Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.

 
Madness
It's Saturday - party day!! - I'm in a much better mood. Thanks for all of your general and very specific input and support. Today is beyond crazy: Marc Weisblott came in Thurday night, Sulizano got here yesterday. David Hogberg DROVE in from Iowa late last night (stud), and the trickle turns to a flood today. Just packed Kristen, Chris and two friends off to the Indians game. I'm headed for the airport in a few minutes tp pick up SPECIAL OUT OF TOWN GUEST, and the hits just keep on coming.

Pictures and drunken commentary later - there are already some actions photos up on Dawn's site. Let the madness begin.
posted by Eric at 1:07 PM

 
Status
I'm off to record radio show, please see the Ira Robbins interviews at Blogcritics, and all of the other fine material there as well.

This is where I am right now - I really appreciate the positive input, but there are still only four freaking comments, not a dime in the PayPal and the traffic isn't soaring. I'd say the questions have pretty well answered themselves.

Will be meeting people coming into town for the Blogger Fiesta, going to watch my son play in the marching band at their first football game, etc. etc. Will report at some point. Have a good one.
posted by Eric at 1:34 PM

 
Patriot Act Data Scuffle Follow-up
I reported yesterday on the confrontation between the Justice Department and the House Judiciary Committee over data regarding usage of the Patriot Act. Today

the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) is leading a group that sent a letter of support to the House Judicial Committee in its efforts to obtain information about how many times bookstores have been approached by the FBI for information under the Patriot Act. Today ABFFE took the battle a step farther, joining with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to file an expedited request for that information under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FOIA request asks the government how many subpoenas have been issued to bookstores, libraries and newspapers under the Act. The "expedited" request gives the government 10 days to respond.

An attempt to restore a few checks and balances.
posted by Eric at 12:41 AM

 
Strange Twist to Fort Bragg Saga
Strange movement in the Fort Bragg murder cases after a lull over the last few weeks. The situation is discussed here, here, here, here, and here.

The Fayetteville Observer reports an anti-malarial drug may have driven the soldiers to psychosis:

The Pentagon is considering sending an epidemiology team from the Office of the Surgeon General to Fort Bragg to investigate the ''medical aspects'' surrounding the murders and murder-suicides involving four Fort Bragg couples this summer.

Pentagon officials say the investigation would include a look at the anti-malarial medication Lariam, which is also known as mefloquine. Lariam is routinely prescribed to soldiers in malarial countries, such as Afghanistan. Some users have blamed the drug for causing psychotic symptoms.

The drug's label says possible side effects range from anxiety, paranoia and depression to hallucinations and psychotic behavior.

Rare cases of suicide have been reported, the label says, but ''no relationship to drug administration has been confirmed.''

....''The Army medical department will investigate potential explanations for the recent spouse murders and murder-suicides at Fort Bragg,'' said Elaine Kanellis, an Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon. ''This includes a medical literature search on effects on the use of mefloquine (Lariam) although there is no evidence indicating its possible use had any impact on the behavior of the suspects.''

She added, ''They are going to be examining all medical aspects of the situations down there, behavioral, physical.''

The domestic violence people aren't buying it:

Christine Hansen, the executive director of the Miles Foundation, a group that deals with domestic violence in the military, doesn't believe Lariam played a role in the Fort Bragg murders.

''I think the issue of Lariam and a myriad of other issues may actually detract from the conversation relative to the prevalence of domestic violence and the potential of domestic violence being involved in these tragedies at Fort Bragg,'' she said.

Hansen said the issue is about power and control and taking responsibility for one's actions.

''This is violence against women,'' she said. ''Violence against a gender.''

Other than the case of the wife and daughter who killed the husband/father, which was still violence against a gender: the opposite one.
posted by Eric at 12:11 AM

 
On My Mind
This has been one hell of a week. We have been going through all of the usual pre-party machinations, making arrangements, confirming reservations, cleaning up the house, all of that stuff which is leading to maximum fun, but is low-grade stressful in the preparation.

Saturday is coming fast, and we can't wait, but in the meantime there is a shitload of work to do. (The first to arrive, Marc Weisblott, is here!, having bused his way from Toronto. He is eating pizza in the kitchen, talking to Chris right now. He will tell you about his adventure at the US border in his own time.)

But that's the least of my concerns: we had a tremendous launch of Blogcritics.com last week with all kinds of coverage, links, traffic, and attention, much of it do to the interview with RIAA pres Cary Sherman, thanks to a genius inspiration from Matt Welch, who hooked up with a publicist for the RIAA at a bar one night and had the brainstorm. All of the excitement, interchange of ideas, suggestions and sweat from lots of great people (see the Special Thanks list at Blogcritics, our roster of Blogcritics - thanks to you all!) made the thing go super smoothly (Glenn Frazier did the hard tech work).

But now that we are up and running, there is the inevitable emotional letdown as attention turns elsewhere, traffic levels off, contributions slow down, minor problems arise, you know, life occurs and once a project like Blogcritics.com is up and running, to keep it running requires, you know, work

I have spent the last week with my attention divided between Blogcritics and here, and I have anxiety about finding the right mix of my time and attention. I fear I have cannibalized my own readership and divided it somewhat between the two sites: traffic has been down here exactly since last Tuesday's launch, which really frosts my flake and causes me to toss and turn at night. It surely doesn't help that Dawn's traffic has been kicking the llama's ass down the street and into the stormdrain over the same period. And it pisses me off even more that it pisses me off when my wife is doing better than I am: what kind of a dick worries about such things? I am even considering folding this site into Blogcritics and cutting down on the redundancies - would that bother anyone out there?

It also pisses me off that it seems like my traffic is at its lowest, and I get the least general attention out there in the land of the midnight blog, just when my writing is at its best. I'll think I have reached a brilliant concept, or keenly followed some thread of truth, or composed a bold swath of eloquence, and.... NOT A FUCKING THING HAPPENS: no comments, no big jump in traffic, few or no links on the matter. It's perverse - the more excited I am about a post, or series of posts, the more certain it is that no one will give a diseased rat's glute about the matter. I would be greatly remiss not to mention, though, that Bill Quick, Pej, and Steve Green have rocked me very well this last week, and many others of you have hooked me up as well. Thanks - it means a lot to me - I'm just being a baby.

And then there is the comments issue. With the kind of traffic we get here - even though this has been a down week - we should get way more comments than we do. There are entire days that have passed with, like, ten comments. This is absurd. I haven't snapped at anyone's ass in a long time - I respond to most comments in a timely manner. I don't have the slightest idea why I still get more emails than comments, when comments are so much quicker and easier. I throw my hands up on that one, but it pisses me off.

But now we come to the real issue - all of the above is pretty much petty whining, which I do periodically - but the real deal is I have to make a huge life decision right now, and I don't know which way it's going to go. We were going to build a house on some land my parents own, but there were many complications and extra expenses - like a freaking $50,000 driveway to get from the street to where the house was supposed to go - and a bunch of other crap like finishing the house before hard winter set in, but the real problem has been the down payment. It's up to me, and I haven't come up with a way to come up with it. I still don't have a book deal for America.com, nothing much is coming in from this blogging nonsense, and I feel a fool and a failure.

So now we have another chance. We can trade in our crappy little house as a down payment on a beautiful new house on a hill almost completed in a great area - down payment resolved, but I have to be able to make the payments. Dawn works like a dog at a real job, and on her blog, and with the kids, and I am a fucking worthless slug. I have to come up with the steady income to make a substantial house payment every month, or my entire family - three generations - will disown me.

The time has come. And Paypal - which rings not nearly often enough by the way - isn't ever going to solve this problem. I basically need to find real money on a regular basis, and find it within about two months when the house payments will start. That's the real issue, time to return to being an adult and take care of the family.
posted by Eric at 10:00 PM

 
Hail Wars
Rural teenage Chinese girls blast hail out of the sky in 30-year tradition:

Farmers in this remote pocket of north-central China have been at war with the elements for as long as they can remember. Each summer, walnut-sized hailstones threaten to tumble from the heavens and wipe out entire harvests of corn, cabbage, tobacco and wheat, ruining their meager sources of food and livelihood.

There was no taming Mother Nature until intrepid villagers formed an all-girl army of hail-busters three decades ago, a gutsy outgrowth of the Chinese women's movement.

Working wonders with out-of-date antiaircraft artillery from China's wars in Korea and against Vietnam, these weather guerrillas have become cult heroes to many local folks, who give thanks to them for surveying the skies and saving the crops.

....most scientists consider such attempts wishful thinking, saying there is no way to prove what nature would have done without the effort. So any claim of success, they say, is dubious.

"I don't want to be cruel and call it scientific illiteracy," said Fred Carr, director of the school of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. "But people don't really understand the cause and effect. It's like saying, 'I slammed the door and the hail didn't fall on my house.' "

But many Chinese swear by their artillery power.

"Of course it works. Otherwise, we wouldn't have used it for so long," said Wang Shuaixiong, a Communist Party cadre at the weather bureau here, explaining that the artillery is laced with chemicals that speed up condensation and produce rainfall instead of hail.

This is, needless to say, a classic line coming from a Communist Party cadre, who has doubtless been using the same logic to explain much of his behavior.

Having girls man the guns is a matter of tradition and practicality:

The government pays less than $20 a month—too little for the men, who could earn a lot more as migrants in the cities. But for the young women, most of whom can't afford to go on to middle school, it's a decent first job.

Almost all of the recruits are teens. The oldest is in her early 20s and the youngest barely 16. Married women aren't eligible.

...."The boys don't want to do it, because most of the time it's too boring and the money is no good," said Yan Tienlin, another villager. "The girls are better at it because they are more patient and they won't make mischief with the explosives."

....Twice a day, they contact the local weather bureau on ancient two-way radios that look like they were ripped out of a junkyard pickup truck.

A scratchy voice on the other end will order them, just like Charlie does with his angels, to stay put or gear up for war.

They work together as a team of loader, targeter, shooter and commander. They serve as each other's eyes and ears, arms and legs in the wrestling match against the storm.

Even if it isn't scientifically accepted that the girl's method works against hail, it must be very psychologically satisfying to believe you have what humanity has craved since time immemorial: control over the weather:

Liu's job during an attack is to load the ammunition into the gun. Stacks of steel grenades the size of 20-pound dumbbells pop in and out of her hands.

Her comrade, He, hops into the driver's seat and spins the steering wheel, panning the body of the weapon in a fan-shaped swing as she chases storm clouds from side to side.

The longest-serving cadet is 19-year-old Wang Qingjuan. Her job is to aim the long barrel of the gun up into the center of the storm.

One of the girls not operating the weapon waits by the radio for the command to shoot. Another runs out to yell "Fire!" The trigger—a pedal under Wang's pink-slippered feet—is pushed.

BLAM! "Take that hail! We defy you, storm! Ha Haaa!" Imagine the power a young, poor, under-educated, rural Chinese girl would feel at blowing holes in storms and saving the village. They'd probably do it for free. Sometimes science doesn't have all the answers:

"Without these girls, the damage to the village would be unthinkable," said their guardian, Wang Changqian, 67, a sturdy farmer with two bottom teeth.

In nearby Henan province last month, a hailstorm killed 18 people. Wang from the weather station said he suspects a lack of hail-busters there.

"Not every attack works, of course," he said. "But most of the time, we attack and there's no hail. We don't attack and there is hail."

posted by Eric at 3:31 PM

 
Backing Off....Some
It seems clear to me that Stratfor was right about the Bush administration backing off on attacking Iraq in the immediate future:

The Bush administration has begun to back down from plans for a near-term attack on Iraq. The controversial plan was shredding the coalition against al Qaeda, which Washington needs in battling the group. But the Bush administration's retreat from Iraq, although necessary, forces it to manage a political and psychological defeat

The Bush administration in the past few days has begun backing down from its single-minded commitment to attacking Iraq. This was forced in part by broad opposition in the Middle East and Europe to such a plan and dissension at home.

