Particle and Parcel

Slow chase

2007-05-17T09:25:00.001-05:00

Slow chase: The New York Police Department has just bought a fleet of ten Segways for its patrols. I have to admit that I’m skeptical: How, exactly, is this any different from walking? Even at top speed, a Segway is only a little faster than running. But apparently the NYPD thinks otherwise. Thanks to the Times for picking this up:

Ten of the two-wheeled Segways are to be deployed today as patrol vehicles on pathways and boardwalks in parks, at beaches and at stadiums, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference yesterday.

Twenty-five officers have completed training as Segway drivers, he said, enabling them to maneuver the devices safely for up to eight continuous hours.

“Their obvious advantages are visibility and mobility,” Mr. Kelly said. He was referring to the battery-charged agility of a Segway, which can roll up to 12.5 miles per hour, and to the imposing stature the devices tend to give officers, who are eight inches off the ground and ride standing up.

[…]

The potential for preventing crime, and arresting lawbreakers, remains to be seen. Mr. Kelly said that the Segways would be driven only on marked pathways or boardwalks, and that officers would be under strict orders not to venture on city streets or sidewalks.

[Link]

Whitewash

2007-05-17T09:21:00.001-05:00

Whitewash: After the 2004 election, the Election Assistance Commission ordered a study on vote fraud and voter intimidation throughout the country. The end result was, in a surprise for those of us who have seen no data indicating significant vote fraud, a study that said that vote fraud was a pervasive problem. Slate got their hands on a first draft, though, that says exactly the opposite — just like the chapter on global climate change in the EPA’s annual Report on the Environment, which was edited by political apparatchiks to downplay the evidence for global warming. What insight the draft of this paper on vote fraud lends us into this White House.

In their “predecisional” draft (excerpted below and on the following four pages) [Job] Serebrov and [Tova] Wang reported that “the only interviewee who believe[d] that polling place fraud is widespread” was Jason Torchinsky of the American Center for Voting Rights, a conservative organization that’s been accused of fronting for the GOP. (It’s Republicans who typically complain about voter fraud, because the allegations are usually directed at minority and low-income voters who tend to vote Democratic.) Most other interviewees, though not unanimous, showed “widespread … agreement that there is little polling place fraud” (Page 4). Nonetheless, the draft report observed, the Justice Department’s public integrity section is pursuing voter fraud cases energetically: “While the number of election fraud related complaints have not gone up since 2002 … the number of indictments the section is pursuing” against “alien voters, felon voters, and double voters” has risen substantially (Page 5).

Serebrov and Wang submitted their initial findings to be “vetted and edited” by an Election Assistance Commission working group. That’s when the hackwork began.

The final report asserts, falsely, that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud in elections.” Wang, the Democrat, has objected in writing that this and other revisions were made “without explanation or discussion.” A gag order in the original contract forbids her to discuss the matter. Serebrov, the Republican, isn’t happy either. The New York Times reported (subscription required) that he complained to a staffer for the Election Assistance Commission that neither consultant “was willing to conform [their] results [to] political expediency,” and that Serebrov “could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”

[Link]

A train runs through it

2007-05-17T09:12:00.001-05:00

A train runs through it: The Times’ “The Lede” blog reports on the first trains to cross the DMZ between South Korea and North Korea, one going each way. This is the first time that a rail link — even just as a publicity stunt, like this one — has existed between the two countries since 1951. Holy cow:

Aboard each train were 100 South Koreans and 50 North Koreans, including "celebrities, politicians and a South Korean driver from one of the last trains to cross before rail links were cut in 1951," Reuters said.

After traveling about 15 miles past the zone into the other nation, both trains returned to their starting points. No plans to begin regular rail service were announced.

In South Korea, the event was covered live by all major networks. North Korea noted the event in its enigmatic way, releasing a four-paragraph report from its official news agency, according to Reuters. That report does not appear to be posted on the official site so far, but a visitor can find “Greetings to Norwegian King” and an ode to “Favorite Bean Foodstuffs.”

As the Northern train arrived in South Korea, it bore a sign on the front reading "The Train Once Boarded by Great President Kim Il-Sung," the nation’s version of "Elvis slept here."

[Link]

Now they'll really love him on the South Side

2007-05-16T16:00:00.001-05:00

Now they'll really love him on the South Side: If you go back far enough, everyone has some interesting historical footnotes. Like me being very, very distantly related to Johann Strauss the composer, for instance. It doesn't say very much about you, if you ask me. Nevertheless, ancestry.com seems to have discovered good, solid evidence that Barack O'Bama has a little Irish brogue in him:

The junior senator from Illinois, seeking the Democratic nomination for the White House, has made much of his background as the son of a Kenyan father and American mother. Far less publicized is the European side of his family tree -- including, new research has found, a great-great-great grandfather from the heart of Ireland.

A genealogy Web site, Ancestry.com, has spent months looking to pin down the origins of Obama's ancestors -- including Fulmouth Kearney, who immigrated to the United States at 19 and has ties to Obama's Kansas-reared mother, Ann Dunham.

Kearney is a common name in Ireland with roots in many counties. But the Utah-based organization got lucky when it made a call in March to Canon Stephen Neill, a parish priest from the Anglican-affiliated Church of Ireland.

