Aging Disgracefully

March 4, 2008

Vigilantism 2.0

By now, many of you have probably heard of or seen the video that has been racing around the net that purportedly depicts a US Marine in Iraq killing a puppy. If you haven't, you probably shouldn't (it had a big impact on even a walking callus like me). If you insist on doing so, it can be found in various places (it reportedly keeps getting pulled down wherever it is put up), but try here. In it, you see what is likely a US Marine (the authenticity of the video is subject to debate, but I can see no smoking gun kind of tell that would lead me to doubt its authenticity) manhandling a puppy and then casually
throwing it (presumably to its death) from an embankment.

Needless to say, a shocking image like this has provoked a range of often emotional responses. I was personally disgusted by the video and hope that, if it is authentic, the Marine pictured in it is punished as severely as possible. I have a hard time accepting the oft-advanced argument that this is simply an inevitable product of the violent conditioning that is war: I think that even those truly inured to violence and brutality still do not engage in gratuitous malice. No, I suspect something else is going on here: this guy probably lives at the intersection between an anti-social personality type and a sadist.

Equally outrageous, however, has been the the public dissemination by various blogs of the private identifying information for an individual suspected of being the Marine in the video (the video ends with a soldier off-camera possibly identifying the offending Marine as "Motari", which has led to this individual with the same surname being advanced as a suspect), typically accompanied by calls essentially for a vigilante response.

For excellent examples, see "Crime and Federalism", the video link above or, even better still, Mir1, which actually posts his home address and number.

As upsetting as the video images are to me, am I the only one who finds this electronic lynch mob rush to judgment a bit sickening as well? WE DON'T EVEN KNOW FOR CERTAIN WHO IS IN THAT VIDEO, WHERE IT WAS ACTUALLY SHOT, ETC. Although my personal sense is that it probably is real, the fact is that anyone with access to am Army-Navy store, some airsoft weapons and a desert environment could have shot it. And all we have is some brief mention of one name (is it actually the Motari referred to on the video? Is Motari the one throwing the dog, or a third Marine off camera (you can't be certain from the video)? Did he say Motari? Moteri? Motarrey?) to go on ( and have the good people at Mir1 not noticed that the surname in the address they provide does not even match that of the individual accused of being the Marine in the video?)

But don't lose hope. The author of "Crime and Federalism" offers the following sage advice:

Others have noted, and I agree, that we must await confirmation of the puppy killer's identity before taking further action. The matter is still under investigation, and we need to confirm identities. Once we have confirmation, we should do everything legally within our power to make the killer's life a living Hell. But we must await confirmation before taking further action.

Although he has been somewhat more careful than many of those commenting in blog postings about this incident by adding the qualifier "legally", I am still left with the following question: who the the hell empowered this guy, or any of the other individuals making calls for legal (or, in many cases, blatantly illegal) action against this individual? Who do you think you are, and can you explain to me why it is that you seem to think that the blogosphere is a more acceptable staging ground for vigilantism than the streets? When did this become acceptable? We are a society with rules and individuals and institutions lawfully empowered to enforce those rules. Why is it acceptable in the blogosphere for some people essentially to deputize themselves?

Posted by dag at 3:58 PM | Comments (0)

October 5, 2007

Remembering Vijay

Though I had intended for this blog to involve only current news, observations, etc., I've decided to share periodically stuff that I wrote in the past-if only to provide some narrative backdrop for the person I am today.
I wrote this January 11th, 2004:

So, I'm a wreck. I have just witnessed one of the most agonizing football games in history.

The Carolina Panthers ultimately prevailed in a see-saw affair, bringing down the Rams after two quarters (two quarters!!) of overtime. Each team was at one point or another saved only by a gross miscarriage of football by the other. Will any amount of Grey Goose return my blood gases to normal and restore my equilibrium? And I'm not the only one: from his sideline dispatches it was clear that Tony Siragusa was about to blow a head gasket. I think his blood pressure must have been roughly 457 over 321 by the end.

So where to begin? I think at the end. Of regulation time, that is. The Rams had the ball, with countless seconds on the clock, with the endzone in sight. The were down 23-20. In a decision that will surely be analyzed by conspiracy theorists for decades to come, Mike Martz did not go for it. The chronology:
1:24 -- First-and-10 from the Carolina 25: Marc Bulger passes to Marshall Faulk for 6 yards.
0:42 -- Second-and-4 from the Carolina 19: Faulk runs off right end for 4 yards.
0:03 -- First-and-10 from the Carolina 15: Jeff Wilkins' 33-yard field goal is good.
This much is certain: the world will long note, but never understand, why Martz, with sufficient time and an energized offense, did not try to cross the plane, denying the Panthers the oxygen of overtime. But isn't this exactly why we love watching sports? On the surface, Martz's decision was colossally idiotic, but on some deeper level wasn't it just a metaphor for so many of the choices we make all the time? The mistakes we knew we were making, to borrow from Eggers? Nonetheless, it was a sad affair for St. Louis.

But now my mind drifts to other sad affairs. The Patriots are playing as well, and I'm reminded of my old friend and classmate Vijay Bhagavan. Vijay was a fat, wonderful cannonball of a guy. A son of the Ganges and the Charles, he was perhaps the most devoted of Pats fans. Seven years ago Vijay died. Such a young death was a poignant reminder of the ruthlessness of Nature.

Memory is strange, and betrays more than it serves. But I don't think I'll ever forget Vijay's infectious laugh. Or his generous spirit: he was one of those rare people who exude only the highest caliber Mana. This was a man who sported one of the most epic beards (and bellies) of the American Century, and yes, his head was always covered by a Pats cap. I remember once asking Vijay if he could ever reverse his ancestor's journey and return to India. "Oh yeah. Absolutely. No problem. As long as it's Boston" he said with a mysterious brilliance that was Vijay's, and Vijay's alone. As unpretentious and down to earth a guy as you'll find, it was only after his death that I learned he was from a really high caste.

After his death the Pats took it all (another unforgettable spectacle, but that is a game I should have addressed years ago). I remember sitting on my couch in the strange darkness that followed the Patriots Super Bowl win. I raised a glass or two (or ten) of...was it Knob Creek?... to Vijay, who I knew was up there somewhere in the Sweet Hereafter, watching his boys. And in that darkness, the weirdness set in: a flood of memories that had been set aside for years burst through. There I sat, getting ripped with a ghost, sharing in the glory of a victory that was his, after all.

Certainly his death resonated far and wide. To begin with, Boston Market saw its sales plunge. For me, Vijay's death represented a nasty turning point in grad school. After that, the whole thing became a rather unpleasant gig. Maybe because he was gone. Maybe he had helped to take the edge off of what had always been a rough ride. Then again, maybe not. But now that Long March is over, and Vijay looms large in my mind on this weird night.

And the Pats are in the mix again. It doesn't matter who emerges from the Colts-Chiefs game tommorrow (and for my money, it'll be the oh-so-smooth Peyton Manning Experience in the end). In either case, they won't take the Pats, not at home. Right now I'd rather take on a Waffen SS Panzer division than the Pats at home.

At the risk of expulsion from my own home (no, no: even then I'm far too valuable to my wife...I think), I'm gonna back them against the Panthers, if it ever comes to it. It's my salute to Veejay, who I will miss for the rest of my life. He still works through me, and in strange ways. Patriots vincit omnia, my brother, wherever you may be.

Posted by dag at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2007

Maybe Math Majors Shouldn't Have to Take Calculus Either

This is appalling.

Posted by dag at 5:23 PM | Comments (0)

July 3, 2007

Web 2.0 and Its Discontents

I need to read this. I think I can safely say that so far the Internet seems to have delivered little of some of its early promise (or, at least particular items I really cared about: whatever happened to the virtual office that was just around the corner?) while certainly carrying some of the costs Mr. Keen describes.

And let's face it: the idea of the "wisdom of crowds" probably is just non-sense. In terms of the empowerment of everyman in every realm, I can say from my own narrow little standpoint of (professional) expertise that I cringe at 99% of the economic "analysis" offered up at, say, blogs.

Posted by dag at 11:48 AM

May 10, 2007

It's Official

The barbarians have breached the walls.

What is our country coming to when even the Boston Pops (the Boston Pops!!!) is not immune to this incivility???

Posted by dag at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

May 3, 2007

The March to a Warmer World: Our Friends in that Other Kingdom

Today's NY Times has an article about the ways that rising temperatures are affecting plant growing zones. I have read in the past that, if temperatures continue to rise in central North Carolina (where I live) at the pace of the past 15 years, in 15 more the tall fescue lawns that predominate here will be untenable, and we may have to switch to a more southerly grass. The thought of that kills me after all of the effort, and the river of water, I have poured into our lawn. But then again, maybe the need for all of that effort and water should be telling me something.

I've also been watching with growing concern the predictions about the likely implications of global warming for wine. At the point where pinot won't work in Burgundy...well, then we panic.

Posted by dag at 1:38 PM

March 12, 2007

Ridiculous...and so telling

Posted by dag at 10:42 AM

February 8, 2007

The Decline and Fall of the American...

More good news on the public finance front...

Posted by dag at 10:30 AM

February 5, 2007

The Modern Language Association Meeting

Oh dear god.

Posted by dag at 12:42 PM

January 25, 2007

How Exciting to Be Present at the Creation of a New Manifestation of Discrimination

From CNN:

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) -- It's always interesting to me, that in my own country, I often get assignments where I walk into a room, and everyone looks and sounds different from me. Different language. Different culture. And sometimes, different beliefs.

On this story, I crossed such a threshold.

I stepped into the taxi depot that serves the Minneapolis - St. Paul International Airport, where drivers sit and wait for their next fare. In this crowded, noisy room, most of the cabbies are Muslims originally from Somalia.

"We're doing a story about the conflict between the cabbies and the airport. The Muslim drivers have been refusing to take passengers carrying alcohol, such as wine or liquor purchased at a duty free shop," I explained.

A group of men gathered around us.

"This is America, we have freedom of religion," says one cabbie. We could see their feelings are intense -- that the issue seems to cut to the core of their identity.

