush. The group might have recast itself as Billionaires for Obama. But that would have required “irony we can believe in,” said Andrew Boyd, who sometimes goes by his Billionaire name, Phil T. Rich.

“Here’s the conundrum,” Mr. Boyd said. “Can you point out that the emperor has no clothes when you like the emperor — and his clothes?”

We told you this was a crisis.

Not that it’s entirely new. Satirists have struggled with the ascension of Barack Obama for a while now. Clearly, some white comedians are pulling their punches out of fear of being accused of racial insensitivity (though racial equality should mean that a black president may be skewered as thoroughly as a white one). Race aside, many comics feel that any new president deserves to be cut some slack. As an added inhibitor, some have said, this president is simply not his predecessor.

“He’s difficult to satirize,” Mr. Boyd said. “He’s very self-aware. He calls himself out on stuff. He’s able to leaven his own heaviness.” Self-awareness, Mr. Boyd said, was not a conspicuous trait of the previous president.

It should be noted that the Billionaires are not exactly equal opportunity offenders. Their politics fall squarely left of center. But unlike many activists, left or right, their weapon of choice is a rapier rather than a sledgehammer. In their reverse world, Vice President Dick Cheney was unfairly attacked and Halliburton wrongly maligned. Big Oil works for the common good, and streets must be liberated from destructive bicyclists.

“Bicycling is a gateway drug to environmentalism,” said Paul Bartlett, or Robin Eublind in Billionaire-speak.

The group tried switching focus as the Bush presidency’s days dwindled down. Some ventured forth as Billionaires for Bailouts. Others threw their support behind Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg by forming Billionaires for Term Limits Except for Billionaires.

But it wasn’t the same. The Champagne had lost its fizz.

“I think we were serious about having our brand lose its brand identity,” said Elissa Jiji or, if you prefer, Meg A. Bucks. Mr. Bartlett observed that “it’s not the time for ostentatious wealth.” Even though there are still plenty of potential targets — Bernard L. Madoff and bonus-hungry Wall Street executives, for example — there seems little point going after them when others are, too.

“They’re no longer held in such esteem that they need to be knocked down,” Mr. Boyd said.

For now, the Billionaires have chosen to put away their gowns, toss aside their top hats and leave their badminton rackets in the closet. Soon after the Obama inauguration, a few dozen of them met at a Greenwich Village bar for what Ms. Jiji described as “a last huzzah.” She had “thought we’d be sad,” she said, “but it was very festive.” Mr. Boyd called it a “farewell to arms contracts.”

But bear in mind that “Billionaires never die,” he said. “We just refinance.”

So they may be back. They could be like Tom Joad in reverse. If there’s a rich man being wrongly hassled by a tax collector, they’ll be there. If there’s a war profiteer unfairly condemned in the press, they’ll be there.

Look on the bright side, they said. It probably costs less than before to bribe corrupt public officials.

What they’re missing, though, are tunes to capture the mood. You have to give the Depression this much: It produced some great numbers. Mr. Boyd suggested reworking a classic from that era. This one would be called “Brother, Can You Spare a Diamond?”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

Microbe Wakes Up After 120,000 Years

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090615/sc_livescience/microbewakesupafter120000years

After more than 120,000 years trapped beneath a block of ice in Greenland, a tiny microbe has awoken. The long-lasting bacteria may hold clues to what life forms might exist on other planets.

The new bacteria species was found nearly 2 miles (3 km) beneath a Greenland glacier, where temperatures can dip well below freezing, pressure soars, and food and oxygen are scarce.

“We don’t know what state they were in,” said study team member Jean Brenchley of Pennsylvania State University. “They could’ve been dormant, or they could’ve been slowly metabolizing, but we don’t know for sure.”

Dormant would mean the bacteria were in a spore-like state in which there’s not a lot of metabolism going on, so the bacteria wouldn’t be reproducing much. It’s possible the bacteria could have been slowly metabolizing and replicating.

“Microbes have found ways to survive in harsh conditions for long times that we don’t yet fully understand,” Brenchley told LiveScience.

To coax the bacteria back to life, Brenchley, Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and their Penn State colleagues incubated the samples at 36 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) for seven months, followed by more than four months at 41 degrees F (5 degrees C).

The resulting colonies of the originally purple-brown bacteria, now named Herminiimonas glaciei, are alive and well.

“We were able to recover it and get it to grow in our laboratory,” Brenchley said. “It was viable.”

Such vigor is partially due to the microbe’s small size, the scientists speculate. Boasting dimensions that are 10 to 50 times smaller than Escherichia coli, the new bacteria likely could more efficiently absorb nutrients due to a larger surface-to-volume ratio. Tiny microbes like this one can also hide more easily from predators and take up residence among ice crystals and in the thin liquid film on those surfaces.