Neill had just inherited rolls of baptisms, marriages and deaths dating back to the 1700s from a late parishioner, who had kept the records in her home. In the index he found Joseph Kearney, Fulmouth's father, a cobbler in the village of Moneygall, County Offaly -- which, back in those days of British rule, was known as King's County.

Neill hadn't been told by Ancestry.com researchers why they wanted to know about the Kearneys of Moneygall. When he called them weeks later with his find, he was surprised to learn that Fulmouth was an ancestor of the Democrats' rising star.

"Everyone here says he's going to have to call himself O'Bama from now on,'' Neill said in an interview. "People are fascinated that such a remarkable man, and a potential president of the United States, could be connected to such a tiny, unremarkable place as Moneygall."

The village today is home to about 300 people, has two pubs, a Catholic church, and a Gaelic sports ground. A busy highway cuts through the middle.

[Link]

Road to somewhere

2007-05-16T14:53:00.001-05:00

Road to somewhere: Where I live in Orlando, all but one of our limited-access highways are toll roads, and the tolls are expensive enough. In China, where tolls are comparatively more expensive and where the rule of and respect for law has always been compromised by bribery and money, people are going to seemingly ridiculous lengths to avoid tolls. So some villagers are striking back:

By 2020, if all goes as planned, China will have completed almost 53,000 miles of expressways, a network roughly equivalent to the Interstate System in the United States. China considers expressways crucial to maintaining its economic growth and developing its western and interior provinces.

But the cost is so exorbitant that China is financing much of the system with tolls that are, by Chinese standards, pricey.

Two people who should know are Mr. Wang and Mr. Gu. The two men — who were nervous about divulging their first names to a snooping foreigner — are posted at a dingy intersection in this farming village in Hebei Province.

Not far away is a highway tollbooth. Every day cars and heavy trucks, as steady and determined as a trail of ants, try to skip the toll by cutting through the village on a narrow road.

Mr. Wang, 65, and Mr. Gu, 58, try to send them back. They say the tollbooth operator is paying the village a monthly fee to help crack down on toll jumpers. For its part the village is trying to stop heavy trucks from ruining its roads. The two men regulate traffic with a long, crooked stick that goes up and down like a crude crossing barrier.

Mr. Gu does the talking. Mr. Wang wields the stick.

“Can I get through?” one motorist asked on a recent afternoon as other cars waited.

“No,” Mr. Gu replied. Only local people are allowed to pass.

“Is there any other way around the toll?” the driver asked, smiling. “Come on, let me through.”

[Link]

Someone needs less caffeine in her life

2007-05-14T12:07:00.001-05:00

Someone needs less caffeine in her life: In Springboro, Ohio, an admitted Starbucks addict is giving up the juice after she found an anti-religious quote on her paper cup as part of the company’s program to spur discussions between their customers. The cynic in me says that, having just about killed local coffee shops like Evanston’s Unicorn Cafe, which have served as discussion-places since the 17th century, now Starbucks realizes their value. Anyway, only in America could this happen, I think:

[Michelle Incanno would] buy the company’s coffee beans every week. Whenever she’d get the chance to drop by a Starbucks, she would, placing the same order every time: a large, house brewed coffee with nonfat milk and two Splenda. When the Seattle-based chain opened a drive-through near her Springboro home, she was in java heaven.

That was until she got an unexpected jolt last week from her coffee cup.

Printed on the cup was: “Why in moments of crisis do we ask God for strength and help? As cognitive beings, why would we ask something that may well be a figment of our imaginations for guidance? Why not search inside ourselves for the power to overcome? After all, we are strong enough to cause most of the catastrophes we need to endure.”

It is attributed to Bill Schell, a Starbucks customer from London, Ontario, and was included on the cup as part of an effort by the company to collect different viewpoints and spur discussion.

“As someone who loves God, I was so offended by that. I don’t think there needs to be religious dialogue on it. I just want coffee,” said Incanno, a married mother of three who is Catholic.

[Link]

P.S.: I know I’ve been away awhile. My time at work is much, much busier now than it was when I started this blog. But I’m going to try to get back into it.

Jesus Is Just Alright

2007-03-14T13:16:00.001-05:00

Jesus Is Just Alright: Since the 2004 election plastered Democrats as “out of touch” with “values voters,” I’ve been keeping a little catalogue of all of the various times that I see liberal writers, bloggers and politicians pointing out that much of the political philosophy that Jesus himself argued for is fairly liberal, all things considered. Mark Kleiman wins not only this week’s prize for best reference, but vaults himself nicely into the Top 10 all-time by making it a parenthetical, for writing it from a Jewish perspective, and for getting in a knock at kashruth laws, all at once:

[I]t’s also true that the worldwide Sexual Purity League, no matter which religion it’s connected to, takes the violation of sexual taboos as more basically, more shockingly immoral than any other sort of norm violation. (Drug abuse is a close second.) Illicit sex is dirty — that is, polluting — in a way that theft, slander, and assault simply aren’t.

(Back when a certain rabbi of the School of Hillel was preaching up a storm in Galilee, food taboos had some of the same salience that sexual taboos have now. He didn’t make himself popular with the local equivalent of the Traditional Values Coalition or Moral Majority when he pointed out that it’s not what goes into your mouth that really pollutes you, since it’s all going to wind up in the same sewer, but rather what comes out of it: perjury and slander, for example.)