"The Metropolitan Airport Commission is discriminating against us Muslim drivers," says Abdulkaddir Adan, a Somalian-American who's been driving a cab in the Twin Cities for two years.

We asked Adan if he'd give us a ride, and let us interview him while he was driving. He agreed. CNN Photojournalist Derek Davis set up a "lipstick" cam, a small camera, positioned on the dashboard.

From the back seat, I asked why Adan would object if I were carrying alcohol.

"The one who drinks, the one who transports, and the one who makes a business of it, they have the same category," he said.

"So, by my transporting my alcohol in your cab, you are sinning?" I asked.

"Sinning to God, yes," he replied.

Adan is not alone. About three quarters of the 900 cabbies serving the airport are Muslim, and many have been regularly refusing passengers carrying beer, wine or liquor.

In the past five years, 5,400 would-be taxi passengers at the airport were refused service for this very reason, said the Metropolitan Airport Commission, or MAC. Last May, passenger Bob Dildine says he waited for 20 minutes, and five cab drivers would not give him and his daughter a ride. He was carrying wine he bought on vacation.

"They're here to provide service to people," said Dildine. "We were a lawful customer, and we were denied service. That's not our way of doing things."

MAC officials said they don't know of any airport other than the Twin Cities where this has become an issue. MAC officials explain that the area has a growing population of immigrant Somalians, many who've sought jobs as taxi drivers. Last year, MAC consulted local Muslim leaders, who issued a fatwa, or religious opinion.

"It is expressly stated," said Kahlid Elmasry of the Muslim American Society. "Transportation of alcohol for Muslims is against the Islamic faith, and therefore forbidden."

Last September, airport officials sought a compromise, and suggested that distinctive lights could be put on the roofs of cabs operated by drivers, who will not transport alcohol. That way, taxi starters -- airport staff who direct people into cabs -- could send passengers with alcohol to those drivers who have no objection.

"But the feedback we got, not only locally but really from around the country and around the world, was almost entirely negative," said airport spokesman Pat Hogan. "People saw that as condoning discrimination against people who had alcohol."

Right now, MAC says any cabbie who refuses a passenger carrying alcohol must go to the back of the line. No small thing, given cabbies often have to wait at the depot up to three hours for the next fare.

But because MAC officials have received thousands of complaints, they're considering stiffer penalties: a 30-day suspension for a first refusal, a two-year suspension for a second.

"We're now at a point where the drivers may have to make a choice," said Hogan.

Adan is clear.

"I would leave my job, instead of doing something that's not allowed in my religion," he said.

The interview with Adan took a long time. Our fare came to $150, a very good day for him. Normally, he makes about $100 a day, so it became more clear to us that refusing a fare is a big loss. But Adan said he won't accept the idea that in America a cab driver should allow something his religion forbids.

A few thoughts on this:

1. Whatever airport official went to the local Muslim leader should be fired. That was grossly inappropriate. Or perhaps we should run the control tower according to their fatwas as well?

2. The religious rights of the Somalis are not being violated. They are, in the context of providing a service within the public domain, imposing their religious views on customers. This is no different than pharmacists who refuse to supply things like contraception. It's time for tougher penalties now, and not just by the airport: cab licenses should be at stake. They have explained to us that this is about their convictions, but that does not mean that they get to dictate the rules in any sphere according to them. You don't see many Christian fundamentalist strippers either: they recognize the incompatibility of their beliefs with the requirements of the job. People have to make choices like that all the time. What the Somalis are asking for really does amount to unique, and preferential, treatment.

Posted by dag at 10:08 PM | Comments (1)

January 20, 2007

Reflections on a Gun Show

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Today I attended a gun show at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds. Partly I did this while I still can: I think the prospect of a strange kind of state paternalism, call it 1984 with Birkenstocks, lurks somewhere not far behind Nancy Pelosi's maniacal grin. I suppose that a history of weak sales resistance coupled with a bizarre lifelong fascination with things that go boom also had something to do with it.

The wife and I arrived at the Fairgrounds just as the show opened at 9am. We were immediately confronted with an outdoor entry line filled with one long, disgruntled slice of America waiting to pay their entry fee. The line was nearly wholly male at this point, and the entire crowd can be categorized into one of the cells of a four-by-four matrix with "too angular" and "too spherical" on one axis and "too scraggly" (a category to which I assign mullet-heads as well) and "too clean cut" on the other.

This was one surly crowd of Red Ne...er, Appalachian Americans. Where had all the love in this country gone? I wondered to myself. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should not be too vocal about having spent the previous evening watching the opera Die Zauberflöte on DVD while sipping apple brandy from France.

To be fair, the ominous vibes weren't all about the kind of Fear and Loathing the Good Doctor first chronicled. The fact that it was 34 degrees and slightly windy probably had something to do with it. I'm not sure what it is about the South (maybe it's the water, perhaps contaminated by some awful effluent that is a by-product of NASCAR), but cold temperatures just seem colder below the Mason-Dixon line. 34 degrees and slightly windy in Raleigh, North Carolina feels like 11 degrees and gale-force winds in Albany, New York. I'm sure there's some algorithm so translating temperatures, probably developed by some NC State geek in the spare minutes when he wasn't complaining about Duke and Carolina.

After a few minutes in line we spied out friend and neighbor "Dirt Nap" Dan. I call him "Dirt Nap" because every time I hang around with him my odds of taking one increase by 47 percent (for instance, he had the rocks to cut ahead to us in front of this heavily armed crowd). He was forlornly clutching a box of spent brass and mumbling something about saving a buck or two from the entrance fee by carrying it.

I started to survey the line again. Perhaps one third of the men were carrying weapons. Were they planning to sell or trade them? Were they carrying them to gain some sort of psychological edge on the drive home? In the American South it's tough to tell.

The weapons they were carrying were also sort of interesting. They can be placed into two categories: those used to drive back Sherman and those damned Yankees (ie very historical -by which I sometimes mean ratty- looking pieces) and those that could be used to drive back the North Korean army (ie better not let the ATF agents inside get a close look at them).

We finally reached the ticket booth after your typical episode of Southern Efficiency (it only took 94 minutes for two ticket sellers to collect $8 from each of the 41 people in line ahead of us). Now, in my life I have never heard a persuasive argument against the 2nd Amendment. But at the ticket booth I think I finally saw one: the 300+ pound ticket seller in hot pink pants wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed "Gun Show Girl". She smiled at me and winked. Her teeth reminded me of a piranha while the rest of her evoked a kind of down-market Mama Cass, had she lived. Looking at her, I suddenly understood that a noble concept had somehow gone horribly awry across the time and space separating Federal Hall in New York City in 1789 from Raleigh, North Carolina on this gray morning in 2007.

Having gotten through this first circle of hell, we entered the hall where the line broke up into two streams: those who could proceed directly into the convention hall at the Gov. Jim Hunt building and those who needed to have their weapons flexi-cuffed to render them in-operational (after all, we're always been all about safety in North Carolina). As we reached the threshold of the hall things looked promising: roughly two football fields worth of tables that appeared to be devoted to all manner of weaponry. I watched a father and his young sons shuffle in ahead of me and was suddenly seized by a kind of melancholy: I lost out on so much by growing up in Mario Cuomo's New York. I'm sure Proust expressed similar sentiments.

But enough tears, goddamit. This was clearly going to be a savage kind of experience, and I had to gather myself. I had several objectives:

1. A tricked-out kalashnikov. I wanted one with all the bells and whistles: night vision, tactical grips, laser sites, cup holder, cigar cutter. This is, after all, essential equipment for any serious Man of Letters.

2. Accessories for my Springfield Operator.

3. Perhaps a Kimber Warrior.

Unfortunately, I failed at all three. It's not really my fault: contrary to the occasional report in the blogosphere by a bio-diesel drivin', Dennis Kucinich supportin' pocket mulcher who visits one of these things with the expressed purpose of documenting our "disturbing" (an old stand-by word when seized of intellectual constipation consternation) gun culture, the truth is that for people like me (the seriously disturbed) gun shows are often a mighty let down. And this was no exception.

To begin with, the pistol selection was just terrible. Many were older models that looked like they had accompanied John Wayne to "The Sands of Iwo Jima" and been last cleaned shortly thereafter. There were tons of Glocks (the pistol industry's answer to Microsoft) and some other stuff, but few really great tactical pistols (particularly at my preferred caliber, 45ACP). I was looking for the kind of thing that would help me out in a Dallas SWAT kind of situation, whichever side I happened to be on. But it was not to be. And there were no decent accessories for my Springfield Operator.

The Kalashnikovs were pretty uninspiring as well. Particularly when you consider that the Kalashnikov has been subjected to about 3500 variations, the selection at the gun show was pretty narrow. Basically every table had the same three to four variants and, unlike Goldilocks, I was unable to find among them one that was "just right".

The lack of variety also had something to do with the fact that only a minority of the vendors were actually selling firearms. Many were, in fact, selling the kind of junk that floats just below the market niche of your typical Army-Navy store: crappy Nazi and Confederate memorabilia (who buys broken old SS ashtrays and alarm clocks?? James Longstreet beer can holders???); ancient WWI dough-boy helmets; stained and fraying surplus unit patches for the 101st Airborne, 3rd Marine Division; Duluth Animal Control, etc.; rusted Imperial Japanese bayonets; etc. etc.

There seems to be a whole economy based on selling this kind of junk, which most self-respecting soldiers wouldn't even loot off the enemy dead. I can't really understand what drives these people and, more importantly, what they use for fuel. How do they support themselves? They never seem to actually sell anything (if you don't believe me, visit a gun show sometime and watch one of these vendors for a while). Are double-wides outside of Tallahassee really that inexpensive? And what draws them to this life? That's probably a question I'll never be able to answer. My anthropological context is just too different. But I do feel fairly confident that these are the kind of people that think Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby is a drama.

My wife being there also had something to do with my abject failure, particularly in terms of objective 1. Men at gun shows often lament the failure of their wives or girlfriends to "understand them". They don't seem to understand themselves that it is far worse to have a significant other who, like my wife, actually embraces the gun culture.

