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.

Woe Unto Thee, Ye Scribes and Pharasees!

What with Buddy the donkey having made his appearance in a Dallas, Texas courtroom the other day, I guess I should have expected that He who rode an ass into Jerusalem might make a similar visit to the Dallas - Fort Worth Metroplex. Only in our updated story, the man claiming to be God to both a bank teller and a police officer drove a truck in place of a donkey and rather than driving the moneylenders out of the Temple, he (He?) relieved the same of an undisclosed amount of cash from a Fort Worth bank.

He was subsequently located some eight hours later when residents of a private home he was apparently trying to enter called the police. (So much for "Knock and the door shall be opened to you.") During arrest, the man (miraculously?) broke a pair of handcuffs but was eventually subdued by the Sanhedrin police and taken for psychiatric examination to a hospital. The man's truck has since been located but the money has not yet been recovered.

Madness In Our Method

In his usual measured and even tempered way, Hugh Hewitt rhetorically asks if NBC’s decision to air portions of the video sent by Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui is “the single worst editorial decision in the history of broadcast news.”

I’d still give the nod to the decision to hire Katie Couric for the Today Show chair formerly held by J. Fred Muggs, but reasonable people can disagree about such things.

I’m being flippant because, frankly, much of the commentary that has exploded in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy is worthy of, nay, begs for ridicule. I have already commented on the alleged causal connection between such tragedies and video game violence by America’s child psychologist for children of all ages, Dr. Phil.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko at Reason has nailed Barack Obama’s ludicrous comparison of the shootings to outsourcing as “ignorant,... exploitative and offensive.” And, of course, the finger pointing and ax grinding over everything from justifying more or less gun control to whether campus police and administrative officials acted properly or quickly enough and what about the early warning signs that Cho might have been mentally ill (you think?) and on and on and on continue to inundate the media and the internet and force their way into our collective consciousness.

Here’s a thought. It’s all garbage. The Virginia Tech massacre is the responsibility of one man and one man, alone. Cho Seung-Hui. He was a sick man, a deranged man and a tragic and pathetic man. None of the rest of the 20/20 hindsight pop psychology, ax grinding and blame spreading is worth a rodent’s hindquarters.

Yes, including my own ax grinding right here and now. None of us writing about this tragedy, when we attempt to say anything more at this point than what a tragedy it was and is and will remain, are contributing anything worthwhile to that terrible truth. Unforeseen, unforeseeable and unavoidable tragedies occur to innocent people every day, sometimes because madmen walk the earth, and innocent lives are lost as a result. The urge to make sense or to find something, anything redeeming from such events is understandable. So, even, are the baser urges to exploit those events to our own advantages. We are only human. But unlike madmen, we are supposed to be able to resist our urges.

Or at least to try.

Think Locally, Act Globally

“The church of global free trade, which rules American politics with infallible pretensions, may have finally met its Martin Luther,” writes William Greider in The Nation. I wasn't aware that free trade advocates had been selling plenary indulgences, but Luther in this case turns out to be retired IBM executive and current president of the Alfred P. Slone Foundation, Ralph Gomory. Gomory wrote in collaboration with economist William Baumol, a book entitled Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests some seven years ago. As Greider puts it, the “book languished in academic obscurity and until recently was ignored by Washington policy circles.” As C. Montgomery Burns might say with a view to the latest elections, “Recently, eh?”

I haven’t read the book, but the gist of Greider’s lengthy review is an approving belief in Gomory’s thesis that the rise of multinational corporations engaged in free trade on a global level has resulted in and will continue to result in a net real loss to the U.S. economy. “If nothing changes in how globalization currently works, Americans will be increasingly exposed to downward pressure on incomes and living standards.”

Lucky for us, Gomory has a solution which Greider reports as follows:

Gomory's vision of reformation actually goes beyond the trading system and America's economic deterioration. He wants to re-create an understanding of the corporation's obligations to society, the social perspective that flourished for a time in the last century but is now nearly extinct. The old idea was that the corporation is a trust, not only for shareholders but for the benefit of the country, the employees and the people who use the product. "That attitude was the attitude I grew up on in IBM," Gomory explains. "That's the way we thought--good for the country, good for the people, good for the shareholders--and I hope we will get back to it.... We should measure corporations by their impact on all their constituencies.

Should we, now? And if so, can’t one make a reasonably good case that the constituencies of a truly multinational corporation include the world’s population and not merely the home nation of its incorporation?

Greider trots out the usual snippets about how other nations both protect their own economies and lure U.S. corporations to outsource primarily manufacturing facilities and acknowledges that this constitutes a win for both the emerging nations’ economies and for the corporations. But, alas, “there is another effect beyond the benefits for those two parties--high-value-added jobs leave the U.S.”

Well, yes, if your idea of a high-value-added job is working on an assembly line in a semiconductor factory. Exactly how high paying such a job can be and for how long it will remain so is another matter. Yes, various Asian nations effectively took the electronics manufacturing market and a good chunk of the automobile manufacturing market away from the U.S. over the past two or three decades. And now as the standard of living and cost of labor have risen in those nations, they, themselves, are facing essentially the same phenomenon as those very same manufacturing operations are now beginning to be outsourced to other, less developed nations. Golly, imagine the third world actually having the opportunity to work and grow its way out of poverty. Why, somebody ought to do something about this!

And, sure, the U.S. continues to import more and more goods and services as more and more goods and services at lower prices (and sometimes higher quality) become available. As a result, ignoring for a moment the lost U.S. jobs this process necessarily also entails, we nonetheless all benefit as consumers. And, sure, such benefits accrue only so long as we do, in fact, have jobs and, what’s more, jobs paying enough to be able to afford those foreign bargains.

So what about those lost jobs? Greider says, “Free-trade believers insist US workers can defend themselves by getting better educated.” Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the days of a U.S. labor force in the manufacturing sector earning salaries commensurate with that of their parents and grandparents in the manufacturing sector is probably gone for good and it is unrealistic to expect that the remaining blue-collar work force will be able en masse to educate itself to a comparable earning level in a different sector.

On the other hand, just as we are on average vastly better off economically in this post-industrial economy than we were during America’s primarily agrarian economy, it is far more likely than not that our expanding economy will continue to create a new job market as well, and not only of the burger flipping variety. (For that matter, when, oh when, is someone going to build robots to replace the largely incompetent workforce in what, once upon a time, was called the fast food industry?) Refresh my memory, how many computer related jobs were there in the U.S. thirty years ago?

But, sure, the notion that everyone is a winner all of the time in a free market is absurd and, yes, the disparity between the per capita wealth and earning capacity of the U.S. and other Western nations vis a vis the rest of the world will eventually close in a global market. Yes, also, although that is primarily because such a global market will result in an expanding economy on a world-wide basis, it is also a function to some extent of supply and demand in the labor market – more people capable of performing factory jobs or, for that matter, computer programming or any other jobs capable of outsourcing will result in downward pressures on the price of such local labor.

Which gets to the nub of what is wrong with the notion that the U.S. needs a protectionist national policy. First, it won’t work, neither here nor anywhere else. Not, at least, in the long run; and, yes, while in the long run we may all be dead, our children and grandchildren will not. Second, national protectionist policy is simply local protectionist policy writ large. Read Greider’s article and replace in your mind every mention of the U.S. and foreign nations with, oh, say, Michigan and Georgia (as, indeed, the same sort of progressives as Greider not so long ago routinely did and sometimes still do) and ask yourself if interstate commerce has turned out to be nearly as disastrous as international commerce is now supposed to become? Ask yourself, also, just how much you would have to earn to be able to afford the vastly higher prices and lower quality and choices of a truly local economy by comparison to the market you enjoy today.

These are not, I think, questions Mr. Greider takes very seriously. But if a painless global economy is a fairy tale so is painless protectionism. And only in fairy tales do we all get to live happily ever after.

Politics as Usual at the High Court

As promised (threatened?), I have a few further comments about yesterday’s 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision in Gonzalez v. Carhart (and its simultaneously decided companion case, Gonzalez v. Planned Parenthood, hereafter collectively "Carhart").

Those interested in instant analysis from a more lawyerly perspective might do well to start with both SCOTUSblog and The Volokh Conspiracy. My quick read of the over seventy pages of the majority decision and dissent is that in purely practical terms Carhart accomplishes next to nothing for those who seek to restrict or prohibit abortions.

However, as Justice Ginsburg noted in her dissent, “[f]or the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman's health." Well, “blesses” is a bit strong, but the fact remains that since Roe and prior to today’s ruling, any attempted restriction on abortion that carried with it even the arguable possibility that such restriction might endanger the health of a woman seeking an abortion has failed to withstand challenge before the Court. In that sense, Carhart is a significant political victory for abortion opponents and setback for abortion rights defenders. How long lasting that victory or defeat may be or whether it amounts to anything more than a symbolic gesture remains to be seen.

It is worth remembering that in principle the ethics of abortion, like the ethics of any issue, is a separate matter from the proper role of the Supreme Court in determining what legal rights and liberties do or do not follow from the U.S. Constitution and therefore restrict or permit the (overtly) political branches of government to affect those rights and liberties. Thus, for example, while I might (and do) oppose abortion in general and also believe that Roe v. Wade and the Court's abortion cases since Roe have been bad decisions as a matter of law, I might (and do) also believe that while Griswold v. Connecticut was a bad decision as a matter of law and in some of its subsequent applications (especially Roe), a Constitutional right of privacy broader than the sort of privacy expressly protected in the actual text of the Constitution is a wonderful idea and that it should, by Amendment, be a part of the text of the Constitution.

I am aware that there are those who would disagree as a matter of legal philosophy with the first sentence of that last paragraph. Indeed, I am personally inclined to take the view myself that, at bottom, law like war is merely politics through other means. That is in fact the prevailing view amongst contemporary intellectuals, and perhaps understandably so. Perhaps the notion of law as being something above or apart from politics was always doomed once the notion of positive law of any sort being rooted in divine or at least natural law gave way to our prevailing jurisprudence of legal realism and critical legal studies.

Perhaps it follows from this that the Supreme Court should abandon its almost farcical pretense that its decisions on privacy and abortion (and any number of other matters) are possessed of some sort of consistent application of principles and some sort of unifying logic in that application. One need merely read the dissents in many of those typically split decisions to go a long way toward disabusing oneself of such notions. Indeed, I think, one would have to have the finely developed cognitive dissonance found primarily among Constitutional scholars and Supreme Court justices themselves to come to any other conclusion, and that is as true of Carhart as it is of its many "precedent" decisions.

When the judge says "Bring your ass to court,"

... sometimes he means it literally. Or so it would seem here in Dallas the other day when, during a civil trial between squabbling neighbors, one party did indeed bring his donkey Buddy to court as a "witness," apparently to demonstrate that, contrary to his neighbor's complaints, Buddy was quiet and well behaved. Buddy didn't exactly plead the 5th Amendment, but it seems he had nothing to bray say, and counsel for the opposing party wisely decided not to attempt any questions on cross-examination.



During jury deliberations following a three hour trial, the neighbors came to an amicable out-of-court settlement, perhaps proving that, while there may have been more than one jackass in court that day, they did finally manage to overcome their own mulishness.

Supreme Court Upholds Federal Partial Birth Abortion Technique Ban

The slip opinion has not yet been posted, so I can comment only on the breaking AP report for now.

Abortion opponents, among whom I include myself, should properly greet any retreat from the Court's abortion cases beginning with Row v. Wade as good news of a sort. (And, of course, vice versa for abortion rights advocates.) Still, it is worth noting, first, that the surgical technique under consideration here is used in only a handful of the over one million abortions performed in the U.S. every year and, second, that as the AP reports:

The procedure at issue involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman's uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.

Abortion opponents say the law will not reduce the number of abortions performed because an alternate method _ dismembering the fetus in the uterus _ is available and, indeed, much more common.

That latter is, of course, a matter of dispute. (When it comes to abortion, what isn't?) Still, it must be taken as small comfort from the near-term human being involved that, while her death may no longer be effected by having her skull crushed, getting the job done by dismemberment remains a "viable" option.

More, no doubt, later.

Quick Draw McGraw

[T]he problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me -- common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that. We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose. -- Dr. Phil (McGraw)

Just as we reserve the use of Roman numerals for only the most lofty and dignified of designations such as monarchs, popes and Super Bowls, the use of first names as sufficient identification for public persons is reserved for only the most lofty and exulted in society such as Pope Benedict, Queen Elizabeth, Oprah and her media prince consort, Dr. Phil.

Of course, if I may digress for a moment, there is one other class of adult humanity routinely called by their first name, and that is you and I as customers. It matters not that we might be more than twice the age of the sales clerk behind the counter who has just gleaned our given name from our credit card and whom we have only just met for the first time and barely met at that. He will grasp every opportunity thereafter to call you by that given name as though you and he were the bestest of buddies back in camp last summer. This is called "the personal touch" and taught to such minions by order of their company's executives who would no more tolerate being called by their own first names by said minions than invite them to the club on Saturday for a round of golf.

Not counting government (that's for another rant), this tacit infantilization of one's customers finds the zenith of its expression in medicine, where even the receptionist, incongruously attired in hospital scrubs (does she have a surgery to assist after the filing is done?) blithely calls you by your first name as she finally informs you "The Doctor will see you now."

Ah, yes, the Doctor. You can just hear the capitalization in her voice, can't you? And so it is with Dr. Phil. Who, after all, would take seriously or seek advice from a television psychologist just named Phil? So we have in the case of Dr. Phil a bit of psychological jujitsu, asserting his distancing professional status on the one hand, while projecting a friendly familiarity with his first name on the other.

And who among medical professionals ("medical" broadly construed to include clinical psychologists) make a routine practice of this bit of trickery? Why, pediatricians and child psychologists, of course.

Who better, then, to shoot from the hip ("I'll do the thinnin' around here, Baba Looey!") as in the above quote and explain the psychological nexus between rage-filled sociopaths and psychopaths and video game violence? You or I might have thought just being a rage-filled sociopath would suffice for someone to engage in some sort of rage-filled sociopathic behavior, but it takes Dr. Phil's common sense to connect the dots for us with a "massive violence overdose" ingested from too many hours playing Mortal Kombat.

Now, in fairness, although the research on this topic I have seen shows no statistically significant long-term or lasting effect on children or adolescents in general from their playing violent video games, that isn't McGraw's point. What he is saying is that, whatever the general effect or lack thereof, the higher suggestibility among the mentally ill in particular is causing an escalation in the nature and degree of the sort of violent acts such people may be prone to commit.

Fair enough. I know of no research on that point one way or another and, alas, Dr. Phil cites only "common sense" to support his hypothesis. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a clinical psychologist and an experimental psychologist, never mind what counts as common sense among psychologists generally. But maybe he's right. Maybe there is a connection in that limited sense between the mentally ill and exposure to violence. Who knows?

Let's assume that it is true. Where does that leave us? Banning violent video games for the over ninety-five percent of the population who are not psychopaths or sociopaths? Following Dr. Phil's lead, I just pulled that number out of thin air, but, hey, you know, most of us ain't crazy.

To what extent are we willing to prohibit the population at large from something, anything that many of them want to do and that doesn't harm them because some tiny fraction of the population is thereby at risk? That, of course, is a question we can ask about any number of things including video games, drugs, gambling, et cetera ad nauseam.

But the libertarian takes the question a step further. What business is it of ours if such things do harm some small number of people or even if they contribute in some sense to their harming others in those still, thank God, extremely rare cases like the Virginia Tech massacre that gave occasion to Dr. Phil's thoughts on video games? How much freedom are we willing to sacrifice for a heightened sense of safety or security?

The answer to that question varies from person to person as a function of how important liberty versus security is to him. But there is one class of persons for whom we don't hesitate in asserting that security is more important; namely, children. And so as we allow ourselves increasingly to be infantilized, as we live on a diet of talk show guru prepared pablum and expert pronouncements for our own good and come to see ourselves more and more as children in constant need of protection from one another, Nanny State smiles warmly and waits to take us by the hand and tuck us into bed and read us a comforting fairy tale where they all lived happily ever after.

Update: Coble and Kirk Settle Their Differences

I wrote several days ago about threatened litigation against blogger Katherine Coble by legal counsel for JL Kirk & Associates for libel stemming from comments Coble and her readers had posted on her blog. Coble now reports that the Media Bloggers Association took up Coble's cause and, as these things tend to happen, a mutually agreed upon resolution short of litigation appears to have been reached.

Here's an old joke: The only lawyer in a small town was starving to death until another lawyer moved in and then they both got rich. Here's the reality, at least in many situations: The threat of litigation is a double-edged sword at least once competent attorneys are representing both sides in the dispute. Sanity short of expensive litigation usually prevails.

Here's another reality, albeit of an anecdotal nature: Being once a "starving" young lawyer, myself, I was approached by a would-be client who wished to sue someone for slander. We discussed the facts and, as it turned out, she had a reasonably good case as far as meeting the technical elements of the tort of slander was concerned but her only real damages were her wounded feelings. I explained to her that even if she were to win her suit the court would in all likelihood award no more than nominal damages (traditionally, one dollar) as a token of her vindication. She thought about this and decided not to proceed. Much though I would have liked to earn the fee, I was glad she did the right thing; but if she had decided to proceed I would have taken the case and not because I needed the work. Part of the problem with the so-called law and economics school of jurisprudence is that life is not a business.

One last reality, also mostly anecdotal, but I think relevant here: a memory from law school. We were discussing rental contracts, that is, leases in class one day and the almost universal inclusion in such contracts of clauses giving landlords putative rights that we had already learned were unenforceable. If you went in those days to an office supply store (these days probably somewhere online) and found boilerplate, fill-in-the-blank leases, you would find they almost all included such unenforceable provisions. Now, the ethics of a practicing attorney including such provisions in the drafting of a lease for a client are dubious at best, but that happens, too, and not because the lawyer doesn't know the clauses are unenforceable. Indeed, what she does know is that the average tenant will assume that such provisions are enforceable and is unlikely to challenge them. As often as not, perhaps, the law is as much a game of poker as it is of chess.

