Oh, If Only There Was a Green Party to Save the Red Planet from Itself!

The (U.K.) Sunday Times reports:

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Money quote:

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

Known life or not, my money's on Martian conservatives and interplanetary corporations being behind it all.

Constant Viewer: A 25 Year Science Fiction Film "Top Three" Mini-Review

Next month marks the 25th anniversary of Blade Runner, one of the best science fiction movies in the past, well, twenty-five years if not the entire history of the genre. And the history of science fiction in film is practically as old as motion pictures, themselves. In fact, you can see the very first science fiction film, Georges Melies’ 105 year old Le Voyage dans la Lune, here. Okay, so the special effects weren’t so hot, but this is well before Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), after all.

So, in fact, was Blade Runner, but it holds up remarkably well compared to many of the sci-fi films that follow. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey and a handful of films in between, Blade Runner holds up today both because its effects were meticulously crafted and intended to contribute to the overall film rather than being its raison d'être, and because it was a serious film intended for serious, intelligent film and science fiction fans. Then, again, given (1) that the motion picture industry is first and foremost an industry and (2) judging from the fan ratings at the iMDB Top 50 Rated Sci-Fi Films, it would have to be said that serious, intelligent science fiction films have been few and far between.

In fact, in Constant Viewer’s highly biased view, the only movie on that list that gives Blade Runner a run for its money in the last 25 years is The Matrix. The only other great science fiction film of the past 25 years that CV can think of didn't even make the list; namely, Dark City. (That CV’s three top science fiction films of the last quarter-century are all dystopias probably says much about CV’s world view, but there it is.)

Much has been written about Blade Runner and The Matrix; little has been written about Dark City. With strong roots in German Expressionism and also considerable homage to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, this 1998 movie by Alex Proyas (The Crow; I, Robot) actually preceded The Matrix by a year, though CV has read comments calling it a Matrix knockoff. In fact, the films are similar in some thematic respects. Both also have dazzling special effects, a genuinely interesting story to tell and a strong cast (notwithstanding CV’s general opinion of Kenau Reeves.) Dark City's great cast includes Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O’Brien and Ian Richardson in a story about a city in perpetual darkness where sinister alien forces manipulate the lives of the city’s denizens. To tell more would be to tell too much; but if you haven’t seen Dark City, and chances are that you haven’t, CV strongly urges you to check it out at the local video store. It isn’t quite up to The Matrix or Blade Runner, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most of the sci-fi films made before or after it.

Science fiction movies have both profited and suffered from the relentless march of both film and real-life technology. It is a commonplace observation that sci-fi says more about whatever present time it is created in than about the future; hence, for example, the endless stream of radiation created monsters in the 50’s and 60’s and the various space alien surrogates for whatever terrestrial menaces we faced or thought we faced back then. Still, it is usually painful to watch even a merely 25 year old vision of the future when the now dated computer consoles and various “futuristic” gizmos and gadgets are trotted out on the screen. (And how was Stanley Kubrick or Arthur C. Clarke supposed to know that Pan Am wouldn’t even make it to 2001, let alone to the moon?)

Like real westerns fifty years ago, space westerns have been both the most popular and the least sustaining sci-fi products of contemporary films. Lucas couldn’t squeeze three decent movies out of his Star Wars franchise because there was barely enough juice in the original movie to justify a single sequel. Special effects aside, it was all white hats and black hats and shoot-em-up at the O.K. Space Corral. So, too, even Spielberg finally had to grow up and give up the sci-fi feel-good pabulum of Close Encounters and that diabetes-inducing sugar-teat for three-year-olds of all ages, E.T.

As for the sequels to the original The Matrix, the less said the better. CV doesn’t blame the Wachowski brothers for cashing in, but he does blame them for pretending that wasn’t what they were doing all along. When Dante wrote his two soporific sequels to the Inferno, at least he had the excuse that he was writing an adaptation.

CGI technology has now extended the movies’ ability to realistically bring to the screen literally anything imaginable. So far, it has largely gone to waste on superheroes and special effects for special effects’ sake. Don’t get CV wrong – he’ll enjoy taking his son to see Spider-Man 3 soon like half a gazillion other fans. But is it too much to ask that the next 25 years yields more than just a few truly great science fiction films?

Just Us as Fairness

The Fairness Doctrine has no place in our First Amendment regime. It puts the head of the camel inside the tent and enables administration after administration to toy with TV and radio.

So wrote the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Douglas, it is fair to say, was not George F. Will's (or my) favorite Supreme Court justice, but Will quotes him in his latest column (hat tip to memeorandum) attacking renewed efforts from the Left to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. Only today such a doctrine would necessarily attempt to regulate not only broadcast media but cable, satellite and internet communications, as well. Justice Douglas would not be pleased. Neither should you.

The observation is almost as old as the phenomenon, itself, but government takes on responsibilities and the power required to meet them when the private sector is unable or believed unable to get the job done. Thus, the means of (interstate) commerce, e.g., roads and postal services, were once thought the proper province of government because such tasks were too daunting or unprofitable to be performed by the private sector. That is not, of course, the only rationale for government action; the interstate highway system was promoted for, among other reasons, purposes of national defense.

Still, roads aside for now, one would be hard pressed to justify the continued existence of the U.S. Postal Service on grounds that no private company is capable of or willing to deliver mail. (No company may be willing to do so at a loss or to deliver a letter from North Dakota to South Carolina at the same price as a letter going crosstown in Manhattan, but that's a different matter.) But, whatever the original rationale, government does not willingly give up power once it is given to it regardless of the lack of usefulness or even the greater harm caused by its retention.

Anyway, the original Fairness Doctrine derived from a similar notion, indeed, from the notion that served to justify the Federal Communications Commission in the first place; namely, the notion that the broadcast spectrum "airwaves" were and are "public property" and that they are "scarce," hence in need of public (i.e., federal) regulation. Never mind that all resources are scarce, at least a facial case could be made given the state of the art of broadcast technology in the early decades of radio and television that some sort of regulating was necessary. Moreover, the rise of the major television networks in an age when they enjoyed the absence of non-broadcast competition did plausibly lead to the conclusion that they wielded an inordinate amount of potential power and influence in the public's access to news and information.

But whatever the strengths or weaknesses of those arguments were then, they simply do not apply today any more that the notion of a USPS as a necessary artificial monopoly makes sense today. As with campaign financing "reform," those like Howard Dean who "believe we need to re-regulate the media," believe this not because they think the abundance of sources of news and information deprives the public of adequate choices but because they do not like the choices the public has been making.

This is the sense of "fairness" that contends not that all political views and all political candidates should be given equal air time; there is no groundswell of support among either Republicans or Democrats for more airtime for Lyndon LaRouche or for Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan or even for the Green Party. Here "fairness" means that as between the Tweedledum and Tweedledee Parties it is unfair to the Dees whenever the Dums get too much media access and vice versa. "Too much," of course, means too much private access, which usually means too much private money but can, in a pinch, mean simply too much of what money can buy but the government simply forces the seller to give away.

But no one is forced to watch or listen to Rush Limbaugh, Jon Stewart or Katie Couric, at least two of whom are successful faux journalists (obviously, no one was forced to listen to Air America, either), and no one is forced to contribute money or spend his own money on air time or print space or whatever and no one is guaranteed access to such media unless and until the government mandates it.

Like the "separation of church and state," the "marketplace of ideas" is one of those clichés that sounds good on first blush but doesn't really hold up under closer inspection. Ideas are not bought and sold, don't have decreasing marginal utility as every new idea is added and, while the supply of good ideas is always scarce, the demand is perennially lower than it should be. In the political realm, in any case, advocates of re-regulating media to ensure "fairness" haven't the slightest interest in a marketplace of ideas. Like the ABC, NBC and CBS of thirty years ago, the last thing they want to see is the cable and satellite guys knocking at your door.

(Semi-obscure title reference here.)

Wittgenstein's Dissertation

Okay, so I'm only writing about this as a set-up to one of my favorite academic stories. The QUICK and the ED has a post over the probably forced resignation of M.I.T. Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones, of whom it was discovered after some 28 years of service that she had fabricated her own c.v. and did not even possess an undergraduate degree. The point of the blog post (and the very different point of my writing about it) is as follows:

This shows how rigid the credentialing mentality has become in higher education, trumping three decades of undisputed good work. It wasn't always that way. When Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, they simply accepted his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a doctoral thesis.

