Johnny Two-Cents

2003-07-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

Grand Re-Opening

Johnny Two-Cents is now experiencing what marketroids call rebranding.

From this point on, you can read the same penetrating analysis, effervescent wit, and banal restating of the obvious at a new home, The Ministry of Minor Perfidy. We thank blogger for providing a (free) home for our observations and bloviating, with (free) customer service and excellent (free) archiving.

Come see our new digs, graciously hosted by Bloghouse.

2003-07-16T17:34:00.000-04:00

The Examined Life

From Buckethead and Johnny Two-Cents:

Farewell, Mike.

Johnny Two-Cents started as a fun project, three friends arguing about the world, as we had often done together over beers back in college. Johnny and I have enjoyed discussing with Mike the state of the world, things important and trivial, things comic and tragic. That this blog has become an engine for the clarification of beliefs and goals is an remarkable thing, and as we pause in our amazement, we are both happy that it has helped to give Mike new focus and a stronger belief in his capacity to do good in the world.

Since we have known him, Mike has ever been strong in his arguments, honest and honorable in his actions, and has always looked for the truth. His desire to act rather than speak demonstrates the depth of his commitment and the strength of his beliefs. He has challenged us in our beliefs and thoughts, for which we will always be grateful. As Johnny once said, having Mike on the blog means always having to bring your "A" game. We will dearly miss him.

We wish Mike the best in all things.

And Mike, if ever you are in the eastern reaches; be sure to seek us out so we can stand you to a beer or twenty, and hear you fiddle.

2003-07-15T20:33:00.000-04:00

Catharsis
A Farewell Post

One cloudy, uncharacteristically cool spring day, as I was sitting in a bar with a friend, we discussed my participation in this newfangled Blog business. He offered an observation, that I seemed to get something out of doing this despite my near constant frustration with it and unending battles with one of the other members that drove me dangerously close to fits of apoplexy. I thought about what that was, what benefits I perceived from yet another net technology that allowed people to broadcast thoughts, opinions, and beliefs over this medium. I responded that the Blog allowed me to keep my writing and debating skills sharp.

But more and more, I returned to my early suspicions of the Internet, first experienced through listservs, usenet, and other such strange things that have been with humans for such a short period of time. It seems like only yesterday that our primitive ancestors wielded a bone for the first time to kill another of our own kind, a la the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now we are increasing our technology a hundredfold with every revolution around the sun. Somehow, our primitive, atavistic impulse to smash the skull of another human with a blunt object, however, remains, despite our advances. Civilization, as the adolescent tome Lord of the Flies teaches, is a thin veneer that is rented asunder with but the slightest tug.

That impulse, I think, has been channeled into the primary function of Internet communications. With every online discussion group or listserv, I gave up in frustration as someone either misinterpreted what I had written or simply attacked me outright. The bone is still there. It’s a keyboard now. The urge to kill is right outside my window, in all its glory of primitive, naked rage. It’s in me, and every other human as well. We are by nature angry, savage killers who will smash the brains from the head of another human to possess his food, shelter, or his woman.

But the sort of thing that goes on the net is a different manifestation. It’s an opportunity for people who haven’t the guts to wield a bone in deadly combat, to square off with another shaggy, hunch-shouldered, human ape, when the prize is their own survival, and perhaps the meager possessions of the vanquished. The Internet allows people to mouth off at others with anonymous impunity, take all their frustration out on someone they cannot perceive with their senses over the vast gulf of cyberspace, hurling insults and vitriol across that same unseen chasm, physically as imperceptible as the air we breathe. Some people aren’t even taking out their frustrations on the faceless other, on the opposite side of the cable. They’re just mean, and they don’t have the balls to be mean to other people to their face, lest those they verbally attack take up the bone in lieu of the keyboard.

I return to the original question, why did I Blog? I came to understand that allowing me to polish my writing and argumentative skills was in fact but a penultimate objective. The Blog, in truth, allowed me to rediscover who I really am, what I think, and what I might believe.

In the last four years, I have been accused several times of being a sexist, racist, conservative, and lastly, a right-wing extremist. At an Irish studies conference years ago, I tried to make small talk with a conference participant. This is always a mistake. Conference participants are typically keyboard wielders as opposed to bone-wielders, if you follow my conversational drift. But I digress. The other conference participant and I got to talking about political perspective. When I offered that I had in my early adolescence fancied myself a Communist, but that age, experience, and increased knowledge had brought me to a perspective akin to that of Social Democracy, or a Social Democrat, the other participant rolled his eyes and rocked back on his heels, ensconced in expensive, glistening, leather shoes.

“Oh,” he drawled, the attempt at condescension left uncamouflaged, “so you’ve moved way to the right,” extending his arms widely to indicate that I had fallen far and fast, a distance traversing an entire ocean. I gave up trying to talk to this person, and most other people at the conference.

Since enlisting at a certain Jesuit university that shall remain nameless, I have been accused, in so many words and directly, of also being sexist, racist, ethnocentric, what have you, in addition to a right-wing extremist. I have puzzled repeatedly over how this could be true. Since I do not believe that all men are evil and should be castrated, by some people’s standards apparently, I am sexist. Since I am white, I am automatically a racist. The extent to which I am white could have been a subject, perhaps, of a discussion here, specifically whether or not near easterners and people of near eastern descent are truly afforded white status now. But the sun is setting with alacrity, and if that subject be discussed, I will be unable to weigh in.

Back to the matter at hand. My pale skin, a genetic takeover by Irish ancestry when in the past I had a robust olive complexion indicative of my coexisting near eastern descent, does not alone make me a racist. What has made me a racist in the recent past are the abominable thoughts that have entered my mind over the last four years as I have watched members of another ethnic group firing weapons at each other and indiscriminately, screaming at the top of their lungs in the middle of the night, threatening to kill me, attempting to kill me, trying to kill other people, trying to hurt other people, taking up the bone, leering with a maniacal grin at the prospect of a satisfying smash of bone against bone.

But just as I am not racist because I have pale skin, rather for other reasons, the people I have described do not engage in violent actions because their skin is dark, rather for other reasons. They do it because they are desperate, angry, poor, hungry, left out of the American dream. They also scream in the middle of the night because they have no consideration for other people. Not all members of their ethnic group stand on the intersection near my building screaming and shooting. Or perhaps, as my Dad once told me long ago, “There are only two ethnic groups. Assholes, and people who aren’t. Skin color and geographic origin has nothing to do with it.”

As I have written, for this Blog, however, I have noticed myself eschewing racist interpretations and statements. It was not conscious, so much as innate, a natural inclination. The disgusting racist, or at least prejudicial, thoughts creeping into my head as of late, were unnatural, and not really me.

My political orientation, like my impulse contrary to racism or prejudice has similarly been confirmed. It appears that accusations leveled at me by the keyboard-wielding members of the asshole ethnic group populating the Ivory Tower are patently false. I’m a union man. A son of the working class. Each according to her or his need, and I demand that need be met. I call for an end to foreign war, and an initiation of global peace. I call for justice for workers, and jobs for the unemployed. I call for an end to all forms of discrimination and injustice. I demand that the narrow wealthy oligarchy that dominates this country make themselves accountable, and pitch in what is their due. I call for the downtrodden to raise themselves up from their knees and spit in the faces of those who held them there in chains. I am, unflinchingly, a leftist, and I proudly puke bright red. I never thought I really believed in anything, but having done this Blog, there are ideals in which I have made a leap of faith. To shift gears slightly, as a leftist, I look forward to one of my part-time jobs because it’s akin to manual labor. It’s honest work.

I also look forward to my other part-time job as a teacher because society has left the underclass with little to advance themselves. Education is one of the keys that have fallen onto America’s dirty floor, forgotten by those who would keep the door locked tight. I also look forward to it as an ideological great grand-child of the Enlightenment. Reason above all else, and the dissemination of reason and knowledge. Liberte, Egalite, Franternite, et vive les droits des Hommes et Femmes.

I wish to wield no keyboard to vent my inconsequential frustrations against faceless others rather than having the balls to face them. As much as I often desire to wield the bone, with a flame so blindingly crimson as all of perdition burning behind my wounded eye, I choose not to do so. I will wield the education key, and help others through the door that I have entered, been ejected from, entered again, and ejected from once more.

Steve, I cast aside the bone that I briefly shook at you with increasing rage as my face sight-unseen twisted in murderous anger and hatred. We are enemies now, you and I. I invite détente, and in that interest, I will not throw more accusations at you or complain further, but I will never discuss matters political with you again. Like a job that I recently had briefly for two days, I simply don’t have the right personality for it. I do not want to wield the bone unnecessarily, or if I can help it, ever again. For that, and because I do not wish to wield the keyboard in a cowardly, undignified fashion, to become what I dislike, a simpering, insult-hurling denizen of this damnable Internet, whining about small matters on a luxury item while others much less fortunate starve and face suffering, war, and death, I withdraw from the discussion.

John, thank you for the opportunity, the forum, your patience, and the gentle kindness which I find so characteristic of you. But this I cannot do.

Adieu.

-Mike

2003-07-15T18:25:00.000-04:00

Anger Rising, critical mass achieved

We both have engaged in a significant amount of moral finger pointing. This person is bad, this person is evil, this person is more diabolical than this other person, naughty, naughty. If you want to level such accusations, feel free. I’m just unwilling to continue it myself.

As to the leftist protestors, I see a consistent amount of vitriol directed at leftist protestors, in so many words liberals who do this, liberals who do that, liberal stupidity, idiot socialists, in actual words “Commie Tommie Daschle” (as if), leftist “ass-hatted fuckwits,” and so forth. Extremely negative comments are consistently directed at people whose ideas and statements fall to the left of the political spectrum, and it gets personal. Just because there are occasional caveats, fine shades of meaning, and distinctions, when someone in so many words or in plain language denigrates and insults a group of people to which I belong I am in turn and by extension denigrated and insulted. I don’t recall offering myself specifically as a punching bag. Nor do I recall making blanket statements about the stupidity or ass-hatted fuckwittery of conservatives, or people right of center, what have you, of any stripe.

I have made specific criticisms of Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, and much further outside the realm of credibility herself, Anne Coulter, but when have I extended those criticisms to any group of right-winged people? I have criticized Fox News, not for being on the right, but for reporting inaccurately, and for such instances as when they have a guest who believes that EYE-rack is “full of Buddhists,” without correcting that guest, or offering a retraction or correction. The New York Times, many of whose staff members appear to hold leftish beliefs, has also dropped the ball on accurate reporting. Have I defended the NYT and attacked Fox News solely on the basis of political orientation? If you can find evidence that I have done these things I claim to be innocent of, I’ll make a public blog apology.

I have after all, in times past, said, in so many words, “Okay, fine, fair enough, alright.” When have points ever been conceded to me? Are you still holding a belief that Nazis fell on the left of the political spectrum?Was there smouldering in silence without concession?

Back to the leftist protestors, personal liberties in America were not created in America, but rather maintained in America by people with leftist ideas and through protest. The American Civil Liberties Union is largely left in character, for want of a better term, and has defended personal liberty to the point of arguing that Neo-Nazis should be permitted to march in Skokie, Illinois. Leftish reporters who refuse to reveal their source protect freedom of the press. Anti-war protestors who seized control of Lake Shore Drive in Chicago defended their right to freedom of assembly while simultaneously protesting the war.

And where do those ideas about personal liberty really come from? America? Don’t make me laugh. Ideas about freedom of the press, assembly, and speech, as well as societal egalitarianism and responsible government with separate branches came collectively from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was Swiss, Voltaire, who was French, John Locke, who was English, and various other European thinkers, most of whom were your arch-nemeses as Frenchmen and women. And correct me if I’m wrong, but ardent supporters of those rights in the political field, such as Georges Danton, sat on the LEFT side of French assembly houses, hence the term. And let's see, Alexander Hamilton, a rightist of his time and place, OPPOSED the Bill of Rights! Hmm, gee I wonder, who, oh who must have pushed for that Bill of Rights? Well, if Hamilton the rightist opposed it, then maybe it was the left of that particular time and place? You think? Thus, both the creation in Europe and the maintenance in America of individual liberties come from the leftists of the past, the recent past, and even the current time, as I’ve argued, are thanks to filthy, puking leftists.

As foot-notes: 1) Morocco did not oppose, and technically invited, the American military presence in 1942. The World War II analogies don't work. That was there and then, this is here and now. History is not the present, it is the past. 2) The pronunciation of Iraq is not the same as Paris. Paris in English is Paris. Roma in English is Rome. Deutschland in English is Germany, Espana is Spain, (please forgive the lack of an appropriate diacritical mark), Eire is Ireland, Italia is Italy. Those things are all fine. EYE-rack is not the English word for Iraq. Saying EYE-rack is roughly the same as saying, “last night I had EYE-talian food at the Olive Garden.” Which has more than a grain of truth.

3) Hussein has been removed from power. Fine. But there was nothing altruistic about the U.S. government and military initiating his removal. When a consigliare wants a Capo whacked, he gets whacked. It had nothing to do with the fact that the Capo was selling drugs to children in his own mother’s neighborhood. All I’ve asked is that the administration, for once, tell the truth about why it went to war. Improving the lives of Iraqis no longer under Hussein wasn’t it. They could give a damn about the lives of Iraqis. That was an unintended consequence. I doubt, for that matter, the Iraqis killed by American bombs and various other American weapons of mass destruction feel all that liberated. Whether or not Iraq was truly liberated has yet to be seen. It depends on what follows. An American puppet state won’t protect the liberties of Iraqi’s, seeing as Hussein didn’t back when he was still taking orders from Washington. There’s good in this, and there’s also bad. How much bad remains to be determined. Bad in that the administration has lied to the American people and the world. Bad in that civilians were killed. Bad in that American military personnel lost their lives, and their families will never see them again.

4) I do not believe the UN is a cesspool. I think it’s a good step toward a single word government. The kinks have yet to be worked out, but these things take time. 5) World opinion is not irrelevant. Americans, though many of them seem to think so lately, are not on this planet alone. We live with other nations. I think we should work with them rather than against them. 6) Dictators are problematic. Perhaps working with the international community might alleviate that.

7) As to salving the fragile egos of the Middle East, it’s got nothing to do with that. I’m just tired of people who reveal and indeed revel in their ignorance with gratuitous mispronunciation.

2003-07-15T16:40:00.000-04:00

On Marriage

A question for opponents of marriage/civil unions for homosexuals. If, as I often hear, the only true reason for marriage is to procreate, then what of all the couples in the world who choose to remain childless? Let's posit a heterosexual, standard-issue young married couple who do not intend to have childen though they may adopt at some far future date. Moreover, let's posit that their marriage ceremony contained not one reference to a higher spiritual power. As these people did not get married under the auspices of a religion, and as children are neither expected nor wanted except through possible future adoption, the marriage is indistinguishable from what's being called a "civil union" such as is legal for homosexual couples in Vermont.

So I ask you. Based on that information, how is this marriage, between a man and a woman, different in any way from a civil union between homosexual partners?

2003-07-15T14:09:00.000-04:00

A comment

ZM should get a fair trial. If they were going to go the route of military tribunals, they should have gone that way from the start, and then it wouldn't have the feel of a Kafka novel, where rules change randomly, and never to the benefit of accused. The accomplices of the Rosenbergs weren't brought to trial at the same time because the gov't didn't want to reveal the fact that we were reading the Soviet's communications. (Btw, McCarthy and Cohn began their hearings to try and get info on those same people.)

2003-07-15T13:25:00.000-04:00

An Answer

Since I'm not a lawyer (my degree is in video game testing), I can't say with 100% accuracy, but probably not. It would be worse. The DoJ may refuse to comply with the standards of the civilian court in which they wished to try him, and then move the proceedings to a military tribunal.

At least in double jeopardy you get a real freaking trial, albeit twice. The filthy terrorist Zacarias Mossaoui won't get the one which our fundamental principles say he deserves.

[moreover] Calpundit has more punditry:

This whole thing is way too much like the Salem witch trials for my taste, where guilt is preordained and nothing a defendant can say will prove otherwise. I don't have much sympathy for Moussaoui, who's certainly an al-Qaeda terrorist of one kind or another, but considering what we've learned lately about the quality of U.S. intelligence in matters like this, I'm also not inclined to simply accept the government's word that he was a participant in the 9/11 conspiracy. Moussaoui should be allowed a fair trial.

2003-07-15T13:02:00.000-04:00

A question

(comments weren't working) Is it double jeapardy if he was never tried in a civilian court?

2003-07-15T12:38:00.000-04:00

The Consta-what-tion?

I see via South Knox Bubba that the Federal Government have ruled that Zacarias Moussaoui may not bring a witness in his defense. Well, great!

Even better, if this ruling results in dismissal of all charges-- because, after all, in a court of law, you get to have witnesses-- Atty Gen Johnny A has promised to declare ZM an enemy combatant and start a military tribunal. Hey, now that can't fail! Ha haaaa! We'll get this bastid! Double Jeopardy? Fair and Speedy Trial By One's Peers? Fifth Amendment? Sixth Amendment? Our dignity? What use have I for these? I am John Ashcroft! The Law Is My Plaything!