[Link]

2007-02-25T16:49:00.000-05:00

Partying while Rome burns: I don't normally agree with much on Ben Stein, but he and I see eye-to-eye in his Sunday column in the Times. He asks, why are rich Americans squandering their massive Bush tax give-aways on parties while poor Americans are dying by the truck-full in Iraq? He can't believe that the $10 million b'nei mitzvah exists, and neither can I. The Republicans holler that it's wartime, that dissent is impermissible; but neither is profligacy:

I started to feel hysterical [watching Donny Deutsch's program on lavish parties]. Is this what America is all about? We're in a war and we cut taxes to stimulate the economy — and it probably did (Ed. note: Uh, not bloody likely) — and we are having million-dollar parties at home while our soldiers are paid starvation wages to offer up their lives in Iraq? We're in a war and the government cannot afford to pay for adequate training for our soldiers, but the society at home is routinely having million-dollar weddings and bar mitzvahs?

Can anyone say "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"?

We are creating a debt that is about $3 trillion greater than it was when Bill Clinton left office, and one sequel is $10 million birthday parties? Is this what supply-side is all about? To obligate future generations so our generation can have $10 million parties for teenagers?

[Link]

2007-02-25T13:09:00.000-05:00

In the Happiest City on Earth: This month, National Geographic makes the point that I’ve made since I arrived here, that there would be nothing in Orlando if not for Disney World. But writer T.D. Allman sees beyond that. As Allman sees it, Disney not only made Orlando, it made it what it is, and made it the model for the new suburbs sprouting up all around America. Where the old-line suburbs in older cities — I lived in Evanston, Ill., a classic example — are much more mixed-use, much denser, much more gridded, it was Disney’s influence that made suburban Phoenix, Chicago, Seattle and Atlanta more alike than different. It’s a brilliant article, in other words:

In this place of exurban, postmodern pioneers, the range of choices is vast even when the choices themselves are illusory. Here life is truly a style: You don’t want to live in a mass-produced, instant “community”? No problem. Orlando’s developers, like the producers of instant coffee, offer you a variety of flavors, including one called Tradition. Structurally it may seem identical to all the others. Only instead of vaguely Mediterranean ornamental details, the condos at Tradition have old colonial finishes. In Orlando’s lively downtown, it’s possible to live in a loft just as you would in Chicago or New York. But these lofts are brand-new buildings constructed for those who want the postindustrial lifestyle in a place that never was industrial.

Orlando’s bright lights are not the garish displays of Las Vegas or the proud power logos of New York. Instead, Orlando glimmers with the familiar signage of franchise America: Denny’s, Burger King, Quality Inn, Hampton Inn, Hertz. Orlando also leads in the culinary transformation of the exotic into the familiar. From its Orlando headquarters, the Darden Corporation, the city’s first Fortune 500 company, mass-markets theme foods. It standardizes the output of Red Lobsters and Olive Gardens everywhere.

All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.

Welcome to the theme-park nation.

[Link]

2007-02-21T16:18:00.000-05:00

But how many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a CFL lightbulb? Australia is making moves to become the first country to phase out the use of incandescent light bulbs, in exchange for compact fluorescent bulbs, which use much less electricity. These aren’t your grandparents’ Carter-era sickly white fluorescent bulbs, either: The only incandescent bulb I use is on a dimmer switch, with which ordinary CFL bulbs are incompatible, and the lighting’s better as well as cheaper in my apartment. Between Australia, California and Wal-Mart, we might just change the world. From the Times:

“The most effective and immediate way we can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is by using energy more efficiently,” Mr. Turnbull said. “Electric lighting is a vital part of our lives; globally, it generates emissions equal to 70 percent of those from all the world’s passenger vehicles.”

He pointed to International Energy Agency data showing that a worldwide switch to compact fluorescent lights could result in energy savings equivalent to five years of Australia’s present electricity use by 2030.

Australia already has minimum energy performance standards that apply to appliances, and a similar system will be put into effect for light bulbs. The standards would ultimately make it impossible to sell incandescent bulbs. Mr. Turnbull said the government would consider some exceptions, like medical lighting and low-power oven lights.

[Link]

2007-02-21T02:00:00.000-05:00

But it never tastes that way when I make it: My mother has a recipe that she often makes when I come home, a chicken dish that she’s been making for years. I cannot replicate it. Don’t we all have a recipe that way? Kim Severson, of the Times, put this to the test, attempting to trace her mother’s pasta sauce all the way back to Italy in the hopes of understanding it. She failed gloriously:

Among my four siblings, how mom makes her sauce has been a constant source of discussion. We’re all decent cooks, but none of us can get it just right. When does she put in the paste? Is a little bit of roasted pepper essential? Do you need to use oregano in the meatballs?

This is a problem my cousins have, too. Sharon Herman still lives in Cumberland [Wisc.], not far from the Zappa family dairy farm. Her mother (my aunt and godmother, the late Philomena DeGidio) was one of the oldest of the Zappa girls and was considered the best sauce maker. My cousin has lived for years under the cloud of never having mastered the master’s sauce.

