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2006-05-10

 

what do you call a man with no arms and no legs floating down the futaleufu river?

the asnwer is "bob." the bad joke is homage to robert f. kennedy, jr., who had an article in yesterday's nytimes on rafting down the futaleufu.

first a question: is this an inappropriate joke? i seem to be tone-deaf on such matters. for example, my brother told me this joke. a rabbi walks into a bar in brooklyn with an african spotted toad on his shoulder. the bartender says, "man, where'd you get that?" and the toad says, "brooklyn. there are thousands of them." i had heard this joke told with a nigerian and a parrot. my brother said that version is racist. i wondered whether, if the version i had heard was racist, his version was -- what? -- antisemitic. i put the question to my poker group. eventually, for reasons i will not bore you further with, i reached the conclusion that both versions are offensive. but maybe i am wrong, about either or both. the point being that this post's title might be offensive. if so, i apologize and someone should educate me as to why.

so much for my tangent. the subject of today's diatribe is that i am constitutionally disposed to agree with anything that anyone whose last name is "kennedy" says. but check out this sentence from the aforementioned article:

"Class V white-water rafting is inherently risky, but with experienced guides and good safety plans, it is no more dangerous than skiing or touch football."

huh? this guy is no moron, but that is one moronic sentence. first you have to realize that, according to kennedy, there were four people in his group, including children ages 10 and 12, who had never paddled before. next you need to know that the extent of their training was "a safety briefing and seminar on paddling techniques" as they were standing at the river's put-in in a jungle clearing.

now i have never paddled this river, but people with this little training are fully capable of drowning in a class III, never mind huge water like the futaleufu. people who die while skiing die b/c they do something they shouldn't (ski too fast, ski backwards, play football on skis); people die in whitewater even when they are doing everything right. (i've never heard of someone dying during a game of touch football, but i suppose if it could happen to anybody, it would be a kennedy.)

class V whitewater is an adrenaline rush like few other things, and that itself tells you all you need to know. where there is adrenaline, there is a risk of fatality. on the bunny slopes and touch football fields, i don't think anyone is high on endorphins.

 

# posted by drdow @ 5/10/2006 11:25:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-05-08

 

pop stars and pedophiles

continuing with the posting theme related to reality tv:

nbc is getting ready to show about its 5th installment of a "news" program that basically involves setting a trap for pedophiles. they (the people from nbc) rent this nice house in a middle class neighborhood, and hire some people to go into chat rooms and pretend they are 13 years old or so and lure men in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and maybe even 60s and 70s to come over to the nice house. the men arrive. there are stainless stell appliances in the kitchen and granite countertops, but there is no young lolita, only some guys from nbc news. bummer.

these stories are, for me, like watching a car crash, for a couple of related reasons. the first has to do with entrapment. there's a line in the talmud, i think, about not digging a hole in front of a blind man. true, the blind man is "innocent," in any meaningful sense, whereas these geezers chatting up young teenagers are not remotely so, but the idea is the same. there is a rich literature in the philosophy of punishment on the concept of entrapment. i'm not saying that society is not made safer by having law enforcement, or even (as in the nbc show) free-lance vigilantes troll for these guys, but there is still something deeply troubling about enticing someone to commit a crime or immoral act.

the second, related theme is that shows like this one convince me that the internet will ruin human civilization. true, you can google the person you met at a bar and find out if he/she really did win a pulitzer, and you do not have to go to a library any more to do research. but these are trivial benefits, and they are massively outweighed by how the web facilitates catatrophes like 9/11, and how it connects sexual predators with prey in an essentially unpolice-able way.

maybe i am just a luddite, but technological advances undoubtedly change human civilization. books and printing were in important ways engines of democracy. in the short run, the internet will also be an engine of democracy, spreading it into the globe's last holdouts. meanwhile, established democracies will begin to rot. of course, the percentage of deviants in any society is not significant, so it is not as if the pedophiles will rule the earth, but they will damage many more people than their grandfathers damaged two generations ago.

 

# posted by drdow @ 5/08/2006 10:23:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-04-19

 

the annual handicap

ok, time for my annual handicapping of the american idol contestants:

ace young -- 200:1. he is perhaps the best-looking of the male finalists, though daughtry would be if he's do something with his facial air. unfortunately, he's easily the weakest singer left. he's good, but not in the league with 5 of the other six.

chris daughtry -- 50:1. his performance during the standards week (april 18) moved him from 200:1 to his present 50:1. the reason is that he showed he could be a solo artist. a rocker cannot win this contest. simple as that. the judges like to have them for variety, just like it was nice to have ross perot running for president. but adding entertainment value doesn't mean you can win.

elliott yamin -- 10:1. the best male singer this year, and perhaps the best male singer in the contest's history, and one of the three best finalists, period. this is a guy who will get a recording contract no matter where he finishes, and people who listen to jazz, blues, and standards will buy his record.

katharine mcphee -- 5:2. the best singer this year, the best singer in this show's history. and during standards week she showed, for the first time, some warmth. until then she seemed like a singing computer: pitch perfect and perfectly soleless. but i think she finally broke through that.

taylor hicks -- 12:1. the best entertainer. this is a guy who i would go watch in a nightclub. i'd like him to come to houston and play at the gallant knight, except now he's too popular for that small venue. and he has a terrific voice, but i don't think people who listen to music would buy a record even though they'd pay the cover charge and the two-drink minimum.

paris bennett -- 8:3. she's young, which is her biggest liability. but what a voice. she sounded like a young ella on standards week.

kellie pickler -- 200:1. cute cute cute. and a one-trick pony. a country specialist has a slightly better chance than a rocker, but only slightly.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/19/2006 09:04:00 AM 1 comments  

 

abba eban, ted williams, and those last convulsive throes

abba eban said famously that the palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. with the newly elected hamas government now having embraced the most recent suicide bombing in tel aviv, i'd say that abba's still batting a thousand.

and i liked rummy's comment that the wave of recent criticism of his performance will pass. of course it will. as keynes said, in the long-run, we are all dead. this is the same guy, of course, who said that the iraq insurgency was in its final throes about a year ago. he still might be right; it's just that the endstage of final throes appears to take longer than we were led to believe.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/19/2006 08:58:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-04-05

 

the personal is political and other hackneyed truisms

yesterday's nytimes carried a front page story on the intra-republican split regarding the immigration bill. the story reported that pete domenici's mother, alda, disappeared from the family's home in albuquerque during world war 2, at the hands of federal agents looking for italian sympathizers. the gist of the story is that republicans with personal experience with immigrants (read: parents who immigrated), republican senators like domenici, specter and kyl, and democrats like mel martinez, are therefore supportive of bills that are hospitable to immigants.

the article thus makes one realize why gender equality is an easier issue than sexual orientation.

yesterday's paper also reports that hugo chavez, the arguably crackpot president of venezuela (note: i say he's arguably a crackpot, not the nytimes), also puts his money where his foot and mouth are: he's given more than $2 billion, according to the story, to the economically deprived, principally in latin america.

meanwhile, according to today's paper, american taxpayers who earn more than $10 million a year -- as albert brooks said in lost in america, that's $10 million "a year" -- will be paying, on average, $500,000 less a year in taxes under dubya's revisions to the tax code. but here's where the "personal is political" business breaks down: clinton had as many rich friends as bush does, but apparently didn't feel the need to help them get richer.

thank goodness dubya has restored integrity to the oval office.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/05/2006 09:14:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-03-30

 

so charles, slobodan, and sadaam are in a room . . .

and you have only two bullets. whom do you shoot?

what is interesting about the arrest of former liberian president charles taylor is that it suggests how the usa really could be the world's cop if it wanted to. you drop a bunch of leaflets announcing that your plan is not to occupy the country, but just to come in and grab the bad guy (or bad guys) and try them in the hague. this is essentially what happened in afghanistan, and although afghanistant is not a place that is going to see a rush of immigration any time soon, it's a helluva lot more appealing than iraq. (our only failure there is that we can't find osama, but at least the country is not coming apart at the seams. and if the taliban does come back from the margin, we just go in with the big guns again.)

the bottom line is that getting rid of tyrants is much easier than building a democracy, and you do need to crawl before you walk. we could say, ok dictators (think of king hussein in jordan, or the saudi royal family), we'll leave you be until you start butchering people. then we're coming for you. this approach has a track record, too. qadaffi behaves himself now, doesn't he? at least more or less.

it's depressing to think about this, b/c you realize that we could have averted the iraq fiasco by concentrating on intelligence and smart bombs. we might have missed sadaam three or four times, but eventually he'd run out of doubles.

this would not be nation-building. it would be nation-saving. and if the administration embraces this approach, we could actually leave iraq tomorrow.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/30/2006 12:59:00 PM 0 comments  

2006-03-29

 

hey, i defended you today:

they said you aren't fit to eat with pigs, and i said yes you are.

that is the strategy of moussaui's trial lawyer. you can read about it here. you rarely have a lawyer telling the jury that his own client is a liar and a crackpot, but that's what moussaui's lawyer did, and it was absolutely the right thing to do.

so the second most interesting aspect of the case is how the defense lawyer's ostensibly crazy strategy was actually superb. it explained all the evidence, and it had the additional virtue of being true, which might not be something lawyers are supposed to care about, but it does help them get through to juries.

