Now Entering Laboville

We are thankful for...

2008-11-27T23:34:00.003-05:00

The turkey has been cooked, eaten, and put away for leftovers. Bread was baked, stuffing stuffed, potatoes mashed, squash roasted, onions creamed, pies pecaned and appled and pumpkined. Wine was uncorked, and cider was drunk, and stories were told and laughs were laughed. And then dishes were done, and polished silver was put away for another festive meal, and serving dishes were tucked carefully back into the cabinets until company comes the next time, and linens that so recently were freshly pressed were balled up at the bottom of the stairs, ready to go upstairs to be laundered anew.

We were all thankful for each other, and the meal and the privilege we share to live in a place of abundance, peace and prosperity, a point driven home by events in Darfur, and more recently by events in Mumbai.

We also picked up a stray (one of Tasha's associates at work), which we seem to do with regularity each Thanksgiving, and she fit right in. It made me happy that we could be that kind of family, the one who always has room for one more at the table. It was the way my mother's table was when she was alive, and I think she would have been proud of us today.

I missed her a great deal today. Still, I am thankful for the example that she and my father showed me. It seems to have stood me in good stead all these years later.

Brevity is...wit

2008-11-18T01:16:00.002-05:00

Hemingway wrote what he touted as the world's shortest short story: "Baby shoes for sale; never used." Since then, Wired magazine has periodically sponsored contests for others to match Hemingway. A propos of nothing, the other day, I had an epiphany for a series of political pot-boilers, in six words each.

So, without further ado, my publishing debut:

"Voted for Bush, twice. My bad."

And now, the sequel:

"Did penance. Voted for Barack Obama."

[I hasten to add that the first is a work of fiction. The second is based on the fictional premise of the first novel in the series, although the second sentence is autobiographical.]

That's What I Said!

2008-11-13T18:52:00.009-05:00

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Accordingly, we in Laboville would like to give a hat tip and a sincere thank you to the pranksters who this week mocked up a copy of the New York Times's July 4, 2009 edition, presumably to commemorate Barack Obama's election and the promise of better times ahead. [Link]

Here is what the pranksters published:

And here's the image from my family's 2006 holiday card, drawn by yours truly:

I would like to say, officially, that I am flattered.

Are You Smarter than a Twelfth Grader?

2008-11-12T01:04:00.006-05:00

There are lots of reasons to stay in school, and apparently, the ability to read this blog is one of them. On a lark, I submitted Laboville for a "readability evaluation" courtesy of Juicy Studio. [link]. The evaluation software "reads" a website and applies various algorithms to determine how "readable" it is. The tests measure different factors, but all of them rely to some degree on the number of words in a sentence and the number of syllables in each word.

The result is a number that is both meaningful and meaningless. Meaningful in the sense that it gives some indication whether the language itself is accessible and at what level, but meaningless in the sense that "readability" is about both the language used and the concept being expressed, and these algorithms ignore the second part.

With all of that in mind, here are the results:

On the Gunning-Fog Index, Laboville rates a 12.43, which means you need that number of years of schooling to understand the language used here. By comparison, the Wall Street Journal typically scores around 11, and the Times (London) scores around 14. The Bible comes in at about 6.

On the Flesch Reading Ease scale, Laboville scored a 59.86 out of 100, with 100 being more readable, and 0 being less readable. According to the description accompanying the results, writers should strive for results between 60 and 70, so Laboville is close to the statistically optimal range.

On the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, Laboville rates an 8.93, which means that the average ninth grader should be able to read and understand the text.

Two observations: First, just for the sake of comparison, I tested several Supreme Court decisions for readability, and found that on average, they scored about a 10th Grade reading level on the Gunning-Fog index, and a reading ease score of approximately 59-62. In an admittedly unscientific survey, I found that Justice Scalia scored the highest grade level of the current members of the Court, while Justice Thomas scored the lowest (insert joke here). Yet even there, Justice Scalia tended to score in the 10-11th grade level.

Second, I share Juicy Studio's sense of irony that the word "monosyllabic" has five syllables.

2008-11-11T16:41:00.007-05:00

That was the week that was...

It has now been a week since Barack Obama became our president-elect. Something about the last week of news coverage and punditry brought to mind, perhaps cynically, Tom Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week." There's something about conservatives, teeth gritted, smiles forced, saying nice things about the President-elect that makes me think that they're doing it only because they know they have to, not because they believe it, and that they're just waiting for the moment when they can snidely say "I told you so." (What it is they told me so about, I'm not altogether sure. It's just a feeling, after all.) Suddenly, I just started humming the song...

Anyway, here are the lyrics. Draw your own conclusions.

National Brotherhood Week (Music and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer)

On the white folks hate the black folks

and the black folks hate the white folks.

To hate all but the right folks

is an old established rule.

But during National Brotherhood Week,

National Brotherhood Week,

Lena Horne and Sheriff Clarke are dancing cheek-to-cheek.

It's fun to eulogize

the people you despise

as long as you don't let them in your school.

Oh the poor folks hate the rich folks

and the rich folks hate the poor folks.

All of my folks hate all of your folks

It's American as apple pie.

But during National Brotherhood Week,

National Brotherhood Week,

New Yorkers love the Puerto Ricans

'cause it's very chic

Stand up and take the hand

of someone you can't stand.

You can tolerate him if you try.

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics

and the Catholics hate the Protestants,

And the Hindus hate the Muslims,

And everybody hates the Jews.

But during National Brotherhood Week,

National Brotherhood Week,

It's national everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood week.

Be nice to people who

are inferior to you.

It's only for a week, so have no fear.

Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!

2008-09-11T14:57:00.002-04:00

Remembering 9/11, Part II

This is a post that I wrote on the second anniversary of 9/11. Somehow, in the waning days of the Bush Administration, it felt right to bring it out again.