[…]

I use fresh basil and fresh bread crumbs instead of Progresso in my meatballs, but I still stick to dried basil and oregano in the sauce. My canned tomatoes come from Italy, even though my mother thinks Contadina or Hunt’s is just fine.

It never tastes just like hers, but I keep trying. And maybe that’s the problem. Perhaps I’m too fixated on my fancy-pants ingredients. Or perhaps it’s just a psychological quirk of the kitchen. The one that makes you think nothing ever tastes as good as your mother’s

[Link]

2007-02-20T17:35:00.000-05:00

You've got to make your free throws: In electronics as in sports, sometimes, it's the little but dependable things that count. Free throws are free points. And remembering to back up your hard drive means never losing data. It's how I survived with the same computer, through three hard drives, for five years (and before that, for six years with four different hard drives, on the same desktop). But I didn't remember to back up my iTunes library, and I lost several hundred dollars worth of paid music. Bandwagon is a service that aims to fix that... and I'm going to give it a whirl. I want to get back to some of my distant tech-blogging roots, from the early days of the Idea Salon. It sounds like it uses Amazon's S3 service, or at least the idea behind it, which I find fairly impressive -- the tech details will be disclosed along with the review.

Anyway, Bandwagon's introductory, pre-launch offer is $69 per year for regular storage -- I'll let you know how it goes. (Fair disclosure: They're bribing us bloggers with a year of free access. But you know I'm impartial.) From their site:

What we are
Bandwagon is for music geeks that use Macs.

Bandwagon is for people that use rsync, ftp or cds + dvds to backup their iTunes and want to find a better way.

Bandwagon is for smart people that have a huge music library that has never been backed up.

Why is this distinction of what Bandwagon can (and cannot) do important?

[Link]

2007-02-20T17:30:00.000-05:00

But he never got the Mount Hood Freeway: Robert Moses is the Antichrist to a certain generation of urbanist thinkers, and to those of us who grew up in places where his influence was at its lowest. He was the urban planner who gave New York City the BQE, the LIE, the West Side Highway, the FDR, the Van Wyck, the Cross-Bronx, et cetera. He was the urban planner who nearly destroyed America’s great cities to make more room for cars and sprawl. I was fortunate to grow up in Portland, Oregon, one of the least Moses-friendly places on Earth, which memorably rejected one of his pet projects and became the first city in America to tear out a freeway. But three new exhibits in New York are trying to reclaim Moses’ legacy. I’m not buying it, but the Daily News is:

Finkelpearl says that while there is a desire to look at Moses’ achievements more evenhandedly, the estimation of the man himself is unchanged. His racism, for example, is well-documented, but it was standard for the time. It did not prevent him from building a swimming pool in Harlem. He also built Lenox Terrace, the first building in Harlem that had 24-hour doorman service and upscale amenities.

As for his destroying the South Bronx, Ballon points to an overhead view that shows the George Washington Bridge shortly after its completion in 1929.

“It was like a cannon pointed at the South Bronx,” she says. “You had all this traffic coming over needing to go North and East - where was the logical place to sort it out?”

An interesting part of the third Moses exhibit, “Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution” at the Wallach Art Galleries at Columbia University, is the unused designs for Lincoln Center, one of his grandest projects.

Coming back from Columbia on the M11 bus, however, passing blocks and blocks of high-rise apartments, reinforces Jacobs’ objections to Moses’ plans: The buildings are drab, the grounds lifeless, a stark contrast to the streets just south, where tenements have been renovated, new businesses seem to be thriving and the streets themselves are inviting.

[Link]

2007-02-19T10:59:00.000-05:00

Whitewashed: A New York man who was a major Republican campaign contributor was indicted on charges of financing terror on Friday. Abdul Tawala ibn Ali Alishtari, a.k.a. Michael Mixen, contributed $15,000 to the RNCC in 2002 and 2004. That’s right, a major Republican financier is also literally a supporter of terrorism. Bet you won’t hear about that on Fox News, hmm? From CBS News:

The indictment said Alishtari tried to support terrorists between June and December by accepting an unspecified amount of money to transfer $152,000 that he believed was being sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan to support an Afghanistan terrorist training camp.

He believed the money would be used to fund the purchase of night vision goggles and other equipment, the indictment said.

He was also charged with money laundering for allegedly causing the transfer on Aug. 17 of about $25,000 from a bank account in New York to a bank account in Montreal, Canada. The money was to be used to provide material support to terrorist, prosecutors said.

[…]

CBS News has confirmed that Alishtari is a donor to the Republican Party, as he claims on his curriculum vitae. Alishtari gave $15,500 to the National Republican Campaign Committee between 2002 and 2004, according to Federal Election Commission records. That amount includes $13,000 in 2003, a year when he claims to have been named NRCC New York State Businessman of the Year.

Alishtari also claims to be a lifetime member of the National Republican Senate Committee’s Inner Circle, which the NRCC describes as “an impressive cross-section of American society – community leaders, business executives, entrepreneurs, retirees, and sports and entertainment celebrities – all of whom hold a deep interest in our nation’s prosperity and security.”