Why not have a damn regular trial, bring a solid case, and convict him? This military tribunal BS smacks of the third world.

2003-07-15T10:13:00.000-04:00

On Cesspools

The problem with cesspools is that there are so many of them, and the temptation to try to drain them all is so strong. You can try all you want, but you'll just end up covered in filth.

Mmmmm, pithy!

Mike, in my opinion the case for libervading Afghanistan was much, much more compelling than that for Iraq. In September '01 all that was clear was that al Qaeda had planned the attacks, that they were currently being housed and supported by the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, and that swift action was called for. Fair enough. Ass-whupping and libervasion to follow. And, despite what I have said in the past about the US's role in muddling the situation in Afghanistan, I'm willing to count many things as total improvements there. Life is better. That being said, the libervasion of, and the improvement of life in, Afghanistan are two separate issues. The improvements are merely welcome side-effects to the real mission of crippling al Qaeda and their backers.

The same applies to Iraq. The difference is that, in the case of Iraq, the stated reasons for needing to invade at the moment have not, in my opinion, proven compelling.

Buckethead, I disagree with you on three fronts. First, you wrote in response to Windy City Mike, "Is it impossible for you to imagine that there might be good in this, and that the effect on the Iraqi people is net positive?" That's not the point. Of course there is good in this! But the effect on the Iraqi people is not the question at hand. The question is, was the President being straight up about the threat that the Hussein regime's Weapons of Mass Destruction posed to the US and other nations, and was he being straight up about Iraq's deep and abiding connections to Islamic terrorism? As I've said before, the net postive effect on the Iraqi people is a fabulous boon, but diplomatically, and for the purposes of whether Bush's case to the world was sizzle or steak, it doesn't enter into the question, for us or Bush. In his State of the Union address, the President devoted two paragraphs to Hussein's human rights violations. He devoted sixteen-- about 1,200 words-- to Weapons of Mass Destruction.

On that matter, you write, "But remember, this is not a court of law. We simply do not have to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that these nations are threats. So, the fact that we haven't found (yet) ironclad evidence of WMD is not that significant." I disagree totally. The Weapons of Mass Destruction were the main reason that Dubya offered to the American people and the world in the SOTU. Bush was careful to frame his argument in the context of Hussein's noncompliance with the UN, but also expressed certainty that Hussein was intending to use his WMD's shortly. His closing statement was "We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him."

Fine. We led the coalition. Now where the hell are the 30,000 warheads, 25,000 liters of Anthrax, and the 38,000 liters of Botulin toxin? And why did he cite the "significant quantities of uranium from Africa," knowing as we now do that the intelligence behind it was shaky? I find it disturbing that the President may have overstated his intelligence for the sake of a Grand Middle East Plan (as you posit), and horrifying that absolutely none of the material we went into Iraq to find has been located. 25,000 liters of Anthrax is pretty damn significant, whether diplomatically or otherwise.

Furthermore, our failure so far to find them has concrete results-- for example, India's decision not to send troops to Iraq to relieve the 3rd Infantry, currently in their 10th month of continuous deployment. India will send troops only under an "explicit UN mandate." Oooh-- burn!! That's not to mention the heat that Tony Blair continues to take for his bold decision to back the US. When you say that international opinion simply doesn't matter, you are simply dead wrong. We needn't be slaves to it, but it bears remembering that those once bitten bite back.

Buckethead, you also wrote: "We were attacked, and we are taking steps to assure that it does not happen again. If, in the process, we violate some nations' soveriegnty, so be it. If, in the process, we sledgehammer some fascist regimes and liberate their people, great. Eliminating international terrorism is doing a favor for the world. Like eliminating the international slave trade was when Britain did that in the nineteenth century." What are we, the Incredible Hulk? "Hulk smash! Napster bad!" Like the Onion put it, you are limiting our choices to two: blind rage, or measured, focused rage. Are these really our only choices? Besides, does defining our mission in this way excuse us from attending to the complexities of the situations we create? In the past, you have conceded that "with great power, comes great responsibility," adhering to the Spider-Man thesis of American foreign policy. Why ignore that now?

2003-07-14T18:24:00.000-04:00

Dander up, Mike?

I was unaware that I was guilty of moral finger-pointing. I was careful to limit my comment to the pathetic leftist protestors, not merely leftists in general. I notice that you did not challenge the other parts of that sentence, so I assume that you agree with the fact that the UN is a cesspool, and world opinion is irrelevant in regard to the cynical European governments and third world dictators.

And, I was unaware that leftists had anything to do with all those liberties I like so much. Did socialists write the Constitution and Bill of Rights? I imagine it would read rather differently if they had. Socialists didn't exist until after Babeuf (and weren't even called that until Owen), and the left began with the French revolution. The Constitution was written two years before that began. The only significant "new" rights since then came out of the civil war, and that was hardly a leftist enterprise. Abolition and Civil Rights were largely Christian in their origins. And, it seems odd that all these people are mistakenly calling themselves leftists and communists despite your conviction that they are not.

As for Iraq, why did we ruthlessly invade Morocco in '42? They had never invaded us. As for Afghanistan, it was the home of all those Al Qaeda training camps, and the Taliban was in tight with bin Laden. Afghanistan did not attack us, true, but it harbored those who did. And I guess we were completely wrong to liberate Iraq. We should find Saddam, apologize, and reinstall him in Iraq, so his son can go back to feeding dissidents into wood chippers feet first. Is it impossible for you to imagine that there might be good in this, and that the effect on the Iraqi people is net positive?

Most of the hijackers were Saudis. And I think the time or reckoning for Saudi Arabia is long overdue.

2003-07-14T17:57:00.000-04:00

Angry Retort

Buckethead wrote that, "The UN is a cesspool, and world opinion is irelevant when it is being generated by cynical european governments, third world dictators and pathetic leftist protestors." Really, do tell? You know, a lot of those freedoms you're fond of might not exist had it not been for leftist protest at various points in recent history. Admittedly, there are people these days masquerading as leftists who want to restrict various freedoms and make us wear helmets, but as I'm reiterating, those people constitute le gauche faux.

Buckethead also wrote that, "We were attacked, and we are taking steps to assure that it does not happen again." Indeed? When did Iraq attack the United States?

For that matter, the U.S. appeared unable to offer any solid, hard evidence that Afghanistan in fact had a hand in attacking the United States. Most of those hijackers were Saudis. What the attackers of 11 September 2001 did was extremely wrong, but I will not belabor this point as I've tired of this moral finger-pointing that tends to go on with this blog. But I'll point my finger one last time and say that what the U.S. did was wrong, too. There was no verifiable evidence that the nations the United States has attacked had anything to do with the attack on the U.S. itself.

2003-07-14T17:35:00.000-04:00

Iraq

The justifications that the administration offered for going to war with Iraq were smoke. Here's an organized crime analogy. Think of the United States as a crime family. Hussein was a Capo working for the family who got out of line and refused to do things the way the boss, IE the first Boss Bush, dictated. Therefore, more eager underbosses, street bosses, and the consilgiare, not so much loyal to the boss as they were to a previous boss (IE Reagan) wanted Hussein whacked. When the first Boss Bush attacked Hussein's crew, Boss Bush 1 employed some restraint and just cut down his crew. But Bush left Hussein alive, and even letting him earn at subsistence level provided he kicked more upstairs.

When leadership passed to Bush's son, the underbosses and consilgiare remained in power. Pressured by attacks from rival families, the underbosses, etc. who wanted Hussein whacked before saw an opportunity to clean their own house and try to whack Hussein for good. Instead, they stepped on their dick, the other heads of the five families lined up against them, and they succeeded only in purging more of Hussein's crew. But Hussein went on the lam when the U.S. decided to go to the mattresses, and they can't find Hussein to whack him. Not to mention they can't even find the head of the rival family who started all this shit in the fist place, and he remains unwhacked as well. It's a good thing the U.S. isn't really an organized crime family, or they'd be out of business quickly.

While I'm on the subject, something else that's been annoying me lately deals with the pronounciation of Iraq. Many people, including the current boss of the U.S., pronounce it "EYE-rack." It is in fact "Ear-ACK," dumbasses.

2003-07-14T14:52:00.000-04:00

Springer's campaign ticks off Hicksville

God, do I love that headline.

Much as I dislike George Voinovich (who is stalking me), the Springer cure is far worse than the disease. Btw, Springer only got busted in the writing checks to prostitutes incident after the check bounced. This apparently pissed off the hooker.

2003-07-14T14:46:00.000-04:00

Heh

The New York Times, all the news that's print to fit.

2003-07-14T14:43:00.000-04:00

Free speech in Palestine

In an interesting tidbit in the UK Independent, a political scientist in Ramallah was assaulted, and his office trashed, by a mob of 100 refugees when word when out that he was about to publish the results of a recent poll his organization conducted.

Why were the Palestinians so exercised? The rioters were delivering, "a message for everyone not to tamper with our rights." This, because the poll demonstrated that only a small fraction of actual Palestinians actually wanted to return to Israel. Khalil Shikaki's survey showed that five times as many refugees would prefer to settle permanently in a Palestinian state than return to their old homes in what is now Israel.

The poll, conducted among 4,500 refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Jordan, was the first to ask where they would want to live if Israel recognized a right of return. Only 10 per cent of the refugees chose Israel, even if they were allowed to live there with Palestinian citizenship; 54 per cent opted for the Palestinian state; 17 per cent for Jordan or Lebanon, and 2 per cent for other countries, and 2 per cent didn't know.

Interestingly, 13 per cent rejected all these options, preferring to wait for the destruction of Israel.

In a related news item, the Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad warned yesterday they would end a truce announced last month if the Palestinian Authority continued to try to disarm them. I guess they're serious about the roadmap to peace.

2003-07-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

Happy Bastille Day

Today is, of course, the French Equivalent of Independence Day. Of course, French Independence day should properly be celebrated on June 6th. Casual sniping aside, the French are a race of smelly perfidious backstabbers. Happy Bastille Day!

2003-07-14T11:02:00.000-04:00

"I did it!" "No, I did it!"

Further muddying the water (or sand) in Iraq, Armed Islamic Movement for Al Qaeda, the Falluja Brancha is saying, "We have attacked the US, not those lying Saddam bitches." Actually, they said, "I swear by God no one from his (Saddam Hussein) followers carried out any jihad operations like he claims...they (attacks) are a result of our brothers in jihad,"

In a pro forma statement, they also boasted of, "a new anti-U.S. attack in the days to come which would "break the back of America completely." Yeah, right. The group also is, "Calling on U.S. forces to leave Iraq," and warned that "the end of America will be at the hands of Islam."

Remember kids, Islam is a religion of Peace.

2003-07-14T10:47:00.000-04:00

Iraq

Our justification for invading Iraq was not centered on the certainty that, after we invade, we would find all the evidence we wanted. This is not analogous to law enforcement, or a "fishing" warrant. We had intelligence estimates, we had a history in Iraq of WMD use and manufacture (ask the Kurds!) and an assessment of our risk. You make risk assessments based on capabilities, not intentions. Iraq had the capability to develop WMD, this is incontrovertible. (And he had shown willingness to use them - bonus insight into intentions.)

In the wake of 9/11, our tolerance for risk, well, plummeted. The risk of having a chemical or nuclear attack on the United States is intolerable. Look how damage was done with three airliners. Al Qaeda operated with state support - Afghanistan certainly, Saudi Arabia and Iraq likely, Syria and Iran possibly. But remember, this is not a court of law. We simply do not have to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that these nations are threats. So, the fact that we haven't found (yet) ironclad evidence of WMD is not that significant. Saddam is gone (though sadly not to his eternal reward) and if we can be even moderately succesful in creating a decent soceity in Iraq, we have gone a long way toward winning the war on terror.

I've mentioned before that right after 9/11, Bush did not declare war on Al Qaeda. He declared war on Terrorism. This is different. Iraq is unquestionably a state supporter of terrorism. (And so is Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Libya...) I believe that Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and their teams of pointed headed strategic planners have come up with a plan to transform the Middle East. Bush has signed off, Powell perhaps with reservations, but it follows the general outlines of take out the low hanging fruit of Iraq, and then use that as a lever to destabilize the middle east. Owning (for the moment) Iraq gives us a tremendous strategic advantage. We can use it to influence neighboring states that support terrorists that attack the US.

At the time, I felt that going to the UN and going off on WMD was a mistake. The UN is a cesspool, and world opinion is irelevant when it is being generated by cynical european governments, third world dictators and pathetic leftist protestors. We were attacked, and we are taking steps to assure that it does not happen again. If, in the process, we violate some nations' soveriegnty, so be it. If, in the process, we sledgehammer some fascist regimes and liberate their people, great. Eliminating international terrorism is doing a favor for the world. Like eliminating the international slave trade was when Britain did that in the nineteenth century.

I think that most of our diplomacy for the last couple years, and for the near future is purely tactical. We have allied with the military government of Pakistan. We continue to profess our love for the Saudis. We talked to the UN (though not so much anymore.) We have extended our ties with Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe. Those who help us now will get some consideration. Those who hinder us are on our list. But relationships, even long standing ones, will not prevent us from pursuing the war on terror.

2003-07-14T09:45:00.000-04:00

Speaking of true believers

So why was it again that the President said that Iraq needed a spanking? No Weapons of Mass Destruction (yet!, we are assured). No compelling, systemic links with Al Qaeda. No building of nuclear rockets. No yummy yellow cake. No smoking gun of any kind to warrant such an action.

I have been waiting for months, albeit skeptically, for the President's assertions about Iraq's role in international terrorism to be vindicated. I'm now long past giving up on the whole affair as a lofty-minded attempt to reshape the world never mind the reasons. Kevin Drum at CalPundit referred to Iraq as "low-hanging fruit," and that assessment seems more fair every day.

Buckethead, I'm interested in your thoughts on this matter. I know how I see the events currently unfolding, but I'd like your take. Do you feel that the last few months of findings stand up to the President's stated reasons for libervading Iraq? Aside from the happy collateral fact that Saddam Hussein no longer rules (never offered as a central reason for libervasion), does the current evidence justify the President's case made in January and early February?

2003-07-14T09:35:00.000-04:00

On North Korea

Buckethead, good point. It does say something about the perfidy of the NK regime that an expatriate recommends starting over from a glassy, radioactive tabula rasa.

2003-07-11T22:43:00.000-04:00

North Korea

I wasn't necessarily offering an endorsement of the Korean exile's opinion. Nevertheless, for someone to think that the people in charge of his native land are so entirely bugfuck that they would recommend that we nuke it; well I think that says something about the nature of the regime. In the bit excerpted in below, I think that that is entirely lipservice. What person working for one of the world's last authentically Stalinist (tm) states would say to a foreign journalist, "Psst, we all really love America here, and btw, Kim is a complete nutbag who likes to bang twelve year olds." People, no matter how cut off from the rest of the world, are not stupid. Some Noerth Koreans would remember the days before Communism, and those stories would be remembered. Those few fortunate enough to have TVs or Radios would get South Korean broadcasts much as the East Germans did.

Certainly, there are those who are true believers, and those who go along because they benefit from the status quo (though they are few - most North Koreans are by all accounts severely fucked and near starvation most of the time.)

They may not know much about us, but I feel sure that they know that their system is inhuman, evil and farcical.

2003-07-11T21:01:00.000-04:00

North Korea

I don't know much about North Korea as a place (after all, how much can one really know about a nation that has sealed itself off from the rest of the world?), but the lead article in this week's Boston Phoenix comes to the opposite conclusion as Buckethead's citation below. According to this piece, North Korea is an Orwellian nightmare in which all ills-- poverty, fear, etc.-- are all attributed to the USA. Result: a nation of fanatical America-hating militarists, as if we needed another one of those. . . . Read on!

Air-raid drills are a fact of life in Pyongyang, along with scheduled blackouts that plunge this city of two million into an eerie darkness through which even the trams ghost along without lights. This may be the most militarized nation on earth, but people here believe the nuclear threat comes from the outside. "The Americans were the first to threaten a pre-emptive nuclear strike," says my guide, O Jin Myong, as he leads me through the cavernous subway passages decorated with enormous glass chandeliers, Romanesque arches, and huge murals extolling the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung. The platforms, carved more than 100 yards underground, will serve as shelters in an attack, Mr. O tells me. "Here the American bombs can’t get us."
At first, the talk of nuclear bombs and first strikes sounds premature, even paranoid. But during my weeklong visit to the world’s most isolated nation last February, I hear this mantra so many times that it takes on a logic of its own. "Tell the world we are not afraid of nuclear weapons," says an elderly female guide, Ri Ok Hi, after finishing up a tour of a monument to the Workers Party. "We will fight to the death for our leader."
As one of the first Western journalists allowed in since North Korea’s latest nuclear crisis with the United States began last fall, I experience firsthand the paranoia that marks everyday life for North Koreans. For seven days, I am watched, followed, and fed propaganda. From doctors to parsons, everyone I am introduced to — and I have no choice about whom I meet — parrots the same line: hatred of the Americans, matched only by their love of the "Great Leader," Kim Jong Il. . . .
At the Grand People’s Study House, North Korea’s national library, two huge reading rooms are dedicated to the works of Kim Jong Il, including treatises on filmmaking, journalism, architecture, agriculture, and, of course, military strategy. Some are so well thumbed that the tattered pages look ready to crumble. The young librarian, Hwang Sun Ryol, insists that her country’s leader wrote 1500 books during his university days. When I doubt that anyone could write a book a day for five years, she does not hesitate: "He is the most outstanding theoretician. No one can match his creativity and enthusiasm." (I thank her and, in the spirit of cultural exchange, donate an anthology of George Orwell’s essays and a video of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

Certainly, some of this overwhelming Kim-love can be chalked up to lip service, but how much? In a nation where radios must be left on at all times, where air-raid drills are a daily occurence, and managed starvation-- blamed on America-- is a way of life, one wonders just how Orwellian a place can possibly be.