September 11, 2001 was about the swirling and crawling and stopping of time. Only two points are fixed in my memory: 8:48 a.m., when I heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center; and 10:03, when I experienced the South Tower collapsing three blocks away, and ducked into a sandwich shop to escape the dust. How long I spent waiting for the black cloud to pass, I couldn't tell you. Did Tower 1 collapse while I was holed up or after I had started my escape uptown? I don't know. How long did it take to get home? Same answer. What did I do the rest of my day? No clue.
September 11, 2002 was about defiant normalcy. I came to work and lived as normal a life as I could. It was the best way to show that no, the terrorists hadn't won.
Today, it was about sounds. As I walked down Church Street toward the site of the former WTC, I could hear the monotone naming of the dead. A bell tolled in slow measured beats on Barclay Street, [DONG] rung by a firefighter in polyester dress blues, [DONG] white gloves that were too small [DONG], and a white hat perched precariously on his head. [DONG] The uniform looked slightly tattered, [DONG] like it had been used far too many times this year and last year. [DONG] The man inside the uniform looked slightly tattered too. [DONG]
Though he was strong, though his hands were big and manly, he looked tired, [DONG] as though pulling the rope that led to the clapper that rang the bell to commemorate the dead [DONG] was draining whatever reserves he had left.
We made eye contact as I walked by [DONG], and he held out his hand to me.
"Ring the bell, brother?"
I stopped and looked at him and then at the huge, silvery bell, which was hung from a black scaffold sitting on the ground. I hadn't paid much attention to it as it was ringing but I now saw that it had been polished recently, and whoever had done it had made small sweeping circles on the last pass with the cloth. It would have taken hours at that rate. "Yes," I said.
I took the rope from him. It was thick and scratchy, and heavier than I expected. I gave it a quick tug, self-conscious that I had broken the gonging rhythm. DONG. The clapper moved easily. Satisfied, I raised my right hand to shake the fireman's hand.
"Again," he said.
So I pulled it again. DONG.
"Again." DONG.
I pulled the rope four more times, until my pulls had reset the rhythm of the bell. It was time for me to go.
"Thank you, brother."
The fireman had reclaimed the rope and had made the bell clang again, but was looking me straight in the eye. He looked haunted.
I took his hand, and mumbled, "Thank you." I wished I had something more profound to say. There was something about that look, about the sound of the bell, about the magnitude of the day that seemed to call for it, but I couldn't think of anything.
But I think that the fireman understood, and maybe that was why he had invited me to ring the bell -- after all the memorials and prayers and funerals, he too had run out of things to say. All that was left was to toll the bell, slowly and mournfully and over and over again, for all the world to hear.

2008-09-11T14:42:00.002-04:00

Remembering 9/11, part I

This morning at 9:25 a.m., the NYSE observed a moment of silence on the trading floor. On my way to the trading floor to participate, I had a chance encounter with Oliver Howard, one of the security guards at the Exchange. Ollie was on duty, stationed somewhere else in the NYSE complex today. Now, Ollie is a humble guy, and probably wouldn't tell you this himself, but he is a genuine hero of 9/11. At the time, Ollie was stationed at the Exchange's Division of Enforcement, which was located in Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. Ollie was on duty when the tower was struck, and he would say he was just doing his job, but I think it was something more. What did he do? Ollie opened every single office on three floors of the building, making sure people were evacuated, checked every single bathroom, and made sure that one of the staff, an attorney who was a paraplegic, got out of the building safe and alive. Several, maybe dozens of people owe their lives to this man who was just doing his job.

The Monday after the attacks, Dick Grasso hosted a lunch for all of the Division's employees in the Exchange's board room. Ollie, in full dress uniform, got a three minute standing ovation from the 130+ staffers. Later, he was honored by ringing the Opening Bell.

Ollie certainly wasn't the only hero on that day, but what made me want to share him with any readers out there who stumble across this post is the fact that today, seven years on, Ollie was at his post, somewhere else, in his regular uniform, and was genuinely surprised that anyone remembered his heroism. In this political season where we're being inundated by cynical messages about honor and character, Ollie's humility in the face of genuine heroism was a genuinely moving antidote.

2007-07-25T21:44:00.000-04:00

Harry Potter and Primo Levi

Just finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

My initial impressions are mixed -- on the one hand, it's a real page turner, and it reaches deeply into the past six books to tie things together, so that the whole book feels through-composed. On the other hand, I found the epilogue to be utterly unnecessary, a tiddly-bump happy ending that some editor somewhere probably insisted upon because "that's what the readers expect", even though Ms. Rowling had done an estimable job in the last chapter planting little seeds of closure that would have grown quite nicely in the readers' imaginations on their own. Indeed, I found the change in tone to be jarring, so much so that it almost felt like the epilogue must have been written by someone other than Ms. Rowling.

But what surprised me most was the overwhelming sense that what I was reading was a fictionalized exploration of Europe's struggle against Hitler. Certainly, there are obvious parallels to Nazism -- one of the central themes of the book is racial purity, and the ways in which the Death Eaters terrorize the so-called "Mudbloods" are eerily reminiscent of the campaigns against the Jews in the 1930s -- there's anti-mixed blood propoganda, Voldemort supporters misuse pseudo-science to score political points, there are public humiliations, mixed-blood wizards and witches are stripped of their wands (rendering them unable do magic), their businesses are closed down, there are show trials where they must (in vain) prove their purity and on and on. The Death Eaters form a sort of Brown Shirt brigade, or perhaps a wizarding version of the SS Guard. Voldemort's supports also seek legitimacy by propping up a puppet government at the Ministry of Magic. Of course, like Vichy France, it's riddled with resisters both organized and not, with the Order of the Phoenix standing in the role of the French resistance. There's even an underground radio station to rally the resisters.

One of the parallels felt more subtle, and so I can't decide if it was intentional or coincidental. I don't want to spoil the plot, but it will suffice to note that for a significant part of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione hide out from Voldemort and the Death Eaters by camping out in woods and forests around the English countryside. They are on the move constantly, lest they be discovered, and most of the time, they sit around waiting for something to happen (exactly what, they're not sure, and this is part of the dramatic tension), stealing what they need to survive and generally living off their wits.

Of course, this being the wizard world, they travel in style, complete with a tent that is bigger inside than it is outside and things like invisibility cloaks, but even so, I was struck by the parallel in tone to Primo Levi's If Not Now, When?, which recounts the story of Jewish partisans in Eastern Europe during World War II. In that book, the partisans hide out in the woods, steal what they need to survive and generally live off their wits. In both books, the time in the woods, doing nothing, weighs on them, and in the end their lives take on a weird sort of routine despite a world turned upside down. They take turns gathering food, and standing watch for the enemy, and they bicker, love, laugh, cry with the frustration of it all. Their existence is punctuated by moments of sheer terror, as they find themselves in situations that they must bluff or fight their out of or run away from, or die. But mostly they wait around for something to happen, and it is the waiting that weighs on them most heavily.

As Levi so achingly recounts, and Rowling echoes artfully, the partisans get by by reminding themselvs of their vision of an idealized future, a world without the evil that they are forced to confront moment by moment. Their resolve flags sometimes, and is revived by sporadic news from the outside world that reminds them that they're not alone. Each band has a mission -- to reach Italy and freedom, and to destroy Horcruxes, respectively -- and during the long days and even longer nights, they lose and then rediscover their faith in the mission, before finding its underlying meaning. And in the end, the ultimate victory of the cause for which they have been fighting is bittersweet, laden by the burden of the struggle, tinged with the guilt of the survivor.