Update: Chris notes in the comments that Fox News did, in fact, post this story on their Web site, and I'm man enough to note that. But I have yet to hear any word that they've put it on TV, or that, for instance, the usual suspects -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, et al. -- have so much as mentioned this story. Imagine if he'd been a Democrat, what an uproar it would've caused.

[Link]

2007-02-19T10:41:00.000-05:00

Pharoah, let my people donate blood: Since 1985, the Red Cross has disallowed blood donation from any man who has had sex with another man since 1977. At the time, this made sense, given the limited reliability and high rate of false negatives of the AIDS testing regime. But, Bill Hooker at 3 Quarks Daily argues, today, the logic behind this ban no longer applies, so we are excluding a critical supply of blood donors for purely non-scientific reasons. I once had administered a lunchtime debate about this, in college, and I made almost the same argument, and was told by a Coulter acolyte, “Gay sex is inherently risky and immoral behavior. We should not reward it.” The opposition is not logical any longer. From 3QD:

A variety of expert presentations at a March, 2006 FDA workshop on behaviour based donor deferrals indicated that, with the advent of [nucleic acid testing], the window period for HIV infection is less than 12 days. In the US, the residual risk of transmission of HIV or HCV by blood transfusion is estimated, by a variety of models, to be around 1 in 2,000,000 donations. This is clearly a very conservative estimate, since there are around 15 million donations every year and I could only find mention of four authenticated transfusion-related transmissions of HIV since NAT was implemented in 1999 (none of which involved [men who have sex with other men]). At the same FDA workshop, Celso Bianco re-ran an earlier prediction using risk and other estimates that were getting general agreement at the workshop and came up with a figure, which he called conservative, of one infected unit per 32 years.

So, while it seems intuitively likely that including a high-risk group (as judged by increased prevalence) in the donor pool would increase overall risk, calculating — or rather, estimating — that increase is far from straightforward. The only numbers I could find were presented by Andrew Dayton to the same FDA workshop:

The 5-year [deferral, instead of a lifetime ban] would result in possibly a 25 percent increase in the current residual risk, and the 1-year would be 40 percent.

So, worst case scenario: 1.4 transmissions per 2 million donations, instead of 1.0 — or about three extra cases per year (and remember that, to date, the observed level of transmission is much lower than the estimate). I’m not familiar with what sorts of risks are considered acceptable in public policy formation, but I can say outright that I would be prepared to accept that risk to my own person as the cost of allowing MSM to participate on a more equal footing in a profound act of community altruism. (To say nothing of a 1% increase in a critical health resource that is often in short supply.)

Furthermore, given that the window period is less than two weeks and you can only donate every eight weeks, there is an obvious method for reducing the risk even further. According to the AABB, red blood cells can be stored cold for 42 days or frozen for ten years, and plasmaand cryoprecipitated antihemophilic factor can be frozen for at least a year; of the fractions into which whole blood is routinely divided, only platelets have a shorter effective storage life, about five days. It is clearly possible to hold (at least most of the fractions of) any first-time donation until the donor returns and can be re-tested; two clear tests eight weeks apart are definitive proof of HIV-negative status.

[Link]

2007-02-15T15:34:00.000-05:00

COINTELPRO, revisited: I just picked up my paper today, and holy cow is the front page of the Sentinel a stunner. Apparently the man who organized a neo-Nazi rally through the heavily African-American Parramore neighborhood, last year, was a paid informant for the FBI who infiltrated the National Socialist Movement. Damn. From the Sentinel:

The FBI would not comment on what it knew about the involvement of its informant, 39-year-old David Gletty of Orlando, in the neo-Nazi event. In court Wednesday, an FBI agent said the bureau has paid its informant at least $20,000 during the past two years.

[...]

Orlando drew national attention when the city granted a permit to Gletty so a minimum of 100 white supremacists and National Socialist Movement members could march Feb. 25 through the historically black Parramore neighborhood.

Wearing swastikas and holding signs declaring "White Pride," the 22 neo-Nazis who turned out were protected from 500 counterprotesters by about 300 police officers.

Gletty's secret life became public Wednesday in a federal court hearing resulting from the arrest last week of two suspected white supremacists on charges of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.

Last Thursday, the FBI arrested Tom Martin, 23, and John Rock, 35, after Gletty wore a wire to a meeting and agreed to help them rob a drug dealer in Casselberry, according to testimony.

Rock told Gletty in a tape-recorded conversation that he and Martin had robbed seven drug dealers by posing as law-enforcement officers, according to testimony. Martin and Rock remain held without bail in the Seminole County Jail.

[Link]

2007-02-15T11:44:00.000-05:00

The proof of the cake is in the eating: At one time or another, we've all relied on Betty Crocker's lemon chiffon cake. It's delicious, and, as long as you have a stand mixer, pretty easy. It's also a delicious slice of '50s nostalgia. But I didn't know that, until 1948, the recipe was a complete secret, invented by Harry Baker, a mostly closeted gay man living in Los Angeles, who sold his cakes to the Brown Derby. Holy cow. From Minneapolis' The Rake magazine, the (slightly over-written) account of the cake:

Harry [Baker] also began to tinker with cake recipes, and he would have put Cook’s Illustrated’s Stephen Schmidt to shame. He devised more than four hundred different recipes in his quest to bake a sweeter, moister angel food cake. He varied ingredients, measurements, and the baking time and temperature. Nothing satisfied. In later years, he described the eureka moment that led him to salad oil in almost mystical terms: It was, he told a reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, a “sixth sense—something cosmic” that revealed his secret ingredient. And it worked.

