Fiat Lux

An older article from The Register (a favorite news site) got called to my attention today. RFID, which hasn't gotten much attention to date, is poised to become a serious threat to personal privacy over the next few years. The potential for RFID to make the lives of retail businesspeople easier is vast - and as one of them, I can't say that that's a bad thing. I just got 60 cases of shoes - more than 1,500 pounds of product - delivered to my store in the past 2 days. Comparing the contents of each case to the printed manifest of what's supposed to be there is a pain in the butt. If I could just wave a scanner over all the boxes and get an exact inventory readout that I could upload to the computer, I'd be thrilled.

However, something is going to have to be done to allow consumers to remove or disable RFID chips once products have left the store, just like we can remove the sales tags and security devices today. The potential for abuse is just way too vast for there to be any wiggle room on this one. "Once you buy your RFID-tagged jeans at The Gap with RFID-tagged money, walk out of the store wearing RFID-tagged shoes, and get into your car with its RFID-tagged tires, you could be tracked anywhere you travel." says The Register, and it's not a pretty picture.

Two years ago today was the worst day of my life.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

jetBlue Airlines, for reasons passing understanding, violated their own privacy policy and handed passenger information lists over to a government contractor.

Why they blithely handed millions of passengers' names, addresses and phone numbers over without a subpoena to a private company that could do anything with that data passes understanding.

I'm not feeling inclined to be flying jetBlue again.

Update: Check out this website for more on jetBlue and their invasions of personal privacy.

Iraq Coalition Casualty Count

According to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, "Jews rule the world by proxy" and that Jews "invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy" to avoid persecution and gain control of the most powerful countries.

Wow. If we're so powerful, why I am so broke?

Taken from his NY Times column today:

It's time for the Bush team to admit it made a grievous error in disbanding Iraq's Army � which didn't even fight us � and declare: "We thank all the nations who offered troops, but we think the Iraqi people can and must secure their own country. So we're inviting all former Iraqi Army soldiers (not Republican Guards) to report back to duty. For every two Iraqi battalions that return to duty (they can weed out their own bad apples), we will withdraw an American one. So Iraqis can liberate themselves. Our motto is Iraq for the Iraqis."

I think it's a very interesting idea. Of course, if we were to do it, depending on the sympathies of the soldiers who re-up, the door is open for a religious takeover of Iraq. That isn't what our soldiers died for. But better ideas are few and far between right now.

While listening to ABC's "This Week" this morning on my way to work, I started to hear echoes of Robert McNamara in Donald Rumsfeld. Look at what he said today: "It's clearly a tragic day for America," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington. "In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days. But they're necessary." (source). Maureen Dowd wrote a great column on this very subject a few days ago. Her best line, and one oh so apt for Rumsfeld's quote today: 'In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."'

In the early days of the war on Iraq, my husband and I discussed whether we weren't getting into another Vietnam. As time passes and the shadow war continues, I grow more sure that President Bush and his crew have not learned the lessons of history and have committing our troops to another multi-year battle against an enemy we cannot defeat in a land we do not understand.

I feel both sad and angry that who knows how many of our men and women will have to pay the ultimate price until this mess gets straightened out. I just hope our next president will be able get us out of there quickly and with some faint shreds of our honor intact.

$200 million dollars to NPR, courtesy of the late Joan B. Kroc (the widow of McDonald's restaurant founder Ray Kroc).

Personally I think McDonald's sucks, but Mrs Kroc did a very cool thing with her money, so maybe I'll actually go buy some McNuggets for lunch tomorrow.

Or maybe not. Their food still sucks.

Scott pointed out something tonight that I totally missed in the last episode of ER. There's a nice echo of Moby Dick in the end to the saga of Dr Romano in that he was killed by the same creature that previously took his limb (in other words, a helicopter, albeit not a white one).

Very clever of the writers.

Found a long, highly informative article in US News & World Report today about the level of secrecy in the Bush administration. Yet more reasons to be disgusted by what this administration has done to our country. It's quite long but worth a read.

As far as personal veils of secrecy go, I haven't heard back from Allstate yet about my car, so I'm still in limbo. I just hope it's all done with soon so I can get out of that dirty, smelly loaner car.

The New York Times, and many other news sources, are reporting today on President Bush's latest proposal, to earmark 1.5 billion dollars to promote healthy marriages. With 7+ years of marriage under my belt, I'll be first to admit that healthy marriages take work, but I'm appalled that in such tight economic times this is considered a big priority by The Powers That Be.

"A growing body of statistical evidence suggests that children fare best, financially and emotionally, in married two-parent families," says the Times. And that's true. But what this country really needs is not more smarmy commercials promoting being a Dad, but a focus on creating the kinds of jobs that help families stay afloat financially and on improving education so that more Americans are capable of holding down those good jobs.

Most of the press coverage I've read focuses on how this plays to the president's base of conservative voters, and how this may be the first step towards federal regulation or legislation against gay marriage. I find myself wondering whether this is another way to get the much vaunted "faith based initiatives" back into play. After all, the Federal government really doesn't have much apparatus for family counseling or marriage training. A lot of churches do, though.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced this is another one of Karl Rove's political moves. It's not really about public policy or actually helping people. It's about having a proposal on the table that you can use to smear your political rivals as being "anti family" if they say anything to oppose it. And to top it off, this proposal appeals directly to the soccer Moms who are key swing votes.

I know this is the sort of thing to expect in an election year. I'm sure more is to follow. But boy, does it suck. This is the kind of blatant political posturing that made me think I'd sooner pick up doggie poo all day than run for political office.
I did want to run for office when I was younger. I thought I would be able to do something good for people. I'm glad I didn't. I don't think I would like being the kind of person who can successfully get elected in America these days.

Very interesting article in today's SFGate.com. In a nutshell, here's the issue:

Wal-Mart could save Bay Area grocery shoppers as a whole $382 million to $1.13 billion per year -- roughly 5 to 13 percent of their expected annual spending on groceries -- if the growth forecasts hold true, the report says.

On the flip side, the average Bay Area grocery-store employee can expect to lose $21,000 from his or her current annual wage-and-benefits package of $42,552 per year, the report warns.

From where I sit, this just seems like another example of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Granted, downward pressure on the wages in one segment of the employment market does not translate to downward pressure across the board, but it's indicative of a theme in corporate beliefs these days.

As I've said in these pages before, this ongoing downward pressure in wages and tendency towards outsourcing jobs is one that I consider hugely dangerous to America as a whole. We are sacrificing our future for short-term profits. Because when everyone is making less than $30K a year, who is going to buy all these goods and services?

It's also a good argument for taking your destiny into your own hands, via self-employment and/or starting your own business. If you can.

It's been a few years since my own business venture failed, and I still bear the scars. The biggest one being a loss of confidence that I really can do what I set out to do. That's been ameliorated somewhat over the last year or so by my discovery that I am pretty good at this retail stuff, but it's not entirely gone either. And my credit's still screwed.

I've always said that despite the scars, I'd want to do it again some day. And I still believe that. But I haven't given a lot of thought to how I'm going to make that happen. It's a little late for New Year's resolutions, but perhaps that should be mine for 2004 - to start thinking seriously about what I'm going to do about my career. With the economy and Bay Area job market so screwed, I've basically been in a reactive, not proactive mode. I don't know if the economy has changed all that much, but I'm getting tired of letting the current take me where it will. I need to start doing more of my own choosing, not what others choose for me.

Scott and I watched the entire Super Bowl halftime show this year. Not that we were particularly fond of any of the artists -- some of them I'd never heard of before -- but the rest of the party had migrated into other rooms and for whatever reason we stayed on the couch. So I saw Boobgate as it happened.

We weren't quite sure whether we'd even seen a naked breast, it was on screen so short an amount of time. It was not a topic of conversation when the rest of the party wandered back into the room. If someone had asked me about the show, I'd more likely have said how overall the show sucked, or something about Kid Rock's wearing the US flag as a poncho, than about Janet Jackson. So it really surprised me to see the avalanch of press the situation has gotten.

What really bugs me about the whole thing is, why aren't more people mad at Justin Timberlake? He was the instigator. He grabbed her boob and ripped off the clothing covering it. I'm not a lawyer but it seems possible to me that what he did approached the legal definition of sexual assault. So why are so many people mad at her?

I was listening to a local toalk radio show coming home from work last night and the guy on the air said that it's all because America is racist and that if Janety Jackson weren't black, things would have been different. I'm not sure I agree with that, mostly becasue I don't think of Janet Jackson as being black. She's so mainstream and so light-skinned that her color is not what immediately comes to mind for me. I think of Halle Berry in a similar light. They're entertainers first; their skin color is a very distant second.

At any rate, I don't think this is necessarily a racial issue. I'm not sure what the real reason is. It could be sexism, or the hypocritical morailty that so many Americans embrace, or just a slow news week.

Whatever the reason, it's a huge tempast made out of a very small teapot. Anyone who thinks that two flashing seconds of breast exposure on TV was indecent or immoral or would somehow harm their children is an idiot.

It's nice that this should happen 2 days before Valentine's Day: the first gay marriage license was issued in San Francisco today.

To be completely honest, this is an issue I have struggled with. As much as intellectually I have no problem with the equal protection clause of the Constitution meaning that gay couples should be able to marry just like straight couples, in my heart, I am uncomfortable with the concept.

At any rate, I've been giving this issue a lot of thought. As I said, the concept of real, legal gay marriage has pushed my comfort zone quite a bit. I can't even pin down exactly why I feel that way, except to say that it's not something I am used to. I know that must sound pretty lame, and maybe it is. And as someone who's generally on the liberal side of the political spectrum, it's not at all 'correct' (how I hate that word) to say that gay marriage makes you uncomfortable. I've wondered whether I might be hurting some of my friends' feelings by saying how I feel here in this blog. But I think honesty is the better policy. I hope that my struggle to come to terms with the issue will be met with respect. And if reading this does make one of my friends feel bad -- please, let me know so we can talk about it.

My parents sent something of a mixed message when it came to homosexuality. It wasn't a subject often discussed, but if it were to come up, they didn't have much positive to say about homosexuality. On the other hand, they've employed an openly gay man for the better part of 20 years. The fact that this entire time he and his partner have been living together has never seemed to bother them at all - they've always treated him with total respect, asked how his partner was doing, and so on. Like I said, that sends a pretty mixed message.

Things were different when I was growing up. Even living in New York City, with an active passion for the theater & arts, I don't think it really registered on me what "gay" meant until I was in junior high. I had a couple of more or less openly gay teachers in high school and of course, gay colleagues during my career in the theater, but back then (the mid-late 1980s) the issue of the day was AIDS. People were much more concerned about staying alive than about whether or not they could get married. But still, my world was a heterosexual one and marriage was something that a man and a woman did.

Ultimately, what finally pushed me over into the pro-gay marriage camp was a piece Andrew Sullivan wrote called "Here Comes the Groom - The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage". It's a well-written piece that essentially says this: Marriage is an institution created to help stabilize society, and that people who enter into it take on both benefits and obligations. We should be encouraging people to marry because ultimately it's good for society; certainly better than the potential quagmire that 'domestic partnerships' open up.

Sullivan is himself gay, so it's not surprising that he should favor gay marriage. Still, his argument is sound and it was enough to help me come to terms with the question. I may feel a little queasy about it, but the first legal gay marriage in America has been performed. It will be very interesting to see what happens next.

So Bush is going to push for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. In other words, he wants to use a document created to guarantee the rights of a free people to take away rights from one class of citizens.

You know, 50 years ago, most people would probably have voted to uphold Jim Crow discrimination laws. That didn't make it right. Neither is this.

Caught this today: Jews not welcome in Saudi Arabia. It's a new visa policy the Saudi government has instituted.

Not that I would ever want to go there, but really. It's just wrong that they are our ally, but they can do this and we don't say squat.

So the Senate passed an "Unborn Victims of Violence Act" today. This heinous piece of legislation defines an "unborn child" as any child in utero, which it says "means a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb." In other words, from the moment sperm meets egg.

This is some scary stuff for people who believe that a woman should have the right to control her own life and her own reproductive system. If it's a crime for a 3rd party to harm a fetus, it's a pretty small step to making it a crime for the mother herself to harm said fetus. And once that's the case, then is it that big a step to having the goverment control what a woman can and can't do, or eat, or drink? Whether she can get on an airplane, or even drive a car while pregnant?

Hell, let's just send all women who become pregnant off to special pregnancy camps, where they can stay for 40 weeks and incubate, only doing exactly what the government thinks is good for them during that time. Never mind the woman's rights. It's all about the fetus.

Think it could never happen in America?

Just wait. If Bush is re-elected, I'll lay good odds that Roe v Wade goes down during his 2nd term.

American troop deaths in Iraq this month now number more than 90, and there's still 11 days to go before the month ends. Yet in just 10 weeks, the US is supposed to hand over soverignity of Iraq over -- although to whom is far from clear.

This would all be funny if it weren't so terrible. It makes me feel like we're trapped, like a mouse caught on a glue trap, nothing to choose from except bad alternatives, and what's worse is that it all could have been prevented.

And now people like Paul Bremer, as well as most of the military in Iraq, seem to think that only more violence is going to break this bad cycle and fix things. Have they learned nothing from the history of the Middle East this past 100 years? Increasing the violence is only going to breed more violence.

This is the kind of crap that makes me feel bad to be an American.

Since Vietnam, presidents have been concerned (and rightfully so) that their military antics would lose support once the public started to see the bodies of US soldiers arriving home in flag-draped caskets.

The Bush administration installed a simple solution: It ended the public boradcast of those images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings.

Well, thanks Matt Drudge, and screw the Bushies. This is the price we're paying for the Bush/Cheney fixation on Iraq:

PS - the person who originally took those photos has lost her job.

Couldn't sleep, so I was browsing the news sites this morning. I came across this gem from Salt Lake City: No-Carb Eating Couple Booted From Buffet.

Roast beef was the issue. As Reuters put it, "when [customer] Amaama went up for his 12th slice, the manager asked Amaama to stop." Chaos ensued.

What rational person is going to think they're controlling their weight by eating that much food? 'Oh, but it's low carb!' you hear the cry. 'Cut out the carbs and you can eat anything you want and still lose weight!'.

I call bullshit.

If each slice of roast beef averaged a mere 2 ounces, that's just under a pound and a half of meat eaten. Let's look at the calories in that (you remember calories, right?). According to the handy guide at http://www.calorie-count.com/, 3 ounces of cooked beef, all fat removed, has 232 calories. So those 11 slices of roast beef contained approximately 1700 calories - more if my estimate of a 2-ounce slice is too small or if all the fat had not been trimmed off.

It passes my understanding how people can think this is a good way to lose weight. The FDA recommends consuming approximately 2000 calories a day, depending on a person's age and activity level. You can bet dollars to doughnuts (if you'll pardon the carb-laden expression) that this goober ate much more than just 11 slices of roast beef that day. Whether he was excercising regularly or had an active lifestyle wasn't mentioned in the article, so perhaps I'm doing the guy a disservice. Maybe he mountain bikes to work every day and rarely sits down on the job. But somehow, I suspect that's not the case.

You want to lose weight? It's simple but it's not easy. Burn more calories than you consume. How you do that is up to you. Excercise or don't, eat carbs or not - it doesn't matter, as long as your net calorie count is negative, you'll get lighter.

Maybe I should write my own diet manual. Call it "The Sanity Plan." I'd make millions, quit my job, and spend my days doing book tours and being pampered. With merchandising tie-ins (I see 'I want sanity' t-shirts, maybe kitchen products), perhaps a chain of Sanity fitness centers, I'd be set for life.

Unfortunately, most of America is not ready for sanity. And people (I do not exclude myself) are generally lazy. They really want the magic fix-it that's going to let them do as little as possible and still shed pounds. Sanity is too hard.

Ah well. Time to brew some coffee and get ready for work.

When key members of the House of Saud stir up anti-Semitic propaganda instead of taking a hard look at why they have a terror problem in their country, you know there's a problem.

To be specific: Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Saud have both blamed "Zionists" as being the ones pulling the strings behind recent terror attacks in their kingdom.

I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: with 'friends' of America like these, who needs enemies?

Thomas Friedman gets it right again:

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld � today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

I know that tough interrogations are vital in a war against a merciless enemy, but outright torture, or this sexual-humiliation-for-entertainment, is abhorrent. I also know the sort of abuse that went on in Abu Ghraib prison goes on in prisons all over the Arab world every day, as it did under Saddam � without the Arab League or Al Jazeera ever saying a word about it. I know they are shameful hypocrites, but I want my country to behave better � not only because it is America, but also because the war on terrorism is a war of ideas, and to have any chance of winning we must maintain the credibility of our ideas.

Indeed. But will Bush do it? Odds are, no.

I'm still more or less staying out of the Iraqi prison mess but caught this quote of Ann Coulter's today & thought it worth citing: "this is yet another lesson in why women shouldn't be in the military."

It boggles the mind how of all the lessons that could possibly be drawn from this catastrophic mess, that is the one less Coulter draws? Crazy, I tell you.

Some reports out there include reports of rapes on Iraqi prisoners. Ann will have to figure out how that too is the fault of women in the military.

Here's one dedicated to all the schmucks who drive behemoth SUVs:

http://www.daveheinzel.com/suv/parking1.php.

And the job fair was a total waste of time.

Apparently Nick Berg was a Jew. Just like Daniel Pearl. Although his religion seems to have been less of an issue to the people who chopped off his head than his being an American. Still, the subtext is there and concerns me.

Atrios has a good one over on his blog today.

I've frequently said there are three kinds of cities (or colleges or countries or sports teams or insert any similar entity here).

People who live in 1st class cities never feel the need to tell everyone how great their city is. It speaks for itself. Think New York, Paris.

People who live in 2nd class cities feel the need to proclaim their greatness, and to convince you that they really are 1st class cities.

People who live in 3rd class cities just accept their lot and get on with their lives.

Scott and I disagreed whether San Francisco is a first or second class city. I think it's borderline first class, he says definitely second class.

Speaking of first class cities, I'm going home to NYC next week. Unlike my Rome trip, 'net access should be easy there, so I expect no blog interruptions.

Daily Kos has a good one about the job situation and how it will impact the coming election. The bottom line? There are fewer jobs in the United States today than there were in March 2001.

Of course this is not good news to someone who has just quit her job, but I'll worry about that some other time. The really good news is, if the Kerry campaign handles this information correctly it could be a huge help in pushing BushCo out of the White House.

I just hope they don't screw it up. Watching Kerry in the run-up to the convention has not been inspiring.

As a Jew, I freely admit that some aspects of Christianity are alien to me. The recent public debate about whether or not pro-choice Catholics should be allowed to take Communion brings to light one of them.

Here's one example: Catholics who feel so at odds with their church's ideology - who don't they just go worship at some other church? What makes them stay committed to being a Catholic even if they vehemently disagree with what their church is doing? Is it an unwillingness to let go of their tribal identification? Fear of the unknown? Do they sincerely feel that Jesus won't love them if they go to the church across the street? Is it a love of the liturgy they grew up with? Or do they think that if they wait long enough, the church will change and become more in line with their own beliefs? It could be pure politics - nobody wants to be accused of flip-flopping on moral issues. Or something else entirely that I'm overlooking because I'm not Christian.

I've heard the phrase "cafeteria Catholics" and it's a term that could be applied to a lot of other religions, Jews included. I'm guilty of the practice myself. But I do think you have to draw the line somewhere. Not agreeing with every aspect of a religion is one thing. But if you disagree with enough key points, sooner or later I think you have to ask yourself what you're really doing there.

I'm also aware that the Catholic church is not monolithic on this subject. There are bishops who would excommunicate anyone who is pro-choice and there are those who would not. And perhaps that diversity of opinion is enough to give Catholics hope.

It would make for some big headlines if a few high-profile Catholics switched affiliation to other denominations. I doubt it would change what the Catholic church is doing though. If the morass that is the wholesale molestation of children by priests has not overly upset the Vatican, I doubt a few politicians changing affiliations would.

Side note - Andrew Sullivan has a good article on this issue. His focus is partially on Bob Novak and some snarkiness about an Opus Dei priest, but it's worth a read.

Seen in the New York Times today: A Sports Turnaround: the Team Doctors Now Pay the Team.

Apparently there's a new trend in player health care: "In an upside-down scenario spawned by an increasingly competitive health-care market, hospitals and medical practices � eager for any promotional advantage � have begun bidding to pay pro teams as much as $1.5 million annually for the right to treat their high-salaried players."

It's a lengthy article that tries to cover the practice from both sides. On the surface, the teams are probably correct when they say that their players' quality of care is not affected. That's not the real issue, though.

The article claims, and again I'm sure they're right, medical institutions gain paying customers and prestige by being known as 'The official medical group of [insert favorite NFL/NBA/MLB team here]'. "Sports industry experts say that teams for years have had official soft drinks, official beers and official pickup trucks, so why not official health-care providers?" says the article.

I think it demeans the practice of medicine to equate a doctor with a hot dog. But even more than whether or not it's dignified, I find the concept disturbing on an ethical level. We're talking about people in pain, potentially with career threatening injuries. Sponsorship deals should not be a part of the treatment equation.

Years ago, when I was still active in the theater, I had an accident and broke one of my toes. It was three weeks before opening night for a show I was in, and I needed to get my foot fixed, fast and right. I ended up seeing a doctor who, my mother informed me, treated not only members of the New York Mets but also the New York City Ballet. I was impressed, and rightfully so. When I told the doctor that I needed to dance onstage in three weeks, she knew how to help me; in fact, right before opening night I took my dance shoes to her office and she rewrapped my bandaged foot so it would fit inside the shoe.

What impressed me, though, was that those star athletes and dancers had chosen to go to this podiatrist. I would have felt differently if I'd known that the doctor had paid a big fee to the Mets and that the players were contractually obligated to go there. I suppose I can't blame people for thinking that "the players go there, so it must be good". After all, I did too. But that was then.

And to end the day, a bit of bad news.

'Babylon 5' actor Richard Biggs dies.

It's sad when talent passes too soon.

I didn't see a single cicada while in NY/CT this past several days, but this is funny as heck anyway (thanks for the link, Craig!). Here's a sample:

Do Cicadas make that loud buzzing sound to attract a mate? No, that is a common myth. Our research indicates that sound is actually a battle cry that roughly translates as Kill the Humans. When you hear that sound, take cover! It means the killing spree is about to begin.

Courtesy of Cicadaville. Now go read the rest and enjoy.

As Yogi Berra might say, "It's deja vu all over again." Remember the spate of articles published in the mid-late 1990s about people who used the then-new medium called the Internet? What did many of them focus on? Obsessive Internet use. So today, The New York Times writes about blogs. And what do they focus on? Obsessive bloggers.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession.

Can't the mainstream media come up with something else to write about? There are probably a couple of million blogs out here in the blogosphere. There's got to be something more newsworthy in all that wealth of punditry, rants, raves, personal details, pet and child photos, and general snarkiness. There's got to be at least a few good stories in there somewhere.

The cynic in me suggests that if mainstream media were to take a more realistic look at blogs and blogging, they would have to ask themelves some hard questions about whether they don't have some things to learn about reporting from the blogosphere. (Jeff Jarvis has touched on this subject over at Buzz Machine). So instead, they look at the freakshow aspects.

I certainly don't consider myself to be obsessed with my blog. There are days I post multiple times, there are days I don't post at all. If I don't post for a couple of days, I do start feeling like I ought to get something up here, but it's hardly a compulsion. And I suspect many - dare I say most? - casual bloggers feel the same way.

But of course, that's not newsworthy.

An art gallery owner is assaulted because someone decided they didn't like some of the art in her gallery - specifically, a painting showing US soldiers torturing naked men. The gallery is now closed.

What's surprising is this happened in San Francisco, not a city know for its quanitity of right wing activists.

Taking a break from politics, here's a neat news item: Prayer does not help you get pregnant after all.

It was a miracle that created headlines around the world. Doctors at one of the world's top medical schools claimed to have scientifically proved the power of prayer.

Many Americans took the Columbia University research - announced in October 2001 after the terror attacks on New York and Washington - as a sign from God. It seemed to prove that praying helped infertile women to conceive.

But The Observer can reveal a story of fraud and cover-up behind the research. One of the study's authors is a conman obsessed with the paranormal who has admitted to a multi-million-dollar scam.

Now, I am not even remotely a scientist, but there does seem to be something slightly hinky with the numbers in the study. If you look at Table II, the NIP group (not prayed for), had 28 preembryos implanted, of which 21 resulted in successful pregnancies. This is a success rate of 75%. The IP group (prayed for) had 62 preembryos implanted, of which 44 resulted in successful pregnancies. This is a success rate of 70% - a figure lower than the not prayed for group. So how did the authors come up with the original claim of a 100% improvement in implantation success? Or am I just a moron that can't read the numbers correctly?

The Journal of Reproductive Medicine is apparently a reputable organization. Why they decided to publish this in the first place is a mystery to me. My guess is they didn't know how to vet pseudo-science like the power of prayer and didn't want to seem politically incorrect by outright refusing to print the study. Less likely - perhaps some misguided believers on the staff were so thrilled to see a study 'proving' their beliefs that the standard review procedure was skipped.

Either way, it's another example of the pervasive influence of religion in America today and why it's a problem.

The trailer for Fahrenheit 9/11 is out.

I am not a complete admirer of Michael Moore. In fact, I couldn't get through "Stupid White Men", it annoyed me too much. I prefer Bill Maher or Al Franken; they make anger funnier. But I'll go see this one when it comes out.

A whiff of anti-Semitism seems to be in the wind these days. Kevin Drumm has more on the smearing of George Soros.

On a more positive note, I decided to answer the haters another way. I went and stood with SF Voices For Israel and waved a big Israeli flag at demonstrators for several hours yesterday. I'm sunburned but it was worth it. It feels like too many people these days know what they're against, but not too many people know what they're for. It felt good to go stand for something - in this case, Israel.

Most unexpected note from the rally: At one point a contingent of Soviet Jewish �migr�s started singing the Russian national anthem (which I only recognized because it was sung in The Hunt For Red October). I have no idea why they were singing it and it didn't seem to quite fit into the proceedings, but it was touching in its own way.

Most personally uncomfortable note: About 20 or so Freeper types showed up with American flags, Bush bumper stickers and "Vote Arnold" t-shirts, and mostly anti-communist signs. I felt a little weird standing next to them, knowing that on just about every other issue we completely disagree.

Party platforms are supposed to spell out the guidelines within which members of the party operate on a policy basis. That's nowhere near the same thing as actually getting laws on the books, of course, but it's a clear indicator of which way a party wants to go. So when I read the new party platform the Texas Republican Party has adopted, I was more than a little concerned.

Here's three of the scariest items:

A plank in a section titled "Promoting Individual Freedom and Personal Safety" proclaims the United States a "Christian nation."

"We therefore oppose any governmental action to restrict, prohibit or remove public display of the Decalogue or other religious symbols."

[The platform] refers to "the myth of the separation of church and state."

Considering that the Republican party currently controls the Texas legislature and the governor's mansion, one wonders exactly how far they will push the envelope trying to put these party planks into the law books.

Not too long ago, it was not uncommon to see signs that said "Whites Only" in the South. You'd think that after all this time they would know better than to hang a sign on the state of Texas that says 'Jews Not Welcome'. Apparently not.

Tip of the hat to Atrios for the link. Kevin Drumm also has a longer assessment of the platform.

At the risk of overload on the torture issue, one more post on it.

Tonight I read Digby's take on it and was struck by how well he gets to the heart of the matter. There's been a lot of anger, outrage, and disgust (and deservedly so) about this issue. Digby has transcended these responses and his eloquence is moving.

Do read what he has to say.

The best quote from the Ronald Reagan funeral - perhaps from the entire week - belonged to Ron Reagan Jr today:

Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.

Thanks Kevin Drum and the Washington Post for the pointers to a transcript.

SF Gate columnist Carol Lloyd does an interesting article on Burning Man from a city planning perspective.

One factoid that stuck out:

the nonprofit organization that sponsors the event has 20 full-time employees, a Department of Public Works, a DMV (Department of Mutant Vehicles), a tech department, a media department, an infirmary and an airport.

No wonder tickets have gotten so expensive.

Here's an idea worth considering: Replace the Pledge of Allegance with the Preamble of the Consitution.

The Preamble, which I like many others of my generation memorized thanks to Schoolhouse Rock, is not written as a stand-alone piece of langauge and doesn't have the same patriotic 'punch' that the Pleage does. But looking at it as an alternative to the debate over "under God" is a very good idea and I hope it changes the argument some.

Crossposted from the All Spin Zone:

ASZ's "DOUBLE BURN" Campaign

What if "word of mouth" and repeat viewings of Fahrenheit 9/11 literally blew the doors off over July 4 weekend? Right at this moment, it's hard to say if distribution will expand this week, but given all the sellouts, it wouldn't be a surprise to see the movie hit a lot more screens.

Now, we realize that Spiderman 2 is coming out this weekend, and realistically, there is simply no way that F9/11 beats out S2 at the box office. We may be liberal pollyannas, but we're not dopes.

But what if F9/11 came in a barnburning second, and made the $22 million box office from this past weekend look like chump change?

ASZ is proud to announce the DOUBLE BURN campaign. All you have to do to participate is see Fahrenheit 9/11 this coming Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday (July 2, 3, 4 or 5).

I like it.

Well, it's easy to see what the military has decided to use as its next "honest it's really not torture" persuader of unwilling detainees.