More than dissent from both sides of the aisle at home or public criticism from abroad, the critical need to keep open the channels of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and other Islamist terror organizations forced the administration's hand.

Listen to the change in tone from the president:

President George W. Bush promised Wednesday to consult allies before any military action against Iraq and asserted that an end to President Saddam Hussein's regime "is in the interest of the world."

"How we achieve that is a matter of consultation and deliberation," Bush told reporters.

....Bush said he would act in a deliberate fashion in deciding how to deal with the Iraqi leader.

"I am a patient man. ... We will look at all options and we will consider all technologies available to us and diplomacy and intelligence," Bush said.

Note use of the words "dipomacy," "consultation," "deliberation," "patient." You don't have to be in the Foreign Service to pick up on these signals: "Okay, you win for now. There are options other than military for us to seriously consider - perhaps we have not yet exausted all of those options. We need your continued cooperation with intelligence in particular."

Bush claims Iraq didn't even come up in meeting with his defense team yesterday: if it really didn't, then that is the surest indication of all that military plans have been delayed - not that Saddam is any less dangerous than before, however:

"The American people know my position and that is regime change (in Iraq) is in the interest of the world," Bush said. "How we achieve that is a matter of consultation and deliberation....I am a deliberate person."

"But one thing is for certain is that this administration agrees that Saddam Hussein is a threat and ...it hasn't changed," Bush said.

Regarding the defense team meeting:

NBC’s Tammy Kupperman reported that the absence of Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who as head of Central Command would oversee any military campaign in Iraq, appeared to lend credence to the denials by the White House, as did Rumsfeld’s plans to take the rest of the month off at his ranch in Taos, N.M.

Yet, John Hillen writes in the NY Post that while the timing may have been changed, America must remove Saddam in due course:

while it has been necessary for President Bush and his advisers in Washington to downplay possible U.S. war plans against Iraq, one fact cannot be avoided: The president has said on numerous occasions that Saddam Hussein must go. This is not simply a rhetorical device (as the "axis of evil" label could be construed). By making Saddam's removal the stated policy of the world's only superpower, the president has engaged American prestige, credibility and honor.

While we urbane post-modernists have little use for honor these days, it is an important pillar of our international standing and one with grave operational ramifications. As one Islamic scholar pointed out recently in the New York Times, prior to the U.S. attack on al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Islamic militants joked that if they attacked the United States, they would only get sued in return. The president has boldly and successfully buried that perception. But his pronouncements on Iraq have been so definitive that it would only indicate weakness and invite attack if America were to not follow through in some vigorous and purposeful sense. Even for those who decry the macho and perhaps fatalistic determinism of honor, it cannot be ignored that our adversaries think in these terms to the point of death.

Maintaining this delicate balance between temporary acquiescence and determination, the U.S. ambassador criticized German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in remarks published Tuesday for his refusal to support any attack on Iraq:

U.S. Ambassador Daniel Coats said he told senior Schroeder aides during a meeting at the Berlin chancellery last week that the German leader's stand was "not appropriate," the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported. The Bush administration is "disappointed," Coats told the newspaper.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Berlin confirmed Coats' remarks to the paper.

Schroeder, who is fighting for re-election in September, has increasingly loudly ruled out sending German troops for an "adventure" to oust Saddam Hussein ( news - web sites), a stand many voters sympathize with.

He has accused the Bush administration of setting "wrong priorities" by calling for regime change in Iraq, saying that would wreck the international anti-terror coalition and plunge the entire Middle East into turmoil.

Coats criticized Schroeder's choice of words, including suggestions by the German leader that the United States has no strategy for a post-Saddam Iraq.

Finally, assuring us that Saddam will be around for us to kick, was this announcement today:

The ruling Revolutionary Command Council on Thursday nominated President Saddam Hussein for another term, the official Iraqi News Agency reported.

INA said the council, Iraq's top decision-making body, re-nominated Saddam because "his leadership of the revolution and the state ... has been a strong guarantee for protecting Iraq's independence and continuing on the march to development despite the imperialist and Zionists' plots and the unjust embargo imposed on our people," INA reported.

A decree in May set the referendum for Oct. 15.

The Iraqi National Assembly, the 250-member parliament controlled by the ruling Baath Party, will convene in an emergency session to endorse the nomination, according to INA. It didn't say when the session will take place.

In an October 1995 referendum, Saddam was endorsed as president for a seven-year term.

Saddam was first appointed president by the council in July 1979 after replacing Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the general who led the party to power in a coup in 1968. Saddam has since held the post of the party leader, army commander and chairman of the council. Occasionally he has served as prime minister as well.

posted by Eric at 1:36 PM

 
Round Trip
In the first of several trips to the airport over the next few days with the Blogger Fiesta at our house Saturday, I must depart to haul my parents there. Back shortly - please check out the tiff below over Patriot Act data.
posted by Eric at 10:45 AM

 
Ira Robbins Interview On Blogcritics.com Tomorrow
Be sure to stop by Blogcritics.com tomorrow for our exclusive online interview with legendary rock writer Ira Robbins. We will talk about the future of the music industry, the revival of Trouser Press online, favorite music, his work with MJI, and your questions.

Blogcritics.com - "a sinister cabal of the web's best writers on music, books and popular culture miscellanea" - launched August 13 with a much heralded and controversial interview with RIAA president Cary Sherman.

In its first week of operation Blogcritics.com posted over 150 CD and book reviews and news items, and received over 40,000 page views from approximately 20,000 visitors - a most auspicious debut.

Please be sure to pass on the word about Ira's interview with us tomorrow, and visit the site often. Many more surprises are in store.
posted by Eric at 9:24 PM

 
Book Groups Support Congressional Demand For Patriot Act Data
Edward Nawotka writes today in the PW Daily Newsletter:

A group led by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers and the PEN American Center has sent a letter of support to House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R., Wis.) and Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), the Committee's ranking Democrat, protesting the Justice Department's refusal to reveal how many times it has taken information from bookstores and libraries under the Patriot Act, passed last October as an amendment to the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In June, the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Justice Department asking 50 questions about the use of the Act. On July 26, Assistant Attorney General Daniel Bryant replied in a letter that the requested information was confidential and would be turned over only to the House Intelligence Committee. The House Judiciary Committee has legal responsibility for overseeing the Patriot Act while the House Intelligence Committee does not.

....The issue is of particular interest to booksellers. Section 215 of the Patriot Act grants the FBI the ability to demand that any person or business immediately turn over records of books purchased or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement with "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities." The act includes a "gag order," preventing a bookstore or library from discussing of the matter with anyone or announcing the matter to the press. A bookstore may phone its attorney at the time of the request, but it can be done only as an afterthought, as the information must be supplied to the FBI immediately, or the employee risks arrest.

....Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, told PW Daily, "We're all in the dark here because of the gag provision as to how many subpoenas or court orders have been issued. No one will tell you if there's a few or a thousand that have been issued. It's likely to scare people to hear that the Justice Department is fighting not to reveal the number." He added, "We're not asking for details, we just want to know a number."

The FBI can walk into any bookstore or library with a search warrant, demand sales or lending records for anyone suspected of "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities." The employee has no recourse but to turn the records over, then cannot discuss this activity with anyone other than his/her attorney. The House Judiciary Committee and representatives of booksellers want to know how many times this has happened. I'm not sure that the booksellers have any right other than courtesy to the information, but surely the House Judiciary Committee, with legal responsibility for overseeing the Patriot Act, does.

Again we see a near-paranoid aversion to divulging any information to anyone from John Ashcroft's Justice Department - a condition that only leads others to a similar state of paranoia in others, with or without cause. Why give so-inclined people the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild? When people perceive a pattern of unwarranted secrecy, they suspect the worst. Ashcroft's Justice has handled this general problem very poorly in both word and deed.

the book groups said that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment and urged the Committee to pursue its efforts to ensure that the Justice Department does not abuse its new power. "The secrecy surrounding the issuance of search warrants pursuant to Section 215 and the lack of any adversarial proceeding…are an open invitation to abuse of governmental power in the absence of proper oversight," they said.

Whether this is happening or not, the perception is there that it may be.

Judith Platt, who directs the Association of American Publishers' Freedom to Read Program, stressed that "an individual's right to read without the government looking over his shoulder is the most basic right in a free society. If we allow this freedom to be abridged in the interest of law enforcement, we have a right to demand the most stringent standards of judicial and Congressional oversight."

In an interview Monday with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rep. Sensenbrenner, a Republican,

said he would "start blowing a fuse" unless Ashcroft's Justice Department gives answers by Labor Day week to 50 written questions about the act raised by the House Judiciary Committee in June.

If the committee still doesn't have the answers by then, Sensenbrenner said, he may take the unusual step of issuing a subpoena to Ashcroft to force him to testify before the Judiciary Committee, which Sensenbrenner heads. He noted that the department already has missed two deadlines issued earlier by Congress for answering the questions.

....The subpoena threat isn't the only weapon Sensenbrenner is wielding.

Sensenbrenner said he told Ashcroft during a summer social event: "Look, there's a sunset in the Patriot Act. If you want to play 'I've got a secret,' good luck getting the Patriot Act extended. Because if you've got a bipartisan anger in the Congress, the sunset will come and go and the Patriot Act disappears."

The act automatically expires in late 2005 unless Congress votes to extend it.

Giving Sensenbrenner's position on the Patriot Act data some perspective is his position on a related matter:

he said he doesn't favor blanket release of the names of the foreign detainees arrested since the act went into effect. A judge should make the decision on a case-by-case basis with the burden on the government to prove secrecy was necessary, Sensenbrenner said.

The issue is pending before a federal appeals court.

Isn't this a man with whom Ashcroft should be trying to work?
posted by Eric at 7:15 PM

 
Hookers and Junkies Want Piece of the Pie
And you thought mind-reamingly audacious lawsuits were confined to the US?

The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, which represents about 1,000 residents of the seedy Downtown Eastside, has sent a letter demanding compensation to 30 production firms. They include Club Six Prods., currently filming MGM's "Agent Cody Banks" starring Frankie Muniz and Angie Harmon.

The letter states: "Sex trade workers must be compensated for displacement they experience at your hands in the same manner you would compensate a business if you were to use their locale during operating hours. The same must hold true for homeless people you push from beneath a bridge or doorway, and drug users you move from a park."

It also wants financial compensation for all disrupted work, including panhandling; alternative accommodation for affected residents; and equal financial compensation for residents of buildings impacted by filming.

Do you mean that people who earn money from illegal acts shuld be paid when those acts are "interrupted" by legal commerce? On what possible grounds? That they feel like it?

Why, do they imagine, has so much production been driven from Hollywood making places like Vancouver attractive in the first place? Absurd and burdensome rules and fees and labor requirements not unlike what is being asked for here.

I am sympathetic to the homeless, druggies, and whores: I think the government should provide a place to stay for everyone who needs it with a requirement that they work off their housing costs a la "workfare"; prostitution and drugs should be legalized, regulated, and taxed by the government, just like topless dancing and alcohol. But I do not think that those accustomed to squatting on public land or private land they do not own for the purpose of committing illegal acts are owed shit when they are inconvenienced by those performing legal and licensed acts, like film production.

Those involved get credit for substantial balls, but surely the powers that be must call bullshit on this one.
posted by Eric at 3:40 PM

 
California Coercion?
Dawn and I had a spirited discussion with several bloggers and others about homeschooling (interesting that the word/phrase is variously spelled "home school," home-school" and "homeschool" - get it together) last week. We both softened our positions against it, but still believe it is very difficult to do right, and requires a huge commitment from student and teacher alike.

Although found in the deeply conservative Washington Times, this story is quite troubling nonetheless if this boils down to bureaucratic coercion for financial purposes:

School officials in California are warning parents that they cannot educate their children at home unless they obtain professional teaching credentials.