Also, Buckethead, I would like to point out that the North Korean emigre you cite recommended that we preemptively nuke another nation. Your arguments a few months ago about nuclear fears being overblown notwithstanding, is that man on effing crack?

2003-07-11T20:49:00.000-04:00

Ohio!

I don't like to pick on my home state, but they make it so damn easy!

Yes, Jerry Springer is running for the US Senate in 2004. Oh, good. Finally someone to bring some dignity and restraint to Washington! I wish that wasn't so true! I need another Martini!

Jerry: word of advice, son. This time, when you get a hooker, please be sure not to pay her with a personal check. Senators carry cash for that.

The CNN article linked notes that Springer, who was born in Engaland, is therefore not eligible to run for President. Pity.

2003-07-11T20:45:00.000-04:00

On the bass

Buckethead-- totally agreed. There are, however, certain exceptions. Prince, one of the great musical geniuses of the last twenty-five years, rarely uses a traditional bassline. "When Doves Cry" has no bass of any kind, and few of his songs have a funk bass line like one might expect from the direct heir to Sly Stone and Rick James.

[moreover] His recent work notwithstanding, Prince is a genius. Anyone disagreeing with me is not only foolish, but cruising for a world-class ass-whipping. I'm a pretty big Prince fan, as is Goodwife Two-Cents.

2003-07-11T20:40:00.000-04:00

A caveat

I've been drinking vodka this evening. Please excuse me, for it gives me Russian moods.

2003-07-11T20:34:00.000-04:00

On pestilence

My favorite old-timey disease name of all time: dropsy.

My favorite made-up disease: the staggers. As in, Q: "Buckethead, you look a little rough. What happened to you?" A: "Oh, I'm ok. Just a fifth of Beam and a case of the staggers." Of course, I made this one up shortly before our cat died to describe her inability to walk straight, so it's not really that funny when you look at it that way. *snif* I really miss little Iron Chef Chen Kenichi.

I think, Buckethead, you shouldn't ask for too much in the way of excellent disease names. Just look at the last few years. Sure, "I got the SARS" doesn't sound half as good as "Poor Jim's got a case of the hoof-and-mouth," or "I had to put down grandpa like a cow with the aftosa," but "ebola" is a great name for a disease that eats your flesh and makes you die, and likewise, Monkeypox is a perfect name for a disease that comes from pet prairie dogs. MONKEY POX! And it's FATAL! HAW!

I knew a prairie dog once. His name was Stinky. Guess what he did?

I leave you with this: Ten cases of the bubonic plague in Algeria, two of them the almost certainly fatal septicimic variety. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. I say it will end coughing blood, weeping, and cursing God for his twisted sense of humor. But me, I'm an optimist.

2003-07-11T16:57:00.000-04:00

Bass

I have noticed that whenever a band comes along that has interesting bass lines, I really like it. And most music that I don't like, lacks good bass. Substantial overlap. Big exception is a lot of the blues and (very) early country that I listen to - a lot of that is voice/guitar, voice/banjo, or something equally sparse.

2003-07-11T16:39:00.000-04:00

Apologia and Nu-Metal

Having spent the morning today exploring the outer limits of my caffeine tolerance (verdict: 12 oz. premium drip coffee not enough, 24 oz. of same far, far too much), I have been in no condition to read, much less string words together in a clear, engaging, and trenchant fashion such as my dear readers have come to demand. I think I may be dying.

But whatever. I'm a wuss.

Be assured I am working on a giant, blockbuster post about the role of the bass player in modern rock music. The Boston Globe had an article this weekend about the decline of the electric bass in pop music that simply cried out for me to respond, so I'm-a-gonna. I shall attack Nu-Metal as a tool of satan, and compare bassless pop music (the White Stripes, the Black Keys, most things these days) to the porn industry. Also be assured I shall proceed with the utmost taste and discretion in my dissertation on same, yeah right.

For now, I will just offer this screed.

Nu-metal is terrible and nu-metal musicians are monumentally stupid [nothing like an easy target, eh? -ed. [stop that, a-hole! -kaus]] I might be old, and I might not be "hip" or "jiggy," but these are immutable facts. In fact, nu-metalers are so stupid, they even get their own lineage wrong. Ask them and they will cite Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, etc. as heavy bands to copy. They claim these bands as their fathers. Well, that's wrong. Know how you can tell? Listen to the bass. Metallica (ver. 1.1, featuring Cliff Burton), not to mention Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Sabbath, Deep Purple, Alice In Chains, etc. etc. featured competent-to-excellent bass players who frequently played lines distinct from the guitar parts (no!!). Moreover, the bass contributed swing and what I like to call "thwack" to the sound.

Nu-metal on the other hand, devalues the bass player. There are several reasons for this. First is the bassiness of modern production. Rather than elevate the role of the bass to prominence, modern production combined with detuning allows guitars to take up the frequency range formerly inhabited by bass players. This same detuning hedges bass players in. If the guitars are chunking along in C#, a mere major sixth above the bottom of the bass' range, this leaves no room to break out, and requires the bassist to double the guitars. Additionally, even with a low-B string, any deviation from the guitar line would result in sonic sludge at such low frequencies. Second, modern basses with their newfangled low-B strings don't sound as good as older 4-string models. As a matter of physics, low-B strings are flappier and less tight-sounding than the EADG strings. Pickups designed to compensate for these shortcomings seem to detract from the overall sound of the bass. Third, "heavy" music places a premium on unison playing to increase the "heaviosity" of the riff, and also tends to value unison stops. Hence, the bass follows the guitar.

These sonic and musical considerations are only half of the story, though. The other half is this. When you listen to nu-metal, the bass tends to play very simple figures over and over. It may as well not be there, but for the need for increased heaviosity. This was NOT the case when Bruce Dickinson fronted Iron Maiden, my friend!! But this WAS the case when Kip Winger fronted, er, Winger. All that has changed is the musical vocabulary. Whereas hair/glam metal bands would have had the bassist play a pedal tone eight hundred times underneath the intro riff to song (for example Judas Priest's "You Got Another Thing Coming," or Van Halen's "Running With The Devil," or almost every Poison song ever) while the band sings about guitars, women, parties, or touring, nu-metal bassists play E-F-E-Bb over and over while the band sings about fury, rage, anger, or angst. New wine, old bottles. Bo-ring. Nu-Metal bands are nothing but Poison in a post-grunge world. Except without the hair or entertainment value. Or quality.

I don't know why I care so much; and I can't think of why you should. I actually LIKE hair metal, a lot. A lot a lot. But hair metal bands labored under no illusions that they were making art, much less a statement. It was fun! Nu-metal, on the other hand, tries hard not to be fun. And, as Lisa Simpson once said, "making teenagers feel angst is like shooting fish in a barrel."

Up next: the death of the bass in indie rock: the porn connection.

2003-07-11T16:38:00.000-04:00

News from N. Korea

A defector from N. Korea, Park Gap Dong, is suggesting that the US mount preemptive strikes on that nation's nuclear facilities, to forestall Kim Jong-il's regime from arming its missiles with miniaturized nuclear warheads.

The article has some interesting quotes:

"U.S. strikes against North Korean targets would force Kim Jong-il to seek asylum in China. Kim is a coward. If attacked, he will flee. The North Korean army would not fight after the regime collapsed."
"Many North Koreans believe that the United States is their savior and the only nation that can liberate North Korea," he said. The flood of hate-America propaganda from North Korea represents only the relatively small number of people around Kim Jong-Il."

Park also warned that the North, given the opportunity to develop nuclear weapons, would use them against the south, Japan and even the United States.

Park heads the National Salvation Front, a group of high-ranking North Korean exiles that includes five former generals of the North Korean army, the former vice minister of home affairs, the former vice minister of culture and the former superintendent of the North Korea Military Academy.

2003-07-11T16:28:00.000-04:00

Some old disease names

BILIOUSNESS - Jaundice or other symptoms associated with liver disease; may also have been any upset leading to vomiting bile or just vomiting
BLACK JAUNDICE - Wiel's Disease; Black Water fever (deadly form of malaria)
BLACK POX - Black Smallpox
BLOODY FLUX Bloody stools
BREAKBONE Dengue fever, Infectious fever endemic to East Africa
CORRUPTION Infection
EEL THING Erysipelas
FRENCH POX Syphilis
KRUCHHUSTEN Whooping cough
LOCKJAW Tetanus or infectious disease affecting the muscles of the neck and jaw. Untreated, it is fatal in 8 days
MORMAL Gangrene
RICKETS Disease of skeletal system
SCRUMPOX Skin disease, impetigo

2003-07-11T16:14:00.000-04:00

Disease Names

I have noticed a disturbing trend lately. Names of diseases no longer sound like disease names. Long gone are the days of scurvy, gout, consumption, scarlet fever, yellow fever and plague. Now we have antiseptic acronymic disease names like AIDS, SARS, HIV, CFS. We have even ruined good disease names like herpes by adding -simplex I and the like.

The only decent new disease name is hemorrhagic fever. We need to come up with better names for our diseases. Names with bite, names that sound like you are slowly dying in agony.

2003-07-11T10:04:00.000-04:00

Re: Summer Reading

Despite the derivative nature of your post, there is a reason why many people do it. Its fun. (Except for ripping off Kaus, which is annoying. -ed) I have had little time to read lately, which is painful as I have read three books a week for most of the last twenty years. The addiction is strong for me.

Nevertheless, I have managed to read a couple books this summer.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Johno has been bugging me to read this since the dawn of time. I should not have waited so long. (btw, this book got the record for most comments from other people who see me reading a book, at five. The previous record was for Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. I do live in DC.)

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. I read this book about once a year. I still don't know what the plot is, but what is plot when the writing is this beautiful?

A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I love, love, love this book. Thoats, Zitidars, and Calots, oh my.

Heaven on Earth, by Joshua Muravchik. Still reading this one. A history of socialism by a red diaper baby who lost his faith. He still has sympathy for the figures involved, and it seems a balanced account. It is amazing how everything in modern communism was prefigured in Babeuf back in the French Revolution. Good book.

Johno is right, I do like the hard sf. One reason I stopped reading fantasy was the depressing sameness of it all. The engineering/scientific outlook on life does lend a certain flavor to hard sf. But it certainly doesn't suppress the imagination. Working under the constraints of hard sf forces some writers to greater flights of imagination than more open formats might.

[btw]My favorite part of killing star was the central park analogy. Read the book, it is one of the more chilling things you'll read. Because it could be true.

2003-07-10T16:35:00.000-04:00

On Liberty

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has an excellent, penetrating, and informative piece up at the National Review about the SCOTUS decision in Lawrence v. Texas. Here's the opening paragraph and two of the conclusion.

The more one ponders the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the more revolutionary it seems. Not because it recognizes the rights of gays and lesbians to sexual activity free of the stigmatization of the criminal law — though this is of utmost importance. No, the case is revolutionary because Justice Kennedy (and at least four justices who signed on to his opinion without separate concurrences) have finally broken free of the post-New Deal constitutional tension between a "presumption of constitutionality" on the one hand and "fundamental rights" on the other. Contrary to what has been reported repeatedly in the press, the Court in Lawrence did not protect a "right of privacy." Rather, it protected "liberty" — and without showing that the particular liberty in question is somehow "fundamental." Appreciation of the significance of this major development in constitutional law requires some historical background. . . .
In the end, Lawrence is a very simple ruling. Justice Kennedy examined the conduct at issue to see if it was properly an aspect of liberty (as opposed to license), and then asked the government to justify its restriction, which it failed adequately to do. The decision would have been far more transparent if Justice Kennedy had acknowledged what was really happening (though perhaps this would have lost some votes by other justices). Without this acknowledgement, the revolutionary aspect of his opinion is concealed, and it is rendered vulnerable to the ridicule of the dissent. Far better would have been to more closely track the superb amicus brief of the Cato Institute which he twice cites approvingly.
If the Court is serious, the effect on other cases of this shift from "privacy" to "liberty," and away from the New Deal-induced tension between "the presumption of constitutionality" and "fundamental rights," could be profound. For example, the medical-marijuana cases now wending their way through the Ninth Circuit would be greatly affected if those seeking to use or distribute medical marijuana pursuant to California law did not have to show that their liberty to do so was somehow "fundamental" — and if the government was forced to justify its restriction on that liberty. While wrongful behavior (license) could be prohibited, rightful behavior (liberty) could be regulated provided that the regulation was shown to be necessary and proper.

The debate over privacy has long been misguided. The question germane to our Constitutional rights is not "does [state action x] violate our right to privacy?" Although the ninth amendment could be construed to contain such a provision, it's not clear that it does and I'm sure real actual legal scholars, of which I am not one, would be able to tell you why.

The germane question in any case-- be it bedroom behavior of any kind, medical marijuana, or the right not to be videotaped in your home-- is rather, "does [state action x] violate our right to liberty?" Barnett does an excellent job splitting the difference between liberty and license, for which reason alone you should read the article. But the more important point he makes, from where I sit, is that the Constitution includes clear instructions on how to cope with questions of thou shalt/not when it comes to consensual, individual action, and those who would fight for liberties they find important would do well to stand on that firm ground.

2003-07-10T15:46:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading

It's well known that we do things our own way around here.

(Actually sir, that's not so well known. Nobody reads this blog. And you're about to do something that everybody's doing. Not to mention you're ripping off Kaus. -ed.)

Well, whatever. Since I've been reading at the steady clip of about three books a weeks for the last few months, I thought I'd share some recommendations.

Jarhead, Anthony Swofford. Is to the Gulf War what The Things They Carried was to Vietnam, in every way possible, including being much easier to read.

Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis. Joe Ellis might be a liar and a cheat, but his history is good. For all of my degree-having and claimed expertise, it was this book that really made me begin to understand the men who shaped the United States' destiny.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakame. The only points of comparison I have are Thomas Pynchon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and perhaps Milan Kundera. Wierd, masterful, and breathtaking.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. I read this book about once a year. I still don't know what the plot is, but what is plot when the writing is this beautiful?

Everything on Buckethead's Science Fiction List. I'm almost through it, and have not been disappointed yet.

And finally, beautiful irony. I think Buckethead likes more than I do science fiction written by scientists and science-advocates, e.g. Gregory Benford, Jerry Pournelle, Charles Pellegrino. Their writing tends to share a certain cant, much as police procedurals, outbreak novels, and spy novels do. It doesn't appeal to me too greatly, but I read it for passages like this one, from a point in the Pellegrino/Zebrowski novel "Killing Star" after the aliens have found Earth and tried to wipe it out but before anyone knows why:

"Got it!" he announced triumphantly. "The Intruders seem to be rebroadcasting what remains to this day the loudest, most highly synchronized electromagnetic shout ever sent out from Earth. On April 5, 1985, as part of a publicity effort to bring aid to the starving children of Africa, every radio and television station on every continent began brodcasting the same message at the same moment-- a composition called "We Are The World," by one Michael Jackson. I'm not trying to sound ironic, but I think the Intruders are trying to tell us what first drew their attention to our species."
"So this Michael Jackson became the first definitive sign of intelligent life on Earth," Sargenti said acidly. "And the Intruders are throwing it back at us. Whatever for?"
"To mock us?" General Stoff asked. "But of course that can't be true."
"So what did they do all these years?" Sargenti said. "Just wait around replaying this tune to themselves until they could build starships and come finish us off? They must be insane!"
"Or very determined music critics," Isak said.

I appreciate cruel symmetry wherever it exists.

2003-07-10T15:22:00.000-04:00

Awe-Inspiring Kung Fu

Via the New Republic's weblog, witness the unstoppable majesty of Ari Fleischer, speaking at a news conference yesterday:

I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are. [emphasis added]

We are but grasshoppers.

2003-07-10T00:28:00.000-04:00

Things that have annoyed me lately

The fact that no person or news agency other than PBS' Frontline has been honest about the very simple reasons for going to war with Iraq, and that removing a dictator with things that go boom wasn't one of them. There are reasons, and then there are excuses.