Taser Wins $1.8 Million Stun Gun Contract

The company did not disclose Wednesday which branch of the military would be using the approximately 1,000 stun guns and accessories in the new order, said Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle.

We can guess though.

More fun stuff going into the long weekend:

ROCK PAPER SADDAM

If you're on really slow dial-up you might prefer this link though.

Thanks to Sid's Fishbowl for the link!

Per the AP via Yahoo News:

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's new government is considering offering amnesty to Iraqi insurgents who fought the U.S.-led occupation, perhaps even pardoning those who killed Americans.

A spokesman for Allawi said fighting with U.S. troops was "justified" as resistance to occupation.

"If he (a guerrilla) was in opposition against the Americans, that will be justified because it was an occupation force," spokesman Georges Sada said. "We will give them freedom."

No blogging for me unless something really bad happens. In the meantime, here's some thoughts for the day:

The Declaration of Independence

The United States Constitution

And in honor of the 800+ members of the US armed forces killed in Iraq. May they rest in peace, and may those still in Iraq come home soon, safely.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I said I wasn't going to post unless something bad happened but insead I wanted to note something good happening: the laying of the cornerstone of the new Freedom Tower.

I hate the name but I'm really glad that rebuilding on the Ground Zero site has begun. It's a good way to show terrorists that in the long term they didn't win.

Yahoo News is reporting that the Archdiocese of Portland has filed for bankruptcy under the weight of payouts due to accusations of sexual abuse by priests. It's the first US archdiocese to do so.

I wonder how they will structure the refinancing? The Boston archdiocese avoided bankruptcy by selling off a bunch of church-owned property, and I assume that Portland has similar assets, albeit probably not as many. At last resort the Vatican can bail them out if the local banks can't or won't.

Digby has a nice long post today about what happens when innocent people, like the guy whose crossword puzzle scribblings got him onto the Homeland Security watch list, get swept into the DHS's web.

His conclusion?

The stories begin to accumulate, each one a random intrusion by dumb, underqualified government authorities who seem to have watched too much television and have very little common sense.

Dumb? Not quite. What I think we're seeing is a bunch of people who do not know how to handle the situation they have been thrust into. This is not to say they're stupid. They're scared, and scared people rarely make smart choices. Just look at today's latest security alert:

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Thursday warned Americans that al Qaeda may try to carry out "a large-scale attack" to disrupt upcoming elections, but offered no details and had no plans to raise the terror threat level.

Bottom line, this is about fear - or terror, if you will - and how humans respond to it. You'd think that by now we'd have learned that the predictable response is usually the wrong one, and that we need some new solutions.

How are people supposed to react when they hear ongoing unspecified warnings of terrorist threats? Absent any concrete information, those of a more fearful cast of mind are going to see a potential threat at every hand. A doodle on the edge of a crossword puzzle can be seen as a threat of lethal action. (There's a Greek tragedy in there somewhere but I'm not smart enough to write it.)

Those of a more conspiracy theorist cast of mind will say that the government's true intent is to keep American citizens cowed and fearful while they move forward to bring about their own nefarious goals. I believe that about as much as I believe the wingnuts who insist that anyone who seriously opposes the Clintons ends up dead - which is to say, not at all.

I have previously commented on the similarities of our current invasion of Iraq with Vietnam. But it also occurs to me that parallels to the "Red Scares" of the 20s and 50s are also apt for the times we live in today. Apparently we have to re-learn the lessons of history all over again.

Two op-eds this weekend decry the decline of reading in America today: Harold Bloom and Andrew Solomon. Kevin Drum takes Bloom to task for writing off the Internet completely. Solomon, to his credit, concedes that the Internet can have some good writing, but also assigns it to the same category as TV watching - non-interactive, alienating.

I actually agree with Bloom and Solomon that Americans should read more. What I take issue with is the sweeping generalization that the Internet is part of the problem. For example, this Solomon quote:

The Nazis were right in believing that one of the most powerful weapons in a war of ideas is books. And for better or worse, the United States is now in such a war. Without books, we cannot succeed in our current struggle against absolutism and terrorism. The retreat from civic to virtual life is a retreat from engaged democracy, from the principles that we say we want to share with the rest of the world. You are what you read. If you read nothing, then your mind withers, and your ideals lose their vitality and sway.

If Solomon thinks that the 'virtual life' is not capable of producing an engaged democracy, then he has not only never checked out any blogs but also slept through the entire Democratic primary season. Interaction and communication are the lifeblood of the Internet. It's worth noting that long before the Web came along, most of the major functions of the Internet were interactive - email, mailing lists, and Usenet - not to mention IRC, MUDs and MOOs as well.

Of course, by posting this here instead of writing a letter to the editor, I'm well aware that I'm preaching to the choir.

Totally gratuitous side note: Andrew Solomon attended the same high school as I did, although he was a few years ahead of me. The Horace Mann School gave us a heck of an education. I grew to love Shakespeare by having to read several of the plays aloud in various English classes. The first time we did it, in 8th grade, I thought it was a little weird. But by 10th grade it was one of my favorite things to do in class.

So Linda Ronstadt got in trouble with the casino who hired her for dedicating a song to Michael Moore. I think that's pretty lame, frankly. I also think it's lame that nothing was done about the audience members who reportedly

tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air.

Michael Moore has weighed in on the issue here - offering a personal appearance and a free screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 as a way for the Aladdin casino to make it up to the American public. Think what you want of Moore, but he is an excellent publicist.

I'm kind of annoyed by the whole thing and decided to make a gesture. I went over to iTunes and bought a copy of the song 'Desperado' that was at the core of the whole mess. I know it's a somewhat meaningless gesture, but it was fun picking which version of the song to buy - there's at least a dozen of them aside from the Eagles' original version and Ronstadt's cover of it.

You can't (yet) outsource the person who actually hands the order to the customer, but you can outsource at least some fast-food jobs. The latest application of technology:

Pull off U.S. Interstate Highway 55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant - or even in Missouri.

The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines.

At least the call center is is Colorado, not Hyderabad.

Tip of the hat to The Left Coaster for the link.

Orcinus has a lengthy comparison of attitudes today towards Arabs with attitudes towards Japanese in the 1940s - worth a look. If you replace the word "Arab" with the word "Jap" in the materials he presents, it's hard to tell what was written when.

Bottom line?

The reality, just as it was in 1942, is that focusing on a single race as "the enemy" is not only wrong-headed and grotesquely unjust, it's amazingly ineffective. The United States wasted a large portion of its wartime food production by incarcerating Japanese farmers, devoted millions of taxpayer dollars to rounding them up and incarcerating them, and eventually paid billions more in reparations for having done so.

More to the point, the reality is this: It's extremely, extremely unlikely that you will witness real terrorists in action, whether merely "warming up" or actually carrying out a plot. Suspecting someone merely because they are a different color or are acting in a way you think is unusual is almost certainly a leap of logic based in prejudice and false stereotypes.

Good op-ed from Richard Clarke about the 9/11 commission report (yes I know I said I wasn't going to talk about it) and how to make its recommendations even better. Key points below:

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.

The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don't suffer the "failures of imagination" that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.

I saw the report in a bookstore on Friday night but I can't bring myself to buy it. It's like books about the Holocaust - too painful for me to want to read them.

Seems like good news to me at least:

Israel's Defense Ministry has mapped out a new route for the separation barrier in the West Bank that heeds a Supreme Court order to reduce hardships for Palestinians and runs closer to the Israel's 1967 border

As with all things in Israel, the Devil is in the details. But at least it's a step in the right direction.

Let's say you built a building, got it inspected and a certificate of occupancy issued, and then the roof caved in. You sue your builder. Then the twist - the local government files an amicus brief on behalf of the builder. Their claim? The building was issued a certificate of occupancy, so suing the builder undermines the credibility of the government.

It would be funny except that the feds are doing the same thing right now with the FDA. And in at least one case they've won. By way of the NY Times:

The Bush administration has been going to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they have been injured by prescription drugs and medical devices.

The administration contends that consumers cannot recover damages for such injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In court papers, the Justice Department acknowledges that this position reflects a "change in governmental policy," and it has persuaded some judges to accept its arguments, most recently scoring a victory in the federal appeals court in Philadelphia.

Allowing consumers to sue manufacturers would "undermine public health" and interfere with federal regulation of drugs and devices, by encouraging "lay judges and juries to second-guess" experts at the F.D.A.

As if no product has ever been FDA approved and then later been found to have serious problems and been pulled off the market (the FDA's own website even has a page about this issue). But even more than that, it's the idea that the government is right and people are wrong that bugs me.

Trent Lott calling John Kerry �a French-speaking socialist from Boston, Massachusetts" would be funny except that unfortunately, in some parts of America, implying someone does something different like *gasp* speaking a language other than English (let alone the language of those cheese-eating surrender monkeys) is not a positive.

What Trent Lott told a crowd of people at one fair in Nebraska is ultimately immaterial to the overall election. It's just another stroke on the canvas of Us versus Them that's being painted in America these days. But it's also about the isolation of America from the greater world.

It's a human trait to fear that which is different. And if you only speak English, everyone you know only speaks English, and you like it that way, then hearing that a political candidate is not like you creates a sense of difference. And that sense of difference, that subtle feeling that the candidate is not a part of your world, makes a difference when you're in the voting booth on election day.

I know of a guy who was contacted by some business types about starting a new venture. They were based in England and he lived in Middle America. He decided to commit to the project and jumped through all kinds of paperwork hoops, getting his visa in place so he could move to Scotland to start a new business. When he got there, there were some issues with the investors and it was a hectic few weeks straightening out some of the wrinkles with his colleagues (not surprising when you're trying to start a new company at a distance). Once he'd gotten everything set how he wanted it, he cancelled the sale of his house and came right back to America.

I was amazed. I couldn't believe after all the work he'd put in getting the right to work legally abroad, that after a couple of weeks he would turn around and run for home, but he did. And he's happy about it. To be honest, I think he's a bit of an idiot for running home so fast. But as I think about it more, living in such a large and homogenous society does that to you. It's hard to handle differences when so much of America is the same. And some politicians have made a lot of political hay on this fact.

I don't know what if anything can be done about this state of things. The only way to become comfortable with difference is to experience it on a regular basis. When you live in a city like New York or San Francisco, that's pretty easy to do. It�s not so easy living in Nebraska.

Three months to election day. And a fresh round of terror warnings. What concerns me is not so much the warning but

1) The sense that there have been too many vague terror alerts without anything happening - and by that I mean the arrest and successful prosecution of some actual terrorists here in the US.

2) A sense that there is so much skepticism of anything that comes out of this administration's mouth that warnings are not going to get taken seriously, even if the threat is real.

Now I'm still willing to believe that our law enforcement agencies are sincerely trying to find and stop terrorists. But it would help me and I think a lot of other citizens be less cynical about the whole thing if we saw or heard more than just vague threat announcements ever so often. I'm not an expert on how terrorists get busted, but it seems to me that if our law enforcement services know enough about domestic plots to be able to provide warnings about specific times and places, they should know enough about who is doing the planning to make some arrests and make some cases in court (hint - Jose Padilla doesn't count). It also doesn't help credibility when the government can't even produce an accurate report on how many terror attacks have occurred recently.

At least on the left side of the fence I don't have a lot of company in my willingness to give the benefit of the doubt. It's not just the flame-throwers like Pandagon who think the government is either deliberately politicizing, flat-out lying and/or too incompetent to do a good job of protecting the country from real threats. Even more moderate lefties like Orcinus are highly skeptical of what's going on.

Sent to me by my sister. I have no idea who wrote it originally.

A Guide to U.S. Newspapers

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like the smog statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn't have to leave L.A. to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country, and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority, feminist atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are democrats.

10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

My addendum:

11. New York Newsday is read by the people who used to read the New York Daily News but have moved to Long Island. They still don't care who runs the country as long as they get a seat on the train, but now their commute is twice as long.

There is so much bad news coming out of Iraq these days, so much confusion and chaos, and no idea how anything good is going to be able to come out of that mess, that I just shut down and stop processing information. I don't want to deal with it.

I suspect I'm not the only person who feels that way, and that might be part of why Iraq coverage is not in the press as much anymore. Also, of course, the so-called handover of power now means that news stations can, if they choose, slot Iraq back into their Middle East coverage, not treat it as US news (despite the fact that American troops are still dying and being wounded there daily).

All this is a very long preface to yet another reason why I LOVE Fafblog. The guy is a freaking genius. He somehow manages to report on a lot of news and still make me smile.

"You gotta use discipline on a young country," says Giblets. "Otherwise it won't grow up with the right values. Spare the gonad electrocution, spoil the child." "But won't torture corrupt the government an make the people angrier and more hostile?" says me. "An won't they hate us more for letting the new government torture them?" "Oh-hoho," says the Medium Lobster. "You poor, ignorant little Fafnir. You must understand: Iraq is going through a transitional period right now. It would be wrong for us to shock them with the presence of strange, new, unfamiliar cultural elements, such as 'not-torture' and 'not-oppression.' The key phrase here, Fafnir, is 'transition'."

Meanwhile Iraq's new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has banned the TV network Al Jazeera for the next 30 days after accusin it of "inciting hatred" an actin "against the interests of security, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people."

"But how is this different from politically-motivated censorship?" says me.
"Well you can't have a democracy without some politically-motivated censorship," says Giblets.

Go read the rest. Then bookmark Fafblog if you haven't already. And then bow! yes, bow before Giblets, bow before Giblets NOOOOOOOOW!

I've often thought over the past few years that my grandparents, who weathered the Great Depression, would have a lot of insight to offer on today's economy. Kevin Drum makes a similar point on his site today:

Almost everyone who's not already well off these days knows someone who's been ruined by a personal catastrophe, and this personal knowledge rubs off. You're worried that you could get laid off at any time � and not be able to find a job for months or years. You're worried that a sudden healthcare crisis could devastate you. You're worried that your pension fund or your 401(k) might not be there when you retire because you made bad investment choices.

FDR dedicated the New Deal to "freedom from fear." He believed that government's role was not to provide handouts to the poor, but to provide a certain minimum level of security against the everyday catastrophes that ruin people's lives.

It is this minimum level of economic security that George Bush and modern movement conservatives want to abolish. In fact, it's the point of Bush's "ownership society": if everyone owns their own Social Security account, owns their own healthcare account, and owns their own college accounts, then the government no longer provides security against disaster. If you make a mistake, or if the market makes a mistake, you're screwed.

This is likely to be the eventual downfall of modern conservatism. Human beings have a deep desire for a certain minimum level of stability and security in their lives, and eventually they'll rebel against a party that refuses to acknowledge this. Life today is so much better than it was in the 30s that people have forgotten the basic New Deal ethos that made it that way. But if conservatives have their way, it won't be much longer before they start remembering.

That said, I am not sure what the government's actual role in this process should be. My initial feeling is that attention should be paid to restructuring the tax code in order to encourage 'good' corporate behavior. Instead of the government spending billions of dollars on health insurance, why not alter the tax code so companies have a big financial incentive to give all their employees good health insurance? Self-interest and greed are powerful motivators. If you make it worth a company's while to make life better for their employees, they'll do it gladly.

If this tactic worked (and whether it could I have no idea, I'm not an economist), it would have the added benefit of totally spiking the "democrats hate business" card.

On a more personal note, certainly this household has had a large share of income instability over the past few years. It's left both financial and emotional scars on us, and an intimate knowledge of how easy it is to fall out of the 'middle class'. You need to work hard to not become a victim of your unhappiness. Finding a good job may seem impossible but you still have to believe you can find meaningful work. You may feel resentful or envious of friends who are doing better than you, but you can't let that poison your friendships, or you'll have few friends left at a time when a broad base of emotional support is more important than ever.

And taking that perspective out to the realm of the political, you can't fall victim to class warfare rhetoric. Blaming X, Y or Z for your problems might feel good for a little while but it won't solve the problems. And more than anything, that's what we need to do.

That said, I agree with Drum that today's so-called conservatives are not solving the problems we're facing. We need to give something else a try.

Sad news this morning.

We all should be so lucky to have had a life and a death like Julia Child's. Dying peacefully in your sleep at age 91 is a pretty good way to go.

Julia Child's passing is a great loss. Her honesty and humor were refreshing, and her passion for good food, good wine, and having fun in the kitchen were obvious.

I saw a couple of the FoodTV programs featuring her last year. One that stuck in my mind was a visit by Emeril to her home, where they cooked together. She totally schooled Emeril on how to cook a chicken. It was a hoot. There was another epiode where Wolfgang Puck came over bearing champagne and made her veal, asparagus, and dessert.

Red wine with your steak, anyone?

Maybe moving back to NYC isn't such a bad idea after all .... SF beats NY on the "most overpriced places to live" list. At least we don't live in the most overpriced city - Seattle!

Yet another report on Abu Ghraib is out but this one at least starts to point the finger in the right direction.

What began several months ago with the emergence of shocking photographs showing a handful of U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq has led this week to a broad indictment of U.S. military leadership and acknowledgement in two official reports that mistreatment of prisoners was more widespread than previously disclosed.

The reports have served to undercut earlier portrayals of the abuse as largely the result of criminal misconduct by a small group of individuals. As recently as last month, an assessment by the Army's inspector general concluded the incidents could not be ascribed to systemic problems, describing them as "aberrations."

But the findings yesterday of another Army investigation offered a more critical appraisal of what led to the mistreatment at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. It implicated 27 military intelligence soldiers in abuse, providing some support for assertions by some of the seven military guards previously charged that they were not acting alone. Counting other intelligence, medical and civilian contract personnel cited for failing to report the abuse, and three more military police officers alleged to have engaged in abuse, the report appeared to raise to nearly 50 the number of people who may face charges or disciplinary action for misconduct at Abu Ghraib.

The people at the top of the foodchain, of course, are probably never going to have to pay for what happened. We'll be lucky if anyone over the rank of Colonel feels the heat.

2 Russian airplanes go boom and it's barely a blip in the US press. Why? Because it's internal terrorism.

A top Russian official acknowledged Thursday what many citizens already suspected -- that terrorism was the most likely cause of two jetliners crashing minutes apart, a feeling reflected in a newspaper headline warning that "Russia now has a Sept. 11."

A day later, a Web site known for militant Muslim comment published a claim of responsibility for Wednesday's twin plane crashes, connecting the action to Russia's fight against separatists in Chechnya.

OTOH, I suppose the lack of press is good in that at least it won't inflame the paranoid among us even more.

A quadruple bypass is not a walk in the park. I'm sending President Clinton & his nearest & dearest some good energy today.

Update - I'm also sending a get-well card - like anyone who's been sick, I'm sure he'll appreciate the support. If you're of like mind here's a mailing address:

The William J. Clinton Foundation
55 West 125th St.
New York, NY 10027

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

Juan Cole has a lengthy article about how al-Qaeda sees the world, and what it really wants. Whether he's right, I don't know, but it's an interesting assessment of the situation.

Amazing what you'll find when you're a police officer exploring the catacombs below Paris:

a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

Sad news for fans of musical theater - Fred Ebb has died.

I was part of the technical team for a production of Cabaret in college. I have a love-hate relationship with the show - on the one hand, it's great theater, but on the other hand, given the timeframe it's set in and the unhappy ending, it's not exactly uplifting material to work on. But then you have a gem like this:

[HERR SCHULTZ]

How the world can change
It can change like that -
Due to one little word:
"Married".

See a palace rise
From a two room flat
Due to one little word:
"Married".

And the old despair
That was often there
Suddenly ceases to be
For you wake one day,
Look around and say:
Somebody wonderful married me.

[FRAULEIN SCHNEIDER (spoken)]
You don't think it would be better simply to go
on as before?

[SCHULTZ]
No.

Rest in peace, Fred. Thanks for the memories.

Amidst the despair, and there is a lot of it, a small ray of hope. Go read Bob Harris' excellent column.

I haven't been in large office buildings much the past few years, but having started classes at UC Berkeley's extension campus in downtown SF I am now going to one several times a week. And the security is ridiculous.

Call it a sign of the post 9-11 times, I suppose. Every person who enters the building is supoposed to sign in and show photo ID. Fine, but you're talking about a building where both Berkeley and SFSU hold classes. At peak times you'll have several dozen students lined up at the desk trying to get in before class starts, and two harassed, overworked guards trying to check everyone in. Someone 'unauthorized' can get in with no problem by scrawling something illegible on the paper and waving their wallet in the general direction of the guards. There's no metal detectors or bag checks, so it's not in any way a deterrant. It's more of an annoyance to the students who are standing there checking their watches and wondering if they'll get to class on time.

Seems to me this is just another example of a vast trend in America -- doing something to look good although no actual result is being produced. The building management's insurance company likely insisted on it, and if they didn't, then some of the major tenants' insurance companies probably did. After all, if a terrorist decided to bomb a classroom of people studying accounting and there was no building security someone might get sued. So now there's a desk and some people and a nice set of policies to point to in case of an emergency. Not that a spiky haired kid and an overweight older woman behind a desk could really do anything about anything except possibly call 911.

Now maybe there's hidden cameras with facial ID working to provide some accurate security, in which case I take it all back, but even in the unlikely possibility that there is, why go through the farce at the desk at all?

What's even more annoying is I have to go through this three or 4 times a week for the next couple of months.

Billmon's op-ed on blogging in the LA Times has a lot of people navel gazing today. Given that I've been struggling with the question of my own relevance it seems timely.

Billmon takes issue with the fact that some of the top leftleaning bloggers (Kos and Atrios most notably) have achieved enough success to be self-sustaining financially and have arguably started to be taken seriously by the more mainstream press, as well as the political establishment.

In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers -- those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy -- is gaining larger audiences and greater influence.

The fact that the New York Times would do a major Sunday story about left-leaning bloggers is a good sign - the mainstream media is starting to admit bloggers are something more than a bizarre new Internet fad. And I think that this is more a positive than a negative. I've always been more interested in results than in precess. Even if this blog is insignificant, people who more or less share my point of view are getting listened to, and that's a good thing.

There are some bloggers who, I think, have let success go to their heads, but the number is small (the annoyingly smug Matt Yglesias being the most notable one). But overall, the successfull bloggers that I most liked do not seem to have been affected by success. Billmon is going through some sort of crisis of the soul, I suspect. What it is I don't know and I am not going to speculate. I hope he's OK, because his blog was consistently excellent and I'm sad he has decided to shutter the Whiskey Bar.

I'll just add that the day Kevin Drum linked to a post here and I got 650 views in 18 hours was the day I realized exactly how big blogs really had gotten.

At any rate, blogging ablout blogging is somewhat of an exercise in navel gazing, something I've been doing too much of, so I won't belabor the point.

Final side note - As it happens I have a Six Degrees connection in all of this - my husband was a co-worker of Kos' before Kos went full-time with the blog. That does color my attitude a little.

I'm a city dweller - have been so my whole life. So the new study that says living in a city is better for your overall health is a welcome bit of news:

Living in the suburbs may have once been part of the American dream but it can lead to nightmares such as high blood pressure, arthritis and headaches, researchers reported on Monday.

An adult living somewhere like Atlanta, with its spread-out suburbs and car-heavy culture, will have a health profile that looks like that of someone who lives in Seattle -- but who is four years older, the study found.

And also

There was no link between suburban sprawl and mental health. The RAND team found no differences in the rates of depression, anxiety and psychological well-being between people living in downtown areas and those in suburbs.

Even living in San Francisco, which is less dense that New York, I've noticed that I walk less here. It's easy to see how that effect would be magnified once you leave town altogether.

This is weird:

The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned after one year with the Department of Homeland Security, confiding to industry colleagues his frustration over what he considers a lack of attention paid to computer security issues within the agency.

Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec, informed the White House about his plans to quit as director of the National Cyber Security Division and made his resignation effective at the end of Thursday, effectively giving a single's day notice of his intentions to leave.

I'm sure there's a story there we're not hearing, but no clue what it is.

It's hardly a new or unique insight, but it's all too obvious that we should never have left Saddam in charge of Iraq after Gulf War I. George Bush senior has been quoted as saying that at the time, the Arab members of the coalition forces objected to Saddam's removal from power so he was left in place. I wonder sometimes, how much would have been different if was had told those allies, "No, he's going down".

The road ahead is grim, and the growing rumblings in the blogosphere and the press about the possible need to re-institute the draft are worrisome. I try not to make too much of the rumblings, but then I picture my 21 year old cousin with a draft card of his hand and it's not so simple.

It's been 30 years since the draft was last a reality. A lot has changed since then. One thing that hasn't changed is that no matter how they try to write the rules, the richer, more well-connected, and smarter kids will find ways around any draft.

I am not, by the way, convinced that a Kerry victory means we will not have a draft instituted. It is not clear whether even with the best intentions we will be able to draw down significant troops out of Iraq in the near future. No matter who wins in November, it's possible we will have to change how we build our military. But I am sure that a Kerry administration would not be so reckless with the lives of our soldiers as this administration has been.

If you're a flu shot recipient (I am not) this is a little alarming:

British authorities suspended the license of Chiron Corp. for three months because of problems at its vaccine manufacturing plant in Liverpool, England, which primarily supplies the American market. The action means the company can't supply any flu vaccine during that time, and Chiron said it would provide no U.S. vaccine this year.

(snip)

Chiron had planned to ship 46 million to 48 million doses, but that already had been delayed by a contamination problem discovered in August in the English factory where the vaccine is made. At the time, the company said only 4 million doses were tainted but that the entire supply would be held up and re-tested.

About 1 million doses already had arrived in the United States, but now even that won't be made available because of the British safety concerns.

Chiron's stock, of course, is taking a sharp nosedive today.

And I can't resist the political cheap shot:

Less than two weeks ago, top U.S. health officials assured the public that close FDA monitoring of the rest of Chiron's supply suggested it was fine and that there would be plenty of supplies.

Guess that Reality Distortion Field emanating from the White House has reached the FDA too.

I had the great pleasure of seeing Christopher Reeve on Broadway in 1986 at Circle in the Square, in a production of Beaumarchais' "The Marriage of Figaro" -- the play which Mozart used as the basis for his opera of the same name. Reeve played the Count and did it admirably. He was a much better actor than the "Superman" movie and its sequels ever let him show.

A few years later, I briefly worked at the Williamstown Summer Theater Festival while Reeve was rehearsing a production of "Undiscovered Country". I never crossed paths with him, to my great disappointment, but word of mouth was that he was a cool guy.

It's sad that a man who took a shattering personal tragedy and turned it into something positive did not live to see significant progress made towards a cure for spinal cord injuries. I hope something good comes from his passing.

As usual, the Yankees are in the playoffs and my Mets are in the toilet. Even so, I'd prefer the Yanks to beat the Sox, so GO YANKEES!

Apparently Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has been hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit. Almost as a side note, he gets quoted threatening Al Franken.

Franken's going to have a field day with this, I'm sure (if you've read his book Lies and the Lying Liars et al you'll know what I mean).

Update: O'Reilly is counter-suing.

I've been meaning to post a review of William Gibson's "Pattern Recognittion" for quite a while now and still have not done so. It's a book that moved me deeply in some ways and left me really annoyed in others, and I find it hard to wirte about that contradition. Hopefully I'll get it finished eventually.

Good news today, though -- Peter Weir wants to make it into a movie.

My passport recently expired. I should have renewed it sooner:

Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the Bush administration--specifically, the Department of Homeland Security--has wanted the world to agree on a standard for machine-readable passports. Countries whose citizens currently do not have visa requirements to enter the United States will have to issue passports that conform to the standard or risk losing their nonvisa status.

These future passports, currently being tested, will include an embedded computer chip. This chip will allow the passport to contain much more information than a simple machine-readable character font, and will allow passport officials to quickly and easily read that information. That is a reasonable requirement and a good idea for bringing passport technology into the 21st century.

But the Bush administration is advocating radio frequency identification (RFID) chips for both U.S. and foreign passports, and that's a very bad thing.

These chips are like smart cards, but they can be read from a distance. A receiving device can "talk" to the chip remotely, without any need for physical contact, and get whatever information is on it. Passport officials envision being able to download the information on the chip simply by bringing it within a few centimeters of an electronic reader.

Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that travelers carrying around RFID passports are broadcasting their identity.

Think about what that means for a minute. It means that passport holders are continuously broadcasting their name, nationality, age, address and whatever else is on the RFID chip. It means that anyone with a reader can learn that information, without the passport holder's knowledge or consent. It means that pickpockets, kidnappers and terrorists can easily--and surreptitiously--pick Americans or nationals of other participating countries out of a crowd.

Since the program is currently in test only I suppose I should renew ASAP so I don't get stuck with the chip. You might want to check your own passport's expiration date and see if you're in a similar boat.

I listen to the local ABC AM radio affiliate, KGO, fairly often, but I missed Ronn Owens' show today. Unfortunately. Howard Stern called in to rant at Michael Powell this morning on the air.

KGO has a link to an audio archive of the show on their home page. I'm about to listen to it.

The days when I had any positive feelings about Yasser Arafat are long since passed, but if the reports are true, he's not long for this world and that's Not Good News.

Exactly how ill he is seems somewhat up in the air -- the various news reports I've read range from describing Arafat as practically being on his deathbead to his being ill but not critically.

Says ABC:

Palestinian officials said he had the flu. Israeli officials speculated he might have stomach cancer, but two of his doctors said Wednesday a blood test and a biopsy of tissue from his digestive tract showed no evidence of cancer.