Without the proper credentials, parents no longer can file required paperwork that would authorize them to home school their children, states a memo issued by the state Department of Education. As a result, those children not attending public schools would be considered "truant" by local school districts.

"In California, 'home schooling' — a situation where non-credentialed parents teach their own children, exclusively, at home whether using correspondence courses or other types of courses — is not an authorized exemption from mandatory public school attendance," state Deputy Superintendent Joanne Mendoza wrote in the July 16 memo to all school employees. "Furthermore, a parent's filing of the affidavit required of a private school does not transform that parent into a private school," the memo continued.

...Advocates of home-based education say the memo is just another ploy to frighten home-school parents into sending their children to public schools. Part of it has to do with money, they say, as the state's education department is dealing with a $23 billion deficit.

"This has to do with money and ideology," said J. Michael Smith, president of the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association. "California would be the only state in the union that would require home schoolers to be certified teachers."

Obtain a teaching credential to homeschool? Seems heavy-handed. The state has every right to mandate what PUPILS must know at what point, and testing for such is absolutely appropriate, but as long as the student achieves this, what is the point of mandating what the teacher knows? The proof is in the pudding, and the net result would not seem to be better-educated homeschooled students, but rather a great deal fewer of them, as the Times alleges is the point.

The fact that California would be the ONLY state to have such a requirement, and coincidentally, it also has a $23 billion education deficit certainly serves as circumstantial evidence at the least. But then on the other hand you have this overheated rhetoric:

"There is an attempt to coerce these people to send their children to public schools," said Gary Kreep, founder and president of the U.S. Justice Foundation in California. "Some officials don't like home schoolers because they are the last bastion of independent thinkers, the last bastion of individuality. If these children are not in public school, teachers can't tell them that homosexuality is normal and permissible, which is what's being taught in California."

Gary, for some people homosexuality is "normal" and therefore "permissible," and for such an "independent thinking" "individualist," you are awfully judgmental and closed-minded. There would appear to be plenty of ideology to go around on both sides, although I can think of no good excuse for the state to unduly burden those who would choose to homeschool beyond mandating levels of achievement for the students. Aren't they who this is supposed to be about?
posted by Eric at 2:25 PM

 
Anarchy
David Kaplan has an idea for baseball negotiators:

There is a better way. It's simple: make the system look like any other business-NEWSWEEK's, GM's or anybody else's. Let all major leaguers be free agents. Goodbye, salary arbitration. Goodbye, minimum pay. Goodbye, automatic guaranteed contracts. "Unlimited free agency could very well reduce the overall wage bill," says Lou Guth, a senior vice president with National Economic Research Associates, who used to advise baseball management. (NERA analyzed salary data for this article.)

It may well be that veteran stars like Alex Rodriguez would continue to win top pay. And it's no doubt true that some of the 333 now enslaved young players would see big increases. But it's most everyone else-including the 223 arbitration-eligible players, as well as many of the second-rung free agents-whose salaries might stabilize or decline, as the labor supply remained ample each year. Why sign a mediocre reliever for a few million bucks when five other lefty zhlubs are available for a fraction of that?

Players couldn't possibly object to such a pay structure, even if it deflated average salaries. Their union has been beating the ideological drums since forever and it'd become a laughingstock if it turned down unbridled freedom. What do owners think? Remarkably, they admit they've never considered the idea. It's not because they've run the economic models, but because they believe it would destroy the minor leagues. Clubs, they say, would no longer have incentive to develop talent. But that's nonsense. There'd be just as much need for development, and since all teams would be operating under the same rules, the net effect of unlimited free agency would be nil.

I like the idea of single-year deals for the players to keep them honest; and I like releasing the across-the-board pressure toward escalating salaries that removing arbitration would bring; and the teams would have to pay players what they were worth any given year, not for what they have done in the past nor what they may do in the future; but if fans don't like the lack of stability on teams now, with this plan entire rosters could come and go from year to year - it might be chaos but it wouldn't be boring.

UPDATE
Chas Rich says this idea is not new:

The idea of only one-year contracts was first floated by Charles O. Finley (who by the way burns in hell for his other idea -- the Designated Hitter) back in the '70s before actual free agency occurred. Finley, at the time, was the owner of the Oakland A's. Marvin Miller was representing the union. Finley, a notorious skinflint, recognized that free agency was coming. He also had enough understanding of supply and demand to understand that the best way to keep salaries down with free agency was to make sure the supply was high.

Unfortunately,

1. Marvin Miller also understood this, and knew that limiting the supply (the number of players on the open market) would increase the demand and the players would be bid up in price. He was totally against the idea.

2. The other owners didn't seem to understand this basic economic idea, and were horrified by it seeing only the cost and potential for someone to buy a championship every year (something the Yankees are falsely accused of, but the real examples are Florida in 1997 and Arizona in 2001).

3. The only press was from horrified traditionalist sportswriters who decried the idea.

UPDATE
Dan Lewis says nyet:

most businesses don't have arb or minimum pay, save for the minimum wage. And that drum beaten by the union would be in chorus with those capitulations. But no guaranteed salaries? How does that go against the principles the union allegedly adheres to?

If the Rangers and A-Rod agree to a five page contract that ties him to Texas for seven years (with a possibility of three more), he does so independant of the collective bargaining agreement. In other words, if one were to abolish the CBA, he'd still be able to do this. The CBA, for all intents and purposes, limits the freedom that exists in the marketplace. Minimum salaries and salary arbitration lessen the powers of the owners. (Yes, arb was originally the owners' desire.) The draft, salary caps, and the pre-free agency years -- all parts of the CBA -- limit the players. Non-guaranteed contracts simply limit the players, and have absolutely no place within the union's dogma as asserted by Kaplan.

As I understand Kaplan, contracts would be guaranteed but just for one year; then they would be free agents again. Or does "guaranteed" mean more than one year?
posted by Eric at 1:14 PM

 
Search the Nun, the 90 year-Old Eskimo, and the Pilot - Let the Basketball Player Go
They are not full of shit this time:

To Whom It Should Concern,

On Sunday, August 19th, at approximately 6:45 pm, boarding for American Airlines flight #1849 was announced through BOS/Logan gate B29. The first passenger was asked by the stewardess to submit to a security check. He refused and threatened to make a scene. He had been identified earlier by security staff at the gate as Antoine Walker, a professional basketball player for the Boston Celtics. He was then allowed to board the plane, WITHOUT being screened.

Maybe we do have a caste system.
posted by Eric at 12:29 PM

 
Shades
Yes Oliver, I am a practitioner of voodoo and am lucky and whatnot, but the "multi-hued" part is Photoshop: that couch is actually a dirty cream color.
posted by Eric at 12:21 PM

 
Department of Duh
Per Hot Buttered Death,

Caregivers in Copenhagen [which sounds like yet another UN commission] have found that pornography and prostitutes have a greater calming effect on their elderly patients than traditional medical treatment such as drug therapy.

Staff at the Thorupgaarden nursing home in the Danish capital have been broadcasting pornography on the building's internal videochannel every Saturday night for several years.

And if videos and erotic magazines don't relieve the tension, residents can ask the staff to order a prostitute for them.

The caregivers have told Danish media that pornography is healthier, cheaper and easier to use than medicine, Lars Elmsted Petersen, a spokesman for the Danish seniors' lobby group Aeldresagen, said.

Earlier this year, the Danish government released a report stating that sexuality is an integral part of life for seniors and the disabled. It recommended that caregivers help elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs.

Danish job description: "Protitute for the elderly and disabled; subcategories: gay male [Scott Thorson], gay female [Anne Heche], straight male [Kronk], straight female [Anna Nicole Smith]. Subjects with experience in animal breeding or raisin humping preferred."

This is all rather self-evident, but isn't the Danish approach a bit clinical? Why not just point the elderly in the direction of each other? Isn't the Grumpy Old Men approach a bit more romantic and psychologically pleasing than a visit from a sex worker with a rubber glove and a frown?

After Saturday night porno, just turn the golden agers loose on each other in a padded room with Viagra, dildoes and Crisco. Problem solved.
posted by Eric at 11:57 AM

 
Your Daily Clinton
I think this makes a lot of sense:

CBS and associates of Bill Clinton are reportedly discussing the possibility of the former president hosting an afternoon talk show.

The discussions are preliminary and still very tentative, according to reports in the New York Times and Variety. In addition, the Times reports that the Clinton camp is itself divided over how seriously to take the proposal.

Similar discussions were held with NBC earlier this year. Those talks ended in July. Apparently concerns grew about the amount of money the president wanted from a deal and the appeal of such a show with advertisers and conservative audiences.

CBS and Clinton associates are now apparently talking about the former president hosting a daily syndicated talk show for a salary of $30 million to $50 million a year. If the proposal crystallizes, it would be the highest salary ever paid to a first-time talk show host.

Seriously, communicating about a lot of complicated stupid shit is what Clinton does best, and a daily show would be the perfect forum for him to rehabilitate his tarnished image before a generally receptive audience of bored housewives. Of couse, Clinton's attention could well wander after his success was assured - that's his pattern - but a daily show could also evoke the archetype of perpetual campaign within Bill's brain, with ratings paralleling poll figures, and he might happily stump the airwaves in perpetuity. He'd probably insist on having hot babes on the show everyday, though: maybe he could hire Rosie's staff, they're already used to that requirement.

UPDATE
Frank Martin favors the wife.

UPDATE
Glenn R finds another twist to this one:

CBS, who had reportedly been in talks with former President Bill Clinton about hosting his own afternoon talk show, surprised the broadcast world today by announcing that the former President would instead star in a new spin-off of its hit series, “C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation.”

The new series, “C.S.I.: D.C.” will feature the former President as a police forensics investigator probing, in the words of the CBS press release, “a full docket of mysteries, crimes, and sexual harassment lawsuits from the Clinton administration.”

A spokesman for CBS said that in the first season of “C.S.I.: D.C.,” Mr. Clinton will investigate “such enduring mysteries as the disappearance of the Rose Law Firm billing records, the death of White House aide Vincent Foster, and what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

“He’ll basically be picking up where Ken Starr left off,” the spokesman said.....

posted by Eric at 11:27 AM

 
Cloning Lite
This article subheading is a bit misleading:

In an eerie recreation of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie "Jurassic Park", scientists are planning to clone an extinct animal to be the central attraction of a wildlife park.

Sort of, what they are actually planning to do is this:

Mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago, but using a technique that involves impregnating an Indian elephant -- its closest genetic relative -- with mammoth sperm and then repeating the procedure with its offspring could produce a creature that is 88 percent mammoth in 50 years, the report said.

Per the Times article:

The part of the body that the Japanese are most keen to get are the testicles. Finding frozen mammoth sperm would provide a significant boost to any cloning exercise, because sperm preserves well when frozen, even if thawed and refrozen several times.

If impregnating an Indian elephant with mammoth sperm produced young, that offspring would be impregnated with more mammoth sperm and the process repeated in the next generation, producing a creature that was 88 per cent mammoth.

So although cloning techniques are involved, it's really more like retro selective breeding, approaching the desired creature by degrees over generations.

This would seem to bring up issues such as what if the specimen, buried in an avalanche 25,000-30,000 years ago, bears some sort of untreatable pathogen that currently there is no immunity for, and the like; but assuming no disasters of this sort occur, the scientists appear to have plenty of margin of error as there are estimated to be ten million mammoths buried in the permafrost of Siberia: a cryogeneticist's wet dream. Rather than go through all of this cloning nonsense, why don't we just wake them up?
posted by Eric at 11:06 AM

 
SPF-Dumbass
We all know that sunburn is a BAD THING, but once again there is some pretty amazing legal nonsense going down in Ohio:

Eve Hibbits was arrested a week ago on three counts of child endangerment, said Sheriff Fred Abdalla.