Being told that it's a-okay to have me teaching part-time, but that I might be overqualified to work as a full-time instructor during the course of the interview for said full-time position. The fact that I won't get the full-time position because they'll probably give it to a jug-head who has no business being in a class-room as a student, much less a prof.

Realizing that other, similar colleges might consider me overqualified while knowing that the next step up will most likely consider me underqualified.

Referring to Hispanics (a term that the U.S. government invented) as though they were a single ethnic group. If that's the case, then the whole of the European continent, Britain, Ireland, the near east, and north Africa are all peopled by members of the same ethnic group.

Speaking of Africa as though it were a country and not a continent.

The scratch in my eye that keeps reopening to leave me in blinding pain every morning, including the one I had the aforementioned interview.

Not to sound like a populist demagogue, but banks have my goat at the moment.

The sad lack of free alcoholic beverages distributed by the government to people who work part-time and have difficulty acquiring full-time employment, or unemployed people with no employment, in a poor economy with a national unemployment rate over 6%.

Just the unemployment rate by itself, and that people are having difficulty paying rent and buying food, much less a luxury like booze.

Dealing directly and extensively with people I dislike, especially pain in the ass co-workers.

Women who turn their noses up at men who make less than $100,000 a year. That's roughly 98% of them in this town. The other 2% are already married to guys who make less than $100,000 a year, leaving me pretty much out in the cold.

That the odds of being shot, stabbed, or bounced repeatedly off the front windshield of a speeding taxi attempting to swerve through traffic with its passenger side wheels on the sidewalk are better than experiencing even moderately good fortune.

That by next year, the only good show on HBO will be Six Feet Under. An excellent series, but my life has so little. How 'bout just one more season of The Sopranos after this next one, Gandolfini? What do you say?

Finally, the very last thing that's annoyed me lately, television commercials where one character pretends to accept the meaning of a word or phrase spoken by another character except the second character deals in reality and the first character has his own language and lives in his own little world. Like the one where that rich asshole who made his money the old-fashioned way he inherited it and never worked a goddam day in his privileged life in the pickup with his gold-digging wife and whiny children with a sense of entitlement, hauling a fucking boat, the total monetary value of both vehicles being more than most people will see in their entire lives represents himself as a trucker to an actual trucker and the rich jag-off thinks he's a trucker because he has a fucking pick-up!

I almost feel better. Except something else will piss me off tomorrow, and I'll be back where I started.

2003-07-09T16:07:00.000-04:00

Things not so bad in Afghanistan

While we have come to expect media doommongering as the default view of any world situation, things are not always so bad as they seem. While conditions are not up to western standards in Afghanistan (nor have they been any time recently), according to actual Afghanis, things are getting better since the removal of the Taliban.

2003-07-08T16:36:00.000-04:00

Budget Cuts and Alien Menaces

Buckethead, budget cuts are only half the picture, and the cuts could always have been vetoed by Jeb if he so desired. Furthermore, Pres. Rice in her one term, for all her talk of interstellar security, seemed more than willing to extend the already thin Fleet beyond its capabilities with police actions on every podunk world this side of the Coal Sack. If they weren't already committed in so many systems, it might have been easier NOT to get involved in rearguard actions against local enemies. I think THAT is the very nexus of the problem.

Need I remind you that since Pres. Clinton (shudder) took office, more than twenty new ships of the line have been sent toward the Coal Sack? Need I remind you that it would not now be too late, that those ships would not be all but lost, if it had not been for Bush/Rice's neo-interventionist, Imperial, very hands-on domestic policy (sending our own troops against New Scotland!! Seriously, now!!) sapping the once-mighty strength of the Murcheson Fleet.

There might be hundreds of people I would rather have in charge than our current President, but not even Washington, Jackson, or Grant could do anything more than delay the day our skies blacken with the shapes of the filthy, three-armed menace that will so soon erase us from the face of the Universe.

[moreover] "A Mote In God's Eye" might be pretty good, but Dan Simmon's "Hyperion" and its sequels beats it all to hell on all fronts.

2003-07-08T16:24:00.000-04:00

Budget cuts?Despite the pleas of the Bush/Rice administration, the budgets for the Murcheson fleet were reduced by the house budget commitee (chaired by Clinton?Daschle lacky Rep. McAuliffe) to fund hive rat studies on Makassar. Just like them to underfund the fleet they are so willing to send on peacekeeping missions all over local space, instead of protecting us from the deadliest threat we know of.

It's bad enough being outnumbered by aliens who are stupid. But when you're massively outnumbered by aliens much smarter than you, it's a bad day.

[moreover]I mentioned this novel in my top five science fiction books list back in May. You should have read it by now! Lazy slackers.

2003-07-08T16:07:00.000-04:00

Moties!

Buckethead, the Moties never would have made it more than a thousand kilometers from their initial Murcheson Point if the boneheaded, pollyanna interstellar policy of the Bush III administration had not cut the budget of the Murcheson Fleet to the quick. What, Alderson Drives just build themselves? Clinton/Daschle, as awful as they may be, are merely trying to hold back the tide with a teaspoon. A Bush-III-mandated teaspoon.

Kiss your human butt goodbye, two-arms.

[moreover] For those of you who think we're insane, I give you this classic science fiction novel.

2003-07-08T15:46:00.000-04:00

On a more serious note...

Tomorrow will be a big day in Iran - the fourth anniversary of the student protest movement. It will be interesting if this gets any traction on the major media, or comment from the administration. The latter is more likely, even though the protests could involve hundreds of thousands of people around Iran. This despite the fact that last week the government arrested over 4000 protest leaders, including 800 students, and has closed the University of Tehran and most other schools as well.

I pray that the protestors can bring down the mullahs, and that we support them in their efforts.

2003-07-08T15:29:00.000-04:00

Sheesh

Just reading through all the blogging goodness that I missed while being exploited by my capitalist, uh, exploiters; and working hard to become a dirty capitalist landlord; I noticed Johno's opst on whiteness studies.

That is the most asshatted, fuckwitted, nozzleheaded bugfuckery I have run across in a goodly long while. Although - just think if some sneaky bastard used the banner of whiteness studies to hide a return to the study of the classics? Just thinkin, is all...

2003-07-08T15:11:00.000-04:00

Buckethead is back

...and he's been playing with toys. I would say that fatherhood has changed him, but that would be wrong. Bucket: Blogger looks different because while you've been away, they upgraded us to blogger-super-plus. Also, there is now a cure for cancer delivered in smokeable form, soccer is our new national pastime, dolphins and octopi have been discovered to be excellent at market analysis and are now the bulk of the staff at most large brokerages, and Vice President Daschle is standing by President Clinton's decision to use force against the Motie forces currently massing beyond Saturn.

2003-07-08T15:09:00.000-04:00

More on uranium

Calpundit points to a story that suggests Bush knew the Nigerian Uranium story was bogus from the start yet chose to use it as evidence anyway. Like Calpundit, "I'm not sure how seriously to take this," but if, if this is so, it's awfully damning.

It's one thing to overplay your hand on thin evidence, or ignore the caution of the experts, which is what I think the President probably did. It would be another thing for the President's people to have made up evidence against Iraq as it suits them. I'll be watching this-- I want to know which thing really happened. Bad news either way, but much, much worse if this new development turns out to be credible.

2003-07-08T14:33:00.000-04:00

Fun webtools dept.

The sign builder is a good way to waste some time. When we move this blog to a more salubrious clime, you will be able to see the results of buckethead cut loose on one of the time wasting webtools.

2003-07-08T14:27:00.000-04:00

Wow

The control panel for the blog looks different when you use Netscape 7. How's that for an engaging post after a weeks long absence.

2003-07-08T11:51:00.000-04:00

Crow, served hot

I'm baaack! (finally...)

So, the President has now admitted that the ironclad evidence that Iraq had purchased fissionable uranium from African nations was, in a word, vaporous. Reminds me of the time when the President made up that bit about Iraq buying up aluminum tubes that were only for use in reactors. One event implies nothing. From two like events you can posit the existence of a third.

The NYT has their story, and "Philippe de Croy" of the Volokhs writes,

Whether his credibility is becoming a problem domestically I do not know. There are plenty of people in this country who will continue to defend the Bush administration almost no matter what happens either because they find Bush personally appealing or because the importance of keeping the Democrats out is so great that they would rather excuse Bush and go on trusting him, more or less, content to call for the heads of whatever underlings were, ahem, “responsible” for any misinformation that was distributed. They feel that it beats the alternative. I understand why
I am sure some countries will continue to provide us with ample respect and cooperation in any case because they regard it as so strongly in their interest to do so. But at the margin the cost in credibility will have to be high. I should think that most countries -- their people and their leaders -- will look back at the war on Iraq and remember the incredulous indignation we heaped upon those who would not go along with us. Then they will look at what came out afterwards and conclude that we are clowns or worse. They will not focus on what we claimed that was true. They will focus on what we claimed that was false.

This situation was always one of my biggest underlying reservations about the libervasion of Iraq. Don't get me wrong-- I am delighted, repeat delighted that Saddam Hussein is no longer the man in power in Iraq. But I always felt the risks of libervasion were very high when it comes to the international stage. That's not to say that we must bow and scrape before the UN when we wish to change our trade relationship with Cameroon, but the poisonous war of words that raged earlier this year could turn out poorly for the US. Our incredulous indignation, which is exactly what it was, though seemingly justified in February, could bite us in the ass if in the future we must fend off a truly immediate, credible threat from abroad and the rest of the world 'chooses' to believe we are crying "wolf."

[moreover] The administration's credibility on domestic matters has never been that high from my point of view. I think he's heading for a perhaps hollow, bitter, Nixonian second term at home, and a Wilsonian one abroad.

2003-06-26T16:01:00.000-04:00

More on moralism

Alex Knapp at Heretical Ideas elaborates on my Scalia-bashing, and applies it more broadly:

You know, it's odd how some conservatives like to have their cake and eat it, too when it comes to the state/society distinction. On the one hand, many conservatives argue that just because the state isn't providing for the poor and homeless doesn't mean that society won't step up to fill in the gap. And yet, many of those same conservatives will turn right around and say that if we don't keep drugs illegal, or we don't maintain the ban on gay marriage, then society will just fall apart. So apparently, people are perfectly capable and responsible enough to provide for each other without state intervention, but if we can legally get high at the coffeeshop or marry someone of the same sex, then we'll become junkies and leave our families for crazy gay Objectivists because hey, now we can! Anyone else see the incongruity there?

Yep.

2003-06-26T15:42:00.000-04:00

Exhortation

Matt Welch, in a great article on immigration policy, says:

But ignored laws, suddenly enforced, will do more than weed out criminals and terrorists. It will drive people—including good, hard-working people—into the deepest of the black markets, never to interact with a government agency except maybe in the emergency room, or at the local jail.

Yes! This applies in every area of law: immigration, tax policy, municipal laws, the sodomy ruling today from the SCOTUS, the "drug war" ad infinitum ad nausem. And all of you who have, not should read The Crying of Lot 49 now. Even if you find it to be the worst kind of pretentious wankery, and you may, you should still read it.

Oh, and also, The Soft Bulletin by the Flaming Lips is one of the greatest albums ever made. Today at least, it is the greatest. You may find it to be the worst kind of pretentious wankery. I disagree.

2003-06-26T15:26:00.000-04:00

A Layman's Guide To Bayesian Filtering

This is possibly the most boring headline I have ever written. Who cares! It's interesting! Via slashdot comes this story which explains a Bayesian approach to email spam-filtering in easy to understand terms. Read it here!

2003-06-26T12:04:00.000-04:00

Justice Scalia versus common sense

Score one for privacy!! Today, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that essentially overturned all state sodomy laws still on the books. The decision was 6-3, and Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas dissented. Scalia took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench:

"The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda. . . .The court has taken sides in the culture war," Scalia said, adding that he has "nothing against homosexuals."

Oh Really, sir? And I bet some of your best friends are homosexuals, too.

Scalia is thisclose to being a great justice, and would be but for his willingness to let his own moral codes take precedence over legal questions.

[moreover] Although I applaud strict constructionism of the Constitution in general, I feel it has limits. Much like few Christians follow every single word of the Bible, Constitutional fundamentalism is an irrational and unsound, though logically safe, philosophy.

2003-06-26T10:59:00.000-04:00

Outage

So, this blog has been rolled over to the "new" blogger template, which wiped out the ability to post yesterday.

Now, I'm off on vacation so posting from me will be light to nonexistent. Over to you, WCM and Mr. Bucket!

Oh yes, and the comments are not working.

Johnny Two-Cents at Blogspot: Not Just Another Dog And Pony Show.

2003-06-24T15:46:00.000-04:00

Wisdom From The Head Weasel

No, not those Weasels. Screeching Weasel! Ben Weasel, erstwhile singer of that celebrated, beloved smartasspunkrock band, now has a 'blog. It's a good one, found at http://weaselmanor.blogspot.com. Ben recently weighed in with a long essay about file sharing, and it's full of greatness, wit and wisdom. His thesis in a nutshell: "don't lie to yourself: it's stealing, a-hole!" Excerpted:

“Musician” is the only job title in the world other than “monk,” “nun,” or “priest,” where those who benefit the most from your work expect you to do that work for cost, or free. At least monks and priests get health benefits. But to the music fan, musicians should be martyrs for their art. Believe me, it’s scary to realize that your financial future rests in the hands of a demented child who really, really loves you - as long as you behave according to a stringent set of creative and financial rules, that is. Music fans – again, the true fanatics, the bellowing minority - seem to have two personalities: plodding, overly affectionate lummox, and hyper, shrill arbiter of musical correctness. The music fan is constantly checking up on us to make sure that we know we’re adored as well as to ensure that we’re suffering properly and sufficiently. The reason we keep the fans at arm’s length is because if we don’t, we’re liable to end up playing Curley’s wife to their Lenny. . . .
Legally and ethically speaking, of course, you have no right to steal from anyone. Justifying your theft with “Oh, they’re all rich” or “Well, the major labels are crooks anyway” might make you feel better about yourself, but you’re still a thief. Yet in a way, I don’t blame you, at least not for wanting a little revenge. You’ve been ripped off. The majors gouged you – they were busted for it, for crying out loud – and it’s not the first time they screwed you. They’ve been doing it since rock and roll began. They are the reason that quality and success are unrelated concepts in rock and roll. They are in the business of bullying, lying, cheating and stealing. But as wrong as they are – and let’s not forget that they’ve screwed musicians right along with fans – as wrong as they are in practically everything they do, they are right about stealing music. I don’t like to agree with the RIAA – they certainly don’t represent any musician I know – but they are right. Stealing IS wrong, and Internet theft of music IS killing the industry. Maybe the industry deserves to die – I don’t know. But is it worth putting so many people out of business (not to mention losing their creative voices) to get back at what amounts to a handful of very wealthy, very powerful people who, regardless of what you do, will remain very wealthy and very powerful? I don’t think so – working towards an alternative would seem to make more sense. . . .
You’ll be left, for all practical purposes, with two groups of musicians. The first will consist of musicians who aren’t any good and never were and were formerly engaged primarily in attempts to convince suckers in Estonia to download the dopey love songs and experimental art-rock they recorded on their four-tracks; these self-indulgent, pretentious rank amateurs will be your new alternative and they will rule the college radio charts. In the second group will be the musicians you’ll be hearing on commercial radio and seeing on TV. They will be the Survivors Of The Fattest. . . .
This revolution of theft is having an effect on the industry, no question. But it’s not taking out the big guns. They aren’t going anywhere. You’re killing the little guy. You’re ruining the very people that make music interesting, exciting, and vital. I hope you can manage to enjoy what will be left over, and when that day comes – and it’s coming fast – at least don’t insult our intelligence by blaming Metallica or the RIAA or Warner Bros. At least try to be honest enough to admit that it was your own willingness to rip off your heroes – whether out of greed, or misplaced moral outrage, or both - that drove us out of the business. Don’t blame the big, bad corporations for killing rock and roll. Blame yourselves.

2003-06-24T13:47:00.000-04:00

Update

Last week, I linked to a story about a woman who was pulled over in Ohio for breastfeeding while driving. Nice little episode, right? Well, it's still rolling! Check this out! Turns out the father is suing to be sole defendant, arguing under Mosaic law the father is the sole head of the household and responsible for all members therein. They're members of a sect (here's the main page), of course. The family vows to take this all the way to the Supreme Court on the grounds of religious freedom, claiming they are being harassed by the great state of Ohio.

This is an interesting-- even complicated-- matter, but whatever. Under Ohio law, you can't breastfeed while driving, period. A $100 fine could have been paid by the woman, end of story, except that according to her husband, that would have been bearing false witness, rendering her hellbound. Now it's a federal case. Literally.

Read the article. Great stuff in there. I swear.

A special bonus for those who know me well-- can you spot familiar places in the article? I bet you can!!