The problem is that it turns out that women shop for guns like they do for everything else. Sampling the kalashnikovs, my wife rejected one after the other: too heavy; too light; grips too rough; grips too smooth; etc.. Then there are the bizarre aesthetic ("the flow of that receiver does not really go with the motif of the barrel") and sartorial ("I don't have any shoes that match this synthetic stock") reasons.

The customers were an interesting bunch. As devoted as I am to the 2nd Amendment, I must admit that the idea of some of these people being armed does give me pause. Aside from the four varieties in line, I noticed a number of over-buffed faux tough-guy metrosexuals who looked like they had just left NJGuido.com. I saw one lean, urbane, bookish looking twenty-something who looked like he had just stepped off the set of Grey's Anatomy...with one wicked looking Springfield So-Com II slung over his shoulder. Most fascinating to me were the heavily armed and handicapped: people moving around in wheel chairs with machine guns and pistols in their laps. The physics of their setup fascinates me: wouldn't the fierce kick from, for instance, a Galil (which one of them had) make it impossible to fire and remain stationary?? One small man with a walker clutched a Desert Eagle (which, for the uninitiated, is a pistol so fierce I have difficulty firing it with both hands). How does he shoot it without tipping over?? In any case, think hard before you park in a handicap spot.

As the hours wore on (gun shows are huge, and so require time and enormous stamina) I noticed more and more women in the hall. They ranged from the sort that looked like they had just jumped off the pages of "Elle" to those who looked like they...well, hadn't. I wonder what kind of guns elegant and sophisticated women favor. If their sleek cell phones are any guide to the kind of look they were seeking, they were going to be as disappointed as me.

Then there are the athletic types: they shoot like they are riding a mountain bike on a tough trail. I remember visiting an indoor range a few years ago and watching with increasing amazement as a young woman, athletic in a Mia Hamm kind of way, went through her shooting routine with the steely determination and total aerobic control of a spinning class instructor. She must have fired 1000 rounds in fairly short, crisp and efficient order, carefully and quickly retrieving and documenting each target as she did so. If only to chart her progress over time in Excel.

Finally, there are what I call the Bernice Goetz type in honor of Bernhard Goetz, the iconic subway gunman from New York City. Superficially submissive in posture, you get the feeling that one day they will snap and waste the entire office flow chart above them if their boss touches their ass one more time.

Among the vendor tables, I noticed that the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) had set up a booth. Aside from the shakes I get thinking about their organizational mission (to undermine the Constitution), there is something about the look of the agents they put on display at events like this that really un-nerves me. At the ATF, the heavy lifting is done by a bunch of grizzled mountain men. But the "public face" of the ATF is a bunch of clean cut, sharply dressed white-as-Wonderbread young people who somehow come across as a hybrid between cheery (in a sociopathic kind of way) kids from the plain clothes division of the Hitler Youth and the Mormon kids you see proselytizing on UNC's campus. And they always seem to sport a kind of crazed and spacey smile that evokes the devotees of some kind of strange desert cult hopped up on Qualudes all the time.

I wish I had some pics of a new toy, but I don't. Eventually, I gave up hope. I was tired and my eyes were irritated by stealth smoke (a universal truth of gun shows is that you can always smell cigarette smoke but never spot anyone smoking). It was time to re-group and grab some Pho for lunch. Afterward, the wife and I visited Costco where some degree of redemption occurred: they had 2002 Niebaum-Coppola Rubicon. I snatched three bottles.

I hope the May gun show is better: Nancy Pelosi's maniacal grin seems to grow bigger by the day.

Posted by dag at 7:23 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2007

A Place About Nothing (Ikea edition)

This area is some kind of weird out-of-control experiment in suburban planning to see if, in the sense that Seinfeld was a "show about nothing", you can't create a major metropolitan area that is "a place about nowhere". Today our local rag tells us that we have been passed over by Ikea.

Incredible. The home three counties of the Triangle, with a population over 1 million, are growing like cancer; the population is young, educated and forming households...and yet we can't even attract this ultimate cliche in retailing.

(Mind you, I'm not complaining about this development; I just think it highlights the strange nothingness of this place. I'd think a city without a McDonalds was strange too, despite the fact that I basically never go to McDonalds.)

There are some states where you don't even get a zip code without having at least two Ikeas within one 25 square mile area. It's as if we are completely cut off from the national retailing scene.

This really is a place about nothing.

At least the restaurant scene is progressing well. Next stop for the wife and I: Bonne Soiree.

Posted by dag at 11:15 AM | Comments (2)

January 12, 2007

Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want:

Not to have to look at David Beckham and Posh Spice every damned time I tune into ESPN in the next five years.

Posted by dag at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

December 6, 2006

A Nation of Hothouse Orchids

In today's edition of the local rag I ran into this fresh example of fear and loathing in America. This is a sick guy, who legally buys and stables on his property an old but decent little horse at the end of its days, in doing so probably puts a bit of light into his own and his family's life, and...of course, the resentful little local creeps and malcontents start coming out of the wood work, and now they want to change the law. The article gives just the faintest hint that jealousy over lot size may play a role.* Of course, the "Spine of Jello" Wendell Board of Commissioners will probably vote his horse out of Wendell (which I have visited: it is not an urban area. Period. Any delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Period again.).

Well, I've said it before and I've said it again: we are not going to have a damned freedom left in this country at this rate. Forget about Guantanamo bay: you will be legally muscled out of even owing a pet because some citizens of "America the Easily Offended" have a problem with it.

This nation may be far from the peak of its power, and yet I think the seeds of its decline and fall may well already have been planted. I hear the distant screech of our own Twelfth Eagle.

This concludes the rant for today.

*But that can't be all. There must be some deeper sickness at play. I have never trusted people who did not care for horses. Somehow, to me, that just runs counter to healthy human genetics.

Posted by dag at 3:26 PM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2006

Damn My Fatal Fading Allure

According to this article in the NY Times, I have to make the most of the winter of my 35th year: soon I will turn 35, and will no longer be young and hip enough for any city to want to compete for me.

Sniff.

What the article does not explain to my satisfaction is why anyone from any demographic would want to live in many of the cities mentioned (Hotlanta? Vegas?). The discussion of Charlotte was interesting: I suspect that the place to be in North Carolina's future will actually be the Triangle. To cite just one yardstick, our MSA is growing faster. (I believe that the "core" Triangle counties are outstripping those of the "core" Charlotte area by an even wider margin.)

Posted by dag at 9:42 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

Europa Europa

Meanwhile, our "progressive" betters are at it again.

Posted by dag at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2006

The Mile High Club

What's America coming to when you can't even join a club in peace?

I wonder if airlines should introduce an "X" class (in which the seats would ideally be autoclaved after each flight) to deal with this.

Posted by dag at 2:58 PM | Comments (2)

Lou Dobbs

Am I the only one who is growing tired of this buffoon with nothing to say?

What an ego this guy has on him:

Over the past week, pundits and savants of both the left and the right have been trying to simultaneously define me and the newly elected Democratic victors in the Senate and the House by accusing us of being populists. What a dirty little word. Horrifying.

Actually, Lou, I don't think anyone sensible cares what you are.

Posted by dag at 9:51 AM | Comments (1)

November 13, 2006

Foreign Exchange

So much for all of the attempts I've seen in the past few years to read a fundamental, dark and lasting message into the decline of foreign students coming to the US in the years after 9-11.

Posted by dag at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2006

Sanctuary

Today's NY Times has an article about sanctuary laws. Basically, sanctuary laws forbid local officials and police from asking people about their immigration status. The theory is that if you do not ask them about their immigration status, illegal immigrants might be more likely to cooperate with law enforcement.

I'm of two minds about this (tell me you didn't see that coming). It is certainly true that, unless we are really willing to do something about illegal immigration, the illegal immigrant communities in our midst could easily become havens of lawlessness because victims within them are unwilling to come forward for fear of deportation. This is not a very pleasant prospect. This could make the illegal immigrant community an effective incubator for a criminal tradition that, once entrenched, could haunt us for a long time. And I'm not speaking here about just criminals among the illegal immigrants. I'm well aware of the dangers created by having a situation where citizens can prey on some group with legal impunity.

On the other hand illegal immigration is illegal. Why should law enforcement be barred from approaching something that is illegal? This is patently absurd on its own and creates a very dangerous precedent: that certain groups engaged in illegal behavior can effectively pressure officialdom into turning a blind eye to their activities. Such a development, if it ever came to be accepted practice (as opposed to the exception we strive to eliminate) would truly spell the beginning of the end for our society.

Right now in our neighborhood we are having a problem with the developer in an adjoining community currently under construction running huge trucks through our neighborhood. They are not supposed to be doing this. These vehicles are crawling with workers who are, without doubt, illegal immigrants from places like Mexico, El Salvador, etc.

When we have talked the builder about keeping their big trucks off our streets (they block residential traffic, create immediate safety issues and will slowly destroy the roads in our development due to their weight), we've basically been told to go to hell. The Durham Police have not been much help (the one time they have intervened, it has been to illegally tell one of our neighbors to move his car to make way for the trucks; unfortunately, he did not get the officers' names or else we would have filed a complaint against them and the police department).

Anyway, I have nothing against these illegal immigrants. I realize that they are just poor people struggling to support families and taking jobs few Americans would to do. But there is something galling about a big corporation running giant trucks through our neighborhood, in the process turning a quiet and nice place into an industrial site, all the while using illegal immigrants to do so and all that our police have to say about it is that we better not park in their way. Any government that thinks such a state of affairs is OK will rightly be swept away.

Posted by dag at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2006

Court Martial

If she is still in the US armed forces, Gen. Karpinski should be court-martialed for her role in this>.

Posted by dag at 7:39 PM | Comments (0)

When you're not a school anymore...

Am I the only one who has noticed that, increasingly, Universities behave more like corporations (and Microsoft at that!)?

Posted by dag at 3:06 PM | Comments (0)

Is true, no, that women have smaller brain???

Today's USA Today web edition has a funny article about the reactions of some of the real-life people appearing in the new Borat movie. They now want to explain to all of the world "he said he was Borat and I believed him ... but he was lying".