She remained in jail Tuesday in lieu of $15,000 bail, and a preliminary hearing is set for Wednesday.

Abdalla said a deputy noticed her 2-year-old daughter and 10-month-old twin boys had severely sunburned faces at the Jefferson County Fair.

"She pushed her kids around the fairground all day last Tuesday, and it looked like those kids' faces were dipped in red paint," he said. "There was no sunscreen or nothing on these children."

The children had second-degree sunburns and were treated with cold compresses, said Trinity Medical Center West spokesman Keith Murdock.

Hibbits, 31, could face 15 years in jail if convicted of all three counts.

FELONY ENDANGERMENT?? For sunburn?? The stupid bitch clearly wasn't paying any attention, and the delicate skin of a 2 year-old and two 10 month-olds must be carefully protected. The woman should be ostracized, vilified, kicked in the ass, ridiculed, but isn't the cudgel of the law a bit much here? Maybe this is a pattern and the kids should be taken away from the woman, but in and of itself, is sunburn really grounds for felony prosecution? Make her take a course on child safety, make her do volunteer work with a dermatologist. She has already been in jail a week pending today's preliminary hearing. Does it do society any good to lock this woman up for 15 years for neglecting sunscreen?

I am very pleased that a deputy was vigilant enough to notice that three babies were badly sunburned - that's very commendable and the guy deserves several "attaboys" for his keen eye and compassion; but does the image of this hapless mother hunched in the corner of her cell, mumbling to herself all day for 15 years, "Must put sunscreen on the babies, must put sunscreen on the babies, must put sunscreen on the babies...," evoke thoughts of justice from anyone?

UPDATE
Glenn Reynolds has a report from the front lines:

Several readers email to say that the CNN story doesn't capture the extent of the problem Here's one from reader Debbie Eberts:


Fred Abdala was interviewed via telephone on Fox News by Brigette Quinn this morning. The first words out of his mouth were that the county was NOT seeking 15 years for this mother & that he had no idea where that rumor started (we all know). She's been in jail for about 7 days, is being released today and will be given probation and placed under the "watchful eyes" of CPS (his words, not mine). Apparently, this mom is "familiar" with CPS and the end goal is to train her to properly care for her children. So, tax dollars are at work here and Sheriff Abdala seems pretty reasonable.


Of course, she'll probably turn around and sue the Jefferson County Fair for not issuing sunburn warnings.

posted by Eric at 10:37 AM

 
Yes, But Not As Often
Ocean Guy Jim B notes one seismic difference between men and women.
posted by Eric at 9:50 PM

 
A Ball and A Bush
Atrios leads us to an alternate Bush Iraq plan, this one involving clubs, but no baby seals:

Using a golf ball and a set of Ping clubs, President Bush demonstrated to members of the press his administration's current plans for bringing down Iraqi Saddam Hussein.

"You see," said the President, using a seven-iron to point, "That Osama fellow was hard to hit because he was in the rough. So that whole 'we got to hit Osama to win the game' thing was sort of a mulligan. We just forget about all that. But, you see, that Saddam fellow is out there on the green. It's almost like he has a big sick in his head with a flag flying. Sure, you can miss a few times, but you know where the sonofabitch is. So, eventually, you are going to drop him."

Zowie! Just as I was writing this in my office adjacent to the 14th fairway, a golfer sliced one but good and bounced it off of our roof, agitating the squirrels. Kismet!
posted by Eric at 9:45 PM

 
Kill Your Television
Via the mysterious the OmbudsGod, Andrew Cline recoils from the forthcoming TV offerings on 9/11:

Help recapture the collective memory of last year's horror? Do you know anyone who's forgotten it or can forget it?

It is certain nothing new will be revealed. Instead, we'll be assaulted with a rehash of horrific images and stories. To what end? I think a more fitting way to remember the day is spending it with family and friends, sharing our own stories with each other, and avoiding the television.

The medium of television, and the people who create it, are not capable of producing anything that approaches reverence and solemnity. Turn off your TV this September 11th....

posted by Eric at 9:26 PM

 
Out of the Blue
Was it a flash of inspiration? No, it was a real lightning bolt that struck Michael King's place:

I was watching TV in the bedroom, Rachel was in the living room, and all three kids had gone to bed. All this during a pretty hefty thunderstorm.

The bolt happened, and everything in the apartment flashed brightly. The TV sizzled as I dove off the bed for the floor; Rae was bolting for the dining room; all three kids screamed.

Once I got my wits back about me and got up off the floor, I realized the baby was crying hysterically. Rachel beat me to the back bedroom. As I made it down the hall, I heard Mitchell wimpering from his room. While Rae picked up the baby, I sat with Mitchell, until his breathing came back to something approaching normal.

Jasmine stuck her head in Mitchell's room, along with Rae - holding Lynese. "Son, you want to sleep in the hallway until the lightning calms down a bit?"

"Yes," he wimpered. Mitchell plays a brave nine, but he's still afraid of his shadow; not to mention lightning.

Okay, family accounted for and no one injured. What's the next priority for a modern guy? His computer of course:

I finally took a look over at the computer, fearing the worst. The PC had gone into standby mode, and was OK. The cable modem wasn't so lucky. No lights showed up on the face. Once I woke up the PC and tried to query the modem, I got nothing. Fair enough. I ran a quick check on the remainder of the system - everything else was OK.

Phew.
posted by Eric at 9:07 PM

 
Nature Shaped By Man
Natalie Angier says humans, like all primates, are programmed to both love and fear nature:

Biophilia is the term coined by the Harvard naturalist Dr. Edward O. Wilson to describe what he saw as humanity's "innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes," and to be drawn toward nature, to feel an affinity for it, a love, a craving. Who has not experienced the thrill of biophilia? You see a fine, fat maple tree ablaze with the sugared tannins of autumn, or the sun glittering on the Hudson River in an explosion of diamonds and for a moment you wish you were Julie Andrews: the hills are alive!

But then you stumble through a bush and emerge covered with ticks. Or you watch a bunch of Hitchcockian crows maul and kill a baby squirrel. You try to tell yourself, c'est la guerre, there are too many squirrels anyway, but in fact you resent this chronic mouthiness of nature, these endless rounds of attack and snack, and you're grateful anew for four walls and DEET. Nature is a mother in so many ways, and that means you adore her and depend on her but at times she's pure Medea.

....As Dr. Wilson and others see it, the attraction toward nature is the outcome of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection. Those who were drawn toward beneficial environments, while shunning the many hazards of nature, survived to pass their predilections along. By this theory, people find blossoming trees beautiful because they're likeliest to bear ripe fruit; they love waterfalls because clear, cascading water is likeliest to be fresh and potable — and full of fish to eat.

"The way we design our parks is based on a savanna landscape, with its trees here and there and animals scattered about," Dr. de Waal said. "Though in parks we use statues instead of animals." And what is a gothic cathedral but the frozen music of a forest, with stone pillars and vaults for trees and stained glass for the prismatic mist that shatters sun into pieces.

Conversely, many people around the world share aversions to closed spaces, high places, rats and snakes.

My favorite places are where man has guided nature toward his own ends without destroying nature's original framework. I love botanical gardens, Asian landscape paintings, Pacific Island shrines in the jungle: places where man and nature meet on friendly terms. I'm not that big a fan of zoos because man has taken a Noah's ark worth of creatures and constructed artificial living spaces: man is too much in control. Conversely, I don't like the very rawest nature where there are lots of bugs and things that want to eat you and no discernable order to the tableau: not enough human input there. But where they meet on more or less equal terms and respect each other's needs, those are the places I love best.

The Na Pali Coast of Kauai is wild and rugged and effulgent with nature's bounty, BUT it also has a trail cut through it that not only makes passage possible, but reassuringly shows the nondestructive hand of man in the middle of the lushest landscape. I think these kinds of settings are where man's love of nature and instinct to control it come together in the most satisfying way. Now I want to go back - I shouldn't have talked about that.
posted by Eric at 5:18 PM

 
Seekies
Maddie has a big, sweaty, smelly, perpendicular, extemporaneous, seething, apoplectic, smoking killer hotass secret in her cute little bustle: to be revealed Saturday.
posted by Eric at 2:17 PM

 
Why Ask Why?
Bitter Girl Shannon is being interviewed in exile for the same upcoming feature on blogs for which Dawn and I have been corralled:

Yeah. I'm not fond of interviews, because I think I end up sounding much more stupid than I actually am. And then, when I get asked questions like "why do [I] do what [I] do?", I get all existential about it.

Imagine, if you will, the conversation my inner monologue has with itself:


I don't know. Why do you blog?

Because I have nothing better to do? No, that can't be it. Because I like to write? Guess so.

But you're not really that interesting, dear.

Sure I am! And besides, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.

Oh my God, not that again, Shannon. I mean, I know being forced to go to Bible school scarred you as a child, but really, that's a bit much.

Yeah. Like the time I got thrown out of church.

Mom just snuck out of Bible classes. You could've done that, but no, you had to tell the minister off. As a 2-yr-old, no less.

Uh-huh. Wait, where were we? Oh yeah. Why do I do this site anyway?

I don't know.

Me neither. Let's go have some coffee.

'K. Hey, do we still have that Spice Girls movie?

posted by Eric at 1:20 PM

 
Stay of Execution?
Stratfor says the Bush administration is backing off plans to attack Iraq:

The Bush administration has begun to back down from plans for a near-term attack on Iraq. The controversial plan was shredding the coalition against al Qaeda, which Washington needs in battling the group. But the Bush administration's retreat from Iraq, although necessary, forces it to manage a political and psychological defeat

The Bush administration in the past few days has begun backing down from its single-minded commitment to attacking Iraq. This was forced in part by broad opposition in the Middle East and Europe to such a plan and dissension at home.

The White House's wavering reflects the tortuous political and military complexity of containing a war on Iraq and its aftermath. But the Bush administration, unilateralist chest-thumping aside, also realizes that it needs the assistance of many countries if it is to keep al Qaeda and its sympathizers in check.

A reversal of policy on Iraq was necessary in terms of both long-term U.S. anti-terrorism goals and short-term preparedness for new al Qaeda attacks. However, the retreat is a strategic psychological defeat for the administration, particularly in the Middle East. Washington inadvertently stumbled into exactly the trap al Qaeda hoped to set for it.

The key weapon those opposed to an attack on Iraq have brandished is intelligence. The US needs intelligence and cooperation from a number of nations to continue its thus far successful campaign to contain and crush al Qaeda, and with elections approaching, the last thing the administration thinks it needs is another terrorist attack on the US.

Washington already has begun searching for alternative strategies. The London-based Sunday Times reported Aug. 18 that the Pentagon would for the first time begin funding covert operations by Iraqi opposition groups. The State Department reportedly also is freeing up money earmarked for the Iraqi opposition that had been tied up until now.

Support for an attack -- which was never particularly strong to begin with -- has been crumbling at home and abroad.

For instance, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal announced Aug. 7 that Riyadh would not allow the United States to launch an attack on Iraq from Saudi territory. Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Oman have all stated their opposition to an attack on Iraq.

Two more countries joined the opposition Aug. 18. After a meeting with Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa of Bahrain -- where the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet is based -- said his country opposes unilateral U.S. military action against Iraq. The same day, after a meeting in Jeddah with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh declared his opposition to a war as well.

Forced to prioritize, the administration is picking al Qaeda, according to the report:

The administration's about-face indicates that it recognizes the grim reality on three counts. First, despite the increasingly strident assertions by unilateralists within the administration that the United States could attack Iraq without the support of a coalition, the need for friendly bases in the Middle East argued otherwise. The United States literally was running out of room to maneuver. Second, given its battlefield constraints, Washington could not be sure it could contain a war on Iraq within that country's borders or manage the war's aftermath.