(thanks to jo for the idea and the link.)

ah yes, the most interesting thing about the trial: that judge brinkema completely caved and let the prosecutors get away with what is probably the most egregious ethical violation to have occurred ever in a federal death penalty prosecution. for those of you who missed it, a government lawyer essentially told witnesses what other witnesses had said, and coached them on how to respond to what the others had said. there's not a legal ethicist in all of america who could come within a mile of concocting even the remotest justification for this. judge brinkema should have said, "ok, the death penalty is off the table." force the government to appeal. the government would have won in the end. all society's need their occasional ritualistic sacrifices. mcveigh a few years ago; moussaui a few years from now. but she should have tried to force them to play by the rules.

it's a quaint notion, i realize: the government playing by the rules. i suppose i'm just old-fashioned that way.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/29/2006 02:47:00 PM 0 comments  

2006-03-23

 

wigs: 1; jilbabs: 0 -- at least in the u.k.

today's nytimes reports here that a five-judge panel in the house of lords upheld the legality of a high school's decision to prevent a student from attending class wearing a jiljab, which the article describes as a loose, ankle-length gown.

this decision is exactly correct. regardless of whether religious observance is good or bad (of course, it's bad, but that's another post), britain separates the secular realm from the sectarian. lately, they do a better job of this than the u.s., even though here, and not there, the constitution requires separation between church and state.

separation means that you can live in accordance with any non-criminal religious practices you like, while you are in private. as soon as you enter public space, you are agreeing to live in accordance with a separate set of norms. so, for example, if you are a member of a religion that teaches that women are to be subservient to men, which is pretty much all of them, then you can live in accordance with those norms in private, and explain to your daughters why religion is a good thing. but you can't take those practices with you into the secular realm, which men and women are equal.

more than perhaps any othe constitutional value, this basic idea that the religious and the secular are discrete realms is under virulent attack in the u.s. did you know, for example, that here in the u.s., in about half the states, people of any faith can claim exemptions from a wide array of laws, simply by claiming that the law intrudes upon their religious observance, and then the state has the burden of showing that this law is necessary? these laws, which are of comparatively recent vintage (dating back a decade or so) generally antedate 9/11, so there will be no end to the hypocrisy as soon as the muslims start to invoke them (intended, as they were, to provide refuge to far-right christians.)

but sometimes, hypocrisy is the lesser of evils, and if it takes a little irrational enmity toward muslims to bring an end to a lot of irrational favoritism for religious zealots, i vote to pay the tariff.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/23/2006 02:18:00 PM 0 comments  

2006-03-18

 

clint eastwood and nation-building

my friend timski sent me this link, which has an interview with general thurman, who says we will be succeeding in iraq when iraqis think of themselves as iraqis, rather than sunnis, kurds, or whatever.

this is not, in the abstract, an idiotic point. but it is absurd historically, b/c there was no such thing as "iraqis" until the 1930s, or so. and when iraq became an independent nation, it immediately divided along the same fault lines we see rending the society asunder today.

the fact is that there are exceedingly few historical examples of people overcoming religious differences or tribal differences to create a democracy. arguably, the united states is the only place where this has occurred, though i will get some flack from my canadian friend for saying this. i don't know exactly what this means, but i am am pretty sure it means that america's plan in iraq is doomed to fail.

btw, francis fukuyama says that imposing democracy was never part of the original plan, and that dubya's administration fell back on this justification for the war only after failing to find WMD. if true, that explanation falls into the category of good money chasing bad.

oh yeah, the clint eastwood reference (i almost forgot): you build a democracy only when you realize that there are two kinds of people in the world, good and bad, and all other distinctions -- religious, tribal, national -- are irrelevant. the people of iraq are nowhere close to that realization. the bad news is that many americans are losing sight of it also.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/18/2006 08:09:00 AM 0 comments  

 

blind hogs and acorns

dubya's efforts to give his and dick's good friends in the energy industry carte blanche to despoil the environment more than they've done already was dealt a setback by the federal courts. this is only a minor surprise, in that what the administration was trying to allow the energy industry to do was flagrantly violative of federal law. the major surprise is that the vilified janice rogers brown was on the panel that ruled for the environmental group.

you can read the story here.

does this mean that alito or roberts will not be so bad as predicted? probably not, but hope is a nectar.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/18/2006 08:02:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-03-13

 

it's close to time to say "now what?"

here's what's pretty clear: iraq is not going to be a democracy. it will either be a quasi-theocracy, on the model of iran, controlled largely by iran. or it will be a secular regime, controlled by syria. or it will be a new type of theocracy, where the iraqi shites and iraqi sunnis govern jointly and precariously. this latter solution may be preferable to the first two, but it is still a million miles away from democracy.

here's what's not clear: is any of these three likely outcomes sufficiently better than the other two to warrant continued american presence? answer: probably not.

which leads to another not so clear thing: so what should the u.s. do? the answer to this is actually clearer than one might think. there are only two reasons for not beating a hasty exit. the first is that the u.s. would be perceived as weak. the second is that we'd leave mayhem and destruction in our wake.

the first point is just not worth talking about. if the u.s. will be perceived as weak for leaving now, it will still be perceived as weak for leaving a year, or 5, or 10, from now, b/c no matter how long we stick around democracy is not goint to grow deep roots in the desert sand.

the second point is the only conceivable reason for not rushing out. if there is an exit scenario that is the mirror image of, say, darfur or serbia -- if, in other words, there is a plausible argument that the u.s. can prevent atrocities by staying -- then that is a compelling argument for staying. that argument, and really no other, should be the focus of all analysis of whether we should leave, and when.

of course, the reason we will not see this analysis from dubya's administration, aside from the fact that it concedes that an iraqi democracy was an oil industry's sucker bet, is that this argument for staying is an artifact of an unsound decision to invade in the first place. it's along the lines of "yes, we fucked up badly, but now we must stay to ameliorate the evil consequence of our fucked up decision; in other words, the fact we fucked up once doesn't justify fucking up again."

the thing about that argument is that it might be true, but we'll never hear it. not even with less salty language.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/13/2006 01:54:00 PM 0 comments  

 

the pot and the kettle tete a tete

first para from an article in the march 10 nytimes:

"China criticized the human rights record of the United States on Thursday [March 9], arguing that racial discrimination remained pervasive and that the American military abused prisoners held at detention cetners abroad."

i think we have struck rock bottom when china's criticisms are not only true, but non-trivial. china lecturing the u.s. on civil rights. it can hardly get any worse.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/13/2006 08:28:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-02-23

 

iran versus iraq II: the sequel (sort of)

i am having a hard time getting worked up over the issue of which incompetent country or corporation should run the ports. the federal airport security people -- they are employed by an american corporation, correct? -- takes away my matches, forcing me to bum cigarettes in my destination city when i need to smoke, and they forced my then three year old son to remove his shoes and trousers for a pat-down search. so having americans in charge doesn't guarantee very much in the way of judgment or competence.

but i am happy for the fight to continue over this indefinitely. it's like the good old days when sadaam was going at it tooth and nail with the ayatollah.

republican congress versus dubya is a rich spectator sport. i do want to suggest, however, that members of congress modify one of their arguments. i heard on npr that one objection to the UAE's involvement in port security is that several of the 9/11 hijackers were based there, in dubai. that might be true. i'm not sure. but i am sure that more of them were based here, in the usa.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/23/2006 12:39:00 PM 0 comments  

2006-02-22

 

random musings on running kites

the reference is to khaled hosseini's first novel, the kite runner, set in california and afghanistan, during the taliban versus soviet union days. i started the book when it came out three or so years ago, and gave up on it. my wife read it and told me it was great. she does know my tastes, so i gave it another try. mea culpa. she is right. i was wrong. it is amazing. it reminds me of an oped that appeared in the nytimes a couple of weeks back, called the islam gap. you can read it here. the basic thesis is that islam has been hijacked.

my cyber friend ravi says that the u.s. and israel are partly responsible for this. to which i say: maybe, but so what. i understand that psychotherapists are increasingly less focused on having their patients figure out the roots of why they feel the way they do. instead, you just deal with it. that's a sound approach for international relations as well.