Well, now. However excellent at her job Ms Jones may have been, Wittgenstein's Tractatus had already been published in 1921 (how many doctoral dissertations can that be said about?), was widely influential and hailed as a masterpiece almost immediately, especially among the Vienna Circle logical positivists, and it remains one of the most important works of philosophy of the 20th century if not of the entire history of philosophy. The work had in large measure been prompted by Wittgenstein's interest, first, in the work of logician Gottlob Frege (there's a good story there, too) who, in turn, sent him to study with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. Russell's colleague at Cambridge, fellow philosopher G.E. Moore had recommended the Latin title, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to Wittgenstein.

When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, bestowal of his PhD degree was itself a complete sham to enable him to get a paid position, Russell having noticed that Wittgenstein's earlier years there technically met the PhD residency requirement. In that generation at both Oxford and Cambridge, possession of a PhD was not a requirement for an academic career. Promising scholars who had taken "First" (highest honors) B.A. degrees simply continued in their studies and were (and still are) awarded M.A. degrees "in course" after several years; that is, these scholars are not required to complete any further formal course work or write a thesis. Today, as I understand it, British universities typically expect aspiring scholars to complete a PhD just like in the U.S. However, as late as the 1970s a former teacher of mine and a full professor at a major American university held only a B.A. from Oxford, having been too cheap to pay the small fee Oxford required to grant him the M.A.

Now for the story. Wittgenstein's "examining committee" was comprised of - guess who? - Bertrand Russell, whom Wittgenstein contended never did understand the Tractatus, and G.E. Moore, who had probably never even bothered to try. As the story goes, they basically met for tea one afternoon, Russell and Wittgenstein argued for a while and Moore said practically nothing. The "examiners" recommendation was a foregone conclusion, but a written recommendation nonetheless had to be submitted to the university. Moore wrote the recommendation. I have never seen the actual document and reports of its wording vary, so I will simply relate the recommendation in full as it was told to me:

It is my opinion that Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a work of philosophical genius. It nonetheless fully meets the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Do Recent Female Graduates Face Wage Discrimination?

Writing in the Washington Post, Amy Joyce reports on a new study by the American Association of University Women concluding that women "earn 20 percent less than men at the same level and in the same field one year after college graduation." If the study is sound, it undercuts standard explanations for the wage gap based on women working fewer hours or in more family friendly jobs or taking time off for child rearing. Moreover, Joyce reports:

Ten years after graduation, women fall further behind, earning 69 percent of what men earn. A 12 percent gap appeared even when the AAUW Educational Foundation, which did the research, controlled for hours, occupation, parenthood and other factors known to directly affect earnings.

Unfortunately, the study itself is not readily available. I'm not sure why. (Ms Joyce, did you have access to the full report and examine it yourself, or are you relying on the AAUW press release?)

Even if it is only subconscious, discrimination may be the primary cause of both the initial and the subsequent delta. Alternatively, Carnegie Mellon economist Linda Babcock suggests that a significant factor may also be that women are less likely to negotiate effectively or negotiate at all for higher salaries.

Babcock conducted a study in 2002 that looked at starting salaries of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with master's degrees. The starting salaries of men were 7.6 percent higher, or almost $4,000 more, on average, than those of the women. It turned out, however, that only 7 percent of the female students had negotiated, but 57 percent of the men had asked for more money. The students who negotiated increased their starting salaries by 7.4 percent on average, or $4,053. That's almost exactly the difference between men's and women's average starting pay.

I can offer only anecdata here, but both my own experiences fresh out of college and my observation of my college age son's job market experience to date suggests to me that few, if any, recent graduates do much serious negotiating unless they are in sufficient demand that they have multiple offers. Still, I certainly don't deny that could be a factor, nor for that matter that discrimination is at play. What else could be at play that might count toward explaining the pay gap immediately out of college? What was available at the AAUW site included the following:

Men and women remain segregated by college major, with women making up 79 percent of education majors and men making up 82 percent of engineering majors. This segregation is found in the workplace as well, where women make up 74 percent of the education field and men make up 84 percent of the engineering and architecture fields.

Okay, so there are over four male engineering or architecture graduates for every female and roughly three female teachers for every male. My guess, and it is only that, is that the education market is more likely to pay a premium for diversity than the engineering or architecture market; that is, that school systems seek male teachers and pay more for them more than engineering firms seek or are willing to pay a premium to have female engineers in their employ. I'd also guess there are far more teachers than engineers in the U.S., so it would be useful to see how those numbers broke down by field of work and how, in turn, they were aggregated to show an average pay gap.

Do I have any evidence for this? Not a whit. Might this sort of possibility be taken into consideration and discounted or otherwise accounted for in this new study? Sure. Conjecture about a study as reported in a newspaper is little if anything more than sheer speculation.

So much for speculation; now for a little ideological ax grinding. Discounting government jobs for which there are pay bands and such, employers are supposed to hire the best people at the lowest salaries acceptable to those employees. Thus, for example, and regardless of general or average differences in the psychological perspectives or negotiating skills of men and women, a prospective employer wishing to hire a well qualified but insecure man and an equally well qualified but highly confident woman will rationally offer the woman more than the man for the same job. That isn't discrimination any more than vice versa; that's business.

So, too, we are often told that, for example, equally qualified black engineers earn less than white engineers. This could be a function of discrimination if only in the sense that a black engineer may believe, correctly or not, that his job opportunities are fewer than his white counterpart and so be willing to work for less. But if a rational employer knew he could hire equally well qualified black engineers for 80% of what he was paying his white engineers, he'd be a fool not to hire black engineers and realize the cost savings until, as it inevitably would, the greater demand for black engineers closed the gap. Now, any number of employers may be both fools and racists (or sexists) but they aren't all discriminating fools. Some capitalist who values profits over people (and isn't that the leftist stereotype of a capitalist anyway?) will jump at the chance of hiring cheaper labor; hence, the outflow of many jobs to foreign, cheaper labor markets. That will in turn pressure his competition to hold down or reduce labor costs, also reducing any gap caused by discrimination.

The point here is that there is a market for employers just as there is a market for employees and both such markets are subject to market forces. Moreover, whatever discrimination may exist in both those markets may just as often be attributable to employee attitudes and dispositions as to such attitudes or dispositions on the part of employers.

Meanwhile, before we all go jumping to conclusions about a sexual pay gap among recent college graduates, might we at least take a look at the study making that claim?

Housekeeping Notes

The blog is one month old today. I’ve edited the blogroll to reflect the blogs (and similar sites) I’ve been frequenting over the past month and changed the header “quote,” a practice I expect to perform on a monthly basis.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs on the internet, perhaps millions. My personal short-term goal for this blog is to increase readership substantially and for the blog to crack the top 100,000 of those tracked by Technorati. So by way of a minor “bleg,” I’d appreciate it if those of you who have been reading this blog so far would take the trouble of recommending the site or any particular post to anyone you think might enjoy it and especially for those of you who operate blogs yourselves to consider linking here now and then. As Arlo Guthrie once sang, I’m not proud ... or tired.

More direct feedback would be nice, too. I know I don’t always respond to every comment and avoid getting into lengthy discussions even when I do, but I do appreciate all comments (well, all of them so far) and encourage your suggestions and criticism.

Finally, although I intend to continue this blog as a solo act, it occurs to me that some of my readers might like to take a shot at doing a guest blog, either on an independent topic or perhaps as a more extended response to something I’ve posted. If there is any such interest, please feel free to contact me about it.

[Insert USC Mascot Joke Here]

A little over a month ago, I posted over at Inactivist a piece entitled "Introducing Our New NCAA Approved Mascot, ... the Central State Condom!" It read as follows:

Herewith, one wit's list of the Worst NCAA Division I College Mascots, complete with pictures. (And check out the three Honorable Mentions at the end, too. Go Dartmouth!)

Alas, it's only a matter of time before the whole college mascot tradition dies a slow, painful and politically correct death. For example, American Indian mascots of any sort are now verboten as far as that steaming pile of faux-rectitude, the NCAA is concerned. My bet is they'll go all PETA and come after animal mascots next, at which point all that will be left to pick from will be Dead White Guys (always dicey) and politically correct inanimate objects.

Proving once again that life imitates art, I give you:

Misery Loves Company?

I had a rotten childhood. Want to hear about it? Apparently you do, especially if you’re English, though we Yanks are in on the trend, too. So, anyway, the BBC reports on the latest bestseller genre: misery memoirs, or “mis lit” for short.