"The Connection Between Race and Crime"

The shooter responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean national and Virginia Tech senior majoring in English.

Cho’s identity now means we can add the topics of immigration and ethnicity to the cacophony that has already exploded throughout the media and the internet. Have at it, folks.

Meanwhile, over at The Agitator, Radley Balko yesterday posted what he called a Rambling Duke Post reflecting on what he took to be something wrong about the “comparative lack of coverage of the James Giles versus the Duke lacrosse case” and the concluding with “the fact that so many conservatives seem to have walked away from the [Duke] case thinking ... that we aren't doing enough to vilify black people, and that rich white people are the real victims here.”

Well, now.

Actually, I agree with much that Balko writes between those two quotes and most of where I don’t agree with him or don't agree entirely isn’t worth much argument. Moreover, I’m not a conservative, let alone an apologist for some of the conservatives he samples and links to in his post. I did, however, write with some passion about the sort of racism I take to be a motive force behind the deplorable behavior of Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong and I have never written about the James Giles case or the many other cases of wrongful convictions and cases of criminal injustice and police misconduct which Balko, to his great credit, reports on regularly.

What I want to say here, however, is that, while it is true that some in the largely conservative end of the media and blogosphere have made dubious comments about the “black crime rate,” just as many in the liberal end have made many dubious comments about the black incarceration rate in America, I’m not sure it follows that the former has especially been urging, as Balko puts it, the notion that “the media doesn't do enough to tell us about how black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.” (Emphasis in original.)

Some, no doubt have. We call such people racists. Some of them may be ignorant racists (“As opposed to what, Ridgely? Well informed racists?”) in the sense that they literally do not know, as Balko points out, that if you adjust for class and income the crime rate among whites and blacks is about the same. They may be oblivious or indifferent as to how, as Balko also points out, our idiotic War Against Drugs and some of its most insane policies drive up urban (mostly poor, mostly black) crime. Even so, it is one thing to note or decry that the incident of crime is higher among blacks as a percentage of the general population, with or without taking such factors into consideration, and quite another to claim or be accused of claiming that “black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.”

Take the Heather MacDonald City Journal piece to which Balko linked, for example. It is a column sympathetic to the New York Police Department and its officers and, by implication, sympathetic toward the subjective reasonableness of their perceptions and fears as they encounter what I will call (though MacDonald does not) the statistical realities of New York’s crime rates. MacDonald does indeed use the phrase “the connection between race and crime” and further states that “blacks aren’t stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes” and even, in what I would call a poorly worded disclaimer, says “most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection.” (Don’t all black residents, law-abiding or not, deserve police protection?)

Of course, I’ve reprinted those quotes out of context, but I don’t read them individually or collectively, out of context or in context or, for that matter, the entire MacDonald column as stating or implying anything about blacks being inherently more criminal than whites. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that in that one example and on that one small but important point Balko is reading more between the lines than may really be there. Then again, maybe not. I have no more of a window into MacDonald’s mind or soul than I do into Balko’s or anyone else’s.

The thing is, race makes us all crazy. The War Against Drugs (if not drugs, themselves) makes us crazier still. When Homer Simpson calls alcohol "the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems," we laugh. When a young black man living in the inner city considers crack cocaine the cause of and answer to all of life’s problems, it isn’t funny at all. Does the Left truly want to lower the incarceration rate among black men in America? Does the Right truly want to lower the crime rate in the inner city?

Easily done. Legalize drugs.

Urban (black) crime rates will plummet as will incarceration rates, and not only the mere but far too many criminal convictions and incarcerations for possession and use but all the violent crime directly resulting from the illegality of such possession and use in the first place.

Or, if you can’t bring yourselves to support drug legalization, at least recognize that, for example, the criminal penalties attendant to possession of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine do more harm than good.

But let’s get back to race for a minute. Is there any reader here, is there anybody anywhere who, upon hearing yesterday of the horrible shooting spree at Virginia Tech thought to himself, “I’ll bet it was a Korean”?

Of course not. And no one thought to himself it was probably a black man, either. We all thought, at least I sure as hell did until later information emerged that the shooter was a white guy. Is that sort of subliminal racial profiling racist?

Perhaps it simply is beyond our meager powers of reason and reasonableness to think sensibly about race, itself a dubious and poisoned concept, or to think sensibly about how other people think about race. Perhaps we are like the divorcing couple whose rage at each other has blinded them both to any hope of seeing any remnant of good faith on the other’s part.

Some of us, indeed I would suspect the majority of those of us who have written, even in anger, at the travesty of the Duke lacrosse student prosecution did not do so because of some idiotic sense that rich white males are society’s new victims. Except, maybe, in this one highly limited sense: whatever the realities of racial profiling by the cop on the beat or the investigating officer at a crime scene may be, racial or class bias on the part of the prosecutor’s office is as ugly and inappropriate when it rushes to judgment against a rich white man as it is when it does so against a poor black man. Nothing more, but surely nothing less.

Of course, DNA testing should be performed wherever possible to exonerate the unjustly convicted, and perhaps the urgency of our moral imperative to do so is especially acute precisely because the majority of such men are black and poor and the criminal justice system has for too long been and still too much remains an institutional injustice to black men collectively.

But neither black men collectively nor white men collectively commit crimes. Individual men do that, one man and one crime at a time. And, yes, that is true even in the case of organized crime or criminal gangs – they are comprised of individual men, regardless of race or color or class, not the warped Platonic ideals of White Man, Black Man, Rich Man, Poor Man, etc.

We may try to understand the “underlying social causes and conditions” of inner city life that leads to high crime rates among young black men or we might find utterly incomprehensible the underlying mental causes and conditions leading to the horrific acts of a mass murderer. In the end, however, it remains that a single individual does what he does. In that sense, the racial accidents and even the socioeconomic class or status of his birth are entirely irrelevant. Or should be.

Which means, in turn, that just as MacDonald allows as how black (law-abiding) inner city residents deserve police protection, so too do rich white college students deserve unbiased coverage by the media and dispassionate and unprejudiced treatment from prosecutors.

Massacre at Virginia Tech (Updated)

This is an absolutely terrible and gut wrenching story. ABC News reports that at least 29 persons are dead, apparently including the shooter himself, and at least 17 more are injured following a horrific shooting spree at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Blacksburg, itself, is a beautiful and remote part of Virginia and the school, officially Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, dates back to a land-grant in 1872 and is one of Virginia's premier institutions of higher education.

It is foolish to think of any place as one where "it can't happen here." But psychologically the sense of unlikelihood of such an occurrence, the biggest mass shooting on a college campus in American history, happening at Virginia Tech almost approaches the enormity of the act itself.

On a personal note and as a native Virginian, I have known dozens, perhaps hundreds of Hokies or Virginia Tech graduates over the years, my older son considered attending there, and I know at least one faculty member there who I hope and pray is unharmed and safe. This is awful, awful news and my heart goes out to the victims, the families and friends of the victims and the entire Virginia Tech community.

* * * * * * * * * *

UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 33. Predictably, the blogosphere is awash with commentary, also predictably all over the map, some of it measured and sane, some of it not.

Over at Reason's Hit & Run, commenters are engaged in a lively but largely puerile debate over gun control, while Michelle Malkin has taken to posting reader's views on the campus weapons ban at Virginia Tech, suggesting that a well armed student body might have prevented or reduced the carnage. Maybe. So would wearing legal and readily available body armor. It is one thing to argue the right to bear arms, another to suggest that we all do so as a matter of course in our daily lives. Does anyone really want to live that way, and would it really make that much difference to a deranged murderer, or would his choice of weapons simply shift from firearms to explosives?

Meanwhile, The Nation's David Corn, writing at his own blog, notes that other societies have made other choices regarding firearms. True enough, although not self-evidently relevant. He quotes another blogger who, by way of attempting to provide some 'perspective,' writes: "Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 22 American students slain in Blacksburg, Viginia." [sic]

One shouldn't need to reply, although apparently one does, that Iraq is a nation at war not only with the U.S. but with itself. Whatever the merits or failings of the war in Iraq and America's role in it, comparisons between a war zone and a killing spree on a college campus are obscene. Say what you will about firearms and gun control or, for that matter, the ugly brutality and bloodshed of any war at any place or time, firearms have always been plentiful and ready access to them has always been the case in America.

We can resume those discussions and debates tomorrow, not today. Such tragedies as today's in Blacksburg and before that at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have not always been the case. This particular sort of insanity, for there is no other term for it, is of recent vintage.

It seems somehow inappropriate to quote even as respected a science fiction writer as Robert Heinlein today, and yet when events such as today's occur the first thing that comes to my mind is his calling (in 1941, no less) this modern era "the Crazy Years." Perhaps there has always been much madness in the world. Certainly today there is too much.

Global Warming Rally Huge Success

Ward, I'm very worried about the Beaver.

File under "Great Minds Think Alike": Here I've been musing lately about the 1950's and over at The New Criterion's blog, Armavirumque, Roger Kimball -- well, he's a smart guy; me? [shrug] -- posts a friend's list of how times sure have changed in these here United States of America in the last fifty years.

Exposé: Imus Downfall Really Due To Threatened Revelation of 9/11 Secrets!

No, not really. (Sheesh! I already feel like Matt Drudge writing for the National Enquirer.) Still, with a hat tip to memeorandum, this too funny story in Pravda Online can't be missed.

At last it can be told! The Rutgers women's basketball slur? Par for the course for Imus (well, that part's true) and merely a smoke-screen for the real reason he fell from grace: he "threatening to expose the truths behind the events of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars; and to such an extent that another American media personality, Rosie O'Donnell, has expressed concern that US Military Leaders could actually imprison Mr. Imus." And when it comes to hard-hitting investigative reporting, well, I guess we all know you just can't do better than Rosie.

On a serious note here, this sort of nonsense is precisely why I criticized the Pelosi trip to Syria recently. Sure, Pravda even in its post-Soviet incarnation(s) is a journalistic joke in a way and to a vastly greater degree than even I would ever accuse the Washington Post or New York Times at their worst of being. But as with Russian Presidents Vladimir Putin's failure to understand the firing of Dan Rather, so too it remains the case that not only the average person throughout much of the rest of the world but also too many foreign leaders simply fail to grasp how America (still, thank God) works. Believe me, if former Soviet KGB guys like Putin can so completely miss the boat -- and remember, the Soviets poured extensive resources into studying the U.S. throughout the Cold War -- what are the chances of the Iranians, Syrians or whoever being able to put Pelosi's comments into perspective? I'd say roughly zilch.

Anyway, you can't say Pravda hasn't made at least some progress since the old Cold War days. Yes, I know, what are now published in print and online under the title "Pravda" are separate entities and neither is a continuation the old official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Still, the association persists, as no doubt it is intended to persist. And try as I might, I simply can't imagine the old Soviet Pravda running a photo spread on a "dwarf porn star". (The posted pics, btw, are not pornographic.)

Constant Viewer: 300

[Note: Constant Viewer's constant readers will discern at once that this review was originally posted at Inactivist on March 11, 2007. Well, the movie is still going strong at the box office, having already grossed just a tad under $200 million, so this bit of salvaging / recycling still seems relevant. More to the point, however, CV can't seem anything else in theatrical release to watch and review these days. Grindhouse, for example, grossed a measly $11.6 million in its opening week, and that's for a double feature by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, directors with strong fan bases. At this rate, Tarantino could wind up back behind the counter in the video rental store if it weren't for the fact that Rodriguez can bring in a film for around twelve bucks. CV doubts he'll be seeing Grindhouse on the big screen.]

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Frank Miller’s 300 is that it isn’t nearly as gory as Constant Viewer expected. Yes, there are decapitations and severed limbs galore and buckets of virtual blood splattered hither and yon, but the graphic novelesque portrayal of such viscera and mayhem – what another reviewer called a slavish devotion to Miller’s original work – oddly tempers the visual impact. Indeed, given what passes for PG-13 these days, Constant Viewer is slightly surprised 300 carried an R rating.

That’s not to say 300 isn’t violent. Of course it is, the whole story being, after all, a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE between the Spartans and a Persian army variously estimated from 100,000 to over two million. Think Custer’s Last Stand except in this case the overwhelmingly outnumbered side was the “good guys,” more about which below. There is a back story of political intrigue and betrayal and, to spice matters up a bit, a handful of grotesques and the occasional bare female breast (also overwhelmingly outnumbered by the number of bare male breasts – as skin flicks go, this is far more of a beefcake festival for women), but basically we’re talking a good solid hour of battle, and it is splendidly portrayed.

300 is further evidence that digital cinematography and computer generated imagery have reached a trompe l'oeil level that bodes well for a new generation of vastly less expensive film making. "Now," one can almost hear Hitchcock wishing from the grave, "if only we could get rid of those pesky actors entirely, too."

Living in an age in which, as the Marxists once incessantly insisted, everything is political, the question occurs what polemical subtext we can squeeze out of 300. Is George Bush the modern-day Xerxes, spreading his American Empire by brute, overwhelming force across the planet? Indeed, are Iraq or today’s Persia (i.e., Iran) the “moral equivalent” of Sparta and Athens, boldly resisting the Barbarian Hegemon of the West?

No, of course not. Constant Viewer does expect any minute now to see Bush’s head photoshopped over the gold festooned body of Rodrigo Santoro’s Xerxes on his slave-borne throne, but the fevered imagination of ideologues aside, there are no contemporary lessons to be learned from the likes of 300, and axe grinding will not make it so.

Were the Spartans the “good guys”? By contrast to the Persian Empire, that’s a no-brainer. Inasmuch as the West is heir to ancient Hellenic culture, however, the more apt and almost inevitable contrast is with Athens, its sister state and principle Greek rival. The Athenians, it should be remembered, were hardly pacifists, so any comparison between the two stressing the fundamentally martial culture of Sparta is too facile. Constant Viewer is no historian, but there is at least some reason to believe that Sparta has suffered something of a bad rap over the ages, no doubt in part because it left little by way of a written history of itself. That said, the notion that the modern West has much in common with either ancient Athens or Sparta is on a par with the notion that the modern Middle East has much in common with ancient Persia.

300 is a ripping good yarn, appropriately filled as well with Laconic wit. Yes, the characters are one-dimensional and, no, despite what was written above, this isn’t a movie to take the kiddies to see. Constant Viewer’s constant readers will note there is little mention of the actors and none at all of the director or other principle crew. None is needed. 300 is a comic book graphic novel beautifully adapted in what amounts to living animation. If seen at all, it should be seen on the big screen. No home theater screen will do justice, for example, to the scene where, as threatened, so many Persian arrows are shot at once they blot out the sun.

To which threat the Spartans calmly replied, “Then we can fight in the shade.”

[Insert "That sheep's a damned liar!" joke here]

The (U.K.) Daily Mail recently reported that Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has created the world's first human-sheep chimera, having 15 percent human cells and 85 percent sheep cells. The research is aimed at eventually being able to create sheep organs capable of being transplanted into human patients. The hoped for process is described as follows:

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

Excuse me, but... the brain?

[Note: An earlier version of this entry was posted at Inactivist on March 25, 2007.]

It's Like Deja Vu All Over Again, Man!

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

Actually, Einstein may have lifted the quote from an old Chinese proverb. Regardless, it seems that newly appointed interim U.S. Attorney Scott Schools has read neither, deciding to retry marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal on cultivation charges stemming (seedy pun intended) from Rosenthal’s having grown marijuana in 2003 for an Oakland, California medical marijuana program. Herewith, your tax dollars at work thanks to our vastly successful and eminently rational War Against Drugs:

Rosenthal has already been tried and convicted for these acts. Notwithstanding California law, federal law doesn’t recognize marijuana as medicine, so Rosenthal’s defense was not permitted to introduce evidence at the original trial of his relationship to the Oakland program, such evidence being ruled irrelevant. Even so, under the circumstances and despite minimum sentencing guidelines, Federal District Court Judge Charles Breyer sentenced Rosenthal to one day in jail, time already served, plus a fine and supervised release.

Still, it was a felony conviction. Rosenthal appealed and won at the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on grounds of juror misconduct. (One juror had improperly discussed the case with an attorney.) Reversing the earlier convictions and dismissing as moot the government’s cross-appeal regarding the sentencing, the three judge appeals court panel noted in dicta they “would not be inclined to disturb the court’s reasoned analysis underlying its sentencing determination.”

The U.S. Attorney’s office then indicted Rosenthal again, not only on the original counts but this time tacking on four additional counts of money laundering and five counts of filing false tax returns. Judge Breyer threw out the additional charges, determining they amounted to vindictive prosecution in response to Rosenthal having won his appeal and publicly criticized the trial and the prosecution after what amounted to a jaw-dropping open court admission by Assistant U.S. Attorney George Bevan that such vindictiveness was indeed the government's motive behind the new charges.

Still, the U.S. Attorney’s office now intends to proceed once again with the original counts before the same judge whose sentencing decision from the earlier conviction has essentially already been upheld on appeal. Brilliant!

Speaking of swimming...

My friend Ron C. e-mailed me this bit of whimsy the other day from those wacky cut-ups at Google:

Go to Google Maps and select the Get directions tab. Enter “New York, NY” in the from first box and “Paris, France” in the second box. Then hit the Get Directions button. Read the results, especially Step #23.

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall? ... Swim, buddy, swim!"