in truth, original causes have virtually nothing to do with current manifestations of dysfunction. it doesn't really matter why the palestinians and israelis originally started hating one another. they just need to deal with the present problem.

and speaking of solutions -- and now we get to the "random" part of today's post: npr this morning had a story on the santorum versus casey senate race in pennsylvania. if you want to, you can go here to listen to it, but you needn't bother. i'm going to tell you the punch line: which is that this race is going to cost, according to expert estimates, in the neighborhood of $70 million. seventy million dollars. that is truly obscene.

i think the two men should decide on one issue they both think is critically important and in need of lots of money (say, k-12 education). then they should flip a coin. the winner goes to the senate, and an important cause gets $70 mil. considering that casey is pretty damn moderate anyway, this is a win-win solution.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/22/2006 10:53:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-02-14

 

when you come to a fork in the road, take it

today's nytimes reports that the u.s. and israel have a plan to destabilize hamas, and usher in the way for a return to power for fatah.

actually, the better yogi-ism for this one is deja vu all over again.

this is not the most ridiculous thing the bush administration has conceived, b/c there is too much competition for that honor, but it's definitely on the short list. apparently, we have policy analysts in the state department who (1) are too young to remember that this practice failed miserably in (a) latin america, and (b) southeast asia; and (2) are too busy to notice that it is presently failing in (a) iraq, (b) iran, and (c) haiti.

who are these people that we pay for with our tax dollars? it is hard to think of anything that would make hamas more popular than starving the palestinian government of operating funds. sure sure sure: the people voted for hamas b/c the party promised to deliver meat and potatoes, but the palestinians are not morons. if the burgers and fries fail to materialize b/c the israelis and bush admininstration turn off the money spigot, are there truly two analysts in the entire state department who think the palestinian masses are going to turn against hamas?

this tactic is reminiscent of osama bin laden's 11th hour appearance (via videotape, of course) in the bush-kerry election. and that worked swimmingly, didn't it?

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/14/2006 11:02:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-02-13

 

three theses nailed to a minaret

anthony writes:

"The muslim Martinahamed Lutherabama wouldn't need 95 points to nail to the door of a church - he'd only need 3. (1) God opposes violence, not endorses it; (2) education and acceptance = good, fanaticism and beheadings = bad; and (3) guns and jihad are stupid, its jobs and water which count."

i personally think the muslim luther is gonna be a woman. on everything else, i think he's got it exactly right.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/13/2006 09:24:00 AM 0 comments  

 

moderate extremism and partial pregnancy

my friends tim and anthony both wonder the same thing: whether there are enough moderate muslims to make a difference in the relationship between the muslim east and the mostly non-muslim west.

it is an interesting question to which no one knows the answer, but here's the problem the moderates are up against: all ideologies, of which religion is one, tend naturally toward extremism. the reason is simple. moderates, by definition (they are, after all, *moderate*), do not care as much as non-moderates, i.e., extremists. confronted with crazy people bludgeoning themselves to a pulp with chains and tire irons, or burning in effigy a danish newspaper editor whose name hardly anybody can pronouce, the typical moderate is apt to say: these people are nuts; i'm getting away from them. that is why, in the long run, all religions become increasingly extreme. oh, there is a dialectic here, with liberals and moderates winning a round every now and again. but in the end, the extremists prevail every time.

but this long view of history does not mean that the answer to tim and anthony is that there are not presently any moderates. people tend to care deeply about what they've been brought up believing to be important (even if it isn't), and it seems reasonable to believe that moderate muslims who value democracy and free speech are appalled at the trashing of the danish embassy in teheran, among other travesties. but they have no institutional structure to oppose the crazies.

what islam needs at this historical moment is its own martin luther. it needs a protestant reformation.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/13/2006 08:21:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-02-07

 

my breakfast with ernest

really his name is ernesto, but ernest is better for the title, for melodic reasons and double entendre as well.

i'll just talk for the moment on what we agreed upon, since it's more interesting to me than what we disagreed on, our disagreements being old and somewhat marital in nature. (don't ask.)

we were talking about the danes and the cartoon and the muslim riots and the letters in the nytimes telling the muslims they should protest real atrocities -- like suicide bombings and beheadings oof civilians -- instead of an orchestrated "insult."

(parenthetical: who reads danish newspapers? nobody, of course. which raises the question of how the entire muslim world heard about the cartoon. for an interesting analysis of how the spontaneous eruption of protests against this little newspaper was orchestrated by muslim clerics, listen to this story on npr. the gist is that clerics in denmark wanted to meet with the danish p.m. to discuss the cartoon showing muhammad with a bomb under his turban, and the p.m. said no, so the clerics then disseminated the published cartoon, as well as a dozen or so that were never published, thoughout the muslim world. in response, a newspaper in iran has initiated a contest, calling for cartoons about the holocaust. it's an idiotic analogy, which the iranian orthodoxy seems fully capable of. they should be asking for a cartoon mocking jesus, or some famous rabbi.)

actually, the iranian response to the cartoon brings us back to the main point. europeans claim to be tolerant, in the same way that liberals say that convicted sex offenders should be integrated back into society. then the sex offenders move in next door, and the great idea doesn't seem so great anymore. it is an easy thing for europeans to be in favor of diversity, since they have none. the epic conflict between islam and the west will not take place in america -- 9/11 was a massive exception that will prove the rule -- b/c the u.s. knows what diversity is, and is truly built on it, which is why voices like david duke and even pat buchanan rapidly fade into nothingness. but europe is fundementally ethnic and tribal in a way america is not, so the introduction of millions of muslims into that environment creates pressures and conflicts previously unknown.

which brings us to the present precipice. there are parallels between the brewing conflict between christian europe and arab mulsims, on the one hand, and the period between the late 19th century and the beginning of world war 2, on the other. then it was the jews, now it is the muslims. unlike the holocaust, however, which threatened the jewish people but not the entire planet, there are three features of the present conflict that make it much more ominous.

first, the sheer number of muslims. instead of 12 million jews, you have more than a billion mulsims. second, the war against the jews did not target a nation-state, with any weapons, much less nuclear ones. third, there was no sense of martyrdom among the major combatants in world war 2 that created a risk of global disaster.

all those variable are different now. even during the hey-day of the cold war, there was no sense that either the united states or the soviet union was indifferent to global annihilation. you have to have a pervasive embrace of martyrdom to achieve that degree of indifference.

i'm not saying the sky is falling. i'm just saying that the sky could fall unless the west starts aggressively courting moderate muslims, and unless moderate muslims start speaking up.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/07/2006 10:52:00 AM 0 comments  

 

al gore's trident and horns

my friend lisa sent me this article that reveals the single biggest mistake that dubya made after 9/11: he missed the chance to construct a conflict that would not be perceived as "the west versus islam."

note that i am not saying he *caused* the conflict to be perceived in this way, because the causes are deep and complex, and the subject of a different post. but he missed a chance to fix it.

sometimes there is wisdom in law's platitudes, one of them being the "last clear chance" doctrine: even if you are not the cause of the accident, if you are the one who had the last chance to avert disaster, and you missed the chance, you are partly to blame.

dubya's dad, whatever you might think about "the u.s. versus iraq I," did not make this mistake. the face of that war was not the light skins versus the dark, or the christians versus the muslims, or the west versus the east. in many ways the coalition of us v irag I was a joke, but not in terms of appearance, and appearances, as we all know, eventually become reality.

which is why the present appearance needs some air brushing before it's too late.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/07/2006 10:38:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-02-02

 

so the pope, nino, and sam alito go into a bar . . .

my colleague leslie griffin pointed out to me that the supreme court, for i think the first time in history, has a majority of catholic justices (scalia, kennedy, roberts, thomas, alito). i wouldn't think this noteworthy, except in light of the fact that catholic presidential candidates seem to be burdened by their religion. why should a catholic political candidate be compelled to declare his or her independence from the pope and orthodox doctrine, but a judicial candidate not be so compelled? probably the answer is that a political candidate should not have to address this issue.

of course, if justice scalia were forced to address the point, he'd just say that he's more of an authority on catholic canon than the vatican anyway, so what difference does it make.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/02/2006 09:22:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-02-01

 

am i blue?

i thought president bush's tie was the highlight of the state of the union. but i think you'd have to admit: there wasn't a lot of competition.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/01/2006 11:39:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-01-23

 

jim frey and bill clinton have more in common than a love of the ladies

and dubya will one day have it in common, too (though he'll of course have to use a ghost-writer). here's what it is, courtesy of wallace stegner. this comes from the spectator bird:

"Writing your life implies that you think it worth writing. It implies an arrogance, or confidence, or compulsion to justify oneself that I can't claim. Did Washington write his memoirs? Did Lincoln, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Socrates. No, but Nixon will, and Agnew is undoubtedly hunched over his right now."

stegner wrote that in 1976. he was right about nixon. and he was dead-on about agnew, whose memoir go quietly . . . or else tries to paint agnew as an innocent victim of nixon's corruption. un huh.