Amazingly, in each book, the partisans retain their essential humanity even as the world around them seems to shed its own. At key moments, they show empathy for enemy soldiers who have shown some measure of remorse at what they've done or become, and forgive their attackers. But they do not romanticize the enemy, either, and are not afraid to fight or to kill if necessary.

I haven't reread If Not Now, When? recently enough to identify other parallels, but thought this one was worth mentioning. Not bad for a kids' book, huh?

2007-07-19T01:07:00.000-04:00

Spinning the F-word

The Democrats in the Senate attempted to force a vote on a bill (the "Reed-Levin Amendment") that would have required a reduction in troops in Iraq beginning 120 days after enactment of the law. The Republicans blocked Reed-Levin from coming up for a vote, by means of a parliamentary procedure in which they voted against something called "cloture".

Cloture is a term in parliamentary procedure in which the senators agree to end the debate and call for a vote on the bill being debated. When the cloture motion was made, 52 senators voted for cloture, and 47 voted against it. Since a successful cloture motion requires 60 "yea" votes, the cloture motion was defeated despite garnering the support of a majority of the senators. As a result, there was no vote on Reed-Levin.

This is called a "filibuster". Filibusters have a long and illustrious history in the Senate, and have featured prominently in the movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and in an episode of "The West Wing", among others. Clearly, they have dramatic potential.

As an aside, I should note that I have nothing against filibusters, although personally, I dislike today's way of doing it. In the old days, in order to mount a filibuster, a senator (or group of senators) had to hold the floor continuously -- that is, keep speaking without sitting down, and without yielding the floor to the opposition -- until the Senate either gave up on calling for a vote on the bill being debated, or successfully voted for cloture. In other words, a filibuster caused the entire Senate to grind to a halt, which gave the filibuster some of its power and effect. Today, there's some kind of gentlemen's agreement that allows the Senate to, in effect, hold several debates at the same time, so that the filibuster doesn't stop other bills from being debated and voted. Hence, the filibuster becomes just another obscure parliamentary tactic, rather than a Hail Mary parliamentary spectacle, the last refuge of a beleagured minority. End of aside.

My point in giving this brief history of filibusters is that, properly explained, they're not hard to understand, and can actually be interesting.

Which brings me to the Democratic Party's inability to spin what happened with Reed-Levin and the media's appalling lack of balance when describing the Republican filibuster of Reed-Levin. Filibusters, you may recall, last made serious headlines when the Democrats in the Senate used the tactic to block the Senate from voting on some of President Bush's judicial nominations. Then, the F-word was all over the news, as the media parroted the Republican talking point -- "Let's just have a straight up-or-down vote" -- and lambasted the Democrats as intransigent children having a temper tantrum. The Republicans at the time were so incensed that the Democrats would use the filibuster this way that they threatened to rewrite the rules of the Senate to effectively do away with the filibuster altogether -- the so-called "Nuclear Option".

That's right, America. We had a knock-down drag-out full-on front page partisan brawl over a parliamentary procedure. And Americans ate it up! I believe that largely as a result of Republican propoganda at that time, most Americans now assume that filibustering is a bad thing.

So what do the Democrats do to spin the Reed-Levin issue? Right. They studiously avoid the word "filibuster".

The DNC's website headline? "Republicans Block Levin-Reed Amendment To Withdraw Troops". And the lede isn't much better: "After an all-night debate on Iraq, Senate Democrats tried today to end a Republican block on a vote on the Levin-Reed amendment..." Boring.

The same is true around the party. Here's Hillary Clinton:

When the Senate votes on motions to allow debate on both the Feingold-Reid and Reed-Levin Amendments, I will vote for cloture on both.

Ho hum...And on and on. Here's Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Reid: Republicans Continue To Block Democrats' Efforts To Change Course In Iraq, Make America More Secure

And Joe Biden:

BIDEN Decries Republican Refusal to Vote on Iraq War on Senate Floor Today

Even Carl Levin, one of the eponymous co-sponsors of the bill, shies away from the F-word both in the headline and in his remarks:

Senate Floor Statement on the Cloture Vote on the Levin-Reed Amendment

...

If the Republican Leader’s procedural roadblock succeeds this morning, we will be denied the opportunity to vote on an issue which just about every American has strong feelings on: whether or not to change course in Iraq by setting a timetable to reduce the number of our troops in Iraq. Because of that procedural roadblock, we will not be voting at 11:00 a.m. on the Levin-Reed amendment but on whether to proceed to the vote on Levin-Reed.

Of course, it stands to reason that if even the Democrats are avoiding the F-word, so will the media. To wit, you'd think that today, the headlines would be screaming about the Republican tantrums and intransigence that prevented Reed-Levin from coming to a vote. But you'd be wrong. The headlines today talked about Republican "blocking tactics" and how a majority of the Senate "rejected" a vote on troop withdrawal. Really. Even C-Span (!) got in on the act, with the headline "Senate Blocks Iraq Withdrawal Timeline, 52-47".

My point here is that the Democrats are doing a horrible job of explaining exactly what's going on. In fact, they're doing such a bad job of it that C-Span even got it all wrong: what actually happened was the 52 senators (mostly Democrats) voted to bring Reed-Levin to a vote, and 47 senators (Republicans and Connecticut for Liebermaniacs) voted not to, not that the Senate affirmatively voted against the withdrawal timeline. Put another way, the Republicans successfully filibustered the bill.

Thankfully, there was one notable, though unsurprising, exception to the mealy-mouthedness of the Democrats: Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and Senate maverick, who used the F-word appropriately and boldly three times in a one-paragraph statement.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold On Republicans Filibustering the Levin-Reed Amendment

July 18, 2007

Today, a majority of the Senate backed binding legislation with a firm end date to redeploy our troops from Iraq. This shows how far we’ve come since August 2005 when I became the first Senator to propose a deadline to bring the mistake in Iraq to an end. If we had enacted my proposal when I first offered it, our troops would be home right now. Although a number of Republicans have finally acknowledged that the President’s Iraq policy is a failure, their filibuster of the Levin-Reed amendment shows they are still failing to back up their words with action. The Levin-Reed amendment is by no means perfect, but its binding provisions to end our extensive military involvement in Iraq are a significant step forward. With their decision to filibuster, the Republicans have prevented the Senate from voting to bring the open-ended mission in Iraq to an end, and have once again ignored the calls of the American people.

Sigh.