One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider. -- Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), "Guys and Dolls"

Tired of the endless bickering in the blogosphere and barrooms over global warming? Think the doomsayers are full of hot air or the naysayers are all wet? Feel like telling them to put their money where their mouth is? Well, now you can. In fact, you can get in on the action, yourself. At BetUS.com (search “Global Warming”) you can get odds on polar bears becoming extinct by 2010, Antarctica being habitable for humans by 2015 and Manhattan being under water before 2012, plus much, much more. Who says you need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows? Step right up, Suckers Ladies and Gentlemen, and place your bets.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we packed the defibrillator instead."

With a hat tip to Memeorandum, CBS affiliate Channel 2 in Chicago reports that, with Vice President Dick Cheney on board, during its approach to landing in Chicago one of the engines of Air Force Two was struck by a bird.

“All of a sudden we heard this tremendous bang,” said another passenger on the flight. “We were pretty lucky that the pilot and the engine did exactly what they were supposed to do.”

Luckily, also, Cheney apparently didn't have his 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun with him on the flight, so none of the other passengers or crew were injured as a result.

Would You Like To Donate The Change To D.A.'s Crack Habit?

Watching some DVD movie set in the 1950’s the other day, I was struck by a bit of dialog where one of the characters tells the others his new Buick cost $2,700, which means new automobiles cost roughly ten times what they did back then. That led me to remember that as a child I had a weekly allowance once of thirty-five cents. A kid could actually buy stuff with thirty-five cents then. Not much, maybe, but some things. Candy bars were a nickel and there was a store within walking distance that had a whole display case of penny candies and another store that had racks of ten cent toys. No, the proprietors of these stores were not named Ike Godsey or Sam Drucker.

And, no, this isn’t about how things are so much more expensive these days, either. According to my father, who lived through the Great Depression, a young man possessed of thirty-five cents even in 1957 had the world at his feet. Why, back in ’32 he could have booked first class passage on the Queen Elizabeth to sail him to his villa on the French Rivera and still had a quarter left over. But unlike my father, who never really grasped the notion of inflation, I understand the difference between the real and nominal value of money, so I have refrained so far from boring my own kids with stories of what vast wealth that loose change found under the sofa cushions once represented. They seem to understand inflation, too, or at least the real value of a quarter these days. They never bother picking up the change lying about the house, anyway.

Not only are we all, on average, much richer than we were fifty years ago, some goods like food and clothing are actually cheaper in real terms than they were back then. Both rising real incomes and the lower cost of some necessities has resulted in our spending a significantly smaller percentage of the former on the latter.

I’m talking middle-class here, but even the poor in America have it better in many respects than the poor of previous generations. In some respects they even have it better than previous generations of the middle-class. You want to pay 1950’s prices for health care? Are you willing, also, to get 1950’s results?

Actually, what all this is leading up to is a curmudgeonly complaint. I wanted to set the stage first, though, to make it clear that I do understand that the marginal value to me of anything less than a dollar, let's say fifty-eight cents, is next to zero. Even so, it simply drives me crazy when the cashier at the grocery store check-out line these days finishes scanning and bagging my groceries and then asks me “Would you like to donate the change to [insert charity here]?”

Where did this extremely bad idea, that seems to be sweeping the retail nation, come from? I mean, really, who’s responsible for this affront?

Okay, before I go on with this rant, it’s time for the second disclaimer. Look, I have nothing against the Heart Association or the American Cancer Society or Katrina Relief or whatever charity-of-the-month these stores are collecting for. They’re all worthwhile causes and people should support them and I personally make contributions to some of them on a regular basis. Really I do. I’m a much nicer guy than you’d guess from reading this blog. Really.

But fergawdsakes, not like that! In the first place, I went to the grocery store to buy bread and milk. Okay, so maybe beer and cigarettes, what’s the difference? The point is, that’s the deal – they sell groceries, I want to buy groceries, they’ve got a big sign out front that tells me I can buy my groceries there, so that’s where I go to buy them. Sometimes those signs tell me I can buy stamps and prescription drugs and maybe even do my banking inside, too, but there isn’t a word of warning anywhere about dunning me for a donation. And they don’t mention breast cancer in those inserts with all the coupons in the Sunday paper, either. So, basically, it’s an ambush.

What they do is they wait until the very last minute when you’re standing there in line, trying to find your “courtesy card” for the “discounts” and punching in your debit card pin number on the point-of-sale pad and there’s a line of fellow customers in back of you, all of them anxious to pay for their stuff and get the hell out of there too, and the woman right in back of you is already eying you suspiciously because she thinks those three apples you didn’t bother putting in a plastic bag should therefore count as three items toward your fifteen item express lane limit and your bill comes to $37.42 and then and only then does the cashier look you square in the eyes and ask “Would you like to donate the fifty-eight cents to AIDS research?”

And, of course, you can’t say no. After all, you just finished buying a six-pack, potato chips and a copy of People, so if you begrudge those noble AIDS researchers a measly fifty-eight cents you’re going to look like the world’s cheapest cheapskate and the woman standing behind you, who strikes you as just a wee bit butch anyway, will be convinced you’re a homophobe to boot!

So naturally you say sure, take the damned fifty-eight cents “but can I get a receipt for tax purposes?” No, you don’t say any such thing. You just give up the change and as you’re leaving the store maybe you wonder why you don’t feel the same mild and fleeting sense of having done a good deed, however small, you feel when you give a panhandler the same amount even though you know he’s just going to spend it on cheap wine or drugs.

The reason you don’t get even that tiny frisson of smug self-satisfaction you get from giving to the derelict is because, deep down inside, you know you’ve just been had. Regardless of the amount at stake, unless an act of charity is genuinely voluntary it’s just another strong-arm shakedown, albeit of the psychological variety in this case.

By the way, I certainly don’t blame the poor cashier. She’s got a boring, low paying job, she’s on her feet all day and she’s only doing what her boss told her to do. Sure, I’d like to fight back, maybe say to her “No, I don’t think so, but what other charitable options do I have? After all, you folks gave me a choice of four different brands of peanut butter, not to mention smooth or chunky. How about passing along my fifty-eight cents to the Leukemia people, instead?” but, of course, I don't.

It’s simply none of Safeway’s or Kroger’s business whether you or I want to contribute to charity or not just as it’s none of your employer’s business when the office jerk makes the annual rounds for the United Way and that stupid placard by the front entrance tracks the amount pledged and the percentage of employees pledging. Okay, so maybe that’s just part of the deal of being an employee, even though it shouldn’t be. You’re not likely to change jobs as a result. But maybe you should consider changing supermarkets.

Okay, maybe not even that. It would probably cost you more than fifty-eight cents, gas prices being what they are, to drive to another store and back, and besides you know where everything is at your favorite store and it has better meat or produce or whatever. And, sure, it’s a trivial matter economically and maybe you aren’t annoyed by it, anyway. Maybe you think it’s a great idea. Maybe the stores have research showing that more customers like it than not and their sales actually go up as a result. Who knows?

Maybe this is just the wave of the future. Why bother making your own charitable decisions when the good folks at Whole Foods or Piggly Wiggly can make them for you? After all, didn’t you just spend five minutes already fretting over whether to go with the Pilsner Urquell or the Anchor Steam? Life is too short and, besides, the game starts in fifteen minutes. Keep the change. Gotta run.

Aren't There Skyscrapers in Vancouver, Too?

Canada’s Green Party candidate in Vancouver-Kingsway, 44 year old bookstore owner Kevin Potvin, stands by his 9/11 editorial of four years ago in which he wrote:

When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, 'Yeah!' When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, 'Beautiful!' When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air.

Mr. Potvin is entitled to his opinions, then and now. I doubt they are widely shared in Canada, but you never know. Canada is a nice place and a loyal ally of the U.S., and the people I have met there really are very nice people just as they believe themselves to be. Except perhaps in Quebec when a Francophone occasionally mistakes you for a fellow Canadian Anglophone, but once they find out your monolingualism is the unfortunate result of being an American, all is forgiven.

Being an American, I don’t know much about Canadian politics, either; but if their Green Party is at all like ours – and why shouldn’t it be? – my guess is that ideology more than nationality is at the base of Mr. Potvin’s views. There is a segment of the environmentalist movement (not all environmentalist, mind you, just some) whose world-view can be summarized as follows: everything about nature is good except human nature.

Humanity, by this view, isn’t really a part of the natural order of things at all. Or if it is, it is as Agent Smith claimed in The Matrix, a virus. We spread to parts of the world unsuitable for us to live in without heating or air conditioning, screwing up the natural ecosystems as we multiply, performing all sorts of unnatural acts like damming rivers and chopping down forests for wood (to make, among other things, paper for books) and digging for coal and oil and then, worse yet, we build things – unnatural things such as cities like Vancouver and New York filled with unnatural things like skyscrapers. It isn’t hard at all for those who hold this world-view to cheer at any enemy of Western civilization, although perhaps it is a bit odd to find them also engaging in anything so decidedly unnatural and Western as electoral politics.

Here is another of Mr. Potvin’s printed opinions , this one claiming common cause with Islamist terrorists. I happened upon the article following a Google search from which I found, to my slight surprise, a Wikipedia entry for Mr. Potvin, himself. Reading the entry, it turns out that he may have written it, that is, the Wikipedia entry, himself, too.

Well, who am I to criticize self-promotion? And besides, like I said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Here’s mine. I was in the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11, fortunately far enough from the crash to have escaped safely. But several colleagues of mine were not so fortunate. So I’m afraid that if I should ever encounter Mr. Potvin in person, I'm of the opinion that I would very likely feel the urge to pump my fist in his face.

Of course, I would never do such a thing, it being too natural and uncivilized a thing to do. But then, that is only one of the ways in which I, unlike Mr. Potvin, do not share a common cause with terrorists.

Sandel on Embryo Ethics

With a hat tip to both Reason's Ronald Bailey and Arts & Letters Daily, herewith, with commentary, are excerpts from Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel’s recent Boston Globe column on the subject of embryo ethics. First, Sandel fairly states what is, more or less, my own position, as follows:

Human beings are not things. Their lives must not be sacrificed against their will, even for the sake of good ends, like saving other people's lives. The reason human beings must not be treated as things is that they are inviolable. At what point do we acquire this inviolability? The answer cannot depend on the age or developmental stage of a particular human life. Infants are inviolable, and few people would countenance harvesting organs for transplantation even from a fetus. Every human being -- each one of us -- began life as an embryo. Unless we can point to a definitive moment in the passage from conception to birth that marks the emergence of the human person, we must regard embryos as possessing the same inviolability as fully developed human beings.

Then:

This argument can be challenged on a number of grounds. First, it is undeniable that a human embryo is "human life" in the biological sense that it is living rather than dead, and human rather than, say, bovine. But this biological fact does not establish that the blastocyst is a human being, or a person. Any living human cell (a skin cell, for example) is "human life" in the sense of being human rather than bovine and living rather than dead. But no one would consider a skin cell a person, or deem it inviolable. Showing that a blastocyst is a human being, or a person, requires further argument.

True. The issue isn’t whether a human blastocyst is merely human life but whether it is a human life. As a matter of ordinary language, what we call a human life is a human being. Moreover, what we typically call a human being is a person. Of course, convention and ordinary language do not settle the matter. Strictly speaking, they are not even arguments in support of one view versus the other. But neither are they wholly lacking in probative value. How we weigh that probative value is another matter, of course, but there are likely to be good reasons why we pre-reflectively sort out the world the way we do just as there are likely to be good reasons why biologists may choose to differentiate the life cycle of complex living organisms by deeming one stage a blastocyst, another a fetus or embryo, another as immature and yet another as mature or adult. Just as ordinary usage is far from dispositive insofar as ethical considerations are concerned, so too are biological terms of art.

Sandel continues:

Some try to base such an argument on the fact that human beings develop from embryo to fetus to child. Every person was once an embryo, the argument goes, and there is no clear, non-arbitrary line between conception and adulthood that can tell us when personhood begins. Given the lack of such a line, we should regard the blastocyst as a person, as morally equivalent to a fully developed human being.

Well, some may make that argument. I don’t. I think the better argument and the real point is rather who should bear the moral burden of proof. Regarding a human blastocyst (and note how those who hold Sandel’s position not only employ the distancing language of biology but also avoid as much as possible using the morally critical adjective "human") as a person calls for a moral decision. But so, dear reader, does calling you or me or Prof. Sandel a person.

That we typically have neither factual nor normative grounds to deny the personhood of, well, of another person means only that accepting or acknowledging such personhood is the standard condition and paradigm of our experience. If you accept the proposition that under ordinary circumstances those other beings you encounter every day are not only human beings in the biological sense but in the morally significant sense, i.e., persons, then the moral force of the so-called non-arbitrary line or slippery slope argument derives from personhood being a defeasible claim. That is, X (where X might be you or me or a child or infant or crowning pre-born or human blastocyst or even a Harvard professor) is a person unless, well, unless what?

Answers to the “unless what” question can be and have been offered to claim personhood in some such cases and deny it in others, but consideration of the soundness or persuasiveness of such answers and arguments is beyond the scope of this post which is intended only to respond to Sandel’s column. He considers the non-arbitrary line argument, as he phrased it, unpersuasive. I agree. But if the burden of proof falls, as I believe it morally must, on those who would contend “This X is not a person; therefore, we may harvest its cells or organs,” then it falls to Sandel’s side of the dispute to provide the morally significant criteria that make the line, wherever it may be drawn, not arbitrary.

More Sandel:

Consider an analogy: although every oak tree was once an acorn, it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that I should treat the loss of an acorn eaten by a squirrel in my front yard as the same kind of loss as the death of an oak tree felled by a storm. Despite their developmental continuity, acorns and oak trees differ. So do human embryos and human beings, and in the same way. Just as acorns are potential oaks, human embryos are potential human beings.

The acorn analogy seems to be very popular among academics, but I fail utterly to grasp its persuasiveness. How we should regard persons or, for the sake of argument, even putative persons is qualitatively different than how we should regard other entities or beings, and that is so regardless of how our taxonomy of such other beings might play out. The moral rights of non-human animals, sentient machines or intelligent space aliens aside, whatever my reasons for regarding an acorn one way and an oak tree another way may be, my relationship will be, to use Martin Buber’s distinction, an I-it relationship and not an I-thou relationship.

The analogy, in other words, is simply not relevant for precisely the reason the dispute arises in the first place; namely, that persons are different from non-persons in a moral sense. How we distinguish between persons and non-persons is therefore necessarily a matter of providing morally significant criteria. There may be all sorts of non-morally significant differences between oak trees and acorns, but there aren’t any morally significant criteria, at least none that I can think of. Again, that isn’t to claim that developmental differences in the lives of human beings are of no moral significance at all. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.

For that matter, it is one thing to note that there are morally significant differences among persons that are a function, for example, of their age or stage of development but that do not go to whether they are persons, another to assert that the fact that such distinctions exist are themselves evidence in support of denying the status of personhood in other cases. Arguing that a three year old child shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever it wants or given access to dangerous weapons, for example, is irrelevant both to whether that child is a person and to whether it was a person some three and a half years ago.

Sandel again:

The distinction between a potential person and an actual one makes a moral difference. Sentient creatures make claims on us that nonsentient ones do not; beings capable of experience and consciousness make higher claims still. Human life develops by degrees.

This is completely question begging. The matter disputed precisely being what is a person and what isn’t, of course potential persons, as a subcategory of the vast universe of things that are not persons, are, well, not persons. Peter Singer and the PETA crowd aside, whether merely being a sentient creature suffices to “make claims” on us is, to put it mildly, not yet a settled matter, and Sandel’s mere assertion takes us no closer to settling it. Human life does indeed develop by degrees, but that is not to say we are clueless as to when and how it begins. Again, the question is whether that point in the life of a human being or some later point establishes that human being’s personhood.

Those arguing the later point typically assert something along the lines of Sandel’s “beings capable of experience and consciousness make higher claims still.” I agree. But what counts as being a “being capable of experience and consciousness” remains to be fleshed out, as it were. Must such a being be capable at present? Certainly, that can’t be the relevant criterion, otherwise we would not be people while asleep or unconscious (say, under anesthesia). What level of consciousness is necessary to make those higher claims? Does a newborn’s suffice or is a neonate still merely a potential person. Mind you, there are logically consistent and ethically defensible arguments to support the neonate’s merely potential personhood. Whether they comport with our moral sentiments is another matter. It takes a highly developed level of intellectual and ethical sophistication to believe, for example, that non-human animals have rights but third trimester prenates don’t. I don’t claim that Sandel believes that – I don’t know one way or the other – but some people do believe it.

The rest of the Sandel article raises objections to President Bush’s supposedly morally inconsistent position on embryonic stem cell research on grounds that it is, um, morally inconsistent. I am no apologist for the Bush Administration, but I will offer a couple of observations in response. First, it is true that the logically consistent view of those who contend that there is something immoral about embryonic stem cell research because human embryos are human beings must be “that the 400,000 excess embryos languishing in freezers in US fertility clinics” are also human beings. Whether “they should also be leading a campaign to shut down what they must regard as rampant infanticide in fertility clinics” is another matter.

Whether what Sandel calls Bush’s “don’t fund, don’t ban” policy is morally inconsistent or not, legitimate moral distinctions can be made regarding the proper use of federal funds without raising the underlying moral objection to a Kantian categorical imperative. So, too, a robustly utilitarian ethos of the sort all too familiar at, say, Harvard and Princeton can quite reasonably agree, for example, to permit abortions in cases of rape or incest as the regrettable price to pay in a political compromise to save other human lives. There is no per se moral inconsistency or failing in saving however many people one can from a burning building despite not being able to save all the others. Not even from an ivy-covered building at Harvard.

Nifong: "Oops! My bad!"

No, not really. What Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong actually said today was:

"To the extent that I made judgments that ultimately proved to be incorrect, I apologize to the three students that were wrongly accused."

Okay, let's play Spot The Equivocation:

(1) "To the extent that..." A classic. Right up there with "Insofar as...." Certainly no more than to that extent, whatever it may hypothetically be, though. After all, it only qualifies...