Finally, the administration accepted that Iraq is peripheral to its primary strategic concern: al Qaeda. And while the United States may have the firepower to defeat the Iraqi army, it needs intelligence as much as rifles to defeat al Qaeda. That intelligence comes from allies in the Middle East, and the United States cannot afford for it to dry up.

Stratfor opines that there will be little fallout from the reversal at home or with allies, but the US will need to be very careful in its dealings with the Islamic/Arab world, which may be emboldened by the reversal, assuming it is true.

Thanks to reader William Utley for the heads up.
posted by Eric at 12:53 PM

 
Batty
While I was absorbed with the Blogcritics.com launch last week, Ken Layne discussed bats:

most people don't realize when they've been bitten by a bat. Why? Dirty little bat teeth are so small, it's tough to notice the wound.
Then you get the rabies. So if you have bat trouble, just assume you've been bitten and head down to the hospital for the painful series of shots and enemas.

In theory I like bats: they have cool sonar and they eat bad bugs and you can use their poop to make bombs and stuff - we just had a good time checking them out at the Cleveland Zoo (7th oldest zoo in the US!).

But as Ken notes, the big problem with bats is rabies:

What people are dying from is bat rabies. Of the 26 rabies deaths since 1990, 24 have been from bat bites, most of which were unnoticed or ignored.

So bats up in your nutsack are bad news. My junior year of college, I lived in a big old house with a bunch of other students, and we had a communal rec area up in the attic. It seemed like every other week or so, some damn bat got up in the room and frightened the civilians and we had to kill it because there were no windows up there (how did they get in? we always wondered).

The answer? Bat tennis. Upon hearing the cry of "bat!," we would snag our tennis rackets and charge up the stairs in an effort to be the first to "serve" the bat. There were lamps and bongs and crap up there, so we had to be careful where we swung, but once in place, we stood still, made little bat noises and waited for the winged rat to take flight, whereupon we took to dramatic displays of serving technique, which sooner or later led to the bat being propelled into a wall, ceiling, fellow student, floor, etc.

You had to be wary: if someone else got hold of the little furry shuttlecock and launched it in your direction, you would have to volley the bastard lest it meet its end up against your forehead or something. Once we volleyed our winged visitor no less than four times before it got lodged in the couch. It looked a little worse for wear: head dinged up pretty good but still smiling, even in bat death.

While all of this may sound a bit callous or even cruel, it was nothing of the kind: the impact of the racket on the bat's skull invariably killed or at least stunned it instantly, and racket impact killed nicely without dismembering and making a big freaking mess of bat parts everywhere. To this day, if I am in bat country I carry a tennis racket for the protection of myself and loved ones. Usually just seeing the racket scares the rabid little neck-biters away.
posted by Eric at 12:16 PM

 
Marketplace
Picture this dispute at a university in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Iraq, where the "marketplace of ideas" is virtually nonexistent:

CHAPEL HILL - An attempt at the 11th hour failed to stop small-group discussions about the Quran on Monday at the University of North Carolina.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond turned down the Family Policy Network's bid to halt the seminars just hours before they were set to begin.

The controversy has been brewing for months, ever since UNC asked about 4,000 freshmen and transfer students to read Michael Sells' book ''Approaching the Quran.'' The Family Policy Network sued. North Carolina legislators in the state House voted to ban the use of public funds for the assignment.

University officials defended their decision.

....At 1 p.m., the small-group discussions began without fanfare. About 180 UNC faculty and staff, including Chancellor James Moeser, volunteered to lead them.

Moeser usually leads a seminar for the first-year summer reading program. But this year, after the sessions concluded, he addressed a gaggle of reporters in front of Wilson Library.

''This is a great day for our university,'' Moeser said. ''We did the right thing.''

Moeser referred to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the speaker ban of communists in the 1960s and said fear drove those decisions.

''Academic freedom is safe at Carolina,'' he said.

....Jason Reed, a freshman from Asheville, said, ''No harm ever came from reading a book. I read a lot of books in school that I didn't like.''

He said it is ironic that many of the same people who protest the absence of prayer in public schools are now trying to prevent the study of religion at a public university.

....Watson ended the discussion by asking students to consider the critics who say the university is guilty of celebrating the traditions of America's enemies and disrespecting the values of western civilization.

''Is that what we have done today?'' he asked. ''Have we shown disrespect?''

Students said no.

''We're learning about a religion of America,'' said Jason Reed, the freshman from Asheville.

''We are acknowledging part of our heritage,'' said Craig McLemore, a freshman from Duluth, Ga.

Surely there is nothing wrong with studying ABOUT any religion, and what religion has been more in the news over the last year than Islam? It is shameful that North Carolina legislators in the state House voted to ban the use of public funds for the assignment. This is the worst kind of political granstanding on what should be a purely academic matter.

Time makes note of the fact that this particular book on the Quran focuses on Muhammad's early teachings, before he became a political entity:

While critics slammed U.N.C. for teaching the Koran, the real problem may be that the school is not teaching enough of the Koran. Moeser says Approaching the Qur'an, assembled and translated by Haverford College professor Michael Sells, "was chosen in the wake of 9/11." But the book omits the verses in which the 9/11 terrorists might have sought to ground their actions. Subtitled The Early Revelations, Sells' book features scripture enunciated by Muhammad before the Prophet's takeover of the Arabian Peninsula, and so omits lines arguably forged in combat, like 9:5, the Sword Verse: "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them." From such verses emerged the Muslim concept of holy war. Noting their absence, Family Policy Network head Joe Glover says, "Sells whitewashes Muhammad."

"To approach the Koran as an assassination manual is an irresponsible attack on another religion," says Carl Ernst, the U.N.C. religion professor who first recommended the book. He has a point, but the hard fact is that Islam's relationship with war is what many non-Muslim Americans want to know about. As 2 million to 6 million (even population estimates are politicized) overwhelmingly peaceful U.S. Muslims look on in alarm, historians, preachers and anchorpeople weigh in on whether Islam has a bloody heart or has been, in Bush's word, hijacked.

Balance is a key element of academic responsibility, but we must trust the marketplace of ideas to regulate itself, as it has in this case by drawing protests from those who contest the image of Islam as presented in the book. It seems to me the system, other than the grandstanding by the NC House, worked very well in thos case, with all sides getting their say. It is never a violation of the separation of church and state to simply teach ABOUT religion, as legitimate an academic pursuit as physics or 18th century Russian literature, as long as that teaching doesn't veer into advocacy.

The Religious Tolerance site has a nice overview of the case with links to all involved except the Family Policy Network, whose site seems to be down.
posted by Eric at 10:42 AM

 
The World of Arbitrary Justice
Two seemingly unrelated cases bring up the disconcerting issue of unevenly distributed justice. As I mentioned yesterday, here in Ohio, in tiny Vinton County with only 13,000 residents, a judge has starkly acknowledged economic reality in a murder case:

A judge in a small, poor Ohio county told prosecutors there this month that they could not seek the death penalty in the murder of a college student because the county's share of the defense costs would be too great.

The decision, which experts say is the first of its kind, is a rare judicial acknowledgment of the powerful role money plays in death penalty cases.

"The law acknowledges that capital cases are different and require enhanced due process, for obvious reasons," Judge Jeffrey L. Simmons of the Court of Common Pleas in Vinton County wrote.

Noting that such cases "require additional resources," the judge added: "While the court has authority to approve expenses, it would be disingenuous to suggest that a trial judge can consider such requests without an awareness of the financial impact on this county. The court finds that the potential impact of financial considerations could compromise the defendant's due process rights in a capital murder trial."

The problem is that economics aren't supposed to be such a determining factor in justice. Justice is supposed to be blind and distributed as evenly as possible throughout: with an eye on the law, not on the purse strings. If the death penalty is applicable in this case - and it would appear to be:

The defendant, Gregory McKnight, is accused of killing Emily Murray in 2000. Ms. Murray, then 20, was a student at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She had been missing for a month when her body was discovered in Mr. McKnight's trailer, 80 miles away in Ray, Ohio, south of Columbus.

Mr. McKnight, 25, has also been charged with a second murder, in which the death penalty has not been sought. He was convicted of another killing as a juvenile in 1991 and served six years. He is now in prison on a burglary charge.

K. Robert Toy, who represents Mr. McKnight, said that his side's cost to try the case might amount to $75,000. With appeals and other postconviction litigation, total defense costs could reach $350,000, Mr. Toy said.

The state and county split defense costs roughly 50-50.

then the county in which the crime occurred should not be a determining factor as to how the case should be prosecuted. Justice should be the same in every corner of the state: rich, poor, north, south, east west.

"What the judge is saying is that there's a death penalty in Ohio but not in Vinton County," said Joe Case, a spokesman for the attorney general's office. "There is nothing in the law that would allow the judge to dismiss the death penalty components of the charges. The people have a right to prosecute the case."

Despite the fact that I am against the death penalty, I completely agree that the law should be applied evenly across the board, even if I don't like the law. In order to retain respect for the system and the law, it must be seen as impartial and not subject to such vagaries as the budget of a given county. The county's budget matters not a whit to the murder victim or her family.

Halfway around the world, an uneven application of justice appears to heading toward an even more appalling result:

An Islamic court in northern Nigeria ruled on Monday that a young woman must face death by stoning according to Muslim law for having a child outside marriage.

The decision, upholding a verdict by a lower court, looks set to re-ignite international outrage against Nigeria and could stoke sectarian tensions in the country's largely Muslim north.

"If one can be sentenced to death for fornication then it makes nonsense of our democracy," said Innocent Chukwuma of the Centre for Law Enforcement Education, a Lagos-based legal rights pressure group.

"The majority of Nigerians should be sentenced to death by such a ruling."

As discussed often in these pages, sharia is an hellish anachronism whose time was past a few hundred years ago, but what's worse here is that sharia is not the law of the land, just the law of about a dozen states in northern Nigeria:

Kurami was sentenced to death in March by a lower court in her state of Katsina, which like a number of others in northern Nigeria has adopted Islamic sharia law.

In June, a regional appeals court in Funtua gave her a two-year reprieve to wean her child.

Kurami is the second woman to be sentenced to death for bearing a child outside marriage since 2000, when the first of about a dozen states adopted the strict sharia code.

In March, an appeals court quashed a similar sentence on Safiya Hussaini Tungar-Tudu and acquitted her after the European Union led worldwide appeals for clemency. President Olusegun Obasanjo warned Nigeria risked international isolation.

The introduction of sharia law has been controversial in the north of Nigeria, where more than 3,000 people have died in Muslim-Christian clashes in the past three years.

"Sharia amounts to discrimination against the people of the north since no such draconian laws exist elsewhere in the country," said northern church official Samuel Num.

While we do have variation in laws from state to state, and some states have the death penalty and some don't, the difference here is between life without parole and the death penalty for the very worst of crimes such as aggravated murder, and the difference in Nigeria is between death by stoning for having a child outside marriage, where elsewhere such behavior ISN'T EVEN A CRIME. This is an absurd level of variation, reducing justice in Nigeria to a bad mordant joke.

While the spectrum is wide and the Nigerian case makes our justice problems seem relatively trivial, the difference between the Vinton County case and the Nigerian stoning case are different only in degree, not in kind: justice arbitrarily and unevenly applied is justice denied, and is wrong anywhere it rears its ugly head.

UPDATE
Eugene Volokh says I am wrong about the Ohio case:

Interesting, but I'm afraid I disagree with your objection on the Ohio death penalty issue. One important aspect of our system of local self-government is that jurisdictions can make different decisions. Some can abolish the death penalty, some preserve it for only a few of the most heinous murders, and some implement it for many more heinous murders. Some can decide this way for moral reasons and some for financial reasons. (After all, one of the arguments of the death penalty abolitionists has long been that the death penalty is a waste of money.) Each county has its own prosecutors that make their own decisions. That's self-government for you.