2007-07-16T22:42:00.000-04:00

Great Speeches

A propos of nothing, I was reading a book review on Arts & Literature Daily [link] about great speeches in American history [link]. As the book review makes clear, there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of oratory in the United States over the years.

Which got me to thinking. I don't know exactly which speeches are included in the volumes being reviewed, but a Google search of "great speeches" yielded several websites purporting to collect great speeches, including a site known as "History Place" [link].

As I read through some of the more recent ones, I was struck by the power of a good speech. Two stuck out, however. The first was President Reagan's speech in Berlin in 1987, the speech in which he said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The speech is lucid, well written and powerful. [link] But even this speech, as powerful as it was, pales in comparison to the 1962 speech by President Kennedy on why we chose to go to the Moon.

That speech, fittingly entitled "We Choose to go to the Moon...", is a powerhouse of persuasive oratory that elevates, motivates and elucidates noble ideals, but never departs from simple imagery or clear phrasing.

For example, in order to explain the magnitude of our achievement as humans, and the duty that that imposes on us to reach further, President Kennedy captures, in one paragraph, how exciting it is to live at the edge of such amazing scientific progress. And he does so without bogging down in soporific detail or getting lost in gauzy abstractions:

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

It almost makes you want to jump up and shout, "Who are we to stand in the way of such incredible progress?"

The speech is also notable for making some of the science involved accessible (not an easy task -- after all, it is rocket science). For example, rather than talk about the complexities of calculating trajectories and launch windows, he gives a (if you'll pardon the pun) down to Earth example that neatly sums up the degre of difficulty:

The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium [Rice University in Houston] between the 40-yard lines.

Note also the subtle sports imagery, which taps into the America's image of itself as the winner who does the undoable, and makes it look easy to boot.

Kennedy's penchant for plain talk continues when he is talking about a most difficult subject -- how much it will all cost. Note how he deftly defuses the question of cost by putting it into terms we can all understand (and does so with a touch of pointed humor):

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year's space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year--a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.

His rhetoric doesn't skirt the hard issue, either -- as much as it's cost so far, it will cost more in the future -- but he contrasts this with an appeal to our nobler ambitions -- to be bold:

Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority...But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.

[I should note here that management consultants love this last part of the speech as an excellent example of true leadership that inspires us by setting out a vision statement (to paraphrase, "invent a machine and a process to go to the Moon and come back safely") that focuses the collective effort.]

All in all, I found the speech to be uplifting, honest and a fine example of what rhetoric can be in the hands of a skilled orator.

2007-06-13T07:10:00.000-04:00

Logic Has No Place in Journalism

London's Daily Mail ran an article last week about "nose art", which is the generic description for the images painted on the fuselages of warplanes. [link] As the article notes, nose art had its heyday during World War II, when bombers bore names like the Memphis Belle, and were decorated with images to match.

Apparently, the RAF commanders in Afghanistan think things have gone too far, the pin-up girls painted on the sides of their planes being too raunchy or riske to pass muster. According to the article,

Commanders decided the images were sexist and insisted there was no place for them in the modern armed forces.

There was also concern that they could cause offence in a muslim country where until 2001 all women were forced to wear the head-to-toe burkha in public.

The Daily Mail reports that last tidbit without a hint of irony, and without any follow-up that would suggest that the reporter is engaged in any critical thinking.

Let's be honest here, people.

Is the source of (potential) offense among Afghans really the fact that RAF planes flying there bear caricatures of naked or scantily-clad women that no one on the ground will ever really see?

Or could it be something else that's offending them? Isn't it possible -- you know, maybe, I'm just throwing this out here -- that Afghans might be taking offense because of what these airplanes do, and not how they look? I mean, I'm just saying, but mightn't their offense actually stem from the fact that these planes have an annoying tendency to drop bombs on people -- combatants, yes, but also civilians -- on the ground?

2006-12-18T07:53:00.000-05:00

Bigots and Bullies

Hi, remember me? I used to blog here. I've been away for, well, let's just say it's been a while. So what issue is so compelling, so important, that I would once again take up the keyboard? Buster Bunny, that's what.

For the over-5 set, who may not know who Buster Bunny is or why he's important enough to talk about, let me fill you in. Buster is a rabbit (that much you may have guessed), who's best friends with Arthur, an aardvark who has his own t.v. show on PBS. Big with the kids. Anyway, Buster got a spin-off show, called Postcards from Buster. The premise was that Buster travels around the country meeting real-life kids, and then sharing their stories on t.v. in a combination of live-action and animation. Quite charming, actually.

But then Buster went to Vermont, for a show about making maple syrup. Let me tell you, from first-hand experience, this is Currier-and-Ives stuff, the essence of Americana -- crisp mountains in spring, sap running into buckets, horse-drawn sleighs collecting the bucket loads, the sugar houses on century-old farms, yada yada yada. Except that Buster featured children who are being raised by two lesbians. And so, of course, conservatives and their Republican lackeys went ballistic. The Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, wrote to the President of PBS, and the episode was pulled, toot sweet.

So far, this is old news (the events in question took place in January 2005). But let us not pass over this without quickly recalling Secretary Spellings' bigoted comments: "Many parents", she wrote, "would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode." Note, by the way, that the words "deviant" and "twisted" are omitted from the Secretary's statement, but, I believe, can be fairly inferred from the context.

As an aside, I'd prefer if my young children weren't exposed to the lifestyles of the homeless men we pass each day on our way to the subway. But I don't see the Secretary of Education rallying the conservative faithful to eradicate the scourge of homelessness. I'm left to my own wits to explain to a five-year-old why a grown man is asking him, a kid, for spare change -- and what he can do to really help. See, it turns out, Madame Secretary, that the world isn't always pretty, and part of my job as a parent is to help my kids make sense of that, instead of hiding unpleasant things away and making believe that everything is fine. It's what I signed up for. End of aside.

But here's the part that compelled me to post: after the broo-ha-ha over Buster's visit to Vermont, underwriting support for the entire show dried up. Such is the strangle hold that conservatives have over government and business. But that's not the worst part, to my mind. See, according to a story in today's New York Times [link], it turns out that show had received $5 million from the -- wait for it -- Department of Education, as part of "Ready to Learn" grant program, which calls for programming to "promote cultural diversity". So what did the DoE do to back up the bigotry of the Secretary? Give yourself a point if you said they rewrote the Ready to Learn grant to eliminate the call for cultural diversity. That's right -- in an effort to ensure that our kids don't discover about that girls sometimes do dirty things to girls instead of to boys as god intended (because really, isn't that what the conservatives here are really worried about?), we have eliminated an incentive and a means to teach kids to be tolerant of, and learn from, people who aren't like them.