(2) "I made judgments..." And don't we all? What the heck? So Nifong's "judgments" were supposed to be supported by credible evidence, a respect for the law and the ethics of the profession and the integrity of the criminal justice system, but "judgments" has a nice distancing tone, doesn't it, as though those "judgments" did not amount to actions he took or ordered in his professional capacity as a prosecutor. And who can really hold him to blame when, after all, they were only...

(3) "ultimately proved wrong..." I mean, "ultimately," right? Not, oh, say, within a matter of days or weeks or even months of the investigation but only at the very end. The real problem, you see, is that those "three students" were ...

(4) "wrongly accused." Not wrongly charged by Nifong, mind you, but only wrongly accused. It isn't as though he might have made inflammatory comments to the press or possibly withheld exculpatory information from the defense along the way or dragged the whole damned prosecution out far longer than the credible evidence justified, you know. Oh, those pesky false accusers! What trouble they've caused!

Oh, yes, and Mr. Nifong also said this:

"It is my sincere desire that the actions of Attorney General Cooper will serve to remedy any remaining injury that has resulted from these cases."

I'll bet you do, Mike. I'll just bet you do.

**********

NON-GRATUITOUS ADDENDUM: When, I wonder, will we be seeing an equally defensive and weasel-worded attorney work-product purporting to be an apology from Duke University?

GRATUITOUS ADDENDUM:

Like the answer to New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser's question whether any evidence of contrition will be forthcoming from the New York Times after its shoddy and heavy-handed reporting in this case, the answer to future XM Radio personality Don Imus as to when Al Sharpton will be apologizing to the three former defendant Duke students is:

When Frosty the Snowman reigns in Hell.

Bible Belt

James Lee Sheppard, a guard at the Blue Earth County (MN) Jail, is alleged to have forcibly turned inmate Jeremy Hansen's other cheek for him when Sheppard took Hansen's Bible and struck him in the face with the book. Apparently, there is a surveillance video of the incident but it hasn't made its way to the intertubes yet.

[Insert stern "separation of church and state" comment or "throw the book at him" joke here.]

The Internet v. The Immediate Jewel of Their Souls

Clearly, the biggest little story sweeping through the blogosphere today is that of the dispute between blogger Katherine Coble and JL Kirk Associates (the latter being represented by the law firm of King & Ballow) over apparently less than mutually satisfactory business dealings between the parties and statements subsequently posted by Ms Coble and readers on her blog. Ms Coble has now received a letter from legal counsel for JL Kirk Associates demanding that she remove allegedly defamatory statements from her blog site and cease publishing any further such statements.

Predictably, the blogosphere is closing ranks in favor of Ms Coble. (Bill Hobbs offers what appears to be a good roundup tracking the story, as does Nashville is Talking.)

I may be one of the few libertarians, not to mention libertarian bloggers, who continues to believe that the law of defamation, properly understood and applied, is a good thing; that is, that one’s reputation is properly the subject of legal protection under some circumstances. But that’s for another day. I care to weigh in only on a point or two that so far seems not to have been addressed by my fellow bloggers.

First, however, the inevitable disclaimer. I am not a member of the Tennessee State Bar, nor do I have sufficient factual information nor have I conducted sufficient legal research to hold or offer an opinion as to the legal merits of the dispute one way or the other. I’m not taking sides and I'm sure as hell not offering legal advice to anyone. I’m not quite that big an idiot.

(Besides, I’m more of a contracts guy than a torts guy, anyway. And some would say even that is stretching my dubious credentials to their limit. I would be fascinated to know, however, what my old sparring partner at the (unfortunately now defunct) blog Left2Right, Don Herzog – not, to his credit, a lawyer, but an expert on tort law at the University of Michigan’s Law School – thinks about the law of defamation as it applies or should apply in general to the internet. Don, any thoughts?)

I was intrigued, in any case, by a paragraph in the demand letter as reprinted at Ms Coble’s website ** because it struck me that it could be interpreted to be claiming that the applicable law of defamation in Tennessee was substantially different from the general law of defamation as I understand it. The relevant paragraph is as follows:

Under Tennessee law, any malicious publication expressed in writing intending to injure the character or diminish the reputation of a business is libel. Moreover, even if statements are literally true, the publisher of those statements is subject to monetary damages where “the meaning reasonably conveyed by the published words is defamatory.” Memphis Publishing Comany [sic] v. Nichols, 569 S.W. 2d 412 (Tenn. 1978)

[** - Lest either Ms Coble or Mr. Korpady, the attorney who apparently signed the demand letter, accuse me of libel per quod (see below), I have no idea whether the word "company" was misspelled by either or both of them nor do I imply nor should the reader infer any carelessness on either's part. I merely cut and pasted the excerpt from Ms Coble's blog site and noted the misspelling without correction. Indeed, I have only Ms Coble's blog as evidence for any of this affair, as far as that goes. There, now that that little bit of CYA is done...]

As a general rule of law, the truth of the defendant’s published statements being alleged to be defamatory is a sufficient defense against a charge of libel. So the question occurs when it might be, under the law of Tennessee, that truth is not a sufficient defense.

Unsurprisingly, because the cited case is not all that recent it could not be found online except through subscription legal research services to which I do not have current access. I did, however, find at the Tennessee Supreme Court website several subsequent cases citing Nichols, including one that briefly summarized its relevant facts, as follows:

... Plaintiff cites Prosser for the proposition that “[t]he form of the language used is not controlling, and there may be defamation by means of a question, an indirect insinuation, an expression of belief or opinion, or sarcasm or irony.” William A. Prosser, The Law of Torts § 111 at 746 (4th ed. 1971) (footnotes omitted). Our review of Prosser and the cases cited therein, leads us to the conclusion that Prosser was referring to situations where actionable defamation may occur through sarcasm, insinuation, and the like, when the truth is twisted by either omitting relevant facts and circumstances, or alluding to “facts” and circumstances that do not exist. The classic Tennessee case on point is Memphis Publishing Co. v. Nichols, 569 S.W. 2d 412 (Tenn. 1978). In Nichols, the Memphis Press-Scimitar published an article stating that Mrs. Nichols had been shot “after the suspect arrived at the Nichols home and found her husband there with Mrs. Nichols.” Although true, the Tennessee Supreme Court held that this statement could be defamatory because the story failed to mention that several others, including Mr. Nichols, were present at the time. Without this important fact, the article implied that Mrs. Nichols was having an adulterous affair with the suspect’s husband. The Court held that: “Truth is available as an absolute defense [to a charge of defamation] only when the defamatory meaning conveyed by the words is true.” Nichols, 569 S.W.2d at 420.

Hunt v. Tangel, C.A. No. 01A01-9705-CV-00199, __ S.W.2d __ (Tenn. Ct. App. 1997)

Ah, now that makes sense. It appears the court was grappling with the common law distinction between libel per se and libel per quod, a question of whether the published statements were defamatory on their face or required knowledge of extrinsic facts to make out the defamatory meaning which, in turn, affected the plaintiff’s burden of proof regarding damages. In its modern manifestation, however, one might say informally that a ‘falsehood’ is still required to prove a charge of libel when the published statements are themselves true in that the reader must be reasonably likely to draw a false and defamatory conclusion from those otherwise true statements as published.

Let me repeat that I neither know nor care to speculate on what statements were true or false or what sort of extrinsic facts there might be that could result in whatever truthful statements Ms Coble published being deemed defamatory or where, as lawyers are wont to say, "the equities" lie in this matter. It does not, in any case, appear that the law of defamation in Tennessee is especially different from that of other jurisdictions at least on the point herein considered.

One other observation, though. The phrase “intending to injure the character” from the demand letter also struck my eye. I don’t know whether that is the phrasing of Mr. Korpady, himself, or a phrasing merely taken from one or more defamation cases. Probably the latter. Courts, themselves, can be notoriously casual in their phrasing, causing much legal mischief as a result. Even so, as my long-ago torts teacher once observed upon hearing a student (not me!) use the often heard phrase “defamation of character,” defamation is about reputation, not character. False assertions can injure another person’s reputation; the quality of his character is up to him.

"All right, Sheriff, pull over and let me see my license and registration."

From the AP Strange New file, Brown County, Wisconsin Sheriff Dennis Kocken wrote himself a ticket for an unsafe lane change while trying to pace a possibly speeding car ahead of him. "As sheriff, I'm held to the highest standard in law enforcement. How can I hold officers accountable if I don't hold myself accountable?" he said. "I'm satisfied I'm doing the right thing."

Sorry, but I call bullsh*t. Either Kocken is too focused on the letter versus the spirit and intent of the law – issuing a traffic citation is always discretionary on the part of a law enforcement official, and mitigating circumstances are supposed to be taken into consideration – or, more likely, it’s a cheap bit of political grandstanding. As in most American counties, the office of sheriff in Brown County is an elected position.

Back in the day, the occasional “man bites dog” story about some cop giving the mayor or governor a ticket would make the news. No more, I guess. Nowadays, involving someone else in one’s holier or more law abiding than thou gestures runs the risk of having to share the spotlight. If I were the judge in Sheriff Kocken’s case, I’d take him at his word and ensure he really was being held accountable by, oh, say, sentencing him to a bit of remedial driver’s education.

"Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off The Air We Go!" (Updated)

"My goal is to goad people into saying something that ruins their life." -- Don Imus

I can’t imagine myself ever writing or uttering the phrase “nappy-headed hos” except, as here, in quote marks. Not that I’m all that pure and punctilious when it comes to insensitive or offensive speech or comments, mind you. Say only that it isn’t my style personally and draw whatever conclusions you wish as a result.

Much ado has been made already about Don Imus and his latest failed witticism, but I don’t listen to Imus in the morning or at any other time or to radio much at all except for XM in the car, and then it’s either one of the jazz channels or the comedy channel where the programming would make “nappy-headed hos” (there, I wrote it again!) sound like I accidentally tuned to one of the kids’ channels. But then, that’s comedy.

We essentially empower or give comedians permission to say things on stage they could not get away with saying as private individuals. Not that he seemed to have much talent as a stand-up to begin with, but it was obvious from the Michael Richards video that he was no longer "on" but had lost it emotionally and was merely ranting and reacting as just another jerk, having lost both his comedian persona and control of the audience.

Even when a comedian doesn't lose control, how the audience might react to a racial joke can be risky business. Sarah Silverman, doing a bit about getting out of jury duty, said (not verbatim) "A friend said put something racist in the juror questionnaire and they won't take you, so first I wrote 'I hate chinks,' But that sounded mean, so I erased it and wrote 'I love chinks.'"

She caught some flak for that joke and responded beautifully. (Again, not verbatim) "I got criticized in the press for using the word 'chink' and, speaking as a Jew, I just want to say that I find it deeply disturbing that we may be losing control of the media."

Now, that's funny.

Imus, on the other hand? [shrug] Under the “First they came for the Jews” line of reasoning, I should probably rise to his defense at least as far as noting that people should have the right to make jackasses of themselves in public without being forced to go to reeducation camps. Then again, that freedom of speech thingie also entails the right of the annoyed, insulted or supposedly injured to respond accordingly. (Today's Washington Post article on Imus reports Rutgers Coach C. Vivian Stringer as saying, "We have all been physically and emotionally spent and hurt" by Imus's remarks. Physically? Sheesh!)

And, yes, this isn’t about government censorship but about public opinion, a vastly different kettle of fish, and more to the point about Imus keeping his overpaid job. But I’ll come to Imus’s defense this far: the man had to spend an hour with Al Sharpton. Surely, that should be punishment enough no matter how big a jackass he is.

Truth is, Imus and Howard Stern and most other so-called shock-jocks and, for that matter, Ann Coulter and Mike Adams and most other so-called pundits are, just like Silverman and Chris Rock and Sasha Baron Cohen, in show business. There is no bright line or at least none worth drawing between, say, Lenny Bruce (whom Nick Gillespie finds less than funny) and Ann Coulter (whom I find less than insightful) however they may be categorized by others. They’re selling a product. Some are profiting handsomely from it, which means they are selling a product people want; but the market tends to sort that sort of thing out nicely, if not the way you or I would sort it out, ourselves.

I’m all for civility, though I have my own lapses now and then; but what I find mind-boggling is the endless torrent of self-indulgent righteous indignation and alleged aggrievement these petty incidents invariably arouse. Can we really have become such thin-skinned hothouse flowers -- how’s that for a mixed metaphor, by the way? -- that the national psyche must be purged over and over again via Mao-esque show trials of public denouncement and contrition? Or are such events, as some cynics might suspect, merely opportunities for posturing and preening identity politicians to capitalize on?

I don’t care whether advertisers decide to disassociate from the likes of Don Imus or not. They will, in any case, be making a business judgment, not a moral one. Crude and tasteless as his comments were, if the worst thing in life that happens to the women on the Rutgers basketball team is that they were insulted by a guy who himself looks like the Marlboro Man ten years after he died of lung cancer, they should consider themselves blessed.

**********

UPDATE: No, not about Imus getting sacked. A New York Daily News blog reports that Hillary Clinton plans to visit the Rutgers woman's basketball team on Monday. My God, haven't those young women suffered enough already?

Adorable Kitty Prostitutes?

This blogging business continues to intrigue. I say business, of course, not in the sense of profitable enterprise, at least not in my case, but in the sense of cultural phenomenon. This site, for example, in existence less than a month so far (twelve days, in fact), has already attracted visitors from domains as far away as Ireland, Australia and Thailand, though I honestly can’t imagine why. Unless, that is, titles with words and phrases like “prostitute” and "rape fantasies" popped up in those viewers’ searches. Not to be too cynical, but that seems more likely than being led here by a Google search for “reductionism.”

Installation of a hit counter has helped assuage my curiosity to some extent about such matters, and I’m pleased to announce that readership is rapidly approaching triple digits. (How about them apples, Huffington Post and Michelle Malkin!) A few days ago, Memeorandum had begun to link an occasional post here again, as it had been linking a fair number of my posts previously at Inactivist; but then that seemed suddenly to stop, perhaps because I got boring, perhaps because I jokingly told former co-blogger Mona in a comment that it saddened me that she’d noticed a post here only via Memeorandum? Who knows. C’est la vie. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, no man but a fool ever wrote except to be read; but I really haven’t a clue how web traffic works or why, and there is only so much pandering to the masses I can bring myself to do. I am, however, shamelessly planning on a special Shoes! article in the near future to lure former reader Susan W-G back to the fold.

Constant Viewer, my modest homage to Dorothy Parker’s far wittier reviews of yesteryear, has been disappointingly idle of late, there being damned little on the big screen worth seeing. In fact, my last such venture to the cinema house was to accompany my twelve year old son to watch TMNT, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" for the over-thirty crowd, but I’m afraid a review of same would have to focus on the quality of the popcorn. (Not enough salt.) Perhaps the current drought will lead me to an occasional review of older films -- I hear that Citizen Kane flick is pretty good.

My intent was and remains to blog about the passing scene from a less than rabidly ideological libertarian perspective -- no, I don’t think children under twelve should be permitted to own nuclear weapons -- at least as opposed to what I call the “My Adorable Kitties” web-log alternatives. However, I think it’s already fairly obvious that my interests are as eclectic as my knowledge of many such matters is, or so I’m told, highly doubtful. One reader, not even here but over at Jim Henley’s shop, thought not only that my opinions regarding digital audio files were “absolutely full of sh*t” but that I, personally, was, as well. I quote: “You’re saying things that sound like they might be sensible, but are in fact completely crazy.” Sadly, he is not the first person to arrive at such a conclusion, nor will he likely be the last. What the hell, he may even be right.

And so it goes. Purely political blogs bore me almost as much as adorable kitties. I have lived most of my life inside or at least right next to Washington’s culture of political obsessives, and I have grown weary of self-important people espousing their self-important opinions, more often than not for mostly self-serving reasons. Yeah, I’m one of those people, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the fact or can’t occasionally resist my own self-important and self-serving inclinations, however briefly.

So this is the result so far. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe a dog’s breakfast at the end of the day, but at least it’s fun in the making. Sure, blogging is largely an exercise in ego gratification. Who the hell am I, anyway? But when it comes down to it, what isn’t? And more to the point, will that guy from Thailand be back?

At Least No Harm Was Done (Updated)

Unless you count, oh, say, the fact that Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler lost his job, the entire spring lacrosse season was canceled, two of the students charged were suspended, untold time, energy and money was spent on what now seems to have been an entirely unjustified prosecution and even more spent on their legal defense, racial tensions were heightened throughout Durham and much of the rest of the country, I think we can say that, all in all, the finally dismissed charges against the accused students was much ado about nothing. Hey, no harm no foul, right?

Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, already up on ethics charges before the North Carolina State Bar including withholding evidence from defense lawyers, lying to the court and to bar investigators, and making misleading and inflammatory comments about the defendants, should be disbarred and then have his head served up on a platter and then be sued by the students on civil rights grounds. Usually, I’m all about the “innocent until proven guilty” thing, but I’ll make an exception here, seeing as how he so obviously did. Prosecutors wield enormous power and must accordingly be held to an extremely high standard of ethical conduct. Nifong’s conduct doesn’t even pass what lawyers call the straight-face test here; namely, the ability to voice a legal argument in open court without the lawyer or judge breaking out in laughter.

Forget race and sex and class. Criminal prosecutions isn’t about affirmative action. Prosecutors, even or especially the sort who hope to milk some political mileage out of a case, have no business being overzealous in charging rich white boys these days just because it used to be the case not so long ago that rich white boys routinely got away with murder or at least rape if the victim was a black woman.

I know next to nothing about the defendants or the alleged victim in this case. If there was probable cause to arrest and indict the students, they certainly should have been arrested and indicted; and if the evidence continued to hold up, they should have been tried; and, if guilty, they should have been convicted. But once the case began to unravel as it did here, the state had every bit as much responsibility to pull the plug on this fiasco as it did to move aggressively against the accused students in the first place.