I suspect that the judge probably got this wrong; it's not up to judges to make such fiscal decisions. But the problem has to do with the limits of the judicial role, and not to the supposed inequality among counties.

posted by Eric at 9:42 PM

 
Stupid Criminals Pt 365
Carjacking is a cowardly violation, but carjackers usually pick their targets a little better:

The co-ed team from Florida International University of Miami was in town to teach a self-defense course and were taking a tour of Hollywood before heading to the airport Sunday afternoon when they crossed paths with the carjacker at a gas station about six blocks from where he had carjacked a Nissan minutes earlier.

In that incident, police said, the carjacker punched the Nissan's driver and pulled him out of the car then drove away with the female passenger.

The carjacker pushed the woman out of the car after trying to steal her purse, police said.

The suspect apparently was trying to ditch the first vehicle and steal another when he approached one of the students, police said. He demanded money and got into a scuffle with judo student Nester Bustillo.

"We get into a little bit of a struggle and he eventually winds up jumping into, trying to take our car," Bustillo told a local TV station.

The other students piled on and subdued the suspect in a body hold until police arrived.

Very zen: they turned his momentum against him and held him in the car, Jack. The foiled carjacker was heard to say, "This just ain't my week - I got all poked up when I tried to jack an old ladies' knitting team a few days ago. I'm going back to pimpin' ho's."
posted by Eric at 7:53 PM

 
Too Much Or Not Enough?
As discussed here, Nevada is voting in the fall on whether to decriminalize possession of up to three ounces of marijuana for those over 21. Relevant to Nevada, my question here is whether or not this kind of behavior is due to too much or not enough ganja:

A mob in Kingston's volatile Mountain View neighborhood chased and stabbed to death a bus driver who argued with a passenger, sparking a transit strike and taking Jamaica's murder toll to 600 for the year, authorities said Monday.

Harold Collins, 32, was driving a bus for the state-owned Jamaica Urban Transit Co. late on Sunday in an area known for bitter political feuds when he got into an argument with a passenger who wanted the bus to make an unscheduled stop, police said.

The passenger, identified as Tony Cowell, assaulted the driver and encouraged residents to stone him, police said.

Collins tried to escape but the bus was halted by residents who blocked the road. He ran but was chased down and stabbed to death, police said.

Bus drivers and conductors struck on Monday to protest the killing -- the second of a public transit driver in four months -- virtually shutting down Jamaica's public transportation system. More than 200 transit company buses were parked at three depots in Kingston as sign-waving protesters took to the streets.

Jamaica has one of the highest murder rates in the world with 600 so far this year in a country of only 2.7 million, after a record 1139 murders last year.

Everything is not irie in the home of rasta. This is all pretty embarrassing given that Jamaica is right down our global street. Isn't there something we can do to help them get their shit together? Jamaican gangsters have caused a fair amount of trouble here as well.
posted by Eric at 5:13 PM

 
"Gaza First"
IDF leaves Bethlehem:

Beginning the implementation of Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer's 'Gaza First' plan, the IDF pulled out all of its troops from the West Bank city of Bethlehem Monday.

The IDF will not reimpose the closure on the city and its forces would not re-enter if the PA did indeed take full security control, media reports said.

The pullout was greeted, on the one hand, by optimism on the side of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian legislators, and dissent on the side of the Israeli extreme right-wing and Palestinian terrorist organizations Hamas, Islamic Jihad, who announced they would continue carrying out attacks against Israel.

That's probably a good sign if extremists on both sides hate the plan.

A source close to Arafat said a security agreement was reached which allows the IDF to withdraw from PA territory captured after September 2000. In return, the PA has promised to take security control over the areas evacuated and keep the peace there.

Ben-Eliezer had originally said Israel would withdraw from Gaza first, and hand over control to the PA security services there. But the PA insisted other Palestinian cities be included in an initial pullback.

"I think the issue of Gaza first, which I initiated, will include not only Gaza but also other places," Ben-Eliezer told reporters at a meeting with Catherine Bertini, an envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, earlier Sunday.

UPDATE

Abu Nidal, a Palestinian linked to bombings and assassinations around the world since the 1970's, was found dead in Iraq, a Palestinian newspaper, Al Ayyam, reported today.

The Associated Press, citing two Palestinian officials in Ramallah who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Nidal's body had been found in his Baghdad apartment with multiple bullet wounds, though they described his death as a suicide. A spokesman for Abu Nidal in Lebanon, Ghanem Saleh, said he had no comment on the report, The A.P. reported.

American officials in Washington said they were aware of the reports of Abu Nidal's death but could not confirm that he was dead.

Abu Nidal, who would be about 65, has been a rival to Yasir Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization. Abu Nidal, who was born Sabri al-Banna in Jaffa, is accused by Washington of having killed or injured 900 people in attacks in 20 countries since 1974. He is wanted in the United States, Britain and Italy and was condemned to death by the P.L.O., from which he broke in 1972. Italy also sentenced him to death, after a trial in absentia, for organizing Rome airport attack on Dec. 27, 1985, in which 16 people died. A parallel attack in Vienna the same day left four dead and 47 wounded......

posted by Eric at 4:33 PM

 
Culture of Military Failure?
Norvell de Atkine notes that assessment of enemies based upon cultural assumptions has often proved unhelpful:

Thus, the U.S. Army in the 1930s evaluated the Japanese national character as lacking originality and drew the unwarranted conclusion that that country would be permanently disadvantaged in technology. Hitler dismissed the United States as a mongrel society and consequently underestimated the impact of America’s entry into the war. American strategists assumed that the pain threshold of the North Vietnamese approximated our own and that the air bombardment of the North would bring it to its knees. Three days of aerial attacks were thought to be all the Serbs could withstand; in fact, seventy-eight days were needed.

Yet de Atkine looks for cultural reasons as to why "Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era."

Kenneth Pollock concludes his exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness by noting that “certain patterns of behavior fostered by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to 1991.” These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level. The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington’s notion of a “clash of civilizations” in no way lessens the vital point he made — that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by modern communications.

....In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature.

....Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not challenging. Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told.

..... Indeed, leadership may be the greatest weakness of Arab training systems. This problem results from two main factors: a highly accentuated class system bordering on a caste system, and lack of a non-commissioned-officer development program.

....On a typical weekend, officers in units stationed outside Cairo will get in their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the enlisted men to fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway and flag down busses or trucks to get to the Cairo rail system. Garrison cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation, in various degrees, exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries — less so in Jordan, even more so in Iraq and Syria.

....The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf War when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands.

....This author has several times seen decisions that could have been made at the battalion level concerning such matters as class meeting times and locations referred for approval to the ministry of defense. All of which has led American trainers to develop a rule of thumb: a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an Arab army.

....Arab officers are not concerned about the welfare and safety of their men. The Arab military mind does not encourage initiative on the part of junior officers, or any officers for that matter. Responsibility is avoided and deflected, not sought and assumed. Political paranoia and operational hermeticism, rather than openness and team effort, are the rules of advancement (and survival) in the Arab military establishments. These are not issues of genetics, of course, but matters of historical and political culture.

....Until Arab politics begin to change at fundamental levels, Arab armies, whatever the courage or proficiency of individual officers and men, are unlikely to acquire the range of qualities which modern fighting forces require for success on the battlefield. For these qualities depend on inculcating respect, trust, and openness among the members of the armed forces at all levels, and this is the marching music of modern warfare that Arab armies, no matter how much they emulate the corresponding steps, do not want to hear.

A rather damning litany of cultural attributes leading to military deficiencies. One could take this list of cutural attributes and ascribe them to the general failure of Arabic-speaking societies in relationship to the West, and in particular the United States: fiefdoms of information, lack of trust and/or coordination between units, rigid hierarchy with disregard for those beneath you on the ladder and resentment toward those above, an emphasis on placing blame rather than taking responsibility and getting things done, lack of personal initiative.

One does not wish to take this argument too far into religious rather than cultural territory, but surely a factor in all of this is a religion whose highest dictates are "submission" and "modesty". Can Islam be reconciled with a modern, democratic, secular society that is now the paradigm of worldly success: cultural, economic, military, technological? Maybe, maybe not; but in the coming years I wouldn't want to be a soldier on their side.
posted by Eric at 3:02 PM

 
Goat Balls
Via Gene Healy, if you live in a town where the mayor is a goat, don't ask for a beer from a working man and give it to the goat without expecting some ramifications.

But castration? Seems harsh. In the famous Idaho case of the town with a beaver for a mayor, the faux pas only drew a swift kick in the posterior. This seems more in line with the offense in question.
posted by Eric at 2:24 PM

 
More Tedious Warnings For Dumbasses
The insure-ification of America continues:

a cup of Joe is the riskiest food to handle while driving, says the head of an auto insurance firm who rated the 10 worst road foods.

Why coffee?

"Drinking isn't necessarily the problem," says McKeel Hagerty, president of Hagerty Classic Insurance in Traverse City, Mich. "It's the spill. Your first response is to wipe up the mess, and that's what takes your eyes off the road."

That would ruin my day: scald my scrotum right off my body AND run over a nun as a result. Clue: don't drink anything really hot while you're driving, which seems to inevitably require fairly abrupt changes in momentum, thereby causing liquids to slosh about and land in your unsuspecting lap. If the liquid is hot, it will burn and cause discomfort, you shit-for-brains.

2. Hot Soup: OK, so you've got one hand on the wheel and one on the spoon; what's gripping the bowl? On second thought, don't answer that.

If it's soup you must have go with gazpacho. A cold mess beats a scalded lap every time.

3. Tacos: Never a great driving choice, but if you've got an option, avoid the hard shell. "We are soft-shell advocates here," Hagerty says. "From our experiences, you bite into a hard shell, and it can just explode on you.

4. Chili (and all its relatives): The foot-long chili dog is especially risky.

5. Hamburgers: Common sense would have it that the more layers, the tougher to handle, that driving with a triple-decker triples your odds of an accident.

"We did not find that to be the case," Hagerty says, "but I wouldn't rule it out."

6. Barbecued food (of any kind): It's about slop, not type. The more it drips, the more dangerous it is.

7. Fried chicken (although which part of the bird you get matters): "I would say a drumstick is certainly more user-friendly. The others seem to collapse in your hand," Hagerty says.

8. Jelly and cream-filled doughnuts: "The cream-filled Long Johns can be a real disaster," he says. Grab the honey-glazed.

9. Pop: Mainly because of the flimsy cups they come in and the even flimsier tops. And some are so big that they don't even fit in a car's cup holder. There is no evidence yet on whether hypercaffeinated power drinks lead to road rage.

10. Chocolate: "It's that last little crumb of the Snickers bar that ends up in your lap or on your white shirt that gets you," Hagerty says.

In response, I'd say that if you can't eat a fucking candy bar while you're driving without causing an accident, it's amazing you lived to driving age in the first place. Same with doughnuts - candy and doughnuts are just egregious empty calories anyway. Screw candy and doughnuts, eat a carrot.

Only a mongoloid would try to eat anything that falls apart on contact, has hot sauce dripping all over the place, or requires two hands and a table to eat successfully, like soup. If I see you eating soup while you're driving, I will try to make you spill it and laugh when you do.

There's a good rule of thumb to follow when you are driving: don't be a complete fucking insentient peabrained mindsuck and you won't need lists like this.
posted by Eric at 1:55 PM

 
One Life
9/11 victims came from all over the world, but Bill Moskal came from the Cleveland area:

Every day is Sept. 11 for Lorraine Moskal.

She long ago accepted that her husband of 22 years, William Moskal, died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

"Time doesn't have a place for me right now," she said yesterday before a memorial ceremony honoring her late husband. "The idea of [Sept. 11] is constantly there."