On Tuesday, a hospital official said Arafat was suffering from a large gallstone. The gallstone, while extremely painful, is not life-threatening and can be easily treated, the official told AP.

So why is this bad news?

Arafat's health crisis has highlighted how unprepared the Palestinians are for their leader's death, making a chaotic transition period all but inevitable. Arafat refuses to groom a successor; rival security chiefs already have battled each other in the streets.

[snip]

No leader of Arafat's stature and popularity is waiting in the wings, said Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi. "It's only natural to expect that there would be either a power struggle or there would be a loss of cohesion," she said.

Analysts said it could take years for a leader to emerge, hurting prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. However, Israel and the United States hold out hope that a post-Arafat Middle East will be more conducive to peace because of what they say is Arafat's blind eye to terror and opposition to reform.

Polls show the second most popular Palestinian after Arafat is Marwan Barghouti, a leader of Fatah's young guard. But Barghouti is serving five consecutive life terms in an Israeli prison for involvement in deadly shooting attacks.

On paper, at least, a path of succession has been charted. The parliament speaker would replace Arafat as Palestinian Authority president for 60 days, until elections are held. However, current speaker Rauhi Fattouh is a bland backbencher uncertain to hold on during a turbulent transition period, and timely elections appear unlikely.

Somehow I don't think this is going to end well. We shall see though. After all, if the Red Sox can finally break the Curse of the Bambino, anything is possible.

The Washington Note has a seriously depressing account of what is really going on for our armed forces in the mideast. Basically, there is not one bit of good news.

It is worth a read, though.

Michael Kinsley gets it mostly - but not completely - right today (by way of Washington Monthly, since I don't have a login at the LA Times):

It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values...don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don't, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don't claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?

I find the first paragraph much more persuasive than the second. A quick look around the left-leaning side of the web this last week shows an awful lot of contempt and close-minded prejudice to people on that side of the divide, at least in some circles. Some of it was just post-election angst venting, but some is more deep-seated than that.

And when it comes to science, it's harder to say that folks on this side of the divide don't want to impose. We may feel that evolution, for example, is an obvious choice for what to teach in schools, but if your view is belief-based then I can see that mandating the teaching of evolution is a forcible imposition. Some of us may like to think that the Scopes trial settled this issue decades ago, but events in Kansas in 1999 and Wisconsin today are showing that this issue is by no means dead.

Ugh. So many issues, so may ways to alienate people. I just hope we can all find some sanity at the end of it.

UPDATE: Digby got in touch with his funny side today & came out with a good post on this issue as well.

Update #2 (6/29/06): Welcome, Volokh readers.....

Atrios is back after a few days R&R and he's on fire about the upcoming proposed changes to Social Security and the tax code. All the pieces are good, but this is a point I particularly like:

As I've written before, my opposition to a forced savings plan [note to Democrats: "forced savings" has a nice ring to it, and is in fact what such a plan would be.] is largely due to the fact that it opens the door for Fund firms, one way or another, to loot the US Treasury and to loot these mandatory accounts. Conservative trolls like to write "Oh, but if you lose all your money it's all your fault!" which, after I get a good laugh at how stupid they are, depresses the hell out of me. First, investments are not deterministic. They are risky. People who do well in the market like to believe they're "smart investors." Maybe they are. But, most of them just got lucky. Being a "smart investor" means that you know more than the market does, something which can't exist if we believe the markets are efficient, as our conservative trolls usually do.

Emphasis added. And this is where the rubber meets the road:

Someone earning $40,000 per year is going to be putting just $800 per year into one of these accounts.

Mutual fund companies hate low-dollar accounts like this -- they do not make money for the company. And thus, they are going to try to find ways of making these accounts more profitable, to the detriment of the account holders. Tacking on lots of fees is a possibility, although I suspect that the eventual legislation will cover that obvious loophole. A more likely one is a tactic the industry has already been indulging in -- one much easier to abuse:

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating about a dozen brokerage firms - including Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab and E*Trade Financial - on suspicion that they failed to secure the best available price for stocks they were trading for their customers, according to people who have been briefed on the inquiry.

At issue is the way the companies executed trades of Nasdaq-listed securities when the markets opened in the morning, a period of intense trading activity resulting from the backlog of orders since the market's close the previous day.

After examining trading data from the last four years, the investigation found evidence that trades were often processed in ways that favored the firms over their clients, these people said.

Securing the best price is one of the industry's critical obligations to investors. If the investigators' suspicions are confirmed, these practices are not likely to add up to significant costs for individual investors - the difference would be pennies a share traded - but in total they could represent substantial amounts of money for the brokers.

Frankly, I find the whole thing somewhat academic, because I'm one of those who thinks that the odds are good the entire Social Security system will not exist when it comes time for me to retire. That said, this all sounds to me like a good way to hasten the liklihood of it happening.

Sorry for the longer than usual quote, but Josh Marshall has the beginning of a highly interesting take on the red state / blue state issue that's worth a notice:

The oddity of this Red State moralism argument emerges most clearly when you look at statistics for virtually every form of quantifiable social dysfunction. Divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, poverty, murder, incidence of preventable disease --- go down the list and you�ll see that they are all highest in the reddest states and lowest in the bluest.

There are exceptions certainly --- the Prairie states being the key examples. But the pattern is striking and consistent.

The issue that interested me most were the statistics on murder, in part because they seemed to have the most interesting historical roots. Murder rates are also least affected by cultural bias. For instance, non-reporting of rape varies widely from country to country and region to region. The same can be true of assault. Murder, on the other hand, tends to get reported, regardless of the cultural context.

Thankfully, murder rates in the United States have dropped rapidly over the last decade. But the regional patterns remain. Broadly speaking, New England and the parts of the country originally settled by New Englanders have low murder rates --- some only a fraction of the national averages. The South on the other hand, and the parts of the country originally settled by Southerners, have higher murder rates. (The highest homicide rates are in the Old Southwest --- Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.)

The regional patterns get even more interesting when you drill down deeper into them.

Commonsense would probably tell most of us that big cities have higher murder rates than suburbs and small towns. And that�s true. But not everywhere. In the North and in much of Blue State America, for instance, big cities have higher rates of homicide. But in the South the pattern is turned on its head. The murder rate is highest in the small towns and rural areas.

Digging deeper still we find another difference --- though here the evidence becomes a bit murkier and less definitive. In the North, where murder rates are higher in urban centers, they tend to track with the commission of felonies.

In other words, people get killed by people who are in the process of committing felonies --- whether those be drug sales, muggings, robberies gone bad, organized crime, or something else. But in the Southern states, where murder rates are higher in small towns and rural areas, this isn�t the case. Rather than happening in the process of committing other crimes, these murders tend to be rooted in what are best described as violations of honor, personal slights that escalate into violence or in the simplest sense, rage.

So Arafat is really dead this time.

At one point I might have been sad to see the man go, but taking his legacy all in all, he could not bring himself the be the man who made a real peace with Israel. And all I can say is, good riddance.

What will happen next, we don't know. Depending on the outcome of the political infighting, it could be good or bad. But at least there's a chance to get some new cards on the table now.

Digby delivers a big fat kick in the pants this morning and he's got a hugely valid point, which is: all the trumpeting about how 'moral' the Red States are is plain old hypocracy. We should not pander to it.

the fact is that somebody in the red states is watching Will and Grace and somebody is watching Girls Gone Wild and a whole bunch of somebodies are downloading pornography. I'm sure they tut-tut those terrible liberals while they pass the popcorn and laugh over The Bachelor's latest catfight.The biggest hit of the TV season is the sexually adventurous Desperate Housewives and it ain't just because people in New York and LA are watching it. The National Enquirer and the Globe are hugely popular in Middle America with their fascination with Hollywood dirt.

This is mass consumer culture and it plays very successfully all across that great swathe of red. Somebody's watching all this stuff and buying all this stuff and consuming all this stuff.

I could quote the whole thing becasue it's all good, but that's the gist. Enjoy.

By way of Atrios, some nasty gay-bashing (targetted at the black community) in the Washington Post.

I'd excerpt it but I don't have the stomach for it. AmericaBLOG has a PDF of the whole nasty thing if you're really interested.

Bleh. Bigoted crap coming to your home, by way of the paper that brought down Richard Nixon. How times have changed.

I've been following the events in Ukraine with some interest, but the US press has generally been more interested in reporting on the holiday sales figures instead. One of the Kos diarists has posted an excellent primer on the situation here.

It's a rare day that I am in agreement with anything the Bush administration says or does, but this time they do seem to be siding with the right guy.

Came across a blogger who's been giving a first-person account of the goings-on over in the Ukraine. Check her out.

And a hat tip to new Kos guestblogger David for the link.

Fresh from the state that recently rejected removing segregation-era racist language from its state constitution, this latest bit of proposed bigotry:

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

I started trying to compile a list of what might get pulled out of an Alabama library if this passes but it's too depressing. Walt Whitman, Lillian Hellman, and Tennassee Williams all make the hit list, and that's just the first few I thought up.

Over the years, Hormel has gracefully handled their flagship brand's name becoming associated with the tidal wave of junk e-mail permeating the Internet. Now, they're going one step better.

A play called "Monty Python's Spamalot" is headed for Broadway, and Hormel Foods Corp. is laughing.

Based on the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the musical begins previews Feb. 14 at New York's Shubert Theatre. It will run in Chicago from Dec. 21 to Jan. 23.

Hormel plans to issue Spam golden honey grail in a collector's edition can. The product will be available in limited quantities at select New York City retailers in February.

For those who can't wait, cans will be given to the first 100 customers who purchase tickets when the Shubert box office opens Dec. 6.

"Spam is the holy grail of canned meats," Eric Idle, a Monty Python veteran and lyricist and book writer for the new musical, said in a recent statement.

"Spamalot," directed by Mike Nichols, stars David Hyde Pierce, Tim Curry and Hank Azaria.

Idle has said the musical will be "as good as or quite likely better than any other show with killer rabbits and a legless knight opening on Broadway or in Chicago this season."

Hormel spokeswoman Julie Craven said company executives who have read the script said it's hysterical, and company leaders including chief executive Joel Johnson plan to attend the show's New York opening.

Rock on, Hormel!

For the third time in four years, the New England Patriots have clinched an NFL playoff spot.

I need to make sure I put in for time off so I can watch da boyz kick some butt in January.

Go PATS!

It's gotten to that point in December where the incessant blasts of holiday music at work and elsewhere are starting to make me a little loopy. So this bit from No More Mr Nice Blog is particualrly apt:

The people who are complaining about the secularization of Christmas in contemporary America probably shouldn't step into the Wayback Machine...

...looking into the past will not yield up any meaning of the Christmas holiday that most of us will recognize. The December date on the festive calendar two centuries ago was an occasion for public brawling by wandering crowds of inebriates.

Until Christmas was transformed in the 1830�s and 40�s, it was not unlike Mardi Gras. Men dressed as women and vice versa; off-key, discordant, squeaky, tub-thumping bands marched through the streets; liquored-up groups of revelers would force their way into the households of honest burghers to demand money, food and drink. When they managed to get what they came for, it wasn�t Christmas alms or charity, but something close to extortion.... These bands of not-so-merry makers would stand in front of homes and wassail those inside with such songs as this:

We�ve come here to claim our right ...
And if you don�t open your door
We will lay you flat upon the floor.

That's Nicholas von Hoffman in The New York Observer (his source is The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America�s Most Cherished Holiday by Stephen Nissenbaum).

The network news' long history of "If it bleeds, it leads" bears yet more fruit:

Via Talk Left I see that 44 percent of Americans think that we should limit the civil liberties of American Muslims. And, waddaya know:

The survey also examined the relation of religion to perceptions of Islam and Islamic countries and found the more religious a person described themselves, the more negative their views on Islam.

The amount of attention paid to TV news also had a bearing on how strongly a respondent favored restrictions.

"The more attention paid to television news, the more you fear terrorism, and you are more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties," said Erik Nisbet, a senior research associate with Cornell's Survey Research Institute who helped design the survey

I admire the guy. And I'm pleased to see him get the cover of Newsweek.

What's interesting, though, is the close proximity of this cover story to the Time "Person of the Year" annointing of Bush. One wonders if there's a connection, or perhaps even a subtle choosing of sides.

Unlikely of course, but still interesting to speculate about.

The Moderate Voice has a great roundup of blogger reporting and photos of the disaster in Southeast Asia.

Massive egotist that I am, my initial reactions on the subject were relief that my sister had left Thailand before it happened, and wondering what would happen to Scott & I if a tsunami hit here. We live 2 blocks from the ocean.

At any rate, it's horrible. I wish there was more one could do when nature is this savage, but other than trying to comfort the living and bury the dead, there's not a lot.

It's looking like Yushchenko won the latest Ukraine elections. Good. At least democracy works some of the time.

About 6 weeks or so ago I talked about how abortion is scarecely available in a lot of America these days. Here's a CNN piece to back that up: a look into the only abortion clinic in Mississippi and more.

Hat tip to Larry (yes I still do read your blog) for the link.

Maybe it seems trivial in the face of the ongoing mega-disaster in Southeast Asia (I'm waiting for the death toll to pass 100,000 - it's pushing 80,000 so far), but actor Jerry Orbach has also died.

In performances that spanned half a century, the Bronx-born Mr. Orbach came to embody two beloved New York archetypes: the musical matinee idol, to which he gave a refreshingly modern spin with his rugged and idiosyncratic persona, and the shrewd, irascible cop, a role he honed to a razor's edge as Detective Lennie Briscoe on "Law & Order."

Orbach was a star in the original casts of Chicago, Promises Promises, and The Fantasticks, and appeared in productions of The Threepenny Opera, Carnival, and the Gower Champion production of 42nd Street, among many other stage credits.

Unfortunately I never had the pleasure of seeing Orbach perform live, although I've certainly seen plenty of episodes of Law and Order.

At least 2004 is almost over. Maybe we'll get a rest from bad news for at least part of 2005. Although somehow, I doubt it.

It was another "be at work at 4:30 AM" day so I'm too tired to think much right now. Per Pandagon, here's the 10 random songs that my iTunes gave forth on Shuffle:

Baubles, Bangles, and Beads - Kismet (Original Broadway Cast)
All Night Long - Lionel Richie & The Commodores
And Suddenly There Was With The Angel - Handel (Messiah)
With This Love - Peter Gabriel (Passion Music for The Last Temptation Of Christ)
Take Me to the River - Talking Heads
Virtual Reality - Rusted Root
Poems, Prayers And Promises - John Denver
Too Early For The Sky - Johnny Clegg & Savuka
Take Another Piece Of My Heart - Faith Hill
In The Still Of The Night - Neville Brothers (Red Hot + Blue, A Tribute To Cole Porter)

I do actually listen to stuff written after 1995, but random chance didn't pull any of it into this list.

Dare I say, dynasty? The Patriots stomped the Steelers tonight and are going to the Super Bowl again.

YAY!

Apparently the city of San Francisco, where I reside, is considering imposing a bag tax on grocery bags in an attempt to "eliminate waste" and recoup some of the costs of waste management.

As a shopper on a budget, I'm pissed off. Scott and I generally go grocery shopping two times a month, and we tend to stock up on stuff when we go. Our groceries get packed into anything from 8 to 12 bags - some of them double-bagged to take the weight. My rough calculation is that this new tax would cost us about $6 a month. And that's just the cost for our Safeway trips. It goes higher when you add in the odds and ends we pick up from other local stores, runs to the greengrocer, etc. All told this bag tax could cost us $100 a year. That's not chump change anymore. Especially when I've just cut back my work hours for school.

Big grocery stores will also hate this because it will slow down their lines and increase their labor costs. If they have to count exactly how many bags are used for each customer and then charge for them, you won't be able to close out one transaction and start the next one until after all the groceries are bagged. Plus, self-bagging will no longer be an option unless you bring all your own bags. That's workable when all you're buying is a few items, but not when you're buying two weeks' worth of stuff.

And need I point out that this is a classic regressive tax? People with even smaller budgets than ours will be hit harder by this.

It's great that the city of San Francisco is trying to be a good manager of our natural resources, but this is a crappy way of doing it.

If you ever doubt that one person can't do anything to change things, here's an example to the contrary, albeit not necessarily a very positive one:

A fire that began with a homeless person trying to keep warm by igniting wood and refuse in a shopping cart has crippled two of the city's subway lines, which might not be restored to normal capacity for three to five years, officials said today.

The Sunday afternoon blaze in Lower Manhattan was described as the worst damage to subway infrastructure since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It gutted a locked room that is no larger than a kitchen but contains some 600 relays, switches and circuits that transmit vital information about train locations.

"This is a very significant problem, and it's going to go on for quite a while," said the president of New York City Transit, Lawrence G. Reuter. He estimated that it would take "several millions of dollars and several years" to reassemble and test the intricate network of custom-built switch relays on which the two lines rely.

In the meantime, long waits and erratic service are likely to be the norm on the A and C lines.

[snip]

In a statement, the transit agency said there were "no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future."

If I were still living in my old apartment in NYC this would have directly affected me; the Spring Street C/E station was half a block from me and I took the C several times a week.

I'm less concerned with whether or not the Iraq elections get held as much as I am with what happens after the elections. That said, Juan Cole has a couple of excellent posts about the past 48 hours in Iraq, particularly this one, that are worth a read.

There's a rumor floating around the blogosphere that the famed Deep Throat, who (if you're too young to remember) helped Woodward & Bernstein investigate Watergate and take down President Nixon back in the day, may be dying.

That's good news for folks like me, who are really curious to finally find out who the guy was. However, I do not think it's Rehnquist.

The Rude Pundit has a really good obituary for the late great Arthur Miller.

The National Hockey League canceled what little was left of the season Wednesday after a series of last-minute offers were rejected on the final day of negotiations.

Per Feministe:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

Mine: Why?

From: Writing Effective Letters, Memos, & E-Mail by Arthur H Bell. Third Edition (C) 2004.

One of the campus facilities dep't trucks was decorated with this bumper sticker:

Why is MY oil under THEIR sand?

*sigh*. Some people are real idiots.

I'm tempted to make a minor stink about the sticker to the college administration but since I didn't get the license plate of the truck I'll let it slide. if I see the truck again, though, I'll make a note of it.

Steve M from "No More Mister Nice Blog" is shuttering his blog.

I'm bummed; his was one of the ones I really liked.

Remember not too long ago, I was ranting about a proposal to tax grocery bags 17 cents each to fund waste management in SF? Well, someone went that one better in Florida:

Florida's Legislature is flush with good ideas. Sen. Al Lawson's involves a 2 cent-per-roll tax on toilet paper to pay for wastewater treatment and help small towns upgrade their sewer systems.

It's actually a fairly clever idea. But not very likely to (ahem) pass.

I was tempted to start out this post with a string of curse words aimed at Justice Antonin Scalia this morning. I really don't want this blog finding its way into any nanny filters, so I'll skip the profanity and go to the causes thereof:

Justice Antonin Scalia criticized the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down the juvenile death penalty, calling it the latest example of politics on the court

and

In a 35-minute speech Monday, Scalia said unelected judges have no place deciding issues such as abortion and the death penalty. The court's 5-4 ruling March 1 to outlaw the juvenile death penalty based on "evolving notions of decency" was simply a mask for the personal policy preferences of the five-member majority, he said.

Why is it that people are perfectly willing to point to other people's personal feelings when they disagree with them, yet remain oblivious to the fact that they too are motivated by feelings? Obviously this is a subject the esteemed Justice feels strongly about, so much so that he's gone to the trouble of making a speech about it. I think it is fair to assume he actually has feelings on the subject. Why is it OK for him to be motivated by his feelings but not other people?

And what exactly is wrong with using an "evolving standard of decency" as part of the decision-making process, anyway? As much as Scalia would like to pretend that this is still the 1700s, times have changed since the Constitution was written. It was an evolving standard of decency which removed the odious practice of counting blacks as 3/5ths of a person, for example. It was an evolving standard of dececy which gave women the right to vote. True, it was also an evolving standard of decency which kicked off Prohibition, but that mistake was pretty quickly rectified.

In short, I think Scalia is full of crap.

I've been trying to come to grips with my apathy lately. I found "trueblue illinois" over at dKos who said some things I really wish I had said, related to the cognitive dissonance it is to be an American these days. Here it is:

I've heard modern conservatism described as a "philosophy" of "Got mine. Get yours." It seems to be a mindset of radical self-interest. What is strange to me is how many people have jumped on that bandwagon. Or is that just how the election results were portrayed?

When Americans look into the mirror, they like to see the NYC firefighters of 9/11; the liberators of post WW II Europe; a generous people who open their wallets and hearts to people in need. I know that most of us are that, deep down.

But under the GOP, our image is increasingly that of an unapologetic Scrooge. There's a cravenness, a selfishness, an aggressiveness that just does not jibe with the way most people in this nation see themselves. Of all the people I know personally, of any political stripe, not one person would fit that definition. And yet that is what we as a nation are projecting.

It seems like it will take some huge shock, some giant international snub, for people to wake up and realize that the image in the mirror does not reflect who they are. One would have thought that 9/11 would have served that purpose. It could have. But Bush & Co. played on our fears and encouraged the worst aspects of our natures to come out. They've leveraged that to radically change the nature of our laws and our society into something most of us with any perspective would not recognize as "American."

At some point, the cognitive dissonance will have to kick in. When the scales fall from our eyes, we as a nation are in for the sort of anguished soul-searching that gripped Germany after WW II.

I have, in fact, met a few American who really are as aggressively selfish as the commenter describes above. And I'm sure many of the BushCo folks are that way as well. But overall she's got a point.

I worry what it will take for the rest of the country to wake up. How bad does it have to get?

In a way, I think I have kicked into my own selfishness mode. There are so many outrages going on in our country that I could literally spend all day every day doing nothing but trying to stay on top of all the bad things that are going on, much less trying to react to all of them. I can't do it. I can't be that person, constantly outraged, constantly active in the struggle. There's just so much to fight against I can't even decide where to start anymore.

And yes, I know, this is one of the ways "they" can win. We don't all have to be thrown into jail or leave the country. We just need to give up and stop caring.

15, or even 10 years ago, I might have done things differently. But I'm older, and sadder, and just plain tired. If America is screwed, at least I can have time with the people (and pets) most important to me as we all go down the tubes together. It's less aggressively selfish, but still a selfish decision I've made. So maybe trueblue illinois is more right than she knows.

It's virtually impossible to avoid the whole Schiavo mess right now. I'm with Brad Plumer:

Ugh, very much not interested in reading about the Schiavo case right now. It's "important", I know, and it's the big news of the moment, but� holy f***. This crap is completely debilitating, and at least now I know that when the apocalypse comes, via GOP diktat, I'll be here, slumped helplessly on my couch, rubbing my eyes in sheer defeat, unable to think of a single goddamn thing to say.

My favorite chocolate is actually good for you:

Investigators from the University of L'Aquila in Italy found that after eating only 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces, of dark chocolate every day for 15 days, 15 healthy people had lower blood pressures and were more sensitive to insulin, an important factor in metabolizing sugar.

UPDATE: If I'd known Kevin Drum was going to link to this post, I'd have put some more thought into it and maybe even a few actual insights. So it goes. Welcome, all you visitors from Political Animal!

Brad Plumer has some policy-wonk posts up today about health care reform. Although this isn't a front burner issue for me most of the time, it got me thinking.

I'm generally supportive of converting America to a single-payer health care system like what most European countries and Canada have. And then it hit me -- what if my wish came true?

Would I trust my government to make decisions about things like who gets access to prescription birth control devices? Not if a Republican were in the White House. Given the SCOTUS precedent of Griswold v CT, I'm fairly sure they couldn't eliminate birth control entirely, but they could include things like 'conscience clause' that would allow doctors to not write prescriptions for birth control pills if they chose not to. As we've already seen with abortion services, if nobody chooses to provide something, you have an effective ban on service even if it is still legal.

That's a really scary scenario, and one that is making me rethink whether I support single-payer health care after all. Just one more thing to blame on the right wing nut jobs trying to run this country.

I'm supposed to be studying for my Accounting midterm, but this song just cycled through my iMix and I just had to say it:

The Dave Matthews Band song "Grey Street" is a really good song. But it would be even better if Peter Gabriel covered it.

Midterms are over; time to focus on everything else that's been piling up. Like renewing my now-expired passport. The application has been sitting on my desk for months, but I really need to get off my butt & do it before I get RFID'ed.

I've posted previously on the problems with putting RFID chips into passports. As this recent article notes, DHS is "dealing" with the problem not by looking for a better solution, but by engaging in an Orwellian re-naming of the technology involved.

Conspiracy theorists and civil libertarians, fear not. The U.S. government will not use radio-frequency identification tags in the passports it issues to millions of Americans in the coming years.

Instead, the government will use "contactless chips."

The distinction is part of an effort by the Department of Homeland Security and one of its RFID suppliers, Philips Semiconductors, to brand RFID tags in identification documents as "proximity chips," "contactless chips" or "contactless integrated circuits" -- anything but "RFID."

The Homeland Security Department is playing word games to dodge the privacy debate raging over RFID tags.

So very typical of this administration.

Woke up this morning with severe pain on the left side of my neck. I've had this problem on and off for years but this is a particularly bad episode. Advil isn't doing it for me, but I have class today, so I'm not trying anything stronger.

While trying to keep my head from moving too much, I dedcided to review my current blogroll. I do this roughly every month to check on what I'm enjoying, what I don't much care for, and what I click on out of a sense of obligation. And I've noticed an interesting pattern developing. More and more, I'm cutting group blogs out of my daily read lists.

It's not that I think the group blogs are "bad". It's just that what really keeps me at a blog is the personal voice of the writer, and in many group blogs that personal feel just isn't there. The group blogs often have a lot of interesting news items, good writing, and thoughtful insights, but I find I need something more than that to keep me excited about coming back to a blog over the long haul. A touch of personality -- be it cat blogging, talking about your latest trip, or even just a Friday iTunes mix -- makes a difference. At least for me.

There's a related point I've been thinking about, which is, why I think "business blogs" are both a dumb idea and doomed to being either boring or short-lived, but that's a post for a different day.

My ongoing neck pain is really slowing down my productivity this week. However, here's more on the US gov't and passport silliness. As if the RFID chip proposal wasn't bad enough, this one is, pun intended, a real pain in the neck.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S announcement that U.S. citizens are soon going to need passports to get back into their country from Mexico and Canada, is being played as a way to keep Americans safer. But like most everything else this president has done in the name of security, the only things there will be more of if this measure goes through are bureaucracy, hassles for Americans who don't have passports and never needed them before to travel to Mexico or Canada, and bad feeling between the United States and its neighbors.

San Francisco's mass transit system, MUNI, announced a triple whammy today: driver layoffs, service cutbacks, AND a fare increase. Suckage all around. Scott and I rely on MUNI to get both to work and to school, so now we get to wait and see if the lines we ride will be affected, plus pay more for less service.

What a stupid, short-sighted move this is. There are not many cities that have the geography and urban density to make living without a car a real option, and San Francisco is one of them. SF should be increasing, not decreasing, the amount of mass transit coverage it has. Otherwise you're just making it harder for people to get around and encouraging more car use.

Yes, I know that budgets have to be balanced, yadda yadda, but there's got be be better ways to do it than this.

I haven't blogged on this issue yet and I should have. Fortunately the good folks over at the All Spin Zone kicked me in the butt and reminded me that I need to.

The recent rise in rhetoric about bad things happening to judges who don't make the "Right" decisions (and I use that in both senses of the word) is very troubling. Without a fair and honest judiciary, one that can make decisions without fear that they'll be second-guessed by someone with a gun, this country is in big trouble (if it isn't already).

Here's a key point, from a WaPo piece on a recent gathering of conservative leaders in Washington DC:

...lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [SCOTUS Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary.

Indeed.

By way of PVP Online, I found this completely depressing news item: Sesame Street's Cookie Monster will not be singing "C is for Cookie" anymore.

How thoroughly depressing. Yes, I know, American kids are fatter than ever and need to learn healthy eathing habits, Blah blah blah. I don't care. I loved the Cookie Monster exactly the way that he was and I'm sad that the next generation won't get to grow up with great, catchy kid's songs like this:

C Is For Cookie

"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
Oh.........cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C".

"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
Oh....cookie,cookie,cookie starts with "C".

Hey,you know what?
A round cookie with one bit out of it looks like a "C",
A round donut with one bit out of it also looks like a "C",
but it's it not as good as a cookie!
And oh the moon sometimes looks like a "C" but you can't eat that

Sooooooooooooo.........

"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me...Yeah!
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
Oh....cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C"
Yeah!
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C"
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C"

MmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmM...

Two bits of health-related news today:

1) It's OK to be a few pounds overweight. Woot!

2) the USDA are a bunch of wankers. Their MyPyramid website is slow as hell and gives insipid, confusing advice to boot.

80 years after he went on trial for teaching evolution, John Scopes' battle is being fought again in Kansas:

Eighty years after the first famed "Monkey Trial," a second one was under way Thursday in Kansas, giving critics of evolution a forum for attacking the theory.

A State Board of Education subcommittee began four days of trial-like hearings on evolution, and witnesses were advocates of intelligent design, critics of evolution or both.

The entire board plans to consider changes in June to standards that determine how Kansas students are tested on science.

The European Parliament voted Wednesday in favor of an obligatory 48-hour maximum work week

Yes another reason I wish I was about 15 years younger and spoke more than one language. I can't imagine the US enacting something like this.