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/23/2006 10:21:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-01-19

 

mayor ray and reverend pat sacrifice at the same altar

this is a goose and gander post. mayor ray naggin says god is pissed. hence, bad shit happens.

he apologized the next day. that's a good thing. but people who have this thought, and certainly people who express it, should not be mayors. they definitely should not be mayors of cities where the homicide rate is like the wild west.

saying sorry proves, maybe, that the mayor isn't insensitive. but the original statement means that the good reverend is going to have to share his gold medal for idiocy in the face of disaster.

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/19/2006 03:06:00 PM 1 comments  

 

aren't you embarrassed to know me?

my friend tim asks why he, as a christian, should be embarrassed by the good reverend pat robertson. the rev speaks for himself. just b/c tim's a christian doesn't mean that every old christian's idiocy should cause him shame.

this is an interesting and incorrect viewpoint. we have spokespersons. we just do. this means that certain people speak on our behalf, or are perceived as speaking on our behalf.

that's why i am embarrassed when president bush says something moronic: b/c he's my president, as it happens. it's why my grandmother used to ask: is it good for the jews.

sometimes the only reasonable reaction is embarrassment, even when the idiot causing the reaction is someone we do not respect, admire, or even like.

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/19/2006 03:00:00 PM 0 comments  

2006-01-11

 

satan's blushing in charleston

get it? charleston, west virginia.

if you have to explain a joke, it probably isn't funny.

anyway, moving on. today i have two reader reports:

in response to an oped i wrote that you can read here, kang points out that prophets are unappreciated in their day, such that only a false prophet could ever be confirmed as a supreme court justice.

kang's is a subtle point. it would be true if the average member of the senate were not a self-aggrandizing blowhard. according to today's nytimes, exactly two members of the judiciary committee spent less time on their respective questions than judge alito did on his answers to their questions. one, a surprise, was dianne feinstein, who is actually a republican, even though she has a "d" after her name on the california ballot. the other was herb kohl of wisconsin, who even looks laconic.

anthony says, in response to my comment about pat robertson, that he personally knows at least one gentile -- himself -- who is embarrassed by the good reverend's rants. i am confident there are others whose names i do not yet know.

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/11/2006 09:59:00 AM 0 comments  

2006-01-06

 

joel, ariel, coal miners, and the wrath of the lord

pat robertson reportedly said that ariel sharon's stroke is punishment -- delivered by the almighty herself -- for dividing god's land. i think the reverend must be referring to sharon's decision to leave gaza. he quoted the prophet joel as saying that god has enmity against those who divide her land. so apparently what sharon should have done was just give the entire country away. then it wouldn't be divided, and ariel would still be torturing his horse by riding around on his ranch.

and i suppose that the sin of the west virginia miners is that they voted for robert byrd.

why aren't all christians embarrassed by this buffoon?

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/06/2006 09:40:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-12-29

 

PETA, chicken mcnuggets, and the hope diamond

i saw another article about gold mining yesterday. as best i can tell, and all i know is what i read in the nytimes, one of the worst things for the ecosystem, right after burning fossil fuel and CO2 emissions, is gold and diamond mining. so i am wondering why the good folks from PETA, or whoever cuts holes in fences on mink farms and throws blood on silver-haired ladies wearing furs, doesn't start throwing ground-up dead fish on people wearing precious metals.

i'm finding, as i get older, that the only way to avoid complicity in a moral wrong is to dig a deep hole and crawl down into it. this must be wrong, but i can't figure out why.

 

# posted by drdow @ 12/29/2005 11:23:00 AM 1 comments  

 

is george w. bush the dumbest person ever to be president?

that's it. is he?

i've been thinking about this question more or less constantly since his prime time appearance two weeks ago on the subject of how much progress we've made in iraq. gerald ford and bill clinton said stupid things, but hardly anybody would say that they are stupid men. reagan wasn't a genius by any means, but don't you think he had a clue? i'd rate bush's performance up there with "there is no soviet domination of eastern europe" and "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" for sheer idiocy.

i think i'd enjoy hanging out with dubya, or would have back in the days when he still drank. and if he's ever in houston on the night my poker group plays cards, i'd like to have him join us. or if i'm in his neck of the woods, i wouldn't mind going mountain bike riding with the guy. but i just can't even bring myself to watch him on tv.

which is worse: for a married man to have oral sex with a young woman his daughter's age? or for an elected official to order his subordinates to eavesdrop illegally on american citizens?

 

# posted by drdow @ 12/29/2005 11:00:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-12-08

 

news alert: ward churchill travels to stockhom and transmogrifies into harold pinter

hey, i'm as intemperate and as big a bomb thrower as the next guy, but harold pinter is either (a) senile, or (b) a moron, or (c) both.

i'm not even going to comment on how overrated his work is, only b/c i do not want to offend my friend in vermont who i think might admire him, or at least his plays, at any rate. so i will content myself to pointing out that the guy's an idiot, proving that just b/c you win the nobel does not prove you have the principal quality that makes us human, which quality is discernment.

as best i can tell from today's nytimes -- and, ok, maybe the story is insufficiently nuanced for me to get the gist of what pinter said during his nobel acceptance speech -- pinter compared the crimes of the soviet union to post world war 2 american foreign policy. aside from the fact that pinter, who is 75-years-old, had his own personal brisket pulled from the fire by americans in world war 2, it's just downright irresponsible for someone who should know better to compare mistakes -- even huge mistakes, like supporting pinochet or like abu ghraib -- with intention. nixon wasn't stalin, no matter how much you detest him. and truman might have killed as many people as hussein, but anyone who thinks they are morally equivalent is an idiot to whom no one should pay attention.

so boycott pinter. don't buy the books. don't attend theatres that stage his plays. let ward churchill get him booked at the boulder improv.

 

# posted by drdow @ 12/08/2005 09:23:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-12-05

 

eine girl equals how many kuehe?

some cultures do not warrant respect. my friend anthony reports that the going rate in tanzania for one full blooded female homo sapien is 16 cows (or 14; i cannot remember exactly).

there are limits to tolerance, i think, and of the desirability of multi-culturalism.

yesterday's nytimes reports the difficulty that modern germans have in condemning muslim men who kill their sisters because their sisters have brought "shame" to the family. this difficulty stems from the obvious. but thinking that there is equivalence between the holocaust and refusing to tolerate misogynism reveals the thinness of the line between sensitivity and insanity.

 

# posted by drdow @ 12/05/2005 09:09:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-12-01

 

wanted: joint degree candidates, corrections officers and obstetrics

just in time for the end of the year bonehead awards, dalton conley argues in today's nytimes oped page that a man who impregnates a woman as a consequence of a voluntary sexual encounter should be able to obtain an injunction to prevent the woman from having an abortion. after making this argument, he says that it might be problematic to put his proposal into effect. au contraire. already there are some prisons designed for pregnant women. in these facilities, the women even get to be mothers to their infants once the children are born. (how about having to indicate on your college application that your place of birth was alcatraz?) anyway, we just throw all the unhappily pregnant women into the clink and make sure they have no sharp objects in their cells.

it's an interesting paper today. on page 3, a french woman, an anthropologist, who is married to a man with around 6 other wives, talks about what great friends all the polygamist's wives are, and how she thinks of all the children as her children.

and the vast right wing conspiracy says the nytimes is part of the liberal elite.

 

# posted by drdow @ 12/01/2005 11:54:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-11-28

 

bovines, females, and the monthly rent

sunday's nytimes reports that women -- girls, really -- are still chattel across a broad swath of sub saharan africa. i think we should add the countries where this culture predominates to the list of countries we should consider invading.

my friend jo in vermont thinks i'm just being cantakerous. but i'm not. there are two reasons to go to war: to protect our own security, and to better the lives of others. it is of course absurd to think that invading iraq had anything at all to do with protecting our own security. but fellows like christopher hitchens who defend the war, do so along lines suggested by the second justification for invasion: protecting the iraqis from a dictator.

now it is quite possible that that justification is also absurd. the jury is still out. if a strong islamic state develops, we'll just have traded one form of despotism for another. but the basic idea -- that it is moral to save people -- is surely sound. indeed, people who say that the united states waited too long to enter world war II in europe make a cousin of the same argument.

it's decided, then: invading a country to save the people who live there from a thug is morally defensible, and perhaps morally obligatory.

so why should "saving" people be limited to removing them from danger of death? why not also remove them from other forms of danger, such as having their humanity squashed? when african men are trading their daughters for cows, and selling them to rich villagers, there is a trading in human life that is as abhorrent as slavery.

it's one thing for crazy, brainwashed women to consent to this outrage. but the nytimes article makes clear that young girls, some not yet teenagers, also meet this dreadful fate.

let's just invade, and remove all the young kids who don't want any part of this life.