Which, by the way, is something that kids do innately. It's the intolerance that has to be taught.

2006-08-28T23:06:00.000-04:00

My Campaign Commercial

I have a simple idea for a campaign commercial, and though I lack the time and expertise to actually produce it, I offer the broad outlines here for anyone who wants to actually do it.

It's called "People Die of Republicanism".

The concept is simple. It features sound clips of the President and senior members of his administration saying certain memorable things -- like "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie", and "No one could have anticipated that they'd fly airplanes into buildings" and "No one anticipated the levees would fail". These clips would be juxtaposed with still pictures that the camera would pan across, a la Ken Burns. The pictures would be unflinching -- the idea is to show that the Republican way of governing has very real consequences, that it's not just about abstract ideology, and all that. So the images I would choose would be pictures of dead bodies in the streets of New Orleans, and at the Convention Center and floating in the water. And I would use some of the searing shots of people jumping to their deaths on 9/11 or clinging to the windows at the Trade Center, where you just know they're going to die. Finally, I would superimpose various conservative mantras, like Grover Norquist's quote about drowning the government in the bathtub. At the end, I would fade to black, then put up in white letters, "People die of Republicanism. Isn't it time we tried something else?"

Is that exploiting suffering for political gain? I don't think so, particularly since I'm not exactly advocating that the "something else" be Democrats. I think it's simply saying that when there is one party that controls the federal government, it's reasonable to ask whether the governing party is up to the task of taking care of We the People, in the face of demonstrable evidence that they're not. End of story.

2006-08-21T23:35:00.000-04:00

The Fog of War

I hate to be a drape in the midst of the media frenzy now that JonBenet Ramsey's alleged killer has been found, but as of August 21, 2006, 2,610 Americans have died in Iraq.

8,886 have been wounded and not returned to duty within 72 hours; another 10,625 have been wounded but were returned to duty within 72 hours.

I keep waiting for the media frenzy over *that*.

2006-07-17T23:11:00.000-04:00

Eulogy for My Mother

In Memoriam, Deborah R. Labovitz, Ph.D., OTR, FAOTA
October 13, 1942-July 14, 2006

My mother died an untimely death at the young age of 63. Sadly, it was the first time she had been early for anything.

I had always assumed, as good sons do, that my mother was immortal. This was not just an exercise in faith or filial longing, but was based on certain quasi-scientific observations. For one thing, my personal experience with the death of family members seems to have always involved longevity. Grandmom Gi, zichrona livracha, died in her 90s; Greatgrandmom Ida, in her mid-90s also; Grandmom Clara in her 80s; Frank, Gittel’s third husband, also in his eighties. I therefore took for granted - naively, perhaps - that longevity was the natural way of things.

Second, my mother had an indomitable will to live her life in full. I say this not only because she was a constant frenzy of motion, with a schedule to match, but also because she fully intended to live multiple lives. One of her favorite phrases was “in my next life”, which was always a prelude to some idea that she had about what she would do after she was done being a mother, or an occupational therapist or a university administrator, or whatever. There was even a room in our house that was optimistically named the “art room”, because that was the room that my mother always intended as her studio when she finally took up art full time in one of her many lives. After hearing her say “in my next life” often enough, and after seeing how much she could accomplish in the average day of this life, I came to take this “multiple lives” thing seriously. I anxiously awaited what might come next, whether it was resuming her career as a weaver in the loft over the garage in Vermont, or her career as editor of a series of inspirational books about the helping professions, or something else that hadn’t occurred to her yet and that therefore I hadn’t heard about yet.

In any event, given all of this, it was something of a shock, to say the least, to find out, a little over three years ago, that my mother was indeed mortal. She had been having unexplained seizures for a few months, which she approached academically, almost clinically. After long research, she and my father and her doctors considered, and ruled out, diagnoses of things that were mundane, but treatable, then considered and ruled out the more exotic maladies. Finally, the doctors narrowed down her diagnosis to a stage-4 brain tumor, the worst kind. The mortality statistics were pretty grim – according to her doctors, only 2-3% of patients with stage-4 cancers of this type survived more than 9 months.

Others might have heard this news and simply given up, but not Mom. Quite the contrary – “2 to 3 percent” became her watchwords. My mother fully intended to beat the odds, to be part of that "2 to 3 percent". Those of you who knew her probably weren’t surprised to find out that she did beat the odds, for a good long time.

But this was a mixed blessing, since one of the side effects of her treatments was that she lost some of her former vitality. Weakened by the disease, and chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, and two brain surgeries, my mother in some ways ceased to be the person I had grown up with, and became someone else – still my mother, but somehow different.

It’s a flaw of our memories that we tend to remember the recent much more vividly than the more distant, and so there is tendency to think that what was recently has always been. In my mother’s case, this obviously obscures so much of who she was.

For example, it obscures that my mother was an artist, whose creations in pastel, and watercolor, and macramé and weaving adorned the walls of our home and today decorate my office, among other places.

It obscures that she was a master at real life logic puzzles, usually involving train trips by various family members to and from New York and cars left strategically at 30th Street Station or North Philadelphia station for them to transport themselves home. Compared to some of the machinations that she concocted, I fully believe that the Normandy invasion was a piece of cake.

And it obscures that she had a wonderfully distinctive style, too. I always thought, growing up, that she was six feet tall, until I realized, much later, that six inches of that was her unique hairdo and four inches was her ever-present high heels. She was also the only person I knew in Vermont who wore suede pants even when the forecast called for snow – but, I have to admit, she looked fabulous doing so.

On a more serious note, perhaps the best way to remember her is in her own words. It’s not often that someone who dies writes her own eulogy, but two of my mother’s hallmarks were her ability to multitask, and her willingness to take charge of situations to make sure that things got done right. And so, true to form, in the preface to her book, Ordinary Miracles: True Stories About Overcoming Obstacles & Surviving Catastrophes, she not only introduced the book, but also presciently left us some insights into how she might want to be remembered.

The book, she wrote, was about optimism and hope, and the stories contained in it about people courageously overcoming adversity and improving their lives through resourcefulness and creativity. Then she wrote this:

In many ways, this reflects my own personality and the philosophy of my profession of occupational therapy. I believe that every problem has a solution, and we just have not discovered the best one yet for those problems still unsolved; that not only is the glass half-full, but refills are on the way. When people tell me that “those who can keep their heads when all about them are losing theirs just don’t understand the gravity of the situation,” my response is that only those who can keep their heads – and find a ray of hope – can ultimately fix the grave situation. I believe that even if we cannot control the circumstances we are in, we can control our reaction to those circumstances and can turn tragedy into triumph with our own strength and with the help of others.