I've flown United Airlines quite a lot - as much as five times a year - for the past seven years. When it comes to providing the nonstop NYC - SFO flights that I want, at the times that I want, for a price I consider reasonable, they've consistantly met my requirements. Occasionally I've flown American or JetBlue, but they generally are less convenient and/or more expensive. United has been my airline of choice.

And now, United has dumped their employee pension plan as part of bankruptcy recovery plan. That's a six BILLION dollar committment to employees, dumped off onto an underfunded Federal bailout organization. So retired United employees are potentially screwed, and we the taxpayer get to pay the bill.

Well, United, you've gone from being my airline of choice to my airline of last resort. That's my response.

He quotes Gilbert & Sullivan's Ruddigore!

SCOTUS gets one right!

Wine lovers may buy directly from out-of-state vineyards, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, striking down laws banning a practice that has flourished because of the Internet and growing popularity of winery tours.

The 5-4 decision overturns laws in New York and Michigan, which supporters said were aimed at protecting local wineries and limiting underage drinkers from purchasing wine without showing proof of age. In all, 24 states have laws barring interstate shipments.

The court said the state bans are discriminatory and anticompetitive.

"States have broad power to regulate liquor," Justice
Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. "This power, however, does not allow states to ban, or severely limit, the direct shipment of out-of-state wine while simultaneously authorizing direct shipment by in-state producers."

The AP reports:

Last month, animal rights extremists followed the wife of a pharmaceutical company executive to her job, rifled through her car and stole a credit card. They used it buy $20,000 in travelers checks, which they then donated to four charities.

It should be pretty obvious from my blog that the welfare of animals is important to me. But I have no idea in what twisted mindset it's OK to commit felonies against people in order to "protect" animals. The ALF likes to say that they have no intention of hurting people, but I wonder how long it will be before some sick freak decides to start killing Forest Pharmecutical executives.

Think that's too extreme? Tell that to the families of the doctors who have been murdered for providing abortions.

Per Reuters:

Syria has severed military and intelligence cooperation with the United States, its ambassador to Washington told The New York Times in an interview published on its Web site on Monday.

The ambassador, Imad Moustapha, told the newspaper in an interview given last Friday at the Syrian Embassy in Washington, that his country had, in the last 10 days, "severed all links" with the U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency

Not that I am any kind of a fan of Syria, but that's not good news.

Some big things are afoot in Europe. It seems likely that France will vote this week to reject the EU constitution. If they do vote to reject, the constitution will not be able to be implemented, causing a serious issue for the 25-member European Union. Bloomberg's been covering this because of the potential effect on the Euro exchange rate, but other than that I haven't found much US coverage.

Predictions that a 'no' vote from France will "kill" the EU may be premature, but it's a real possibility. It all depends on whether there's a willingness to do further work on the EU constitution. Getting 25 different countries to agree on anything is really, really, hard, so going back to the drawing table could mean years of additional negotiations and voting. Not an appealing prospect.

From what I've been able to glean in the English-language press, the anti-constitution opposition feels that

the charter enshrines an "ultra-liberal" economic model, putting market interests ahead of social concerns and does not protect workers enough.

Amazing. They'll vote the EU constitution down because it doesn't protect workers enough. I'm not sure if I'm impressed or annoyed, or both, by this. I'm impressed that the people of France feel so strongly about the issue that they're willing to bring the whole EU-nification process to a halt over it. Annoyed because I think the EU is generally a good idea and that the French acting to derail the process is short-sighted of them.

And a minor side-note, note the use of the word 'liberal' as being pro-business, not pro-worker, in the Reuters UK piece. No matter what side of the Pond you live on, 'liberal' seems to be a bad word.

"Nameless soldier" over at dKos is getting shipped out to Iraq this weekend. Godspeed and keep your head down, dude. I've added your blog to my blogroll.

A 2.5 quake doesn't harm much, but when the epicenter is only about 3 miles awy from you, you sit up from the couch you've collpased onto and take notice.

Gimi was parked next to me on the couch and it disturbed him. I think this may have been his first 'real' earthquake.

And an earthquake of another sort from Europe: As expected, France votes "No".

On this Memorial Day, Musing's Musings says it better than I could.

Yes, I think the War on Terra was a big fuckin' mistake, and that the people who started it are criminals who should be in the dock in the Hague. My bet is that quite a few of the guys and gals fighting in the war feel the same way I do. But because the people running the country into the ground are misguided Republican asshole extremists doesn't mean I don't think that our fighting men and women aren't worthy of support.

Our troops should get 100% of everything they need to do the jobs we give them to do. We shouldn't be sending them into harm's way unless there's absolutely nothing else for it, but when we do, no matter what the pretext or the evidence, they should absolutely go into combat with all the guns and ammunition and armor (body and otherwise) they need to do what they have to do with a minimum of casualties. Nobody who signs on the dotted line to put his or her body between us on the home front and the people who are trying their best to destroy us should not have to be worrying about whether his/her family back home is going to be able to make ends meet. No military family should ever have to take food stamps or go on welfare because one or more members is in the service. And when the war's over, no serviceman or -woman should have to wonder if there will be health care available to take care of his/her needs, support for easing back into a normal routine or into civilian life. For those that don't come home in one piece, or, God forbid, don't come back at all, there should be no question that their needs will be met and their loved ones cared for--justly and fairly.

Indeed.

In what bizarro world is this proposal indecent?

Only women over age 35 or 40 be allowed to drive and only in cities. On highways, he said, they could drive if accompanied by male guardians.

Saudi Arabia, of course! Women are banned from driving in Saudi Arabia, and a Saudi councilman Mohammad al-Zulfa has recently suggested easing the ban to allow some women to drive some of the time. But the thought that women might actually be allowed to do anything for themselves in Saudi Arabia is just too scary. What happened?

Bob Herbert's column today, and the multi-part NY Times series on class in America, is pretty depresing stuff. But Jesse over at Pandagon said something in response that ought to be emphasized:

There's no problem with the people who run the company earning more money. There's a problem when we set up an economy where they reap all the benefits for the company they run, as if everyone under them is simply a token functionary who adds nothing to the company's success.

There's a larger point to be made here about the whole issue of how the work world has changed in the past few decades but I'm strugling with the words for it.

Nancy Pelosi says:

If you ever need any inspiration or need to know how urgent our work is, just remember that the CEO of Wal-Mart makes as much in two weeks as its entry-level employees make in a lifetime. A lifetime; not a year, not four years: a lifetime

Emphasis added.

UPDATE: Thinking some more, I want to add why I find this so annoying. Companies like Wal-Mart are almost entirely dependent on their front-line troops as generators of revenue. Wal-Mart would not make their huge profits if their stock clerks and cashiers and other front-line employees did not do what they did. So for them so be so poorly compensated when the CEO sits back and makes vast bucks as if that were totally unconnected to the long, hard, earnest labor of the poorly paid front-line troops is particularly offensive.

Funny how even PETA can become that which they hate:

Two employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have been charged with animal cruelty after dumping dead dogs and cats in a shopping center garbage bin, police said.

Investigators staked out the bin after discovering that dead animals had been dumped there every Wednesday for the past four weeks, Ahoskie police said in a prepared statement Thursday.

PETA has scheduled a news conference for Friday in Norfolk, Virginia, where the group is based.

Police found 18 dead animals in the bin and 13 more in a van registered to PETA. The animals were from animal shelters in Northampton and Bertie counties, police said.

The two were picking up animals to be brought back to PETA headquarters for euthanization, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk said Thursday.

Emphasis added.

Dad's visiting his sister in Vienna (the one in Europe, not the one outside Washington DC). Calling him there would be expensive, not to mention hard to coordinate with that 9 hour time difference, but I sent him a "Happy Father's Day" text message. How times change.

One of the professors at USF e-mailed this out today:

CASTING CALL: The Apprentice on NBC

The search is on for Donald Trump's next "Apprentice" on NBC !

NBC's "The Apprentice" is coming to San Francisco to conduct interviews.

Beau Bonneau Casting in San Francisco is seeking business-savvy go-getters who have what it takes to "make it in the boardroom."

Interviews will be conducted at the Beau Bonneau Casting Studio in San Francisco on Friday, July 8 or Monday, July 11, by appointment only with a possible second interview on Tuesday, July 14. Selected candidates must be available for the show for up to eight weeks in the Fall of 2005. Candidates must be at least 21 years old and a US citizen.

If you meet all the criteria and are interested in interviewing for the show please call 415.249.9383 a.s.a.p. and leave the following information after the beep.

- Your name
- 2 Telephone numbers where we can reach you
- Your educational background (MBA, PhD, etc.)
- Where you are currently employed
- Why you think you have what it takes to "make it in the boardroom"

Beau Bonneau Casting will be calling you back to set up an appointment if we are interested in interviewing you. Thank you.

Beau Bonneau Casting Staff
http://www.beaubonneaucasting.com

I'm not interested, but I am somewhat amused. Does the professor think that's a good use of his students' time?

Scott apparently was up late & heard about the bombings shortly after they happened, but unlike 9/11 chose not to wake me up for this one. So now it's about 6 hours after the fact and I'm playing catch-up. I even turned the TV on to MSNBC but was soon treated to some utter stupidity: A nameless newscaster suggesting that commuters in major cities bear some responsibility for preventing these kinds of atacks, and since Londoners have lived with this sort of bombing attempt for a long time, it's partially their own fault for not noticing the bombs.

Jerk. No wonder I don't watch TV news anymore.

If this is another al-Quaeda attack, it's a concern. But it's also noteworthy that the attacks they have made have steadily declined in severity since 9/11. That attack killed just under 3,000. Madrid killed about 200. This one, so far, has killed less than 50. Whether that is due to AQ's decreased capability or increased security measures taken after 9/11, I don't know. Maybe both. At any rate, continued attacks = bad thing, but decreased casualties = good thing.

I expect the war drums will beat louder now. If anything good can come out of this bombing, it will perhaps call more attention to the fact that our misbegotten invasion of Iraq is not helping fight the "war on terror". Although whether BushCo will see it that way, I seriously doubt.

Clicking through series of links this morning, I ended up coming across an article in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" regarding applying for jobs in academia and how reading applicants' weblogs had an impact on the hiring process. I'm not looking to work in academia, but this did hit on an issue I've wondered about: could what I've written here come back to haunt me professionally down the line?

I'm well aware that what you post to the Internet never really dies. Knowing that, I've deliberately avoided some subjects in this weblog and tried to minimize the comments I made on others, including work. But according to this article, even that might not be good enough for some potential employers:

Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author's credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer's current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process.

It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned.

[snip]

...in truth, we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate's chances.

More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.

Well, Fiat Lux has been online for almost two years now, and judging on how much of my traffic comes from Google, even taking it down would not prevent people finding what I've blogged. If someone reads what I have to say here and decides not to hire me because I'm too opinionated, or because of my particular view on things, or because they think I'm a risk for what I might possibly say in the future .... well, that says more about their own issues than it does about mine.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't care whether this blog could affect my job prospects in the future. Of course I care. But since I can't de-Google myself, I'm damned already in some people's eyes. I might as well keep going on.

I love the Smithsonian. Look what they just came out with:

Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, a trove of about 60 unpublished photos from the landmark case has been found in Smithsonian Institution archives, including a shot of Clarence Darrow's courtroom sparring with William Jennings Bryan.

[snip]

Among them is one of Darrow, the most famous defense attorney of his day, interrogating Bryan, the orator and presidential candidate prosecuting the case. The trial had been moved outdoors because of the heat. Bryan fell ill and died five days after the trial ended.

Here's a link to the Darrow/Bryan shot in question. It's grainy but still impressive.

We had the kittens out for a play session and I flipped on C-Span for some background noise. Sen Coburn was holding committee hearings on renovating the UN Building. And what do I see but His Hairpiece, Donald Trump, sitting there in the first row.

I'm assuming he's there to testify but didn't stick around long enough to find out. It did get me thinking though... the new UN building, brought to you by Donald Trump? It could happen...

Why Egypt? I understand why a fundamentalist Muslim group would want to attack the UK or Spain or America, or even Bali, but why Egypt? I'm sure there's an explanation, but I can't think of it off the top of my head.

At any rate, bombings suck.

Nathan Newman makes some excellent points about how liberals, too, can work against their own self-interest. In this case, by opposing efforts to build more local high-density housing in New York City:

while I understand the nostalgia for Brooklyn's low-rise housing and it is lovely for those who can continue to live there, the reality is that blocking higher density there condemns others to homelessness and the rest to increasingly long commutes. And while quaint neighborhoods are preserved in Brooklyn, it means more people will be driven out into the suburbs to create more strip malls, SUVs, environmental degradation, and Republicans.

And don't forget sucky commutes, too. The NYC area has some of the best commuter mass transit systems around but even so, trying to get to a job in Manhattan from the affordable-housing zones in New Jersey, Long Island, or further out is no picnic.

I used to live in a three-bedroom apartment in Soho. It was a sweet deal -- the apartment had previously been the building superintendent's, so it came into the market at the low end of the rent spectrum ($1200), and being rent-stabilized rent increases were less than $50 a year. Despite its being a sixth-floor walkup, I hung onto that place for a decade, knowing damn well I'd never find a deal like that again. I shudder to think of what that place is being rented for today - I would not at all be surprised to find that it's been decontrolled and renting for $2600 or so.

At any rate, call me a hypocrite for supporting more housing out of my own self-interest, but I'm all for it.

It's the little things that make a city special. Here's one of the special things about New York:

On a steamy morning, traffic is backed up on West 89th Street near Central Park.

Moving vans and garbage trucks screech to a halt. Motorists fume. All they can do is honk their horns and watch as a line of eight horses and riders plods out of the Claremont Riding Academy up ahead, and enters the busy street.

"Look out for taxis!" shouts the leader to seven girls riding behind her. The horses walk serenely in front of the congestion. They clip-clop past a housing project and turn right at a pizza parlor. Minutes later, they disappear into the park.

The traffic begins to flow again.

Horses have been fixtures here since 1892, when a carriage depot was first constructed on the site. Today, the Claremont academy is the oldest continuously operated stable in the United States � and the last public stable left in Manhattan.

"We have a strong whiff of tradition," says Paul Novograd, whose family has owned the landmark structure for 62 years. "The idea of running a stable in the heart of New York may sound unusual, but this place is truly our home."

The beige-brick building, filled with hay and oats, sits on a street less than two blocks from Broadway, where elegant brownstones and condos sell for millions. On one side of the stable is a luxury apartment building, on the other is a multistory garage.

I have fond memories of the Claremont. As a kid, I was in and out of the place frequently. And why not? My grandfather owned it, and it was less than 10 blocks from our home. Grandpa's gone now, and my uncle Paul continues the tradition. Long may it last!

Michael at AmericaBlog asks two related and very difficult questions:

What do you do if a people want to live in your society but don't embrace the values that society stands for?

and

If you don't want to live in a free society that respects the rights of women and infidels and other religions, why did you move to the UK/France/Holland/etc in the first place?

As a member of a minority culture, I'm all for retaining one's unique religious and/or ethnic identity. But if you're going to live in a country dominated by a culture other than your own, you need to face up to reality and make your peace with it. If you can't find a way to navigate the differences, that's where the problems happen.

America's history with regard to immigration issues is far from pristine. But overall I think we've managed fairly well. Our country's relative youth and large geographic size has helped. Europe doesn't have those advantages. On the plus side, though, the creation of the EU and the Euro currency unification have given them some object lessons in how to play nicely with their neighbors. We'll see how it all plays out.

Sometimes, when I have a blogging lull, it's because there's not much that I want to talk about. Recently, the opposite has been true. There's a number of things going on that I want to talk about, but I'm not sure what exactly I want to say about them. So rather than sound insipid or downright wrong, I've been keeping my mouth shut.

Here's an example. 11,000 people applied for the 400 jobs at a soon-to-open Wal-Mart in Oakland. It was front-page news in the SF Chronicle yesterday.

I had to run some errands around town last night, so I got to listen to two different KGO talk radio hosts opine on the subject. And since this is the Bay Area, it was pretty easy to predict what people were going to say about the whole thing: "Our economy sucks! Wal-Mart is evil! This is terrible!". All of which happened as expected. Although it was funny listening to one host try to defend the concept that any time you have a willing buyer and a willing seller, the result is a "good job" no matter how crappy the wages and benefits are. I was tempted to call in and ask if that extended to things like murder for hire, but I figured that might not get past the screener.

So here's some of what I think. On the one hand, although those job numbers sound bad at first, when you break it down, that's about 27 applicants per position. Competitive, but from where I sit, not horribly so. Not after hearing stories of hiring managers getting flooded with hundreds of resumes for one job posting on Craigslist. Now, not being a tech hiring manager myself, I don't know if those stories are still true, or if that was only in the immediate post-bust timeframe. Maybe I'm wrong and these days, getting 27 applicants per job is really bad. Or maybe it's not that bad after all. Bottom line is, I don't really know, and therefore have a hard time taking a firm stand either way.

Something else I thought about, but have been hesitate to talk about, is the intersection of race and class and hiring here -- note this photograph of the new Wal-Mart employees. But frankly, as relatively privileged member of society, I don't feel comfortable making a lot of points about race and class and employment. It's not my area of expertise, and I run the risk of sounding clich�d, banal or clueless, or (god forbid) a combination of all three.

And yes, Wal-Mart has some terrible business practices. But that's not exactly news if you've been paying attention.

Perhaps after two years of blogging, I'm coming to a place where I feel less like just venting off my emotions and opinions, and instead trying to have some solid ground under my feet when I post. Perhaps I'm being overly cautious -- it's not like I've got a horde of trolls ready to attack me if I say something wrong; I'm lucky to get any comments at all here. Or maybe I'm just being lazy. *grin*

Next, I'll consider whether or not to say anything about Gaza.

There's a classic Jewish story that goes something like this:

Avram and Shlomo have a dispute, so they go to their Rabbi to have him settle it. He and his wife welcome them into their parlor and settle down to hear them out.

Avram speaks first and tells his side of the story to the rabbi. He is articulate, emotional, and logical. He makes a great case for himself. And the Rabbi said, "Avram, you are right." Next Shlomo stands up. He speaks with such passion and persuasion about his side of the dispute that the Rabbi says to him, "You, too, are right, Shlomo."

The Rabbi's wife is upset by this and says to her husband, "How can you say that both of them are right? If one is right, the other must be wrong."

The Rabbi thinks long and hard and finally says to his wife, "You know, you're also right."

When it comes to the issue of Gaza and the West Bank, this story is particularly apt. After 30+ years of anger, misunderstanding, and bloodshed, nobody's hands are clean, and nobody wants to admit that they might have been wrong about some things. And through all the hatred, lies, and pig-headedness, somehow, a way needs to be found for everyone to co-exist. (I didn't say like each other, that might be asking for too much.)

Personally, I do not hold with those who say that all of Israel was given to the Jews, and that giving back Gaza is a sin against God. I don't think God sits there with a map drawing lines as to what is or is not Israel. Israel existed in the heart of every Jew during our long Diaspora. Israel will continue to exist, with or without Gaza. And the wounds the occupation have given us, the spiritual coarsening we have fallen into in a vain attempt to hold onto that land is bad enough. For the sake our our collective soul, we need to let go in order to heal.

But even if giving up Gaza is a good thing, it's still a hard thing to do, and a sad one. Seeing the photographs of weeping settlers holding onto IDF soldiers who were also weeping, was hard. The settlement policy was a deeply misguided one, but the settlers themselves are not puppets, they're people. They are not all gun-toting Arab haters, and now they have lost their homes. Perhaps this is the karmic payback we have to go through in order to make amends for past wrongs. If so, then perhaps some good will come of it.

And I do wonder whether giving back Gaza will allow Hamas and their ilk to claim victory, or even worse, give them a reason to keep on sending out suicide bombers and spilling innocent blood. Giving up land for peace is one thing. Giving up land and not getting peace in return would be intolerable.

(Crossposted at the All Spin Zone)

Israeli paper cups in a Saudi hospital! Cue the outrage - It must be a Mossad plot!

Riyadh, 22 August (AKI) - Paper cups made in Israel have caused a storm of protest in a Saudi hospital, the Saudi newspaper Arab News reports. Officials at the King Khaled National Guard Hospital says they are investigating after the catering subcontractors for the coffee shops in the hospital ran out and began using Israeli paper cups with Hebrew writing on them, sparking outrage among the customers.

What's sad is that someone, somewhere, probably does think that my opening joke is for real.

Pat Robertson seems to have hurt nobody but his own evangelical bretheren by his recent call for the asassination of President Chavez:

Venezuela's government has temporarily suspended permits for foreign missionaries after a U.S. televangelist said Washington should assassinate President Hugo Chavez.

The policy announcement came four days after conservative evangelist Pat Robertson said Washington should execute Chavez, a former soldier who often accuses the United States of plotting to kill him.

The chief of the Justice Ministry's religious affairs unit, Carlos Gonzalez, said Friday authorization of permits for missionaries would be curbed while the government tightened regulations on preachers inside Venezuela.

The permits "are suspended for a short time ... while we organize a system to see what additional data we need for people coming into the country to preach," Gonzalez told Reuters.

"We were already working on this, but these declarations have made us speed things up," he said.

Heh.

Hat tip: AmericaBlog

Yeah, yeah, yeah, "study of the week" science is sometimes suspect, but this is news I like to hear:

Coffee not only helps clear the mind and perk up the energy, it also provides more healthful antioxidants than any other food or beverage in the American diet, according to a study released Sunday.

... is a town I'm quite fond of. I hope it dodges the Katrina bullet.

Update: By way of The Sideshow, I came across this New Orleans webcam site. As of the time I typed this, the cam is still working.

The bad news out of New Orleans continues, the news out of Iraq is bad too. And from NY, I got an email that my old rabbi has died (UPDATE: here is an obituary).

About the only thing I can do from here is make a donation to the Red Cross.

If Katrina had hit a few weeks ago I could have taken the Red Cross training and gone there to help, but the semester has now started and I'm tied to SF for the next several months.

Bleh.

Krugman today:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans.

I think it's time to update the disaster preparedness supplies in the house.

He also makes a very good point:

I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government.

Good one from The Sideshow this morning:

Mr. Sideshow came in earlier and quoted to me a permutation of Arthur C. Clarke's famous formulation that I'd never heard before:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I like it.

And on a related note, this little gem from TBogg:

So here's an e-mail I received today:

Hoping you'll host a link to my blog on your site -- and not too proud to beg! ;-)

[links redacted]

Lots more original art and commentary that pulls no punches. All a solo effort.

peace,
[name redacted]

After checking the blog in question out, I decided that there was nothing wrong with it, but that I didn't want to add it to my blogroll. So I sent the following response:

Thanks but no thanks.

Maybe I could have been nicer about it, but hey, it was an unsolicited e-mail. A bit later in the day I get this back:

Wow, nice snotty reply.

I'm sure your "blog" will do well with more nice widdow kitty pix...

LOL

At which point I got annoyed. Talk about being unable to handle rejection!

So here was my response:

You know something? You need to check your attitude.

YOU sent ME an unsolicited e-mail asking for a blogroll link. I could
have just ignored your request but instead I took the time to visit
your blog, read your most recent posts, and decide not to blogroll
you. I then sent you a short and somewhat flip, but not impolite,
e-mail telling you so.

Your response is to call me snotty and make fun of the fact that I
post photos of the work I do for the SF SPCA on my blog. That kind of
response does not incline me to change my mind. It makes me think I
made the right decision in the first place.

One of us has a problem, but somehow I don't think it is me.

It takes a lot of nerve to turn around and insult someone that you'd just asked for a favor.

They say Time heals all wounds. I suppose that's true; the pain 9/11 caused me is not as sharp as it used to be. But still, 9/11/01 was the worst day of my life.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

UPDATE: Read Pete Hamill today.

per Brad Plumer, Bill Clinton says that Area 51 has no aliens and who know what happened at Roswell....

CLINTON: (Laughing and blushing) Well I don't know if you all heard this, but, there was actually, when I was president in my second term, there was an anniversary observance of Roswell. Remember that? People came to Roswell, New Mexico from all over the world. And there was also a site in Nevada where people were convinced that the government had buried a UFO and perhaps an alien deep underground because we wouldn't allow anybody to go there. And uhm� I can say now, 'cause it's now been released into the public domain. I had so many people in my own administration that were convinced that Roswell was a fraud but this place in Nevada was really serious, that there was an alien artefact there. So I actually sent somebody there to figure it out. And it was actually just a secret defence installation, alas, doing boring work that we didn't want anybody to else see.

...

The Roswell thing, I think, really was an illusion. I don't think it happened. I mean I think there are rational explanations and I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that revealed things. If there were, they were concealed from me too. And if there were, well I wouldn't be the first American president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere, hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But if so, they successfully eluded me�and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you I did (chuckling) try to find out.

For the record, I've always thought that the 'weather balloon' thing sounded fishy, but I'm not much for theories of vast government conspiracies either. Sooner or later, people will talk or paperwork will come to light. So chalk this one us as "who the heck knows for sure".

Still, it's kind of cool that he actually asked.

Busy week ahead. Luckily for me, Maha has done an excellent piece about how Iraq is coming to resemble Vietnam more and more every day -- this time, by reintroducing a focus on body counts.

Isn't there ANYONE in the US armed forces who remembers ANY of the lessons we learned so painfully in Vietnam? It's not exactly ancient history, you know.

*sigh*

Back to class readings & prep for our upcoming weekend trip to Miami.

... but the AP has a pretty good track record of not running hoaxes:

"Leaving Brooklyn? 'Oy vey!'" That's what motorists now see as they cross the Williamburg Bridge into Manhattan.

Avedon Carol kindly responded in the Comments to yesterday's post citing Jon Stewart about why so many Americans are so uninvolved with politics. Her thoughts:

There's also the part where in an oppressive state, keeping your head down is the only protection you might have. Such a state will go after its enemies. If your first allegiance is to your family or to your own survival, the last thing you want to do is draw the government's attention to you by criticizing them.

Seems to me that this POV is part of the disconnect between many left-leaning bloggers and that vast swathe of America that gets them so riled up. If you buy into that point of view, you'd have to be a person who believes that America is today a neo-Fascist state with such tight command and control over our daily lives that the average citizen rightfully fears the repercussions should s/he speak out against the state. I seriously doubt that mindset pervades Middle America today. Hell, even I don't believe it.

Yes, I'm aware of Gitmo and situations like Jose Padilla's, and the super-secret monitoring devices the NSA has that can read all our emails, and the provisions of the Patriot Act, and I am concerned about the state of civil liberties in America today. And who knows? It might even be possible that somebody in a back room in Washington DC is putting me on an "Enemies of the State" list because I've expressed my opposition to the war in Iraq.

But it seems to me that a left-leaning blogger like me is much more likely to run into trouble in the workplace because of my blog than any other possible outcome. I don't see anything going on in America today that makes me feel that my own physical security is in any way at risk by the state for my point of view.

There's a passage in the William Gibson novel "Pattern Recognition" that bears repeating here:

Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained.... he wouldn�t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.

Win's first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world's richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years.

Last year, according to government statistics, 1.1 million Americans fell below the poverty line. That equals the entire population of a major city like Dallas or Prague.

Since 2000, the ranks of the poor have increased year by year by almost 5.5 million in total.

Per Yahoo/Reuters.

As it happens, a member of my family has worked for the IAEA at 2 different times over the past 25 years, so I'm quite pleased to see this today:

"The Colbert Report" hits the airwaves soon.

Frankly, I tended to fast-forward through many of Colbert's bits on "The Daily Show". I get that what he's doing is intended to be funny, but at least half the time it just made me feel impatient: 'Yeah, yeah, you're skewering self-important, ill-informed newscasters with big egos. Point made. Move on.'

That's just me, though, and as my husband can tell you, I have a somewhat deficient sense of humor at times. I'll TiVo the first week to see if he can extend the joke to a full half-hour (less commercials).

Here's why this matters, even if I don't find Colbert funny:

When Colbert talks about skewering hypocrites, he makes clear that, like Stewart, he cares about politics as more than a punch line. He recalls Vice President Cheney, in a CNBC interview last year, being asked about having said it was "pretty well confirmed" that terrorist Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi official in Prague -- part of a White House attempt to demonstrate a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Cheney denied making the comment, but "The Daily Show" later aired a tape of a 2001 "Meet the Press" interview in which the vice president had said the Atta meeting was "pretty well confirmed."

"When Dick Cheney says, 'I never said that,' and then we play the tape, why did we do it?" Colbert says. "Why wasn't it done broadly? Because he wasn't speaking about something inconsequential. It wasn't like we were playing gotcha journalism over some quibble. It was over weapons of mass destruction. That's not advocacy journalism. That's objectivity in its most raw form."

So why don't more working journalists do what Stewart and Colbert are doing? Perhaps, Colbert says, "there's a sense that if they engaged in what we do at 'The Daily Show,' they'd be accused of being too aggressive."

I'm sure the station management is justifying this by saying they're afraid they will lose their license if they deny the Klan access to public TV, but this seems wrong:

�The Klan,� a video news program distributed by the Ku Klux Klan will be airing on MCTV in Midland. The first airing of the program will be on Saturday, October 22nd at 11:30 pm.

According to their website, the Ku Klux Klan brings �a message of hope and deliverance to white Christian America. A message of love, not hate.�

On the site can be found links to sign anti-gay marriage petitions, messages that �race-mixing� is unholy, and articles stating Martin Luther King Jr. had ties to the communist party.