Make no mistake about it, affluent white preppy lacrosse students at a rich, white preppy school like Duke are unsympathetic defendants. Schools don’t get much preppier than Duke and school sports don’t get much preppier than lacrosse. (Okay, so the equally preppy University of Virginia has a polo team. But, hey, it’s a public university and players have to provide their own horses!) And, yes, frat boys and jocks are capable of the most outlandish sort of behavior, too often including criminal behavior. But an assumption of guilt based in large measure on prejudice against the privileged is no less onerous than such assumptions aimed at the poor or underprivileged and it is no less loathsome when being white (or male) makes one a more likely suspect in the eyes of a prosecutor than being black.

The words inscribed above the main entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court building, Equal Justice Under Law, are clear enough even for a prosecutor to understand.

[N.B. -- This post is substantially the same as my Inactivist post of March 22, 2007.]

A Tale Of Two or Three Childhoods

Dad didn’t read. Oh, he could read. Well enough, at least, when need be. And he subscribed to the local newspaper and liked to look over the sports section in the morning with his coffee. There were ten or twelve books in the house, mostly tucked away in a bookcase in the corner and, like the other bric-a-brac my mother regularly dusted every week, they were there only for display. They were, as I vaguely recall, Readers Digest condensed versions of then popular novels; but I never saw either of my parents open any of them or, for that matter, not counting the Bible my mother read from once in a great while, saw them read any book at all.

I take that back. Mother read frequently. To me. Children’s books, of course, though not what anyone would call children’s literature. Mostly, they were Little Golden Books, thin cardboard bound illustrated books sold at grocery stores for twenty-five cents apiece, the titles ranging from fairy tales to Disney stories. She read them to me every night until, by an early age, I had memorized the texts and somehow thereby taught myself to read. I entered first grade reading at the third grade level. By third grade I was reading at a high school level. Reading came easy to me, but there were still few books at home by the time I left for college.

But this isn’t about what a bright fellow I am, let alone how different my subsequent relationship with books has been from that of my parents. My mother managed to complete only elementary school and my father dropped out permanently from fourth grade, but those were different times and different circumstances. No, what this is about, at least in part, is my memory of my father extolling the one novel he remembered ever having read, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

“Now that was some story!” I remember him saying on more than one occasion. I never did discover, probably never even thought to ask, why he read it or when, perhaps as a child, himself.

Truth to tell, I’m not a great Dickens fan, nor would I recommend that particular novel to anyone who hadn’t read him before. I have a good friend whose admiration for Dickens is probably exceeded only by her admiration for Jane Austen and who occasionally teaches classes in both at Georgetown, and we have discussed Dickens’ merits and weaknesses on any number of occasions, my view being that the latter outweigh the former. He does adapt wonderfully, however, especially in a mini-series, a number of which the BBC has produced brilliantly. Anyway, this really isn’t about Dickens, either.

Except that today my younger son, age twelve, began reading A Tale of Two Cities today. He also reads well above grade level, but his attitude toward novels, like his attitude toward any object not requiring electricity and including a viewing screen (and, preferably, a game controller), is not especially keen. But the book is a reading assignment from school -- usually, at least in my remembered school experience, the kiss of death. Still, I found a copy from our library and he took it up, grudgingly, and opened it. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of....” Well, you know.

An hour or so passed and he had made his way to Chapter Four. That was this afternoon. It is nearly ten o’clock now and he is reading more or, more precisely, having more read to him by his mother. By request.

Perhaps someday I’ll tell him how his newfound enthusiasm for A Tale of Two Cities this day oddly mirrored his grandfather’s so many, many years ago. Maybe not, though. The parallel, such as it is, is no more than a bridge from my own now often hazy memories of childhood to the present delight of watching a son of mine fall in love with a book. But his grandparents would be delighted, too.

"American troops would not surrender...."

Via Memeorandum, Tony Harnden at the (U.K.) Daily Telegraph has some harsh words for several of the Royal Navy sailors who, recently released from Iran, have sold their stories to the media. In truth, if the excerpts are as he reports, one has to agree that the British personnel who have thus far spoken out have not, either during their capture or since their release, “covered themselves in glory.”

Two observations. First, I have no idea how I would behave as a hostage in Iran, and while I do think I might be more circumspect in reporting the experience afterwards, I rather doubt I’d have covered myself in glory, either. Thus, I’ll leave criticism of these sailors to men and women who are, themselves, made of sterner stuff or at least believe themselves to be.

Second, I disagree with Harnden’s contention that “[s]trategically, Iran has been emboldened.... and learnt that illegal actions against the West can yield dividends.” That lesson, tragically enough, Iran learned first and foremost as a result of then President Jimmy Carter’s disastrous handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979. As between the West and Iran, the latter has had little reason in the intervening three decades to think otherwise.

Harnden continues as follows:

There is now a real danger that a similar escapade will be attempted against American forces. That is very likely to result in a bloodbath - American troops would not surrender and confess in this way - and could be the incident that ratchets the temperature up towards war.

I both hope and, in fact, do believe that Harnden is correct in his assessment of American troops. History by damned, Iran would be foolish to believe otherwise. Unfortunately, there are altogether too many fools these days on both sides of that potential confrontation and too many, for that matter, on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, for me to be at all sanguine about the foreseeable future.

Notes on Reductionism

Not counting theology, there probably is no more inherently hubristic academic discipline than philosophy. The “love of wisdom,” as it literally translates, affords the practitioner the salubrious or, depending on your perspective, dubious privilege of sticking his nose into the business of literally every other intellectual endeavor and more than a few that don’t even rise to “intellectual.” Take philosophers of science, for example. Often not scientists themselves, they nonetheless presume to analyze and comment on what it is that scientists, themselves, do, how they go about doing it and what sense or, occasionally, nonsense they speak when they, themselves, talk about what it is they do.

Case in point (by way of the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily), a book review in American Scientist by University of Exeter Professor John Dupré of Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology by Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg. Put in its simplest terms, Dupré contends that Rosenberg ascribes to a sort of physicalism termed reductionism, a view that is in general disfavor among philosophers of science although, in one version or another, it is almost certainly the naïve view of most practicing scientists, themselves.

(By “naïve,” I don’t mean to say that most practicing scientists are ill informed or unsophisticated about the nature and practice of science but only that, being practicing scientists, they spend the bulk of their time doing science, not philosophy of science. Similarly, to say of a philosopher of scientist that he is not a scientist is not a way of discrediting what it is that he does (my somewhat caustic introduction aside) so much as a way of putting what it is he does into some sort of perspective. There are, to be sure, philosophically sophisticated scientists and scientifically sophisticated philosophers.)

Part of the problem here, as readers of the linked Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry will learn, is that both physicalism and reductionism are variously defined concepts. What sort of physicalism and what sort of reductionism one is espousing makes a great deal of difference. Here, anyway, is Dupré’s account of Rosenberg’s position:

[Rosenberg’s] new idea is that recognition of the pervasiveness of Darwinism in biology will enable us to assert reductionism after all. Rosenberg is an admirer of Dobzhansky's famous remark that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution:

Biology is history, but unlike human history, it is history for which the "iron laws" of historical change have been found, and codified in Darwin's theory of natural selection. . . . [T]here are no laws in biology other than Darwin's. But owing to the literal truth of Dobzhansky's dictum, these are the only laws biology needs.

The suggestion is that something Rosenberg calls "the principle of natural selection" is actually a fundamental physical law. Natural selection, according to him, is not a statistical consequence of the operation of many other physical (or perhaps higher-level) laws, as most philosophers of biology believe. Rather, it is a new and fundamental physical law to be added to those already revealed by chemistry and physics.

Well, maybe. I’ll leave it to Rosenberg and Dupré to fight this one out, commenting only that I suspect most scientists would find it a bit overreaching for a philosopher to assert what is or is not a fundamental physical law, let alone that natural selection counts among them.

Let’s back up a bit. It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that, whatever biology is, its foundation is to be found ultimately in chemistry and, similarly, that whatever chemistry is, its own foundation is to be found, ultimately, in physics. But that is only to say that biological organisms and their component parts are comprised of chemical molecules, themselves comprised of atoms comprised of elementary and sub-atomic particles. That is, after all, what we believe about the material world. Moreover, unless we ascribe, for whatever reason, to an ontology that includes a sort of being or substance other than the material substance of the physical world, we are likewise committed to the view that whatever it is that mental activity and the mind may be must also find its foundation in the material; namely, the brain.

Fair enough. However, what exactly it is that we mean here by “foundation” (my rough term, by the way) is unclear. To be sure, all the evidence points to the notion that human beings are, in purely physical terms, “nothing but” highly complex combinations of elementary particles doing what elementary particles, thus combined, happen to do. We remain a very long way, however, from being able to close all the gaps from here to there and so the question remains, both scientifically and philosophically, whether in principle we shall ever be able to do so. Philosophers’ use of such concepts as supervenience and qualia are attempts to bridge those gaps conceptually even as science attempts to bridge them scientifically.

And, no, I’m not talking about evolution here. Think, instead, the physicist’s understanding of heat as motion and, let's say, an imaginary philosopher's at least facially reasonable question in response whether the proposition "I feel heat" is or must therefore be semantically or logically or referentially equivalent or identical or translatable to the proposition, "I feel motion." Yes, I know I'm conflating the physical phenomenon of heat with the psychological sensation of heat here, something a good (even imaginary) philosopher wouldn't do. What I am groping after, however ineptly, is only that the nexus between the world as science explains it and the world as we experience it is not nearly as straightforward as we are sometimes inclined to believe and that this isn't obviously or simply because science hasn't yet "finished the job."

Science, ultimately, is a human endeavor, an endeavor to understand and explain the world as it is, but such understanding is necessarily human and, as such, necessarily bound by the conceptual and linguistic apparatus of human thought. That is to say, among other things, that science operates within and only within our linguistic, conceptual schema and, as a result, is bound to the limitations, complications and confusions of that schema just as is, analogically, the work of the artist whose representation of the world is necessarily limited by the limits of human perception.

Is, for example, logic, the sine qua non of rationality, a fact about the world or “merely” an incident of human cognition – an accidental fact about how the brain happens to operate? Are elementary particles popping into and out of existence and “action at a distance” aspects of the world as it “really” is or merely necessary posits in our best, current working model of that world? (And what work is “really” doing in that question?) Is what we naïvely - there’s that word again - take to be intentional thought and action necessarily illusory in a world comprised of “nothing but” those particles “randomly” doing their thing, or is some viable sense of genuine human freedom compatible with such a physical world even as human consciousness self-evidently is? Would science itself be possible except in the context of our ordinary and decidedly nonscientific and imprecise language? I think it is clear that the answer to the last question, in particular, is no and, further, that if that is so, it raises all sorts of legitimately philosophical, non-scientific questions about what it is science can and cannot hope to accomplish in terms of affording a complete and consistent understanding of the world and our relationship to it.

I have neither the hope nor the intent of addressing these concerns in detail here, let alone resolving them. (Nor, for now, to argue them in great detail in comments, thanks anyway.) Rather, I want for now simply to point, however obliquely, to several of them and to nudge the reader into considering some of the complications involved in sorting them out. For what it’s worth, my own experience in trying to sort out such questions to my own satisfaction has been that a frontal attack tends not to work very well. Then again, maybe that’s just me. After all, I'm just a guy doing this blog thingie here.

Wittgenstein famously said that philosophy "leaves everything the way it is." (Philosophical Investigations, § 124.) So, I think, does science. It is only we, ourselves, in our better understanding of how things are, that are changed.

What’s the difference between a prostitute and the government?

ABC News has, um, nailed alleged “D.C. Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey for an interview in an upcoming “investigative report” on 20/20. Palfrey ran an “erotic fantasy service” from 1993 to 2006 in and around our Nation's Capital, described by ABC as follows:

[She charged] a flat fee for 90-minute “dates” with women between the ages of 23 and 55 whom she termed independent contractors.

The women signed contracts agreeing not to engage in illegal activity, including having sex for money, Palfrey says, and were given guidelines on the difference between legal and illegal sexual behavior. At least one woman, Dr. Paula Neble, is known to have told federal prosecutors that she had sex for money while working for Palfrey. Palfrey is suing her for breach of contract.

You can't make this stuff up, folks.

Facing racketeering charges, Palfrey’s assets were seized and she has since offered to sell her supposedly "upscale" (which in D.C. can only mean politically powerful) client list to the highest bidder to raise money. Needless to say, the powers that be have sought to stop the sale. She has also filed a motion seeking a half million dollars, presumably from her seized assets, to pay for her defense.

Fat chance. One more increasingly widespread government abuse, thanks largely to the idiotic War On Drugs, has been the now almost routine seizure of a criminal defendant’s assets, the prosecution claiming such assets are both evidence of the crime charged and the “fruits” of that alleged crime and, as such, should not be available to defendants to pay for their defense. The burden of proof in the far more widely used civil forfeiture actions is significantly lower than the usual criminal burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The rationale behind forfeiture has a sort of facial plausibility about it. One wouldn’t, for example, expect a person charged with bank robbery and found to have a hundred thousand dollars in his possession the source of which he could not otherwise account for to be permitted to spend that money on his defense.

Aside from the underlying principle that it shouldn’t be criminal for willing adults to sell sexual services in the first place, I have no position as to the likely outcome of Palfrey’s case. It may well turn out that, strictly as a matter of law, she is eventually found guilty as charged, that a sufficient showing that the money seized was indeed the fruit of that illegal activity and that she therefore has no legal entitlement to it.

Regardless, the fundamental principle of criminal law is that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. What is more, it is the burden of the government to prove each and every element of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt. Whatever other arguments there may be in their favor, civil and so-called administrative forfeiture laws not only serve to undermine that burden, they add further to the overwhelming disparity of resources available as between the state, on the one hand, and the defendant, on the other. The state has virtually limitless resources; all but the wealthiest of defendants has, by comparison, vastly less. That is, in fact, a significant part of the rationale behind requiring a very high burden of proof on the state.

Step by step, inch by inch, we have witnessed, nay, permitted the erosion of civil and criminal rights and liberties in this nation, first, to protect us from the grotesquely exaggerated dangers of illegal drugs and now from the grotesquely exaggerated dangers of terrorism. Every incremental increase in power and control over our lives we have ceded to the state has only whetted its appetite for even greater power and control. The proliferation of civil asset forfeiture actions, routinely used not only in drug cases but in tax disputes with the IRS and now even in such dire threats to the survival of the republic as escort service “racketeering” only goes to prove the point. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, any state powerful enough to offer everything it convinces you that you need is far more likely to end up taking everything you have.

Oh, and the answer to the title question is that a prostitute will stop screwing you once you’re dead.

Is Blood Thicker Than WD30?

Returning home from a family outing today, we drove past one of those hole-in-the-wall used car dealerships one finds scattered throughout the nation. However, this particular enterprise was, if not unique, certainly different from any I’ve ever seen before. Along with the signs informing prospective buyers of easy credit financing and such was another sign prominently proclaiming “Bail Bonds.”

Now, just in case you’ve never needed to avail yourself of the services of a bail bondsman, let me briefly explain. Those charged with serious crimes typically will be held in custody while awaiting trial unless they can post bail in whatever amount the court decides is sufficient, let’s just say $10,000, to ensure the defendant will show up in court. If he does, he gets the ten thousand back; if not, he doesn’t.

Of course, the defendant may not have ten thousand dollars available to post bail, in which case he can go to a bondsman and pay usually ten percent of the bail, in which case the bondsman posts the bail and assumes the risk of loss. As with used car salesmen, bail bondsmen may not number among society’s elite, but they serve a useful function. Combining those functions, on the other hand, seems a bit, well, conflicted.

SALESMAN (BONDSMAN): Afternoon, sir. What can I do for you today?

CUSTOMER: Well, my brother Billy’s been arrested and I need to get him out of jail.

SALESMAN: I see. What was he charged with?

CUSTOMER: Um, vehicular manslaughter.

SALESMAN: That’s a shame. First time offender?

CUSTOMER: Oh, hell no. Billy’s had four DWI’s already and enough speeding tickets to choke a hog.

SALESMAN: Hmm. Well, then, it doesn’t look like his chances of being acquitted are all that promising.

CUSTOMER: No, I guess it doesn’t.

SALESMAN: Tell me, just out of curiosity, was there much damage to the car he was driving?

CUSTOMER: Are you kidding? The drunken fool totaled the car. That’s why I had to ride the bus to come see you.

SALESMAN: Oh dear, that is a shame. And how much was bail set at?

CUSTOMER: Ten thousand dollars.

SALESMAN: I see. Well, sure, come into my office and we can start the paperwork right away and have him out first thing tomorrow morning. If... well, if that’s what you want, that is.

CUSTOMER: Why sure it’s what I want. Why’d you ask that?

SALESMAN: Well, it’s just that will cost you a thousand dollars, nonrefundable of course. You do have a thousand dollars, don’t you?

CUSTOMER: I sure do. I’ve been saving it up, um,... for a new car.

SALESMAN: Well, now, that really is a pity because, you know, I have several extra clean late model vehicles at the moment I could let you have for a thousand dollars down. And from what you tell me, it looks like your brother is going to end up in prison, anyway. But I understand your dilemma. After all, blood is thicker than water, and I must say I admire you for your loyalty under the circumstances.

CUSTOMER: So, um, tell me. How much do you want for that red convertible?

"Pick up that candy wrapper, Mr. Orwell, and dispose of it properly at once!"

Britain is increasing the number of loudspeaker equipped closed circuit television cameras, the object being to permit surveillance staff to "talk directly to anyone observed behaving in an anti-social way." At present, according to the Reuters story, "Britain is the most watched country in the world, with an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras, or one for every 14 people."