During the time that Harry Baker was handing out experimental cakes to his neighbors, a handful of entrepreneurs pooled resources to launch a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. The Brown Derby opened for business in 1926, in a building shaped to match its name. Two years later—call it another cosmic twist—Harry Baker walked in with a sample of his unbelievable cake. It became one of the Derby’s signature dishes.

[Link]

2007-02-14T11:06:00.000-05:00

And now the other shoe drops: I blogged in August about Gannett buying the FSView and Florida Flambeau, the Florida State weekly student newspaper. Turns out that wasn’t a one-off deal, which doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is the newspaper they bought: UCF’s Central Florida Future, which isn’t exactly in a position to be a sister newspaper the way the FSView was. The Sentinel has the scoop:

The company’s Central Florida unit, Florida Today/Cape Publishing, paid an undisclosed amount for the Future, a free paper published three times a week during the academic year. It also bought the Seminole Chronicle, a weekly circulated in Oviedo and Winter Springs, and Sales, a coupon book distributed at UCF.

“It is a good fit for them,” said Heissam Jebailey, who was co-owner of the three publications. “It has become a great publication.”

The Future, with a circulation of 15,000, was once the university’s official newspaper. Jebailey said it moved off campus in 1992 and eventually became a for-profit business. Jebailey and a partner, Brian Linden, bought the Future in 2001.

[…]

But [newspaper analyst John] Morton said corporate ownership could bring unforeseen change to student newspapers, which are often freewheeling operations.

“They will be answering to a different master,” Morton said. “And it will be a more strenuous master.”

[Link]

2007-02-08T12:59:00.001-05:00

Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure: My ninth-grade world history teacher used to say that everything comes down to infrastructure in the end. Turns out she was right. The Times is on top of the aging of our urban water infrastructure, which, in Portland, meant raising sewer rates to pay for massive redevelopment projects -- and a swallowed sewage truck:

Local and state officials across the country say thousands of miles of century-old underground water and sewer lines are springing leaks, eroding and — in extreme cases — causing the ground above them to collapse. Though there is no master tally of sinkholes, there is consensus among civil engineers and water experts that things are getting worse.
The Environmental Protection Agency has projected that unless cities invest more to repair and replace their water and sewer systems, nearly half of the water system pipes in the United States will be in poor, very poor or “life elapsed” status by 2020.
[...]
[Portland] is in the 16th year of a 20-year, $1.4 billion, federally mandated project to reduce sewage overflows into the Willamette River from about 100 days a year to 4 days or less. Signs in the city promote two enormous sewer and storm water lines being dug as part of the project, one on the west bank of the Willamette that is 14 feet in diameter and another on the east side that is 22 feet in diameter.
[...]
Overflows are a problem in many cities, and fixing them is not cheap; Portland has some of the highest water and sewer rates in the country. Mr. Marriott said the average residential sewer bill in Portland has risen to about $45 a month from about $14 in the early 1990s, when the city began the mandated improvements.
Once the project is completed, he said, rates will probably stay high so that the city can fix other problems, like the sewer pipe decay that officials believe most likely helped cause the sinkhole in December, the one that swallowed the sewer truck.
Mack McEachern was there on that chilly morning. First the water in his apartment on Southeast Oak Street stopped running. Then the boiler in the basement began to fade. Water-utility workers came to check an exterior main. The city inspected a clogged sewer line. Something was wrong with the system, but what?
Mr. McEachern recalled how he stood outside and watched the big sewer truck start to pull away, supposedly without having pinpointed the problem.
Then, he said, “The ground shook.”

[Link]

2007-02-08T09:48:00.000-05:00

A fan by any other name: A Bears fan in Decatur, Ill., made a pledge that if Da Bears didn’t win the Super Bowl, he would legally change his name to Peyton Manning. Well, the game is history — Bears 17, Colts 29 — and if all goes smoothly, Scott Wiese’s name isn’t much longer for this world. CNN had some real gems for this story:

Wiese, a die-hard Chicago Bears fan, will legally change his name to that of the Indiana Colts quarterback. He signed a pledge in front of a crowd at a Decatur bar last Friday night, vowing to adopt Manning’s name if the Bears lost Sunday’s Super Bowl.

[…]

Wiese will now have to advertise his intention in the local newspaper — the Herald & Review — for several weeks and then have a judge give him the OK to become, legally anyway, Peyton Manning.

The men have little in common, Wiese acknowledges.

Manning the quarterback is 30 years old, stands 6-foot-5 and has a contract with the Colts worth more than $100 million.

Wiese is 5-foot-11 and works at a Staples office-supply store for somewhat less.

[Link] (Thanks, Phil!)

2007-02-06T19:47:00.000-05:00

Korean Fried Chicken?: I’m a devotee of Southern-style fried chicken, with crispy, thick, uneven breaded skin peeling away from the meat. But in Korea, they’ve turned this into a whole separate bird, a microscopic layer of flour and batter finely crisped over chicken. It sounds delicious, even though I’d want it with biscuits rather than pickled radish. The Times has the bird:

Platters of fried chicken are a hugely popular bar food in South Korea — like chicken wings in the United States, they are downed with beer or soju, after work or after dinner, rarely eaten as a meal.