Yes, yes, I know, freedom of speech means that even the people I hate are allowed to voice their noxious views. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

Woe betide the high school radio station that has a broadcast frequency coveted by Christian broadcasters. The Boston Herald reports:

Maynard High School's radio frequency, 91.7 FM, is being seized by a network of Christian broadcasting stations that the Federal Communications Commission has ruled is a better use of the public airwaves.

"People are furious,'' said faculty adviser Joe Magno.

Maynard High's WAVM, which has been broadcasting from the school for 35 years, found itself in this David vs. Goliath battle when it applied to increase its transmitter signal from 10 to 250 watts.

According to Magno, that "opens the floodgates for any other station to challenge the station's license and take its frequency."

Using a point scale that considers such factors as audience size, the FCC ruled the Christian broadcasting network the better applicant. WAVM is given 30 days to appeal, and has done so.

If the FCC refuses to overturn its decision, WAVM will fall silent.

You'd think providing an educational experience for high school kids would be considered valuable, but I suppose given the FCC we've got, that would be asking too much.

So I missed the very first episode of "The Colbert Report" (it is still on the TiVo), but caught the next two. And so far I've enjoyed it. Last night, Scott & I watched the episode together and I laughed more. This is very unusual in our household. Generally I find stuff less funny that he does.

Ezra has a point, though:

It is much tougher to sustain. What's great about Stewart is..well..Stewart. He seems like our voice in the media. A sane, intelligent, skeptical, well-meaning paladin for the people. We like to watch him because his interviews and humor bring us in on the jokes. Colbert, on the other hand, is the joke, trapped in a self-consciously disagreeable persona for the duration of his program.

And this is very much why I was worried for the show before it aired. But so far he has not laid it on as thickly as he did in his "Daily Show" segments. Color me pleased and hopeful.

This caught my eye on the CNN scroll while getting ready to head to campus:

The winners of an annual violin competition in Moscow have a new prize -- a chance to play for a year on a million-dollar violin once owned by famed 17th century virtuoso Nicolo Paganini.

That's a really neat way of making your competition stand out from the crowd -- offer a prize that literally nobody else can offer.

One year ago today was the Presidential election. That was a disappointment, to say the least.

Six years ago today, Scott & I boarded a Tower Air flight with one-way tickets to San Francisco. Frankly I never thought we'd stay here so long. It's been one hell of a roller coaster ride so far. We've switched jobs more, suffered more financial setbacks, moved to new apartments more, and generally undergone more change in the last 6 years here than I either expected or wanted. And many of those changes have not been positives.

This time next year? The Congressional elections and I'll be just about ready to graduate from b-school. Both, I sincerely hope, will be significant changes for the better.

One of the things I didn't get to blog about last week was the whole Wal-Mart / health care / evil memo leak. Nathan Newman has a nice piece at the TPM Cafe about why we need to keep holding companies like Wal-Mart's feet to the fire about health care. Here's a snippet:

The more large corporations like Wal-Mart are attacked by the public for their health care policies, the more those companies will have an incentive to push for national health care to relieve the pressure on them. But bash government, and those companies are happy to see attention diverted from them.

More fundamentally, such an approach assumes that better government bureaucrats are all that are needed to get a better policy, but the reality is that better health care in other countries is dependent on both better policies and stronger worker power to hold their companies accountable. Yes, some of the irrational incentives in the system can be eliminated, but unless the employer role is completely eliminated -- which hasn't happened except in a few countries -- then holding companies accoutable will always be critical.

He is very right.

I've seen firsthand how small employers will not hire employees or resort to contractors becasue of the difficulty and cost of offering decent health insurance. Other companies turn to employee leasing -- which is not a bad solution but doesn't address the root problem. The way things work these days it's going to take the clout of major employers like GM, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, etc to lean hard on the government before we'll get (dare I say it?) a real single-payer, non-employer based healthcare system for Americans.

So bright and early this morning I had to head over to Fremont for a plant tour of NUMMI, a GM/Toyota joint venture. They build mostly Corollas and Tacomas, with some Pontiac Vibes thrown in for good measure.

Going to NUMMI was a required field trip for my Systems class, and I was pretty psyched because I had never seen cars made before. The place was huge and impressive. We watched a short film and then got driven around the plant; frankly I wish the tour had been longer. Still, you see most major areas of the plant except for the paint shops (I suppose they're on another floor). The robot welding machines were a standout for me; I'm amazed that robots can do all that detailed work without 'eyes'. But then, I know very little about either welding or robotics, so maybe robot welders are small potatoes to those in the know.

I wish I could have taken some photos but that's strictly forbidden. The plant photos on the website don't do the place justice.

I did find myself wondering as we drove past racks of car and truck doors -- why do we need so many new cars?

One of the first things you learn in statistics class is this: CORRLEATION IS NOT CAUSATION. Yet time and again you see the scare of the week meme going around because some scientist has found a correlation between X and Y.

Here's this week's and it's a doozy:

Dr. Fuller Torrey is studying whether a parasite in Fluffy's droppings causes schizophrenia, a mental illness that strikes 2.2 million Americans and is characterized by hallucinations, delusions and trouble regulating emotions.

The Washington-area psychiatrist has found that people with schizophrenia were more likely to have had pet cats as young children, or their mothers kept the animals during their pregnancies. Torrey is now testing antibiotics against the feline parasite Toxoplasma gondii to treat schizophrenia.

In other words, he's forund a correlation and now he's testing for causation. There's no real proof of his theory. Except the article goes on to say this:

Torrey advises parents not to buy pet cats for young children.

Now I have an issue. If this meme catches on, a lot of animal shelters are going to get a wave of abandoned cats and have problems adopting out cats to people with kids. And at this point, all you have is a correlation, NOT proof of causation.

Not good at all.

What does it mean? Too soon to tell. But I have a feeling that somebody is trying to force countries like Jordan, which have been more or less on the sidelines of recent conflicts and relatively pro-West, into a more active stance.

Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has posted a handy list of things to do if protecting your personal information is important to you. It's worth checking out.

Thanks Kevin, well put:

Torture should be flatly illegal because that's the message we want to send both to our own people and to the rest of the world. Legal torture should be reserved for regimes like Cuba and North Korea, not the United States of America.

However, in the fantastically unlikely 24-esque event that we capture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking atomic bomb, he's going to get tortured regardless. The torturer will immediately get pardoned by the president for doing so, and would be unanimously acquitted by a jury even if he weren't. And I'm fine with that.

So please. Enough with the idiotic ticking time bomb already. If we're going to talk about torture, let's talk about how it's used in the real world.

Which one of these is NOT a liar?

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

No wonder they didn't want to be under oath in front of Congress.

I know a lot of people are extremely fond of Craig's List, but I've found Freecycle to be as good as, or even better than, CL when it comes to finding a new home for stuff. The 'catch' is, you can't get cash for your stuff. You have to give it away. I suppose it's deeply "hippie dippy Californian" but it works.

Goodwill is excellent for rehoming many things (plus you get a nice tax deduction), but there's some stuff they don't take. Moving boxes, for example. I hate throwing perfectly good (and not inexpensive) boxes away when a move is done. Twice now I've tried posting ads on CL to get rid of our boxes after a move, and didn't get any takers. Today, in less than three hours, I found a willing taker for all our extra boxes on Freecycle. And the nice guy who took them promised to Freecycle the boxes in his turn after his move was done. So, the boxes get reused, I feel good and get some space in my living room back. All is well.

If you've got some stuff you don't want to just throw away, and can't find a new home for it on your own, take a look at Freecycle.

I don't often agree with Dick Morris, but he's entirely right here:

Special-interest legislation doesn�t get much more obnoxious than the bill now making its way though Congress to clamp down on students and former students who want to refinance their loans at lower interest rates. They are about to be severely punished for seeking not only an education but a debt-free life afterwards.

While homeowners can refinance their mortgages as often as they want and relieve themselves of high-interest debt when rates cycle downward, student and former-student debtors are only permitted to refinance once for the lifetime of the loan! And now the House is considering legislation that would stop students who are in school from keeping their current interest rate of 4.75 percent and would instead force them to pay 7.9 percent, creating a lifetime burden entirely unjustified by the lending market.

Of course, since I'm dependent on student loans to finance my grad school education right now, you could call me biased, and you'd be right. But even so, it's ridiculous that you can't refinance student loans the same way you can any other loan.

Hat tip: Kevin Drum (whose trackbacks still seem to be broken).

Wow, I go out to study for a few hours and all sorts of stuff hits the fan in Israel.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will quit his ruling Likud ahead of snap elections and form a new centrist party.

[snip]

Sharon will tear apart the movement he helped found to break from the far-right Likud "rebels" who opposed his withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip and potentially free him to give up more land that Palestinians seek for a state.

But the 77-year-old's gamble is possibly the biggest of a military and political career built on risk-taking and polls indicate it is uncertain he can turn the popularity of the Gaza pullout into electoral victory.

Dumping the hardliners and moving towards the center. Good move. I hope it succeeds.

It will be interesting to see how the tinfoil hat crew responds. So many of them are convinced that Sharon is some kind of evil puppet master; I wonder how they'll spin this?

On the weekend before Thanksgiving six years ago, I bought my first-ever car: a Saturn SL2. It's a great car that has taken me safely through two nasty accidents, still gets 30+ MPGs on the highway, and is very reliable. I will probably drive it until it falls apart.

So to wake up to the news that the Spring Hill, TN plant where my Saturn was made is slated to be closed was a little sad. It's been years since Saturn was the "different kind of car company" it started out as. These days, Saturns are made in a number of GM plants, have reverted to steel frames, and are generally Just Another GM Brand. When the day finally comes that I do get another car, it's not likely it will be a Saturn.

I wish I'd been able to get to see the Spring Hill plant in its heyday.

RIP JFK.

Don't let it be forgot
that once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot

Jacqueline Kennedy (as she was then called) said it best in the Life Magazine interview of her, the week after JFK was assassinated:

There'll be great presidents again ... but there'll never be another Camelot again. Once, the more I read of history, the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes.

Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the book and lyrics to Camelot and in whose autobiography I found the quote above, said that he was never able to watch a production of Camelot again afterwards.

As I was doing my morning pass through my Bloglines feeds, I noted AmericaBlog's John in DC calling attention to a piece in the Washington Post about whether extreme bigotry should be considered a mental illness.

John takes that ball and runs with it:

We should set a long-term goal to get the psychological and psychiatric associations to officially make bigotry a mental disorder. The religious right would flip, fun in and of itself, but this would set the tone for an entire change in the culture, where prejudice of any kind of is considered the work of sick people.

I have two problems with that advice; one scientific, the other tactical.

First, the science. While it seems pretty clear that the people talked about in the WaPo are indeed mentally ill, I wonder whether the bigotry displayed isn't really just a symptom of the underlying disorder. Do we really need to create a new illness for this, or is it more likely that that the people in question are actually suffering from paranoia, or schizophrenia, or some other already-identified diseases?

Next, the tactics. Choosing "They're mentally ill!" as a tactic with which to attack the Religious Right is not helpful. For if you accept the underlying premise, then prejudice against bigots also falls into the illness category. In other words, when both sides get to flog the other with accusations of mental illness on top of all the other mud they fling at each other, nothing really changes. And the people who really need help still won't get it.

Finally, Shakespeare's Sister beat me to the punch with the excellent observation:

Bigotry isn�t a mental defect; it�s a learned behavior.

I'm surprised that Governor Schwarzenegger denied clemency to Williams.

From the information I have currently, I think I would have granted clemency simply because it seems to me that Williams alive provides a service to society by continuing to speak out about why gangs are bad. Williams can't do that dead, plus his execution could polarize some members of the community in negative ways. I have not done an exhaustive review of the case though, so perhaps if I examined all the facts I might feel differently.

To be clear: I am not opposed to the death penalty as a concept. I believe that there are some crimes that display such a complete disregard for your fellow humans that it is not unreasonable to deprive the person who commits those crimes of his life as the price of their acts. That said, I am well aware that the American judicial system has massive systemic problems that result in the death penalty being applied unfairly. I think there should be a moratorium on its implementation until such time as we can fix those inequities.

Or put more simply, the system is broken, but I still think that some really evil bastards deserve to fry for what they did.

"The West Wing" wouldn't have been the same without Leo McGarry. And we lost him today. 58 is way too young.

ReddHead over at firedoglake has some excellent advice today. She directed it towards lawyers, but I think it's got applicability in the wider business world as well as the political one:

You do not adequately serve your client by telling him only those things he wants to hear. Period. The most important function you can have as an attorney is to tell your client all the things he does not want to hear -- for the sole reason that he must hear them in order to make a fully informed decision. To do less is to fail at your job.

Another cardinal sin is to believe that your argument is the only right one. One of the first things you learn as a litigator is that there is always another side. Always, always, always. And you must give due consideration to every side of an issue to adequately do your job.

Of the many bits of macroeconomic esoterica I studied this semester, one that particularly caught my interest was the bond yield curve. Normally, long-term bonds pay more interest than short-term ones, because you have to lock your money up longer (this is also known as the time value of money). When you plot these prices out on a chart, you generally get a nice upward curve to the line.

However, in recent months, this hasn't been the case. The yield curve has become virtually flat. A flat yield curve means, among other things, that people believe that the economy will continue to decline.

The Big Picture goes into a great deal more detail of why this has the potential to be a problem. The piece is a bit technical but not horribly so. Here's his bottom line:

While not every inversion leads to a recession, every recession has been preceded by an inverted yield curve.

In other words, it's a sign that as 2006 fast approaches, the American economy is treading on very thin ice indeed. We may get through it unscathed, but getting back on course is going to be damn tricky.

Not only are they massively fuel-inefficient, they are NOT safer for the kiddies:

Children are no safer riding in sport utility vehicles than in passenger cars, largely because the doubled risk of rollovers in SUVs cancels out the safety advantages of their greater size and weight, according to a study.

Researchers said the findings dispel the bigger-equals-safer myth that has helped fuel the growing popularity of SUVs among families. SUV registrations climbed 250 percent in the United States between 1995 and 2002.

"We're not saying they're worse or that they're terrible vehicles. We're challenging the conventional wisdom that everyone assumed they were better," said Dr. Dennis Durbin, a pediatric emergency physician who took part in the study, published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics.

Good. Maybe people will finally stop clogging the roads with them and I will once again be able to actually see more than one car in front of me when stuck in traffic.

Amazing. Anybody, any phone number, any time.

Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls

John of AMERICABlog tests one service out, and finds that their web advertisement is correct:

The company boasts on its own Web site:

Give us the cell phone number and we will send you the calls made from the cell phone number.

So I went to their site, plopped down $110, and within a day I had a list of every single phone number that called my cell, or that I called from my cell, for the month of November. I even had the dates the calls were made, and for a premium I could find out how long the calls were.

I called Cingular and they were shocked by what I told them - yeah right.

No I am not linking to the site in question. I'm not giving them the free publicity. But I'm pissed off. Why this isn't illegal I don't know. If it is, someone ought to be going to jail pronto. And if it's not, it ought to be.

Ran a lot of errands; not feeling very bloggy.

However, Atrios had a nice piece on the concept that "Leaving = Losing" that's worth a read.

Also, back on Friday, Reddhedd had a long but truly excellent piece titled "A Question of Doing What's Right" that if you missed it, you should go back and check it out.

I just can't bring myself to care about the Alito hearings. Mostly because I'm quite sure he will be confirmed unless a massive smoking gun emerges, so why bother getting upset?

The NY Rangers' Cup-winning season of 1994 is a long time away, but the memories are still sweet.

Mark Messier, who led the New York Rangers in 1994 to their first Stanley Cup in 54 years, had his No. 11 jersey retired on Thursday in an emotional celebration at Madison Square Garden.

Surrounded by many of his teammates from that Stanley Cup winning team, members of his family and the Cup itself, Messier watched as his No. 11 banner was slowly lifted to the rafters to the strains of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

His was the fourth jersey ever retired by the Rangers, joining Rod Gilbert (No. 7), Eddie Giacomin (No. 1) and Mike Richter (No. 35), the goalie on the '94 championship team.

I'm lucky enough to have seen all 4 of those excellent players at The Garden. I wonder who will be the next Ranger to join their company.

Because I'd be willing to bet his crackpot theories would be a perfect fit at this little bash:

Iran said Sunday it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, an apparent next step in hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's campaign against Israel and a move likely to deepen Tehran's international isolation.

Ahmadinejad already had called the Nazis' World War II slaughter of 6 million European Jews a myth and said the Jewish state should be wiped off the map or moved to Germany or the United States.

UPDATE: Whoops, I didn't realize Irving was currently in prison in Austria.

Shakespeare's Sister today reposts one of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr's best speeches in honor of the holiday. There's not a man or a woman alive today who's as good a speaker as he was. We have some gifted speakers, no doubt, but none with quite the combination of fire and poetry as he.

It's a fun game to conjure up a ghost from our past and ask, "What would So-And-So think about today's world?" I'm not foolish enough to put words into MLK's mouth, but I'm pretty sure he would not be happy with the world today.

But the important thing is that Dr King was not a pessimist. Look at that speech again. Those are the words of someone who deeply believes that tomorrow will be better than today. If in 1963, Dr King could look at an America deeply racist and divided, and see a better future, then we here in 2005, with so many gains made since that day, should be able to see a brighter future too.

Insomniacs unite!

However, being awake at 5:00AM at least gives me the time to blog this bit of New York weirdness:

more than 160 riders participated in the fifth annual No Pants Subway Ride before police halted their No. 6 train about 5 p.m.

I don't think riding the subway in your boxer shorts qualifies as illegal activity, although going commando and then offing your pants probably would. Apparently this lot were all underpants-clad, so hey, go for it. Whatever floats your boat.

With more than 4 years' distance between 9/11 and today, I suppose it's time to start asking where 9/11 fits into the larger tapestry that is American history. In the NY Times this weekend, Joseph Ellis takes the question on. He is likely to get roundly smacked in some quarters for this comment:

Where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

And in fact, by his own definition, I'm not sure even World War II qualifies as "first tier", because although it was a dire time for many of our allies, I am not convinced that either Germany or Japan would have been able to seriously threaten the survival of the American republic. Perhaps if the war had gone very differently, and then both countries united in an invasion attempt ... but I digress.

At any rate, he's right about 9/11. Now, saying that does not negate the fact that 9/11 was a horrible day for me personally, for the people in my life and my home town, or for the country in general. However, worse things have happened to us, and they may yet again. Demogogues use this to their advantage, though; inflating 9/11's role in the grand scheme and trying to whip up people's fears that 'the terrorists' are lurking outside their local strip malls and Wal-Marts, ready to strike at a moment's notice with just a cell phone call from Osama.

The Heretik asks, "Where does it end?" 4+ years later, that's a more than fair question.

I was in class and missed the whole thing. I have no interest in raising my blood pressure by watching the news snippets and/or reading a transcript of the President's State Of The Union speech. I'm just going to pretend it didn't happen and get ready for Wednesday Hell Day.

This is really getting out of hand. Cooler heads need to start prevailing, and fast.

Several thousand Syrian demonstrators set the Danish and the Norwegian embassies on fire on Saturday to protest at the publishing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad by European newspapers.

The title of this thread comes from a Flash animated cartoon, by the way. Hopefully nobody will be offended by it.

The Heretik says today:

THE COURAGE TO BEGIN is one thing, the courage to continue perhaps greater.

Very true. Even the simplest acts, like starting to write, can be courageous. And we need more courage in this world.

Sometime I think fear is just as dangerous an emotion as hate.

This crossed my path today:

A civil rights group is suing classifieds website Craigslist for publishing what it calls discriminatory housing ads. Lawyers say some of the offending listings called for "no minorities," or "no children."

Other listings were more specific, "African Americans and Arabs...won't work out," or, "requirements: Clean Godly Christian male."

Newspapers clearly cannot publish ads that discriminate. But Craiglist says while it asks people to read and understand the law, it cannot be responsible for ads that break that law.

Ultimately the question seems to be whether Craigslist is a publisher or a service provider. One's protected, the other isn't. I'd be surprised if CL doesn't end up having to make some changes in how housing ads get posted to the site, but time will tell.

Side note -- We've never found the Craiglist housing ads particularly helpful. All three of the places we've ended up renting in the Bay Area have come from other sources -- the first was via a paid service, the second from the SF Chronicle ads, the third from the San Mateo Chamber of Commerce.

As William Gibson pointed out, paranoia is often narcissism. Dave Neiwert makes an excellent point today about the fine line between healthy concern and paranoia:

I recall that the right also used to claim that Clinton was not just building concentration camps, but he was also secretly wiretapping American citizens. That he was assassinating political enemies in secret. That he was remaking the presidency into a virtual dictatorship with limitless powers. All without a smidgen of anything approaching factual evidence.

And now we have a president who really is not just preparing to building mass detention centers, but who has been conducting illegal domestic surveillance, who has claimed the power to order assassinations on American soil, who does appear to be claiming limitless powers as a "wartime" executive. Is it any wonder, really, that people's paranoia meters are running at full blast?

I remember reading some of the Y2K websites back in 1999, and was vaguely amused to find how often they would wander into "New World Order" tinfoil hat rhetoric. Just because we're seeing similar rhetoric on the other side of the spectrum doesn't make it more true. As always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

All of which is not to sat that there's no potential for abuse here. There definitely is, and we need to be aware of it. But jumping to the exact same conclusions that proved to be groundless in 2000 is probably not the way to go.

Not something I'd normally write about. However, the Indianapolis Star did a multi-article special report on the topic this week, and one of the main contributors is someone I've been friends with since we were 12.

So check it out.

Remember a week or so ago, when I posted a report about a small town where trying to educate kids about opera by way of "Faust" was considered too radical?

Now another town has decided that "Grease" and "The Crucible" are inappropriate (the NY Times notes that they are the second-most frequently performed musical and drama in US schools). And all it took was three letters to the school's principal to start the censorship ball rolling.

Even better is the chilling effect this will have for upcoming productions and even on the drama teacher's career:

The teacher and her students are now ruling out future productions they once considered for their entertainment value alone, like "Little Shop of Horrors," a musical that features a cannibalistic plant, which they had discussed doing next fall.

Torii Davis, a junior, said that in her psychology class earlier that day, most students predicted that "Little Shop of Horrors" would never pass the test.

"Audrey works in a flower shop," Ms. Davis said. "She has a boyfriend who beats her. That could be controversial."

Ms. DeVore went down a list of the most commonly performed musicals and dramas on high school stages, and ticked off the potentially offensive aspects. " 'Bye Bye Birdie' has smoking and drinking. 'Oklahoma,' there's a scene where she's almost raped. 'Diary of Anne Frank,' would you take a 6-year-old?" the drama teacher asked.

"How am I supposed to know what's appropriate when I don't have any written guidelines, and it seems that what was appropriate yesterday isn't appropriate today?" Ms. DeVore asked. The teacher said she had been warned that because of the controversy, the school board might not renew her contract for next year.

I wonder what those head-in-the-sand culture bigots would think of "South Pacific" ... the guy who sleeps with a Polynesian girl gets killed off, after all ... maybe they would consider that appropriate punishment for immoral behavior. The underlying message, that bigotry will lead to unhappiness, might just sail right over their heads though.

ADDENDUM: Something I remembered after I hit the "submit" button -- back in the day, quite a few of the music/drama types in my high school class were enamoured of the Stephen Schwartz musical, "Godspell" (which is a muscal adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew). We begged our theater teacher to schedule a production of it. He refused, saying it would be too controversial. And given that the Jewish population of our school was probably better than 50% I suppose he was right. He did not generally shy away from controversial subject matter -- one of the productions we did do during my years at school was the Schmidt / Jones piece "Celebration", which includes a number in which two characters are making love while a third person watches.

Is there a point to my anecdote? Not really, I just thought it was interesting to show how what is and is not 'appropriate' for high school students can vary so widely.

Kevin Drum's translation of the new BushCo health plan proposal:

Current system (for those with insurance): When you get sick you go to the doctor. When your kids get sick, they go to the doctor. You don't have to quibble over costs or spend time second guessing your doctor over whether a test he recommends is really necessary. As Bush himself says, it seems like a pretty good deal.

Now here's what Bush is trying to sell: When you get sick, you should spend a lot of time shopping around for doctors to find one you can afford. You should put off tests that he recommends if they're expensive. You should haggle over the cost of drugs as if you were buying a used car. And when you get home you should worry about whether you made the right decision or not.

Indeed. Of course, if you don't have health insurance the whole issue is moot, and neither the current system nor the BushCo proposals are good ways of solving that particular problem. But given the existing setup, less worry = better.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

-- Bertrand Russell

So famous Holocaust denier David Irving has been sentenced to three years in jail in Austria for violating this law:

whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.

Given the recent debate over free speech issues regarding the Danish cartoons, a lot of people are probably going to say that Irving should not be jailed for what he did. I'm not so sure.

I don't see this so much as a free speech issue as an issue about lying. I don't think it is unreasonable to say that in countries such as Austria, if you're going to talk about the historical record of WW2, you have an obligation to do so accurately. Irving is entitled to whatever opinions he wants, but he's not entitled to his own set of facts, and I think it's acceptable to call him on that difference.

We send people to jail for perjury, after all. Why is this so different?

I'm not generally a Mark Morford fan, but he did a good column in the Chronicle today about obese America vis a vis his recent vacation to Cabo. Here's a snippet:

Perhaps this, then, is the new great divide. Forget red state versus blue state. Forget liberal versus conservative, straight versus gay, rich versus poor, mullet versus sideburn, red wine versus white. The new division in America is greater than anything we have seen before: Healthy versus ill. Slim versus fat. Light versus heavy. Clean-running organs and unstrained hearts and the ability to engage with the world around you with something resembling lightness and ease and swift reflexes, versus a sort of indolent awkwardness and dis-ease and pain, an unconscious layering-on of fatty protection against a world gone angry and confusing.

On average, probably not:

The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace.

They say getting older makes you more conservative. Maybe it's true, because when I read this over at AmericaBlog, my reaction wasn't quite the same as John's:

Anyone who thought this "traditional family values" garbage was only focusing on gays, well, get ready because you're next.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Olivia Shelltrack finally has her dream home. Her family moved into the five-bedroom, three-bath frame house in Black Jack last month. But now she fears she and her fiance face uprooting their children because of a city ordinance that says her household fails to meet Black Jack's definition of a family.

Shelltrack and Fondray Loving, her boyfriend of 13 years, were denied an occupancy permit because of an ordinance forbidding three or more individuals from living together if they are not related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The couple have three children, ages 8, 10 and 15, although Loving is not the biological father of the oldest child.

Here's what I simply don't understand. They've been together 13 years. The have kids together. They own a home together. Why on earth don't they just get married and be done with it?

I know, I know, they're entitled to organized their lives the way they choose to organize them, and it's more than a little stupid for the town to pass an ordiance like that. But really, would it kill them to just go to city hall and get the piece of paper? Especially since there are so many financial and legal benefits to being married. It's not like being married is a Bad Thing.

Like I said, maybe I'm just too old to get it. But I don't see what is so horribly wrong about getting married.

*sigh* Between this post, the Mark Morford thing, and my post about David Irving the week before that, I'll probably get kicked off a few progressive blogrolls for showing DINO tendencies. I'm sorry, truly, if I've upset any readers. All I can say is, this is who I am; if I'm not quite as far Left as you thought, I'm sorry. I do think Joe Lieberman is a dork - does that help?

Each game of chess means there's one less Variation left to be played Each day got through means one or two Less mistakes remain to be made...

Chess (Anderson, Ulvaeus, Rice)

Today's actions were just one early move in the bigger chess match that is abortion rights in America today. I'm not surprised at the latest burst of outrage around the blogs, but remember the big picture here, gang. South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds' signing the bill was a forgone conclusion. It doesn't start to get interesting until someone -- presumably Planned Parenthood -- files their challenge to the law and the courts get into gear.

This is chess -- think a few moves ahead. Not only is this law on the fast track to SCOTUS, but in addition, it's also nicely timed for the 2006 congressional election cycle. You can bet your bootie that congressional candidates all across the country are going to be asked to weigh in on their beliefs about women's reproductive rights by way of their comments on this case.

So, vent your spleen all you like, but save some energy for the battles to come, becasue come they will. And if you can, consider tossing some $ to Planned Parenthood; they're going to need it.

Time, by the way, has an interesting look at this issue. It's worth a read, here's a snippet:

In a country where two thirds of the public does not want to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, but nearly as many favor stricter limits on abortion, pragmatic abortion opponents have pushed for parental notification laws, waiting periods, restrictions on late-term abortions: The strategy was to chip away at Roe to try to shrink it, change its shape, and over time promote a �culture of life� that would view abortion less as a right than a tragedy, perhaps eventually a crime. That gradual approach requires a certain level of hypocrisy�or at least a willing suspension of moral belief�because if you truly equate abortion with murder, it�s hard to settle for slowing it down rather than stopping it altogether, right away: the Purist approach.

Nice to see an article that take a real look at this issue outside of the typical platitudes.

I've said this before, but something in a comment thread over at Shakes' place got me going enough to want to say it again.

Thread commenter Eric said:

once Roe is overturned, you are going to see a profound shift in the political landscape as women realize that their own civil, and reproductive, rights are being supressed by male legislatures. The Democrats will then have a strong rallying cry, and perhaps an infusion of support by women as they realize the difficulties, hardships, and dangers of back ally abortions.