I suspect that the majority of these millions of cameras are private security cameras at banks and shops and private residences. Even so, they are increasingly being used as well by government agencies both in Britain and the U.S., the latter so far deploying them largely at stop lights and, in my opinion, less for purposes of prevention than for revenue generation. My cynicism aside, though, it is difficult, frankly, to mount much of an objection to camera surveillance of public spaces, even against the loudspeaker equipped version, given that the proverbial cop on the beat of yesteryear was supposed to do precisely what these cameras are supposed to do now. In Britain's case, planned national identity cards and a database of information on individuals pose a much more obvious threat to personal freedom than some government flunky tut-tutting the on-camera miscreant over a loudspeaker.

As the stop light camera experience has shown so far, it isn't the mere use of cameras, per se, but the purpose to which information thus gathered is put. While, arguably, a proliferation of government cameras could cause legitimate and serious privacy and freedom of movement and assembly issues, it isn't so imminent or serious a threat at present, it seems to me, as the visceral reaction to the Big Brother icon evokes. That's not an argument for unchecked government surveillance; only an argument for some perspective in the matter.

Is It Just Me, Or Is It Getting Warm In Here?

From Newsweek, via MSNBC, comes an article by MIT meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen arguing that alarm over global warming remains unjustified. That’s not to say Lindzen denies global warming or that human generated greenhouse gases are contributing to some extent to that warming trend. Indeed, he readily acknowledges both to be true.

In fact, Lindzen almost exactly mirrors my own entirely inexpert opinion on global warming, which is as follows: (1) it is almost certainly occurring, (2) there is increasingly good evidence of a human contribution to global warming, though estimates of the extent of that contribution are hard to come by, (3) it remains unclear what, if anything, humanity either can or should do about it.

The problem, as my former co-blogger Thoreau has pointed out on a number of occasions, is that discussion of global warming tends to confuse scientific and policy issues. Not being a scientist, I lack credibility to speak to the scientific issues first hand, so I have tended to ground my own guarded skepticism about those issues in the work of fellow skeptics whose intellectual integrity I trust and who have taken the trouble of investigating those issue with some care. You need not be a scientist to understand scientific findings any more than you need to hold a doctorate in philosophy to understand or evaluate ethical arguments. You do, however, need to be reasonably intelligent, thorough and open minded.

Critics of global warming skeptics have tended to attack them on one of those three grounds in roughly ascending order; that is, the skeptic is stupid, cherry-picks the data and / or has some conflict of interests undermining his credibility. One of the more amusing things about the Lindzen piece is its disclaimer at the end stating “His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.” This, in turn, was challenged by several comments, though perhaps tongue-in-cheek, claiming that because the U.S. government allegedly has vested interests in the issue, Lindzen’s views are suspect. So it goes.

I receive no funding from any source, more’s the pity, but I do definitely have prejudices, not so much on the issue of global warming but on the issue of global warming policy. They’re really two entirely different issues and should be kept separated as much as possible. More importantly, rhetorical flourishes should be kept to a minimum. The heat-to-light ratio in the global warming debate is already bad enough.

Unfortunately, Lindzen himself doesn’t do this. On the one hand, he lays out in general terms some of the problems with some of the possibly more exaggerated scientific claims of global warming activists. On the other, he writes about the economic impact of attempts to redress global warming including the mandated use of ethanol and the likely effect of carbon caps on energy prices.

Of course, Lindzen doesn’t need to be an economist to write about economic policy any more than I need to be a meteorologist to write about global warming. But when he writes “There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe,” my sensors start to alarm. “Compelling” is a pretty damned high standard. Wouldn’t the better, more useful adjective here be “sufficient”? And don’t we need a better sense from both sides of the debate as to what exactly would minimally qualify as a catastrophe? I think so.

Have You Blown Up A Ford Lately?

Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally came to the rescue of better known but lower paid CEO George W. Bush last week by preventing the president from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of a Ford hydrogen-electric hybrid vehicle being demonstrated at the White House. Said Mulally, "I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen. This is all off the record, right?"

Now we know why Mulally makes the big money. He's been in Job #1 at Ford for four months now, pulling down a tidy $28.2 million a year to try to salvage the auto maker from itself. Ford managed to post a record $12.7 billion loss in 2006.

No word so far on whether Mulally will personally accompany other Ford hybrid users to ensure their safety or why, for that matter, plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank is even remotely possible even for the likes of President Bush.

Constant Viewer: Woke Up This Morning, With A Cannoli In My Hand

As its final series begins, eulogies for The Sopranos are already pouring in. (See, also, Joe Gandleman's roundup of commentary at The Moderate Voice.) How the series will end is a matter of much speculation. From the viewer’s point of view, however, the answer is self-evident: it will end badly. Badly because however well resolved or unresolved the final episode may leave all the still dangling plot threads, the viewer will nonetheless be as unsatisfied as the reader of a long, absorbing novel is at the final page. These fictional characters, having become real or real enough to him as he followed their stories over the past six seasons, still have lives ahead of them about which he will remain forever ignorant. How unfair.

By way of perspective, The Sopranos isn’t, let's face it, Shakespearian either in its scope or its writing, it isn’t even clearly the greatest television series of all time, and it worked, when it did work (less and less in later seasons), because of the same largely fortuitous convergence of events that blesses any collaborative art that works and especially any film or television program aspiring to art. It had a great theme, great writers and directors, a great cast and crew and, perhaps most important, it had HBO, which had the freedom to let it be what it was without fear of censorship. Remove any one of these elements, some of them entirely beyond the control of David Chase, et al., and the result would probably have been at best only so-so. (The exact same can be said, indeed has been said by William Goldman, about movies. So much for the auteur theory.)

Finally, of course, it stood out in large measure because most of its competition was so bad. But then there has never been a time or an art form in which most of the competition wasn't bad. Even in Hollywood’s "Golden Year" of 1939, most of the movies the studios churned out were crap.

Television remains just another part of show business, emphasis on the word “business.” It’s “vast wasteland” began as a technology that created a new medium for which there was, from the start, insufficient content, let alone insufficient content worth watching. Producers sold shows first and foremost to commercial sponsors, speculating in an age before sophisticated market research and focus groups that sufficient audiences would, in turn, tune in and watch.

The business model of television, in other words, was to sell anticipated audiences to sponsors, not programs to audiences. Cable television and especially premium channels have changed that model, selling product directly to audiences in a manner akin to the movie industry.

That shift and the equally important freedom from FCC guardians of public mores, made shows like The Sopranos possible. Still, with hundreds of cable channels now available, television has again become or, perhaps more accurately, remained a medium in desperate need of more content of any sort, let alone high quality content, than it can realistically hope to produce.

Even in the days of the broadcast monopoly and censors keeping a watchful eye out against airing anything too shocking or controversial, art managed occasionally to rise from the video muck. Writers like Rod Serling and Sterling Silliphant managed to bring wonderfully literate and engaging shows like The Twilight Zone, Naked City and Route 66 to viewers. Imagine what they could have produced with today’s greater creative freedom, vastly larger production budgets and shorter series requirements. (By the end of this final season, The Sopranos will have run 86 episodes in eight years. The Twilight Zone ran 156 episodes in five seasons; Route 66 ran 116 episodes in four.)

So, yes, I shall miss Tony and his two families, even as I have wondered from time to time whatever happened to Tod and Buz and that Corvette that magically traded itself in for a new model every season. (And will whoever owns Route 66 please ferchristsakes bring them out on DVD, even if only in the half-hearted way Naked City episodes have finally been dribbled out?) And, for what it’s worth, here’s my suggestion for the final episode, supposedly still being tweaked: Tony awakens from a dream about being a mobster, only to find himself lying on a psychiatric couch next to his therapist, a one-armed Bob Newhart. Okay, so maybe not.

Parker's Rape Fantasies

Kathleen Parker finds common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man Parker freely admits is “a dangerous, lying, Holocaust-denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug.” But, hey, he “was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles.”

My guess – just off the top of my head, mind you – is that the answer here would be that the mothers in question were, well, volunteers. Essentially advocating sexual discrimination, Parker manages in a very brief space to say a very many nutty things. Take this, for example:

Just because we may not "feel" humiliated doesn't mean we're not. In the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations, we're wimps.

Sorry, Ms Parker, but that's exactly what it means. If you don’t feel humiliated, you aren’t. Simple as that. Besides, in “the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations,” we are far worse than mere wimps. We’re also, amusingly enough, misogynists for letting, well, women like you “dress like prostitutes.” Who cares what “Iran and other Muslim nations” think about our concepts of personal liberty and sexual equality? You might as well tell us most witch doctors take a dim view of MRIs and antibiotics.

Here’s another choice tidbit:

Rape, though not a likely risk in this case, is a consistent argument against putting women in or near combat. While advocates for women in combat argue that men are also raped, there is an important difference. Women are raped by men, which, given the inherent power differential between the sexes, raises women's rape to another level of terror.

Huh? Men aren’t raped by men? Aren’t equally or maybe even more terrified at the prospect? Does Parker really think that because of this alleged “inherent power differential between the sexes,” we manly men are somehow better equipped psychologically or physically to just, um, suck it up and take it like a man? Jeez!

Look, I’m entirely sympathetic to arguments, first, that young children need their mothers more than their fathers and that this is a sufficient reason for women with such children not to enter or remain in the military. Where I clearly draw the line with Parker, however, is whether they should be permitted to make that decision for themselves and, yes, by extension for their children. As between those mothers making that call or leaving it to the state or the likes of Parker, I'd say the answer is a no-brainer. (Sadly, it does not follow from something being a no-brainer that many people, even including those with brains, won't get it wrong.)

Second, I’m all about the argument that physical standards should be set high enough to get the job done in the infantry or any other combat position, and if any particular woman can’t meet those standards, then she has no business being in that position. But the same is just as true of men. God forbid the defense of my nation should ever fall to needing, well, wimps like me to fight off the enemy in hand to hand combat. The point here, though, is that sex has nothing to do with who is or is not physically capable of getting the job done. Have the forces of Political Correctness undermined that principle? Yes. Does that have any friggin' thing to do whatever with whether any particular woman (a young Janet Reno springs to mind) would be capable of meeting the physical requirements? Of course not.

Still, my read of Parker’s real concern is that it isn’t about average physical strength differences between the sexes or even about motherhood. It’s really all about the risk of rape, I think. And she may be right, for all I know, at least in her own mind. Only, that is, I mean, but, on the other hand, um, just who the hell is she to make that decision for every other woman in the Western world?

Oh yeah, that’s right, she’s that writer with roughly the same sexual politics as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Which reminds me that there is at least one thing Parker got exactly right.

“Positioning women to become pawns of propaganda, meanwhile, is called aiding and abetting the enemy,” Parker wrote.

Just so, Ms Parker. When will you be turning yourself in?

"To Whom It May Concern..."

Having recently moved to the semi-former Republic of Texas, I can report that as ubiquitous as, say, Starbucks is in your average East Coast city, churches are in Dallas. And Dallas, I am occasionally reminded by Texans from other parts of the Lone Star State, is only tenuously a part of Texas anyway. Not as bad as Austin, mind you, but still, as the folks in Fort Worth like to say “where the East peters out.” Even so, should your car ever break down here, I can’t speak for the nearest garage, but I can guarantee you there will be a church within walking distance where you can go and pray for its recovery.

Texas no doubt has many members of other faiths, as well ("Bless their hearts!"), but there’s little doubt that this is the Bible Belt, with a heavy emphasis on the New Testament, by Gawd. Thus the prospect of a Muslim Imam, specifically one Yusuf Kavakci of the Dallas Central Mosque, offering the invocation in the Texas Senate with what some bloggers are calling an anti-Jewish and anti-Christian prayer was bound to cause, as they say in these parts, some ruckus. Well, as Bryan at Hot Air reports, the senate is in Austin, and Austin is, after all, “Berkeley in all but name.”

Kavakci is variously alleged to be both a moderate voice and as being sympathetic to some Islamic fundamentalists, and I have frankly neither the time nor the interest in tracing or sorting out these allegations. The key here, to me anyway, is the text of the invocation, itself, which has been translated as follows:

In the name of god, Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. All praise is for Allah, our lord, the lord of the worlds, the compassionate, the merciful, master of the day of judgments. Oh, god, Allah, you alone we worship, and you alone we call on for help. Oh, Allah, guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have earned your wrath or of those who have lost the way. Our lord, have mercy on us from yourself and guide us in our efforts, strivings, and works.

These same sites report that the penultimate sentence of that prayer is well understood in Islam as referring first to Jews and second to Christians, Islam being the "straight path." “How dare this man offer a non-inclusionary prayer in a public building,” seems to be the gist of the complaint; or, perhaps more accurately, how dare he voice a non-inclusionary, non-Christian prayer!

I’m perfectly willing to accept the ‘anti’-Jewish and ‘anti’-Christian interpretation at face value at least on grounds that any Muslim who doesn’t think Islam is the truth and other religions are therefore in error and risk God’s (or Allah’s) anger wouldn’t be much of a Muslim. And, of course, the same would be true of Jews and Christians, as well. So it basically comes down to that whole Church / State thingie and something Mom used to say about geese and ganders.

Any invocation more theologically specific than (and probably even including) “To whom it may concern, if there’s anybody listening, please help.” will be offensive to someone. This leaves two alternatives. First, permit no prayers of any sort for any public, official events of any sort. Otherwise, permit any and all such prayers, offensive or not, and let God, who probably has better things to do than listen to politicians in the first place, sort it all out.

Speaker for the Misled

Probably the very worst thing you can say about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s much criticized junket as amateur ambassador without portfolio to Syria is that Jimmy Carter approves. Given everything else that has been said so far, that’s saying something.

Carter, whose Nobel Peace Prize was won largely as a result of holding Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat hostage at Camp David, torturing them with homespun piety until both would gladly have converted to the Unification Church and signed anything just to get out of there, has been a chronic disgrace as a free-lance diplomat ever since leaving the White House. Come to think of it, his official track record in the Middle East, the Camp David Accords aside, wasn’t all that hot, either.

It’s comforting, though, to see how quickly Democrats can approach the Republican standard for overreaching their legitimate authority once back in power. If nothing else, it has a wonderfully clarifying effect on our understanding of the negligible difference between the parties in their grasp of such trivialities as separation of power.

I won’t speak to the substance of Pelosi’s rather inverted “Road to Damascus” experience because it is irrelevant to my basic point, which is simply that in matters of foreign relations, the United States must speak with one voice. Sadly, that voice is currently George W. Bush’s, but I’d make the same claim if Pee Wee Herman were president. All you need to know about this particular point when it comes to high stakes negotiations between real or potential adversaries can be learned, as silly as it may sound, from The Godfather.

When Don Vito Corleone declines Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo’s request to provide political protection for his drug business, Sonny speaks out of turn at the meeting. Sollozzo notices Sonny’s enthusiasm for the deal and this leads directly to the hit on Don Vito. Too late does the Don admonish his son, “Never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking again!”

Okay, so it’s just a movie. But the point is valid nonetheless. In diplomacy, like negotiations of any sort, if you show division in your ranks your opponent will attempt to exploit it. Even when American foreign policy needs to be changed, as I believe our policy in the Middle East does, the likes of Pelosi or Carter gadding about the world speaking from a position of perceived power and influence is a foolish and dangerous thing to do. Carter should have known better years ago, but his ego prevents him from grasping this fact and acting accordingly. Let’s hope for America’s sake that Pelosi is still capable, as the media like to say, of growing in office.

"Will Opine For Food"

And what is so rare as a day in June? Well, with apologies to James Russell Lowell, I’d say this blog praising something from The Nation. Still, there it is, as large as life, a column by Eric Alterman with which I almost entirely agree. Pity the poor pundit, once holder of the best gig in professional journalism. Yeah, right.

The advent of the Internet--particularly the blogosphere--has changed all that. Now, not only are the things pundits say and write preserved for posterity; there are legions of folks who track pundit pronouncements, fact-check their statements and compare them with previous utterances on the same and similar topics. They also demand a degree of transparency about methods of inquiry and the reasoning behind conclusions drawn. While proving pundits wrong--over and over and over--has not yet cost anyone a job, it has contributed to a precipitous decline in pundit prestige. The reaction to this decline varies from pundit to pundit, to be sure, but more often than not, it bespeaks a kind of panic.

Pity, for that matter, the poor reporter, whose copy not so long ago was scrutinized only by his editors and the occasional disgruntled reader. The latter had, at best, an irate Letter to the Editor as his sole opportunity for rejoinder. But now? Why, now anyone with a computer and internet access (take, well, me for example) to have his say literally moments after the professional reporter’s story is published. Hardly seems fair, does it?

Then, too, there’s that whole supply and demand thingie. While we mere amateurs may be ‘inferior goods,’ we’re still flooding the market, driving down prices, or at least demand for opinion and analysis from the boys and girls at the MSM. All you need to play are strong opinions and the sort of cocktail party education anyone with a liberal arts degree is likely to have.

The truth is, being a professional pundit or syndicated columnist of any sort is still a pretty damned good gig. A 700 word column once or twice a week and it’s back to the hot tub. The major players even have assistants to perform such drudgery as fact-checking for them. Sweet, huh? Of course, the pay varies considerably, depending on where you are published and how many other periodicals run your pieces and how popular you are on the talking heads circuit and lecture tour, but we’re still not talking about any heavy lifting, are we? So not only will I reserve the pity for the time being; I'd even be willing (grudgingly, you understand!) to take on a job like that myself.