Borders now devotes shelf space specifically for “Real Life” stories, while Waterstone's has a "Painful Lives" shelf where three of the top ten bestselling paperbacks in Britain can be found. It helps, of course, if you’ve been sexually molested as a child; but just having really mean parents will suffice if it all ends with a sufficiently cathartic journey of personal growth, so there’s hope for Alec Baldwin’s daughter and for me, too. Hey, I got yelled at a lot as a kid, you know!

Memo to Booksellers: Sexual abuse aside, bestselling stories about miserable childhoods aren’t exactly a recent phenomenon. Unless you count Dickens as a recent author, that is. Here in America, there’s nary a book reader alive who didn’t at some point identify with Holden Caulfield’s painful journey of discovery taken mostly via cabs around Manhattan after the ordeal of being kicked out of yet another exclusive prep school. The horror, the horror!

Then, too, we have long enjoyed that "mis lit" sub-genre, the celebrity child tell-all, beginning with Mommy Dearest and no doubt soon to be continued with Ireland Baldwin’s forthcoming A.B., Don’t Phone Home. Today, however, you don’t need to be the child of a famous megalomaniac to pen your own bestseller because, thanks to the Baby Boomer generation, just about everybody’s parents these days are megalomaniacs.

And by “the Baby Boomer generation” I mean, of course, MY generation. It is, after all, all about ME, you know. Besides, James W Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, says, "There's compelling evidence that writing about serious emotional upheavals can improve mental and physical health." By which he means, of course, MY mental and physical health. But, what the heck, if it can help you by reading about ME and MY miserable childhood, well, it’s a win-win, isn’t it? And by “win-win” I mean, of course, that I win because I get the cathartic experience of writing and then I win again by selling MY story to you. See? Win-win!

The other good news here is that this trend liberates us Baby Boomers (read: ME) to be lousy parents, ourselves. It frees us to spend more time thinking about ourselves and less time worrying about our own annoying brats wonderful kids. And if there’s one thing we Baby Boomers desperately need it’s more time to think about ourselves. We all had lousy childhoods and, truth be told, the whole point of having children is to make little mini-ME’s anyway, so why shouldn’t they have lousy childhoods, too? Especially if there’s a bestseller in it for them. Hey, that means we can quit saving for their college and go out and buy that Porsche now, too! Another win-win!

Okay, mandatory disclaimer time. There’s nothing funny or frivolous about child sexual abuse or other serious physical or psychological abuse. If the thankfully very small percentage of people who have been victims of such abuse find writing about their experiences useful, and I can see how they would, then by all means they should do so. So, too, I can even see how other victims might feel less isolated by reading about similar experiences.

What I find difficult, nay, impossible to believe is that there are so many such victims that they constitute a sufficient readership for an entire genre, which means that the rest of the writers in this field are basically bitching about the childhood 'trauma' of being yelled at or spanked. Oh, boo-hoo! We weren't all victims and our parents weren't all monsters. Our parents were just human beings, warts and all, and much about childhood sucks under the best of circumstances. Grow up, fergawdsakes.

For years now, I’ve been touting the fiction of Andrew Vachss, an author and lawyer specializing in child abuse who writes brilliant novels about real victims and real monsters, and in recent years I have been encouraging friends to check out PROTECT, an organization seeking needed family law reforms so that childhood victims of abuse are not remanded, as is too often the case, back to the custody of their predator parents. I encourage you, likewise, to check out PROTECT and, especially if you like hard-boiled mystery novels, to check out Vachss. Most importantly, I encourage any victim of childhood abuse to find appropriate help.

For the rest of us, though, for those of us who simply had parents who were far from ideal, and that is to say for practically all of us, my childhood 'misery' doesn’t need your company and vice versa. By all means write about your experiences all you like. Share it if you wish with friends and family. But unless you really want to read in excruciating and breathless detail about, oh, say, the time when I was nine and I got spanked for shoplifting a comic book, thanks for not sharing with me.

Constant Viewer: Music and Lyrics

Hugh Grant is a better actor with more range than the public, at least so far, has wished from him. In that sense, he seems still trapped in a typecast as the English Jimmy Stewart of the last ten or fifteen years (the current American Jimmy Stewart being Tom Hanks). There are worse fates, to be sure. Still, as even Stewart discovered, there comes a time when the bumbling nice guy that audiences found so endearing from an actor in his thirties grows, like the actor himself, a bit long in the tooth as he nears fifty. Stewart found a second career playing tough and grizzled characters in westerns, an option not available these days even to Hanks, let alone Grant.

For now, however, Grant continues to play Hugh Grant parts, the latest being has-been ‘80’s pop singer Alex Fletcher in Music and Lyrics. Grant plays against Drew Barrymore as Sophie Fisher in what amounts to little more than a ninety-six minute pop song with a dollop of rarely witty dialog between takes. The plot? Oh, well, if you insist. They write a song for a vapid pop diva to rescue Fletcher's now ebbing oldies-act career. He writes melodies, she writes lyrics; together, they fight crime! (No, not that last bit, though it might have helped.)

All romantic comedies are formulaic; it could hardly be otherwise. But the formula requires that its ingredients combine properly; hence, the notion of screen chemistry. Because the chemistry is lacking here, the clichéd ‘redemptive power of love’ that reconciles the estranged lovers in the final reel feels as mechanical as, in fact, it always really is. Don't get Constant Viewer wrong here; he loves well made romantic comedies and, for all its artifice, thinks Notting Hill is a fine example of the genre where the chemistry works well. When he's at the top of his game, Hugh Grant does a great Hugh Grant, and Barrymore tries valiantly to make the most of her part here; but Grant basically phones it in on this one, and it shows. If any tears are shed during the big final scene, the cause will be airborne allergens.

Music and Lyrics is nearing the end of its theatrical run now. Constant Viewer saw it today at a $1 matinée, largely because Grant’s recent baked beans episode reminded CV it was still on the big screen. See it, if you must, when it is released soon on DVD.

* * * * * * * * * *

BONUS SNIPE: As if the prospect of Angelina Jolie (and possibly master thespian Brad Pitt, too!) starring in a film version of Atlas Shrugged wasn’t funny enough, CV recently discovered that a film version of the wonderful 1960’s television western, Have Gun – Will Travel, is in the works. And who is slated to reprise Richard Boone’s Paladin? Eminem. You can’t make this stuff up, folks.

"Class, for your next assignment, write an essay about the First Amendment."

Via Drudge, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that an eighteen year old honors student at Cary-Grove High School in Cary, Illinois has been arrested and charged with two counts of disorderly conduct as a result of his submitting a creative writing class essay that "described a violent dream in which he shot people and then 'had sex with the dead bodies.'"

"I have no intention of harming anyone,'' said Lee, who has been transferred to an alternative school setting. "I miss school.''

Lee's father, Albert Lee, who emigrated from China 32 years ago, said his son has a clean academic and police record. He, too, insisted his son's essay was not threatening but authorities "drew a conclusion before the investigation. They didn't want to do the investigation.''

Arrested, mind you! Not merely sent to some sort of counseling or disciplined by the typically idiotic and hyper-reactive "zero-tolerance" mindset of your average public high school, but arrested and charged by the police!

Of course, and especially because Lee is of Asian descent, the question immediately arises whether the actions taken by both school officials and the police were influenced by the recent Virginia Tech massacre. But whether there is some such connection in the fevered imagination of local authorities or not, unless there is far more to this incident than so far reported, this is simply outrageous.

"A Blistering Attack"

It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.

So writes Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, Deputy Commander, 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, in an Armed Forces Journal article entitled “A Failure of Generalship.” LTC Yingling has served two tours in Iraq, another in Bosnia and a fourth in Operation Desert Storm. In what Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks calls "a blistering attack," Yingling writes that, as they did in Vietnam, today’s general officers have:

failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly.... to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq.... [and to] provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.

Though LTC Yingling points the finger at no general officer in particular, such criticism even in general terms from an active duty Army officer is an extraordinary thing. I am neither a present nor former service member of the U.S. Armed Forces nor am I an expert on military law. However, based on decades of close experience with the military, I can pretty much guarantee that just about every military lawyer will soon be thinking, if only academically, about what, if any, disciplinary action could conceivably be taken against LTC Yingling and whether that will be formally considered by his chain of command. Short of direct disciplinary action against him which might risk further negative publicity, it must be assumed that the odds are now prohibitively against his future promotion (and thus against his future) in the Army.