Overturning Roe will be the turning point in the destruction of the religious wing-nut's power over the Republican Party.

This attitude infuriates me. It is just as odious an argument for progressives to make as it is for the wingnuts who sit safely behind their keyboards, cheering on the Iraq war. The bottom line for both types is: It's all good as long as someone else does the dying.

Progressive who argue this line of reasoning are generally sitting safely in deep-blue states or are financially well-off in red states. The only reason they consider the overturn of Roe to be an acceptable turn of events is because they assume that they will be able to insulate themselves from the casualties.

My question to them is: How many deaths do you consider to be "acceptable losses" before it happens?

And a few follow-ups: What if it was not some anonymous women in Red states who had to do the dying for Roe? Are you willing to let your wife / daughters / sisters / cousins / friends be the ones who have to bleed out on their kitchen floors or die from massive infections? And if you're not, then why are those other women's lives expendable?

In short, isn't that the exact thing we're fighting against?

For a happier change of pace, I'd pulled this piece from USA Today about great places for coffee around the USA.

Bay View Farm Honaunau, Hawaii

Caffe Dante and Caffe Reggio
New York

Caffe Trieste
San Francisco

Peet's
Berkeley

Zoka
Seattle

News Cafe
Miami Beach

Stumptown Coffee Roasters
Portland

Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters
Chicago

Caf� Beignet
New Orleans

True Grounds
Somerville

I've only been to the ones in New York -- Caffe Dante and Caffe Reggio -- but they were near our old apartment and I liked both. Caffe Dante was a particular favorite. Aside from good coffee, it is also one of the few places I've found outside of Italy to have really authentic (and good) gelato.

And if I'd known how good the coffee was at News Cafe, I would have gone there when I was in Miami -- it was very near our hotel. Bummer.

KGO was saying this morning that there's a small but real chance that the snow level will drop to ground level during this weekend's storms. Wow. It almost NEVER snows here.

And I for one haven't seen snow in years. I miss it. I hope we get some!

Here's what I'd tell him:

You've got your single-season steroid-enhanced record, and much good may it do you. Accept the fact that you won't beat Hank Aaron, retire, and take all the controversy with you.

But please, just go.

Smelling the Coffee says, "You aren't going to believe this one," but I didn't find it that mind blowing. It seems to be very firmly rooted in the grand tradition of vaudeville to me:

Performer Chris Bliss juggles to the tune of "Abbey Road". (click the link on the right)

Although to be sure, it's a pretty impressive display of juggling skill.

So this week is my Spring Break. It doesn't feel much like a break. I'm working as per usual, three days a week. Plus, with a midterm and a 20-minute class presentation coming up next week, I'm spending my two "off" days up on campus studying and working. In other words, the only thing that's break-y about this week is that I don't have to be on campus at night Tuesday and Wednesday.

Not feeling particularly blog-y either. However, John at AmericaBlog has a really nice rant that's worth a read.

This is definitely NOT work-safe (or kid-safe) but very funny: a video clip with a bunch of TV actors telling us their favorite swear words. Apparently it was part of a promotional campaign for Channel 4 over in the UK.

I like it, although it's one of those commercials that will be remembered more for the content than for the actual product it's supposed to be promoting.

Four times a year, they do a "Day In The Life" challenge at Flickr. You're supposed to chronicle your day and share the shots with the other people on Flickr.

I'm interested and want to participate but also feel very intimidated by the whole thing. There are a lot of good photographers on Flickr; I doubt my pedestrian efforts will hold up well to theirs.

Oh, and Happy Spring to all!

Perhaps it's only funny because despite being exhausted I only managed to get 4 hours of sleep, but seamus over at Rangelife has a very funny mockup of the "new" SF Examiner at the end of a rant on the GWOT and the media.

If you're not a SF area resident you might not get the joke though.

Let's see if I can fall back asleep now or not.

Orcinus started my online Sunday with a long assessment of the current situation around illegal immigration. Kevin Drum and Nathan Newman also weigh in (and I haven't made it through all of my blogroll yet today, so there are probably others as well).

My gut feeling is this: it seems more than a little unfair to slam the door shut on other people when you yourself have benefited from the same avenue to a better life. We are all of us children of immigrants. The only difference is how many generations it has been since we got here.

I also think some of the anti-illegal immigration foes need to get their arguments straight and stop fear-mongering. I don't like "rewarding lawbreaking" either, and I understand not wanting to be flooded with residents who are a net drain the local tax base. That's why we need immigration reform. But the answer is not about building a nice high wall and shutting the rest of the world out. We're people, not ostriches.

There's a lot that could be done to make it easier for people to come here legally, and to smack down employers who employ (and all too often exploit) illegal immigrants. It would be nice if Congress could come up with some good legislation on that front (getting it past the White House would be a whole other issue, but let's let that sit for the moment). As Orcinus points out, even the McCain-Kennedy bill isn't a comprehensive solution to the problem.

I'm less sure that we can do much about the global wage inequalities that are a major driver of immigration to America, although I agree that without some sort of solution to this root cause then the pressure for immigration will continue. I think that's a problem that the world community as a whole needs to address. We can't do it alone. Even so, that doesn't reduce our responsibility to work on the issues we do have control over.

The bottom line is this -- why would we not want people who want to come here and contribute in a positive way to this country? Because they don't look and talk like we do? If that's the best you can come up with, that's pathetic.

I was going to do an April Fool's post, but before I could write it, I noticed that an old friend from NY is off doing what I've wanted to do -- eating his way through New Orleans post Katrina. The first installment of his trip report is up.

Read 'em & eat.

This entry is titled with some words from the DC immigration march that I heard on the radio while I was driving home from work today. There were marches in 130 cities, I hear. AmericaBlog and Atrios got out to their local rallies & have photos posted. I wish I could have gone to one as well, but the closest I got was seeing some of the residual traffic from the San Jose march.

As I said a week or so ago, immigration is something I have strong feelings about. If America had not opened its doors to my mother�s parents � Polish Jews born in the early 20th century -- they would most likely have died in one of Hitler�s concentration camps. As much as I may complain about the things I don�t like about America, I never forget that my family and I all owe this country our lives. And I�m also not arrogant enough to think that we�re the only ones who deserve that good fortune.

So here�s my bottom line: unless there is a damn good reason to think that someone will not be a good citizen of America, we should allow him/her to come here and work for a better life.

Now, exactly how we do that, I�m not sure. We all know the system right now is broken. It�s not just the illegal immigrant problem � anyone who�s fallen in love with and married someone not from this country can tell you what an insane pain in the butt it can be to get their status settled, even when the person in question is here legally.

I recognize that there are some practical concerns that accompany an open door immigration policy and that not everyone who wants to come here is going to be able to come here. That�s Ok, we can work on it. But we need to start from the foundation belief that we want immigration and that immigrants are still welcome in this Land of the Free.

I�m also uncomfortably aware that this is another one of those issues that is being turned into yet another red/blue wedge issue by the Right Wing Noise Machine. As a lifelong resident of urban, coastal parts of America, people from other countries are a part of my daily life in countless ways. Immigration is not just about the people who pick lettuce or clean houses for people like me. In my America, my classmates, co-workers, friends and even family members come from all corners of the globe. For someone from Nebraska or even coastal states like South Carolina, you don�t see that so much. Small wonder they�re more inclined to see immigrants as �other� instead of �us�.

How do we combat that? That�s something else I�m not sure about. But we need to try.

The NYC pix are on Flickr. Here's one of my favorites, taken in the ladies' room of a small bistro on E 61st.

The entire upper half of all 4 walls were papered like this. At first I thought it was wallpaper but nope, it's all real labels from real bottles. Cool huh?

Digby calls this an American problem, but actually I don't think it is all that unique to us. At various points in time, parts of Europe and the Middle East have definitely been afflicted with this set of delusions, and I daresay other parts of the world as well.

Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling, by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason.

Maybe I'm cranky, or jaded. Or perhaps totally dense. But I really don't get why everybody is so upset by the Net Neutrality thing all of a sudden.

I�ve been going online since 1993, and for a significant part of that time, the Internet has been my business. I�ve seem more iterations of "the government is coming to tax your email!" than I can count. When I was still active in the ISP world, I heard about plenty of peering shenanigans that had the potential cut parts of the Internet off from each other. I remember when cable companies started offering Internet access and there was great hand wringing about their potential to cut off their subscribers from parts of the Internet because unlike telcos, cable companies were less regulated.

So when it hit the blogosphere today, my response was, "Oh. That again." (yawn)

This is about trying to squeeze more profitability out of the data pipes, not about �the bad guys are coming to take your blogs away!� Comcast�s execs could care less what you do with the Internet so long as they can make a fat profit off it. Since the US does not have laws on net neutrality, trying to create a tiered content system is an easy way to extract more profit.

That�s not to say that the issue isn�t a real one, but I�m a little confused why so many bloggers are letting themselves be scared by the boogeyman on this one. Here�s what I think will actually happen:

1) Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and all the other large net-based content sites will get their own lobbyists to lean on Congress.
2) The FCC will re-issue their previous rulings on Net Neutrality.
3) Prices for fast bandwidth will go up. Comcast, Verizon, et al will blame the government for not letting them save the consumer money by creating tiered access systems where the content provider pays.
4) We all continue our merry way.

Now, I could be wrong, of course, but frankly I'm more freaked out by this.

Yesterday, I was chatting with a classmate who's graduating in three weeks. She mentioned that even though her MBA is almost done, she really wasn't sure what she's actually learned.

Obligatory snark about a couple of useless classes aside, you actually do learn something in B-school. For example, if I hadn't taken Macroeconomics, I would never have thought this was funny.

I could do without the "We're Columbia, we rule!" verse at the end, and it might be a bit unfair to slam Bernanke when he's only been Fed chair less than 3 months, but still, I laughed and sent the link to my econ prof.

Now you won't have to go to Amsterdam for that "special" vacation.

Possessing marijuana, cocaine and even heroin will no longer be a crime in Mexico if the drugs are carried in small amounts for personal use, under legislation passed by Congress.

The measure given final passage by senators in a late night session on Thursday allows police to focus on their battle against major drug dealers, the government says, and President Vicente Fox is expected to sign it into law.

That's going to be one hell of a tourist boon for Mexico.

Per KCBS:

For nine students camped at the University of San Francisco, Monday's march for immigrant rights was the kickoff of a week long fast to show solidarity for a struggle that is very personal for them.

Sophomore Max Orozso�s father came from Mexico, and the young man calls himself privileged to be receiving a college education.

�We're camping out here in the middle of the school. Most of us sleep in this large tent we have here,� Orozso told KCBS reporter Margie Shafer.

Senior Maria Vivanco�s parents also immigrated from Mexico.

�Only one percent of this world's population has a college education. It is a privilege to have a higher education,� Vivanco said. �So we as Chicanos, we said, OK, we have a responsibility, so we need to act.�

Students from the school�s nursing program make regular rounds at the camp, checking the protesters� vital signs.

That's about all I've got right now. I'm in the run-up to end of classes & finals.

This is the least bloggy I've been in quite some time. Only one final to go and the semester is over, but nothing's really inspiring me to blog.

Yes, I know, there's a lot going on, but since KGO this morning told me that 66% of the country seems to think that collecting information about every phone call you've made since 9/11 is perfectly OK, complaining about it seems rather pointless.

Best line of the day:

"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system."

Hat tip, Discourse.net.

Love you, Mom!

Ezra's got a blog post about the pros / cons of blogging anonymously or under a pseudonym. It's an issue that comes up periodically.

It did get me thinking, though -- it's easy to talk about blogging's potential downsides. What are some of the positive things that have come out of having a blog?

Everyone's answer will be different, I think. For me, it's definitely helped my writing -- I've always been a decent writer, but I'm a faster one now, more confident in my 'voice' and hopefully a bit more polished.

By way of Yahoo:

To you, that angry, horn-blasting tailgater is suffering from road rage. But doctors have another name for it � intermittent explosive disorder � and a new study suggests it is far more common than they realized, affecting up to 16 million Americans.

Road rage, temper outbursts that involve throwing or breaking objects and even spousal abuse can sometimes be attributed to the disorder, though not everyone who does those things is afflicted.

By definition, intermittent explosive disorder involves multiple outbursts that are way out of proportion to the situation. These angry outbursts often include threats or aggressive actions and property damage.

I'm taking bets on how long it will take before a defense attorney tries to get his wife-beating client off by arguing that his client is a victim of this new mental illness.

Two weeks?

What do you think?

There's a small pile of links that I've been meaninmg to blog about but for various reasons they slipped past me. Rather than let them go completely, as I usually do, this time I'm rescuing a few of them:

- I liked Georgial10's take on the RFK 'Election Fraud' article.
- This excellent guest post over at Digby's place is a must -read for history buffs
- And this non-violent approach to rebuilding the Temple has been sitting on my desktop for months.

Also, welcome to the blogroll, Watching The Planet. Hope you're feeling a little less lost in cyberspace.

Seen on LiveJournal today. Very clever.

I'm not feeling so hot, though; it might have been what I ate for lunch (not a lobster!).

Everyone knows the saying, 'Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.' Maybe we ought to change it to include something about the special corruptive powers of government contracts? Or is this simply another proof that the saying is true as is?

As firefighters searched for survivors after the Sept. 11 attacks, heat from the World Trade Center's smoldering ruins burned the soles off their boots. They needed new ones every few hours, and Chris Christopherson made sure they got them. The moment that crushed Christopherson's faith was when his employer dispatched the trucks to the warehouse for those supplies, donated by Americans.

...

Kieger Enterprises of Lino Lakes, Minn., dispatched trucks to a Long Island warehouse and loaded hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donated bottled water, clothes, tools and generators to be moved to Minnesota in a plot to sell some for profit, according to government records and interviews.

Dan L'Allier said he witnessed 45 tons of the New York loot being unloaded in Minnesota at his company's headquarters. He and disaster specialist Christopherson complained to a company executive, but were ordered to keep quiet. They persisted, going instead to the FBI.

The two whistleblowers eventually lost their jobs, received death threats and were blackballed in the disaster relief industry. But they remained convinced their sacrifice was worth seeing justice done.

They were wrong.

...

The lead investigators for the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency told AP that the plan to prosecute KEI for those thefts stopped as soon as it became clear in late summer 2002 that an FBI agent in Minnesota had stolen a crystal globe from ground zero.

That prompted a broader review that ultimately found 16 government employees, including a top FBI executive and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, had such artifacts from New York or the Pentagon.

"How could you secure an indictment?" FEMA investigator Kirk Beauchamp asked. "It would be a conflict."

So... some agent keeps a desk ornament as a memento; that means you cannot prosecute the theft of tons of material for resale? Give me a freaking break!

That this current administration is so wrong in so many ways is no surprise, but even when I think theat I've lost the capacity to be surprised or upset by what they do, they still manage to find new ways to piss me off.

Worst. Administration. Ever.

Watching The Planet is feeling Biblical today. Getting a huge dump of rain on your head can do that to you:

And the Lord sent hurricanes to Florida, THE red state of the 2000 elections. But the Bush Administration did not heed the message of the Lord in the storm, and lo, they did not get it.

And the Lord sent hurricanes to Louisiana and Texas, and the people did cry out with much anguish. And the President continued his vacation, and the people suffered. And the Administration did naught while the people suffered, and the Lord made those who care little for the people to reveal themselves. But lo, they still did not get it.

And the Lord sent rain to Washington, D.C. Five inches in one night. And the Lord caused great frustration among the people, for he caused the Beltway to be closed, and 66 to be flooded, and the 9th and 12th Street tunnels under the Mall as well. And along Constitution Avenue, from 6th to 17th Streets, around the White House itself, closed it was, for there was a great lake, and much frustration and gnashing of teeth. And still the Administration did not understand the wrath of the Lord, and lo, they still did not get it.

Thus Endeth The Lesson.

The guy who got me to start a weblog doesn't blog all that regularly these days, but he put up a post recently that I liked, not least because purple is one of my favorite colors. His "Can I Choose Purple?" is a rant about his frustration with the whole blue state / red state thing and expressing a wish that people could spend their time looking for the purple areas of agreement instead of the things that divide Americans.

Here's a sample:

It�s only when you force someone to pick sides that you start to polarize the issue. �Well gee, I guess if I have to choose between a rock and a hard place, I�ll go with that team.�

I don�t care what color you choose, but by putting up the context that you have to choose, you�re forcing people to go to one extreme, or another. Then with everyone entrenched on being either liberal, or conservative, you�ve created extremists for both sides and isn�t that what the whole War On Terror is about stopping?

Sure, America is divided when you force the artificial constructs of liberal or conservative, but for that matter, you might as well do a program about north versus south, because there are just as many differences there. The simple fact is that America is a diverse nation and whatever type of American you�re looking for, if you look hard enough, you�ll find it.

By and large, I agree with him. If you look hard enough, you can find common ground on at least some issues with people whom you utterly disagree with on other issues. And that's a good thing. It fosters communication and a sense that we are all in this together.

But here's the problem: what happens when not everyone feels that way? What happens when people crank up their fervent rhetoric higher and higher to the point that there is simply no way to deal rationally with them?

There are unfortunately way too many examples of the kind of behavior I'm talking about. But the one that got me posting about this issue today was something Glenn Greenwald looked at in extensive detail this weekend: how an article in the New York Times Travel section can be so completely misconstrued by people firmly settled into the " Us / Them" mindset.

The short version of the story is that the Times did an article about the vacation possibilities in a Maryland town, and happened to mention that two top Bush administration officials have vacation homes there.

If you read any newspaper's travel section, you'll notice that articles about 'new' vacation spots are very often capped by mentioning which famous person happens to go there or own a house there. This is utterly normal stuff. Yet somehow, the fact that the Times dared mention Cheney and Rumsfeld in the article transformed it from a typical piece of travel journalism into ... I am not kidding about this ... an instruction manual for al Qaeda on how to assassinate those men, planted in the Travel section by Times editors who are pissed off that the Bush administration is not happy with their recent reporting in other sections of the paper.

No, I'm not kidding. Go read Greenwald's piece.

So, how do you start to find common ground when people can look at the same thing and come away with such completely different responses?

Anybody?

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

By way of William Gibson:

�A nation,� he heard himself say, �consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual�s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation�s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn�t a nation.� He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun�s inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn�t fired the gun since they�d been together.

�What did you say?�

�Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?� Milgrim heard himself say this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable.

�The fuck��

�If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why they call him �terrorist� He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.�

Brown opened his mouth. Closed it.

�It's actually based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.�

There was a look on Brown�s face that Milgrim hadn�t seen there before. Now Brown tossed a fresh bubble-pack down on the bedspread.

�Goodnight,� Milgrim heard himself say.

This isn't an optimal solution, but if it stops the sectarian mayhem going on in Iraq these days, then maybe it's worth considering....

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.

There's two kinds of crazy in this world. Good crazy, and bad crazy.

This would be an example of the first kind (hat tip, Jason, and click through for the big version):

Who on earth thought this up and then spent the time to put it together? You've got to be a little bit crazy -- the good kind. The world needs more of this.

And then, there's the other kind of crazy. (No, I am not going to take a swipe at Ann Coulter, other people are doing a great job of that already). Who would have thought that a nominally neutral news station like CNN would broadcast something like this?

For the second time in three days, CNN featured a segment on the potential coming of the Apocalypse, as indicated by current conflicts in the Middle East. The July 26 edition of CNN's Live From ... featured a nine-minute segment in which anchor Kyra Phillips discussed the Apocalypse and the Middle East with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg -- who share the view that the Rapture is nigh. At one point in the discussion, Phillips asked Rosenberg whether she needed "to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I'm sorry for all the evil things I've done," to which Rosenberg replied: "Well, that would be a good start."

There's a large number of TV stations where this issue gets discussed regularly. But none of them (until recently) have been CNN, and that's how it should be. The possible coming of the Apocalypse is NOT news, it's a religious belief. It is in a completely different category from the rest of the news of the day and should be treated as such. It's crazy to think otherwise. The bad kind of crazy.

Disclaimer: Yes, I am being very flip about the use of the word crazy in this post. Consider it a lame attempt to be funny and smash two very different topics into one unified blog post. Mental illness is a serious issue, I know. Don't get your hate on.

So I was chatting over IM today with my friend Jason about the whole Mel Gibson thing.

"It's too bad," he said. "I really liked his Mad Max movies."

The implication being, with Gibson's anti-Semitism front and center, what Jew will want to watch his movies anymore, much less buy them on DVD or go to see any new works of his? That sounds about right to me.

I've enjoyed a number of Mel Gibson's movies over the years. Mad Max isn't my thing, but I have seen the entire Lethal Weapon franchise (#1 and #3 are the best), plus at least 8 or 9 other films he's starred in. His Hamlet was excellent; so was Maverick. It's not every actor who can do a good job in such wildly different roles. And until this past weekend, I was prepared to overlook any possible private beliefs Gibson had in favor of his obvious talent. Even during all the hubbub about The Passion... I was prepared to take him at face value and believe that he didn't have any real deep-seeted issues with Jews.

Now? Not so much. Alcohol can certainly encourage a person to say things that they wouldn't have said when sober, but to launch into a full-out tirade against Jews; well, it had to have come from somewhere. The booze didn't make him an anti-Semite, it just brought it out into the open. At least, that's how it seems to me.

I'm not going to be able to enjoy looking at his face any time in the near future. It's like when Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor; reality crowds in so much that it's hard to suspend disbelief and enjoy the show. And why should I spend my time and my hard-earned money on someone who has so little good to say about people like me?

On the other hand, I like Wagner's music too, and not only did he hate Jews, but he was also one of Hitler's favorite composers. The difference being, Wagner is not around to get rich off the money I pay for his CDs, and Gibson is still very much alive and kicking.

Does that mean I'm in a self-imposed lifelong Gibson boycott? I don't know. Maybe a few years from now, I'll feel differently; we'll see what happens. But for now, as much as I've been a fan, I'll find other entertainers to spend my time and money on.

Kevin Drum has a new law (a la Godwin):

If you're forced to rely on random blog commenters to make a point about the prevalence of some form or another of disagreeable behavior, you've pretty much made exactly the opposite point.

Apparently, despite this week's unpleasantness, the Bush administration has its security priorities in order .... NOT:

While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the
Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.

And this is not an isolated incident:

For more than four years, officials inside Homeland Security also have debated whether to deploy smaller trace explosive detectors � already in most American airports � to foreign airports to help stop any bomb chemicals or devices from making it onto U.S.-destined flights.

A 2002 Homeland report recommended "immediate deployment" of the trace units to key European airports, highlighting their low cost, $40,000 per unit, and their detection capabilities. The report said one such unit was able, 25 days later, to detect explosives residue inside the airplane where convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid was foiled in his attack in December 2001.

A 2005 report to Congress similarly urged that the trace detectors be used more aggressively, and strongly warned the continuing failure to distribute such detectors to foreign airports "may be an invitation to terrorist to ply their trade, using techniques that they have already used on a number of occasions."

Tony Fainberg, who formerly oversaw Homeland Security's explosive and radiation detection research with the national labs, said he strongly urged deployment of the detectors overseas but was rebuffed.

So what exactly is DHS doing that is making us safer?

Really good Doonesbury today.

So a co-worked passed this link to me today -- a group is trying to shame McDonald's into not giving out toy Hummers with their Happy Meals. If you're so inclined, you can also make your own McDonald's road sign there.

Like this:

But oddly, after I was done checking the site out, I started thinking "wouldn't a hamburger for lunch be a good idea?"

Not that I would have gotten said burger at McD's, but still, it got me thinking. Maybe that Ronald McHummer site is in fact an evil marketing ploy designed to get people going to McDonald's!

Oh, and for the record, I ended up having schwarma for lunch. Yum yum.

This is what we went to war for?

Nearly five years after the ouster of the fundamentalist Taliban regime, President Hamid Karzai plans to breathe new life into a strict Islamic institution that many Afghans were happy to see die: the Amr Bilmaruf va Nahi az Mankar, or literally, "Do the good, don't do the bad."

Last month, Karzai's Cabinet approved a proposal to re-establish the agency also known as the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, whose police under the Taliban beat and imprisoned Afghans for violating Shariah law. For many, the revival of religious cops raises painful memories of ruffians zipping around Kabul in Datsun pickups mainly in search of women and girls who refused to wear the head-to-toe burqa, donned high heels, wore nail polish or walked down city streets without a male relative. Men were cited for sporting short beards, drinking alcohol, working during prayer time, playing chess or listening to nonreligious music.

Update 6:55PM:

Lest it be thought that I am suggesting that idiocy is confined to just one part of the world, how's this for stupid?

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action.

It's bad enough that we're all treated like potential terrorists every time we get onto an airplane, but now racist passengers also get a say in who gets to fly?

Maha has a great followup to the Flight 613 inanity.

Also, I've been meme-tagged. I'll work on it.

So, Sour Duck tagged me with the following meme:

Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe.

It's a huge list, especially if you add in some of the auxiliary collections available in the random generator. I found 5 quotes, but for all I know there might be others that are even better; I didn't have time to page through them all.

So, here we go. Here are five random quotes that resonate with me:

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
Kahlil Gibran

To believe in the heroic makes heroes.
Benjamin Disraeli

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

Stupid people always think they are right. Wise people listen to advice.
Proverbs 12:15

There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. If you make a chair, you want to make a nice chair. You want people to admire it. I think doing something well is a form of respect for humanity in general. I have found that all incompetence comes from not paying attention, which comes from people doing something that they don't want to do. And doing what you don't want to do means either you have no choice, or you don't think that the moments of your life are worth fighting for.
Hal Hartley

I would tag the Flabbergasted Time Lord, but he is on vacation right now. So I'll tag Seamus instead.

For whatever reason, I'm a little sad to hear this.

I have many fond memories of going to the Hayden Planetarium in NYC when I was growing up. It's undergone a massive renovation since I was last there, but I vividly remember the old permanent exhibits there and all the information about the planets. Will they will have to renovate again now that Pluto's been demoted?

Although this did make me smile a bit:

"It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called 'planet' under which the dwarf planets exist," [astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell] said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

There's a lot of blogging going on this week about the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's taking down New Orleans and the surrounding communities. I haven't weighed in yet, in large part because I feel like I don't have all that much new or original to add to the vast pile of emotions, reactions, observations and condemnations swirling through the blogosphere (although Shakespeare's Sister did a great job of rounding up relevent links here).

There is one thing that I'd like to call a bit of attention to, though. Some bloggers either overtly or covertly pat themselves on the back when it comes to racial issues. "It's those nasty Republicans who are racists, not us!" the thought goes. Yes, there's a lot of racist Republicans out there, and many of them are not as obvious about it as George 'Macaca' Allen. But you know something? When you point a finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you. Even in the bluest of blue states, racism still rears its ugly head.

Last month, before I left for Barcelona, I met a friend from school for a lunch and some shopping at a high end mall near her new apartment. We had a great time & I got what I needed to get for the trip. But as we rested and sipped lemonade late in the afternoon, she started telling me about how annoying it was for her to shop at times. Clerks would follow her around the store, stop her and ask to see her receipts, or not be willing to help her out. Her mother (a VP at a publicly-traded tech company, by the way) had the same problem, although she'd found that a different mall was overall better than the one we were currently sitting in.

What could I say? I sympathized and agreed that the mall workers were jerks. But inside, I was shocked. I had honestly believed that kind of thing didn't happen in places like California, and I was wrong. Right here in the deep-blue, massively multi-ethnic SF Bay Area, my friend is being singled out by shop clerks as being more likely to shoplift because she's black. And I am shamed by that, not only because it happens, but because I had no clue it was going on.

That's something to think about as we point fingers at racist Republicans this week.

Way to go, Oslo police!

"The Scream" and another stolen masterpiece by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch were recovered by police on Thursday, two years after gunmen seized the paintings from an Oslo museum.

"'The Scream' and 'Madonna' are now in police possession," police chief Iver Stensrud told a news conference. "The damage is much less than we could have feared."

Three years ago today, Fiat Lux went live.

That was 1095 days and 946 posts ago, which means I've managed a posting rate of a bit less than a post a day on average. Not bad for a personal weblog.

Quite a bit has changed in my life in these past three years, and just about all of it for the better. Looking back on my first post, I wrote

What next? Who knows. But I think that I'd like to blog the journey.

That hasn't changed. So to the 20 or so regular readers of my blog, and to the who knows how many casual guests, thanks for coming along on this journey with me. May it be a good one for all of us.

Well, this piece of news is a shitty way to end an otherwise lovely day:

"Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, dead at age 44.

I know a lot of people thought he was too out there, too "over the top," but I was a fan. I loved his passion and enthusiasm.

I suppose there is some consolation that he died doing what he loved, but it's cold comfort when you think about how many more years he might have had and how much more he might have been able to do for animal conservation.

Well fare ye, Steve. I'm sorry you left us so soon.

I know that in left-leaning circles, it's not really fashionable to talk about politics and marketing in the same breath, but sometimes I get really frustrated when I see people forgetting one of the principal rules of marketing. You are not your customer, and as such, you need to tailor your message to them if you want to have a real impact.

It usually pops up on a blog in the form of an angry rant along the lines of, "Why doesn't Joe/Jane Sixpack WAKE UP and get outraged about The War / The Bush Administration / Global Warming / [insert latest outrage here]?". And I sympathize, I really do. I'm amazed at the capacity of people to rationalize and accept things that go against their own self-interest. But the fact of the matter is, they do. Ranting about it might let off some steam and help you feel better, but it's not going to change the facts on the ground.