The cream of this crop is the piece by the feminist sculptor of "woman warriors" who finally walks out on Borat when he questions the cognitive abilities of women (see here).

Two things capture the essential handle:

1. Baron-Cohen does not like to involve people who know of the Ali G show. What a punk. It would be much more impressive if he used people who were supposed to be in on the joke and dis-oriented them anyway. Then he'd be entering Andy Kaufman territory. As it is, this comes across as an elaborate but, in all of the essential ways, terribly conventional con.

2. The feminist scupltor's main concern does not really appear to be Borat's tactics, but rather that in her case he is going after the wrong "-ism" in a fashion that makes uncomfortable someone who is, in her view, consitutionally entitled to feel like a victim. This attempt to frame the ruse as a hostile political gesture is silly and simply reveals even more about her than Borat was able to tease out. Only a feminist artist from the New York City-or perhaps San Francisco-would live in enough of a hyperbaric cultural and politcal chamber not to see how this would be viewed in the real world.

Posted by dag at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)

November 5, 2006

In loving memory...you son of a bitch

Today's NY Times has an interesting article about one tricky ramification of online memorials to the dead: the rise of the "dissers of the dead" (ie people who speak ill of the dead in the comment or guest book areas of an online memorial).

I have some conflicting thoughts about this:
1. To do this, you have to sort be a chicken shit in many cases. From some of the examples they gave, one wonders why the people writing didn't have the courage to say this publicly when the person was alive, thus obviating such post-mortem testimonials.

2. In some ultimate sense, who are third parties (the editors) to say what should or shouldn't be presented in a public forum like this?

3. The whole reason people have private services for the dead is that they wish to focus on their own experience with this person, rather than weather alternative viewpoints. I realize that those who own a memorial site do have the absolute right to censor it, but didn't they realize that this was one of the ramifications of such an open forum? Didn't they realize that the collective view of the dead would become more democratic?

4. In a lifetime, we likely influence the course of many other people's lives. Shouldn't they, in some poetic sence, have some right to relay that experience? After all, it was as real as the impact of that person's life on those who control our memorial.

5. Does the medium (ie the web) make it just too cheap and easy to fling any indictment at the dead? I have noticed that people are often much less guarded in their emails than their face to face conversations. I have received several nasty emails over the years, and when I responded by confronting the sender face to face they went into headlong retreat almost immediately (and I don't think my size is the issue-in each case they were aware of it before they sent their email).* There is something about the disintermediation of face to face contact that seems generally to raise inhibitions, while the reverse is true of online communication. Since face to face exchanges obviously evolutionarily predate online communication, is it possible that the latter lowers our inhibitions to a degree that is just not a good idea for human societies? If everyone expressed every thought they had every moment they had it, what kind of a society would this be?

*In one case someone perceived an email of mine to be quite nasty, and they wrote back how much it hurt them and how angry and upset they were with me. This was not my intention: I wrote the message quickly and matter of factly, leading them to read into it a tone I did not intend. The moment I called them up and they heard the tone of my voice, I think they understood the mis-read immediately and amicable relations were quickly re-established.

Posted by dag at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

November 2, 2006

How to Rescue the Times Editorial Page

Step I. make Robert Harris a more regular contributor.

Posted by dag at 1:54 PM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2006

Gathering clouds

I only have a few minutes to write today, but wanted to touch on two issues.

First, I have been watching the wrangling over the hand-over of power to a pre-vote caretaker government in Bangladesh with increasing worry. The installment of President Ahmed thankfully does not appear to have exacerbated the situation as badly as some of the alternatives might have. The big test will come on November 3, the deadline for meeting the opposition Awami League's demands for reform. Some of these seem pretty hard to get done by then, though it would seem that the Ahmed has already made some gestures in their direction. What will their response be to partial fulfillment of their demands???

Second, over the past few days I received a couple of emails from web people I know asking for my thoughts on the Stern report on global warming (which suggests that the economic costs of warming could be large). Most of the attempts to predict the economic impact of global warming rely on pretty heavy guess work against spotty facts. The Stern report is no exception. The reality is that even if we fully understood the likely climactic trajectory from a scientific standpoint (which we don't, and won't in any convincing fashion for the forseeable future), predicting the economic consequences is a tricky business. There are just so many variables involved, the partial equilibriun effects (let alone general equilibrium net effects) of which remain the subject of intense research and debate.

Nonetheless, I think that the Economist more or less got the handle, when it suggested that the report is more of a political instrument than a work of serious economic analysis, the purpose of which is to get America off her ass. The desire to see America take the lead is probably driven by several considerations. First, we are the biggest producer of greenhouse gases, and no serious attempt at global stabilization of such gases could ever be made to work without doing something about our enormous and growing contribution, even if we are to be overtaken in the forseeable future by China. Second, we are the Romans, we have the imperium, they respect our authoritaaaay, l'etat c'est us, etc. etc. and as such we still set the fashion. Despite the anti-Americanism so fashionable around the world today, it never ceases to amaze me in my travels the degree to which the really cool kids around the world want to emulate us. On a political level, it is nearly impossible to think, for instance, that China will be swayed by the global crowd pushing atmospheric carbon stabilization without the weight of the US on board.

A third and important but often overlooked argument is that if America changes her ways she will suddenly create a massive market for the latest and greatest in environmentally friendly technology. Make no mistake about it: we have no intention of taking a European out whereby we lose ground for a cooler world. No, as usual, it would be the American style to insist that we have our cake and eat it too. So you have a country with massive wealth, an enormous carbon hole to dig ourselves out of, and the desire to do it with as little sweat and tears as possible. If that doesn't create an exciting new market for a certain type of emergent technology I don't know what does. If the American ship were to change course on this issue, we wouldn't even recognize the environmental technologies of twenty years from now. The promise of our demand would make financially reasonable investment in research and technology that seems irrational right now. This would be a development with extraordinary salutary global effects.

However, there is a giant cloud wrapped around this silver lining (hey, I am a dismal scientist), one that I have already explored in an earlier post: from a strictly self-interested standpoint, the US has little to gain from switching course. Nothing in the Stern report convincingly suggests otherwise. The reality is that the anticipated abatement costs (associated with, for instance, the meaningful US contribution to stabilization of global atmospheric carbon concentrations at any of the suggested thresholds) are large against the likely benefits for us (in terms of the environmental losses we avoid). This is doubly true of China.

This enormous global asymmetry of incentives between sovereign nations has been the 800lb gorilla that activists on this issue have consistently missed. Maybe it seems too dirty to them (the business of haggling over the global environment's future). I'd urge them to remember the following: China, the nation that sacrificed millions to build the Great Wall and the US, a country determined to, for instance, prosecute her Civil War or pursue reality TV programming at any cost, are unlikely simply to volunteer to do something against their interest. Moreover, we are the nation that has endured just too many decades of John Madden's Maddenisms ("they are down 31 to 18, so their strategy now should just be to score two touchdowns", "the only way the Cowboys are gonna win this one is to score more points than the Giants", etc.) to be worn down now by any kind of persistent intellectual assault. So how do you get past an 800lb gorilla? Simple: offer it some bananas.

Posted by dag at 8:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2006

Not with a whimper

And so it begins...

Posted by dag at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2006

The "Wrong" Side of History

Today while screwing around...er, I mean faithfully pursuing my research objectives, I ran into the following superb essay by Orhan Pamuk.

Posted by dag at 4:29 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2006

Aleksey Vayner

My ongoing search for the most ridiculous person who has ever lived has turned up a powerful contender. Three possibilities occur to me:
1. This guy is a comic genius on the lines of Andy Kaufman.
2. This guy is basically a Tom Ripley who fails to recognize the implications of living in the internet video age.
3. This guy has the misfortune of being born about 200 years before the development of powerful medication that might have helped him.

Posted by dag at 9:19 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2006

The State of Giving

Ever wonder how generous your state is? Well, wonder no more.

Posted by dag at 1:04 PM | Comments (0)

October 9, 2006

The Real World Series of Poker

The wildman of Pyongyang has called the wildman of Washington. Now we'll see if we were bluffing. Which possibility is scarier? I don't know. If we go all in, well, I don't have to tell anyone what that likely means. If we don't, I think this is going to be one of those moments such as when the Japanese walked out of the League of Nations.

Posted by dag at 2:20 PM | Comments (0)

October 6, 2006

Michelle Versus You Tube

I'm not sure how many of you are aware of this, but Michelle Malkin and other conservative pundits have entered into a kind of low-level conflict with You Tube (for instance, see here). Essentially, if I read the situation correctly, the basic handle is this: You Tube has been removing anti-Jihadist videos made by conservatives like Malkin.

I really don't care for Michelle Malkin. This is not an ideological impulse: we apparently share many of the same political views. Instead, my problem with her is really more intellectual: her thinking is, more often than not, simplistic and slip-shod. She would seem to me to be an example of the old adage about a broken watch being right twice per day.

Of course, all of this hand-wringing on my part may be rather beside the point: her objective is likely not so much to inform public discourse as to place herself at the center of it.

And the notion, advanced by some, that You Tube's actions are censorship is ridiculous. You Tube is a private entity. If their actions represent censorship in any meaningful sense then Malkin would have the right, for instance, to space on any given private billboard.

At the same time, I am disgusted by You Tube's choices and, as another private entity, henceforth will not be involved with it in any way. There are apparently flattering (or at least self-congratulatory) video portrayals of Jihadist violence on You Tube. These portray the truly offensive acts (often against our troops in Iraq) of a fundamentally reactionary, medieval and counterproductive group of people. Nothing has been done about such material. That You Tube is comfortable with their crap (as opposed to Malkin's stuff, which is simply stupid and self-promotional in nature) is really odd.

There are two possible explanations for this. First, the You Tube team may sympathize with these "Iraqi Minutemen". I seriously doubt this. By way of evidence from one end of the political spectrum, I have many left-loopy-lib friends and I can say with complete confidence that they do not share Michael Moore's idiotic nihilism. Their argument with conservatives like me is more about how to deal with the Jihadists. I have never sensed that my liberal friends, however liberal and anti-Bush, have any sympathy for Zarqawi and the gang (indeed, if you are liberal and have paid any attention to what the Jihadists want, ideological consistency demands that you reject their goals and world-view). And it would be inconceivable that those with a conservative agenda would act against Malkin's videos (except if, possibly, they recognized her for the intellectual embarassment to conservatism that she is).