It may sound odd to say, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Whatever degree of personal or professional sacrifice Yingling’s decision to publish his article may entail, there is much to be said for the notion that good order and discipline in the Army requires that its serving officers, at least below the rank of general officer, refrain from public criticism of their superiors. Then, too, for all I know Yingling may already have burned his bridges, as it were, and his published views may merely be what amounts to a parting gesture. I couldn’t say. Moreover, some of his recommendations, e.g., placing greater emphasis on civilian graduate education and foreign language proficiency for general officer candidates, hardly seem as compelling as he suggests.

Nonetheless, what I can say is that from my admittedly non-expert perspective much of what he writes rings true; that, for example, “professional military men [have tended to] blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters” and that “[I]n a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity.” The latter is all well and good if the process is producing the sort of generals needed, but what if it isn’t? If anything, the unwillingness or inability of senior military leadership to be candid, not merely to senior civilian leadership but to the American public itself is some evidence that the process is not producing the sort of military leadership required either in Iraq or in general.

It is a fundamental principle of American law and of the entire structure of the Department of Defense that our military forces ultimately be subject to civilian control. Only a fool or a would-be despot would wish differently. The current enabling legislation for that principle is the Goldwater Nichols DOD Reorganization Act of 1986, late Cold War legislation that still presupposed a vastly different military mission from the situation the Armed Forces confront today. Whether or not he is correct in the particulars of his desired reforms, Yingling is correct in arguing that the responsibility for reform must primarily rest with Congress. Congress should seek reforms which, at minimum, provide senior military leadership the opportunity for candor which current institutional structures not only do not facilitate but, in fact, inhibit.

In an age when not only candor but honor and integrity were more highly valued in society than they are today, we might more reasonably have expected more senior military officers to be willing, when circumstances demanded it, to forsake their own careers for the greater good of the nation. My sense of that leadership leads me to conclude that such expectations would be almost completely unreasonable today and that the sort of moral courage of which Yingling speaks is, in fact, sadly lacking.

Does America now face the sort of mortal danger of which LTC Yingling warns? I don’t think so. But mortal danger or not, we might all sleep more soundly at night if we had better reason to believe that the responsibility for sounding such alarms was met not by lieutenant colonels but by their superior officers. We have no reason to believe that today.

Hey, wait a minute! He ain't a lawyer, is he?

In their continuing effort to prove that it's only 99% of the legal profession who give lawyers a bad name, the folks over at Volokh Conspiracy (many of whom belong to the other 1%) have landed one of my favorite economists, Steven E. Landsburg, as a guest-blogger. Okay, so it's basically an opportunity for Landsburg to plug his latest book, More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (which I look forward to reading very soon). Still, where else will you find the likes of:

[I]f I could make just one change in the American political system, it would be to give each voter two votes in every congressional election. You'd get one vote to cast in your own district and another to cast in the district of your choice. When a congressman from West Virginia funnels taxpayers' money from fifty states to his home district, I want him to face the prospect that taxpayers from fifty states will share their feelings with him on election day.

I'd also redraw the boundaries of Congressional districts according to the alphabet instead of geography. Instead of congressmen from central Delaware and northern Colorado, we'd have a congressman for everyone whose name begins with AA through AE, another for everyone whose name begins with AF through AL, and so on. The point being that it's easy to devise a pork barrel project that benefits everyone in northern Colorado, but a lot harder to devise a pork barrel project that benefits everyone whose name happens to begin with Q.

Finally, I want federal income tax rates determined separately in each congressional district, as a function of how much spending your congressman has voted for. The more he votes to spend, the more you pay in taxes. That should solve the problem of voters who pay little attention to what their representatives are up to.

Wonderful stuff. Check it out.

"No, no! Not the war, but this war!"

Unlike “the present King of France,” whom Bertrand Russell once argued was not a logically proper subject straightforwardly (and thus meaninglessly) denoting a nonexistent entity but a disguised description, “the war in Iraq” would seem to refer to, well, the war in Iraq. Thus, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said that the war in Iraq is lost, we might reasonably assume (1) that we understood what he meant and (2) that it was either a very bold or a very stupid thing to say. Or both. Given the reaction so far, the consensus seems to be leaning toward stupid, enough at least to prompt his Senate colleague, Chuck Schumer to engage in a bit of philosophical analysis, himself; to wit:

What Harry Reid is saying is that this war is lost -- in other words, a war where we mainly spend our time policing a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. We are not going to solve that problem. . . . The war is not lost. And Harry Reid believes this -- we Democrats believe it. . . . So the bottom line is if the war continues on this path, if we continue to try to police and settle a civil war that's been going on for hundreds of years in Iraq, we can't win. But on the other hand, if we change the mission and have that mission focus on the more narrow goal of counterterrorism, we sure can win.

So, too, as David Broder also recalls that other great political metaphysician, Bill Clinton, famously wondering whether existence is a predicate as he grappled with the definition of “is,” we should be comforted by the highly nuanced appreciation of the vagaries of language our elected officials are capable of explicating at the drop of an overnight opinion poll, let alone a subpoena.

Of course, the war in Iraq isn’t the sort of ‘thing’ that has tidy and discrete definitional or physical boundaries, so perhaps we can forgive Schumer this sort of semantic back peddling. Whether the war in Iraq is lost or not does, after all, depend on how one defines the phrase “war in Iraq,” not to mention “lost,” doesn’t it? And I, for one, would be happy to learn exactly how we “sure can win” that “more narrow goal of counterterrorism."

Care to give us the details, Senator Schumer?

"Far out, Moonbeam! They've co-opted our co-op!"

With a hat tip to Right Reason, I came across an Economist article (reprinted here in Financial Express) entitled “Postmodernism is the new black.” The article suggests that contemporary retail “niche” marketing has been influenced by the likes of such so-called postmodern thinkers as “[Jean-François] Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida [who] were all from the far left ... [and who] wanted to destroy capitalism and bourgeois society.”

It seems to me, however, that the article makes more, for example, out of Foucault's suggestion that his followers read Hayek than is really there to be made. (I’d have to say, by the way, I know more people who started with Hayek and eventually got around to reading Foucault than vice versa.) Richard Branson, mentioned in the article, and other modern marketers may have been exposed to a bit of PoMo musings back in their school days and may even subsequently have co-opted some PoMo pet phrases, but I doubt that sort of thing is much different from the almost obligatory references to Wittgenstein, Einstein or Freud some thirty or forty years ago.

I wrote recently about the irrelevance of who gets to anchor the CBS Evening News, noting the proliferation of alternative news sources in contemporary society. This, too, is a sort of PoMo “fragmentation” example. However, we might just as easily say that new technology has simply facilitated an expanded market in response to a previously frustrated demand for alternatives. There may be counterexamples here and there, but the Leftist suspicion that producers create demand as opposed to merely (if they’re lucky) responding to it is itself suspicious. The problem isn’t that we don’t really want all the things producers would sell us but that producers don’t have nearly as many things to sell us as we want.

That is not to say there isn’t now or hasn’t always been a great deal of crap offered for sale, including not only material crap but aesthetic and intellectual crap, and it is as true of expensive crap as it is of cheap crap. That is, long before Rodeo Drive there were the shops at St. Mark’s Square in Venice and today's Dollar Store is simply this generation’s Five & Dime. Quick Quiz: Other than Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson (and without using the internet), name a few of Shakespeare’s fellow Elizabethan playwrights. Nope, I can’t either. Much of what was produced in every age or generation was quite properly soon discarded and forgotten. Why should our age be any different?

The contemporary enclosed mall is in many respects merely the climate controlled downtown of an earlier generation, itself the shop-by-shop enclosed equivalent of the agora. If anything, the most depressing thing about the contemporary mall is its lack of diversity. The same chain stores are to be found in every mall from coast to coast and the anchor department stores offer the same depressingly few currently popular designer goods also sold at the designers’ own boutique shops, often in the same malls. The internet holds the promise of being the ultimate mall, but even it is content starved by comparison to our desires, the virtual equivalent of Moscow's old Soviet-era GUM department store, vast beyond comprehension but with largely empty showcases and shelves.

Having lived through (and participated in) the counter-culture of the 1960’s, I have some visceral lingering sense of the frustration among some of those who never quite made it out of the ‘60’s over what they take to be the bourgeois capitalist co-opting of their anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois worldview. But that is to say only that I was once blissfully unaware that all those beads and tie-dyed shirts and bongs and black lights and “underground” records and such were even then just a market response to demand, no different from how PBS has now replaced most of its airing of symphonic music with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock or reunion tours of once skinny, long haired rockers who now stand paunchy and bald on stage to play their decades old greatest hits. Even “the French philosophers whose interest in accessories was limited to a Gauloise” needed not only the local tabac but also the huge commercial network that stocked its shelves. Should we go all PoMo and call that a Niche-sche market?