The question then becomes, what do you do about it? And this is where a lot of people go off-track. They either write off those people as "sheeple" too stupid to know their own minds, burn out and stop trying, or (if you're a blogger) write long venting blog posts. What they rarely seem to do is take a good long look in the mirror at why they're not making any headway.

Let's say you're an activist with an Important Issue, and you want to raise awareness about that issue and move people towards taking action on your issue. You can write a blog, and issue press releases, and send mailings to targeted lists, and lobby Congress, and do a LOT of other stuff to try to raise awareness. And if you're good at your job, sooner or later, you get a group of people who are in your corner, and you feel good. But then, eventually, you seem to hit a plateau. You're doing OK with your core group, but there's large numbers of other people you just can't seem to reach. You get frustrated. Your issue is Important. You're doing everything right. Why do so few people seem to care?

Good question. This is where the marketing comes in. This is what you might call a market segmentation chart for political action:

In looking at the overall possible audience for your mission, there's four basic groups aligned along two spectrums: Interest / Non-Interest and Belief / Disbelief. Your initial success is going to be in that group of people who both are inclined to believe you, and are interested in the issue -- the Simpaticos. At a certain point, though, you're going to run out of Simpaticos and need to reach out beyond them. Your next choices are the Skeptics, who are interested in your issue, but for whatever reason, they are not inclined to listen to what you have to say about it, and the So Whats, who have no reason to distrust you but are just not interested in your particular mission. (The Skips are people who don't trust you and don't care about your issue. Skip them, they're not worth the time until you've gotten the others on board.)

The problem is, what worked for the Simpaticos is not going to work for the So Whats or the Skeptics. Yet, especially in politics or policy work, many people seem to feel that changing their approach or their message in order to reach out to new groups is somehow tantamount to "selling out" and hurting their original mission.

At which point, I have to ask, what are you really trying to achieve? Do you want to be right, or do you want to actually get something done? If you want to change the world, you have to change THIS world, not the idealized one in your head. And that means accepting the fact that not everyone thinks like you do and cares about what you care about. If you want to reach out beyond the Simpaticos, you need to stop getting frustrated that the Skeptics and the So Whats aren't listening to you and figure out how to communicate with them effectively.

It's not easy. Going beyond your comfort zone rarely is. But it beats losing.

Five Years.

When something really horrible happens to you, it can warp your sense of time. You feel caught in your agony like a fly in amber; it's as if the intensity of your pain will never end. And although nothing is completely the same again, sooner or later, the pain begins to release its grip on you, and slowly time begins to move in a more normal manner. Then one day, you realize that weeks, months, even years have gone by since the horrible event.

And here we are, five years after 9/11.

I've been doing my damnedest to avoid most of the media hoopla leading up to this day. I don't need to watch the images again, hear the stories of grief and pain retold. It's all inside me still. The rawest edges of the horror and sorrow and shock have been worn smooth over time, but even so, all I need to do is close my eyes and it's all still there.

For those of us for whom New York City was not a series of iconic images on their TV screen or an occasional travel destination, but rather their home, 9/11 can be an intensely personal pain. Those hijackers tore a gaping hole out of my life. My memories of the World Trade Center span not just special events like the dinner with my family at Windows on the World the night of my 18th birthday and drinks with my friend Diana and the rest of her wedding party on her bachelorette weekend in NY, but also hundreds of morning and evening commutes, lunches, trips to the FedEx dropoff in the lobby, visits to friends in their offices. Not to mention that for 10 years, the towers were the first thing I'd see coming out the front door of my old Soho apartment. That those towers no longer exist is something I still haven't fully come to terms with.

Terrorists cannot steal my memories, but they destroyed the tangible reminder of those memories. It's a small loss compared to so much else that was destroyed that day, but it's a real loss nonetheless.

And then there's Kath.

She was only 40 when she went to work that brilliant September morning. And she never came home. AA Flight 11 slammed right into her office on the 97th floor of One World Trade; we'll never know for sure, but I'm told her desk was on the opposite side of the building from the impact point and it's possible that she never even knew what hit her. I pray that that is the truth, because thinking that she might have been standing there at a window, watching the plane heading right for her, is just too painful.

For the first year or so after 9/11, not a day went by that I didn't think of Kath. And to be honest, five years out, I don't think about her every single day anymore. But even so, in a way, I feel that I'm living for both of us. That sounds a little odd, and it's not exactly what I mean, but I do feel a connection and an obligation. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that I feel a responsibility to use this time that I have, which she did not get, in a way that honors her.

We never know what day will be our last. We never know what goodbye will be the final one. And yet, all too often, we waste our precious time. We waste our days at jobs that bore us, we don't stay in touch with the people who matter to us, we think, 'There's always tomorrow'. But sometimes, there isn't. There's only a sunny morning, and an airplane flying low over New York City, and the ending of all our dreams.

UPDATE: Read Keith Olbermann.

I really ought to be getting up to campus, but instead was clicking through a few bookmarks and ran across this over at the Guy Kawasaki blog:

Six Basic Principles of Maturity.

1. Accept yourself. �You�re on the road to maturity if you can begin to appreciate yourself without trying to be what you cannot possibly be.� The CEOs who failed at Apple did so because they wanted to be another �Steve Jobs.� They couldn�t accept themselves and their own, different capabilities and shortcomings.

2. Accept others. �Your relations with other people are a basic test of your maturity. If you don�t get along well with others, it�s not because you�re not smart enough, or because you�re smart and they�re dumb. It�s because you still need to grow up in some vital centers of your being.� For example, there are companies in Silicon Valley that maintain a �tyranny of PhDs� where only the advanced degreed are held in high esteem and marketing, operations, and others are fodder.

3. Keep your sense of humor. �Your humor reflects your attitudes toward people. The mature person uses humor not as a bludgeoning hammer but rather as a plane to shave off rough edges.�

4. Accept simple pleasures. �The capacity to get excited over things even when they seem ordinary to others�this is a sign of a healthy personality.� For example, some tech entrepreneurs have yachts that can barely pass under the Golden Gate Bridge. (I�d just be happy if I could skate backwards.)

5. Enjoy the present. �Emotional grown-ups don�t live on an expectancy basis. They plan for the future, but they know they must also live in the present. The mature person realizes that the best insurance for tomorrow is the effective use of today.�

6. Welcome work. �Appreciation of work is a hallmark of mature people.... Immature people are constantly fighting certain aspects of their work. They resent routine reports, or meetings, or correspondence. They allow these annoyances to grate on their nerves continually. Satisfaction in doing a good job is blocked out by the dust speck in the eye of resentment over trivia.�

Can I just sta how amazingly cool Jet Li is?

Four songs you could listen to over and over again:

-The Downeaster "Alexa" (Billy Joel)
-City of New Orleans (Arlo Guthrie)
-Solsbury Hill (Peter Gabriel)
-A Change In My Life (Rockapella). I first heard a version of this song in the Steve Martin movie, "Leap of Faith". The movie was so-so, but the song stuck in my head and I eventually tracked it down as covered by Rockapella. I listened to this incessantly during 2001-2002, a very difficult time in my life.

Four songs that drive you up the friggin' wall. With a chainsaw:

-Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)
-My Humps (Black Eyed Peas)
-Butterfly Kisses (Bob Carlisle)
-My Angel is a Centerfold (J Geils Band)

Add to this list anything even remotely heavy metal.

Four songs that you're embarrassed (or should be) to admit you like:

-Country Roads (John Denver)
-Dragostea din tei (O-Zone). Better known as "The Nummi Nummi song"
-Tubthumping (Chumbawumba)
-Karma Chameleon (Culture Club)

Four Best Driving Songs:
Pretty much anything by Bruce Springsteen fits the bill here. I can't narrow it down to just 4 songs, so here's 4 albums to drive to:

-Born To Run
-Tunnel of Love
-Lucky Town
-The River

Honorary mention: Silver Thunderbird (Marc Cohen)

Four songs that make you cry:

-New York New York (Sinatra). This one only started to bother me after I left NYC. When I was working at Starbucks last year, it was in one of the store CD rotations and I'd have to go hide in the back so customers wouldn't be upset by the sight of a barista pulling shots with tears running down her cheecks.
-Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream (Simon & Garfunkle)
-White Cliffs of Dover (Burton & Kent). My recoding is by Very Lynn.
-Miami 2017 (Billy Joel)

Four best risqu� songs:

-I Want You Now (Depeche Mode)
-Let's Do It (Cole Porter)
-Love For Sale (Cole Porter)
-Steamroller (James Taylor)

Four best kid songs:
Not having kids, this category is tough. Plus, I grew up in a household where we got a heavy dose of classical and light opera, and it stuck, so my favorites as a kid were pretty far off the beaten track. However, I did notice last week that my two nieces (7 and 4) love that pop song "Sk8ter Boy".

Four best (fill in your own category here):
"Short Classical Choral Pieces," because I really miss singing this stuff.

-Ubi Caritas (Maurice Durufle)
-If Ye Love Me (Thomas Tallis)
-Magnificat: Sicut Locutus Est (JS Bach)
-Hymn to St Cecilia (Benjamin Britten)

and a bonus for the VLOG gang down at the bar: The Pirates of Penjance: Hail Poetry! (Gilbert & Sullivan)

The last time I tagged someone with a meme it got totally ignored, so this time feel free to tag yourself if you so choose.

The Detroit Tigers pulled off a major upset by knocking the New York Yankees out of the playoffs on Saturday with an 8-3 win that clinched their best-of-five divisional series.

Good thing I'm a Mets fan. Although they may not get past the Dodgers either, we shall see.

The Grameen Bank was one of the primary cases we studied in my Social Entrepreneurship class this summer. I'm totally stoked that Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize today.

Yunus, 66, set up a new kind of bank in 1976 to lend to the neediest, particularly women, in Bangladesh, enabling them to start up small businesses without collateral.

In doing so, he pioneered microcredit, a system copied in more than 100 nations from the United States to Uganda.

[snip]

In awarding a prize more traditionally given to those who sign treaties to end wars or fight for human rights, the secretive five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee said eliminating poverty was a path to peace and democracy.

"Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Microcredit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights," the committee added.

"Eradication of poverty can give you real peace," said Yunus.

I honestly do not understand why some people are pissed off about the new ban on online gaming. Online casinos are a profit machine that do their customers no favors.

I would never trust an online casino to not rig the game somehow. Given how relatively easy it is to put in "streakbreaker" code or something that skews probability more in favor of the house, combined with the fact that these online casinos are virtually unregulated -- there's just no reason to NOT do it.

So when I see comments like this about the online ban:

"We're going to have Prohibition, and what happened then?" said champion poker player Annie Duke, a former University of Pennsylvania doctoral candidate who began playing professionally in 1994. "We had people running around with tommy guns and drinking moonshine because they weren't given a safe product."

My response is, give me a freaking break! There is a perfectly safe product out there already. It's called a brick-and-mortar casino. A quick Google turned up this fact: There are 47 states in United States which have 1492 legal gambling facilities available. That's plenty of product. Don't live close enough to one of those casinos? There's always poker night at your buddy's house.

As my statistics teachers were fond of reminding us, even in an honest game, every casino game is set up so that the odds are in the house's favor. That's why casinos make so much money. But at least in a US casino, you can be reasonably sure that it's a clean game.

And by the way, I'm not an anti-gambling crusader. Scott and I don't gamble often, but when we have the cash, we've been known to hit a few blackjack tables and while away some hours. Well, actually, Scott plays blackjack and I either kibitz or wander off to lose some money in the slot machines.

At any rate, I want to be clear that I am not against gambling per se. I just think that anyone who's upset about the Internet gambling ban needs to get over it.

Via Ezra's linkblog, some excellent observations from Larry Summers:

The twin arguments that globalisation is inevitable and protectionism is counterproductive have the great virtue of being correct, but do not provide much consolation for the losers. Nor can they rally support for policies that maintain, let alone promote, international integration.

Economists rightly emphasise that trade, like other forms of progress, makes everyone richer by enabling them to buy goods at lower prices. But this offers small solace to those who fear their jobs will vanish.

Education is central to any economic strategy, but there is a limit to what it can do for workers in their 40s and beyond. Nor can education be a complete answer at a time when skilled computer programmers in India are paid less than $2,000 a month.

John Kenneth Galbraith was right when he observed: �All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.� Meeting the needs of the anxious global middle is the economic challenge of our time.

He may be a sexist pig but he's right about this.

I'm off work today, the sun is shining, and it's been a good week. Here's the top 10 that iTunes had for me this Friday:

1) By My Side - Godspell
2) I'll Forget You - The Scarlet Pimpernel (Concept Album)
3) Banu Hoshch Legaresh - Subliminal
4) Heartbeat City - The Cars
5) You've Got A Friend - James Taylor
6) The Heart Brings You Back - Blues Traveler
7) Everything Is Everything - Phoenix
8) When I Grow Too Old To Dream - Mandy Patinkin
9) No One is to Blame - Howard Jones
10) Peaceful Easy Feeling - The Eagles

Rock on!

It is really easy, especially here in urban, sophisticated California, to make fun of rural Texas. So when I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal today, I have to say, I was really impressed. I have a student subscription, so I'm not sure if the article is firewalled or not. I'll excerpt as much as I can.

At the sound of a tone blown over a large conch shell, 17-year-old senior defensive tackle Alex Kautai threw off his helmet, freeing a mane of curly black hair. He shouted several sentences in a foreign tongue and waved his arms as 93 visibly agitated teammates gathered behind him on the sidelines. Alex Kautai of the Trinity Trojans does the haka dance in Bedford, Texas.

On cue, they dropped into a wide, crouching stance and began the ritual known as the haka. "Ka Mate! Ka Mate! Ka Ora!" (We're going to die! We're going to die! We're going to live!), they chanted in unison as the fans went wild. For the next 60 seconds, the players acted out an ancient battle in which a big hairy man saves the life of a Maori chieftain.

With each phrase, the players slapped their thighs, arms or chests. They stomped back and forth, symbolically thrusting and jabbing at the enemy. At the end of the dance, Mr. Kautai jumped in the air and landed on one foot, his right fist in the air and his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he sneered fiercely.

[snip]

Most of the 24 players of Tongan descent on the Trinity football team weigh between 250 and 308 pounds and stand at least 6 feet tall. Besides that, they are quick, so the combination makes Trinity an intimidating force on any high-school field. The Tongan players helped transform Trinity into a Texas football powerhouse.

Last year, Trinity won the Class 5A Division 1 state football championship. It went undefeated in this year's regular season and administered an old-fashioned 40-14 whupping to the Permian Panthers. Trinity begins the first round of state playoffs Friday night against nearby Arlington Martin High School.

"We do the haka to ignite the breath of competition. It means that I've got your back and you've got mine," said Mr. Kautai, who stopped shaving and let his hair grow long this season to make himself look even more intimidating than he already does at 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds. He likes to splash water on his face and hair before the haka so it will fly off in a mist as he performs the movements.

[snip]

The team first performed the haka for fans at the beginning of the 2005 season. Concerned about seeming to taunt opponents unfairly, the coach restricted the haka performance to the sidelines at the end of the field where most Trinity students sit.

It was an instant hit. Today, the stands closest to where the team performs the chant are full an hour before kickoff. An eerie silence falls over the stadium as soon as the tone is sounded on the conch shell as fans strain to hear the haka leader urging on the team.

Fans wave haka signs and wear black "Got Haka?" T-shirts. Rather than race to the parking lot to beat the crowd at the end of the game, hundreds of people routinely wait 20 minutes or more for the team to do the haka one more time.

The team has performed the haka at elementary-school assemblies in order to fire up the children before state-mandated tests. It has performed for the City Council. Before last year's championship game, one fifth-grade class learned the haka and performed it to cheer on their newfound heroes.

Very cool. And this is Bush country, deep-red, rural Texas, mind you. Perhaps there's hope.

Yesterday, while I was up on campus at an all-day class thing (ugh), Scott met with our friend Katie to plan out the menu for Thanksgiving. I won't be doing much for the festivities other than acting as Scott's prep cook, but I will be making the stuffing as well as an appetizer.

I originally found this recipe on, of all places, the now-defunct webvan.com site back in the fall of 2000, when Scott and I were getting ready to cook our first big Thanksgiving dinner. I've made it pretty much every year since then. It's tasty and not at all difficult; the biggest challenge is the prep time, which can take a while what with all the chopping and bread drying.

Anyway, here it is. I'd be happy to e-mail a file with the recipe on request:

Cornbread and Sage Dressing

Ingredients:

1 9� x 9� cornbread
1 16-ounce loaf sourdough bread
2 cups diced bacon
1 cup diced onion
1 cup diced carrot
2 tablespoons fresh sage chiffonade
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 cup half-and-half
1 cup chicken stock

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375� F. Cut the cornbread and the sourdough bread into � inch cubes. Spread onto baking trays and bake for 15 minutes or until the bread has dried out. Set aside in a large mixing bowl.

Cook the bacon in a large frying pan over medium heat until it begins to crisp. Add the onions and carrots. Cook until the onions soften and start to turn translucent (about 5 minutes). Add the sage, salt and pepper. Turn heat to low and cook an additional 10 minutes.

Add the contents of the pan to the mixing bowl and gently mix with the bread cubes. Add the stock and the half-and-half, continue mixing until the dressing is moist and well blended. I usually use my hands for this but a large wooden spoon is good too.

Put the mixture into a 13� x 9� x 2� greased baking pan. Cover with tin foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove cover and bake an additional 15 minutes or until the top is crispy.

Substitutions:

If you want to add more turkey flavor, use turkey stock instead of chicken and/or spoon some turkey pan drippings onto the dressing.

Use 1 teaspoon dried sage instead of fresh sage if you can�t get fresh.

If you can�t get sourdough bread, then nice peasant bread would work too.

Notes:

This is dressing, not stuffing, and should not be cooked inside the bird.

I use a cornbread mix to make the cornbread, but if you want to save time, buy one from a store.

Prepping the bread can be done the day before and the bread kept, loosely covered, overnight. Use day-old bread for faster drying.

I usually use beef bacon instead of pork due to having been raised in a loosely kosher home, although given that there�s also half-and-half in the mix, this recipe is in no way kosher. If you used all kosher ingredients and replaced the half-and-half with more stock, it could be, though.

We cooked up a storm. Well, Scott did most of the cooking and I helped.

We ate a lot.

And now, I think I'm going to bed.

Well, file this one under "maybe I shouldn't be writing about this because I am white," but I wanted to say something about Reverend Jesse Jackson's new campaign to pressure the entire entertainment industry to never use "the N word" again.

I understand the impulse, but I think it's a stupid move. Removing a word from the common vocabulary does nothing to eradicate racism. A large part of the power of words is their context. If anything, censorship adds power to the word in question, and does nothing to keep people from expressing their bigotry.

The word "boy", for example, is generally neutral and harmless. But when spoken in a certain tone of voice and addressed to an adult black man, it becomes a racist and derogatory word. And on the other hand, Chris Rock made that word which I cannot say into high comedy.

Or to take an example that's a little closer to my own experience, the word "jew". Spat out of the mouth of a skinhead in a voice twisted by anger, it sounds and means something completely different than it does if said by someone whose heart is not full of hate. And removing the word won't make him hate me any less.

All of which is not to say that I think it's a good word or that it should be used more, of course. This is all about context, and it seems pretty obvious that the context in which that word is acceptable is extremely limited and narrow, as it should be.

Like I said, it is possible that I'm wrong about all this. Maybe the word really is so bad that nobody of any color should ever say it again anywhere or in any context. But even so, for Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson of all people to be telling others what they should and should not say seems a little hypocritical.

This is amazing:

Scientists have finally demystified the incredible workings of a 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator built by ancient Greeks.

A new analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism, a clock-like machine consisting of more than 30 precise, hand-cut bronze gears, show it to be more advanced than previously thought�so much so that nothing comparable was built for another thousand years.

[snip]

The new analysis reveals that the device's front dials had pointers for the sun and Moon�called the "golden little sphere" and "little sphere," respectively�and markings which coincided with the zodiac and solar calendars. The back dials, meanwhile, appear to have been used for predicting solar and lunar eclipses.

The researchers also show that the device could mechanically replicate the irregular motions of the Moon, caused by its elliptical orbit around the Earth, using a clever design involving two superimposed gear-wheels, one slightly off-center, that are connected by a pin-and-slot device.

[snip]

By winding a knob on its side, the positions of the sun, Moon, Mercury and Venus could be determined for any chosen date. Newly revealed inscriptions also appear to confirm previous speculations that the device could also calculate the positions of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn�the other planets known at the time.

Really, I have nothing to add. I'm blown away that the Greeks could do all that mechanically.

People can do some really amazing things.

His post tonight may not be the Best. Post. Ever. but it's right up there with the classics.

Go, read, and enjoy.

As for me, I have 2 projects due this week and 2 finals next week. I'm tired.

If you're still looking for a holiday gift for a history fan, you might want to consider a little novel that an old friend of mine back home has just published: Die Fasting.

Here's the blurb from his site:

The year is 1758, and though the locale is workaday New York, the landscape is wildly exotic. Our fresh-faced hero is Thomas Dordrecht, raised on a remote farm�in the heart of modern Brooklyn�speaking both Dutch and English. Though he thinks himself unusually worldly, he has no idea what he�ll face when he agrees to defend the claims of King George II in the brutal French and Indian War. In six exciting months, he gains a lifetime�s education not only in honor, courage, and tenacity, but in rashness, cowardice, falsehood � and murder!

Congratulations, Jon. May this be the first of many!

It's things like this that really make you wonder about the laws of probability. What are the odds that two massively unusual events would happen to the exact same person?

A woman whose apartment was burned in the high-rise crash of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle�s plane was the victim of another frightening, bizarre and high-profile Manhattan accident years earlier, when a lamppost knocked over by a parade float seriously injured her.

Kathleen Caronna and her family were unhurt in the crash, which killed Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger. But the engine of the Cirrus SR20 landed in her bedroom, which went up in flames minutes before she would arrived home.

Caronna was critically injured during the 1997 Macy�s Thanksgiving Day Parade when the mammoth Cat in the Hat balloon went out of control and knocked part of a lamppost onto her head. The then-33-year-old investment analyst lay in a coma for nearly a month.

Caronna had been watching the parade with her husband and infant son at 72nd Street and Central Park West. The plane crash occurred at 72nd and York Avenue, several blocks east.

Emphasis added. Hat tip, Discourse.net.

I was going to post the lyrics to "The Shortest Day of the Year" from The Boys from Syracuse in honor of this day, but I couldn't find them online, and I also can't find my cassette with the soundtrack.

So, no Rodgers & Hart for you all. Sorry.

Americablog's Chris in Paris has this to say about Saddam Hussein's apparently immanent execution:

I have little sympathy for Saddam but I still struggle with the fact that he is being executed for killing 148 people considering the hundreds of thousands who have been killed since the invasion.

He's got a point. I don't think Saddam should be allowed to go off and live a comfortable retirement in some South American country, but I'm also not terribly happy at the thought of hanging him, especially considering his somewhat bizzare trial and the ongoing slaughter zone that is Iraq since we took him out of power. I'm not a person who feels that the death penalty is immoral and should never be used, by a long shot, but this makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Something is not right about this end to Saddam Hussein's story.

There's another quote that's been hanging around in my mind since reports started to circulate that Saddam's death was nearing (reports currently circulating seem to indicate that he will be dead before the New Year):

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

That's JRR Tolkien (Gandalf speaking to Frodo), if you don't recognize it.

Update 12:20PM: Just wanted to add: why is is that Osama Bin Laden is still at large but we're hanging Hussein?

Oh right, that's a 'Success that hasn't occurred yet'.

Amazing.

Update #2 6:15PM: Everyone else seems to be linking to Josh Marhsall's post on this topic, so why not me too.

I feel like a ghoul -- I want to turn the TV on, and I don't, both at the same time. I'm also tempted to have a good stiff drink, but I don't want to seem like I'm even remotely celebrating, becasue I am not.

To wrap up the year and kick off the New Year fesitivites, here's a gala iTunes Random 10:

1) Tubthumping - Chumbawamba
2) Another Day In Paradise - Phil Collins
3) I Love Paris - Les Negresses Vertes
4) Let's Get It Started (Spike Mix) - Black Eyed Peas
5) I Feel Lucky - Mary Chapin Carpenter
6) Trapped - Bruce Springsteen
7) Looking for a New Love - Jody Watley
8) Nights in White Satin - The Moody Blues
9) The Revolution Starts Now - Steve Earle
10) I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones

Cheers all!

And best wishes from me, Scott, and all the kitties to all our friends and family for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2007. Catch you all on the flip side.

Two bits of good news to start off 2007:

1) Welcome to blogland, Leo. YAF,R?

2) Starbucks to drop trans fats from menu items. Starting Wednesday, all donuts, muffins and other breakfast stuff in half of Starbucks' US stores will be completely free of trans fats. The other half should go TF free by the end of the year. Yay!

Only in America would the idea that corporate sponsorship of healthcare services be seen as a bold, innovative approach to help make healthcare more affordable. If our system weren't so screwed up in the first place, we wouldn't need to discuss whether Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com would be a better sponsor of test results.

Why the discussion? This piece by David Lazarus in the SF Chronicle today:

On Monday, [Gov. Arnold] Schwarzenegger took the wraps off a plan that would require all state residents to have medical insurance.

"Everyone in California must have health insurance," he said. "If you can't afford it, the state will help you buy it, but you must be insured."

Among other things, Schwarzenegger's plan would require employers with at least 10 workers to provide insurance or pay 4 percent of their payroll into a state fund that would buy insurance for such people.

It would also prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone because of their age or a pre-existing condition, and would force insurers to spend at least 85 percent of premiums on patient care (as opposed to administrative costs).

One catch, however, is that the governor's plan relies on an infusion of about $5.5 billion in additional federal money, which isn't a sure thing. It also raises a possibility that contributions from employers to a state insurance fund would lag annual increases in health care costs, thus creating a shortfall for lawmakers to deal with.

That's where corporate sponsorship would help.

Although, as the article points out, companies would have to position themselves carefully to make sure that their brand is nowhere near any part of the healthcare system that delivers bad news. So, expect lots of jockying for support for children's immunizations or well-baby initiatives, but not so much for things like chemotherapy or surgery. Because after all, providing corporate sponsorship for inexpensive immunizations will help fill in budget shortfalls so much faster than offering financial support for expensive things like chemotherapy.

Yes, that was sarcasm. Sorry. Haven't had my coffee yet and I'm feeling cranky.

Well, neither of the teams I was rooting for won their respective playoff matches today, so it looks like I'll be watching the Super Bowl for the commericals this year.

To console any other depressed Patriots and Saints fans, here's a cute video of a kitten and a Mac:

That's either insane ... or brilliant.

That cup of coffee just not getting it done anymore? How about a Buzz Donut or a Buzzed Bagel? That's what Doctor Robert Bohannon, a Durham, North Carolina, molecular scientist, has come up with. Bohannon says he's developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods, without the bitter taste of caffeine. Each piece of pastry is the equivalent of about two cups of coffee.

Thinking about it, I'm leaning towards insane. But I've been wrong before.

I ran across the "Ask a Ninja" podcasts on iTunes sometime this past fall and thought it was a hoot. In fact, I showed one of the videos to my teammates in my Strategic Management class, and it was such a hit we took 'Ninja' as our theme for the final paper and presentation for the class. I an not sure our instructor liked it as much as we did, but at least we had fun putting the thing together.

If you're curious, this was the �NINJA� strategy we developed:

Narrative � Is our strategy compelling and easy to communicate? If not, something is wrong.
Innovative � How will we keep being better than our competition?
Nimble � Anticipate and embrace change. Be where the competition is not.
Journey � The journey will not be the same at each point along the way.
Assess � Always be asking: How does this help reach our strategic objectives?

At any rate, it was nice to see that the AaN team is getting a nice payday for their efforts:

The folks at Ask a Ninja are pretty excited. I spoke with Kent Nichols today and he says that he and Douglas Sarine, the other madmen behind the year-old video blog, just signed a deal with blog network Federated Media that guarantees them a contract for sales in the low seven figures this year.

Basically, the two have agreed to work together in wooing advertisers. In exchange for the right to sell ads for Ask a Ninja, FM promised the video blog it would bring in a certain amount of revenue. Whatever FM sells, the two split, with Ask a Ninja taking the majority, Kent says. And if FM doesn't sell that much? Well, Ask a Ninja then simply can walk out of the contract.

My favorite is still the "Pop!Tech" episode.

Looks like a new William Gibson book will be out reasonably soon. Yay!

It's been a long, busy week. Today was a gorgeous, warm, springlike day, though, which was a very nice way to wrap the week up.

And this is some very welcome news too:

The U.S. House of Representatives denounced President George W. Bush's Iraq troop buildup on Friday in a symbolic challenge to his unpopular war strategy that is expected to lead to a mighty struggle over financing the extra troops.

The Democratic-led House voted 246-182 for a resolution that voices support for U.S. forces but opposes the Republican president's decision to send 21,500 more troops to bolster security in Baghdad and violent Anbar province.

[snip]

The resolution passed with support of all but two of the House's 233 Democrats and 17 of its 201 Republicans, many worried about their political fate should they stick with Bush. Polls say most Americans oppose adding troops in Iraq.

That's a very nice way to start the weekend.