I think the second possibility is more likely: we are dealing with old fashioned cowardice. It is much less risky (in a literal, physical sense) to act against the anti-Jihadists than the Jihadists. If you don't believe me, ask a certain Danish newspaper (however, no one that promotes herself as much as Malkin does could entertain any serious thoughts of committing a martyrdom operation against those who dislike her). This cowardice is not something I can abide: the You Tube team apparently will not stand up for the principals that made You Tube possible.

So go ahead, You Tube: selectively remove Malkin's stuff. That's your right. And here's one of mine: to turn my back on you.

Posted by dag at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2006

The Hen Hasn't Cackled Yet, But...

Ned Lamont is trailing Joe Lieberman in Conneticut. It is true that, first, Conneticut is just one state and, second, Lieberman has some name-brand advantages over Lamont (though I think this point can easily be stretched too far: the unusual Democratic primary situation in Conneticut gave Lamont an extraordinary amount of visibility and he beat Lieberman in that primary). But still, I am forced to wonder: is this a potential harbinger of trouble for the Democrats in coming the coming two elections ('06 and '08)? Is the anti-war wing of their party overplaying their hand?

Posted by dag at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2006

Not with a bang...

This is how our freedom is ending...with a whimper. Who are these people to tell us what we can and can't eat? I think Bloomberg secretly wants to re-name New York City "Singapore".

Update: I almost forgot to mention this interesting study about the link between demographics and party loyalty.

Posted by dag at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

Do you have a visor????

A little something to get your morning going: a hilarious Bush impersonator.

I think his Clinton impersonation is at least as good.

Posted by dag at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2006

The Pestilence

The last two days have been sort of crappy. On Sunday I was working on my lawn when I suddenly felt some movement along my left leg. I looked down to see that I had stepped on a fire-ant mound and the little fuckers were all over my foot (unfortunately, I had elected to wear sandals). Twenty four hours later my foot had swollen up like a balloon. Fortunately, it's starting to subside.

Interestingly, I had to make three (three!) applications of ant poison to kill them. At that point, I knew well that a.) I had been stung many times on the foot and b.) I was going to pay dearly for a.). I decided that if the third application of poison didn't do the trick (thank god it did), that part of the lawn be damned: I was going to get my shotgun, make a desert and call it peace.

Posted by dag at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2006

The Jury is In

Yesterday's Panther's/Vikings game turned on the most idiotic play in the history of the game. I swear, I have never seen a more stunning miscarriage of football.

Posted by dag at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2006

Five Years

It's really hard to believe that five years have passed since September 11, 2001. It's difficult to comprehend all that has transpired in the time since then, for both our society and my small corner of it. For the vast majority of Americans, I think that those hijacked planes were like cold and jagged scalpels cutting into our collective cocoon. The Nineties were an age of hope, unprecedented prosperity and, I think it is safe to say, a generally strong undercurrent of confidence and self-satisfaction. The zeitgeist of the Nineties ended on 9/11.

What an idyllic little world we had built for oursevles as of September 10, 2001. Still, it would be too simple, and unfair, to characterize the September 11 attacks, to borrow Donald Kagan's terms for the Peloponnesian War, as "a tragic event, a great turning point in history, the end of an era of progress, prosperity, confidence and hope, and the beginning of a darker time": to a significant extent the Clinton era was one in which we, as a society, collectively drank the Kool Aid.

Beyond America's shores, the intensifying smoke from a distant fire was increasingly clear to all who cared to look carefully. I can remember travelling to China in the summer of 2001 amidst all kinds of hints of bad craziness-the sense that something was going to happen-stemming from travel advisories, the underlying vibe, my own gut, etc. The world we tried to make with the end of the Cold War had, in fact, been steadily unravelling for some time.

In other words, looking back on the decade that preceded September 10, 2001, we should have seen that something was indeed coming. Stepping out on a limb (its always easy to talk about what we should have seen once history has shown her cards), what do I see looking back on the last 5 years? What do I see in my nation and the rest of the world that could really drive the next 5 or 10 years?

Well, here are some random thoughts from a madman:

1. Before the rest of the world, we are a Roman society without Roman values. That is perhaps the worst thing you can be. In foreign policy terms, it would be better to be French than what we are.

2. The political leadership of Western societies is really quite weak, and that reflects deeply divided but also apathetic elecorates. In the US we have resorted to war, whatever the arguments against it, because ordinary political channels no longer seem to be able to meaningfully and forcefully address anything. And this isn't just about Iraq: both the UN and our Western allies eroded their credibility throughout the Nineties in places like the Balkans. Negotiations became an endless cul-de-sac.

3. Within America, the War on Terror has allowed us to miss the story of the decade on the domestic front: the Fed has done a terrible job regulating the monetary supply. Its' strategy has essentially led us from one potentially devastating financial bubble to another.

4. Similarly, global warming is a serious challenge, but the absence of any of our mainstream political actors from the debate (they were too busy talking about security) has allowed public discourse on the subject to be framed by a bunch of people who never ran for sheriff, with predictable results.

5. The cyber-balkanization of America continues apace, making any kind of real public discussion harder and harder.

6. They never should have cancelled Frasier, Seinfeld or Friends. Staleness, warts, etc. and all, they were vastly superior to what dominates the network landscape today. I'm not sure exactly how this will influence geopolitics, but I am sure that it will.

Posted by dag at 1:58 PM | Comments (0)

September 5, 2006

Double Happiness

Today's NY Times has an interesting article about American couples recruiting au pairs from China. And why are they doing this? They want their children to learn more about Chinese culture, and learn Mandarin in a more natural fashion, because they believe that in China lies the economic destiny of the world.

Learning about another culture is admirable enough (though the "glass half empty" view would be that children raised in two cultures face a kind of double jeopardy: most cultures are as much prison as palace). Still, I see clouds around this silver lining:

1. These people are often making substantive decisions for their children on little evidence. To quote the article:

“I’ve never been to China,” said Ms. Friend, a single mother who is retired.

She added that she considered China central to the future of global economics, saying, “I think China will rule the banking world in my children’s lifetime, and I want them to be able to participate in that if they want to.”

So what lesson will her kids be absorbing? To make decisions without doing any homework?

If Ms. Friend had visited China (as I have, and many times) she would see that the clean narrative of an emergent hyperpower becomes considerably more complex on the ground. And China's future is far from assured. Have any of these parents looked into the implications of the graying of China, for example?

I bet these people would have had their kids learning Japanese in the Eighties, and Russian in the Fifties (and, in terms of their motivation for doing so, wasted their own and their kids time).

2. These Chinese girls might be dangerous. At the bottom of the article one of them explains:

As for American cooking, she foresees it as a challenge.

“I don’t hate it but I don’t like it,” she offered. “I had pizza yesterday. It’s better at home.”

I've had pizza in China: you don't want a monster like this around your kids. Trust me.

Posted by dag at 2:35 PM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2006

When the Pack No Longer Followed Rome

Today's NY Time has an editorial that amply illustrates why we are a Rome in decline. The weak minded approach to dog, and frankly human, relations, advocated in the author's critique of Millan's approach epitomizes the degree to which our God's have grown weak, lazy and dishonest. I have seen this ascendant approach on display in my recent work on the architectural committee. This is an age where honesty, fidelity to agreements and strength are not valued. Weakness, evasion, excuses, endeless compromise with, and understanding for, laziness and dishonesty are
instead valued far higher.

Is this the age of our Twelfth Eagle?

Posted by dag at 4:58 PM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2006

A Fields Medalist's (Whether He Accepts It or Not) Thoughts on Academia

“It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens,” he said. “It is people like me who are isolated.”

-Grigory Perelman

Posted by dag at 7:31 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2006

Israel's Worst Crime

For all of the recriminations within Israel and condemnation of her throughout the world, I think that most commentators have missed perhaps Israel's greatest crime in launching such an ill-conceived war: she has helped bring a new boy band into the world.

In light of this ghastly development (remember, world culture barely survived N'Sync), Israel should in the future consider the possible unintended consequences of war before pursuing one.

It almost makes me want to support Hezbollah instead of Israel.

Almost.

Posted by dag at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2006

Meanwhile, Down in Crawford

a little light reading for George....

This was more or less to the point as well.

Posted by dag at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2006

The March to a Warmer World: Where You Sit Is Where You Stand

Today's Washington Post has an excellent editorial by Cass Sunstein that drives home a point I have been trying to make for years to friends exasperated by the failure of the United States to do more to curb her emissions: countries like the US have little incentive to join international agreements such as the Kyoto Treaty because they gain little by curbing emissions in the face of potentially high abatement costs.* Sunstein correctly observes that what is true of the US is doubly so for China (and the list of nations that would lose by joining, for instance, the Kyoto Treaty is not limited to the US and China).

Unfortunately, Sunstein's only suggestions for remedying the situation rest on global moral suasion, which is unlikely to work. (When has that ever convinced a nation to act against its own strategic or economic interest?) Moreover, Sunstein mentions the possibility that global warming could lead to large and catastrophic discrete climactic events, but fails to mention one of the most feared (because the mechanisms that would drive it seem relatively straightforward) possibilities: that global warming will shut down certain ocean-based thermal conveyor belts (such as the Gulf Stream). My understanding is that it is Europe that would be most vulnerable to such a development. (Can we say Ice Age, anyone?)

These two considerations of course suggest a third possibility for breaking the global abatement negotiations logjam: explicit concessions or transfers from Europe that might make doing something about the problem worthwhile to the US and China. And this seems only fair (in the sense of fairness that actually does have meaning between sovereign nations that really cannot be compelled to anything against their will): Europe should bear some of the costs of adjustments on the part of the US that benefit Europe far more than they do the US.

