Author Archives: CliftonBisdee

It’s a Coder! It’s a Teacher! It’s a Kick-Ass Graphic Novelist!

Mother Jones

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One sunny morning after the kids had split for the summer, I sat down with Gene Luen Yang in an iMac-filled classroom at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, California, where he was training his replacement after 17 years as a computer science teacher. I was kind of surprised he had a day job. In 2006, Yang’s American Born Chinese became the first graphic novel ever named a National Book Award finalist—it also won an Eisner (the Oscar of comics) and the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award, bestowed by the American Library Association on the best book for teens “based entirely on literary merit.”

He repeated the feat in 2013 after landing on the bestseller lists for a matched pair called Boxers & Saints—character-driven takes on the Boxer Rebellion from opposing perspectives. Yang kept teaching, he told me, because (a) he likes kids—and has four of his own to support, and (b) “I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy.” Among his other notable extracurriculars are Prime Baby (a hilarious serial comic for the New York Times Magazine) and 2014’s The Shadow Hero, wherein Yang and illustrator Sonny Liew revive the Green Turtle, a 1940s character they believe may have been the first Asian American superhero. Yang also writes the Avatar: The Last Airbender comic book series and recently signed with DC Comics to author the new iteration of Superman.

The latter, as it happens, was Yang’s first comic book—purchased by his mom when he was in fifth grade. (“It was a trustworthy brand,” he explains.) Who’d have guessed that the Man of Steel’s fate would one day lie in the hands of a son of Chinese immigrants? Certainly not Yang, who (like his protagonist in American Born Chinese) struggled with his ethnicity after moving to a white suburb going into first grade. He endured teasing in elementary school, and later at his middle school, where a gang of kids (“the stoners”) would yell racist taunts in the hallways. “I began to wonder if this group was voicing things that everybody thought, but they were the only ones brave enough to say it,” Yang told me. “That’s when I started to feel uncomfortable hanging out with non-Asian friends.”

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It’s a Coder! It’s a Teacher! It’s a Kick-Ass Graphic Novelist!

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Boxing Day Cat Blogging – 26 December 2014

Mother Jones

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Traditionally, Boxing Day is when the upper classes present the help with Christmas boxes full of money or gifts. As you might guess, this tradition has been corrupted a bit on its way to California. Here, it’s the day that the help presents the upper classes with a box. Empty is preferred, actually. This one is big enough for two cats, but Hopper isn’t interested in lounging inside the box. She leaves that to Hilbert. She prefers to sit on the outside and gnaw on the box instead. Her motto: If it’s cellulose-based, it’s meant to be ripped to shreds.

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Boxing Day Cat Blogging – 26 December 2014

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Here’s a Great New Cause For the Tea Party

Mother Jones

Harold Meyerson writes today about something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement provision, a feature of most trade agreements since the Reagan administration. Basically, it means that if, say, a Mexican company objects to a regulation in Texas, it can sue Texas. But not in a US court. Instead the case is heard in a special extra-governmental tribunal:

The mockery that the ISDS procedure can make of a nation’s laws can be illustrated by a series of cases. In Germany in 2009, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, seeking to build a coal-fired power plant near Hamburg, used ISDS to sue the government for conditioning its approval of the plant on Vattenfall taking measures to protect the Elbe River from its waste products. To avoid paying penalties to the company under ISDS (the company had asked for $1.9 billion in damages), the state eventually lifted its conditions.

Three years later, Vattenfall sued Germany for its post-Fukushima decision to phase out nuclear power plants; the case is advancing through the ISDS process. German companies that owned nuclear power plants had no such recourse.

After Australia passed a law requiring tobacco products to be sold in packaging featuring prominent health warnings, a Philip Morris subsidiary sued the government in Australian court and lost. It also sued the government through the ISDS, where the case is still pending. The health ministry in next-door New Zealand cited the prospect of a Philip Morris victory in ISDS as the reason it was holding up such warnings on cigarette packages in its own country.

Meyerson wants to know why Democratic presidents continue to support ISDS, but I’m more interested in why the tea party crowd hasn’t yelled itself hoarse over this. After all, this is a tailor-made example of giving up US sovereignty to an unaccountable international organization, something that normally prompts them to start waving around pocket copies of the Constitution and going on Hannity to complain that President Obama is trying to sabotage America. Agenda 21, anyone?

So why not this time? I guess it’s because ISDS is normally used by big corporations to challenge environmental laws. So which do you hate more? The EPA or an unaccountable international organization? Decisions, decisions….

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Here’s a Great New Cause For the Tea Party

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