I sent the email below off to a complete stranger on a whim. A slice of internet history for the curious, though:

Hi,

I came across your cat resource site by accident and noticed you bring up the infamous Tubcat on a page discussing feline obesity. On your site, you mention that the cat's weight is unknown. I figured you might be curious to learn more about the animal.

As it happens, I have a framed picture of Tubcat hanging over my desk, which was actually clipped from the publication the picture initially appeared in (here in the states, at least). My mom showed me the picture when I was a senior in high school (I'm now in grad school), and I've kept it ever since. This was well before Tubcat became an internet superstar.

First, the picture initially appeared in Us Weekly, p. 96, on October 1, 2001. The cat's name is Tulle, and the 12-year-old girl holding him is Tahabita (spelled Tabitha elsewhere) Pedersen. They're from Denmark, and Tulle was 6 years old in the picture. The caption also mentions Tulle's weight, which was 43 pounds when the picture was taken -- at the time, about 4 pounds shy of the then-fattest cat on record, an Australian tabby named Himmy.

My Dutch is awful, but it's my understanding that Tulle died in January of this year, of diabetes. Link below, if you're interested. Anyway, I thought I would send this along, since it looked like you'd poured a lot of time into writing that page.

http://www.kvp.se/nyheter/1.992641/varldens-fetaste-katt-ar-dod

DC Tedrow

RIP, Tubcat. Ye shall be missed.

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Writing for San Francisco's BeyondChron, Matt Gonzalez takes a hard look at Barack Obama's policies.

This is a candidate who says he’s going to usher in change; that he is a different kind of politician who has the skills to get things done. He reminds us again and again that he had the foresight to oppose the war in Iraq. And he seems to have a genuine interest in lifting up the poor.

But his record suggests that he is incapable of ushering in any kind of change I’d like to see. It is one of accommodation and concession to the very political powers that we need to rein in and oppose if we are to make truly lasting advances.

 Some of the key points made include:

• Obama supported spending on the War in Iraq, as well as reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
• He refuses to commit to pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013.
• He wants to increase the military by 100,000 troops.
  
• He plans to move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, merely changing the war rather than ending it.
• He voted in favor of banks and corporations to pass the Class Action Fairness Act, which removes states' abilities to handle class action lawsuits. Under the act, only federal courts can handle class action lawsuits, and in general these courts are much more hostile towards them.
• He voted with the banks again when he refused to cap credit card interest rates, ensuring many more people will continue to stay in debt and poverty. Pretty good proof that he doesn't really are about members of the poor working class.

And then there are many more.  Definitely worth reading.

On the plus side, Nader threw his hat in the ring last week. Unless it looks like a Republican won't carry the state (which hasn't happened in a very long time), Texans wanting to make a difference should ignore the election cycle completely, spend about 2 minutes voting for Nader in November, and then get back to doing important shit. In fat, I can say with certainty that the only time my vote made a difference was when I voted for Nader in 2004. (My ballot somehow broke the machine and held the line up. Who knew voting could be direct action?)

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Content analysis usually requires the researcher to establish inter-coder reliabillity, which means that about 10 percent of the articles in a sample frame are content analyzed by two different coders in order to make sure there aren't wildly different interpretations of text. (In theory, this keeps the research honest, although it's probably the case that in the end both coders will have certain shared assumptions about what they're coding.) For the study to be legit, inter-coder reliability should be around 80 percent or higher. For the inter-coder reliability to be legit, though, it must rely on truly randomly selected articles at the outset.

Sometimes this can be a pain. Researchers generally rely on all manner of goofy ways to get a good batch of random numbers, none of which involve computers. What? No computers? That's right, no computers. The problem with computer-generated "random" numbers is that they're not truly random, as any programmer or computer scientist could tell you. These numbers might appear random, but they usually use a complex mathematical formula that, in the end, has predictable results.

It looks like Random.org might have found a way around all this, though. The site uses atmospheric noise (read: the weather) as a starting place for generating randomness. I don't know whether many (or any) researchers have latched onto this, but I don't see any reason in principle why they couldn't. Given that the site has apparently been around since the late 90s, in fact, I'm actually pretty astounded that this method wasn't covered in my Research Methods course last semester.