 

# posted by drdow @ 11/28/2005 10:34:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-11-09

 

texas and kansas both end in "as"

there are no coincidences. texas voters approved a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one woman and one man on the same day that the kansas board of education mandated teaching of intelligent design. this is proof that all of america is just satan's sandbox.

proponents of intelligent design (which used to be known as creationism, but it got a name makeover by the same folks who gave the estate tax its new handle: the death tax) say that some organisms are so complex that they had to have been designed, as opposed to developing randomly (as evolution posits). if something has been designed, then there is, of course, a designer. so far these careful IDers (and they are clever, brutus; remember the "death" tax?) talk mostly about design of flagella and the like, but human beings are next. already they talk about the human eye.

so here's what i find perplexing: did the designer design the eye but not the sexual orientation? why would she do that? there's a queer eye joke lurking here somewhere. you win a gift certificate if you send me one that makes me laugh.

 

# posted by drdow @ 11/09/2005 08:47:00 AM 0 comments  

 

and a couple of others, too

add to the invasion list north korea and sudan. there's really no point to being the world's only superpower unless you're going to be, well, a superpower.

 

# posted by drdow @ 11/09/2005 08:42:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-11-08

 

it's time to find an army to fight

everybody now knows that the problem in iraq is that the enemy wears no uniforms. john cornyn got bent out of shape when wesley clark and chuck hagel -- both of whom we actually in vietnam, senator cornyn -- drew comparisons between iraq and vietnam, but facts are facts. and here's the basic one: in neither case did we have any earthly idea how we were going to win.

so i propose invading iran and syria, maybe even at the same time, although if we start with iran the syrian regime may just go ahead and flee.

there are a couple of advantages to this. one: at the outset at least, we will fighting an army, which makes it easier on the military. and when we are fighting an army, we know what "winning" means.

two: you can't have democratic islands. iraq qill eventually become a puppet, like lebanon. it would probably be worse if iraq became a puppet of iran, but it would also not be great for it to become a puppet of syria. the point is: if the goal is truly to install democracy in the arab world, it is necessary to displace not only secular dictators (iraq and syria, not to mention saudi arabia), but theocratic autocrats as well.

the only reason not to do this is that it would cause bush's popularity to soar. so maybe this is something to keep in mind for 2008.

 

# posted by drdow @ 11/08/2005 08:18:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-10-31

 

just say no to no country for old men

i love cormac mccarthy. blood meridian and suttree and the first two volumes of the border trilogy, and maybe even the first half of the third, are books that people will, or should, read for many decades. but ncfom is just a mess of a book. it is unsatisfying as a thriller, and worse, unsatisfying as a work of art.

when i heard that a movie was being made of all the pretty horses, i knew it would bomb. you can't make a movie about a book that has, as its greatest strength, its language. so maybe what mccarthy was aiming for in ncfom was a book that could be made into a decent movie.

maybe this one could, though it will require a terrific screen writer who is able to make it clear from the outset who the hero is (the sheriff, not llewellyn), b/c audiences don't like the hero to get killed three-quarters of the way through, at least if they don't get to witness the killing.

in other words, wait for the movie. and if there is no movie, it's not such a loss.

 

# posted by drdow @ 10/31/2005 08:20:00 AM 0 comments  

 

jump before they push you

you might not have heard it here first, but you did hear it here: alito will vote to overrule roe v wade. it's not clear that, in the long run, overturning roe, standing alone, would be terrible. the broader problem is that alito has a view of rights that is frighteningly close to scalia's: rights come from political majorities, in his view, rather than from antimajoritarian constitutional values. i could easily be mistaken here. his opinions are only a hint. but you don't get the nickname scalito without earning it.

bush's pick of miers was not so surprising. his decision to push her overboard was. maybe i've been naive to think that the vaunted value of bush loyalty is a two way street.

 

# posted by drdow @ 10/31/2005 08:08:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-10-19

 

bill maher on jihadists and texans

"If you don't want the world to think your religion is medieval, stop beheading people. Texans are bloodthirsty and dim, and even they learned to use the electric chair."

quoted in O Magazine, November 2005, page 262 (i read widely, especially on airplanes when travelling with my lovely wife).

jay leno has an old joke: if jesus was crucified today, christians would wear little electric chairs around their necks.

in truth, they'd wear little syringes, but electric chairs is funnier.

 

# posted by drdow @ 10/19/2005 11:05:00 AM 0 comments  

 

winslow in love

by kevin canty. my one word review: stunning. read this book.

 

# posted by drdow @ 10/19/2005 11:04:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-10-06

 

harriet miers and the cast of ten thousand

george will has reportedly opined (i say "reportedly" b/c, to be frank, he's pretty close to the bottom of my reading list, so i must depend on others to read him for me) that if 100 scholars listed their top 100 suggestions for being a justice on the supreme court, harriet miers' name would not be anywhere among the 10,000 names.

he might be right about that. we'll never know. what i am wondering, though, is whether mr. will performed a similar multiplication when dubya's dad named clarence thomas. does anyone know? of course, in thomas' case, you could have used a 1,000 by 1,000 matrix and still found his name in none of the squares.

 

# posted by drdow @ 10/06/2005 11:46:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-10-03

 

thomas dale delay

my knowing the hammer's middle name reflects that i have, at long last, read the short indictment. i have heard some refer to the indictment as vague. well, go to findlaw.com and read it yourself. it isn't vague at all. it's simple and straighforward and i, who know close to nothing about election law, understand it and the crime it is charging.

it may be too soon to be confident that the law delay is charged with violating is constitutional; this question will (may) be affected by a case the supreme court will decide this term. but it's not too soon for a prediction: delay will plead, or he'll be convicted.

of course, i also predicted that scott peterson would not get sentenced to death. but in my own defense, my mistake there was in not realizing how utterly the jury detested the defendant. a similar underestimation in the case of tom delay is truly quite impossible even to imagine.

 

# posted by drdow @ 10/03/2005 11:57:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-09-29

 

thinking out loud about the doctor and the hammer

maybe you're just naive enough to believe that bill frist was really planning to sell his stock two weeks before it tanked. but what i don't get is that the stock was held in a blind trust. perhaps some trusts expert can write me to explain the fallacy in my thinking, but i thought blind trusts were blind -- meaning that the beneficiary of the trust does not control the trust's disposition of assets. so how was dr. frist directing that shares be sold, even if it was two weeks before the apocalypse?

and on a related note of sordidness: does tom delay's decision to hire dick deguerin remind anyone else of the decision of the grand poobah of the imperial wizards of the ku klux klan to hire a jewish lawyer, or, gads, a black one? of course, one should not let mr. deguerin off scott-free; lots of jews resigned from the aclu when the aclu decided to represent the nazis who wanted to march through skokie. and tom delay is no kay bailey hutchinson.

anyway, delay says the indictment is political. maybe, but there's more to it than there was against bill clinton, and i do not recall that the hammer dismissed the impeachment articles as mere politics driven by partisan fanatics.