Many of the activists agitating for greater US (and, soon, Chinese) commitment to global emissions abatement have taken an incredibly naive approach to both nations: George Bush was not elected by, and ultimately is not bound to answer to, the "global community". He is the President of the US and must answer to its voters.

And it should seem clear that bypassing Bush to appeal directly to the US public is unlikely to work either: despite the effective loss of New Orleans (which should have served politically as a symbol of the hazards of global warming, even if there is some reason to doubt scientifically that its fate really was determined by global warming), there has been little effective change in voter commitment to act on this issue. In fact, in light of the fate of New Orleans, it does not seem unreasonable to conclude that the broad base of American voters are pretty calculating on this issue. Indeed, the lack of greater outrage over the slow pace of re-construction perhaps reveals just how calculating: I think that many Americans, reasoning that there is no reason to re-build low lying areas that are vulnerable to major storms and anyway will likley be claimed by rising seas in a warming world, have effectively written off greater New Orleans. It's just a matter of cost-benefit analysis. So too with the Kyoto Treaty.

If you want real movement by the US on this issue, offer us a deal.

*Two other problems in terms of genuine commitment not mentioned in Sunstein's article are nations that signed the Kyoto treay because poor macroeconomic performance made it relatively easy to meet its demands for now (Japan might be an example) and hence have not really faced a meaningful test of their true commitment and position and, second, nations that signed in conciously bad faith (maybe Russia) or are unlikely to show the willpower to meet their commitments (perhaps Spain).

Posted by dag at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2006

Now I've Heard Everything...Part MCCXXIX

Today I deleated a bunch of spam. I am always gratified by the windows that spam opens for me. (Well, how else would I know "Louis Vuitton Handbags Can be Yours for 100% Off", "Erections are Still Possible", or that "Times are Tough. Don't Pray for Retail Software"?)

However, a phrase in the subject line of one of them really caught my eye. It included the term "Braille Playboy". Never one to give up an opportunity to do some basic science, I decided to pursue this and learned...that there really is a braille Playboy.

It seems to me that a braille Playboy would represent a real form of cruel and unusual torture. And what is the market here? You figure that maybe 500,000 to 1,000,000 American men might be blind. Following trends for men in general, only 1 in 250,000 of those blind men might be interested in Playboy for the interview with Bill Moyers and not Miss April's, ummm, assets.

These the the logs of your captain here on the USS Clueless. Over and out.

Posted by dag at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

August 8, 2006

Tea party...playah

Via the Good Rabbi, this is the funniest rap spoof I've seen in some time:

Posted by dag at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)

August 6, 2006

Protect your memories

The other day I was surfing around on google looking for a newspaper article that had mentioned some statistic I wanted to use in an NIH grant application that I am writing. As I scanned the results, reading the small sample of text google always places below the link, a little light clicked on in my brain.

About an hour later, in the midst of something completely unrelated, it occurred to me that a name I had seen in one of the google blurbs matched that of a girl I knew growing up. Curious (the name isn't exactly Jane Smith, but neither is it inconceivable that someone else had the same one), I searched through my history, and found the link.

It was to a newspaper article about a recognition dinner for a drug and alchohol re-habilitation center in an upstate NY city at which this person spoke. She is a newly recovered addict. The age seemed dead-on.

The city, and girl, shall go un-named: despite the fact that this girl's name is in the article, and hence her particulars are in the public record, I would prefer not to use her full name, for a variety of reasons. If you are reading this and knew the two of us once upon a time, please do not leave her full name in comments. But for those of you from the old days who do visit my site from time to time, I am writing of Amy I. (or Aimi, Aimee, as I learned it was spelled in old yearbooks later that afternoon). (Check the yearbooks and it should be clear who I am talking about. She was a year younger than me and would have been in the class of 1991.)

Later that night, I asked my brother Tim (who stayed in the general area (though next week he will be joining me in Dixie) and hence is a little better connected to people from the daze) if he had heard anything about her. He had, though it had been at least a decade since he had heard any more of her. What he had heard corraborated key details in the article, making it almost certain that this was the same person I knew long ago.

What I learned from my brother and this article really bothered me. She became a heroin addict by the time she was around 21 (I was 22 at that point, and obviously locked into an entirely different story). She spent 11 years addicted to heroin. While she has, or had as of September, 2005, kicked the habit, I could not help but to feel a tremendous sense of loss.

And I can't really explain why. I certainly knew her, probably hung around with her once or twice, and would consider myself to have parted with her on good terms. But no more than that.

Maybe its because the person I remember was such a pretty and smart girl. Maybe its because thinking about what happened to her is like a violation, however peripheral, of my memories of a time in my life that I have probably embellished to some degree or another, perhaps because it is a safe place to return to now and again as an adult.

How did this person, who I remember as so smart, and full of promise, live this life?

I know that all of us have a tendency, it's a natural defense mechanism I suppose, to lock people into roles, identities, images, etc., with which we are comfortable and familiar.

That's a big part of the tragedy when a child dies. All things must die. But when a child dies their identity, the person they would have become, is annihilated, not only physically but also in the eyes of those who loved them and would have watched them grow.

They will never be able to express themselves beyond the parameters of a child, to become a fully articulated person. And those who survive them are not instinctively driven to try by dint of the imagination to flesh that person in. Our conception of them is more or less locked forever in time and place as we knew them then: a small child.

Thinking about Amy also led me to remember a little girl named Briana, the daughter of friends of my parents, who died of a brain tumor when I was a young teenager. It occurred to me that she would be in her mid to late Twenties today, had she lived. But she is trapped in my mind as a little girl whose dying desire was for a Cabbage Patch kid.

The opposite is going on with Amy, I think: confronted with the adult, I am trying to lock out the person she became and reinforce my memory of the comparatively pristine girl.

Which is not to judge: I didn't know Amy that well and don't really know what led her down the path she followed. And it goes without saying that I've made a lot mistakes myself. Certainly since the time when I did know her I have learned that, if you are not careful, it is so easy to slip out of this life. If I saw Amy again, maybe I'd tell her about one of the other important things I've learned since then: that beyond a certain point, regret is a useless emotion.

I guess if there is any moral to this story, it is to protect your memories.

Thomas Wolfe was probably right.

Posted by dag at 4:46 PM | Comments (3)

June 28, 2006

Backstory

Check out the Good Rabbi's blog, where he is following a potentially interesting story about trouble at Daily Kos.

Posted by dag at 10:58 PM

June 16, 2006

Death Among the Forgotten Minority

I forgot to mention it, but Slate had a funny article yesterday about how the super rich die. Notice that, despite having the means to procure such a death, none of those mentioned died by drowning in a swimming pool filled with DRC Richebourg.

I guess that proves that money can't buy good taste.

Or something to that effect.

Posted by dag at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2006

"What kind of people loot dirt?"

George Will has offered perhaps the best obit for Zarqawi I've yet seen. What a strange hybrid of the modern and medieval worlds was that man. He made very effective use of the possibilities offered by modern media technology. And navigated the threat posed by modern military technology equally well: it might not be an exaggeration to say that in this sense Zarqawi was the most saavy prey the US military has ever pursued. No cheap bin Laden "I'm gonna hunker down in some cave last inhabited by Australopithecus" out: Zarqawi lived large and flambotantly, travelling in our midst throughout the Sunni triangle and beyond. Indeed, in his capacity to evade a sophisticated, technogically advanced dragnet while remaining an active terrorist, he exceeded even "The Engineer". All the predator drones in the world could not, at least for a time, provide an answer to his crude car bombs or the dull knives with which he beheaded people because he was always two clever steps ahead of our gizmos and toys. And yet all of this in the service of a nihilistic, tribal and medieval zero-sum-game outlook. Had we in the West not decided at some point at least to try to outgrow this outlook (Zarqawi is both a creature from a contemporary (in the sense that it is happening in the midst of the modern world) reality we cannot understand and an echo of who we once were), we would still be confronted with the meager prospects offered by life in the 11th century. And that is all Zarqawi can offer Iraq at the end of the day.

Posted by dag at 3:33 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2006

O Albany

This morning the Good Rabbi, one of the great pyromaniacs of the American century (yes, yes: essentially stealing from the Good Doctor's eulogy for George Plimpton) and fellow former resident of Albany, NY, sent me an article about the flight of young people from upstate New York. As I researched this post, I noticed that this is the second most emailed story in the NY Times right now: it matters to many people. I am part of the great mass of young people, now in their twenties and thirties, who grew up in upstate New York in the Seventies and Eighties but have now left for more promising shores. I will be the first to admit that I have not done the best job keeping up with grade and high school classmates, but my informal understanding through the grapevine is that most of them have left. Even more ominously, it appears that higher educational status appears to be a positive predictor of leaving (though this is casual empiricism...oh no, I'd never engage in that). From what I have seen, it seems as if most left for the South. A big cohort lives in the DC area, still others actually live somewhere in this near mythical state of Tarheelandia, while still others have moved even farther into the South. Florida seems popular (which is only natural: we didn't read Carl Hiassen's stuff in high school lit classes in Upstate New York in the Seventies and Eighties, and hence could never really have understood what we were getting ourselves into by moving to Florida).

Some parts of upstate have certainly fared worse than others. In terms of youth flight, it seems as if the last decade was more brutal where my wife grew up, in one of those ethnic, big hair, yes-we-pre-supposed-Wayne's-World, the world is Kodak and Kodak is the world (the kind of place where people were saying "Micro...what was that...soft? Apple?!? Do you mean the fruit?" as recently as 14 months ago) suburban towns that, in cooperation with the lake, have Rochester well nigh surrounded.

Anyway, when you talk to former Upstaters now living in Dixie, they invariably offer some justification based on the brutal winters (which we can juxtapose against the mild, enjoyable summers here in the South) and then talk a bit about job opportunities. I don't really buy the weather argument, unless these guys really have turned into a bunch of Nancys since their days two decades or more ago of playing the man's game (hockey, for you philistines) on a thousand frozen ponds in Upstate.