In other news, I am going to take advantage of the three-day weekend upcoming to try upgrading the blog to a more recent version of Movable Type. Three+ years on version 2.6x is long enough. With luck, all will go well and I'll finally get some new features and a new look to the blog.

One possible outcome is that I utterly hose the site and get stuck starting from scratch, althought I dearly hope that's not the case. Either way, if you stop by over the weekend and things look a little odd, that's probably why.

The back-end upgrade from MT 2.64 to MT 3.34 went almost shockingly well. Nothing seems broken, all my old entries & comments are still here, and (what I was most worried about) my templates are all still working.

So far, so good. I'll have to wait and see how the new comment spam system works as compared to my trusty old MT-Blacklist installation.

The next stage .... the front end. I'll be playing around with my Rome travelogue to see how the new StyleCatcher plugin works as far as skinning the site goes. If I can't get it to work & look good over there, I may leave things as-is here. It will depend on how much hacking I need to do to the CSS and templates to make my ancient, customized templates work properly.

UPDATE: 1:56PM
As I suspected, those old templates are causing trouble. I had to completely overwrite them to get StyleCatcher to work. As of now, a new template is up and running on the Rome blog, and I'm going to try to figure out how to add some of the old stuff back in.

UPDATE 2:30PM
I got Sitemeter back on the Rome blog but have not have the nerve to do any more significant hacking. Taking a break for a while. It's a really lovely day and I don't want to spend it all indoors.

UPDATE 6:25PM
The Rome blog's in decent shape now. Once I got the hang of the template widget module system, getting some customization into the sidebar wasn't tough at all. I tried a couple of different skins but for now I'm using a very basic one (Vicksburg Desert) that's not too different in look and tone from my old one.

UPDATE: 8:30PM
I've widget-ized and updated the templates for the main site. And for good measure, I installed a 3rd party plug-in called "Promote This!" to add some social bookmarking links to my entries. I'm thoroughly impressed by how easy it's all been -- easy being a relative term, of course. What's easy for a moderate geek like me would be pretty damn difficult for a non-techie, but then, that's what Blogger and TypePad are for.

It's a little weird not seeing my trusty old templates anymore, but now that I've got the version 3.x templates installed, I can skin to my heart's content. Probably tomorrow, though. I think that's enough work for one day.

Nothing busts up a morning quite like discovering that your less-than-six-months-old Melitta coffeemaker has given up the ghost.

I suppose that's what you get when you buy discontinued merchandise from Woot!, but the other stuff I've gotten there hasn't had problems, so maybe it's just bad luck.

I had some vague plans of heading over to a car dealership and starting the long process of looking for a new car, but instead a trip to buy a new coffeemaker is definitely in order. Yes, the coffeemaker has a warrantee, but I don't want to wait several weeks to get it repaired. I want a coffeemaker now.

One of the big issues with converting from old-style Edison light bulbs to compact fluorescents is the cost. I wonder whether the news today that Australia intends to ban old-style light bulbs will help drive down CF prices over time.

The Australian government on Tuesday announced plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs across the country.

I'm all for saving energy and reducing greenhouse gases, but I have to say that this news also makes me feel a bit sad. "Old-style" light bulbs give off a warmer glow than CF bulbs, and I like the feel of that warmer light.

Ah well.

For an upcoming dinner party, Scott wanted to start with a dish we really enjoyed when we had it last year at a local restaurant: roasted tomato and fennel soup. Today, we set out to replicate it. February probably isn't the best time of year to be trying recipes that depend heavily on the freshness and quality of its vegetables, but we're lucky enough to live three blocks from a fantastic market where you can get top-quality, fresh produce year-round. The results were an unqualified success, and the dish is quite easy to pull off. We're definitely serving this to our guests next week.

I'm sorry to say that some of the measurements and cooking times given below are my best approximation, not exact. This was a seat of the pants operation done by people who know their way around a kitchen. However, this is a soup, not a soufflé, and as long as you don't burn anything the end result should turn out just fine. When in doubt, let common sense and your taste buds be your guide.

Ingredients:

1 1/4 lbs heirloom tomatoes
1 bulb fennel (about 3/4 lb)
4 cloves garlic
2 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons kosher salt

Preparation:

First, we cut off the leaves and fronds from the fennel, de-seeded the tomatoes, arranged the cut pieces on foil-covered trays, sprinkled all the pieces with oil and salt, and then roasted the fennel and tomatoes in a 375 degree oven for 50 minutes. The garlic cloves were left in their skins, wrapped in a separate piece of tin foil, and roasted at the same time.

Next, everything (except the garlic skins) went into the blender, along with the chicken stock, and pureed. This puree went through a medium-mesh strainer and heated over low-medium heat for about 45 minutes to reduce. We then put the soup through a second, finer mesh strainer and reduced again for another 45 minutes or so. In went the cream, and simmered again for maybe 30 minutes.

Although straining and reducing the broth down multiple times is a trick we borrowed from Thomas Keller, it felt counterintuitive to me and I was unsure how the result would taste. The pulp sitting in the strainer tasted good, after all, and I was hesitant to toss it out. But after tasting the strained liquid in the pot, I realized that I was wrong. Straining really does clarify and intensify the flavor.

We used no additional salt other than what went onto the veggies during the roasting stage. If you feel the need to add more seasoning, I strongly recommend that you wait until you're at the final stages to make sure you don't overintensify the flavors as the soup reduces down.

We were unsure what was going to be better to finish off the soup, so we tried two different toppings at the end: we topped one serving with a little grated Parmigianino Reggiano and diced fennel fronds, and a second with a drizzle of black truffle oil and fennel fronds. Both were good, but the truffle oil was definitely better.

The end product was four small portions of a very intense, flavorful soup. As we're planning on serving this as an amuse bouche at the beginning of a meal, that's just fine. However, if you want to make this dish a more central part of the meal, you're probably going to want to at least double the recipe.

The whole set of photos from today’s kitchen adventure is up on Flickr.

And the good news of the day is: one of my favorite food writers, Michael Ruhlman, finally got bad-boy chef Tony Bourdain to officially be a guest blogger on his food blog.

His first official guest-blogging post is not as accessible as his recent rant on the various Food TV celebrities; rather, he's weighing in on a recent spat between a NY restaurant owner and the NY Times food critic. Nevertheless, it's worth a read just for his choice of imagery:

Maybe I'm being cynical here but the Message seems to be: "Even a freakin' strip club--where you get lap dances offered between courses is better than your soulless, overpriced meat-emporium. I'd rather spend time in a hot tub with Bob Guiccione than you!" Subtext? "Don't Fuck With Me!"

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tony. Enjoy the ride.

No, not the Ruhlman book. Anthony Bourdain's inimitable style has extended into the web comic world. Check out yesterday's Dork Tower.

Sarah Hornik is an extremely talented artist who lives in Tel Aviv. She makes some of the most beautiful glass beads I've ever seen; each one is a colorful jewel, completely unique, whimsical, fun, and loaded with color. She also has a blog, and this week she uploaded a video of how she makes her beads. I've never actually seem lampwork done before, and it was fascinating to watch how fast she worked.

So, if you've ever been curious how someone would make something as beautiful as this:

then check this link out.

She sells her work on her website, as well as on eBay, if you decide you have to own some of her stuff (although the bead show above has already been sold, sorry. And not to me.)

Yes, I really am enough of a geek to find the concept of "Pi" day (3.14) amusing.

I bought an individual-size apple pie for Scott, and I had strawberry rhubarb. Tart, yet tasty.

By the way, I have not forgotten about my promise to write a post about how to keep on blogging. I just need to find the time to do it.

I wonder how much they saved by not having to pay the claims for all these people whose policies were canceled?

Blue Cross of California systematically violates state law when it cancels health insurance policyholders after they get pregnant or sick, making no attempt to determine whether the consumers did anything to merit such harsh treatment, a scathing investigation by state regulators has found.

As a result of its unprecedented investigation, the Department of Managed Health Care today fined Blue Cross $1 million. The department's findings also expose the company, the state's largest health insurer, to legal liability in dozens of lawsuits filed by consumers who allege their policies were illegally canceled, subjecting them to substantial hardships.

Other major insurers face similar investigations and are targets of lawsuits over similar charges.

The investigation found that Blue Cross used computer programs and a dedicated department to systematically cancel the policies of pregnant women and the chronically ill regardless of whether they intentionally lied on their applications to cover up pre-existing medical conditions, a standard required by state law for canceling individual policies. Regulators examined 90 randomly selected cases of policy cancellations and found violations in each one.

Hat tip, Kevin.

I know I said at the end of my last post that perhaps we should have a 'blog against sexism in technology' week, and strictly speaking this isn't a post about that, but I think it's relevant anyway. Check out this anecdote from Anthony Bourdain:

I will careful tell you of an equally horrifying episode. At a recent event, I was introduced to the incoming (Beard House honcho whose position I will not describe here). Suffice to say it was a high position. Very high.

When she inquired about the possibility of my involvement in some tandem Beard event with my friend Eric Ripert, I declined, saying it would be hypocritical of me--given what I've said and written--to take part. I explained that I would be an enthusiastic supporter and participant of all things Beard when and if I saw some kind of an effort to acknowledge the people who are actually doing the cooking in this country--the between 30 and 70% of restaurant employees of Mexican and Latino origin--of varying legal status. I was thinking a few bucks set aside for free para-legal advice. Maybe a widely accessible library. English lessons.

Her response? She looked at me with an expression of absolute sincerity and said, "Oh..we're very aware of the important contribution of our Lateeeno population." Then, proudly boasted about the good works Beard House has been doing on their behalf: "Why...just last week at a dinner at the House, 7 out of 10 of the waiters we hired were Lateeno!" She looked at me, guilessly, as if expecting a pat on the head.

Here, it's Latino workers in the food industry instead of women in technology, but the unthinking cluelessness is all too familiar. "The extreme carelessness of the very rich" is how F Scott Fitzgerald put it, and that sounds just about right. The real prerogative of being in a position of power is that you don't have to care. You can slide through your comfortable, privileged life without ever once having to think about how food gets on a table, or why everyone else in the boardroom looks just like you.

I was raised to believe that there's a responsibility that comes with power, though. No one person can do something about all the problems in this world, but you can have an impact if you set a goal and make a real effort to do something about it. Some people like to make fun of Hollywood stars who so earnestly champion their pet causes. I don't. There's few enough people in this world who both want to do something good and are in a position to have that kind of an impact. As far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier.

75,105 and $3.27

The first, is the number of miles on my car odometer. The second, the price of unleaded gas at my regular station in San Mateo this morning.

Days like this, I start wondering whether it might be time for a new, more fuel efficient car.

But on the other hand, here's another number: 31.5.

That's the average MPG my 2000 Saturn SL2 has been getting recently. And that's not at all bad for a 7-year-old automatic transmission car.

I could certainly do better. if you look at the Top 10 Most Fuel-Efficient Cars of 2007 (as rated by Edmunds.com), it's clear that as good as I'm doing with my current car, there's room for improvement in my MPG. The fact that I don't know how to drive stick shift does limit my options, though. I'd have to go hybrid to see a significant MPG improvement.

With my student loans starting to kick in, I'm not very enthusiastic about taking on a new car payment, though. So perhaps it's just as well that my old Saturn is merrily chugging along.

Because it's looking like it's going to be a long, dry summer around these parts. And that's not good news:

More than 2 million Bay Area water users could face mandatory water restrictions this summer if they do not cut back on consumption now, the head of the San Francisco Public Utility Commission said Wednesday.

The Sierra snowpack -- the major water source for people in San Francisco, parts of the Peninsula, the South Bay and southern Alameda County -- is less than half of what it should be for this time of year. As of the beginning of the month, the snow pack was at 46 percent of normal.

[snip]

Officials will look at the measurements at the end of May and make a recommendation on mandatory restrictions for San Francisco's 2.4 million users, said Susan Leal, general manager of the city's Public Utilities Commission.

Mandatory restrictions could mean reducing consumption up to 20 percent. Customers who do not comply could face fines or have their water turned off.

The local CA radio stations didn't start reporting on the Virginia Tech massacre until after rush hour, so I didn't find out about it until I got to work. Watching the death toll increase over the hours while trying to get work done was pretty sucktastic.

There's really not much I can add to what's already been said today, other than the observation that Chris Rock was right:

Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost 5,000 dollars.

One of the victims at Virginia Tech was Liviu Librescu: A holocaust survivor.

Liviu Librescu, 75, a senior researcher and lecturer in engineering, was a Holocaust survivor. He had immigrated to Israel from Romania with his wife Marlina, also a survivor, in 1978. He was an expert in aeronautics at Tel Aviv University and the Haifa Technion before moving to the United States in 1984.

...

According to media accounts quoting students, Mr. Librescu and the class heard shooting in a nearby room. The students said their professor blocked the door to prevent the gunman from entering while some students took cover underneath desks and others leaped out from windows.

זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה וְשֵׁם רְשָׁעִים יִרְקָֽב׃

how can a mentally ill person walk into a store and buy semi-automatic guns with no questions, background check or wait period but an average "joe on the street" can't walk into a drug store and get a couple of drugs to ease post nasal drip without having to show proof of i.d. and getting their name, address and phone number put on a national medication database to make sure that they don't buy more within a certain time period.

something is really freakin' wrong with our society.

Yes. And it's our complete refusal to deal with mental illness in anything resembling a sane fashion (pun intended). Either mental illness is a joke, or it's not "real", or it's a sign that the person is not to be trusted. There's almost no middle ground.

And then to make matters worse, people who dare to speak up and talk about their struggles with mental illness do so at the risk of losing their ability to earn a living. It's small wonder that the few who do generally wait until they're rich enough, famous enough or respected enough that people are willing to overlook it. Someone less rich or successful who is open in the workplace about their illness risks losing any ability to further their career at that (or any other) company -- the ADA notwithstanding. That's a really good reason to keep your mouth shut and let the stereotypes perpetuate.

Only yesterday, I was saying maybe it is time to start rethinking how much "industrial" food we buy for the household humans, as well.

Well, what a difference a day makes. By way of Litbrit @ Shakes' place:

It was only a matter of time before this happened: melamine has been detected in the feed and body fluids of pigs meant for human consumption, and California authorities have issued both a quarantine and an advisory to not consume pork from at least one farm; others may follow, since the tainted feed was also shipped to New York.

Yes, it's only one farm, and one that does not resell pork, so maybe this is Not That Big A Deal. But how much more of this stuff might be out there, unreported?

This issue of where our food comes from is not going to go away soon.

Only yesterday, I was saying maybe it is time to start rethinking how much "industrial" food we buy for the household humans, as well.

Well, what a difference a day makes. By way of Litbrit @ Shakes' place:

It was only a matter of time before this happened: melamine has been detected in the feed and body fluids of pigs meant for human consumption, and California authorities have issued both a quarantine and an advisory to not consume pork from at least one farm; others may follow, since the tainted feed was also shipped to New York.

Yes, it's only one farm, and one that does not resell pork, so maybe this is Not That Big A Deal. But how much more of this stuff might be out there, unreported?

This issue of where our food comes from is not going to go away soon.

Here's some of the most sane writing I've seen on the subject:

It is not possible to for an average person to live a reasonably prosperous North American (or even European) lifestyle and reduce their footprint to one planet by themselves.

This point is worth pausing on, because so much of the green marketing BS around us tells us that the planetary crises we face are our fault, that it is our responsibility to fix them and that buying products which are marketed as "green" will fix that problem. The myth of individual lifestyle responsibility is so strong, most of us don't even comment on it anymore. But in many ways, it's a lie. What most needs to be changed in the world are the systems in which we are all enmeshed, and we ourselves, acting alone, are almost powerless to change those systems. To do that, we need better information, stronger connections and new ways of thinking.

Oh so true. Replacing your lightbulbs or recycling your cans is great, truly, but what's really going to turn this planet around is not what individual people do in their own homes, it's what happens in the factories and the oil refineries and in the boardrooms of companies across the world. You want to see real change? That's where it needs to happen. Organizations like Forest Ethics get that. Some others don't.

Go, buy some new CF lightbulbs today if it makes you feel better. Just don't mistake that for an action that's really helping the planet.

On a purely personal note, this sucks:

This weekend will be the last time riders can rent horses from Claremont Riding Academy to take on Central Park's bridal path.

The academy is the oldest continuously operated stable in the country but decreasing ridership and increasing development on the Upper West Side is forcing it to close.

That business has been in my mother's family for many decades. It's sad, sad news that the end has come.

UPDATE 4/24 The news that Claremont is closing is mostly a NY story, but Pravda, of all places, has picked it up too.

I'm still pretty bummed about the news. I know everything comes to an end eventually, and that 100+ years is a really great run, but that's cold comfort.

And in tonight's "wow, this is cool" news -- a potentially habitable planet has been found Out There in space.

Now all we need is a way to get there within something resembling a human timeframe and find out if it really is what the scientists think it is.

And the melamine contamination problem spreads to more parts of the American food chain: More animals got tainted food.

What irks me is that the only thing the politicians seem to be responding to is that "OMG terrorists might put something in our food". Which is true, but it's not the immediate threat. How about the fact that potentially lethal industrial-grade chemicals are being dumped into our food supply RIGHT NOW? Shouldn't that be enough of a reason to take action?

This is a start:

[Congressional] Democrats say they will introduce legislation that would permit the FDA to force mandatory food recalls -- a power it now lacks -- and increase funding to hire more inspectors.

Hopefully this President will actually sign such legislation.

One thing we did this weekend was to head over to Whole Foods and attempt to do all our weekly grocery shopping there. We've gone there before for specialty items, but never tried to do our 'normal' grocery shopping. And with the exception of one item (some Aquafina flavored water that Scott really likes) we were able to do so, and we came home with several bags full of organic, non-big-brand food for the house. A few items matched the prices we would pay at a conventional grocery store (like pasta and tomato paste), but most items were a little more. Some few were double the price of their 'conventional' alternatives. For example, we skipped buying and meat or chicken -- with boneless chicken breasts going for more than $6 a pound in the "sale" bin, the price was too high.

Although we have a bunch of nice, "safe" food in the house, I don't feel particularly good about our shopping trip. It's no secret that the food shopping options for poor people are worse than the ones for more well-off ones, but Whole Foods and their higher prices seems to raise the bar even further. As amazing as Whole Foods is, the people who really need the added benefits of a healthy diet are the people least able to afford their prices.

You shouldn't have to be well-off to be able to have access to safe food. And you shouldn't have to scare the government with the terrorism bogeyman in order to get them to do something about the safety of the nation's food supply.

I bow in humble thanks before the Goddess of Commuting that my commute doesn't go anwhere near the utter mess that's been made of the East Bay / Bay Bridge. And it didn't even take an earthquake, just one fool in a tanker truck.

[Highway] 580 at Interstate 80, located near Emeryville [looks] to be completely destroyed. The tanker explosion caused the upper deck of a connector ramp to collapse onto the lower deck, according to a California Highway Patrol dispatcher.

Interstate 580 is closed approaching the Bay Bridge, according to the dispatcher.

The dispatcher said eastbound Interstate 80 to eastbound Interstate Highway 580 collapsed after heat from the tanker explosion on the westbound Interstate 580 at Interstate 80 rose and melted the upper roadway.

The East Bay in general has sucktastic traffic; this isn't going to help any.

As if the high gas prices weren't bad enough, there's more for Bay Area residents to worry about: the spectre of water shortages to come:

Frank Gehrke and Dave Hart of the state Department of Water Resources didn't even bother to take their measuring devices out of their vehicle before they hiked out into a barren field near Highway 50 at Phillips Station, a roadside stop established in 1859 at the 6,800-foot level.

Patches of white lingered on the hills around them, and the Sierra peaks were snowcapped in the distance. But all the surveyors spotted on the ground at Phillips Station were lodgepole pine cones and a few scattered dog droppings.

The meadow was under 67.4 inches of snow on the same date last year, double the historic average.

"This is definitely a dry year, no doubt about that," Hart said.

[snip]

[Nearly all] reservoirs in the system will be filled to start the dry season, PUC spokesman Tony Winnicker said, because of the excess water in previous years. But there won't be enough runoff to refill the reservoirs as the year progresses. That sets up a potential water shortage in 2008, unless next winter turns out to be wetter than average and recharges the system.

Officials will assess usage and storage trends in July. Contingency plans for mandatory cutbacks already are being drafted just in case. The system serves customers in San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

Ezra's got an interesting post up today. It's about class inequality, but with a different twist -- instead of looking at how the gap is widening between rich and poor, he looks at how despite the income gap, the tastes and habits of the rich are becoming more mainstream.

One odd cross-indicator of rising income inequality has been the determined democratization of culture in this country. Containers of garlic hummus and free range eggs that would have been judged luxury items a few decades ago now dot the shelves at Safeway, mega-bookstores of the kind only available in wealth urban centers now populate every shopping mall, espresso drinks that could only have been procured at fine Italian and French restaurants are now offered on every street corner

[snip]

There's no doubt that wealth inequality has increased in this country, and that primary expenses ranging from housing to fuel to health have rapidly increased in cost. But there's simultaneously been, I'd argue, a drop in consumptive inequality, and a significant convergence in the experiences of the rich and, if not the poor, the middle.

It's a valid insight and one worth thinking about. Sadly, I'm off to work, so I don't have the time right now.

I am by no means any kind of an expert on trains, tunnels, church architecture, or construction, but something about this just strikes me as a really, really bad idea (emphasis added):

It has survived the death of its architect, a dearth of funding and the destruction of its prototypes during the Spanish civil war. Now the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí's surreal, unfinished opus, faces a new threat: plans to bore a high-speed train tunnel within meters of its foundations.

"What would possess someone to build a tunnel like this next to the heaviest building in Barcelona, the most visited monument in Spain?" said Jordi Bonet, who leads a team of 20 architects working to complete the 125-year-old basilica.

In a workshop below the building, he paused next to a plaster model of the unbuilt facade and whipped out a yellow tape measure to show how the tunnel would pass just 1.5 meters, or 5 feet, from the cathedral's foundations.

This is the church in question, by the way:

Like I said, I am no expert, but you'd think that protecting a site like that would be considered important. I'm all for a high-speed rail link from Barcelona to Madrid, but couldn't they have found a better route?

In thinking about the life and times of the hapless would-be Donald Trump of Sacramento, Casey Serin, it occurred to me that (gender aside) he's much more like Blanche than The Donald.

Think about it.

Scott's company had a company shindig on one of those party boats this week, so instead, here's a couple of photos from that event:

I rather like the composition of this.

Doesn't get more touristy than that, does it?

No, this was not our ship.

This would be funny if it were not so true:

hat tip, Ritholtz

Just in time for the 4th of July -- Jason and a crew of dedicated hot dog fans have survived The Great Off The Broiler Hot Dog Tasting of 2007 and come up with a set of recommendations.

Worth a read.

We spent last night down on Stanford campus with some friends, picnicking, enjoying a concert, and finally, a fireworks display. Great weather, good friends, good food, and a good time.

Except at the end. The soundtrack for the fireworks was a standard Boston Pops set of classic American war music. The glorification of war and of American armed might in the music struck me as both ironic and sad, given how badly the war in Iraq is going. Usually, when I see fireworks, I find myself thinking about John Adams and how he though the 4th should be celebrated, and wondering what he would think of the America of today. This year, though, I mostly though about the soldiers over in Iraq, and what they might be thinking of today.

The sooner they all come home, the better.

Two quick food & cooking related notes from the past weekend:

1) We've made the Roasted Tomato & Fennel soup recipe we came up with several times over the past few months, always to great acclaim. As a follow-up, Scott decided to try a new version of the recipe with a medley of roasted root vegetables (carrot, parsnip, and turnip, plus a leek and some garlic cloves). We weren't sure whether beef of chicken stock would go better in this version, so we did a split-test and did half-batches in separate pots with the different stocks. The result was tasty, but not quite as successful as the tomato-fennel version. We'll try again with some other combinations in the not too distant future.

2) We saw Ratatouille. I share Ruhlman's highly positive take on the piece -- with one caveat. My feminist funnybone got dinged by the fact that the movie was set up so that Remy the rat ALWAYS knew better than Colette when it came to food. She's presented as a highly talented line cook who worked her butt off to get where she was. Couldn't she be right at least once?

Sports gambling -- and the NBA in general -- isn't something that normally crosses my radar screen. However, if this NY Post column is accurate, even I know that an accusation of fixed games in the NBA is a very big deal indeed. The last thing any professional sports league needs is allegations of fixed games.

That said, the article makes it pretty clear than only one referee is under investigation, and if that's the case, then one bad ref should not tank the whole system.

I got home after midnight yesterday and am too pooped to make it back up to the city today for the 2nd half of WordCamp.

I did have a great time, though. Got some stickers to bling out my ancient laptop, a way-too-small t-shirt (Damn you, American Apparel!) and I even got to meet the inimitable Cheezburger, who's quite a nice guy.

UPDATE: Photos on Flickr.

Most people who move to the suburbs do so in order to raise a family in a "good" school district.

Not us. We moved to San Mateo to get more bang for our housing buck, better commuting options, and more walkability. Our address scores 77 out of 100 in the "Walk Score" at this fun mashup site I found tonight.

Our last apartment in San Francisco? It had a Walk Score of 55.

A New York Times article on the millionaires of Silicon Valley is garnering mostly negative feedback today. And it's easy to see why. It's hard to have sympathy for people like this:

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” [Gary] Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar

I can't say I'm all that sympathetic to people who got themselves onto a money treadmill and now feel that they can't get off it. You always have a choice, and if you think you don't, it's because you're not looking in the right places for options. If your role models are the folks with a net worth of $50 million, then yeah, you're a schlub for only having $5 million. Perhaps you might try spending a little time with people whose net worth is only $500 thousand instead? Is that too demeaning for you? Those people, after all, can't afford a nanny for the toddlers and new Acuras for the teenagers. They might even -- dare I say it? -- rent their homes and join the Y instead of a country club.

Is that too much like "admitting defeat"?

Cry me a freaking river.

Here's where I come from on this: I went to a very exclusive private school when I was growing up, and my family was on the lower end of the income spectrum for the school. Kids didn't have ipods and multi-function cellphones and $200 Gucci sunglasses back then, but some things were the same; many of my classmates had brand-new cars, designer jeans, shopping sprees at Bloomingdales, and spring break skiing trips to Aspen. I didn't. I'd like to say that it didn't matter, but that would be a lie. Of course you're going to feel bad if some people in your peer group have stuff you don't. What's important is how you deal with it.

If you're lucky, you take away the lesson that 'stuff' doesn't necessarily make you happy, that somebody is always going to have more stuff than you, and to be happy with the stuff you do have. If you're less lucky, you walk away with the ambition to get all that stuff, and then some, when it comes time for you to raise your own kids. And thus, a new generation of overworked treadmill-walkers is born.

Any accusations of sour grapes aside, there's also a business lesson to be drawn here. I was interested to see that one of the subjects of the article earned much of her wealth from being an early member of the team at Handspring (and later a senior staffer at Palm). One wonders if that company's ever-increasing inability to deliver products that people wanted might be linked to their own staff's disconnection from what life for "normal" people is like.

I am old enough to remember Hank Aaron's drive for Babe Ruth's record in 1973-74. It was a special day when he finally did it.

Today ..... not so much.

I console myself with the thought that if A-Rod stays healthy, there's a good chance he'll top 756 in the not too distant future.

Another week, another random mix.

1) Lohengrin Prelude - Wagner
2) Shape of My Heart - Backstreet Boys
3) Beat Box - Matisyahu
4) Blood Of Eden - Peter Gabriel
5) My Hometown - Bruce Springsteen
6) It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - REM
7) Not A Day Goes By - Mandy Patinkin
8) Say It Isn't So - Hall & Oates
9) Still Take You Home - Arctic Monkeys
10) my funny valentine - Sting

#2 is a little embarrassing. At least it's the only song of theirs in my collection.

There will be no more encores for stellar tenor Luciano Pavarotti.

I had the pleasure of hearing Pavarotti live once, years ago, in New York. The world will not soon see his like again.

UPDATE: Yahoo has a nice aggregation of news reports, obituary notices, etc.

74%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Well, at least I'm less addicted than Jeremiah Owyang is.....

Six years.

I was thinking this morning about 9/11, and about closure.

They say that 9/11 was the Pearl Harbor of our generation. I suppose that's so. But America had closure for Pearl Harbor eventually -- we fought and won World War 2.

What do we have? Iraq, which regardless of whether we win or lose is not closure, because Saddam Hussein didn't cause 9/11. We don't have Osama Bin Laden, and for all we know, we never will. He may be skulking in a cave in Asia, or he may be rotting in an unmarked grave. Either way, no closure there.

So what do we do?

I had some thoughts last year about time and the memory of pain. I find my feelings haven't changed all that much since then.

Two years after 9/11, it was still painful for me to be at work that day. Tomorrow will be an normal workday for me; we're even having a special event, part of a new product launch.

But in my heart, I'll still feel the pain.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

This sounds like a joke, but I found it on cbs5.com, so I'm assuming it's legit.

A California judge says an Oakland carpenter caught hammering nails and sawing wood in the nude can legally work without wearing any clothes.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Julie Conger found Percy Honniball not guilty of indecent exposure Thursday. The 51-year-old was arrested last year after the he was spotted building cabinets in the buff at a home where he had been hired to work .

Conger ruled that although Honniball was indeed naked he was not acting lewdly or seeking sexual gratification.

The carpenter has said he likes to work in the nude because it's more comfortable and helps him keep his clothes clean.

Oy.