2003-06-24T11:43:00.000-04:00

Da Bears

I seem to recall the Bears did acquire Kordell Stewart from the Steelers recently, and intend to play him at quarterback. So, this naming thing is only the second dumbest move of the off-season.

2003-06-24T11:36:00.000-04:00

The Limit

I see via fark that the Chicago Bears are now going to call themselves, wherever possible, "Bears football presented by Bank One".

No, I'm not kidding. Really, I'm not.

You can call me old-fashioned, hypocritical, or conservative if you like, but the DAY the Cleveland Browns change their name to Browns football presented by Goodyear, I drive seven hundred miles to Ohio with a tire iron, a roll of duct tape, and a car with a three-body-big trunk to take care of some business.

I have no problem with corporate sponsorship per se-- it's as big a part of modern sport as growth hormone, endorsement contracts, and drug convictions. But of all the stupid... cynical.... *sputter* ... They sold their name??

2003-06-24T10:42:00.000-04:00

Trial Of The Century

Calpundit asks a very good question.

Every time there's a big trial the media names it the "Trial of the Century." But it occurred to me the other day that now that the 20th century is over, we should be able to decide which trial really was the Trial of the Century (American version).
Leopold and Loeb? Sacco and Vanzetti? The Lindbergh baby kidnapping? Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? The Chicago 7? Patty Hearst? OJ?

A reader also mentions the Scopes trial, which would probably get my vote, and I would have to add in more: the Debs trial; Nuremburg (though a military tribunal); Roe v. Wade.

The problem with choosing just one trial of the century is that all the standouts are so iconic, and for different reasons. Anti-communism. Xenophobia/Anti-immigrant sentiment. Racism. Anti-Semitism (repeatedly). Class. Culture. Morality. The damn anarchists. If nothing else, an interesting mind exercise which illustrates what you believe to be the single dominant theme in 20th century US-weighted history.

2003-06-24T10:19:00.000-04:00

Synthesis

Mike, it occurs to me that the one arena where your argument about class being more important to Americans than race is affirmative action. I was partially mistaken in arguing the contrary, and I apologize.

In fact, affirmative action illustrates your point perfectly. If it weren't for class, AA would not be as widely considered as necessary because class-derived performance issues (including those attributed to the legacy of segregation, i.e. race) would be less of a concern. In fact, I remember writing something to that effect a while back, so I am doubly remiss in contradicting you.

Ahhh... here it is. On April 1, I wrote (slightly edited):

[W]ithout dismissing several hundred years of history and systematic repression, there are many social, cultural, economic, and geographic factors aside from race that determine how a child's education goes. [In fact], affirmative action stands in its own way [by focusing the discussion solely on race rather than other related matters]. Now, when we want to talk about race-based issues in education, we talk about affirmative action. Unfortunately, AA doesn't even address the [real educational questions attributable to lingering racial issues]. For example, take the high incarceration rate among young black men. A felony rap means not being eligible for federal student aid, a Clinton policy that cut off a large swath of society from easy access to higher education. Affirmative action can't touch that, though it's partly a race-based education issue. It's my sense that economic factors influence more about a person's educational path than does race, yet colleges do not consider economics[ that is, class differences] when deciding admissions policy. . . . Public schools are in [deep trouble] all over the place, and students advance grades without learning basic skills. Affirmative action can't compensate for that either, even though that's what it was meant to do. Instead, the debate remains narrowly confined [and cuts] the real problems out of the picture.

2003-06-24T10:08:00.000-04:00

More on Libraries

Upon discussions with Goodwife Two-Cents (who knows about such things), I find I was wrong about something yesterday (no!). While I was correct that public libraries generally do not receive operating money from the Federal Government, they do receive lots of Federal funding in the form of grants. That's how they buy computers. With library budgets slashed to the bone, libraries have two options to buy new computers for patron and administrative use: federal grant money, or Bill Gates' largesse. The first comes with strings attached, the other is rather rare. As a result, the Supreme Court's decision yesterday to uphold the CIPA will have an immediate, and unfortunate, effect on public libraries.

2003-06-24T01:35:00.000-04:00

Irish Americans and Whiteness

Well, I had an extended post on the subject and I lost it. I'll be brief. First, I'll reiterate my intense hatred for Noel Ignatiev and his so-called book that is really a big pile of crap. Second, whiteness studies, including Noel Ignoramus', argue that the Irish were racially distinct in Anglo-Saxon America and then tried to become white. Really? All the Irish Americans in all of America all got together at a meeting and voted unanimously to become white? In order to do so, they also voted to hate African Americans and be mean, evil, racist, awful terribly people. Where are the minutes of that meeting? There was no meeting. Irish Americans, like every other ethnic group, have simply wanted better for their children than they had. That's it. End of story. I've touched on this in previous posts so I won't belabor it here. I'll just say this. Sure. Members of the Irish-American ethnic group have, and some still do, prejudged others. But other ethnic groups are exempt from this? Hardly. In a previous post I wrote that my mother used to tell me that there's good and bad in all kinds, and that most American ethnic historians weren't paying attention if their mother told them the same thing.

Thus, whiteness studies are another way for the IT to browbeat Irish Americans. They decided to become white by hating African Americans. They are evil horrible people.

Oh, go sit on your Ivory Tower and spin.

2003-06-23T15:33:00.000-04:00

Paging Eric Estrada

That funny, funny man Senator Howard Berman (D-CA) has introduced a bill (H. R. 2517) into committee that would give the FBI jurisdiction over peer-to-peer networks and instruct them to vigorously pursue evil file sharers. You can see the bill here(via Slashdot).

Dubbed the "Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003," the law is pretty much what you would expect from Hollywood Howie Berman, giving the FBI pretty much all the latitude it wants to bust the hell out of teens who are really, really into Justin Timberlake. Idiots. Here's the money section:

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall--
(1) develop a program to deter members of the public from committing acts of copyright infringement by--
(A) offering on the Internet copies of copyrighted works, or
(B) making copies of copyrighted works from the Internet,
without the authorization of the copyright owners; and
(2) facilitate the sharing among law enforcement agencies, Internet service providers, and copyright owners of information concerning activities described in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of paragraph (1).
The program under paragraph (1) shall include issuing appropriate warnings to individuals engaged in an activity described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) that they may be subject to criminal prosecution.

Jeez. And, further proving that they just don't get it, Section 4 of the bill, "DESIGNATION AND TRAINING OF AGENTS IN COMPUTER HACKING AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY UNITS," calls for the creation of special detachments of law enforcement and FBI, to be dubbed.... wait for it.....

......wait for it....

.......CHIPS Units, dedicated to the bill's enforcement.

Priceless.

2003-06-23T15:12:00.000-04:00

Oh, Riiiight...

This is why the rest of the country thinks we're a joke. From Reason's blog:

"Accessibility for all is very important," says the Web site for the town of Shutesbury, Massachusetts. "Please remember all public events in Shutesbury are fragrance free."
If you are wondering what "fragrance free" means, there's a helpful explanation here from Ziporah Hildebrandt, chairperson of Shutesbury's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Committee. If you're planning to go to a select board meeting or visit the public library during Fragrance Free Hours, you should
shower beforehand using baking soda instead of soap and shampoo. Baking soda effectively removes many odors. Change into clothing that has not been dry cleaned or laundered with scented products, especially fabric softeners, and has not been around smoke or fragrances. Rinse contaminated clothes with baking soda. Dry without additives. Wear a hat to contain residual odors from hair products. Wear an uncontaminated shirt over your other clothing. Depending on the event, these measures may be sufficient. Ask others present if your clothing, hair, etc. is a problem. Leave if you cause discomfort to others, or sense that your presence may be a problem. Remember: “An ounce of prevention!” Planning ahead to be free of scents is the easiest and best solution.
The connection between accessibility and fragrance freeness is "multiple chemical sensitivity," a syndrome that, according to Hildebrandt, makes its sufferers vulnerable to "extremely upsetting symptoms as well as irreparable damage" from "just one whiff of many chemicals." Combine this contention with the logic of the ADA, and we may all be forced to go fragrance free one day--not just in government buildings but in any business identified as a "place of public accommodation." Since "just one whiff" is reportedly all it takes to cause "severe pain, fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, respiratory distress and other symptoms," separate sections for the fragrant will not cut it.

Jesus. Good think I had my underarms botoxed, or I'd be a damn pariah!

FYI, Shutesbury is a small town about fifteen miles north of Amherst, a pretty cool little place like you find in that area where farmers and hippies can coexist in peace. Entertainingly, Shutesbury is governed by selectmen and open town meetings. Question: can barring citizens from town meetings on grounds of fragrance be construed as violating the 24th Amendment? (Probably not, but it's still not right.)

2003-06-23T15:00:00.000-04:00

Thinking of the children, again

In regard to my post this morning on the Supremes upholding the Children's Internet Protection Act, I have to ask... if the Court is leaving it up to "community standards" to determine what gets filtered from library to library, what is the point of upholding the law in the first place??

2003-06-23T13:19:00.000-04:00

Irishness and That "Whiteness" Thingy

Mike, I'm interested to get from you sources in which whiteness is used to set the Irish apart racially (as opposed to culturally or ethnically) from the rest of society. I'm familiar with "How The Irish Became White," but nothing else.

2003-06-23T13:10:00.000-04:00

Class/Race/Paper/Scissor/Rock

I thought I'd pull this out of the comments section. Thanks to Windy City for the opening volley.

WINDY CITY MIKE: I've spent so much time pointing out the flaws in whiteness with my departmental compatriots that I''d rather not rehash it now. But I'll go on record to say that it''s wrong, stupid, and just another way for historians of ethnic America to brow-beat Irish-Americans, except that everything they say about Irish-Americans is wrong.
Race isn't really the big divider in the U.S. It's actually class. Aside from Japanese Americans during WWII, who hates Asians? Seriously. Do people with prejudices fear African-Americans wearing a three-piece suit, carrying a briefcase, and speaking into a cell phone? No.
Propagators of whiteness are only trying to deflect attention from themselves because they are members of the middle class or better. That's the group that really has all the privileges they attribute to "whites."
White is not an ethnic group. I say to Noel Ignatiev, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and this professor at UMass, get your head out of your ass.
JOHNNY TWO-CENTS: Mike,
I disagree. Although class is a powerful, and unheralded, divider in the USA, race still exerts a powerful undertow. Also, despite the great class consciousness shown in the Gilded Age and first part of the 20th century when Frick, Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Morgan formed a brotherhood and the mill workers formed one in opposition, the middle of this century all but wiped out the working-class unity of spirit that I think you would agree is necessary for a true class consciousness. The proud man in overalls was replaced in American iconography by the man in the gray flannel suit, and the so-called working classes have never quite made it back to that status, except on a local scale.
However, race retains its power to divide and unite long after the worst abuses took place. To take an easy example, why do you think "In The Heat Of The Night/They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!" is still such a good film? Because it plays upon the mistrust of middle-class African-Americans (suit, briefcase) by certain white Americans. If viewers of the film can't all necessarily agree with that prejudice, it is still familiar enough to resonate with most if not all American viewers.
When whipped up by demagogues, race can still trump class. Although empirically I agree that people really differ and unite more along class lines, the percieved power of race (what certain marxians would call a "false consciousness') is greater. Long after racial inequality/discrimination/awareness has been minimized, the spectre of race will linger.
As for whiteness studies, it is of limited usefulness. A few excellent books and articles have been written on the subject that avoid navel-gazing and total self-indulgence, but as I said, the field lends itself so easily to abuse, indoctrination, and dogmatism that it is a dangerous petard to hoist. To coin a phrase. Petard... is that even a word? (Yes, yes I know...)

In closing, I just want to say to you, Mike, that from what I have seen you are 110% correct in characterizing most "whiteness" studies practitioners as having ulterior motives. I do think there's more to it than class, though, namely the famed and notorious white liberal academic guilt we hear so much about these days. Having taken classes in which "whiteness" was a topic of "learning" (enough with the "scare quotes," Johnny!), I can report that class, politics, and race all come together in one big ball of squishy, soggy pointy-headed guilt.

Finally, what an amazingly provincial concept, "whiteness studies" is! Made by US historians and US cultural theorists for the study of US History by specialists in US History. A bit of a tempest in a teapot, if you ask me. Or at least it should be.

2003-06-23T12:46:00.000-04:00

Happy now, Judson?

Ross of Spiral Dive thinks we don't post enough. Well, hard cheese.

2003-06-23T12:38:00.000-04:00

Libraries lose one

The Supreme Court upheld the "Children's Internet Protection Act"(CIPA) (Thanks, President Clin-ton!) today against a lawsuit from the American Library Association. The law declares that public libraries must install internet filters on all public internet access points in the library or lose federal funding.

This law is bad/unnecessary for four reasons:

1) Filters are inaccurate, messy, and problematic. Even the best block many "legitimate" sites. Families who do not have a home internet connection and can't use the internet at work often rely on public libraries to gain access to information. Restricting the access of these people to the internet, even somewhat, should not be encouraged. Although the SCOTUS leaves it up to "community standards" to determine what content gets blocked in a particular library, my ethical principles lead me to oppose this decision.
2) The SCOTUS in hearings made much of the traditional role of libraries as selective repositories (that is, they buy this book but not that book). See this excerpt from the WaPo article:
The government argued that the law allows communities to set their own standards for what content would be filtered by school and library computers. It also argued that filtering Internet content is no different than the book-buying decisions that libraries make all the time. Adults, the government also noted, can ask librarians to disable the filters.
I think this is a bad idea. The internet, by its very nature, is different from other data sources. Libraries have already grasped that fact-- it is one reason they opposed the CIPA, which would affect the free access of adults to information they seek.
Furthermore, the SCOTUS' comparison of the internet with the book holdings of a library is wrong. The internet is more like the reference desk, where they will look up anything you need, and refer you to other sources when they cannot help you. On this count, I think the CIPA is bad law and the Supreme Court is dead wrong.
3) Interstate commerce?? Unless the kid uses a credit card to buy porn online, I don't see how this is the Fed's problem anyway.
4) Finally, the CIPA is an empty victory for anti-Porn crusaders. The vast majority of public libraries recieve little funding from the Federal Government. Most of their budget comes from state and local initiatives. If the letters to the editor of Modern Librarian are any gauge, I think a lot of libraries will choose to forego the Federal pittance, and leave their internet access filter-free.

There are many better ways than filtering software to control the access of children to so-called "harmful" information. Libraries have been trying out these alternatives on the local level for years. The SCOTUS merely demonstrates its lack of fine understanding of how the technology works when it upholds CIPA.

On a better note, the COPA (Children's Online Protection Act)(Thanks again, President Clin-ton!*) was overturned in the same decision. This law would have put the onus on website operators/owners to make it impossible for children to access their sites, presumably via magic, future-technology, or reversing the polarity on the antimatter injectors.

*Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.

2003-06-20T13:23:00.000-04:00

The World Would Be A Better Place If...

...everyone would just watch "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge" on TNN. If you want to meditate on the fluidity of cultural signifiers while you do it, that's your business.

2003-06-20T13:09:00.000-04:00

Whiteness Studies

The Washington Post is running an article today on the new "fad" in academia, whiteness studies. Even better, the program cited is at UMass-Amherst, where I got my advanced smart-person credentials. I remember the advent of "whiteness studies." Since my work tends to address questions of identity, group identity, and that horrible word "othering" I was excited by the possibilities even as I became weary of the dogma. Despite the involuted recursiveness of the very concept (doesn't that just trip gaily off the tongue?) I found the concept of "whiteness," that is, the construction of an explicity white identity by discernible groups, to be very handy. It can help immensely when trying to understand the finer points of racial dynamics in, say, Murfreesboro in 1885.

However, the lure of the dark side is strong. David Horowitz correctly points out that the easy, concensus conclusion to draw from women's studies, African-American Studies, and whiteness studies is that whiteness is, predictably, an evil hegemonic force against which no retaliation is unjustified. The UMass class cited in the article certainly seems to move along those lines. The article's lead sentence:

Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege walk, and she wasn't happy about it.

Oh, lordy. See my comments below, and I'm going to reiterate what I said on Wednesday: "We all know what happens when college students get ahold of Big Ideas That Explain Everything. For a padawan learner such weapons are not, only for a Jedi are they. Mmm, yes. If you give a student Foucault, Hamlet is only about sex. If you give a student Marx, King Lear is a parable of Capitalism. These tools are powerful, but they are also crutches, and in the wrong hands lend themselves easily to arrogance, narrowness, and false first principles."

I'll be danged if that doesn't sound better every time I read it! I'm so great.

2003-06-20T11:21:00.000-04:00

On Futility

CalPundit writes about another failed test of missile defense. Money quote, with which I predictably agree:

I'm not philosophically opposed to missile defense, but I am opposed to sinking money endlessly into a program that never seems to achieve anything. Conservatives rightly castigate social programs that don't produce results, so why are they willing to put up with it here?

Furthermore, is this assertion from the same post true?

(Oh, and don't forget that Bush has decided that missile defense will be deployed in October 2004 regardless of whether it works or not. October 2004. Does that date sound at all suspicious to anyone?)