She also left us some instructions on how we might mourn her. Reflecting on September 11, 2001 she wrote about how, in the face of such a large tragedy, the ordinary work of life seemed somehow trivial. Wrote my mother,

I must admit that the tragedy affected me deeply…It was difficult for me to resume life and work as usual, and particularly challenging to continue to compile and edit [the stories in the book] – stories about individual people who overcame adversity, unconnected to the tragedy. The people and the stories seemed not to reflect the immediacy and immense scope of the disaster.

True to my mother’s personality, however, she believed that the healing process was best facilitated by refusing to sit still:

As an occupational therapist [she wrote], I believe in the power of “doing”. To cope with the tragedy and to contribute to the recovery, I needed to act. So I volunteered my time, donated funds, read articles about the heroes and the victims, and examined the photographs. I attended tributes to heroes and visited street corner and police station and firehouse memorials, and I began collecting more stories…These activities were and continue to be very satisfying and helpful to me.

Finally, she sent a message to us all that even in the face of catastrophe, even when there seems to be a huge gaping hole in our lives that will never heal, that even when thing look their bleakest, we can recover our optimism if only we stop to appreciate the joy and wonder, the hope and rejuvenation that are to be found in the ordinary miracles of life. I’d like to leave you with her words, since I think they best describe what she would want us to feel right now:

Ultimately…it was resuming work on this book with its message of hope that was the most powerful and important activity that helped me begin to heal and to recapture my optimism. I came to realize that these stories, about the large and small miracles of life, about the courage and creativity of individuals, about the ability to recover from disaster, were exactly what I needed to begin my healing process. These stories represent the wonder, joy and hope that makes life worth living. They are the embodiment of life and the future. They make it possible to go on, to hope and to continue to face the future with optimism.

2006-04-02T23:13:00.000-04:00

Common Cause?

A quick quiz -- in what publication did the following statement appear?

The biggest problem is Bush himself, who—though a decent person who might make a good neighbor—suffers from unbridled hubris. His absolute certainty appears to be matched only by his extraordinary ignorance. His refusal to reconsider his own decisions and hold his officials accountable for obvious errors have proved to be a combustible combination.

(a) Mother Jones
(b) The New Yorker
(c) The American Conservative
(d) The New York Review of Books
(e) Tikkun

10 points to those of you who guessed (c). The quote is from Douglas Bandow's review of Bruce Bartlett's book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (Doubleday 2006). [link] The review is interesting, in part because it reads like something that a frustrated Democrat could have written, and in part because it was written and published by "true" conservatives.

It isn't exactly news that true conservatives, led by Pat Buchanan, among others, have come to dislike President Bush. To quote Bandow's review,

Five years later, the traditional conservative agenda lies in ruins. Government is bigger, spending is higher, and Washington is more powerful. The national government has intruded further into state and local concerns. Federal officials have sacrificed civil liberties and constitutional rights while airily demanding that the public trust them not to abuse their power.

The U.S. has engaged in aggressive war to promote democracy and undertaken an expensive foreign-aid program. The administration and its supporters routinely denounce critics as partisans and even traitors. Indeed, the White House defenestrates anyone who acknowledges that reality sometimes conflicts with official fantasies.

In short, it is precisely the sort of government that conservatives once feared would result from liberal control in Washington.

To me, it seems like this is a watershed moment -- when the intellectual base takes to comparing its leadership to the pigs in Animal Farm, it seems to me that the disaffection is potent. And potent disdain is a catalyst for change.

So now for the $64,000 question: can liberals make common cause with disaffected conservatives? Perhaps we can, if we start small and build.

On some issues, I think we can all agree: we all disdain the neocon fantasies of nation-building in the Middle East. and therefore, surely we could make common cause on that issue.

On other issues, the goal should be to show them that regardless of why, we want the same ends, and therefore we can make common cause there, too. Thus, on civil liberties, for example let us stop trying to convince them of our rightness, and instead, sell them on pragmatism. In other words, pitch to conservatives that a vote for the Democrats will ensure a rolling back of government intrusions that offend them and us. Or take No Child Left Behind (please). Democrats dislike the law because it forces schools to make pedagogically questionable decisions in an effort to comply in a time of chronically short budgets. Conservatives ought to dislike it because it extends the federal government into an arena that has historically been the province of local government. Surely we could fashion kind of mutually agreeable compromise?

Finally, on some issues, we should contemplate how we can preserve our values, but consider compromising on what that means. Here, I am talking about big government:: in theory, Democrats ought to get behind the idea that government should do primarily the things that the private sector cannot do efficiently, and should be comfortable with the notion that there are some areas where the government could stand down. President Clinton and Vice President Gore made "reinventing government" a touchstone of that adminstration; surely, we could come up with some smaller government initiatives that we can all agree on?

They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows. Perhaps the time is right for both sides to stop insisting on ideological purity, and see what we can do together. It seems to me that the stars are strangely aligned for a strategic understanding between moderate Democrats and true conservatives, which might come with substantial electoral support from both sides.

If you can't be with one you love, honey, love the one your with...

2006-02-22T22:46:00.000-05:00

My So-Called Life as a Blogger

If you've read my blog lately, you'll notice that there hasn't been much to read. I'd like to think that this is because I have been too busy to blog (which I have) or had other things to do than blog (which I do), but the real reason, I think, is that I haven't felt like blogging. Some of that is me -- I'll start a post but halfway through, something comes up, or I just lose interest, and the post languishes, abandoned.

But some of it, I feel, is a sense that it's all for naught -- that bloggers can post till our fingers fall off and it just doesn't make a difference. Progressives have always believed that sunshine is the best disinfectant; that if people only knew what was really taking place behind the curtin, they would rise up in moral outrage, demand change, and not rest until things were right. Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair and thousands of activists after them catalyzed momentous changes just by telling the world what they had seen.

I fear, however, that we have reached the limits of moral outrage, or, more accurately, that cynical politicians have finally figured out how to deflect the moral outrage so that even sunshine no longer disinfects. How this has been accomplished has been ably catalogued by others, but none better than Peter Daou, of the Daou Report, who succinctly described the cycle of scandal when the warrantless surveillance scandal first broke. [link] Here's Daou's (frustratingly prescient) paradigm, in his own words:

1. POTUS circumvents the law - an impeachable offense.

2. The story breaks (in this case after having been concealed by a news organization until well after Election 2004).

3. The Bush crew floats a number of pushback strategies, settling on one that becomes the mantra of virtually every Republican surrogate. These Republicans face down poorly prepped Dem surrogates and shred them on cable news shows.

4. Rightwing attack dogs on talk radio, blogs, cable nets, and conservative editorial pages maul Bush's critics as traitors for questioning the CIC.