The real reason people left, lets face it, was no jobs: if the people can't keep steaks in the fridge, you can't keep the people in your community. I blame Mario Cuomo and his ilk: he was the grand pooh-bah when I was growing up. The ultimate Cadillac liberal, he taxed and regulated Upstate New York to death, sucking out its entrpreneurial chi in the process. I think the emotional side of the harsh feelings the adult me has toward economic liberals (liberal in the 1975, not 1875, sense, of course) comes from the part of me that grew up in Upstate New York in the Cuomo era and then watched as the saga played out afterwards: those people, in the misguided (and frankly, to a degree, selfish..yes, selfish, but I'll elaborate later) pursuit of their egalitarian utopia, destroyed the place where I grew up.* To me, the so-called progressives represent a potential disaster in the making: put their ideas into play anywhere in the US, and they'll create another New York. Tacitus once wrote of the Roman conquest of Carthage "they made a desert, and called it peace". When I think about the liberal/"progressive" (because that is all that progressive economic policy ideas are: a cheap, budget renta repackaging of tired leftist policy proposals that are in no sense new or "progressive", and have failed everywhere that they have been taken seriously), I'm moved to paraphrase: they made a desert, and called it justice.

There are few or no little boys on those hockey ponds these days, I'm told.

But you can forward their parents mail to Fairfax County, Virgina.

* Yes, yes: NY has had a Republican governor for a main era now. But he inherited an awesomely over-powerful state government from Cuomo and then went on to succeed in proving only that the Romans were right: absolute power does corrupt absolutely. There's your legacy, Governor Pataki.

Posted by dag at 10:11 AM | Comments (1)

June 13, 2006

Quoting Adolf

CNN has an article online about the furore over yearbook photos accompanied by quotes from Adolf Hitler. The quotes used were:

1. "Strength lies not in defense, but in attack."

2. "The great masses of people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

The quotes themselves are comparatively innocuous, so one must presume that their source is the reason for the uproar. There is even talk of disciplinary action against the students. Leaving aside my own feelings about Hitler (though, to avoid having anyone think that what I am about to say represents some sort of closet endoresement of him or his policies, let me just summarize them as follows: I am satisfied with the conclusion of WWII), what kind of a civics lesson is this? You have a right to free speech...just don't trample anyone's sensibilities?

Posted by dag at 1:55 PM | Comments (4)

June 12, 2006

Quote of the Day

"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."
-- J. Edgar Hoover

Posted by dag at 6:33 PM | Comments (0)

Off to a great start

Posted by dag at 1:12 PM | Comments (0)

June 9, 2006

We Want 'Em Back

Ok, with this post I'm headed out on a limb in two ways:
1. I am lifting the story below from the NY Times (I couldn't get the backdoor to the Time to work for this one).
2. I am going to be a heavy about something, breaking my rule for the new Aging Disgracefully.

Here is the story:

Zarqawi's Family 'Celebrates' and Asks for His Body Back
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

ZARQA, Jordan, June 9 — There were no tears today, no somber remembrances, just a few angry speeches declaring that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was selected by God to fight for Islam, but also one request: His family would like his body returned so it can be buried in the family plot here.

Small children ran around the dusty streets shouting "Infidels deserve to die," and "He's a hero, a martyr," as men gathered beneath a tent and women met inside a small house during the azza, or traditional gathering that takes place after a death.

Mr. Zarqawi's brothers and sisters insisted this was not a mourning ceremony, but a celebration for a loved one they deeply admired. "Welcome to the celebration of the martyr, the hero, Abu Musab Zarqawi," read a hand painted banner hanging from the tent set up for men who came to pay their respects.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may have been the most wanted terrorist in Iraq — a man said to have personally decapitated two men, held responsible for killing thousands of Iraqis and taking credit for sending suicide bombers into three hotels in Amman, Jordan.

But here in Zarqa he was the hometown boy, the local hero who went off into the world and made his family and neighbors proud — at least that is what people were saying as they came to offer their respects at the memorial tent.

Mr. Zarqawi's older brother, Sael Fadal el-Khalailah, left his place greeting visitors to introduce himself and to ask that his family's wishes be conveyed to the Americans. He asked an English-speaking friend to translate: "They want the body back," the friend said, as Mr. Khalailah invited a visitor to take a seat beneath the tent. "They are not sad." the friend continued. "He fought and then he was killed. Our belief is he is going to paradise. He was a fighter and he was fighting against those he believes were his enemies."

Jordanian officials seemed determined not to give the Zarqa crowd a platform to spread their vision of reality. Police officers patrolled the area and blocked some journalists from broadcasting the views of the family members.

For that reason it seemed unlikely the authorities would ever allow his body to be buried in Zarqa, where it might become a pilgrimage site for like-minded people.

But the family was determined to try to retrieve him.

"We are going to ask to have his body and bury him here," said one of Mr. Zarqawi's sisters, Intissar. "They probably won't agree to this because he is not liked by them. They see him as a symbol for terrorism, as a criminal, but they are the enemies of religion."

The tent went up early this morning on the street opposite Mr. Zarqawi's family home, beneath barren desert cliffs at the edge of Zarqa, a city of about three quarters of a million people. At sunset, his two brothers, along with some cousins sat on plastic chairs greeting a steady stream of friends and relatives in a ritual that typically lasts three days.

Occasionally, someone would get up and give a speech.

"God is the one who chooses these martyrs, said Muhammad Abu Faris, who identified himself as a member of the Jordanian Parliament and the Islamic Participation Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. He drove up in an older red Mercedes Benz, dressed in traditional while robes, and in a loud, angry voice said: "There is no security for us and no path or way for us to liberate our land in Afghanistan, in Palestine, in Iraq — except with blood."

The family members, cousins and brothers, stood up every time people arrived. The men kissed three times, once on one cheek, twice on the second, and then took their seats. One relative, Khalid, dressed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt served small cups of Arabic coffee to the guests. Young boys poured sweetened fruit juice from a large cooler.

"We would like his body," Khalid said. "If we do not receive him, that is God's will."

In this ultrareligious corner of Zarqa, where men boast of having fought in Afghanistan, the women gathered across the street, in the walled-in courtyard of the Zarqawi family home. Inside the small living room of the house, women were praying and glorifying the self-declared leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

"May God make the Muslims victorious — Amen," the women recited together.

"May God make the Muslims prosper —- Amen," they chanted.

Mr. Zarqawi's sister, Intissar, 35, sat on a step, inside the house.

"We are happy and we are sad," she said. "We are sad that he left us, but we are happy because he became a martyr."

The family actually found comfort in the photograph of Mr. Zarqawi after he died, his sister said, because it appeared as if "his face was illuminated, as if he was alive."

But there was another reason his sister said she found solace in his death, and she offered what was repeated independently by many others who were there: "God sent Abu Musab, and he will send others."

The men who filed into the tent and the women in the courtyard were for the most part quiet: a few smoked cigarettes, while others ate the honey- soaked pastry that was passed around.

But the children were wild — and there were many — dashing in the streets, under the tent, and in and out of the courtyard where the women gathered, throwing rocks and chanting.

"We will seek revenge for Abu Musab Zarqawi and we will continue on the same path that was laid out by our brother Osama bin Laden," declared Moath Muhammad, 10, who said that his father met Mr. Zarqawi training in Afghanistan.

The adults smiled, and Mr. Zarqawi's brother, Sael, winked as children marched through the street pumping their fists in the air shouting, "The curse, America!" and "Zarqawi, Zarqawi!"

Are these people out of their minds? America, we curse you, the world order your stand for, you are the enemies of God, you are Zionist crusaders...Oh, and we'd like the body back.

What planet do they live on?

Is it time for us to get Roman with these people who stand for this absurd, nihilistic, medieval vision, in the process tuning them in to the realities of the modern world?

I have a suggestion about how to start: hand his body over to the people in the Shiite neighborhoods where he committed his worst atrocities. Show the people where Zarqawi came from that when you behave the way he did, you don't get a martyr's burial at a gravesite that will become a shrine.

You get dragged through the streets like a dog...

Some may find this harsh, but people like Zarqawi have hijacked Iraq's future at enormous cost to her people. When confronted with such a challenge to progress (admittedly, as they defined it), the Romans began crucifixions and other similar measures. Do you know why?

Because it get's through to people like Zarqawi and his family.

Posted by dag at 9:23 PM | Comments (0)

June 1, 2006

Broken Glass

The NY Times has an interesting article about Dale Chihuly's lawsuit against two other artists for copying his work. I'd love to get my hands on some of the court documents, if only to get a fascinating inside look at the inner workings of a celebrity mass production artist's operation. The suit sounds pretty reckless however: he may not win (the precedents are mixed at best), and even if he does the damage to his reputation from an open court fight will likely outweigh any gains from that win.

Posted by dag at 11:05 AM | Comments (1)

May 28, 2006

Fighting a Rising Tide

Ever wonder how rising sea levels might affect property values in your area? Well, wonder no more.

The key, I guess, is to aim in all of your personal consumption decisions for an individual contribution to greenhouse gases commensurate with exactly that amount of global warming that will make your house beachfront property. I'm sure that Kenneth Arrow, or a young Arrow-wannabe, would have a lot to say about the bizarre equilibrium outcomes this might yield.

Posted by dag at 3:03 PM | Comments (2)

May 23, 2006

The Great Ones

I'm trying to put together a serious list of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. In particular, I am trying to get my own strange sort of handle on the cream of that crop whose dramatic arc (or at least the public phase of their dramatic arc) occurred mainly in that weird, exciting and mean century (as opposed to people like me, who still actively plague mankind in the 21st century). My first approximation to such a list (in alphabetical order):

Ansel Adams
Woody Allen (Not dead, but Annie Hall and other classics belong to the 20th century)
Fatty Arbuckle
Arthur Ashe
James Beard
John Belushi
Herb Brooks (and if you had to look to see who he was, I hereby revoke your American citizenship)
Johnny Cash
The Collyer Brothers (for their contribution to 20th century urban weirdness)
Adrian Cronauer
John Dillinger
John Moses Browning (A holdover from the 19th century, his guns help define the 20th; I swear by his m1911 design)
Truman Capote
Julia Child
John Coltrane
John Denver (he wrote the soundtrack for the Aspen ski scene in the Seventies)
Charles and Ray Eames
Dale Earnhardt (Hey, he defined America for a whole sub-set of our population)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Stephen Jay Gould
Spalding Gray
Shizuo Kakutani (Not quite American, he nonethless wiggled his way into our hearts by limning a fixed-point theorem or two)
Andy Kaufman
Donald Knuth
Cosmo Kramer
Dean Martin
William Maxwell Gaines (founder of Mad magazine)
Hugh Hefner
Patricia Highsmith
The entire 1972-73 New York Knicks
Larry, Darryl and Darryl (I couldn't leave them off after including Bob Newhart)
Pistol Pete Maravich
Dean Martin
Steve McQueen (The greatest Steve of all.)
Robert Mondavi (who will never actually die, but nonetheless must be assigned to some century)
Bob Newhart
Jack Nicklaus
George Patton
George Plimpton
Oscar Robertson
Paul Simon
Dean Smith
Hunter Thompson
John Wooden
Frank Lloyd Wright

Thoughts?