[moreover] A quick Nexis search shows me that Bush publicly vowed in December 2002 to have Missile Defense ready for October 1, 2004.

2003-06-20T10:09:00.000-04:00

In Defense of Postmodernism

Once again, Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass has posted a very interesting reader comment. The correspondent is someone who can remember the introduction of postmodernism and unorthodox curriculum into the English classroom. He puts it like this: " After 1970, we began to get courses that often strayed a long way from traditional curriculum. The same professor who was catatonia-inducing at noon on The 20th Century Novel shone teaching a non-credit course on film noir seven hours later. Can there be such a thing as a spirit of a profession? If there can be, it was tired of the rigors of scholarship in 1970, and found no joy in its rewards. New and exciting ideas had come into the room, colorfully dressed and flirting madly. "

(A side note. On purely practical grounds, I have to give props to pure-theory academics who start from the premise that nothing has meaning in and of itself, and that nothing is objectively "true." If such is the case, then all the theory in the world is mere solipsism, and the practice of academic theory is a pursuit as pointless, and as sad, as building sand-castles during high tide. By their own lights, day is night, black is white, cat is dog, theory is practice, the map is as good as the territory, and their work is devoid of worth or significance. Yet they get paid for it, sometimes handsomely. A giant scam? Perhaps! Impressive chutzpah? Definitely!!)

Later in the same post, O'Connor takes to task the baseless "grandiosity" of the critical discipline, arguing that

the increasing shrillness, snobbery, and grandiosity of so much humanist scholarship can be traced directly to the attempt to argue for the social, political, and cultural relevance of the arts. And of course they are relevant--they give meaning, depth, and texture to our lives in precious, priceless ways. But they are not relevant in the ways many scholars insist that they are. You cannot discern the ideology of imperialism from Jane Eyre--but there are scores of critics who say you can. You cannot detect a uniquely homosexual literary style in the work of a Walt Whitman or a Henry James--but there are critics who say you can. You cannot argue that a poem or story singlehandedly subverts patriarchal hegemony or that a novel or play may be read as a microcosm of the culture in which it was written. But critics do it all the time, and they do it because they want to make works of art into something they are not. Making exaggerated, often irrelevant claims about the relevance of particular works and making those claims stick: that is the work of the professional humanist today. By and large, it's what gets rewarded, it's what gets published, and it's what gets taught.

This is true, partially, but also see commentary sent by the reader cited earlier: " It takes a good deal of effort to become a “learned person.” You have to value the effort and the goal. If you’re going to teach A Tale of Two Cities, you not only have to know the text back to front, but also have a good idea about how Dickens understood the French Revolution, how the book fit with Dickens’ other work at the time of composition. . . ." The reader goes on to say how tiring this work is when compared to the sexiness of single-theory teaching.

Fair enough, but what gets lost in this discussion is that you need both. In small amounts postmodernism can be incredibly handy, but it must support a rigorously, even tiresomely, researched argument. Of course it's not true that you can comprehend the entire edifice of British imperialism from analyzing Jane Eyre, but you can make a start of it. By carefully placing cultural artifacts or moments in their context, and by creatively teasing out hints and rumors of hidden meaning and unspoken motive, you can get very close to the heart and spirit of a time and place. Kipling's writing is an excellent example. If you take him at face value, you get a coherent, yet distorted view of British imperial-era thought. You get Kipling's view. But if you examine the context around Kipling, his writing, his life, and his history, you can use his work as a base on which to build a more accurate picture.

[begin wankery]To take an example from my own amateurish work: it is possible to discuss the history of African-Americans after Reconstruction by the songs they sang. However of you don't move beyond the texts of the songs, you remain in the solipsistic morass that O'Connor mentions. That happens ALL THE G-D DAMN TIME and it makes me effing crazy.

For example. Historians who study music tend to treat songs as just sets of words, like poems, ignoring the performativity, probable commercial interest, and audience presence inherent in all music prior to the recording age, and ignoring the possibility that the music-- the notes themselves-- might contain signifiers distinct from, and more important than, any "text." Which of course is monumentally stupid. Yet many historians do just this and elevate the lyrics to the level of concrete, ahistorical artifact, deconstructing them through a theoretical lens while ignoring even the most stupendously obvious contextual clues. This is exactly what O'Conner's on about, and I agree to this point. But, by doing the same po-mo exegesis using a theoretical framework of your choice, while firmly placing cultural artifacts in the context they come from-- economic, social, political, geographic, you can hopefully achieve a deep understanding of American history along dimensions that might othewise remain hidden. Theory then becomes what it should be-- one means to an end. [here endeth thee wankery]

I agree with Erin O'Connor and all her various correspondents. I just hope that, when academia finally moves back from the high wierdness of postmodernism, they keep the cool stuff and don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[moreover] n.b. I have made a couple edits to this post for clarity and forcefulness. Hey, meaning is fluid anyway, right?

2003-06-20T04:11:00.000-04:00

Fun with Postmodernism

Here is a bilingual post in Postmodernist Newspeak and English.

Newspeak: Clearly, the subjectivism inherent within the phallocentric blanc homme heteropatriarchy permits agency only to the center of power, in which the oppressive repression of the other is carried out philogically, but the physical realm exists only imaginatarially through agency-oriented cultural constructivism.

English: White guys suck. They are mean to people who are not also white guys.

Newspeak: Denying objective reality is imperative. Only through the lens of the subjective cultural construction do we see the nature of othering. In the mind of the beholder, that which is unreal to the cultural outsider exists. Should the other appear as phantasmagorically unnontransparent humanitas, they are what they appear in the mind of those who other them. But the other other condemns their action as criminal to oppress the other who is othering the other.

English: It's okay to kill other if you think it's okay to kill other people. This is a sneaky way for Postmodernists to cloak their true selves. They're actually Nazi sympathizers finding a justification for the actions of their ideological forbears. We call this moral relativism. It is more colloquially known as bullshit. The term bullshit may also be applied to most assertions in Newspeak.

Newspeak The hibernophallopoliticocentric realm of Chicago others all others supercallifragilisticexpialodiciously in hibernophalloterrorstic logocentric NotreDame-esquely brusqueintadorial combat against peace-centered maternaturuallineally impetuous matro-divine/anti-hibernophillac militaristic industarial complexity.

English ?????????????

I believe that most postmodernists stuck a monkey in a room with a PC and published whatever the chimp banged onto the keyboard.

2003-06-20T03:40:00.000-04:00

A Discourse with a Commenter

First, thanks to Mr. Bad Thoughts for continued readership and commentary. I would like to expand a debate he and I have engaged regarding American generations. I will post a recent comment here in full.

From: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts:

"I would not challenge your delineation out of hand. However, I would point out that when conservatives use the term 'boomers' they are referring to a group of people who have certain experiences from the 60s that involves the questioning of 'traditional America.' Many of the people who are part of the 'boomers' you described are too young to have had meaningful experiences of the 60s; they were a more conservative (or at least much less liberal) generation. Gen Xers, on the other hand, seem to be better characterized by disillusionment with both 60s liberalism (which they largely got from their parents) and Reaganism (the quick wealth scheme having dried up by 1988.)"

To respond to the second sentence, what conservatives do is their problem. On that score the conservatives to whom you refer are quite incorrect. I, however, made it abundantly clear that the Baby Boomer generation is split between what Nixon referred to as a "small vocal minority," a handful of people who were involved in counter-cultural activities, and the great majority of them who were not. What I refer to as counter-cultural activities is what you, I assume, refer to as "the questioning of 'traditional America'?" That is fine.

In the above quoted comment, you seem to argue that the Baby Boomers who were not involved in counter-cultural activities were too young to do so? Then, everyone who was between the age of 16 and 26 between the years 1965 and 1972 were all involved in counter-cultural activity/the questioning of traditional America? I disagree very strongly. Many people, or Straights, if you will, were of contemporary age with counter-culturalists/questioners, or Freaks if you will. To explain further, plenty of 21 year old Freaks protesting the war in 1969 were spit on by an even greater number of 21 year old Straights. I will certainly concede that members of the Baby Boom generation who were pre-teens or early adolescents between 1965 and 1972 missed out, and I'm sure many of them adopted more conservative viewpoints than late-teen/early adult Freaks during the same years. But understand that most people in their late-teen/early adult years between 1965 and 1972 also adopted conservative viewpoints. The bottom line here, and listen carefully, is that a very, very small minority of Americans in their late-teen/early adult years between 1965 and 1972 were involved in counter-cultural activities. The majority of them, like most Americans, were in the middle of the road, or to the right of center. Even when American society polarized in 1968, very few young people were counter-culturalists. Most polarized in the opposite direction.

Thus, I doubt that most Gen Xers received "60s liberalism" from their parents. First off, most people alive in the 1960s really weren't left of center and engaging in counter-culture; that was a small number of people. Second, it doesn't make sense chronologically for Baby Boomers to have all of their children in Generation X. I can't offer hard quantitative evidence in the form of census data, but I'm not convinced that the majority of Generation X members are the product of Baby Boomer parents. Some, certainly. But in my own case, I'm the product of two pre-boomers, and I was born toward the end of my Generation X 1960-1977 chronolongical definition. I was then raised by one of the aforementioned pre-boomers and a very, very early Boomer. A small sample, but nonetheless one example contrary to your argument that Generation X is, correct me if I'm wrong, overwhelmingly a product of Boomer parentage. Is that your assertion?

Let's review. A typical white middle-class person born in the first third of the post-war Baby Boom, between 1946 and 1950/1, would be entering their socially acceptable child-bearing age between the years 1971 and 1976. That places their first round of children in Generation X, true. But their second round of children, roughly three years after the first, would fall between 1974 and 1979. Stay with me here. Thus, the second round of children for even the first third of typical white middle class early Boomers, should they fall in the years 1978 and 1979, enters the realm of Generation Y, or echo Boomers. The second third of the typical white middle class Baby Boomer, born between 1951 and 1955, enter their socially acceptable child-bearing age between the years 1976 and 1980. It is thus possible for the second third to have Generation X children in 1976 or 1977, but more likely to have them in 1978, 1979, and 1980, all within the Generation Y period. Their second round of children, if typical, falls squarely within Generation Y between 1979 and 1983. For the final third of the typical white middle class Baby Boomer, 1956 to 1959/60, the first round of children are likely born between 1981 and 1986, well into Generation Y territory, to say nothing of the second round.

Of course, not every Baby Boomer is typical, white, or middle-class having children when it's socially acceptable and common. Biology often runs counter to those things, and there are always exceptions. But typically, most Baby Boomers, with the above chronological number crunching in mind, are having Generation Y offspring.

Here endeth the lesson.

2003-06-20T02:55:00.000-04:00

Brief Absence

I was unable to post yesterday due to an eye injury that left me in white-hot agony and temporarily blind. I have recovered quickly thanks to medical attention, and am back in the blogging business. Thank you for your support.

2003-06-19T15:38:00.000-04:00

So It Occurs To Me Once Again

If the evidence was so ironclad, so bulletproof, why haven't our armies found any evidence of Weapons of Mass Desctruction in Iraq? Wasn't that the President's stated goal for going to war-- to forestall a threat that was at any moment forty-five minutes away from dumping nerve gas on us or our allies? Again, yes, I'm glad Hussein is gone. I'm elated that his human rights abuses can now be set to rights. But those are collateral benefits of an invasion that supposedly defused a concrete and measurable threat to the US and its citizens.

So where is this ironclad proof? Most Americans don't care--- hell, most Americans think we've found WMD's already, that it was France we invaded, and that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11/01 attacks. But I care, because it's the difference between a President doing the the tough thing for right reasons and a President cynically manipulating public opinion for gain. Like Clinton did. I will allow that, now that the dust has settled, it's possible that the administration finds that some of its intelligence is less useful than they thought. Fine. The emperor is pantsless. But if that is the case, can someone please say so? There's nothing sadder than a man trying to act dignified while not wearing any pants.*

*Trust me-- I should know.

2003-06-19T14:33:00.000-04:00

From Lileks

"We wish the French the best. But their days as the moral avatar, the champion of humanity, are long gone. That reputation -- unearned for decades -- will die in the Congo, where French troops are behaving as effectively as, well, French troops. The painful fact is that no one expects much of them anymore beyond good food, bribery and honeyed hypocrisy.

One liberated Iraqi summed up the American promise like this: "Democracy, whiskey, sexy!" One could say that beats Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.

One might suggest that it already has."

2003-06-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

James Lileks For President, Part II

Or maybe just a highly placed aide... whichever... go read his thoughts on Iran and Newcular weaponry.

2003-06-19T08:58:00.000-04:00

James Lileks For President, Part I

From today's bleat

As for Orrin Hatch and his remarks about blowing up the computers of people who download pirated files: I’ll just say that I think he’s made mostly of molded plastic, there’s a pullstring in his back, and the RIAA fingerprints are all over the big white ring. I won’t listen to any of these guys blather about computers or the Internet until they have demonstrated on film that they can install some RAM, burn a CD (“shiny side down, you say?”), tell me what HTTP and URL stand for, prove they know how to get the source code for a webpage, and know better than to click “Yes” when asked if the computer should always trust data from Gator Corporation.
His remarks about remotely destroying computers that download copyrighted material is just grampa blather. The computers are stealing music! The cars are frightening the horses! The Kaiser took my dog![my emphasis] It would be amusing if these people didn’t have the power to pass thick stupid laws crafted by aides, lobbyists and other gnomes hauling up heavy buckets from the deep sooty mines of legalese. Of course the people who vote them up or down don’t actually read them; they get the gist from the title. . . .
I know, I know - he was just talking off the top of his head. But if someone is talking about, oh, women’s pay relative to men, and they say off the top of their head “can’t the girls just stay home and put up preserves?” - well, it shows what they really think. Off the top of one’s head means when I reach for an idea, this one is the closest. For a reason.

Now, my story begins in 19-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" cause the Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles.

2003-06-18T16:11:00.000-04:00

Orrin Hatch Can Have My Computer When He Pries It Out Of My Cold, Dead Hands

I'm sure you've all heard about this already, but I'm all for kicking someone when they're down. From CNN: Your News Source:

During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.
"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to deliberately download pirated material very slowly so other users can't.
"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."
The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song-writing royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions.

I see... so if his dog takes a dump on my lawn, I will have the right to kick the heck out of it, to teach him a lesson in turn, right?

[moreover] Dude... when word of this gets around to the script-kidz, Orrin Hatch's site is gonna be sooo 0wn3d.

[moreover once over]... So what about THIS, Mr. Senator Man?

2003-06-18T16:09:00.000-04:00

Love Above The Law

This is just weird.

The Missouri Supreme Court struck down the state's "alienation of affection" law, saying that "stealing" the love of a married person is an arcane legal doctrine.
The court, in a 5-2 decision Tuesday, agreed with a woman accused of marital infidelity that alienation of affection is an antiquated cause that has no place in a modern legal system. The justices struck down the law and overturned a lower court's $75,000 judgment against her.
The woman, Sivi Noellsch, was sued by Katherine Helsel for allegedly having an affair with Helsel's husband, David, who eventually filed for divorce. Helsel cited alienation of affection as the reason for her lawsuit. . . . .Alienation of affection is grounded in the outdated idea that married people have property interests in each other and its present-day interpretation does nothing to preserve marriages, Judge Richard Teitelman wrote for the majority. . . . "Most lawyers would have predicted this," Ken Jones, editor of Missouri Lawyers Weekly, said of the decision. "It really brings Missouri into the 21st century."

Nooo... It actually brings Missouri into the nineteenth century, when the laws of coverture were eroded by a rising class of property-owning women, but close enough. It's nice to see 500-year-old English common law can still exert a pull. The article also notes that a similar bill banning "alienation of affection" in North Carolina is not likely to pass into law. Heh.

In other news, the love you take is still equal to the love you make. George Harrison: economist!

2003-06-18T15:49:00.000-04:00

Attempted synthesis

If I feel better tomorrow, I will attempt to fuuuuse together Mike's and my two threads into one beautiful Gordian knot of logical syllogism. In brief, it's the damn hippies who got us in this postmodern crisis of academia, and Generation Y are the first wave of students who may never have been exposed to any other pedagogical method.

I would like to go further into this, but I am tired. I didn't sleep much last night, and when I did sleep, I dreamt that I had been abducted and was being given a tour of the mansion-cum-abbatoir where I would soon be killed and eaten. I was just being shown the hook from which I would be hung to be tortured, die and age before being made into a variety of supposedly delicious dishes, when I woke to my alarm. So I'm really damn tired.

As a result, the best I can do in the way of synthesis is this link via Eric Muller, On the Couch With Beavis and Butthead. Besides being hilarious, it sums up perfectly why a little theory in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing. Let's excerpt, shall we!