H. glaciei is not the first bacteria species resurrected after a possibly lengthy snooze beneath the ice. Loveland-Curtze and her team reported another hardy bacterium in the same area that had survived for about 120,000 years as well. Chryseobacterium greenlandensis had tiny bud-like structures on its surface that may have played a role in the organism’s survival. Another bacterium survived more than 32,000 years in an Arctic tunnel, and was brought back to life a few years ago.

The harsh conditions endured by these microbes serve as models of other planets.

“These extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats,” Loveland-Curtze said, referring to the Greenland glacier. “The exceptionally low temperatures can preserve cells and nucleic acids for even millions of years.”

And studying such microorganisms may provide insight into what sorts of life forms could survive elsewhere in the solar system.

The new bacterium is described in the current issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

The Return of Burma’s Monks

The Return of Burma’s Monks
By A TIME CORRESPONDENT IN BURMA Sun May 18

Rangoon travel agent Chin Chin used to take tourists to a nearby Irrawaddy delta town famous for its pottery. But the vast waterworld of rivers and rice fields that stretched beyond it was a foreign land to her until Cyclone Nargis and its horrific aftermath. On Thursday, Chin Chin and her friends bought rice and water, loaded it on a truck, and drove deep into the delta. She was shocked by what she saw: roads lined with hundreds of cold and hungry villagers, disregarded by their own government, who had walked for an hour from their broken villages to beg from passing motorists.

“They were mostly housewives,” recalls Chin Chin, who goes by the nickname. “They told me, ‘Rice is a must, so it’s worth standing in the rain for three or four hours to get some.’ They didn’t even have a change of clothes.” Fighting back her tears, Chin Chin gave out rice and listened to stories of families torn apart and villages destroyed. “It was piteous,” she says. “I really sympathized with them. We didn’t see any aid from government or foreign groups.”

Chin Chin belongs to a burgeoning homegrown relief effort which is capturing Burmese from all walks of life. Students and shopkeepers, medics and models – thousands of people have now donated money, food or services to Nargis victims. Hundreds like Chin Chin are delivering aid themselves, while privately run local charities are reorienting their operations around cyclone relief.

While they continue to make it difficult for foreigners to offer aid, Burma’s generals welcome the help of their own people – at least officially. “Myanmar people’s generosity is amazing,” marvels a recent article in The New Light of Myanmar, a state-run newspaper.* Privately, however, they must be getting nervous. Ordinary Burmese are horrified by the suffering of their compatriots and angry at the junta’s inadequate attempts to alleviate it. Their humanitarian efforts could well spark a political one, especially as it also involves Buddhist monks, who last September led the biggest anti-government protests Burma had seen for nearly 20 years.

Private donors have faced some government restrictions. Those who arrive in the towns have been asked to hand over their relief supplies to local authorities for distribution. Instead, many are reportedly storing the goods with sympathetic locals and secretly distributing them by themselves. The junta doesn’t want foreigners distributing aid in the delta, but neither does it feel comfortable with Burmese distributing it. “The government is scared that relief workers will get involved in politics,” says a co-founder of one Burmese relief group.

Some are involved already. Celebrated actor Kyaw Thu, who was jailed for a month for joining last September’s demonstrations, runs the Free Funeral Services Society, a private charity offering free cremations for the poor. It is now operating its own relief effort, with volunteers at its Rangoon headquarters loading up delta-bound trucks with donated goods.

Another anti-junta stalwart is comedian Zaganar (the name means “Tweezers”), also briefly jailed for his role in last year’s protests. Zaganar and his celebrity friends have bought food and medical supplies for Nargis victims and are using their names to raise more funds. Both the disaster and the grassroots response to it are unprecedented in Burma. “I think there will be political consequences,” he says. “People are very angry with the government.”

The monks are also on the move again. Buddhist temples and monasteries have always played a central role in helping the needy in Burma (as, in this religiously and ethnically diverse country, have churches, mosques and Hindu temples). After the cyclone, monks led small-scale relief efforts into the delta, the distinctive multicolored flags of their faith fluttering from cars and small trucks. Monks from well-known monasteries in Mandalay and elsewhere in Burma are either in the delta or heading there, while in Pakkoku – the Irrawaddy town near Mandalay where last year’s protests originated – their brethren are reportedly soliciting donations for cyclone victims. Shwe Pyi Hein Monastery, which already runs a free clinic in Rangoon, has dispatched five volunteer doctors to the disaster area, who are treating more than 100 people every day.

Despite the participation of thousands of Burmese, the impact of this homegrown relief effort will always limited, admits Zaganar. “We deliver our supplies by road because we cannot afford a boat,” he says. “But most victims live close to the water. We cannot get through to them.” He says Burma desperately needs more boats and helicopters from abroad. Not even the nation’s richest private donors – who include junta cronies like tycoon Tay Za, who was put on a U.S. sanctions list last year – have the means or expertise to meet even a fraction of the needs in far-flung delta areas.

*The junta that rules the country unilaterally decreed changes in place names, including Myanmar for Burma and Yangon for the former capital Rangoon. The U.S. State Department has not recognized these changes. TIME has chosen to retain the name Burma. – Time.com