5. The Republican leadership plays defense for Bush, no matter how flagrant the Bush over-reach, no matter how damaging the administration's actions to America's reputation and to the Constitution. A few 'mavericks' like Hagel or Specter risk the inevitable rightwing backlash and meekly suggest that the president should obey the law. John McCain, always the Bush apologist when it really comes down to it, minimizes the scandal.

6. Left-leaning bloggers and online activists go ballistic, expressing their all-too-familiar combination of outrage at Bush and frustration that nothing ever seems to happen with these scandals. Several newspaper editorials echo these sentiments but quickly move on to other issues.

7. A few reliable Dems, Conyers, Boxer, et al, take a stand on principle, giving momentary hope to the progressive grassroots/netroots community. The rest of the Dem leadership is temporarily outraged (adding to that hope), but is chronically incapable of maintaining the sense of high indignation and focus required to reach critical mass and create a wholesale shift in public opinion. For example, just as this mother of all scandals hits Washington, Democrats are still putting out press releases on Iraq, ANWR and a range of other topics, diluting the story and signaling that they have little intention of following through. This allows Bush to use his three favorite weapons: time, America's political apathy, and make-believe 'journalists' who yuck it up with him and ask fluff questions at his frat-boy pressers.

8. Reporters and media outlets obfuscate and equivocate, pretending to ask tough questions but essentially pushing the same narratives they've developed and perfected over the past five years, namely, some variation of "Bush firm, Dems soft." A range of Bush-protecting tactics are put into play, one being to ask ridiculously misleading questions such as "Should Bush have the right to protect Americans or should he cave in to Democratic political pressure?" All the while, the right assaults the "liberal" media for daring to tell anything resembling the truth.

9. Polls will emerge with 'proof' that half the public agrees that Bush should have the right to "protect Americans against terrorists." Again, the issue will be framed to mask the true nature of the malfeasance. The media will use these polls to create a self-fulfilling loop and convince the public that it isn't that bad after all. The president breaks the law. Life goes on.

10. The story starts blending into a long string of administration scandals, and through skillful use of scandal fatigue, Bush weathers the storm and moves on, further demoralizing his opponents and cementing the press narrative about his 'resolve' and toughness. Congressional hearings might revive the issue momentarily, and bloggers will hammer away at it, but the initial hype is all the Democratic leadership and the media can muster, and anyway, it's never as juicy the second time around...

Rinse and repeat.

I mention Daou's paradigm because I, for one, am tired of replaying step 6 over and over and believing, in vain, that things will change in step 7. It's not working.

Daou correctly places part of the blame on the media, but I think much more emphasis needs to be placed on root of the problem: step 7, where the Democratic leadership loses focus. I sincerely believe that if you solve that problem, it makes steps 8, 9 and 10 much less likely.

What's my proof? Well, consider how the Democrats responded to the Bush administration's Social Security "reform" proposals. When we stood firm when we stayed on-message, when no Democrats gave Republicans cover on the issue, any popular support that the "reforms" had evaporated. [And yes, I am aware that the proposal lives; I just think that the back-door tactic that President Bush used to revivify his proposal in the 2007 budget -- the fact that he had to slip it in when he thought no one was looking -- is further proof that the Democrats were onto something in their tactics.]

But when will Democrats learn from this? Why did the Democrats fold on the extension of the Patriot Act? Why was Paul Hackett forced from his Senate race in Ohio? Where is the Democratic equivalent of the Contract with America? Why is Al Gore the only prominent Democrat willing to take a principled stand, and stick to it? Democrats have a good product to sell, but the sense I get is that the Democratic leadership doesn't believe it's a good product, and so their salesmanship is lackluster, at best. Whatever else you think about Republicans, when they drink the Kool-Aid, they all drink it, and then they all go out and tell you how delicious it is, over and over again, until people forget that drinking it will kill you.

So how do you counter this? Simple: change step 7 -- if the Democrats can maintain message discipline ("Kool-Aid = Death"), we win every time.

So if you're wondering why I haven't been blogging much lately, it's because I don't feel like the Democratic leadership is holding up its end of the bargain in steps 6 and 7. Of course, if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I'm happy to be dissuaded. I just don' t think it's likely.

Your thoughts?

2006-02-09T00:21:00.000-05:00

Not the Usual Carping and Complaining

If you're not from New York, the name Quachaun Brown probably doesn't mean anything to you, so let me tell you about him -- four years old, a big fan of Spider Man, Chuck-E-Cheese and the movie Robots. Happy-go-lucky kid with the ability to remember names told to him even once. Known around the neighborhood for happily and with gusto saying "Hi Hi Hi" out the first floor window of his family's apartment to neighbors and friends.

Oh, and he's dead. Quachaun was killed allegedly by his mother's boyfriend, an 18-year-old named Jose Calderon, after Quachaun apparently knocked over Calderon's 27-inch flat-screen t.v. Calderon is reported to have swung Quachaun around by his ankles, and slammed him into a wall so hard that it fractured the boy's skull. Apparently, he was bleeding from his ears and his rectum, and when Calderon discovered that the boy had bloodied and soiled the sheets in his bed, he beat him some more. Quachaun's mother was not at home over the 36 hours that Calderon was brutally beating her child.

Quachaun, despite his short life, was celebrated by neighbors and friends yesterday, and then was buried in a tiny coffin. His mother, who's in jail on charges of manslaughter in connection with Quachaun's death, decided to stay away from the funeral.

I mention all of this because I have a four year old son myself, who loves Spider Man, Robots, and places like Chuck-E-Cheese, if not the place itself. And my son can be exasperating, as all four year olds can be, and sometimes even breaks things around the house. A few months ago, when Sam was being particularly naughty, I finally blew my stack and yelled at him, loudly. Instantly, he crumbled, chastened by being yelled at to be sure, but also genuinely frightened at this ugly, loud ogre that his father had suddenly transformed into. In that instant, I realized that I was wrong, no matter that he had provoked me -- when all was said and done, I was the grown-up, and he was a terrified little boy. Whatever I was mad at (I can't even remember it now) suddenly no longer mattered. What did matter was reassuring him that I still loved him, and that he was safe. I scooped him up in my arms, hugged him very tightly, and cried, as much because I had lost control of my emotions as because I had terrified my child.

And what's more, although we very quickly made up, that look on his face at the moment that I yelled has stuck with me since then. When I read about Quachaun, that looked flashed into my head -- I can only imagine the t.v. falling over, and Calderon's face twisting into an ogrish mask, and the boy crumbling in terror, just like Sam. Maybe I'm missing some particulars here and there, but I know four-year-olds, and I know, as sure as I know anything, that that's what happened. And then I thought to myself, how could anyone, seeing that look, do anything but hug the boy, reassure him and forget the damn t.v.?