"Honey, the babysitter has arrived."

Following yesterday's robotic servant problem post, and with a hat tip to Reason's Ronald Bailey, here's some vital public safety information on the looming threat of a Robot Uprising.

"... everything that's wrong with American journalism."

The title quote fragment is from Daniel Okrent, the first public editor of the New York Times from October 2003 to May 2005, regarding the Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse team prosecution debacle, and is taken from a Duke Chronicle article by Iza Wojciechowska. The article is well worth reading despite a lede sentence so bad even I wouldn't have written it. (As if I even knew how to write a lede!)

They Fight Crime! **

He's a former actor with such screen credits as Jesuit Joe and Grey Owl. She's the reigning 2007 Miss America. They fight crime!

(** - Title explained here.)

Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Bulldogs of War!

I think people should start thinking about other people rather than trying to feel sorry for themselves and thinking that the administration is trying to thwart their creativity.... They're not using their own intelligence.... We have to think of the people who might be affected by seeing real-life weapons.

So said Yale's Dean of Student Affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, whose opinions regarding deference to the religious or sexual sensibilities of the theater-going public I would be most interested to learn.

Still, in a reversal of Trachtenberg's earlier outright ban on realistic looking stage weapons, Yale decided instead merely to institute a "policy of announcing the use of stage weapons in advance will hold for all future campus productions." The world's once more the student thespians' oyster, which they with sword can open. Or something like that.

Speaking of how people might be affected by seeing realistic looking stage prop weapons, I worked as a stagehand one season many years ago at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Aside from the fact that I was paid rather less than a migrant farm worker, it was a great experience, the highlight of which occurred during the first (and, I have good reason to suspect, only) American theatrical production of an Australian play that shall remain nameless in deference to maintaining good American / Australian relationships. In any case, in one scene one of the actors was supposed to pull out a revolver and brandish it wildly. Unfortunately, one night he waved it about a bit too wildly and it flew from his hand, landing some ten or twelve rows into the darkened house.

Silence. More silence. The actors on stage stood frozen in a tableau, there being no proscenium curtain to drop, and tried valiantly not to join in the titters of laughter as the audience slowly realized what had happened. Finally, some fifteen or thirty seconds later, the stage lights were lowered, the house lights were raised and the stage manager sent another stagehand into the house and announced through the PA system, "Would whoever has our gun please return it so we can continue the play?"

Ah, the magic of live theater!

Breaking Immigration News!

Renowned Chinese national Tai Shan’s visa has been extended for another two years. Ordinarily, being born in the United States would have qualified Tai Shan for U.S. citizenship. Unfortunately, as both his parents are Chinese nationals residing in America under a diplomatic agreement, he is considered a Chinese national himself and thus must face at least two more years of incarceration in a federal holding facility until his long-term fate is decided.

Tai Shan is a giant panda cub, currently residing at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

There is no word from PETA regarding any protest of Tai Shan’s continued imprisonment. However, in related news, the Republican Party vows to stem the influx into the U.S. of immigrants whose presence pose an unfair burden on taxpayers.

Would You Settle for Just Humming the Body Electric?

From the (U.K.) Daily Mail comes a report entitled “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?” Curiously enough, it does not concern the chances of Al Gore running again for president. Rather, we are told some scientists “predict that in the next five years robots will be available for child-minding, to work in care homes, monitor prisons and help police trace criminals.” No word, so far, on whether such robots will dream of electric sheep.

Stories such as these crop up periodically, invariably asserting the imminence of “thinking” machines of the sort we routinely find in science fiction stories and dredging up references to Asimov’s three laws of robotics. Perhaps we shall see the advent of genuinely thinking machines some day – I hope I live to see it and will even join People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots when the time arrives – but the difference between state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and human intelligence remains vast. Five years?

Still, the public debate called for in the article is a good idea. Whether “autonomous” robot “soldiers” or “caretakers” for the very young and very old are on the near-term horizon, robotics will make a substantial difference in our eventual future and we are well advised to consider the implications of that emerging technology now. Will the “soldiers” now under development soon be able to act independently of their programmed “rules of engagement” or robot “caretakers” soon be able to change diapers? Not a chance. But when the robotics boys finish beta testing and work out all the bugs in the first production model Pris, give me a call.

Candor and Civility

Andrew Klavan writes in City Journal that the problem with conservativism and the political advantage of liberalism is that conservatives are, gosh darn it, just too doggone candid. Liberals, by contrast, profit from, nay, thrive on sacrificing truth for the good manners of not calling things what they are, Klavan contends. (Golly! My first thought was to write “calling a spade a spade,” but someone might think I was a racist. Could Klavan be right?)

Though there is no little truth lurking behind some of what Klavan writes, what he in fact writes as he in fact writes it is nonsense, a fact easily shown by his concluding reference to Lincoln. Refresh my memory, was Honest Abe the personification of 19th century conservativism? Hmmmm...

Liberals and conservatives both suffer, in fact if not in appearance, from a failure to follow through on their own logic. Thus, just as liberals are prone to claim “Things would be so much better if only we changed X” and conservatives to claim “Things were so much better before we changed X,” neither do a very good job of answering “Better for whom?” or “At what cost?” True, much of modern liberalism has failed to live up to its earlier promises, but so too do many conservatives’ overly fond preference for the Good Old Days rely on unreliable or at least highly selective memories.

When, exactly, did we have it right, Mr. Klavan? When our acknowledgment that men and women were indeed different led conservatives to conclude that women shouldn’t serve in the military, or a bit earlier when they thought women shouldn’t serve as lawyers and physicians, or a bit earlier when women were thought unfit to vote, or how about when the law refused to recognize rape inside marriage? Just how long-standing is the conservative view that “that black people bear the same responsibility for their actions as whites”? A view, one might suspect, which also entails the notion that black people bear or should bear the same rights? Was that your father’s understanding of conservativism? Your grandfather’s?

That is not to say that contemporary conservativism is racist or sexist, though some liberals still view it as such, any more than to say that the abiding trust in government among contemporary liberals equates to Stalinism, as some conservatives still argue. Both sides favor far too much government and far too little liberty for my tastes, but turning one’s ideological opponents into a caricature, however much fun it may be, is in fact the opposite of the sort of intellectual honesty that Mr. Klavan’s brand of candor avoids.

Liberalism does tend to obfuscate the truth for the sake of its ideological agenda; but if the current administration is the standard bearer for conservativism, especially in its public pronouncements regarding Iraq, it is difficult to imagine how contemporary conservativism meets the New Testament standard for casting the first stone.

Civility is not a bad thing, deriving as it does from the notion of civilization, something one would think conservatives cared deeply about. For that matter, truth-telling is a virtue, too. Here, then, is one such truth: Mr. Klavan’s sort of candor is the least sincere form of honesty.

The Big Picture

In Canada.com (via Arts & Letters Daily), The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber questions whether the phenomenal success of Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics has had the undesirable effect of turning especially new economists away from the serious business of, well, economics. Solving the problem of productivity growth, Scheiber suggests, is rather more pressing business than, say, cheating in Sumo Wrestling or game show racial discrimination; and he has a point, though probably not nearly as big a point as the comparison suggests.

First, however bright Levitt is (very) or successful Freakonomics has been (very, very), it surely won’t do to lay the blame (or credit) for this fairly minor and small-scale shift in the attention of some economists to his feet, alone. In terms of popular economics writing, for example, Steven E. Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist, less successful in terms of sales than Levitt’s book but in other ways superior, was published in 1993. Moreover, economists have been churning out cross-discipline academic papers for decades now, possibly the best example being the hundreds if not thousands of papers on law and economics.

Still, Levitt is the current poster child for that tiny fraction of working economists whose work is both intelligible and interesting to the average layman, and Scheiber would have a hard time making a convincing case that making economics more interesting to the general population is a bad thing. Among professional economists, on the other hand, at least the ones of my acquaintance, economics remains for the most part the mind-numbing process of mathematical analysis that justifies it being called, if not quite science, surely dismal, nonetheless.