During the video viewing segments of Beavis and Butthead, they are shown sitting on a couch at Butthead's house. Our viewpoint is as if we are staring out from inside the television which they are watching. However, the possible mise en abyeme effect of Beavis and Butthead watching the television viewer watching them watch television, the feedback loop of (virtual) camera and screen evoking Lacan's Mirror Stage, where the child learns to watch himself watching himself, is not exploited here. Instead, Beavis and Butthead are positioned as analysands. They sit on the couch, in the state of regression described by theorists of the cinematic apparatus (Baudry 698-699), and free associate in response to the music videos, a genre which Marsha Kindler and E. Ann Kaplan have both closely connected to the dreamwork (Kinder 12-14; Kaplan 28). . . .
The single most jaw-dropping moment for the psychoanalytically informed viewer in all the Beavis and Butthead episodes comes in the episode entitled "Steamroller." Our heroes are watching a music video by the eccentric Scandinavian singer Bjork when Beavis blurts out: "I heard Bjork has a schlong." Butthead stammers, and asks where Beavis heard this. Beavis claims it was "the guy in the bathroom." After a few more questions, it becomes clear to everyone except Beavis that "the guy in the bathroom" is Beavis' own reflection.
It is a cliche of Lacanian cultural criticism that any appearance of a mirror must evoke the mirror stage, but surely Beavis' failure to recognize himself, coupled with his reflection telling him that Bjork (a small woman) has a "schlong" (a word chosen, surely, over all other possible penis euphemisms for its incorporation of the word "long"), deserves such analysis. It fundamentally ties Beavis' incomprehension of sexual difference to anality (as described in the last section) to his failure to accept the boundedness of his body. In the mirror stage, the infant recognizes that subjectivity is limited to the surface of the body and agency to the reach of its limbs and voice. Previously, the child has no sense of a world outside, but is total ego, thinking of itself as the entire universe, understanding existence only as immediate sensation. . . .
The threat of castration, represented by Woman's lack, is essential to subject formation, and Beavis is clearly outside of this system. Not only does his reflection tell him Bjork has a "schlong," but when he and Butthead watch another video, which features a (supposedly) nude woman in a bathtub, Butthead expresses the hope that the woman will stand up, revealing her body to them. Beavis thinks that she will not, speculating that "she's embarrassed because she has a stiffie." Butthead attempts to explain that women cannot get erections, but the existence of humans without penises is unimaginable to Beavis.

Indeed! Read the entire thing!

2003-06-18T01:36:00.000-04:00

A bit more flapping about generations

So, as my generational delineations (not perfect with overlap) have not yet been challenged in the comments field, I'll continue.

Let's give the benefit of the doubt to those who use the term, "hippie," and what they mean by that. Let's say they are applying the term to that small segment of the Boomer generation who were Freaks, actively involved in counter-culture activities. People who were actively involved in counter-culture might have been less likely to inculcate their children with a sense of entitlement, so the notion that Freaks gave their children a sense of entitlement is incorrect.

Without going into details about the chaotic and somewhat unorthodox (by traditional definition) circumstances in which I was brought into the world and raised, I was ultimately raised by an early Boomer very much involved in counter-culture and political activism during the late 1960s, and a pre-boomer who was of course, not. The early Boomer to which I refer made his position clear. When I came home with a story of some injustice perpetrated against me by the evil teachers, fellow students, and/or school administration, ending with the phrase, "and that's not fair," the response was, "Who the hell ever told you life was fair? Your mother? She's wrong. Get used to it." [There's some poetic license here, but the gist should come across]

Now I realize this is anecdotal, and a small sampling group to say the least, clearly, this was one Boomer who did not choose to inculcate the child he raised with a sense of entitlement. I think those who were involved in counter-culture actually walked away jaded, disappointed, and ultimately, pessimistic. The vast majority of Boomers who didn't have the guts to take a stand, or took one against those who did, are the ones who I think came away with more of a sense of entitlement.

As I wrote before, Gen Y has demonstrated a sense of entitlement, and I think one reason is that in a lot of cases, their parents have inculcated them with it. But that
s not the be-all-end-all. So did children's television programming, and the other things I discussed (please see previous post). Nothing is monocausal. Hell, being Americans has inculcated a lot of these kids with a sense of entitlement. As to whether or not Boomers are still raising kids, if Gen Y has been in college for a period measured in years, they're not really being raised now, are they?

Finally, unlike Scarborough, who wavers between making me laugh and raising my blood pressure exponentially, I have no hatred for people previously involved in 1960s counter-culture. Quite the opposite. I grew up idolizing one of them, and still do to this day to a great extent. They tried to change the world. They didn't succeed, but the deck was significantly stacked against them. But I think they fought one helluva good fight, and my hat's off. Matter of opinion, of course, and that's mine. I'll smile and nodd at others.

Power to the People.

2003-06-17T15:39:00.000-04:00

Zig now for great justice

A federal appeals court has ruled that the USDoJ acted correctly in detaining hundreds of people in the wake of September, 2001. Story here.

I'm going to break with long-standing J2C tradition and not work myself into a frenzy over this decision. I still think it's a bad thing, just no more nefarious than any other of the hare-brained schemes we've seen recently. On one hand, the people detained (for the purposes of this decision) were illegal aliens, who were in the country, um, illegally. That needs checking out. But that fact must be balanced by two considerations: the DoJ's abysmal record of late regarding full disclosure, honesty, and moderation; and the fact that this is the USA and we don't treat people this way (that golden rule thingy). Here's the part that has always troubled me.

A recent audit by the inspector general at the Justice Department found "significant problems" with the detentions, including allegations of physical abuse. Civil liberties groups have noted that only one of those detained, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been charged with any terrorism-related crime.
Ashcroft told lawmakers earlier this month that some of the foreigners "had strong links to the terrorists," but that in some cases evidence was insufficient or too sensitive to bring criminal charges against them in public courts.

Everyone has a right to a lawyer, and everyone has a right to face the charges brought against them. No charges? No detention! Secret courts? While I understand and appreciate the need for discretion in dealing with potential international terrorists, no circumstances should mitigate due process out of existence. And what are these "strong ties" JA speaks of? If they are so strong, why have charges not been brought?

Just asking.

[moreover] Part of the reason I posted this was to elicit commentary. Mission accomplished!! In the 18 hours since I first read the story, I have come 179 degrees. Indefinite detentions are for tinpot dictators. We're supposed to be a forthright, just, honest nation and people. We're Rocky Balboa.

2003-06-17T15:26:00.000-04:00

Education

While all of you are flapping your gums about generational divides, when everybody knows that everything that's really worth learning on that subject comes from TV's "The Wonder Years," I'm going to re-address Brookheiser's remarks on the teaching and learning of history.

I'm going to start with a discussion that has been ongoing over at Critical Mass. Though the discussion started with a piece on the decline of graduate study in the humanities, reader responses touch on Brookheiser's point.

Let me excerpt one reader comment here in its entireity:

I have been teaching at [Prominent Private University] for the last two years, and I have been able to see the effects of this relativism on the undergraduates here. They are genuinely bewildered about what, if anything, counts as knowledge. One example that stands out for me: I taught a “Topics in Theory and Criticism” course this last quarter. The usual approach to such a course here is to pick a flavor (Marx/Marxism, Queer/Gender, New Historicism/Foucault, Cultural Studies/Raymond Williams, etc. etc. etc.), read a series of that flavor’s theoretical/critical texts, and then read a more traditionally literary text or two through the lens of the chosen flavor. It seems more than a bit template-driven. I tried to do something different—though hardly groundbreaking—with my course: take an historical trip beginning with Plato and working through the various paths that begin there and have ended up here (in the various flavors). I had to adapt the course on the fly, because I was supposed to be teaching a flavors course of my own, so I created a Classical vs. Renaissance theory course into which I snuck all kinds of other stuff “off-syllabus.” I thought the class was going miserably—it was sometimes quite difficult to get students to talk about the material we were covering—and I was sure that the approach I was trying was failing. On the last day of class, I got an ovation (there’s something that’s never happened before).
I didn’t understand what was going on until a few days later. Several students came to see me during office hours to tell me that they had never taken a course quite like this one before. What they had expected was a template-driven, “here’s how we apply ****ist theory to texts” approach, because that is how all of their classes are taught in the English department here. I still have a little trouble believing this, but according to my students, this course was the first time they had been asked to analyze the intellectual and/or historical bases of the critics themselves. They had gone into an English major thinking that it was going to be something about literary knowledge, aesthetics perhaps, maybe even history and social context, but none of the ones who spoke with me had been prepared for what you describe as the framework of “deconstructing race and gender, critiquing the concept of subjectivity, and theorizing culture.” Not a single one of these students had ever read a piece of “theory” or “criticism” earlier than the 1960s (with the exception of one who had been asked to read a short excerpt from Marx). They simply had never been asked to do anything other than “imitate without understanding” (to paraphrase your post).
Some of these students will enter PhD programs next year. [PPU] is quite fond, in fact, of taking people straight from a BA into its own PhD program (I was an exception to the general trend). The just barely-post undergraduate students who come here are then immediately put through an Introduction to Graduate Study class that is essentially no different from the template-driven “flavor” courses I describe above (my own here was Marx and Marxism). It is painfully obvious to me now that such students are simply not prepared to do much of anything but accept what they are given (or reject it without knowing exactly why or how, or even what the myriad alternatives are). Graduate “education” in a humanities discipline like English seems to be primarily about indoctrination and self-replication. By the time these students are ABD, knowing Foucault backwards and forwards while knowing almost nothing at all about Nietzsche or Plato (not to mention Shakespeare or any number of other “canonical” figures) is not at all uncommon in my experience. Grandiose maneuvers without any background for them—that’s the graduate (and undergraduate) “education” I have come to know.

Sound familiar? Sure does to me!! An English student who does not read Shakespeare, or a History student who does not read Gibbon (or, if you like, Foner, Hofstadter, Elkins & McKitrick, Levine...), is like a physics student who can't add two numbers. The humanities in general are suffering terribly from an overuse of postmodernism, and it's turning out a generation of students who are functionally illiterate in their chosen fields. Rather than learn the generalities and overarching themes, students skip straight to what Brookheiser in another context calls "units, floating in ahistorical space." After all, it's much easier to use Foucault to rip an article to shreds than it is to develop a nuanced, deep understanding of the history and traditions you are a student of.

We all know what happens when college students get ahold of Big Ideas That Explain Everything. For a padawan learner such weapons are not, only for a Jedi are they. Mmm, yes. If you give a student Foucault, Hamlet is only about sex. If you give a student Marx, King Lear is a parable of Capitalism. These tools are powerful, but they are also crutches, and in the wrong hands lend themselves easily to arrogance, narrowness, and false first principles.

I must applaud Mike, a real, working teacher of History, for successfully working actual stories into his coursework. That should happen more often. Of course, since I am advocating a "first A, then B/ first walk/then run" approach to education, I suppose I have not sufficiently interrogated the linearity of my pedagogical ideology. Or something.

All three of us here are former students of Wilson Hoffman. Three cheers for Wil Hoffman! Huzzah!

2003-06-17T14:02:00.000-04:00

Generational Definitions

Since there have been quite a few comments on the Generations discussion, I thought it might help to expand the discussion in another post. First, some definitions. People disagree as to the exact lines between generations, and pinning down exact years is difficult. It is also quite possible that in such a format as this, people will argue ad infinitum about when a generation begins and ends, who their children are, etc., etc. Generations, after all, are not defined only chronologically but also by the events and times through which they lived.

So I'll offer this scale of American generations. The World War II generation constitutes people born between about 1910 and 1926; those who were old enough to serve, for men. For women, those birth dates put them about at the right age to work in a munitions plant, doing difficult industrial labor.

Boomers are typically the children of the World War II generation. The term baby boomer, after all, refers to the population explosion that occurred during the post-war period and was at least in part the result of G.I.s returning home from service. They were born, about, between the years of 1946, and I would argue, until about 1959 or even 1960. Members of this generation were not necessarily, "hippies," a media invention that constitutes a less than apt term. People describing themselves as "hippies" were probably not actually the kind of person many think of when the think of the Sixties generation, or Sixties people, or Sixties this, that, or the other. The Baby Boomer generation was divided, to put it as simply as possible, between Freaks and Straights.

Baby boomers who actively participated in counter-cultural activities, such as drug use or political activism, were Freaks. They were, as Nixon put it, "a small vocal minority." Their numbers were extremely small. The vast majority of boomers were not these so-called hippies, again, a media invention term, but wore their hair short, abstained from drug use (until marijuana became largely acceptable in the early Seventies), heckeled, and spit on anti-war protesters. They were Straights. They, as the vast majority of baby boomers, did not burn their draft cards, but either served or received college deferments. But most Boomers did not publicly oppose or protest the war. In sum, perhaps 1 out of 100 members of the Boomer generation actually participated in 1960s counter-culture.

The members of Gen X, mostly, fell between the Boomers and their children, about between the years of 1960/1 and 1977. The children of Boomers, particularly those who are white and middle class, as Gen Y, or Echo Boomers or whatever you want to call them, followed in the years after 1977. Thus, a person born in 1955, say a white middle-class Boomer, would be having children between about 1977 and up to 1990. Therefore, Gen Y can most certainly be the children of Boomers. Like to go further back? A person born at the start of the Boom in 1947, also white and middle-class, could, and many did, have children in the second half of the 1960s. Now this would place those children in Gen X. But think about it. A person born in 1947 could also be having children until 1982, if not later, placing those children within Gen Y.

It's not a perfect delineation, and I never said it was. There are exceptions. There is overlap. Generations do not act as a single unit. They are not monolithic. Quite the contrary. Perhaps more posts will follow on this subject, but I'll throw these definitions open to debate for now.

2003-06-17T10:31:00.000-04:00

Rumbles from the Lumpenproletariat

I've been hearing rumblings recently about an impending worker strike at Verizon here in New England. The Boston Globe has the story. Fairly unremarkable as strikes go: copayments and worker insurance payments will rise; layoffs are expected in the same year that Verizon executives gilded their parachutes; and the workers feel they have been subject to unreasonable demands in negotiation.

Through sheer coincidence, I have been privy to some great conversations on both sides, worker and management, in the course of my daily commute. I guess I'm just lucky. Seen on the commuter train, on the back of an IBEW worker from Verizon: a Contract Negotiation 2003 Commemorative T-shirt with the union logo and local on the front, and on the back the best slogan ever: "Can You Hear Us Now??"

Union, yes indeed!

2003-06-16T16:24:00.000-04:00

Is It

just me, or has the National Review Online really gone to the dogs recently? It used to be that I could read (if not agree with) most of the pieces posted, and at least find substantive points to hang a rebuttal on. Recently, the editorial tone has become approximately 45% snarkier and 20% screedier, at the expense of substance, humor, and equanamity. It's too bad-- the NRO used to be how I took the measure of what intellectual neoconservatives were thinking.

In the meantime, check out this half-decent and well deserved parody of NRO's "The Corner" that got Jonah Goldberg all cheesed off.

2003-06-16T16:06:00.000-04:00

Net

Calpundit has an interesting post up, about just what are the Republicans up to?

A while back I had an email exchange with another blogger who said that the problem with Democrats is that they're under the misguided impression that their social policies are actually popular. So they keep banging away on guns and abortion and gays and they don't realize that the country just isn't with them.
As it happens, I don't agree with most of that, but let's leave it alone for now and apply the same thought to the Republicans.Every party in power eventually overreaches, and I think the Republicans are on the verge of doing this right now because they keep fooling themselves into thinking their economic policies are popular. But they aren't. Sure, no one wants to pay taxes, but eventually we'll have to make a choice between cutting taxes and cutting Social Security and Medicare and other programs, and Republicans are going to learn what they know in their hearts already: these programs are a lot more popular than tax cuts. When that day comes, the Republicans will be out on their ears.
I know conservatives hate to face up to this, and libertarians hate it even more, but the social safety net is really, really popular. You screw with it at your peril, and sometime soon it's going to become clear that Republicans have no support for a policy that's designed to cut back on them. The only question is, is "sometime soon" 2004 or 2008?

What he said. Times are hard. Don't try to BS me on this one: times are hard. Tax policy is only sexy until people need to go the emergency room, or go on disability, or lose their job. Then the social safety net suddenly becomes really, really important. (This fact is what blocks me from becoming a true fiscal conservative. The outer reaches of that philosophy are a bit more social-darwinist than I can stomach.) Depending on how the next few months go, this fact may become the deciding issue of the '04 election. That is, unless Buckethead's Chicago-school economics are right. We shall see. We shall see.

2003-06-16T15:07:00.000-04:00

Apologia

Sorry folks. "Life"* intrudes. No substantial posting today.

Of course, the foregoing assumes that anything I post on a theoretically average day is actually "substantive," when in reality even the most disinterested observer would have no recourse but to conclude that, nine times out of ten, a KitchenAid stand mixer has a better chance of producing intelligent commentary on current events than I do on my best days.

The foregoing assumes that you are willing to humor me.

Go read Critical Mass (in the blogroll to left).

In other news, cars cost a lot of money. In other other news, Jonah Goldberg can bite my shiny metal ass.