To make this relevant for my purposes, it looks like I don't have to waste time pulling a hundred different numbers out of a hat to perform my intercoder reliability. How cool is that?

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Looks like I goofed up. I was asked the following in an email earlier today:

I saved your letter to the Daily Texan rightly disputing the benefits of NAFTA for Mexico, particularly its farmers.  You write that "In NAFTA's first year, 6 million Mexican farmers were forced out of work because they couldn't compete with government-subsidized corn and wheat flowing into Mexican markets from the U.S. and Canada."  I agree with your letter (neoliberalism is a disaster in general), but I'm just wondering if you can source that claim about 6 million farmers from a study or article somewhere.  I've done some looking on the net and can't seem to find verification of the figure.

It's a good question. The relevant portion of my response:

I probably sound like a fool, but I can't find the source either. The reason is that there isn't one - I'm afraid you caught a serious error on my part that made its way into the paper. I'm deeply sorry for this, and would be willing to write a letter to the Texan correcting myself if I hadn't sent that to them so long ago. It was an honest but unfortunate mistake, although I feel pretty stupid now that you've pointed this out. I'm usually pretty good about getting my facts straight.

If you're curious, the letter I wrote borrows from a much longer piece I wrote in May 2006, when immigration demonstrations were heating up across the country, and I felt it was important to write a piece dissecting the immigration proposals before congress. (Actually, I felt obligated to help fight all this racist legislation, but that's another matter.) In my original piece, I wrote that:

When NAFTA was passed in 1994, for instance, six million Mexican farmers were forced out of work because they couldn't compete with government-subsidized corn and wheat from the United States and Canada. And in 2008, as many as two million more farmers will be ruined by the full opening of Mexico's borders to U.S. exports of corn, beans, and powdered milk, the last products to be liberalized under NAFTA.

This essay appeared in a radical news magazine I edited for a while, called Turning the Tide. This publication is now defunct, but you can find the essay on another website I run called the New Texas Radical at: http://www.newtexasradical.org/content/view/20/30/

The quote is on page 3 of this web version. I can also give you a hard copy of the issue if you'd like.

The accurate figure is in the passage quoted above, not my letter as it appeared in the Texan. I should have said that six million farmers have been forced out since NAFTA's passage, not during its first year. For NAFTA's first year, it's more reasonable to assume that about 1 million Mexican farmers were forced out of work - which is still criminal, although it's not quite as criminal as pushing out 6 million.

You should be able to find a source for the correct figure, notably a 2004 Carnegie Endowment study discussing the effects of NAFTA. Roughly, what happened was that 6 to 6.5 million campesinos and their families were driven off their lands and forced to emigrate northward. Many more have struggled to hold onto their land, despite that structural changes in U.S.-Mexico economic relations have pretty much guaranteed they'll be screwed. Little wonder that Subcomandante Marcos described NAFTA as a "death certificate for the ethnic peoples of Mexico." This is the sort of the history lesson I wanted to share with my letter. The Mexican campesinos don't need the lesson, obviously. Free trade's a bit easier to comprehend when you're the one under the boot.

Today, of course, Mexican farmers (as well as many others living in the world's poorer nations) face another threat that NAFTA will surely make worse, which is ethanol. In the May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senaur describe how ethanol production will raise the costs of basic food items for people all over the planet, which will be especially hard on the planet's poor population. It's a very important article, and I encourage you to read it if you can get your hands on a back issue or find it online. By the authors' calculations, "1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2025" - 600 million more than their 2003 projection, due largely to the fact that the world's poor spend most of their income on food.

Ethanol, it should be added, is a complete joke, a band-aid for the global cancer of energy consumption. But this is what happens when predatory corporations are allowed to rule the planet. Issues of human survival are outstripped by short-term profit goals.

Anyway, thanks for bringing all this to my attention. I'm mildly annoyed with myself for having goofed that up.

. . .

DC Tedrow

So I was called out on a mistake I made. It happens. Could be worse, I suppose. It's not like I claimed that NAFTA gave people jobs, etc. 

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