As is the case with all academic disciplines, economics is, at bottom, simply what economists do, whatever that may be. As is also the case throughout academia, what the rest of us understand about what they do is a function of how well they teach their own discipline. Here, it must be said, economists typically do not earn high marks, at least not if the average undergraduate’s understanding of economics after an introductory course in microeconomics and macroeconomics is any indication. Such students fall into three broad categories in decreasing likelihood of results: those who don’t get it at all, those who master the rudimentary mechanics and a sort of disjunctive grasp of some of the basic concepts and those who get the Big Picture. Since it is the objective of all introductory survey courses to give the Big Picture (the myriad exceptions and qualifications are for later), these results are not very encouraging, though they do go toward explaining why, for example, so many journalists possessed of elite university diplomas write so obliviously about economic matters.

It is possible, of course, to get the Big Picture without a command of the mechanics or many of the underlying concepts of economics. That, after all, is what Adam Smith managed, though I suspect his grasp of mathematics was no better than mine and he was never once required to distinguish between a change in demand and a change in quantity demanded. It is much more likely, however, for the average undergraduate to be able to answer such questions and sketch out his little demand curve charts and explain how Gross Domestic Product or the money supply is calculated and so forth without ever once grasping how powerful and broadly applicable the underlying concepts of price theory, marginal utility and such truly are.

Which is exactly where the Landsburgs and Levitts come in. Maybe Levitt is wrong about the relationship between abortion and crime, but whether he is wrong or right in the particulars, showing that economic insights are useful in addressing such matters is, itself, enormously valuable. Are such efforts good economics? That’s none of my business; the academics can sort such questions out in their own little free market.

On a different blog several years ago I made some offhand comment about teaching philosophy to undergraduates, unintentionally suggesting that the objective was to turn them into philosophers. A professor of philosophy responded (with alacrity) that this certainly was not the objective of undergraduate instruction in philosophy but of graduate school. He was, of course, correct if and insofar as one defines a philosopher as someone possessed of a PhD who earns his living parsing philosophical concepts at the subatomic level. So, too, an undergraduate degree in economics does not a professional economist make or a B.S. in physics a physicist, etc. But what about the rest of us?

I am (old enough to be) reminded of Don Herbert and of the various teachers and writers I have encountered over the years whose ability to show me, despite my ignorance of the details of their disciplines, the Big Picture – the central insight that, once grasped, transforms forever how, for example, one looks at questions of free will and responsibility or the structure of the physical universe or a painting or piece of music or how we go about our daily lives dealing with limited resources and unlimited wants and the unintended consequences of our decisions. God is in the Big Picture, even if the Devil is in the details.

"I'm not Chevy Chase, and nobody cares."

While it may be big news within journalism circles whether Katie Couric’s job as anchor at CBS Nightly News is secure, it is no more newsworthy to the average American than the latest cricket scores from England.

I don’t watch the evening network news. What’s more, I don’t know anybody who does. I mean it, not a single person. Oh, maybe now and then. But regularly? Nope. Think about that.

As David Letterman aptly noted about his and Jay Leno’s role in the post-Carson era of late night television, it will simply never be the case again that one person can hold sway over America the way Carson did for thirty years on the Tonight Show, and the same can be said about Walter Cronkite's career for nearly twenty years as anchor of the CBS Evening News. None of the subsequent broadcast network news anchors, least of which the lamentable Dan Rather, could hope to be what Cronkite, for better or worse, became in our national consciousness.

The reasons are obvious enough. The broadcast troika lost their oligopoly status as purveyors of news first with the advent of PBS, then with cable television and finally with the rise of the internet. Even running show in a three horse race once meant that a significant part of the population was tuning in and news programming could thus be profitable or at least not a losing proposition.

Moreover, America’s first television generation was transfixed by the ability to see coverage of the major news of the past twenty-four hours, while subsequent generations take such things for granted. For that matter, twenty-four hours is an eternity in a world where technology permits initial coverage moments after a story breaks. By the time Couric or any of the other network anchors tells us what happened today we already know, or can if we wish to know, far more about the story than anything they can cover in a moment or two of broadcast time.

Ironically, network news has always been the USA Today of journalism, ironic because USA Today was founded to be the print equivalent of the nightly news. However valuable the network news organizations may be for continuing coverage of a crisis, their role otherwise cannot help but continue to decline regardless of who reads the news on camera.

Boris Yeltsin, 1931-2007

Death has its own news cycle, much to the annoyance of the press, so the obituaries of the famous are drafted in advance of their demise. Boris Yeltsin’s recently announced death thus resulted in publication of this lengthy obituary, the third paragraph of which reads:

Although Yeltsin pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, many of its citizens will remember him mostly for presiding over the country's steep decline.

Will they? Perhaps so if the reporter means many Russians alive today. Perhaps not if one takes the longer historical view.

Russia, or rather the former Soviet Union, was already in steep decline by the time Yeltsin outmaneuvered Mikhail Gorbachev and became Russia’s first popularly elected president in 1991. Whatever the man’s personal faults and subsequent failings as a leader, the world stood agog as what had quite literally been unthinkable both in and about Russia only a few years earlier came to pass in no small measure because of the force of Yeltsin’s personality and, by comparison to Russia's earlier and current autocrats, his dedication to democratic reforms.

The Russian people not only could have found far worse leadership than Boris Yeltsin, they already have.

* * * * * * * * * *

UPDATE: The link no longer leads to the AP obituary the Post originally published on its web site. I poked around to try to find that obit elsewhere, but to no avail.

Speaking of the Road to Hell...

... and other destinations, the good folks at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Urban Transportation Studies have assembled a web page dedicated to odd traffic signs. I don't vouch for any of them (including the above) not being Photoshopped or, even if the photos are untouched, not being gag signs. Still, they're well worth a quick look and a lighthearted laugh.

"Good news, Mr. Socrates! We can offer you an upgrade to Purgatory-Class seating now."

The Roman Catholic Church has put the kibosh on Limbo in a new official document, called "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised." Publication of the document has been authorized by Pope Benedict.

This will come as welcome news to my friend Ron Bailey who has ‘anguished’ over the eschatological disposition of the unborn, although my admittedly vague understanding of Roman Catholic theology is that the question of when exactly ensoulment occurs in a human life in being is itself unclear. It should also be welcome news for those virtuous pagans Dante relegated to limbo and whose status apparently weren't upgraded during Christ's Harrowing of Hell.

It isn’t good form to make light or be critical of someone else’s religious beliefs, at least not beliefs of these sort since they have no bearing on the here and now. The Roman Catholic Church is free to believe and teach whatever it chooses on such matters as, indeed, God is free to dispose of our souls as He sees fit with or without Papal, let alone my concurrence. In any case, to anyone who might be offended by my somewhat flippant manner here, I apologize.

My point is only to observe that our Western collective imagination about such matters as Heaven and Hell derives more from the likes of Dante and his Protestant counterpart, Milton, than they do from Scripture or the musings of theologians, medieval or otherwise. However much we may believe one thing or another about what, if anything, happens to a person after his death, and however much any religious belief on this question may in fact be derived from divine inspiration, none of us can settle the matter once and for all until we pass through those Gates of Larger Life ourselves.

Let’s hope we are all happy with the answer.

We Bombed Water Ballooned in New Haven

Oh, if only Virginia Tech had a ban on stage props, too! Or so goes the thinking at Yale, where the Dean of Student Affairs has now prohibited the use of realistic looking stage weapons in theatrical productions. One current production has thus been forced to replace metal swords with wooden ones. (Hat tip to The Volokh Conspiracy.)

So much for responsible, effective in loco parentis policies at the nation’s third oldest university. Perhaps Dean Trachtenberg is not much of a theater buff and so misunderstood such hoary stage clichés as “We killed them tonight,” “The audience was a bunch of stiffs,” and, of course, “The play bombed on opening night.” If there is any justice, however, and not least to the Virginia Tech real-life tragedy this decision trivializes, she will be “hoist with [her] owne petar” or at least with derisive roars of protest over such mindless, knee-jerk nonsense.

House Bill Gives Each D.C. Resident a Pony

No, not really. But, as expected and as reported in the Washington Post, a bill did pass by a vote of 241 to 177 that would create a voting seat in the House of Representatives for District of Columbia residents and, just to be bipartisan, a new seat in Utah, as well.

Voting representation in Congress for D.C. residents now faces only three minor obstacles: the Senate, the White House and the Constitution.

Washingtonians deserve full representation in both the House and the Senate and the only sensible method of addressing the current injustice is retrocession of the city to Maryland. Neither Maryland nor D.C. residents are open to that eminently fair resolution, the same resolution by which Northern Virginians who live in what was once Virginia’s contribution to the federal city now enjoy the dubious benefits of taxation with representation.