As the old joke used to go, freedom of the press was freedom only for those who owned the presses. No more. I don’t know that I agree entirely with Alterman’s claim that professional pundits are “in thrall to the specious arguments of the powerful people they are supposed to critique.” (He’s writing at The Nation, after all, so he’d pretty much have to say something like that, wouldn’t he?) Still, how often does one read a New York Times column criticizing how the Ochs-Sulzberger family runs the paper? Far less often than once per F.U. and vastly less often than the Blogosphere takes its shots at the Times, I can tell you that.

The Ballad of Mitt Romney

Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Mitt,
A rich Mormon boy tryin’ to get his campaign lit,
And then one day he was talkin’ to the press,
And out of his mouth came a terrible mess.

He told them boys he’d been huntin’ quite a while,
Shootin’ up them varmints, livin’ country style.
But now it seems he’d gone huntin’ only twice,
And his story’s got to soundin’ like the usual campaign lies.

Bull, that is... Campaign codswaddle...

So his staff said "Mitt, better give the tale some spin.
Shoot some quail in Georgia if you want a chance to win.
Better join the NRA now on your trail to victory,
‘Cause they never hunt for truth down in Washington, D.C."

The Low Fidelity of iPod's Noise... iPod's Noise

Apple (Motto: “Occasionally better, always cooler”) recently announced that the entire EMI catalog of downloadable music would be available at $1.29 a pop, such downloads to be both DRM-free and “offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original [i.e., CD] recording.” Does a 256 kbps bit rate versus the usual 128 kbps bit rate really provide improved audio quality? Probably not, writes Christopher Beam at Slate, and he’s probably right. The truth is, the audio quality of MP3s played on the average MP3 player, including iPods, sucks. (N.B., I am using "MP3" throughout this post as a generic term to include, e.g., AAC.) But the reason isn’t the bit rate. MP3 sound quality sucks by comparison to CDs because of (1) the compression / decompression (“codec”) programs used to reduce the size of audio files and (2) crappy DACs or digital-to-analog converters. (In fairness, a two year old review in Stereophile says that iPods have "a pretty good DAC.")

The technology behind digital audio of any sort is tremendously sophisticated and the mathematics behind that technology is far beyond my meager math skills. At bottom, however, digital audio takes what is an essentially continuous analog signal (sound waves, themselves a form of mechanical energy converted to a modulated electrical signal by a microphone) and converts that signal to a series of non-continuous or discrete bits, symbolically represented by 1’s and 0’s, by an analog-to-digital converter or ADC. That bit stream is then stored and the stored information is eventually reconverted by a DAC into a continuous electrical signal which is then reconverted by speakers back into sound waves.

By comparison, the earlier analog technology of phonograph recordings involved no analog-to-digital-to-analog processing and, for all its other shortcomings, was therefore considered by audiophiles to be in principle capable of approximating perfect fidelity to the original audio source. To audiophiles, perfect fidelity was (and still is) the Holy Grail of audio equipment – recorded music should sound exactly as though it was being performed live – and in the early days of digital audio technology, a battle raged among audiophiles whether the whole digital audio conversion process constituted a fatal shortcoming. Couldn’t, in effect, the human ear hear the difference between the continuous original source and the “merely sampled” digital signal?

Psychoacoustically, the answer is no. Not, at least, at a sufficiently high sampling rate. Moreover, for anyone possessing a merely so-so stereo in the 1980s, although the first generation of CDs and CD players fell far short of Sony and Phillips' “perfect sound forever” advertising campaign, the sound was indeed significantly better than that from analog LPs. Why? First, because most “so-so” stereos were, in fact, pretty crappy, themselves. Second, because even the best turntables produced at least some unwanted “rumble” noise and tape players produced some unwanted “wow and flutter” noise. Also, LP’s became damaged with every use and, more often than not, rapidly became seriously damaged by scratches and dirt and other causes of “surface noise,” while magnetic tapes suffered their own wear problems. Third, digital technology permitted much greater dynamic headroom. Analog recordings compressed volume because sudden shifts in volume created signal distortion, though in fact that was due more to the limitations of the equipment at that time than the analog process, itself.

Even so, that early generation of CDs sounded crappy when compared to state-of-the-art analog stereo systems. There were various reasons for this, too, not the least of which was the fact that recording engineers simply didn’t have sufficient experience yet with the new technology. But the primary reason CD sound quality has significantly improved since the 1980s is, quite simply, improvement in the ADCs and especially the DACs. Aside from the inherent problems in data compression and decompression, the DACs in most MP3 players isn’t very good. Thus, even when the signal output is fed into a respectable stereo system, as opposed to those crappy little earphones, the sound still doesn’t measure up to a CD played on a decent CD player through the same system.

No sound recording technology or equipment is better than its weakest link. I own an iPod, and I enjoy it. But MP3 players are for convenience, just as even the best car stereos are. What they’re not for is audio quality, not if quality means anything within a country mile of high-fidelity, anyway. If an extra 30 cents a tune is worth it to you to be able to avoid DRM restrictions, go for it. If you're seeking audio quality though, forget it. Especially if you're only going to listen on those tiny earphones or a pair of only marginally better computer speakers. Keep buying the 99 cent versions and save up for a decent stereo and the CDs, instead.

"... I'd type a little faster."

Reason’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey expects to die on September 4, 2027. Well, no, not really. He derived that date from a whimsical little internet site called the Death Clock, according to which I died on July 18, 1995. ("Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped." - Groucho)

Less whimsically, Bailey wrote recently (and spoke today on NPR) about emerging diagnostic technology that will permit individuals to learn their likely life expectancy with far more than mere actuarial probability. Some of these tests for some sorts of likely fatal illnesses exist already. More such tests for more such diseases are on the horizon.

Bailey’s not unreasonable position about such advances is that they are a good thing; that the average individual should both want and have access to such information. The medical community, on the other hand, is a bit more conflicted. Physicians regularly tout the life saving advantages of routine examinations of various sorts designed to provide early detection of illnesses for which, if caught in time, viable treatment options and a more successful prognosis are possible. But doctors don’t like giving bad news, whether the bad news is that you’re going to die in a matter of months or, assuming you would otherwise likely live longer, some five or ten years from now because of some fatal disease or disorder.

I admit to being somewhat conflicted myself about having access to such information. As Bailey correctly argues, the individual who is aware of the time and nature of his likely demise is better equipped to make the most of what time remains. In some cases, he is also better equipped to take whatever measures may be available, if not to avoid, at least to postpone that fate. Eventually, perhaps, a more advanced medical technology will allow us not only to identify such genetic diseases but also to cure them. "Eventually", however, may well be a long time away. The question for now is whether or how to use the information in the meanwhile.

Would the average person really profit from having such information available to him? I don’t know. I remember a television series from the 1960’s called Run For Your Life about a man named Paul Bryan who, being told by his doctors he had at most a year or two to live, set off to squeeze out every moment of his remaining time. Of course, it helped Bryan that he had a lucrative law practice to cash in and make the run possible. A show based on the remaining days of Paula Bryan, former librarian, would have suffered from far fewer exotic locations. (The show, by the way, lasted three seasons. Apparently you can get a temporary reprieve from death with high enough ratings.)

Knowing in one’s youth that one had a shorter than normal life expectancy, say only twenty more years, would indeed drive career, lifestyle and even family decisions. But how would the typical person really react to such news? As matters stand, the only two sorts of people who know the exact time and place of their death are suicides and death row inmates. Neither are role models to which the typical person aspires. Indeed, when doctors do have to break the bad news to patients, their doing so is commonly referred to as “delivering a death sentence.” No wonder physicians shy away from that part of the job.

If the only question is whether people have a right to discover, for better or worse, such information about themselves, I agree wholeheartedly with Bailey that they should. As to whether they should seek such information, well, that’s a bit trickier.

Far more troubling, however, as the technology for such information becomes available (and indeed it increasingly will), is who other than the patient will have, indeed, will require such information. Will life and health insurance companies demand such information as a precondition of coverage? It certainly seems likely that they will and, moreover, that those of us who come up losers already in the genetic lottery will find ourselves doubly stricken as we therefore become unable to secure either health or life insurance sufficient to care for our health needs when the inevitable occurs or for our survivors afterward.

Insurance is, after all, about pooled risks. It is, if you will, a sensible way of dealing with ignorance. Perhaps it will not remain a viable way to finance health care or survivor needs in a future in which such ignorance is increasingly replaced with knowledge. For better or worse, however, this is the system we have for now and these are issues that must be confronted and resolved.

(Title quote from Isaac Asimov: "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood...")

Bright College Daze

Well, I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech. And that reminds me of a story that's so dirty I'm ashamed to think of it myself. -- Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) in Horse Feathers

Per CNN, some 200 demonstrating students peacefully protested the anticipated commencement address by Vice President Cheney at Brigham Young University. Meanwhile, counter-protesters -- and what’s a good protest without some counter-protesters to help lure the media? – quietly collected some 400 signatures on a letter of thanks to the vice president. Peacefully? Quietly? Well, BYU ain’t exactly Berkeley when it comes to protests, after all. Then again, come to think of it, neither is Berkeley these days.

Say what you will about FOX News’s conservative slant, here’s how CNN described BYU: “a conservative school owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Well, yes, in the same sense, I suppose, that Georgetown is a liberal school owned by the Roman Catholic Church. Still, one rarely reads or hears such context provided by the MSM in such cases, or is it just me? And is there anyone who didn’t know that Brigham Young is a Mormon school or, as such, a tad less left leaning than, oh, say, Michigan or Yale? (Note to Eli arson majors: next time, kids, at least have the common courtesy to burn your own damned American flags, huh?)

Anyway, commencement speech season is soon upon us and landing a big name commencement speaker is almost as prestigious and competitive among big name universities as seeing who can reject the most high school valedictorians. Ordinarily, a mere vice president isn’t considered nearly as big a catch as, say, a film star; but, hey, it’s Cheney, you know? Besides, political commencement speeches actually can be entertaining. At my own graduation many years ago, then Chief Justice Warren Burger gave a delicious “Law and Order” speech (no, not about the TV show) in the midst of the Watergate crisis of his greatest fan, Richard Nixon. Oh, the irony was dripping faster than the beads of sweat under our silly medieval robes that hot spring afternoon, I tell you.

Generally, though, aside from the rare funny ones, commencement speeches are a waste of time. The speaker is there primarily to bask in his own ego and pick up a worthless degree he didn’t earn (not unlike many of the other degree recipients, come to think of it), while the audience is comprised of gleeful parents busy thinking about not writing any more tuition checks, faculty members busy thinking about all the research and writing they hope to get done that summer and graduating seniors wondering where the best parties will be after its all over.

In fact, the best thing that can be said about the typical commencement speech is that it isn’t the most boring part of the ceremony. That dubious honor belongs to the endless procession of graduates walking up to receive what purports to be their diplomas but turns out to be their very first request from the development office for an alumni contribution. Grass grows faster than they hand those things out, and more interestingly, too.

So cheer up, unhappy BYU students. Cheney will be back to his undisclosed location before you can say Joseph Smith. To paraphrase a far better (and shorter) speech than you will hear at commencement, you will little note, nor long remember what is said that day, and before you know it you’ll be free to begin your lives. Commencement is, after all, not an ending but a beginning and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

"You Got A Problem With My Math, Teach?"

To borrow Lenny Bruce’s description of Chicago, New Jersey is so corrupt, it’s thrilling. In 2005, according to today's New York Times, the Garden State “put either $551 million, $56 million or nothing into its pension fund for teachers. All three figures appeared in various state documents — though the state now says that the actual amount was zero.”

Well, what’s a single half billion dollar accounting error in a pension fund with reported total assets (key word: “reported”) of $79 billion, after all? Oh, but wait. It seems this isn’t some one time accounting error after all. Frederick J. Beaver, director of the Division of Pensions and Benefits in the New Jersey Treasury Department, told the Times the state has been “doing it on a repeat basis.” Indeed, the Times reports:

The phantom contribution is just one indication that New Jersey has been diverting billions of dollars from its pension fund for state and local workers into other government purposes over the last 15 years, using a variety of unorthodox transactions authorized by the Legislature and by governors from both political parties.

There, of course, the key phrase is “both political parties.”

There has been much public outcry over fraudulent accounting practices in a handful of publicly owned corporations over the past decade, especially so when vested employee pension plans have been at risk. Appropriately so. Let’s see if there is similar outrage, especially from the Left, sufficient to require state governments to abide by the same accounting and funding practices private organizations are held to under ERISA.

Traffic Court Roundup: Next Time, Hit That Patrol Car with a Zamboni, Lady

In Sylvania, AL, a woman has been charged with a DUI after allegedly riding a horse through town under the influence of a controlled substance and attempting to ram a police car with the horse. Meanwhile, in York, PA, a man who apparently drove to court to face a DUI charge, allegedly "appeared to be intoxicated at the hearing" and was charged with yet another DUI after a blood test reported a blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit. There was, however, more hopeful news from Newark, NJ, where a judge ruled that a man could not be charged with drunk driving merely as a result of operating a Zamboni inside a sports arena regardless of his blood-alcohol level.

Pranks For The Memories

Back at Inactivist a few weeks ago, I posted a link to one fan's list of the Worst NCAA Division I College Mascots, with a special Honorable Mention to Dartmouth's Keggy the Keg. Well, Keggy's back, along with a few dozen of his best buddies at Dartmouth in a taped prank played on prospective students touring the campus, called Drinkin' Time. That and other YouTube posted college pranks worth watching, especially including one by Columbia's Prangstgrüp entitled Reach: A Lecture Musical Prank, are discussed at the Chronicle of Higher Education, hat tip to their Arts & Letters Daily. (Them there academic types sure do seem to have a lot of free time on their hands!)

Aficionados of college pranks, videotaped or not, might also enjoy checking out some of the legendary "hacks" from those whacky high-tech pranksters at MIT.

"Sensors Are Down, Captain. Better Let Commander Jordie Take The Helm!"

I seem to be on a psychology kick today, but over at Wired – hat tip to the Daily Foo – there’s a fascinating article about neuroplasticity and the future of sensory prosthetics.

We have long known that there is considerable neurological flexibility and self-compensating ability when it comes to processing sensory input. The eyes, for example, being merely optical devises receive images upside down and the brain then flips the image over for us. If one wears glasses designed to flip those initial sensory images right side up so that we then “see” the world upside down, eventually the brain compensates again and flips the mental image to its correct orientation.

The article tells of an experiment by which the subject could, like birds, sense direction as a result of a series of buzzers worn as a belt devised so that whatever buzzer faced north would sound. As the experiment progressed, “"I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place," said the subject.

Direction isn't something humans can detect innately. Some birds can, of course, and for them it's no less important than taste or smell are for us. In fact, lots of animals have cool, "extra" senses. Sunfish see polarized light. Loggerhead turtles feel Earth's magnetic field. Bonnethead sharks detect subtle changes (less than a nanovolt) in small electrical fields. And other critters have heightened versions of familiar senses — bats hear frequencies outside our auditory range, and some insects see ultraviolet light.

We humans get just the five. But why? Can our senses be modified? Expanded? Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound? The answers to these questions, according to researchers at a handful of labs around the world, appear to be yes.

Of course, Big GPS would probably resist making prosthetic direction sensors available, but the possible applications, both for the disabled or injured and for enhancing ‘normal’ sensation, are probably limitless. Neat stuff.

Clearing The Air Constitutionally

If you don’t count their neighbors across the street at the U.S. Capitol Building, nobody in Washington has more authority to speak on the subject of harmful gas than the Supreme Court. So it is only fitting the Court yesterday rejected Administration arguments that the Environmental Protection Agency could not ignore or refuse to take jurisdiction over the matter of carbon dioxide emissions’ environmental impact.

I’ll forego the usual libertarian rant against the broad Commerce Clause interpretation that permits the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act and the resulting regulatory agency to exist in the first place and, for that matter, the substantive scientific debate over the extent of the anthropogenic contribution to global warming, etc. The real issue here is also constitutional, but vastly more obviously so. By Article II, Section 3, the President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” However broad Executive discretion may be in the interpretation and execution of those laws, it is not limitless, a fact too often ignored by the Bush Administration.

Now, in the instant case it appears there is a legitimate question of standing to sue, at least according to the Times’ report of the 5 to 4 decision and the focus of the dissent. That’s an important consideration, too. The Supreme Court has no more business overreaching its legitimate authority than Congress or the White House. But surely the basic idea behind the holding, whether properly reached in this case or not, is valid; namely, Justice Breyer’s assertion that “the use of the word ‘judgment’ [in the Clean Air Act] is not a roving license to ignore the statutory text.”

Executive fiat is no less troubling constitutionally and far more dangerous as a practical matter than judicial fiat. I take no position on the merits of this particular decision, but I take heart at any attempt to rein in this Administration’s arrogant views of its own prerogatives, just as I take heart at checks on judicial and legislative abuses.

Conservatives, even including the “Neo” variety, who profess after all to have a keener appreciation of the rule of law than their liberal counterparts, should be and apparently are becoming more chary of the assertions of presidential power we have witnessed in the past six years. Especially when you consider the increasing likelihood that one of their own won’t be holding that office two years from now.

"Mother's Little Helper" Revisited

The Washington Post reports today that as many as one in four patients diagnosed with clinical depression may in fact merely be, well, unhappy. How depressing.

Psychiatry and clinical and abnormal psychology are, as Thomas Szasz will gladly tell you, scientifically suspect endeavors, at best. That’s not to say, as Szasz in fact has said, that there is no such thing as mental illness. It is beyond serious debate at this point that there are psychological disorders which are, in fact, biochemical disorders or imbalances and treatable as such. So called bipolar disorder and clinical depression are examples of such, if only in the sense that the symptoms of such disorders can typically be mitigated, eliminated or controlled by medication.

In fact, we have more confidence in calling any so-called cognitive, affective or behavioral disorders genuine illnesses only when and precisely because they are amenable to medication. They fit the ruling ontology of the day; namely, that everything, including the mental, is ultimately physical and therefore susceptible, at least in principle, to physical, i.e., medicinal or surgical treatment.