About 200 friends, neighbors and family members gathered yesterday at the entrance to the Emerald Woods subdivision in Brecksville to dedicate a flagpole and a plaque in memory of William Moskal, who would have turned 51 two days ago.

....Is she angry?

"I want terrorism to stop," she replied after a long pause. "There is only one way to stop it, and that is to pursue it and put an end to it. It will not just disappear."

Sometimes she sits behind her computer and logs on to a secure Web site for relatives of Sept. 11 victims. She said widows and widowers without children or anybody else at home with them seem to be having the most difficult time.

Moskal draws strength from her children. Her daughter, Jessie, a student at Indiana University, fought back tears as she read a poem about her father at yesterday's dedication.

Moskal said her son, Andy, has developed inner strength since his father's death.

"He knows where his dad is," Moskal said. "He feels him."

In the flood of 9/11 tributes that will surely flow over us, perhaps numbing us a bit to the reality and details of lives snuffed out midbreath, try to take a little time to focus on a particular life or two and allow the nightmare to be real for you once again - if only for a short time - and then remember the words of Lorraine Moskal:

"I want terrorism to stop," she replied after a long pause. "There is only one way to stop it, and that is to pursue it and put an end to it. It will not just disappear."

posted by Eric at 1:18 PM

 
Talk to Us
I go along with the man with too many consonants and not enough vowels on one key issue:

There is a right and a wrong way for America to wage war. Obviously, if it is attacked, America must respond with all its might. The same is true if an ally is attacked. But the issue becomes much more complex if a threat, but not an attack, is involved. America must then consider carefully the consequences of its actions, both for itself as the world's preeminent power and for the longer-term evolution of the international system as a whole.

The United States may have to go to war to oust Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq because the potential nexus between conspiratorial terrorism and the weapons of mass destruction that Hussein is said to be producing cannot be blithely ignored. But war is too serious a business and too unpredictable in its dynamic consequences -- especially in a highly flammable region -- to be
undertaken because of a personal peeve, demagogically articulated fears or vague factual assertions.

If it is to be war, it should be conducted in a manner that legitimizes U.S. global hegemony and, at the same time, contributes to a more responsible system of international security. Accordingly, several essential steps should be followed:

(1) The president himself has to make, in a speech addressed to the nation, a careful, reasoned case, without sloganeering, on the specifics of the threat. Detailed evidence needs to be presented that the threat is both grave and imminent. An explanation is also needed as to why one member of "the axis of evil" is seen as more menacing than the others. The president's case should also serve as the basis for serious and searching consultations with Congress and with key allies as well as other interested states.

The rest is State Department crap about "one more chance" for weapons inspections, respecting the sensibilities of our allies and "Arab friends," and fretting about the "character of the international system." But at least Brzezinski acknowledges this:

without a respected and legitimate law-enforcer, global security could be in serious jeopardy. America must thus walk a fine line in determining when, in what circumstances and how it acts as such in initiating the use of force.

It is critical for Bush to explain to the American people in as great detail as possible why we need to fight Saddam, why now, and what the possible consequences are: that done, he can get on with it as he sees fit. There is too much confusion and indecision right now because people just don't know what the hell is going on. Bush needs to trust his people to follow his logic, assuming he has a logical case to make. As many of us have said all along, the rest of the world will follow where America leads as long as it makes sense and the American people are behind the journey. It's up to Bush to rally this support.

UPDATE
Thomas Friedman wants to see the case made as well:

Attention President Bush: What is your bumper sticker for justifying war
with Iraq? I've heard a lot of different ones lately: We need to pre-emptively attack before Saddam deploys weapons of mass destruction. We need to change the Iraqi regime to give birth to democracy in Iraq and the wider Arab world. We need to eliminate Saddam because he is evil and may have been behind 9/11. We need to punish Saddam for not living up to the U.N. inspection resolutions.

All of these are legitimate rationales, but each would require a different U.S. military and diplomatic strategy. If the Bush team is serious about Iraq, it needs to zero in on one clear objective, produce a tightly focused war plan around it and then sell it - with a simple bumper sticker - to America and the world. If the Bush administration's different factions - which are as divided as the Palestinians' - can't do that in advance, they shouldn't move.

When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there - just ask the Palestinians. But when you're talking about an unprovoked war to dismantle a government half a world away, any road just won't do. You need a clearly focused end, means and rationale.

Because we certainly don't want to pick up a newspaper two years from now and read that there was just a heated meeting of Bush advisers about what the war in Iraq was supposed to be about.

There are those who use this excuse as a delaying tactic for a war they don't want to see happen, period. But there are others, such as myself, who see clarification as the next step toward successfully waging a necessary war. Let us hope the administration doesn't confuse the two camps.

UPDATE
Peter Beinart says Bush is half right, and that the Democrats can take up the banner of the other half:

I think Bush is right about preemption. For one thing, we aren't containing Saddam now--he's been free to build up his chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal for almost four years now. And given the improbability of Saddam's allowing weapons inspectors free rein, not to mention the waning international support for Iraqi sanctions, it's unlikely we can contain him any better in the future. It's impossible to predict Saddam's behavior, but his history with Iran, Kuwait, and the Kurds suggests there's a pretty good chance he'll use whatever weapons he develops to try to dominate his neighbors. And while he might be deterred by the threat of American retaliation, the whole point of acting now is that once Saddam has, say, a nuclear bomb, he'll also be able to deter us.

What makes the Democrats hesitate, I suspect, is a sense that the Bush team's political isolationism will ultimately undo whatever good its military internationalism achieves--leaving the United States more isolated and ultimately weaker. But the answer isn't for Democrats to mimic Europe's support for a containment that no longer contains. It's to advocate what might be called "preemption plus." The premise would be that if we want our war with Iraq to leave the United States more respected in the world, rather than merely more feared, it must be accompanied by a corresponding political intervention--i.e., nation-building. The Bush administration talks about building a showcase Muslim democracy in post-Saddam Iraq, but its track record on nation-building and democratization is awful. In Afghanistan its opposition to a nationwide peacekeeping force has weakened Hamid Karzai's fledgling government. And in Pakistan the Bushies have watched approvingly as Pervez Musharraf has betrayed his democratic promises, leaving himself--and the United States--more and more isolated.

Focusing on the political corollary to military intervention in Iraq would draw attention to the lingering GOP isolationism and relativism that undermine the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It would also serve as the logical moral successor to liberal anti-communism, which stressed the role of development and human rights in containing Soviet expansion. And it would ensure that Democrats are not bystanders as the United States marches to war. A national dialogue on Iraq is all well and good. But first the Democrats must have something to say.

UPDATE
Steve Green agrees with Beinart:

The only thing worse than doing nothing is toppling Saddam, then leaving the peace up to the Iraqis. Like the Japanese and Germans of 1945, the people of Iraq know only war, terror, oppression, and authoritarianism. From the very first records of history, the peoples living in Babylon have suffered under an endless series of brutal strongmen, from Hammurabi, to the Ottoman Turks, to Saddam himself. Some were more enlightened than others, but never have the people been given the chance to rule themselves.

Without the same help and presence we maintained in Germany and Japan, Iraq would fall apart. The Kurds of the north, free from Baghdad’s iron fist, would go about their ancient tradition of “slaughtering one another over trivia.” The mullahs of Tehran could bolster their fading regime by reuniting – by force – with their Shi’ite brothers in the south of Iraq. The center, as always, would be governed by whichever strongman held sway in Baghdad.

The poor people of Iraq, along with the rest of the world, would put the blame on us for their new woes. And with good reason.

People are people the world over – and most just want to get on with their lives. The average Iraqi is no worse today than your average German or Japanese of yesteryear. Our WWII enemies picked up the good habits of democracy and the secular state in just a few short years of American stewardship – and it is racist to claim that the good people of Iraq can’t do the same.

UPDATE

President Bush will meet at his Texas ranch on Wednesday with his top national security advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but officials sought to dampen speculation they were readying military action against Iraq.

The White House said the meeting would focus on reforming the military's weapons, strategy and finances, and developing a system to defend against a missile attack on the United States.

White House communications director Dan Bartlett implied any decision may be weeks or months away. "We'll continue to have that discussion as we go into the fall," he said.

Bartlett also implied the administration may stop short of invading Iraq, saying Bush may decide "that we need to take action to minimize the threat that he (Saddam) now poses." John Pike, an expert on defense policy and the director of GlobalSecurity.org, said Bush may launch air strikes against suspected chemical and biological weapons plants and other military facilities as soon as late November.

He said deposing Saddam, the stated goal of Bush's Iraq policy, could wait for later.

....While Bush has promised to consult with Congress and U.S. allies, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle said the administration would not expect other NATO allies to participate.

"Our European allies are just not relevant to this. And the one of some importance, the United Kingdom, is, I believe, going to be with us," said Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel. "The rest of the Europeans prefer to look the other way or cut deals with Saddam or buy him off in various ways."

posted by Eric at 12:11 PM

 
Blogger For Rent
Bill Quick is looking for a real job, and is taking the novel approach of spreading the word via blog:

Daily Pundit is looking for a real job.
I have strong skills as a writer, an editor, and a proofreader. I have over thirty published books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as produced teleplays. I am efficient, easy to work with, and both goal and deadline oriented. I am techno-literate, can code HTML and some Perl, and am proficient in most standard business-oriented software. I have experience as a SOHO PC and network consultant in San Francisco. And, oh, yeah, I produce Daily Pundit, one of the top-ranked blogs in the blogosphere, as computed by two different "ecosystems" - N.Z Bear Blogosphere ecosystem and Myelin blogging ecosystem

I'm not sure where this somewhat eclectic skill cluster might fit for someone, but I'm certainly open to any ideas or offers. For instance, if you are contemplating the notion of designing and setting up a blog or blogsystem on your corporate intranet as a centralized, interactive corporate communications tool, I'm your guy. But that's just one idea. I'm sure there are even more interesting possibilities out there, and I'd love to hear about them.

I'd prefer to be able to telecommute. I currently live in San Francisco, but if somebody has a package that would make my relocating to New York City a viable financial proposition, I'd like to hear from you, too.

Please contact me, William T. Quick, here. Thank you very much.

(And now we'll see if this blog thing has any value as an advertising medium, won't we?)

All I can say is I'd hire Bill for about anything to do with writing or writing management. If this works, it will benefit us all. Think about it.
posted by Eric at 11:04 AM

 
Repair?
I do not wish to appear insensitive to the heinousness of the institution of American slavery, and the grievous stain it has left upon our history, but the issue of reparations at this point should be moot. Who should pay what to whom? "White people" in general? What about people of mixed blood? What part of them is responsible to what other part? Should "predominantly white people" of mixed ancentry pay themselves?

It may be facile to say so, but we've had reparations in the form of affirmative action for about 40 years. With the reverse discrimination elements of affirmative action causing even it to be shut down, how could we hope to implement an even more direct and punitive measure against those who are not the decendants of slaves?

As the Roanoke Times says:

Focusing on the past rather than the future, reparations for the evils of slavery are both impractical and a potential impediment to the cause of social justice for all Americans.

....Yes, the experience of black people in America has been different from that of other ethnic groups arriving on these shores. Others encountered discrimination, but assimilation into the social and economic mainstream usually came after a couple of generations or so. For those from Africa, arriving in chains, the barriers remained high and solid for centuries.

And, yes, the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, like the end of legal segregation a century later, did not suddenly set things aright. Betrayal of the freedmen during Reconstruction remains one of the saddest chapters of American history. The effects of that, and of the systematic racial discrimination that continued into the latter half of the 20th century, linger.

But monetary reparations for slavery is deeply impractical: Exactly who, at this late date, owes how much to whom? Worse, the drive for reparations reinforces self-defeating notions of victimhood and inferiority that at best distract from, and at worst work to undermine, the goal of racial justice.

....Affirmative action has been a form of reparations. So are other programs to help equalize opportunity, such as Head Start, that benefit populations and places with relatively large numbers of disadvantaged people.