Maryland wants no part of the city’s crumbling infrastructure, disastrous school system, urban poverty and crime and, worse yet, its concentration of tens of thousands of District voters who would instantly upset the state’s political status quo. D.C. believes itself worthy of full statehood and sees the most recent House vote as a step in that direction.

Some legal scholars (one such here) believe that the Constitution’s grant to Congress of nearly plenary authority over the District and a 'careful' reading of prior case law suffices for statutory enfranchisement to pass constitutional muster. Of course, some legal scholars believe or purport to believe the Constitution is sufficiently flexible as written to accomplish whatever their political hearts’ desire. Not that the Founders’ thoughts on this or any subject are of much interest to such folks, here is a bit of historical background.

Professor Raskin, author of the law review article linked above, makes what I think is the least intellectually compelling though perhaps the most emotionally effective argument in his discussion of the predominantly black racial composition of the District in comparison to congressional redistricting plans deemed racial gerrymandering under Shaw v. Reno. District residents have never had voting representation in Congress since its establishment and the current racial composition of the city is all but politically irrelevant, though Raskin strives to offer counterarguments against the import of that fact.

Still, the sad history of America is such that consideration of race can never be eliminated from discussion of anything so fundamental to our political system as the right to vote. Indeed, if race really is at issue here, then there is a metaphorical “Three-Fifths Compromise” disingenuousness about the current effort. However honorable their intentions, proponents of the current House bill have an intellectual obligation (I know, an odd thing to expect of Congress under the best of circumstances) to explain how a voting seat in the house without Senate voting representation as well redresses the current injustice.

I seriously doubt the House bill will pass in the Senate and I am confident that if it did it would be vetoed by the President. I am equally confident that if that veto were overridden the statute would be struck down by the current Supreme Court. But these predictions go to politics, not to justice. Thursday’s vote, whatever its symbolic value to District residents may be, does not significantly further their legitimate interests. They deserve full representation in Congress. They do not deserve it on their own terms. Neither legal sophistry nor political posturing will make it so.

Constant Viewer: Fracture

Constant Viewer was sooooo excited! Having taken a peek at Metacritic's summary scores for Fracture (I rarely read actual reviews before seeing a movie), it seemed at long last there was something to look forward to on the big screen. I like twisty suspense thrillers, the twistier the better; and while I do expect the critical pieces to fit together at the end, I don’t usually try to figure them out in a race against the screenwriter.

Directed by Gregory Hoblit (Frequency, Primal Fear) and starring Anthony Hopkins as an engineer who shoots his cheating wife and Ryan Gosling as a hot-shot prosecutor who underestimates his opponent in a game of legal cat and mouse, Fracture has all the elements of a very good if not great movie of its sort. Maybe not Chinatown or The Usual Suspects, mind you, but well worth the ride. Indeed, the movie is well directed and beautifully acted with good dialog, an intricate plot and a logical resolution.

And yet, although the resolution works at a logical level, it fails to satisfy emotionally. I had figured out, well, guessed how the missing murder weapon, critical to the plot, went missing in the first place though I hadn’t matched that up with other important clues earlier in the film. I figured out the final twist as well, but more because I have some special knowledge the average viewer wouldn’t be expected to have. (Short of giving a spoiler by discussing the point in detail, I must say that while I’m not entirely sure the film applied that esoteric twist correctly, I will say I think it applied it plausibly.)

But while I might have felt mildly smug about seeing how it would all end, I can’t help but feel that the average viewer will end up feeling cheated on that very point rather the way readers of Sherlock Holmes stories for the first time will feel cheated when the great detective explains to Watson about some esoteric South African poison or other indispensable piece of arcane knowledge unavailable to even the most astute and careful of readers from the earlier text. The problem, in a nutshell, with Fracture is that after so beautiful a setup, the punch line simply doesn’t pack enough punch.

There are other small annoyances, too. Hopkins’s character, Ted Crawford, builds intricate marble track toys as a hobby; you know, where the marble rolls along a track of parallel wires twisting this way and that. Surely, the viewer thinks, these must play more than an obvious symbolic role given their repeated appearance in a number of scenes and the old theatrical rule that a gun appearing in the first act had better be used by the end of the third act. Does the phrase “red herring” ring a bell? The other annoyance, though probably required by the film’s financial backers, is the completely gratuitous subplot of Gosling’s character, Willy Beachum’s nearly new career path complete with obligatory romantic interest (read: mercifully brief rutting scene), an interest that develops faster than a trial lawyer can jump up in court and object on grounds of irrelevance.

Still, Hopkins gives a fine performance in his now signature Lecter mode, toned down considerably here but still deliciously evil, and Gosling gives his formidable co-star a run for his money in the acting department. Their scenes together are simply splendid. The supporting cast is all credible at the very least and, in fact, genuinely supports the effort, especially Billy Burke as homicide detective Rob Nunally and David Strathairn as district attorney Joe Lobruto.

Fracture isn’t a bad movie at all; in fact, it’s quite good despite its several flaws. Constant Viewer can’t bring himself to rave about it or even recommend it enthusiastically, but you could do far worse with two hours of your time and ten bucks of your money right now than settle back and enjoy it for what's there. The movie as a whole may not pass extremely close scrutiny on reflection afterwards, but there are more than enough enjoyable things about Fracture to make it worth the casual viewer's while.

I know what! Let's hire some of them crack TSA folks to secure the campuses!

And the madness continues. Thanks to Jim Henley for pointing out that E.J Dionne essentially makes the argument that we could learn a lot from the Transportation Security Administration when it comes to making college campuses safer. Dionne, later in his column:

Okay, let's be specific. What would the NRA's objection be to a law requiring gun dealers to establish whether a potential buyer is a student and, if so, to inform (or even get permission from) the student's high school or college before any weapons could be sold? What about raising the minimum age for purchasing a gun to 25 or 30? Why not renew the ban on the sale of assault weapons?

Well, golly, E.J., I can't speak for the NRA (I'm not even a member), but, um, oh, let's see... might the objection be something along the lines of "it's none of their #$%&@! business"? Isn't access to or ownership of a weapon outside the college (or, yes, even high school) campus a matter completely separate from the question of bringing that weapon on campus? Shall we further permit the schools to subject twenty-nine year old graduate students to polygraph tests to see if they know of anywhere else where they might get their hands on some guns like, oh, say, their parents' home?

Or perhaps we should turn this around. Shouldn't we have to seek permission from the TSA first before buying a gun or shouldn't the TSA at least get to know we own one? I mean, after all, we might just want to fly somewhere someday, and I'm sure the TSA will be reasonable, efficient and even-handed about such things, especially based on its performance to date.

But why stop there? Young people don't all go to college. Some of them work in office building and factories filled with other people arguably at risk from a shooting spree every minute of the working day. Shouldn't employers have the right to know about or veto their young employees' ownership of guns, too? And movie theaters and restaurants and concert halls, and shopping malls -- my gawd, the shopping malls! -- they're filled with potential victims, too. Shouldn't the Olive Garden and T.G.I. Friday's and Abercrombie & Fitch get some sort of notice or veto rights, too?

I don't suppose it would do a whit of good to point out to Dionne that the assault weapon ban is also completely irrelevant to the Virginia Tech shootings. Such weapons might someday somewhere else be used for such purposes and that, I am sure, suffices for Dionne to draw the connection.

Finally, Dionne writes, "Our country is a laughingstock on the rest of the planet because of our devotion to unlimited gun rights."

I know I've had that experience myself. I land in France or drive into Canada and I find myself incessantly barraged by torrents of laughter and cat calls of "Ho ho ho, you silly Americans and your devotion to unlimited gun rights, you foolish people, you!" I tell you, it makes ordering dinner so unpleasant I almost wish I had a handgun on me right then and there!

What nonsense. Does Dionne know a single person genuinely "devoted to unlimited gun rights," taking that phrase literally? But, hey, what are a few obvious factual misrepresentations, a general obliviousness or indifference to the meaning of words or the genuine risibility of new, shoot-from-the-hip gun restriction ideas if it means the rest of the planet will stop laughing at us?

Constant Viewer: "The Gordon Keith Show"

Local television programming here in the Dallas / Fort Worth area includes one station, KFWD Channel 52, that airs The Twilight Zone weeknights at 10:30 and immediately before that on most weeknights one of the great guilty pleasures in the annals of situation comedies, Married With Children. Catch as catch can, I’ll sit back some evenings and watch both.