“Some places have a very thin, crisp skin; some places have more garlicky, sticky sauces; some advertise that they are healthy because they fry in 100 percent olive oil,” said Mr. McPherson, an English teacher, who writes a food blog called zenkimchi.com/FoodJournal.

[…]

Korean-style fried chicken is radically different, reflecting an Asian frying technique that renders out the fat in the skin, transforming it into a thin, crackly and almost transparent crust. (Chinese cooks call this “paper fried chicken.”) The chicken is unseasoned, barely dredged in very fine flour and then dipped into a thin batter before going into the fryer. The oil temperature is a relatively low 350 degrees, and the chicken is cooked in two separate stages.

After 10 minutes, the chicken is removed from the oil, shaken vigorously in a wire strainer and allowed to cool for two minutes. This slows the cooking process, preventing the crust from getting too brown before the meat cooks through. It also shaves off all those crusty nubs and crags that American cooks strive for.

After 10 more minutes in the fryer, the chicken is smooth, compact, golden-brown, and done. Then, it’s served plain (with a small dish of salt and pepper for seasoning) or lightly painted with sauce. When it’s done correctly, the sauce is absorbed into the crust, adding savor without making it soggy.

[Link]

2007-02-06T16:26:00.000-05:00

In space, your brain has no weight: We already have a winner for February’s You Can’t Make This Up category, and it’s only Feb. 6. What could possibly top this? A female astronaut drove all the way from Houston, wearing diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop, to assault and probably murder a fellow female astronaut who was involved with a male astronaut. The Sentinel has the preposterous scoop:

Lisa Marie Nowak drove more than 12 hours from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a woman who had also been seeing the astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police.

Nowak — who was a mission specialist on a space shuttle Discovery flight last summer — was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol and latex gloves in her car, reports show. They also found diapers, which Nowak told police she used so she wouldn’t have to stop on the 1,000-mile drive. Reports show that after U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman’s flight arrived, Nowak followed her to the airport’s Blue Lot for long-term parking, tried to get into Shipman’s car and then doused her with pepper spray.

Nowak, 43, is charged with attempted kidnapping, battery, attempted vehicle burglary with battery and destruction of evidence. Police considered her such a danger that they requested she be held without bail in the Orange County Jail, reports show.

[…]

Shipman told police that after waiting two hours to get her luggage, she noticed a woman in a trench coat waiting near the airport taxi stand. When Shipman boarded a shuttle bus to long-term parking, the woman followed, according to police.

When Shipman got into her car in the Blue Lot on Cargo Road, reports show, she heard “running footsteps” coming toward her. Nowak tried to open the car door, then claimed she needed a ride, or use of a cell phone.

[Link]

2007-02-03T10:31:00.000-05:00

“An improbable object of desire”: The Oregonian had an amazing two-part feature in December (which somehow I missed and discovered this morning) about Ron Tonkin’s attempt to sell Smart cars in the U.S. Tonkin, who is a car dealer and a household name in the Portland area, became one of the first American dealers to sell Ferraris in 1966, after he fell in love with one on a trip to Italy. He saw the same magic in the tiny little Smart cars, which he believed could sell even better than the Mini Cooper. And they broke his heart. From the Big O:

After his 2001 visit to Italy [when he first saw the Smart car], Tonkin’s mind often wandered to the little car, even as Mercedes Car Group’s Smart GmbH division suffered bleak sales. Mercedes’ parent, DaimlerChrysler AG, decided Americans were too keen on sport-utility vehicles and by 2003 shelved plans to export stateside.

Then one August day in 2005, two Florida salesmen showed up at Tonkin’s dealership office on Southeast 122nd Avenue. He usually didn’t see people without an appointment, but this call piqued his interest. Mike Mervish, a burly 48-year-old with a tan, introduced himself as a salesman for Smartz U.S.A. and proceeded to do all the talking.

Mervish told Tonkin that his Fort Lauderdale firm was the only U.S. company with federal approval to sell Smartz cars — the name twist on Smart that the company gave its version of the impish imports. In an appeal refined over years as a car salesman, Mervish told Tonkin he could be Smartz’s exclusive dealer in Oregon.

Tonkin remembers a pitch heavy on showmanship. The cars were “on the high seas” bound for a port in Brunswick, Ga., Tonkin recalls Mervish saying. Cars would be in Portland by fall, he promised, and Smartz President Tim Davis would keep lining up a dealer network. With Tonkin’s price at $21,000 and retail around $23,000, each Smartz would earn about $2,000 in profit, Mervish said. Not the juiciest margin, but, for a car whose futuristic looks stopped passers-by in their tracks, sales could add up.

Smart cars, designed by edgy Swiss watchmaker Swatch, would zip off lots in the earth-friendly Pacific Northwest, the salesman continued. He had lived in Oregon a while, he told Tonkin, and knew it was full of tree-huggers.

Tonkin contained a good-natured eye-roll. Flashy guys from Florida didn’t need to tell him what his customers liked, he remembers thinking. He was a fourth-generation Oregonian and a second-generation car dealer.