Of course, I realize that's a naive sentiment, and that bad things happen, but god, wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where that was the case?

2006-01-19T01:30:00.000-05:00

But What Do the Experts Know, Anyway?

A quick hit this evening/early morning. The CIA Journal has an interesting article suggesting that overt sources of information (that is, analysis of publicly available information) might be better and more effective for national intelligence purposes than covert, or secret information. [link]

Here is how Stephen Mercado, an analyst in the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology puts it:

We need to rethink the distinction between open sources and secrets. Too many policymakers and intelligence officers mistake secrecy for intelligence and assume that information covertly acquired is superior to that obtained openly. Yet, the distinction between overt and covert sources is less clear than such thinking suggests. Open sources often equal or surpass classified information in monitoring and analyzing such pressing problems as terrorism, proliferation, and counterintelligence. Slighting open source intelligence (OSINT) for secrets, obtained at far greater expense when available at all, is no way to run an intelligence community. Also, we must put to rest the notion that the private sector is the preferred OSINT agent. In the end, I would contend, the Intelligence Community (IC) needs to assign greater resources to open sources.

Mercado's point strikes me as intuitively correct, and, indeed, could well describe the blogosphere, which tends not to break new news, but rather spends its time analyzing information that has already been made publicly available. In the end, much like the CIA process that Mercado is describing, bloggers can (but don't always) add significant value by assembling connections between disparate facts and by identifying trends or explanations that the mainstream media either aren't reporting or aren't paying attention to while they cultivate their "inside sources" hoping to acquire new "secret" information.

In any event, in view of the President's violations of FISA to collect "secret" information, this article made me wonder even more whether the politicians and cronies in charge really know what they're doing?

2006-01-11T23:47:00.000-05:00

What I'm Pondering At the Moment

The New Criterion has an interesting article about demography. [link] The basic thesis is that while we in the Western world are worrying about social justice, pensions and healthcare, demographic trends among Muslims who don't share our "democratic values" call into question the viability of Western countries altogether, with the demographic end being closer than we think. As the article puts it,

If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?

I'm not sure I agree with all of the assumptions in the piece, but the thesis is certainly provocative.

One quote, however, did grab my attention, which is why I am pondering the article. It is this:

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.

Rhetorically, it's an easy step from this kind of thinking to the author's conclusion, and in that sense, the thesis is compelling. But again, I'm still working it out.

Anyone care to contribute their own thoughts?

2005-12-27T17:58:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush, Loyal Foot Soldier in the War on Christmas

A little late for Bill O'Reilly, but here it is -- evidence that President Bush is a closet liberal, intent on oppressing Christians by denying the role of Christ in Christmas. Herewith, the evidence:

2005-12-21T13:48:00.000-05:00

You say FEE-sah, I say FI-sah

Slate has a disturbing article about the checkered history of NSA spying on U.S. citizens. [link]

One thing that sticks out from the items in the article is that in May 2002, the FISA court, after two decades of granting 10,000 secret warrants, and never denying a single one, took the radical step of actually denying one. Right around this time -- the New York Times report isn't clear exactly when -- the President broke the law by authorizing NSA to go around the FISA court. In other words, when the law got inconvenient, Bush deemed it within his "inherent powers" simply to ignore the law (and the Constitution, for that matter). This isn't an isolated incident -- as the Slate article points out, the President authorized similar violations of other inconvenient laws, including the Geneva Convention, the General Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the Headquarters Agreement for the United Nations, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. I can't say that it's evidence of a trend, but the data points are nevertheless interesting.

2005-12-21T00:29:00.000-05:00

Surviving the Strike

Well, day 1 of the NYC Transit Strike is history, and I have to say, it wasn't so bad. In fact, I'm embarrassed to say, getting where I needed to go was downright easy.

Sam and I walked two blocks from our house to the garage where we keep our car. From there, it was an easy seven-minute drive, with no traffic to speak of, to a parking lot down the street from Sam's school. Expecting the worst, we had left an hour early; lo and behold, we arrived at school almost exactly an hour early, which just meant I got to spend an extra hour playing with Sam. What a hardship. (And what's more, coming home was a breeze as well -- in fact, it was so good, I got a parking space right in front of the house, so tomorrow should be even easier!)

It'd be expensive to keep doing this all the time, and so for that reason (among others), I hope the strike ends soon, but man-oh-man, a guy could get used to a life like this...

2005-12-21T00:07:00.000-05:00

On coincidences

Abraham Lincoln's speech in Edwardsville, Illinois, quoted in my last post, reads as an almost pitch-perfect counterpoint to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, TIA, FISA, "if you're not with us you're against us" and all of the other offenses against liberty that our President justifies by reference to September 11, 2001. Obviously, the quote turns out to be surprisingly relevant to today's headlines, not least because of Lincoln's later (controversial) decision to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. That's why I posted it.

But even as I was typing it in, I was struck by the truly random circumstance that brought it to my attention -- I was browsing in Barnes and Noble for a securities law textbook to assign to my graduate students this spring, and saw the "The Law Professor's Handbook", by Madeline Schachter, which is a book I had not heard of before and which was misfiled among the textbooks, else I would not have come across it. As you might guess from the title, the book is about how to teach law classes more effectively, which happened to catch my eye only because I just completed my first semester teaching a new course on Securities Law and Business Crime, and have for a few weeks been doing a sort of mental self-assessment of the semester (preparing to repeat the course in the Spring).

Anyway, the speech is quoted, rather incongruously, in a section about why people decide to teach, despite the fact that the quote has little, if anything to do with teaching.

But here's the weird part, particularly since it so neatly counters the "9/11 changed everything" argument of the Bush administration: As I was typing it into the blog, I happened to notice that that speech was delivered on September 11, 1858.

Cue theme music from The Twilight Zone...

2005-12-20T23:56:00.000-05:00

Inherent Authority

...For more on the President's invocation of "inherent authority" to flagrantly violate the Constitution and his oath of office, let's go to our Illinois correspondent, Abe Lincoln. Abe?

"Thanks, Daniel. What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning embattlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises. Reporting from Edwardsville, Illinois, I'm Abraham Lincoln."

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In Memoriam, Deborah R. Labovitz, Ph.D., OTR, FAOTAOctober 13, 1942-July 14, 2006

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Inherent Authority

In Memoriam, Deborah R. Labovitz, Ph.D., OTR, FAOTA
October 13, 1942-July 14, 2006