On Thursday’s at 10 pm, however, the independent station indulges in a bit of independent talk show programming, the Gordon Keith Show. (Actually, the show is a production of another local station, ABC affiliate WFAA, Channel 8. It just happens that I discovered the show on Channel 52.) Better known, so far at least, as a radio personality and writer, Keith is an affable if slightly affected sort, inclined to low-key mugging before the camera and an attitude toward the whole operation reminiscent of Letterman calling segments of his show “Network Time Wasters.” The production values (show biz talk for how much money is evidently being spent) make a Robert Rodriguez film budget seem like a David Lean epic, and the shows I’ve seen so far suggest the producers aren’t wasting any money unnecessarily on behind camera frills like professional writers, either.

Still, the show is fun in a goofy, Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland “Hey kids, let’s put a show on in the barn” sort of way. In one program, for example, Keith has the curator of a collection of celebrity bric-a-brac claim that several ceramic pots on display were made by George Washington, setting Keith up moments later to smash them “accidentally” with the neck of a guitar once played by Elvis Presley. In another he had a local critic sit in to provide an ongoing critique throughout the show.

Despite the early promise of cable television and its lamentable sop to local government, the “community access” channel, there hasn’t been much local programming in the U.S. for decades. What once there was, back in the black & white, rabbit-ear antenna days of my childhood was largely either local news or children’s programming. Local news endures, but that’s about it.

And that’s a pity. The talk show format in particular, invented by Steve Allen and perfected by Johnny Carson, remains one of the paradigm inventions of the medium and is perfectly suited to low budget local productions. Alas, the catch is that the seemingly effortless way a master like Carson could make home audiences relax and feel a part of the conversation is anything but effortless, as every behind-the-scenes peek at the Tonight Show made clear. It is art to conceal art even when the “artlessness” of a David Letterman is in fact the art on display.

If the Gordon Keith Show isn’t ready for primetime or, for that matter, syndicated or network late night television –and, believe me, it isn’t – that isn’t because Keith lacks the potential but because, so far at least, the apparently casual artlessness of the show is genuine. But that’s okay. Some of Carson’s own early Carson’s Cellar shows make Keith’s show look as polished as a Marine sergeant’s brass buckle. And besides, like I said, it’s goofy fun. The only question I keep asking myself is, “Sure, but wouldn’t I rather be watching Married With Children right now?”

Herbal Medicine vs. Comfort Food Politics

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

My former Inactivist co-blogger, Jennifer Abel writes in the Hartford Advocate about Mark Braunstein, a college librarian whose injuries from a diving accident in 1990 resulted in partial paralysis below the waist. Braunstein makes no secret of his occasional non-medicinal use of marijuana in his youth, a fact common to many people of his generation, but since the accident he has found that marijuana is an effective treatment for his recurring leg spasms and pain. Unfortunately, such treatment is illegal.

Not that it would have any affect on federal law which does not recognize the medicinal use of marijuana, Connecticut is considering legislation, the Compassionate Use Act, that would make Braunstein’s use of marijuana legal at least under state law. However, at least one state legislator interviewed by Abel, Republican Toni Boucher, is an adamant opponent of the pending legislation. Before I quote from Abel’s interview with Boucher, here is the legislator’s official web page motto:

Listening to our fellow citizens and responding to their concerns with common sense solutions to protect individual freedoms and provide a better quality of life for all of Connecticut.

So why is Boucher opposed to legislation that would decriminalize what seems to be a common sense solution to Braunstein’s quality of life problems?

Boucher fears if the Compassionate Use Act passes, marijuana will make sick people sicker and snare children into self-destruction. That’s why, where medical marijuana is concerned, “there’s more harm than good in promoting it.”

And so it went: why should it be illegal for Braunstein to smoke? Because marijuana’s bad for you. So bad those who smoke it should go to jail? Yes, because it’s against the law. Why? Because it’s bad for you.

How long did Boucher think [Braunstein] should spend in prison?

There followed a long silence broken by Boucher’s response: “That’s a ludicrous question.... We’re not the judiciary.”

Given how easy it is to find federal officials willing at the drop of a hat to make fools of themselves, finding the same at the state level is almost unsportsmanlike. Still, Rep. Boucher’s mindset is deserving of the exposure here. Indeed, I have little doubt she represents the attitude of many of her constituents on this point, more’s the pity.

We can easily call attention to the folly of Boucher’s comments. She has no medical expertise, in fact it most certainly is the legislature’s business to decide which acts are to be crimes under the laws of her state and what the penalties for those crimes are to be, and the angle of incline of this particular slippery slope is equal to if not less than zero. Children will not be rushing to paralyze themselves so they can smoke pot legally.

But let’s give this slippery slope argument its due here and acknowledge that however sincere advocates of medical marijuana may be in their belief that it should be a medical option in some instances, their opponents are correct in surmising that legalizing marijuana use in such instances would also serve to undermine the general prohibition.

In that sense, they are equally situated atop the sort of precarious absolutism as that of abortion rights advocates whose reaction to Carhart suggests we are now mere days away from the return of back alley butchery.

It simply cannot be repeated often enough: politics is at least as much if not far, far more about what we fear and what we desire than what we think makes sense. Of course, no one knows anyone whose life has been damaged by smoking marijuana or crack cocaine, for that matter, to the extent that thousands of lives have been damaged by conviction and incarceration for same.

The reason this sort of “destroy the village in order to save it” logic makes no sense and yet is heard, one way or another, over and over again is because we are not, in fact, concerned about the lives of those other people. We are concerned about our own lives and those of our families and friends and collateral damage be damned as long as we believe ourselves to be safe and sound.

The sort of deep, visceral fear involved here is no more rational than the fear of a mother bear whose cubs one has accidentally and innocently approached. It is not only bereft of reason, it is immune to reason. It will not be swayed by mere facts. It is my young daughter frightened by thunderstorms, who cannot be comforted by reason but only by being held and told, over and over again, that she is safe now and will always be safe in the arms of her mother.

Afraid Of Being Shot On Your Way To An Illegal Abortion? Blame Ralph Nader!

I should start a regular feature called Mind Bloggling.

With the usual hat tip to memeorandum, we now find Martin Lewis easily outdistancing Barack Obama and Dr. Phil in the Warped Logic contest that is now sweeping the nation. Mr. Lewis asserts -- as Jack Paar used to say, I kid you not -- the following:

Thanks to Ralph Nader and those "holier-liberaller- progressiver-purer-than-thou" folks who voted for him, Al Gore and John Kerry lost their presidential bids and that led to weaker gun control laws and a more conservative Supreme Court and that, that, THAT, Ladies and Gentlemen, has resulted in "tens of thousands of women who will be denied an abortion as a result of the new Supreme Court decision" and "the slaughter in Virginia."

Truly, the mind boggles.

Mr. Lewis is not, as I first thought (having never heard of him before -- have you?), the love child of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but:

[started] his career as a protégé of fabled Beatles publicist Derek Taylor – he has had a storied 36-year history as a journalist, columnist, writer, humorist, monologist, comedic performer, radio host, TV host, TV correspondent, Master of Ceremonies, producer (of movies, TV, radio, DVDs, stage shows and record albums), talent manager, record company owner, independent film distributor, film-festival curator, political commentator, pioneering organizer of benefit events, human rights activist - and as an award-winning publicity & marketing strategist.

And now we know why he can't hold a steady job. [bada-bing!]

Take a deep, cleansing breath, Mr. Lewis. The lapsed, so-called assault weapons ban never prohibited the 9mm or .22 caliber handguns used in the Virginia Tech massacre, and no president or would-be president could have possibly pushed through legislation banning or even imposing serious restrictions on such weapons in the last decade, nor is it at all clear that such legislation would, itself, pass Constitutional muster.

No responsible abortion rights advocate has ever claimed that there are or have been or are ever likely to be anywhere near tens of thousands of cases of the particular abortion procedure, the prohibition against which the Supreme Court did not overrule as being unconstitutional. Moreover, although the matter is disputed, there is evidence that, for the majority if not the overwhelming majority of women seeking an abortion whose physician might otherwise have considered that procedure, alternative procedures exist and remain legal.

Reasonable people can reasonably disagree about the likely alternative history of the U.S. since 2000 had Ralph Nader chosen not to run for president. But Mr. Lewis cannot be counted among such people. Opinions such as his should not be dismissed lightly; they should be dismissed with howls of derisive laughter.