*In this case "life" refers neither to medical emergency or Star Trek Convention. I don't got the SARS.

2003-06-13T21:00:00.000-04:00

Brookhiser

I'd rather go this route than the comments field. Brookhiser is clearly discussing secondary education, but there is an even greater problem in the universities. Many U.S. courses in the IT have also abandoned politics whole-hog. Having taught U.S. history for the first time this past spring, I did find that a social and economic focus with a dash of culture was more suited to the subject, because it's meatier. American political history can get pretty boring. I would have to disagree with Brookhiser specifically as it relates to U.S. history, that students prefer a poltical focus. My most popular lectures are those that deal with popular culture and the social implications of the industrial revolution. It says so in my evaluations.

But Brookhiser has some points, and this deals with the entire abandonment of political history I've witnessed. To ignore political issues entirely ignores one of the most important aspects of American history. Here I will toot my own horn. My students know who George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Marshall, and Abraham Lincoln were, to name just a few, and what they did. It's absurd to cut the poltics out entirely. They're critical.

This is even more true of a European survey course, having taught those as well. In my American survey course, a history of one nation over a maximum of about 250 years, I emphasize social and economic aspects, little culture, while still giving appropriate weight to political aspects. My European survey courses, as a history of 50+ nations or dynastic states or empires or regions or whatever, over a maximum of 5,000years, pursue a political focus while still granting appropriate weight to social, cultural, and economic aspects. Best thing to do is to balance out all the interests, and don't ignore important stuff. Nonetheless, the social and cultural effects of the industrial revolution make a big bang there too, especially the time I brought my fiddle and played tunes to give a hands-on demonstration of agrarian rural Irish culture. They loved that bit.

Ergo, politics, economy, society, and culture make history. They are intertwined. It is possible to deal with all of them, even in a survey course, and particularly in the one nation 250 years format.

2003-06-13T20:35:00.000-04:00

Generations

Boomers have exhibited some sense of entitlement, as Steve correctly argues. I would say, though, that Gen Y has the biggest sense of entitlement I've ever seen. As we three are members of Gen X, I don't think we ever really expected easy and rich lives. Prophetic in my case, to say the least. We were born amidst the Vietnam war, the subsequent economic collapse, including an energy crisis, and a general spirit of malaise. We were the first generation raised by single mothers. We were the first latchkey kids. We lived with the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust that could potentially have wiped out all life on earth. We were told by media, teachers, and our parents, "You're screwed," in so many words. What media, teachers, and our parents specifically told us was, "You will be the first American generation to do worse than your parents."

So why is Gen X an aggregate ranging from ennui to nihlism while Gen Y thinks the world owes them a living? Like any historical explanation, it's multi-faceted. Gen Y knows little of hard economic times. They know nothing of the Cold War and the threat of human extinction. If you say the words, "the wall came down," they think you're referring to, "that old band? What were they called? Purple Frood?"

But for the issue at hand, Gen Y are the children of boomers. Gen X are the children of pre-boomers, those born not after World War II, but perhaps during. Or, we are the children of people born during the Great Depression. The message from our parents was, "Life isn't fair. Suck it up." Boomer parents have communicated to their children, "The world is your oyster. You are special. You can be anything you want to be."

As a result, while teaching Gen Yers at a certain Jesuit institution, I was confronted with rage and tears whenever students received Bs or even B+s in lieu of As. One student called me an asshole, in front of the class, because I gave her a B on a paper despite carefully explaining what was required for an A, and that what she did merited a B. But according to the Gen Y folk, when I did grant As (grant hell, sometimes I hand them out like lollipops; I'm a grade inflater), I still failed to recognize their special contribution to the human race.

Some of my current students, however, at a city college, have criticized me through course evaluations for being too easy on them. They don't have the sense of entitlement. Why? They're at a city college. Life has not been so kind to them. I see my role as a corrective to that, but not to toot my own horn. Most of my current students aren't Gen Y either, but a little older. The bottom line is that Boomers have inculcated their children with the notion that they are perfect, special, and oh so precious. A former mantra of our generation was, "Life's a bitch. Then you die."

2003-06-13T20:14:00.000-04:00

Boomers

Buckethead writes:

"Mike and I may differ on what services should be provided to the poor, but I think he'll agree that we should not be giving handouts to people who own their homes, have investment portfolios, and a pension."

Damn straight.

2003-06-13T15:57:00.000-04:00

Tony Blair's coup d'etat

Well ho-ly....

Tony Blair has abolished the position of Lord Chancellor in Britain, in favor of what is essentially a Supreme Court. Ho-ly cow. Volokh Conspiracy guest-blogger Iain Murray has the story here.

Can he do that?!?

2003-06-13T15:12:00.000-04:00

Lucky Duckies

Last week, I came across a story in the Wall Street Journal which referred to those very poor people who don't pay federal income tax as "Very Lucky Duckies." After windexing my monitor and calming myself down from a red rage, I was left to wonder if the author of said article found it painful to sit, seeing as his head seems permanently lodged in the intragluteal position. I mean, wow. You know what would be real great? To be homeless! Think about it... no job, no income, no obligations, no mortgage, no rent, no car payments, damn! No taxes at all! Now THAT'S a lucky ducky!! Yeeeeah!!!

As an opinion, the Journal's assertion is monumentally retarded, and as a joke, it's not funny.

The New Republic reprints a letter to the WSJ which sums up the counter-argument better than my feeble gutter ranting ever could.

'LUCKY DUCKIE' INVITES EDITORS INTO HIS POND
I am one of those lucky duckies, referred to in your June 3 editorial "Even Luckier Duckies" who pay little or nothing in federal income tax (at least by the standards of Wall Street Journal editors; $800 is more than a chunk of change to me). I am not, however, a stingy ducky, and I am willing to share my good fortune with others.
In this spirit, I propose a trade. I will spend a year as a Wall Street Journal editor, while one lucky editor will spend a year in my underpaid shoes. I will receive an editor's salary, and suffer the outrage of paying federal income tax on that salary. The fortunate editor, on the other hand, will enjoy a relatively small federal income tax burden, as well as these other perks of near poverty: the gustatory delights of a diet rich in black beans, pinto beans, navy beans, chickpeas and, for a little variety, lentils; the thrill of scrambling to pay the rent or make the mortgage; the salutary effects of having no paid sick days; the slow satisfaction of saving up for months for a trip to the dentist; and the civic pride of knowing that, even as a lucky ducky, you still pay a third or more of your gross income in income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes and property taxes.
I could go on and on, but I am sure your editors are already keen to jump at this opportunity to join the ranks of the undertaxed. I look forward to hearing from you.
Pier Petersen
Chicago

If I ever meet Pier Petersen, the (cheap) beer's on me! Although, I would point out that the occasional trip to the day-old-produce store does wonders to stave off the rickets.

2003-06-13T13:46:00.000-04:00

Drug laws

If we are going to have laws against drugs, fine, I can cope with that. I haven't done anything except alcohol in years and years. My problem, like Johno's, is with other laws being used in the drug wars. If someone is carrying, bust them for possession - its already illegal. If someone is selling, bust them for that. Prohibition, for all its faults, stuck mostly to stopping people from drinking. There was not the vast expansion of police powers that we have seen in thirty years of the war on drugs.

The RAVE act infringes on our right to assemble peaceably. The RICO statutes have been used (quite often) to infringe on our fourth amendment rights. Civil forfeiture is based on the ridiculous premise that property used in the commission of a crime, or even suspected of such, is somehow "guilty". Never mind that only people can be guilty, and that the constitution says that we cannot be deprived of our property without due process of law.

I have not yet read enough to know for certain that the Patriot II act is bad or not - I've heard people come down on both sides. But there is no question that RAVE act and RICO statute provisions are regularly abused, most noticeably by federal law enforcement agencies. And these abuses are regularly given the high sign by our courts.

Why are federal agencies busting raves attended by a couple hundred (at most) teenagers and college students? And bong manufacturers? And doctors? And people like Zippy? Because they're easy, and any bureaucracy wants to expand its power. These are matters for state and local police, not federal agents equipped and trained like military units. The FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the FB of Let's pick on some teenagers or shoot some people and then burn the building down to conceal the evidence of our fuckup.

2003-06-13T13:35:00.000-04:00

Boomers eating their young, part dieux

Apparently Ross and I agree on something. (Actually, not as rare as our comments section would have you believe.) My dad (from the "Silent Generation") and I have discussed the failures of the boomers many times.

We have heard much of the greatest generation in recent years. By and large, this is a fair appraisal I think. That generation suffered through the Great Depression. (Caused by a Republican, prolonged by a Democrat; using exactly the same set of ideas.) After that, they shook the dust off and traveled all over the world to open a stupendous can of whoop ass on Japanese militarism and European fascism. After that, they came home and set about building our country into the most prosperous nation the world has ever known.

However, they fucked up in one crucial regard. They gave birth to the most self-absorbed, self righteous and deluded generation in our history. The progress of the boomers through recent history is a long tragedy. The unrest of the sixties, the indolence of the me generation, the abandonment of all their "ideals" in the eighties; and now as they approach retirement, they are proposing to screw every following generation to finance a comfortable and medically well supported retirement.

The boomers are by and large even wealthier as they approach retirement than their parents were. The average 50 year old boomer owns his home, has investments and a comfortable salary. Despite this, they want the government to provide health care, prescription drugs and social security benefits. How will these benefits be paid for? From taxes on the wages of the younger generations, or deficit spending on a scale that we have never seen in this country.

The only solution is means testing, and some sort of realistic benefit plan that takes into account the amount of money they paid in. And for the rest of us, something like the government workers' pension plan (they are exempt from social security taxes) for the rest of us so that this situation doesn't happen again.

Mike and I may differ on what services should be provided to the poor, but I think he'll agree that we should not be giving handouts to people who own their homes, have investment portfolios, and a pension. That really is theft. Social Security is a giant Ponzi scheme, and our generation is on the bottom of the pyramid.

2003-06-13T13:00:00.000-04:00

RAVE Act: another opinion

Mark Kleiman weighs in on last week's incident in which Colorado law enforcement used the threat of RAVE Act prosecution to stop a pot-legalization concert. His is an interesting opinion, and one rarely heard in the blog-o-sphere.

Maybe Glenn [Reynolds] is right: perhaps the new law was a bad idea. Certainly, it gives lots of discretionary power to a Justice Department whose current leadership has consistently abused the powers entrusted to it, as when it tried to use the DEA’s power to revoke the licenses that physicians need to prescribe controlled substances to nullify Oregon’s assisted-suicide law. If the DEA really did what it has been accused of doing in this case – which seems plausible, though at the moment the only available accounts are from sources hostile to the DEA – that can’t really be called surprising.

But the target of the law – the growing use of MDMA (“ecstasy”) – is a genuine, and potentially large, problem, and the law has, in my view, a better chance of doing something about that problem than most drug-policy initiatives have of reaching their targets. Here’s why I think so:
Starting in the mid-1990s, MDMA emerged rather suddenly from the alphabet soup of recreational chemicals to become what is now probably the second-most-widely used purely illicit drug, behind cannabis. . . .The current MDMA initiation rate is higher than the cocaine initiation rate ever was: cocaine peaked at about 1.5 million new users per year.
Even more troubling, what used to be a distinctively “European” MDMA use pattern – multiple doses, every night, every weekend – has become much more common here, and that more dangerous pattern is closely associated with “raves”: all-night dance parties with a mostly youthful clientele and a set of musical styles conducive to trance-dancing.
MDMA is a highly reinforcing drug; it induces in many users a strongly positive emotional state that lasts for several hours. But it has one very peculiar characteristic: its capacity to produce that state typically wears off with repeated use. Virtually any drug will create a tolerance: that is, over time higher doses will be needed to generate the same biological effects. But the diminished effects of MDMA cannot be recovered by using more of the drug: that’s the peculiar characteristic. . . .
That being so, neither the fact that the RAVE Act will tend to discourage some socially responsible actions by rave operators (such as providing “chill-out” rooms, encouraging the distribution of information about the risks of MDMA use and how to limit them, and allowing on-site pill-testing) nor the risk that the law will be abused, as it seems to have been in the Montana case, suffices to convince me that it will do more harm than good.
I can imagine a radically different approach to MDMA policy, based on harm reduction via dose and frequency limitation, that might have better overall results, but I can’t imagine getting such a policy adopted in the current political climate. If the practical alternative to the RAVE Act was drug policy as usual -- a little more law enforcement, longer sentences for dealers, and inventing fancier lies to tell the children -- at least the RAVE Act stands out from its background as having some chance of not being a complete waste of effort. . . .
The bare assertion by Glenn’s friends at the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism that “The RAVE Act has no valid law enforcement purpose” fails to convince.

While agree with Kleiman that MDMA is a big problem, and a dangerous drug, I can't get behind his analysis of the situation. Drugs are ALREADY illegal. More laws aren't going to make them more so. (How much more black can you go? None. None more black.) Worse, Kleiman underestimates the collateral effects of the law, and probably isn't aware of others.

I have attended, well, if not exactly raves, then parties that would be raves if more people were present. I had a wonderful time, and did not take Ecstasy. Part of my enjoyment hinged on the existence of the "chill-out" room. I could go sit in blue-lit quietness, relax, and most importantly DRINK WATER. My point? That classifying the presence of chill-out rooms as a priori evidence of drug use is illogical, and discouraging party planners from setting up such a room is a health risk to all present. They exist for all dancers to get away from the heat and rehydrate, not just the damn drug users. Furthermore, organizations like Dance Safe, who offer drug-testing to partygoers to ensure the purity of the doses, have done a WHOLE lot of good. Keeping them from doing their job will just make matters worse as party-drug use goes further and further underground, and adulterated drugs go undetected. Think bathtub gin-- it's bad news.

Moreover, no objection to the RAVE Act has touched on what I find most regrettable. Let me tell you a story. I have a good friend, let's call him Zippy, who has been promoting concerts in his hometown since he was fourteen. Mostly, these concerts have been scuzzy local teenagers playing music for other scuzzy local teenagers. In the process, Zippy has learned a lot of skills: marketing, negotiation, basic contracts, event planning, how to obtain licenses and security through legitimate channels, crisis management, and a bucketload of chutzpah. Even more, Zippy was instrumental in creating a "scene" in his hometown-- a network of people and events that focussed the energy of that class of teenager who would otherwise be off sniffing glue, vandalizing, and getting into adult-size trouble. Many of the kids at these shows came away with ideas of their own. The experience has taught Zippy a lot, contributed money to the local economy, improved the quality of life in his community, and actually helped the children (think of the children!).

But forget all that. Zippy has gotten out of the local-concert business forever. Why? Because, over the years there have been some incidents. Crackpipes in a crowd. Pot being sold on the premises. Underage drinking. And although Zippy always took steps to eliminate this behavior, hiring off-duty policement as security to patrol the crowd, and letting it be known that no such behavior would be tolerated, things happen. After years of rising police pressure, the RAVE Act has been the final straw. Now that Zippy knows that he could serve a long felony drug rap just because some dumbass kid brought meth to one of his shows, he's done. Never mind his work keeping the kids off drugs. Never mind his conscientious approach to security. He fears that one slip-up could land him in Mandatory Minimum-land. In his assessment, the risk is now too great, so he's done.

This is the kind of undetectable collateral damage the RAVE act can and will do, and why I am foursquare against it. If Zippy-- who has contributed a great deal to his community-- quits for fear of prison, then something is wrong, I think. The RAVE Act is dangerous, wrongheaded, overreaching, and stupid.

A bit like using a neutron bomb to take care of a rat problem in your basement.

2003-06-13T11:34:00.000-04:00

Remembering the Gulags

By way of Jay Nordlinger of the National Review, this quote from Michael McFaul, a poli-sci prof at Stanford, writing in the New York Times Review of Books. The book under review was Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. Here is the beginning of the review:

In visiting Poland last month, President Bush took the time to go to Auschwitz and tour one of the most ghastly assaults to humanity in the history of mankind. After finishing his tour, he remarked: "And this site is also a strong reminder that the civilized world must never forget what took place on this site. May God bless the victims and the families of the victims, and may we always remember."
The next day, Mr. Bush was in St. Petersburg, Russia. While there, he did not make it up to the Solovetsky Islands, the site of the first camp of the gulag. Nor did he call upon the world to "always remember" the millions of people who perished in the Soviet concentration camps well before Auschwitz was constructed and well after Auschwitz was dismantled. The families of the victims of Soviet Communism — much more numerous than the families who lost loved ones in Hitler's camps — received no special blessing from the leader of the free world.
Mr. Bush should not be singled out for failing to remember the innocents killed in the gulag. Rarely do visiting dignitaries take time to remember the tragedies of Soviet Communism.

I agree, wholeheartedly. Some of the nations of Eastern Europe are examining the crimes of their communist governments, like Hungary. Russia has not, and shows no sign of even thinking of it. And far too many people give the Communists a free pass on millions of deaths.

2003-06-13T11:28:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts on the teaching of history

From Richard Brookhiser