 

# posted by drdow @ 9/29/2005 09:08:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-09-28

 

back from hibernation with a thought about mass evacuations

i was not one of the gulf coast residents who spent 24 hours making the 200 mile trip to dallas. i was one of the people who stayed in my house (with, admittedly, my wife and son safely in oklahoma) watching the seemingly unending news coverage of the 2.5 million people who drove to dallas in more time than it would have taken them to walk, or at least cycle, unless of course they ran out of gas or just fell asleep at the wheel.

here is what i think we have learned -- the only question being why it took us a dress rehearsal to learn this obvious fact: you cannot evacuate 3 million people. you just cannot. the disaster planners are now making two mistakes: first, saying that the evacuation basically worked, and second, that because it did, all we need to do is tweak it for the future.

for those of you not blighted to have suffered through a week's worth of local news coverage leading up to hurrican rita, let me mention that the evacuation began more than 72 hours -- which is to say: more than 3 days -- before the hurricane's scheduled arrival. ok. three days, and we still ended up with no gas and gridlock.

no one should be blamed for this. the mayor, the county judge, and the other local officials did great. but the stubborn fact is that you just can't move 3 million people inland in three days in an orderly fashion, unless you have a transmogrification machine, which as yet exist only fictionally. you cannot get 3 million people anywhere quickly, and even if you could, there's no place to put them.

so we should not be tweaking. we should not be thinking about fuel supply lines and orderly evacuation zones. real catastrophes do not have 3 days' notice. the planners should be thinking about what we do with 3 hours' notice, or 3 minutes' warning. and while you're thinking in these terms, go ahead and make two assumptions that will undoubtedly be sound: that a significant number of people will die, and that panic will ensue.

so here's my idea: put people in high schools and sports stadiums.

cities already piss away obscene amounts of money on sports stadiums. in houston, i am embarrassed to say, we have three new facilities, one each for basketball, football, and baseball, not to mention the vacant dome, the frequently vacant convention center, and the formerly vacant basketball arena, now reincarnated as a church. plus two indoor facilities at the university of houston, and maybe some others that i don't know about. these facilities should be made catastrophe proof. i'm no engineer, and so i cannot begin to guess the marginal cost of adding these qualities, but buildings could have their own power, they could have room for food and water, and they could have emergency ventilation for 3 days or a week. in houston, existing facilities could accommodate at least 150,000 people, and perhaps half a million, i'd guess. you'd have to sleep in a chair, rather than a cot, but it would be for 3 days. heck, i was once at a baseball game that lasted for 9 hours. it's better than sleeping in a car.

the other 75 percent goes to high schools. every neighborhood already has one. you can get there without a car. you need water, food, and a clean air supply. that should be part of every new high school, and old ones should be retrofit.

some people will prefer to build private below-ground bomb shelters, like the good old days of the cold war. let 'em. more room in the dome for the rest of us.

the details of this plan are probably idiotic. like i said, i'm not an engineer. but the part of the plan that is sound is that cities have to be able to deal with crises without resorting to evacuation in advance of the crisis' arrival, b/c you can't evacuate anything bigger than a ghost town in time to outrun a disaster.

 

# posted by drdow @ 9/28/2005 09:21:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-07-01

 

is a page missing from spain's bible?

according to today's nytimes, an ultraorthodix jewish protester (what is "ultra" orthodox?) stabbed three participants in the annual gay pride march in jerusalem. it is possible -- the times does not address this point -- that he is a follower of the rabbi who two months ago, condemning the upcoming parade, insisted that jerusalem is the holy city, not the homo city. i bet he said it in english, because the hebrew probably wouldn't be as clever.

meanwhile, the spanish parliament approved what would be the world's most liberal law recognizing gay marriage. according to the rabbi referred to in the preceding paragraph, a page must have been ripped out of the spanish bible. (in the interest of honesty, i made that up. it's called "creative nonfiction.")

 

# posted by drdow @ 7/01/2005 08:02:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-06-21

 

bruce springsteen is not a jew

adam sandler can add a verse to the hannukah song.

a militant muslim cleric will spend the rest of his life, barring a jailbreak, in a turkish prison for plotting to overthrow the secular authorities and install an islamist state.

according to today's nytimes, the cleric's name -- this is not a joke -- is kaplan.

 

# posted by drdow @ 6/21/2005 08:30:00 AM 0 comments  

 

humpty dumpty falls off the alamo's northern wall

once again, the texas legislature did nothing to improve public k-12 education in the state. that's the bad news. the good news is that the legislature did enact, and governor perry signed, an important piece of legislation that proves that when the state carries out an execution, it is not actually committing a homicide.

generally speaking, there are four ways to die. you can kill yourself, someone can kill you, you can die by natural causes, or you can die in an accident (like falling off a mountain). death certificates indicate how a person died; the person filling it out checks a box (homicide, suicide, accident, natural causes).

prior to the enactment of this important law, when the state executed someone, the person filling out the death certificate would obviously check the homicide box. now there is an additional box: court ordered lethal injection. who thinks up these things?

 

# posted by drdow @ 6/21/2005 08:21:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-06-07

 

beating up women while smoking dope

many of the con law pundits are talking about yesterday's supreme court decision, upholding the authority of the federal government to prosecute possession and use of marijuna, even in the states that permit it. everyone is making the obvious point that justices kennedy and scalia, who have been strong proponents of states' rights, appear to have permitted their hostility toward cannibus consumption to overwhelm their commitment to their own version of federalism. (at least the chief justice, and justices o'connor and thomas are consistent here.)

for kennedy and scalia, the federal government can make patients suffer, by denying them a substance that would make their lives more comfortable, but the federal government cannot permit women who are raped to seek redress against their attackers in federal court. (the decision, for you non lawyers, is u.s. v. morrison.) i doubt justice scalia or justice kennedy would *say* that pot is worse than rape, but decisions, so to speak, speak louder than words.

 

# posted by drdow @ 6/07/2005 12:50:00 PM 0 comments  

 

anarchy in the brothels

the new pope, according to today's nytimes, says that gay marriage is an example of "anarchic freedom which falsely tries to pass itself off as the true liberation of man." maybe that sentiment sounds less stodgy in whatever language he expressed it, but it needs more than lyricism to save it. i suppose true liberation means doing what the bishops and popes command one to do.

the pope also condemned contraception. at least that's one sin that the parties in a gay marriage won't be committing.

 

# posted by drdow @ 6/07/2005 12:45:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-05-20

 

stem cells and soldiers' penises

today's nytimes also reports, in a story that makes me ashamed and embarrassed as an american citizen, of interrogation abuses in afghanistan. if anyone thought abu ghraib was isolated, they need to read this story. it tells of a soldier who rubbed his penis against the face of an afghan prisoner, and threatened to rape him.

our armed forces are doing a bang-up job of training our soldiers.

meanwhile, president bush appears not to be worried about this. instead, he's lathered up about the possibility that congress will ease restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

bill clinton was a brilliant politician and is an intelligent man. george bush (41) was a dismal politician and is an intelligent man. have we ever had someone like george bush (43), who is a brilliant politician and a dolt?

oh yes, his wife laura said that the secret service should, after all, have interrupted her hubby's bike ride when all of washington was under panic because a couple of guys in a single-engine cessna got lost and wandered into d.c's restricted airspace. the point here is that the secret service knows who's running the country.

 

# posted by drdow @ 5/20/2005 12:09:00 PM 0 comments  

 

ward churchill is not the only moron in academia

today's nytimes reports that sari nusseibeh, president of al quds university, and menachem magidor, president of hebrew university, jointly asked a british higher education union to discontinue its policy barring israeli academicians at two universities (bar ilan and haifa) from attending academic conferences and participating in joint research.

there are academic morons on the left as well as the right, but the british decision is about as moronic as it gets.

 

# posted by drdow @ 5/20/2005 12:00:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-05-11

 

what's a synonym for "almost omnipotent"?

yesterday's nytimes reports that pheromone researchers have found that the brains of gay men respond to male pheromones (isolated from men's armpit sweat) the same way that women do, and do not respond to female pheromones (isolated from women's urine), whereas heterosexual men do not respond to the male pheromone but do respond to the female pheromone. the study is significant not only for identifying pheromones, but for supplying another piece of datum for the perhaps obvious point that sexual orientation, like sexuality generally, has a genetic component. and that's probably too mild a statement: genetically determined would be more like it.

i'm not so interested in the philosophy 101 questions relating to free will versus determinism. i'm just wondering whether the proponents of anti-gay bigotry are going to admit that their god appears to have made a wiring mistake when building about five or ten percent of her creatures.

 

# posted by drdow @ 5/11/2005 12:29:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-05-09

 

greenhouse, blackmun, and rorschach

linda greenhouse's new book on justice blackmun is terrific, and is getting well-deserved favorable attention, including a review in yesterday's book review and in today's paper. blackmun critics -- a category that includes conservatives who revile him for roe v. wade and liberals who think they seem smart and full of integrity by criticizing roe -- seem to think the book validates them (rosen yesterday talked about blackmun's insecutiry). his admirers seem to think the book explains their views: his humility and empathy. i think that means the book is a good book.

but the issue worth talking about is why blackmun's friends and allies are so quick to concede the infirmity of roe's foundations. in truth, it is, in many ways, the apotheosis of post-griswold constitutional adjudication.

 

# posted by drdow @ 5/09/2005 12:07:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-05-05

 

democracy rising in the near east

yesterday's paper reported that the kuwait parliament decided not to extend the franchise to women. even in iran, women can vote.

the article made no mention of the detail that the first gulf war was assertedly undertaken to protect kuwait from sadaam hussein and iraq. even conceding that that was the motivation, what exactly is it about kuwait that warrants saving it from someone like hussein?

one might argue that the united states, as the world's only superpower, should go around the world toppling dictators. if the united states could transform the large pieces of africa and asia and the near east that are not even remotely democratic into something resembling a democracy, that would be an epochal achievement. indeed, one might expect a domino theory to prevail. thus, for example, if the united states decided to topple assad in syria next, having gotten rid of sadaam, it would make libya or saudi arabia more vulnerable to democratic influences.

the problem, of course, is that in the short run, islamic fundamentalism will squash the democrats unless the united states is willing to suffer tens of thousands of casualties. and that's not a bad argument for minding our own business. but it leaves the kuwait rescue unexplained.