Posted by dag at 7:25 PM | Comments (1)

Alerting all readers to another rant in progress

While I'm ranting, let me direct my readers to the Good Rabbi's Temple, where he is lettin' it rip on one of my other favorite rant subjects: eminent domain.

Oh, and while I'm at it, congrats to him for graduating from culinary school. He is now a full fledged chef, and I can tell you that before he went to school he made a mean cedar smoked salmon with chutney-walnut glaze on a bed of marijuana infused couscous, so I can't imagine how good he must be now. He is one of my oldest friends, and certainly one of the greatest Catholic Jews, and dedicated pyromaniacs, of the American century (but only, of course, in the best Led Zeppelin generation-meets-the Rat Pack sense). You are truly living the Miller Hi-Life, Rabbi.

Posted by dag at 7:14 PM | Comments (0)

The Decline and Fall of Our Very Last Freedoms

Today's rant is going to be concerned with a topic I have addressed before: the sustained assault on our liberties brought on by public health crusaders, who think they know best and need to decide which risks we can take. Today's will be the
"what are they doing to my beloved salami?" edition. Basically, public health authorities are destroying a beautiful tradition of Italian cured meat that extends back at least to pre-Roman times.

I think that very early on, sometime in the Upton Sinclair reaches of the time fog, the idea got started that the goal of public health policy should be to protect, rather than inform, people about health risks around them. In other words, we were not viewed as responsible adults confronted with possibly inadequate information with which to make decisions, but instead as children who needed a nanny state to eliminate risk from our lives.

Sometimes, of course, this might be appropriate. For instance, individuals can engage in behavior that creates epidemic risk for others. In this case the state steps in appropriately: part of having a society where people really do have some freedom of choice is about making sure that one person's decisions do not intrude on others. In other words, we need referees in the game of life.

This is why I have generally been able to accept indoor smoking bans but not outdoor ones (the scientific evidence for a credible second hand smoke threat is far greater indoors than outdoors), although even this has its limits. Why shouldn't people be allowed to select to patronize bars where smoking occurs (in other words, allow bars pursuing various market niches to decide whether to allow smoking as opposed to banning it in all of them, as some countries and municipalities here have done)? The usual counter-argument I hear is that it places bar staff at risk on the job. This is a silly position: no one is forcing you to work in a bar and lots of occupations involve unusual risks. Why not never use our special forces in an actual battle, on the grounds that getting shot at is risky? The truth is that people select themselves into the special forces (no one is ever forced to join; on the contrary, it is hard enough to get in even when you want to do so) and bar staffs. Let them do so.

But in any case, how can one argue that there is some sort of public externality at stake with salami? The most I can possibly do is get myself sick.

I obviously cannot remember Upton Sinclair's era. But in my own life, the major turning point that led me on my own personal journey to this sorry point began in the Seventies around the time that New York's health authorities went after Peking duck as traditionally made. I remember my father's outrage at the time. I am a goddam adult, he reasoned, and can decide for myself what is a reasonable level of risk for myself. Moreover, if we let them take Peking duck on this principal, where will it stop? (Though, to be sure, by the time you go after something as exquisite as Peking duck we have moved past fat and are beginning to lose marrow.) The point is that this approach to public policy is killing us softly as a free society.

Life is risky. There is no question about that. In a free society, sovereign adults should be able to make their own value judgments about risk. If there is any scope for the state at all, it is only in cases where those decisions intrude on others.

And in any case risk is part of what makes us alive. Without risk, this whole strange spectacle is more like a long sleep, followed by the mere formality of death. In that sense, even more is at stake than liberty.

Posted by dag at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

May 17, 2006

Siskel & Ebert

Ever wonder what the dynamic duo was like off screen? These out-takes

clip 1
clip 2
clip 3

shed some light on this essential question that plaugues all of mankind.

Posted by dag at 6:59 AM | Comments (1)

May 15, 2006

Toward a New Theory of American History

Some time ago I watched an interesting panel discussion regarding the roots of Mexico's resentment of the U.S., including some coverage of what part of that resentment was really legitimate and what part really speaks to a need for reflection on the part of Mexico. One of the speakers, an expert on the Mexican-American war, suggested that some of Mexican bitterness regarding the lop-sided defeat in that war is misplaced: on a fundamental level the Mexicans had all the chances we did, and were simply beaten by an army superior to their own from the highest to lowest ranks. Unsurprisingly, this quickly devolved into a discussion about culture, mis-placed incentives, etc.

Then, more recently, I read Victor Hanson's Carnage and Culture : Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, where he essentially argues that the US military's amazing historical perfomance is simply the latest in a long tradition of Western superiority in that stangest of enterprises, war, which requires at the same time corporate dscipline and order and, for maximum effectivness, soldiers who are highly empowered killing machines ready, willing and able to show initiative at key moments.

Well, after than less than 24 hours in Williamsburg, Virginia for a conference, I have a new theory of American military dominance: we were motivated to join this Greco-Roman tradition of military excellence because the original areas of settlment, the Virginia tidewater country and the Plymouth area (which I have visited earlier), are as boring as ass, as they say. The basic idea runs like this: the early settlers realized very quickly that where they lived was so boring that the thought of living there for the rest of time led to only two possible options, mainly killing themselves or becoming effective enough killers to take some other, more exciting, place by force.

I have found absolutely nothing to do around here in the 21st century. If I had had to live here in the early 16th century, I would have either killed myself or done whatever it took to capture places like the future site of Las Vegas.

By this logic, the Mexicans started out with a crushing disadvantage: they already controlled Tijuana, and so were simply not as hungry for more exciting territory.

Posted by dag at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

May 3, 2006

The Lego Gospels

Never mind that Gospel of Judas, when are they going to have a National Geographic show about the Brick Testament???

Posted by dag at 7:41 PM | Comments (0)

A few more thoughts on the "Day without Immigrants"

Some quick thoughts:

1. Based on the worst sort of casual empiricism (I would never do that...), it seems as if the greatest economic impact of the "Day Without Immigrants" was felt in the immigrant community itself. I'm actually rather struck by how little impact it had. And there is a reason for that. In most cases illegal immigrants would be paid the bare minimum even if they were legally working in this country: their marginal productivity is low and hence their wages will be low. And the political landscape appears unaltered. The bottom line is that congress members read the polls and know that no matter how loud these protests become, the great American middle is, rightly or wrongly, on the other side of this issue.

2. The righteous indignation in places like the Mexican street regarding this issue is misplaced. What the Mexicans should really be asking themselves is why so many continue to migrate to the US? Getting down to brass tacks, how did they manage to squander the magnificent opportunity that geography, NAFTA and other factors presented to them (there are poor countries in Africa that would no doubt collectively kill to be in Mexico's position)? We certainly have a lot of hard thinking to do on this side of the Rio Grande, but a little self-critical examination by the Mexican body-politic is also in order here.

3. One critical departure point for any negotiations has to be recognition and endorsement, by all sides, of the notion that the US has a fundamental right to border sovereignty: you are not entitled to violate any of our laws, including immigration laws. Once again, this is one of the ways that this issue transcends the narrow topic of immigration: part of what separates us from Mexico in terms of things like long-term economic perfomance is a generally greater adherence to the rule of law.

4. As I write this I am watching some (no doubt illegal) workers doing landscaping across the street. At one point I walked up to them and asked where they are from. After a friendly but challenging exchange, I learned that they are from Mexico and El Salvador. I also could not help but to notice that these men were up to a foot shorter than me (I stand 6'3" tall), with none of them standing taller than maybe 5'7". I have known people of Mexican descent who are now several generations into the great American race to the middle. They did not strike me as below average in size. I suspect that the difference between myself and those worker has little to do with genetics and a lot to do with nutrition. They came here, without doubt, to escape the environment which left them so short. Whether we like it or not, the poverty of places like Mexico and El Salvador is our problem. It's coming soon to a lawn near you.

I was also struck by the fact that few of them would look me in the eye at first. Everything about their body language was deferential. That changed as I tried very hard to make my body language friendly and easy going. But the point is that our treatment of them has programmed them to see us (and frankly by us I probably really mean upper-middle class white people) as their superiors. Their station in life must inevitably breed resentment. If we do not somehow formalize the status of those already here, in some sense endowing them with some legal recourse against mistreatment, we really will be cultivating a potentially dangerous group of individuals among us.

5. Those Mexicans and El Salvadorans across the street are hard workers. Really hard workers.

Posted by dag at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

May 1, 2006

A Word is Born

From today's NYTimes (and, more specifically, an article about the "Day without immigrants"):

"When the rule of law is dictated by a mob of illegal aliens taking to the streets, especially under a foreign flag, then that means the nation is not governed by a rule of law — it is a mobocracy," Jim Gilchrist, a founder of the Minutemen Project, a volunteer group that patrols the United States-Mexico border, said in an interview.

Mobocracy. I'll remember that one.

When I have a bit more time, I will weigh in on this issue. There is a lot that I sympathize with, and take issue with, on both sides of this debate.

I think that, at the end of the day, the basic notion that appears to motivate this series of protests-that we should essentially enfranchise those who came and remain here in violation of our laws-seems silly and perverse. (For those who want to call me on this, the