By contrast, historically and still in large measure today, psychiatry and clinical psychology are mostly taxonomic arts – disorders are diagnosed by noting behavioral signs and symptoms and checking them against the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fourth edition and known simply as DSM-IV. As far as an underlying etiology or cause of the current list of disorders goes, theories abound but little is actually known.

Getting back to the depressing business of depression, the WaPo article explains the current diagnostic attitude as follows:

Diagnoses are currently made on the basis of a constellation of symptoms that include sadness, fatigue, insomnia and suicidal thoughts. The diagnostic manual used by doctors says that anyone who has at least five such symptoms for as little as two weeks may be clinically depressed. Only in the case of someone grieving over the death of a loved one is it normal for symptoms to last as long as two months, the manual says.

The problem here, of course, is one of differentiating merely situational depression (how the “sh*t happens” facts of life affect us all) from clinical depression, reserving the prescription of, for example, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s) like Prozac for the latter. A new study suggests, however, that “extended periods of depression-like symptoms are common in people who have been through other life stresses such as a divorce or a natural disaster and that they do not necessarily constitute illness.” (Emphasis added.)

As the kids say, “Well, D’uh!” I haven’t checked on the rest of the symptom list for depression, but chronic recurrent sadness, fatigue, insomnia and suicidal thoughts are also symptomatic of parenthood, a condition that typically (tragically) lasts considerably longer than two weeks. And who the hell said you get just two months to grieve for a lost loved one?

DIGRESSION #1: A guy is playing golf with his friends one beautiful Saturday afternoon. As a funeral procession passes the course, the man stops, bows his head and crosses himself. A friend says, “Hey Joe, I didn’t know you were so religious,” and the man answers, “I’m not really, but what the hell? I was married to the woman for nearly twenty years.”

The problem here, well, one of them anyway, is that in the absence of a specific biochemical or pathogenic etiology psychologists are pretty much free to slice up the whole gamut of human emotions and behavior pretty much anyway they choose. Hence, for example, back when I was in college the DSM still defined homosexuality as a psychological disorder and schizophrenia came in any number of varieties as a grab-bag of serious psychoses that didn’t fit another category. Rumor has it that the immediately prior edition had just two differential diagnoses: whacko and possessed. I don’t deny that subsequent research and reaction to criticism have had no effect on later editions of the DSM, but how many and which symptoms a patient must experience and for how long to qualify for this diagnosis or that is, to put it mildly, ultimately just a tad arbitrary.

DIGRESSION #2: Giving my medical history to a new primary care physician recently, I had already told him I was adopted at birth and thus had no biological family history. Moments later, he asked if there had ever been any suicides in my family. Why, I asked. Well, he said, there have been studies suggesting that even in the case of adopted children, the example of a suicide in the family correlates to an increased likelihood of suicide. Maybe. And maybe like too many physicians he just couldn’t bring himself to say “Oops, I forgot.” (Actually, there was a suicide in my family and a pretty damned amusing one at that. Remind me to tell you about it some time on a slow news day.)

Ignoring the backstage role of ‘Big Pharma’ in all of this, a case can be made for keeping clinical depression diagnostic criteria flexible enough to ensure that genuine cases don’t go undiagnosed and thus untreated, a point made in the Post article. On the other hand, as that article also quotes Rutgers sociologist Allan Horwitz, “People are starting to think that any sort of negative emotion is unnatural, that they can take medication and feel better. [Psychoactive drugs can] make it less likely for people to make real changes in their lives that might be better than medications.”

As psychopharmacology inevitably improves, the line between chronic affective disorder correcting and merely mood enhancing drugs becomes increasingly problematic. It is one thing to be depressed when everything is going well in one’s life, another to be depressed when it isn’t, and yet another to be as happy as can be even when one’s life is a shambles. Analogically, it’s great that we have analgesics to treat pain. But the ability to experience pain is a highly useful, possibly even essential survival trait. Happily enough, so is the ability to feel sad.

* * * * *

BONUS: Speaking of old Rolling Stones' song titles and, well, drugs, celebrity corpse Keith Richards is reported today as claiming (a claim now being denied by his manager) that he once "snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine." What a drag it is getting old.

Nothing Secedes Like With Success

MEMORANDUM

TO: Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan
FROM: D.A. Ridgely
SUBJECT: Vermont Secession

Speaking as a Virginian, recently transplanted to the semi-former Republic of Texas, I congratulate you and your fellow Vermonters on, as you put it, “seek[ing] permission to leave,” i.e., to secede from the United States. Unfortunately, speaking once again especially as a Virginian, I can’t say I think your prospects are very good. There are, as you may recall, some precedents in these matters. You probably read about them; they were in all the papers.

That said, I find myself in almost complete agreement with much of what you write, especially in your criticism of the federal government as it has now come to be. Oh, I might point out that Vermont’s independence between the Revolutionary War and ratification of the U.S. Constitution was not all that substantially different from that of the other former colonies, Virginia included, and that for all practical purposes the 10th Amendment has never been given its due by the federal powers that be. I might also note that, however right Vermonters were on the subject of slavery (as indeed they were), your phrase “universal manhood suffrage” tends to tiptoe around the fact that not even the morally enlightened 18th Century Vermonters were quite so enlightened as to embrace womanhood suffrage. Well, nobody’s perfect. Look, for example, how that “free public school” business has turned out in too many places, too.

It may be true that Vermont fought in the Civil War primarily to end slavery. I couldn't say. Virginia and the rest of the South were wrong, tragically and unforgivably wrong on the subject of slavery, and none of the other historical or ideological reasons given then or now for their own attempted secession changes that fact. Still, whatever the reasons Vermont fought with the rest of the Union, the possibly unintended but certainly inevitable consequences of that Union victory and U.S. history thereafter pretty much means that Vermont has roughly the same chances of seceding today as you or I have of winning this year’s Miss America pageant.

Oh, sure, the federal government might well permit Puerto Rico or some other territory to part company, once and for all, from the U.S. But let’s face it, that’s largely because of what we might call the Dark Side of the Monroe Doctrine. Latin America is just a bit too, well, Latin for Uncle Sam to care all that much if they resign from the club. Contiguous territory arguments aside, in the case of your particular, not to mince words, lily-white (96.9% white) state demographics such permission will not, alas, be forthcoming. Think of the bad example it would set!

Speaking of which (bad examples, that is), you may have heard about the Free State Project, a libertarian movement to, um, move libertarians into your neighbor, New Hampshire, and push the envelope on balking at federal power and interference as far as possible. Yeah, I know – Vermont and New Hampshire aren’t exactly ideological soul mates, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re seriously sick and tired of Washington’s ineptitude and oppression.

Still, however hopeless your stated cause, I wish you and your fellow Green Mountain Boys good luck. True liberty, as true libertarians know, includes even the liberty to opt into a largely socialist state as long as one retains the liberty to opt back out again, too. People should, in other words, be free to screw up their own lives. Not only is it much cheaper and less dangerous, it’s also a lot more fun than letting Washington screw it up for you.

Oh, and thanks for Calvin Coolidge.

“... because the stakes are so small.”

The beginning of that quip is, of course, “The reason academic politics are so vicious” But the observation is probably just as true of any number of realms of discourse, including (Ohmygawd!) the Blogosphere. From Scott Lemieux over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, via Memeorandum, I finally got around to reading up a bit on the internecine crisis of blogroll purging. Seems that, especially in the Leftosphere, so-called A-list blogs have been purging their blogrolls of many of the so-called B-list blogs, much to the consternation, gnashing of teeth and general whining of the latter. Or something like that.

By A-list and B-list it is presumably meant how popular the blog in question is and that, in turn, is measured by how many hits the blog gets, how many other sites link to it, list it on their blogrolls, etc. The metaphor that springs immediately to my mind, especially this time of year, is the various rankings of NCAA teams, and not only how the “majors” have unexcitingly dominated this year’s basketball tournament but especially, also, the Division I-A football schools versus, well, everyone else.

Them that’s got tries to keep it, of course. I’ll strive valiantly (if unsuccessfully) to avoid noting that redistribution of wealth of any sort is one of the more annoying perennial obsessions of the Left, but the notion that there is any merit to the practice of endlessly listing the blogs one has visited once or twice, or of one’s friends, or especially of sites one is angling to have list you back strikes me as both self-defeating and childish. I can speak, of course, only for myself (hence the title of this blog), but I almost never click on a blog from a blogroll in the first place, and the already slim chances of my doing so are inversely proportional to the length of the blogroll in question. If everyone is interesting, no one is. “All are winners and all must have prizes” is a philosophy best left to nursery schools, failed socialist states and, of course, Wonderland.

My own minor efforts to bring order out of chaos being in operation all of three days now, I’d guess that makes this blog a strong contender for Z-list status. (Unless, that is, the pecking order descends below the alphabet, in which case I’m sure I’d descend right along with it.) The fact is, though, life is too short to fret over such matters just as it is far too short to read blog after blog after blog, ignoring in the process what still passes for real news and, oh yes, the real world, as well. Yeah, I’ve got a few sites listed on my blogroll, and the list will probably grow (and occasionally be trimmed). But they’re sites I actually visit frequently in my own net cruising. Indeed, a few may not even qualify as blogs. So what?

My policy (and, hence, my advice) is to link to a site in a blog entry when doing so assists the reader in understand what I’m writing about or I believe the reader will enjoy or profit from reading that site or site entry. Beyond that, I link only to acknowledge - the proverbial “hat tip” - how and where I came to start thinking about the topic in the first place, as in the first paragraph above.

In blogistry, as in life itself, if you’re doing something simply for recognition or influence (let alone for money), chances are you won’t enjoy it, won’t do it all that well and won’t get either. If you do what you like and therefore do it as well as you can, chances are those other things will take care of themselves. Some of them that’s got, got it ‘cause they got there first; but none of them kept it for that reason alone, let alone because they joined the Million Man Mutual Admiration Society.

Google Buys All Internet Porn Sites, Launches You-bOOb (BETA)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: gOOg) today announced the acquisition of the last remaining internet porn site and launched its newest and most ambitious Google product to date, You-bOOb. "Let’s face it, 99.999% of both internet sites and internet traffic is for porn, so obviously that’s where the real money is," said Google co-founder and President Larry Page. “And we ought to know. If you took away the approximately one trillion porn searches using Google every day, hell, we could run the rest of the whole operation from a couple of old Apple II’s we’ve got sitting around up in the attic.”

Page’s Google co-founder, Sergey Brin elaborated further. “Basically, by buying up every single internet porn site – which, by the way, was effected largely by transfer of shares of our already absurdly over-priced common stock to the prior porn site owners – we have not only provided the internet porn seeker with a simplified, one-stop search process for all his pornographic needs at You-bOOb, we have also significantly enhanced the access speed for the remaining 0.0001% of internet traffic. Plus, of course, it makes it that much easier for us to data-mine the amazing amount of, let’s just say, ‘valuable’ information we’ve been collecting about the perverse and disgusting habits of the millions of internet users we’ve been keeping track of since we first launched Google.” “Oh, and also it’s lucrative as hell and we thought of it before Bill Gates did!” Page chuckled.

Industry financial analysts have already reacted favorably to the announcement, noting that pornography is practically the only thing that makes a profit on the internet, anyway, and raised Google's average one year target price estimate from $567 to $12,348,931 per share.

Keanu Reeves to Star in Film Version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

HOLLYWOOD, California – Avant-garde film director and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman announced today that he has signed Matrix trilogy star Keanu Reeves for the lead in his long awaited screen adaptation of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Bringing the philosophical classic to the big screen has been a dream of Kaufman’s for many years, but finding the right protagonist has been a major stumbling block, he told Hollywood reporters. “I’ve been fascinated with the relationship between the phenomenal and the noumenal ever since I first read Kant,” Kaufman explained. “Plus there’s that whole reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism to deal with and the problem of synthetic a priori knowledge. Exciting stuff. Well, to make a long story short, I knew I finally had the right approach when it came to me to rewrite it as an action / science fiction vehicle – the epic struggle between the merely phenomenal world of our experience and the ever lurking presence of pure noumena, hence my working title, Attack of the Things In Themselves.”

After his success with such offbeat films as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman had little trouble getting Attack of the Things In Themselves (or TIT Attack, as Kaufman jokes) green-lighted. “All the major studios wanted to get on board. Money wasn’t the problem at all. But finding the right actor was almost a show stopper. I knew I needed someone who could convincingly project complete obliviousness to the rich tapestry of interlocking and underlying concepts of the movie as well as personify, physically as well as emotionally, the overwhelming blankness of pure noumena in the final reel. Amazingly enough, I’d forgotten all about the Matrix movies. Well, maybe not so amazing when you consider the last two of them. But then when I saw Keanau in The Lake House, suddenly everything clicked.”

Principle photography is scheduled to begin in late 2007. When recently asked how he could justify his current salary demand of "one gazillion dollars per movie," Reeves displayed his signature spasmodic head twitch and replied, “I know Kung Fu.”

Stunning New Poll Results: Presidential Candidate Ron Paul Suddenly Leads Pack

PRINCETON, New Jersey – A new Gallup Poll survey of likely voters in the 2008 presidential election shockingly shows libertarian Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) the new front runner. Results from the survey of over six hundred Americans randomly selected from a database comprised from a list of subscribers to Reason Magazine, contributors to the Cato Institute and members of the Mont Pelerin Society showed that 87% of likely voters prefer Paul over the other announced candidates. Second place went to “None of the Above” (10%) and third place (2%) to “Unsure.” Former front runners Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton came in at 0.01%, 0.0002% and –99.4%, respectively. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus six and seven eighth's percent.

Congressman Paul was informed of the poll’s findings while attending a fund raising event. “I’m gratified by these numbers,” the former flight surgeon told reporters, “and I think it just goes to support what I’ve been saying for some time. No one is better qualified than I am to be President of the United States. Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn’t permit us to elect no one, so I’m the next best thing.”

Those attending the fund raiser, a Fish Fry with catering provided by the congressman’s wife, Mrs. Paul, were also gladdened by the news. “This is great,” said the candidate’s son, Franciscan seminarian Ron Paul II while taking over for his mother at the deep fryer. "Dad's the major flier in the family and mom's the major fryer, so it only made sense for me to become the friar minor" he joked. The younger Paul then attempted to explain his father’s campaign strategy and governing philosophy. Regrettably, the exceedingly high volume of the recorded guitar music played in the background by the candidate’s cousin, the late Les Paul, made the son's comments impossible to understand. The beer battered fish fillets, however, were very tasty.

Leno Gives Away Prized Car Collection To Delighted Studio Audience

BURBANK, California – Studio audience members were stunned and delighted during a special Sunday taping of The Tonight Show when host Jay Leno told them to look under their seats where each one found a set of keys and the pink slip to one of Leno’s collection of classic automobiles and motorcycles.

“If Oprah can do it, so can I,” said the lantern-jawed comedian. “Frankly, it was time to start downsizing. I had three football field sized warehouses holding the collection, and what with NBC farming me out in a couple of years for What’s-his-name, that kid from Harvard, the Missus was getting on my case about the upkeep.”

Leno said he was keeping his favorite, the 1941 V-12 American-LaFrance fire truck, to use as a daily driver after he retires from The Tonight Show. “The beautiful thing about the American-LaFrance, aside from the fact that it gets close to seven miles to the gallon,” he said, “is that you can just drive over and flatten three celebrity-owned Prius’s when you need a parking space on Rodeo Drive.”



In related news, rival talk show host David Letterman said he was giving serious consideration to giving lucky studio audience members autographed copies from his extensive collection of speeding tickets, also estimated to require three warehouses to store.

Episcopal Church To Offer Drive-Thru Communion

NEW YORK, New York - Facing shrinking membership as a result of ongoing controversy over the role of homosexuals in the church, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori announced yesterday that, as part of a plan to reach out to the broader community, the Episcopal Church would begin installing Drive-Thru Automated Communion Machines or ACM’s at parish churches throughout the nation.

“Today’s busy Christians simply don’t have the time these days to sit in an uncomfortable church pew for an hour or longer, bumping their feet against the kneelers, listening to, let’s face it, usually windy and ill conceived sermons and mumbling along to unsingable hymns while they wait to receive the Holy Sacraments,” Jefferts-Schori explained. “And, frankly, our clergy don’t have time for it any longer, either, what with global warming to fight and a real chance of putting a Democrat back in the White House in 2008.”

With an initial roll-out in the Dioceses of Newark, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., Episcopal ACM’s will feature state of the art touch screens (Braille and voice enhanced for visually impaired driver-communicants) and accept both currency and debit and credit cards for tithing. A sliding tray will then open and communicants will receive consecrated, individually wrapped wafers and sippie-packaged wine while a pre-recorded message intones “the Body and Blood of Christ.”

Drive-Thru Automated Communion Machine
Christ Almighty Episcopal Church, Newark

Jefferts-Schori credits the idea of ACM’s as the brainchild of retired Bishop John Shelby Spong. “Johnny and I were having drinks a couple of months ago and he was telling me about an epiphany he had just outside Damascus, Georgia while promoting his latest book, Holy Scripture, Who The Hell Needs It? ‘I was running late that Sunday morning, BK’ – he always calls me BK, you know, short for “Bishop Katie” – ‘I had a ten o’clock book signing at Borders to get to and I was frustrated, you know, because I wasn’t going to have time to go to church, too. Well, on my way to the mall I stopped to go to the CVS drive-thru pharmacy window to pick up a prescription, and that’s when it struck me. If religion is the opiate of the masses, why not bring the church into the 21st century and distribute our controlled substances just like Big Pharma does?’”

Jefferts-Schori said if Drive-Thru ACM’s succeed as anticipated, plans are already under way to modify church lawn sprinkler systems for baptismal purposes.