 

# posted by drdow @ 5/05/2005 11:42:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-04-29

 

wallace stevens, george bush, and donald trump: social security versus the apprentice

well, i'm sure it isn't the first time that the major networks have coerced the white house to change the time of the president's news conference so as not to interfere with truly important matters, like the prime-time may sweeps line-up. still and all, i was reminded of the man with the blue guitar:

A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
Of the undertaker's song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath serene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung and Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.


Wallace Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar, canto XXIII, reprinted without permission.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/29/2005 09:07:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-04-09

 

the pope and the pedophile, and a plug for gilead

i trust that the fact that i criticize all god-centered religions indiscriminately will shield me from charges of discrimination. on top of which, gilead is an amazing book.

here's one of the things i do not understand: a priest who presides over a same-sex marriage gets ejected from the priesthood. an archbishop who covers up several priests' pedophilia and molestation of young boys -- and thereby undoubtedly contributes to more such conduct -- plays a prominent role and delivers a major eulogy at the pope's funeral service.

sometimes one must choose between belief and behavior.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/09/2005 12:57:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-04-07

 

bellow, mcewan, kakutani, and conroy

bellow wrote thousands of pages, yet both ian mcewan, writing on today's nytimes oped page, and the insightful michiko kakutani, writing in the arts section, quoted the same passage from herzog: "Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failures of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs."

i don't much like "tremendous," but the whole thing is still mesmerizing. kakutani quotes less of it, but the effect is the same. mcewan modestly says that he worried about using the passage as an epigraph, b/c it might make his prose sound puny. it doesn't, but you get the point.

i wish they'd say something about frank conroy, who might not have been saul bellow, but whose novel body & soul holds up well against any novel of the past thirty years.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/07/2005 12:17:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-04-06

 

the pope and my american friend in germany

you should mosey on over to my friend andrew hammel's blog, link provided in the left margin, to see what he has to say about the papal effusion. npr this morning reported that some people are beginning to observe that jp2's advocacy of political democracy was matched in intensity by his defense of papal authoritarianism. this is true, but uninteresting. religion is authoritarian.

what is more interesting is that this particular authoritarianism was full of regressive hypocrisy. i'm pleased that the pope renounced the death penalty. but he caused more pain than he prevented, with his opposition to contraception (this is ironic, isn't it?), leading to starving children and children with aids, with his opposition to stem-cell research, and with his sanctification of anti-gay bigotry.

ask the liberation theologists in latin america, bludgeoned into silence by the vatican, how strong a proponent of democracy they consider jp2 to have been.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/06/2005 08:47:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-04-04

 

john paul II and this i believe

npr is resurrecting the edward r. murrow "this i believe" series, which began, i believe, in 1951. this morning a segment played excerpts from the original series. one was from justice william douglas. he talked about materialism, but i did not think it was terribly profound. on the other hand, two struck me enough that i do remember them.

one was from a woman, an academician, a biologist, i believe. she said, and i'm paraphrasing, that behavior, rather than belief, is what matters. she is right, of course, and obviously so, but sometimes obvious truths are the ones people need to be reminded of.

the other was from martha graham. she said that one gets better at life by practice. everything depends on practice, dance, living, everything.

i had a little league baseball coach who used to say that you play like you practice. and william james said that being human involves forming habits. practice practice practice.

 

# posted by drdow @ 4/04/2005 02:05:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-03-30

 

american idol

ignore this post if you don't watch TV.

i am only moderately embarrassed to admit that i watch this show, and that i have watched it, with my wife, every season. i think many of the people on this show are talented singers, but never until this year has there been a contestant whose CD i would actually consider purchasing.

however, scott savol can sing. i will buy a CD regardless of whether he wins -- and he probably won't b/c he doesn't look remotely like an idol. that is the reason that simon (one if the judges) doesn't like the guy. (when it comes to assessing musical talent, simon is a sad sad little man. but when it comes to assessing who (as distinguished from "what") will sell, he might have some talent. i don't know.)

anyway, for all you hollywood music producers who routinely visit this blog to see what's hot and what's not, take note: savol has a set of lungs, and he'll sell lots of CDs, b/c people who buy CDs care about the music.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/30/2005 03:11:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-03-24

 

god is the fire my feet are held to

as long as i'm ranting and raving about the schiavo hypocrisy: when exactly did the republican party become so hostile to the separation of church and state?

this hostility is ironic, in view of the fact that christianity invented the separation.

the connection to the schiavo case is illustrated by the phenomenon, discussed at some length in today's nytimes, whereby evangelical protestants and observant catholics -- two groups that usually talk to each other about as much as orthodox jews and islamic mullahs converse -- have formed the coalition that has endeavored to have the state thrust an unwanted feeding tube down terri schiavo's throat.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/24/2005 03:00:00 PM 0 comments  

 

on panderers, theocrats, shiavo, and the future of the democratic party

here are the two most significant differences between the democrats and the republicans:

1 -- the libertarian wing of the republican party has been marginalized, and democrats are therefore now the party that says that government should stay out of personal decisions. democrats believe that sick people should be able to use marijuana, that terminally ill people should be able to end their lives, that the state has no role in policing bedroom (so to speak) intimacy. the majority of the republican party -- at least those who control the party -- reject each of those propositions.

2 -- the democrats believe that the state should be active in improving the lives of the poor and the powerless, in contrast to the republicans' confidence that the free market will correct these problems. with interest rates steadily moving upward, there is middle class disaster in the offing.

the mystery in view of these differences is why the red states are red. the only red area should be riyadh saudi arabia, where the saudi royalty control all the money and also act as moral police. except where wealth and evangelism coincide, no one is republican.

the one and only valuable thing about the republican exploitation of the schiavo tragedy is that it illuminates how profoundly intrusive and controlling the republicans are.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/24/2005 08:11:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-03-19

 

physics, metaphysics, and IMAX

todays nytimes reports that some IMAX theaters, mostly in the south, refuse to show certain films that mention the big bang, or evolution, or any other strand of modern science that fundamentalists reject. (yes, yes, this suggests that advocates of ID are fundamentalists. well, they are.)

anyway, *the* difference between physics and metaphysics is whether a theory is experimentally testable. by that measure, IMAX is showing physics, and its critics are metaphysicians, and not especially good ones.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/19/2005 11:49:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-03-16

 

schwarzenegger announces he's in love with lou ferrigno

what is astonishing about the california trial court's ruling which struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage is that it has caused so much astonishment. gay marriage has got to be the easiest political and cultural issue of our time.

abortion? good arguments on both sides. capital punishment? ditto. irag? same thing. even the environment: if you could make life significantly easier by wiping out a species or two, so what?

but gay marriage? it's exactly like race discrimination: there was massive political opposition to the voting rights act and to the civil rights act. forty years later, it is impossible to believe that anyone could have actually opposed these measures.

i promise to post a nonlaughable argument supporting the ban on gay marriage as soon as someone comes up with one.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/16/2005 02:27:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-03-10

 

daniel schorr and iraq

i think it's great when people who were wrong about something admit they were wrong. open-mindedness is usually a good thing. (usually, not always.) so it is a good thing that some people who opposed the war in iraq now recognize that perhaps there have been some auspicious consequences.

but we should be clear about one thing: the notion that democracy is sweeping through the region as a proximate consequence of this war is preposterous, if what one means by "democracy" is a form of government that protects individual rights. iran is, under the bush administrations's definition, a democracy. they've got a parliament, and it has been, on occasion, very moderately diverse. but, as condi rice pointed out (see a previous post), that doesn't mean that the country isn't run by a bunch of religious fanatics.

the point being: the fact that there are elections means nothing. even the fact that parliament is diverse, and that power is ostensibly shared among competing groups (shiites, sunnis, and kurds, for example), mean nothing. what matters is what sort of freedoms the people have. and by that measure, i'd say that it's rather early in the day to be saying that critics of the war were mistaken.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/10/2005 02:57:00 PM 0 comments  

 

michael jackson's pajamas and my wife

i was doing an excellent job of knowing absolutely nothing about the michael jackson trial, until my wife sent me a link to a story that his popness showed up thirty minutes late for court this morning, wearing his pjs and slippers. my wife would be the first to tell you that i will never win any awards for being well-dressed, but pjs? honestly.

also, as someone with chronic lower back pain (L4 and L5), i am sympathetic to his apparent excuse that he was felled by a bad back. but here's what i don't understand: shouldn't the parents of the kids who had sleepovers at jackson's house be facing some sort of legal action themselves? who are these parents?