Those people include, but are certainly not limited to, African-Americans. In the America of 2002, more to the point than race-based reparations would be a keener appreciation of the reality of disadvantage and more enlightened public policies - in taxation, in health care, in education - to match.

Like with welfare reform, which has been a nearly unqualified success, we need to continue to help people to help themselves: not hand out checks for the wrongs of ancestors upon ancestors in the fast-fading past.

Those at the rally said it was time for action:

They owe us. I want justice," said Antoinette Harrell-Miller, who drove 19 hours from New Orleans with her husband Dennis to attend. "They built this country off the free labor of our ancestors."

Jaki Mungai of Philadelphia called the rally "a dream that's starting to come true."

"Every other group has been compensated for the wrongs done against them. Africans in America — we are the only ones who haven't," said Mungai, who heard about the rally on the radio and decided to join in.

Ken McDouall of Durham, N.C., one of a handful of whites at the rally, said the reparations issue "cuts to the core of the history of injustice of America."

"America likes to pretend there are equal rights for everyone but look at the history of black people," McDouall said.

This drive is like playing the lottery: a wasteful distraction from actually getting things done. Individual responsibility and action should be the focus now: the politics of group victimization distracts people from availing themselves of the opportunities for self-improvement and upward mobility that are already in place.

I have no problem with a formal apology - why not? A collective admission that slavery is/was and shall always be evil and unacceptable does no harm and may help put aside collective guilt and resentment respectively, but there is no remedy that can attend such an apology beyond a collective determination to vigorously fight discrimination against ALL INDIVIDUALS now residing in the U.S.

UPDATE
Oliver Willis has no use for this concept:

The stupidity of this statement stands on its own.

Black activist Louis Farrakhan told the crowd, "America owes the black people a lot for what they've endured."

Louis, you owe America more money than you can count for having to endure your sorry shuck and jive for all these years.

"We want reparations -- not next century, not 10 years from now, but now," Conyers said. "These wrongs can only be corrected in the House of Representatives, only Congress can do what we want now. All congressmen ought to be here today."

Note to self: John Conyers is an idiot. I'd prefer if Congress concerned themselves with real important issues, rather than cowtowing to corporate masters or shameless race-baiters.

"You have to really make some noise just to be heard," Edna Russell, who traveled from Denver, told Reuters.

Noise is precisely what I would call it. Black America will remained stymied in its place if this school of thought continues to be perpetrated. The only good sign is that the turnout seems to have been rather tepid.

UPDATE
John Venlet with more:

The big news from the rally is this quote from one Charles Barron, a member of the New York City Council, "I want to go up to the closest white person and say 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health." Nice. And we're supposed to take this kind of talk seriously?

posted by Eric at 10:40 AM

 
Hot
I feel misunderstood. It has come to my attention that I am regarded as a veins-in-the-teeth, drooling warmonger in some quarters. While I am strongly infavor of zealous prosecution of the war on terror, including regime change in Iraq and perhaps elsewhere, please don't extrapolate out from THIS war to war in general. I was opposed to the war in Vietnam, still don't understand what Grenada was all about, and the War of 1812 really pissed me off.

In an effort to show another side of me, let's talk about women. They are beautiful the world over, but some corners of the globe are more renowned for hot babes than others. Why is this? I truly believe that women of all races, creeds, and colors are fundamentally equally beautiful, but CULTURALLY there are huge descrepancies in what can loosely be called "hotness."

Think back to the Soviet Union: the women there were routinely denigrated as frumpy babushkas. Comes the end of communism, a change of clothes, a little makeup, a new attitude, and they are now smoking hot babes. Besides my wife, arguably the hottest woman on earth now is Russian. The current Miss Universe is also Russian. They've come a long way baby.

Now it is the Islamic women, especially those laboring under fundamentalism, who are subjected to jokes about their appeal. What do you expect with dictates like this?

1. The outer garment worn in public must cover all of the body except the face and hands.
Surat an-Noor, ayah 31 (quoted above) contains clear command that a woman's natural beauty and her adornment are to be concealed from strangers, except that which might show unintentionally (ie. parts of the dress or ornaments) or which show as a matter of course because it is not prohibited that they be shown (ie. the face the hands).

Abu Dawood authentically narrated that 'Aaishah said:

"Asmaa came to see the Messenger of Allah. She was wearing a thin dress; the Prophet turned away from her and said to her: "O Asmaa! once a woman reaches the age of puberty no part of her body should be uncovered except her face and hands."

Hard to be alluring under those circumstances (no purfume either), but I know they're in there, just waiting to bust out. Yep, it's hard to be hot looking like this, but the Afghani women are coming out of their shells and even smiling a bit.

There's some potential for hotness in here, but it's still nascent. However, this Islamic babe is enough to give the world hope, and Miss Trinidad and Tobago, a Muslim, was criticized by the Islamic world for taking part in the skimpy bathing-suit competition in the Miss Universe competition this year. That's the best news yet, my friends. Perhaps "Islamic hotness" will not be an oxymoronic phrase forever.
posted by Eric at 8:02 PM

 
Unholy Remains
Andrea Harris has some ideas on what to do with the terrorist bodies found at the WTC:

Form into clay tablets, take skeet shooting
Hockey pucks
Urinal cakes
Bury under pig farm

Whatever you do, don't make Frisbees out of them: this would confuse and disturb the heirs of Steady Ed.


posted by Eric at 2:05 PM

 
The Peculiar Case of Joseph Smith
There are two new books out on the life of Mormon-founder Joseph Smith, reviewed in the NY Times today. I realize that everyone else's religion sounds absurd, but what explains the enduring appeal of this loon's ravings?

Born in 1805 to frontier drifters on a hardscrabble farm in Sharon, Vt., Smith was raised in a revivalist culture (the family had settled in Palmyra, N.Y.) and claimed the first of several religious visions at 14. In 1823, three and a half years later, he had a far more momentous illumination, when an angel or resurrected being called Moroni appeared to him and told him of a hidden gospel, inscribed on golden plates, which had been buried 1,400 years before in a mound called Cumorah in nearby Manchester. Joseph dug them up, and found that they were inscribed with ancient characters or hieroglyphics (later called ''Reformed Egyptian''), which he was able to translate with the help of two supernatural stones (or magic spectacles) called Urim and Thummim, set ''in silver bows.'' The result was the Book of Mormon, first published in 1830, which purports to contain a history of America from its colonization at the time of the confusion of tongues to the fifth century A.D., during which Christ is said to have planted his church in the New World. Its narrative (ascribed to an ancient American prophet by the name of Mormon) links the native Indians to the lost tribes of Israel, foretells the rebuilding of Zion and, in the fullness of time, the reign of Christ on earth.

The reviewer, Benson Bobrick, doesn't buy a sympathetic treatment of Smith's life:

In practice, however, his narrative tends to include, accept and enlarge upon them in the way it flows along. For example: ''It is interesting to note that so much of Joseph's life, as reported by Mormon sources, has parallels in the Gospels. Since he believed -- he always believed -- that he had been chosen by God to restore the true church, he must have known that, like Christ, he might be expected to sacrifice his life in order to validate his mission. When the moment came for a final decision, he willingly consented to it.'' Not really. Smith tried to escape his fate in a shootout in a jail, and his last conscious act, before attempting to jump out a window, was to punch a man in the neck. That makes him human; it doesn't make him much like Christ.

Once a particular belief reaches critical mass, it becomes self-perpetuating socially; but what, other than owning the state of Utah, was the original appeal here? Maybe if you gave any cult leader his own state, the results would be the same. I don't think Mormons are evil, just bizarrely misguided - I find the whole issue deeply perplexing.
posted by Eric at 1:47 PM

 
Whores and Bongs
C.G. Hill is keeping a twinkling eye on Nevada, the libertarian paradise:

A Nevada ballot initiative this fall seeks to decriminalize possession of up to three ounces of marijuana for anyone over 21. It's getting a mixed response in the Silver State — the Nevada Conference of Police and Sheriffs first endorsed, then backed away from, the measure — but the one person whose BVDs seem most greatly knotted over the prospect is Clark County Deputy District Attorney Gary Booker, who warned that passing the referendum would turn Nevada into a "stoner haven".

....I'm still trying to figure out what's so horrible about a "stoner haven", myself.

There are worse people to have hanging out, pursuing their collective mellow, wandering around in the desert, getting lost, taking a nap, dying of dehydration. On second thought....
posted by Eric at 1:25 PM

 
No Money For the Hangman
The death penalty is a deeply-felt issue (see comments as well), and one causing problems with international relations. Now, here in Ohio, justice has taken off the blindfold and rather starkly acknowledged economic reality:

A judge in a small, poor Ohio county told prosecutors there this month that they could not seek the death penalty in the murder of a college student because the county's share of the defense costs would be too great.

The decision, which experts say is the first of its kind, is a rare judicial acknowledgment of the powerful role money plays in death penalty cases.

"The law acknowledges that capital cases are different and require enhanced due process, for obvious reasons," Judge Jeffrey L. Simmons of the Court of Common Pleas in Vinton County wrote.

Noting that such cases "require additional resources," the judge added: "While the court has authority to approve expenses, it would be disingenuous to suggest that a trial judge can consider such requests without an awareness of the financial impact on this county. The court finds that the potential impact of financial considerations could compromise the defendant's due process rights in a capital murder trial."

One has to wonder if the judge is using the financial angle to pursue his own political agenda.

K. Robert Toy, who represents Mr. McKnight, said that his side's cost to try the case might amount to $75,000. With appeals and other postconviction litigation, total defense costs could reach $350,000, Mr. Toy said.

The state and county split defense costs roughly 50-50.

Michael M. Bledsoe, the president of the Vinton County Board of Commissioners, said the judge was right about the financial impact of the case but wrong to usurp the board's decision.

The county, Mr. Bledsoe said, has a population of about 13,000 and an annual budget of $2.7 million. "There's not a lot of money there, but still we're a can-do county," he said.

...."What the judge is saying is that there's a death penalty in Ohio but not in Vinton County," said Joe Case, a spokesman for the attorney general's office. "There is nothing in the law that would allow the judge to dismiss the death penalty components of the charges. The people have a right to prosecute the case."

As an opponent of the death penalty, I am pleased with the result here, but I am concerned about the broader precedent. I understand that financial considerations come in to play as a practical matter in many cases, but to state up front that a different course of action is being pursued from the beginning of the case due to financial considerations seems to fly in the face of the theory that justice is to be distributed evenhandedly across the board as a matter of principle.

I am very curious what our bloggy attorneys like Glenn, Ann or Chas think about this.
posted by Eric at 1:08 PM

 
Opera Would Be Great If It Didn't Suck (Kidding)
Dawn has a spunky interview with new Blogcritic and opera aficionado Sasha Castel:

Sasha: I like to say that I'm a classical music and theater consultant. That's what I love doing, and that's what I do on the side. But my paycheck actually comes from the House Management department of the Metropolitan Opera. Most of the time I'm an usher, but I've been lucky enough to appear on stage in a few shows too
Dawn: Do you meet a lot of interesting men doing that?
Sasha: Backstage, yes, quite a few. But in the front of the house, they tend to be....unavailable.
Sasha: (read: married, elderly or gay)
Dawn: What do you look for in a guy you would date?
Sasha: Intelligence, kindness and a sense of humor. Those are the deal-breakers.
Dawn: Good ones too!!

Remembering Pain and Anger
Dawn: What's it like living in Manhattan?
Sasha: Actually, I don't live in Manhattan anymore. I decamped for the mainland 4 years ago due to crazy rents. I live in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx now.
Dawn: Then describe living in New York please.
Sasha: It's amazing. It's the greatest city in the world. I am a total New York snob and not ashamed to say so!
Dawn: Where were you 9/11?....

posted by Eric at 12:22 PM