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/10/2005 02:44:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-03-08

 

hans bethe, artists, and greatness

bethe, who died yesterday at age 98, said there are two kinds of geniuses: ordinary geniuses, whose accomplishments and insights one can imagine achieving if only one were much much better than one is; and magicians, whose accomplishments and insights are so stunningly extraordinary that one cannot even imagine achieving them.

every once in a while one must confront the possibility that being a great artist goes hand-in-hand with being an abominable person. just think about picasso, for example, or john coltrane, or even einstein. (i am not sure this is true for women artistic genius.) but bethe -- an artist, by any measure -- seems to prove that it ain't necessarily so.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/08/2005 09:56:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-03-02

 

juveniles and the death penalty

of course 17-year-old kids know the difference between right and wrong. so do twelve-year-olds, and some precocious four-year-olds. the point is that that isn't the point.

as usual, justice scalia wins the gold medal for the best sentence in a supreme court opinion -- "Consulting States that bar the death penalty concerning the necessity of making an exception to the penalty for offenders under 18 is rather like including old-order Amishmen in a consumer preference poll on the electric car. Of course they don't like it . . . " but his real gripe is with the language of the constitution itself. the eighth amendment prohibits punishments that are cruel and unusual. i myself do not know what "cruel" means, but i know what unusual means, and the only way to determine whether something is unusual is to see whether that something is being done, and if it is, by how many people, and with what frequency. so when justice scalia criticizes the majority for doing exactly what one needs to do to determine whether a punishment is indeed "unusual," what he's really doing is registering his personal disagreement with a constitutional norm.

which he doesn't need to do, b/c we already know.

 

# posted by drdow @ 3/02/2005 10:30:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-02-28

 

intelligent design

a letter to the nytimes that i didn't write:

when did intelligent design become sufficiently respectable that the new york times would publish a truly moronic op-ed defending it? i think there is about one academic defender of this "theory" in the world -- the author of the op-ed piece; and one should remember that even academics who are respectable at one point in their careers can become crackpots. think of linus pauling's late-in-life confidence that vitamin C cures or prevents just about anything bad.

anyway, here's a suggestion for the times: in your corrections space on page 2, how about publishing

 

 

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/28/2005 01:33:00 PM 0 comments  

 

lawrence summers and public restrooms

should we have separate public toilets for men and women? is there some fact about the world that warrants separate toilets, or does having separate toilets create a difference where none existed before (or, perhaps, strengthen a difference that existed only weakly before)? i notice that boy dogs and girl dogs appear to have no discomfort defacating in front of one another.

apparently some liberals believe that women are inherently more modest than men, whatever that means, and that this inherent difference is a good reason for separate toilets. (i base this assertion on a conversation with a single liberal, so perhaps i should have said that at least one self-described liberal believes this.)

i think this is asinine. there is a straight line from separate toilets to presidents summers' provocative observations. so you can think both are wrong, but you can't think that one is right and the other isn't.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/28/2005 12:00:00 PM 0 comments  

 

brass, by helen walsh

this book is a near-perfect first novel. it was originally published in the u.k., and released in the u.s., in paperback, in late 2004. it has been described as a coming of age story, which i suppose it is, except that that description understresses the sense in which the principal character, millie, is radically unlike holden caulfield. i have a theory as to why the book has not received the critical attention that it deserves: b/c the sex scenes are graphic in the extreme, and not even remotely romantic. it doesn't make your skin crawl, like, say, bastard out of carolina, but this is not a book that would have made the oprah list, even if she still had the list. yet it is a beautiful novel. read it before it gets made into a hackneyed hollywood film.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/28/2005 11:41:00 AM 0 comments  

2005-02-22

 

hunter s. thompson

in her terrific book "night falls fast: understanding suicide," kay jamison writes a bit about the significance of the choice of mode of killing oneself. she reports than more than 60 percent of suicides in the u.s. are by firearm. severely mentally ill people who commit suicide use firearms less commonly, preferring more "exotic" modes of death, including self-immolation and jumping in front of trains.

senate minority leader harry reid's father committed suicide. nevada, where reid is from, consistently leads the nation in suicide rate. senator reid himself introduced a senate resolution that urged, among other things, that the senate develop a national strategy for preventing suicide.

except for the addressing the mentally ill, i don't see how the senate has any legitimate interest in preventing suicide.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/22/2005 03:35:00 PM 0 comments  

2005-02-10

 

iran and iraq

i read in the nytimes this morning that condi rice caught some flak from the french for saying that iran is totalitarian. apparently, she should have claimed no more than that the mullahs are authoritarian. this is a subtle and ridiculous point. but it leads to an important one:

a year ago, one would have had to be rather brave to ask the question, but today, one would have to be supremely naive not to. here's the question: if you have any sympathy for sadaam hussein, then i'd say you have too great a capacity for sympathy, but as execrable a human being as he is, and as abhorrent a leader as he was, is an islamic iraq any better?

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/10/2005 03:25:18 PM 0 comments  

2005-02-09

 

the email box overflowed

the email surfeit prompts this clarification:

hey, i don't care if you believe in god. whatever floats your boat. but there is not any necessary connection between believing and participating in ritual. if you stand and watch a skyscraper being constructed, or a highway intersection and exchange being built, and then go disturb an ant-bed and watch the ants, you'll see how participation in ritual (whatever it is: burning incense, taking communion, genuflecting before a statue, mumbling a prayer) is a building block in the creation or maintenance of an ideology.

that's all i mean.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/09/2005 08:51:21 AM 0 comments  

2005-02-07

 

religion and equality

the question a liberal should ask is: is religion in general a progressive or a regressive force? the phrase "in general" does a great deal of work. if it is regressive, is it more defensible to reconstruct a given religion than to reconstruct, say, the confederacy?

there is an asserted distinction between racial antisemitism and theological antisemitism. the key modifier is "asserted": the roman catholic church did not absolve the jews of collective responsibility for being christ killers until 1965.

psalm 58 promises that the righteous will wash their feet in the blood of the wicked.

 

# posted by drdow @ 2/07/2005 01:52:27 PM 0 comments  

2005-01-31

 

substance and existence

around 96 percent of the human body consists of organic material (65 percent oxygen, 18.5 percent carbon, 9.5 percent hydrogen, and 3 percent nitrogen). another 4 percent, plus or minus, is salt (calcium, phosphorous, etc). then there are the trace elements (zinc, iron, copper, etc.).

i was having a virtual conversation with my friend tim kalinowski, which sent me back to eugene mallove’s lovely book, the quickening universe, which points out that the universe comprises around 24-25 percent helium and 75-76 percent hydrogen. there is other stuff (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, metals), but all that other stuff is statistically insignificant.

what does that tell you about the significance of human life in the universe?

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/31/2005 10:17:53 AM 0 comments  

 

bernard lewis on islam, secularism, and church-and-state

“Secularism in the modern political meaning – the idea that religion and political authority, church and state are different, and can or should be separated – is, in a profound sense, Christian. Its origins may be traced in the teachings of Christ, confirmed by the experience of the first Christians; its later development was shaped and, in a sense, imposed by the subsequent history of Christendom.” Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East 96 (2002) (footnote omitted – but read the footnote, which discusses the origin of the term “secularism”).

is insisting that the phrase “under god” be included in the pledge of allegiance therefore, in this historical sense, “unchristian”? is insisting that the state refuse to recognize same-sex marriage, based on the perceived biblical repudiation of such marriages, similarly unchristian?

Lewis again: “The Muslim experience was very different. Muslims had of course their religious disagreements . . . But there is nothing remotely comparable with such epoch-making Christian events as the . . .Reformation, and the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which almost compelled Christians to secularize their states and societies in order to escape from the vicious circle of persecution and conflict.”

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/31/2005 10:13:39 AM 0 comments  

 

gadamer and poetic images

i was reading where gadamer says: "in the case of poetry, one thing is undisputed: conceptual explication is never able to exhaust the content of a poetic image. no one contests this."

no one? maybe the trick is the word "exhaust," but if that is the word doing the work, how is poetry different from any other text or painting or piece of music? and how are all of the above different from a mathematical proof, a volume of history, or the front page of the new york times?

 

# posted by drdow @ 1/31/2005 09:44:18 AM 0 comments  

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i teach at the university of houston. my wife is katya. our son is lincoln. our hound is winona. the cat is mazel. the fish is puffer.

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