But the prospect reignited the spark he’d felt four years earlier in Italy. Here was a shot to sell the flirty little car that no other local dealer had — before Daimler-Chrysler changed its mind.

[Links to parts one and two]

2007-02-03T10:09:00.000-05:00

You are what you eat: In this week’s Times Magazine, Michael Pollan explores the relationship between the way that we eat and the disastrous state of our health. In short, he says, today we are so focused on the individual components of nutrition that we’ve lost sight of the gestalt. It’s a terrific article. (Which I meant to post on Sunday… and forgot about. Sorry, guys.) Somehow, we are less healthy today than we were thirty years ago, when people were still eating eggs fried in bacon grease; and the answer, Pollan believes, is our inability to say, "Eat less meat and dairy."

[I]n retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

[Link]

2007-02-03T09:20:00.000-05:00

Roll up your sleeve: Today, the people who run around claiming various deleterious effects of vaccination are mostly fringe elements, you know: granola-crunchers who believe the government is poisoning us, or Christian Scientists who won’t take medicine. But before World War II, anti-vaccine sentiment was widespread in the United States. The Times Book Review looks at Arthur Allen’s new book, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver, and wonders just how this happened:

Allen sees two events in these years as crucial to the growing public acceptance of vaccines. When America went to war in 1941 following Pearl Harbor, the health of the troops became a primary concern. Determined to prevent the medical casualties of World War I, where the number of American soldiers killed by influenza (44,000) almost matched the number lost in battle (50,000), military officials made vaccination mandatory. “Yes, the shots hurt and even caused illness sometimes, but the soldier survived,” Allen writes. “Returning from the war he wanted his children to have the same protection.”

World War II made vaccination fashionable. Polio turned it into a national crusade. No disease drew as much attention in postwar America, or created as much fear. Primarily striking children, polio killed some of its victims and paralyzed others, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, leg braces, iron lungs, deformed limbs. The quest for a means of prevention led to the largest public health experiment in American history, involving nearly two million school-age volunteers. When Jonas Salk’s killed-virus polio vaccine was declared “safe, effective and potent” in 1955, the nation celebrated as if a war had ended — and, indeed, one had. At a White House ceremony, President Eisenhower choked back tears as he told the young researcher: “I have no words to thank you. I am very, very happy.”

The polio vaccines of Salk and Albert Sabin marked a special moment in medical history. As late as the 1950s, parents had been encouraged to expose their children to diseases like measles, mumps and chicken pox in order to get them over with before adulthood, when the dangers increased. Now, there were vaccines for all these illnesses, and more were on the way. Some researchers spoke openly of a future without infectious disease. “Will such a world exist?” a scientist asked. “We believe so.”

[Link]

2007-02-02T17:55:00.001-05:00

Massive, widespread destruction: I will not have very much to post today. This morning, at around 6 a.m., several very powerful tornadoes wrought enormous damage in many of the counties surrounding Orlando: Lake, Sumter, Volusia and Marion counties. The Sentinel has been covering it like there is no tomorrow, and it's been great. But we'll be silent tonight, in memoriam. From the Sentinel:

Gov. Charlie Crist has declared a State of Emergency for Lake, Seminole, Sumter and Volusia counties after severe thunderstorms and tornadoes slammed through the areas overnight in the communities north and east of Orlando. [...] Thirteen deaths were reported in Paisley/Lake Mack area of Lake and six in Lady Lake near The Villages. The dead include Carla and Donald Downing of Lake Mack as well as their 15-year-old son, David. He was one of three triplets who was killed while his two triplet sisters, Heather and Kayla, survived the storms, said Umatilla High principal June Dalton. Another Lake County high school student also perished, officials there said this afternoon. About 15 to 20 percent of Umatilla High's students were absent Friday, Dalton said. Buses and cars could not pass on some roads. Many kids lost their homes. "Most have been devastated," Dalton said. "We have counselors working with the students."

There is also on-going coverage on the Sentinel's website. [Link]

2007-02-01T15:15:00.000-05:00

He put the surprise in Surprise, Ariz.: The Times had a fantastic story today about the 29-year-old pedophile who spent the last four months posing as a 14-year-old boy in a suburb in Phoenix. Turns out that not only was he living with three other male "relatives," who were also pedophiles, but they believed he was a 14-year-old and had regular sexual relations with him. What a tangled web humanity weaves. From the story:

A retracing of Mr. Rodreick's tracks over the past several years shows that he is under investigation in three states. The authorities in four jurisdictions say he repeatedly failed to register as a sex offender, housed a large cache of child pornography in his computer and, based on videos found by the police, had sex with at least one boy.

"Obviously there are a lot of emotions to work through," said Mindy Newlin, the mother of a kindergartener at Imagine Charter School, the school in Surprise where Mr. Rodreick posed as Casey. "We are just shocked."

Robin Kaiser's daughter Kaitlin shared a class with "Casey," but he failed to make an impression, Ms. Kaiser said. "She remembers him, that he was quiet and sat in the back of the classroom," she said. "She said he looked like he had been held back."

Janet R. Lincoln, the public defender for Yavapai County, who represents Mr. Rodreick and the other three men, did not return multiple phone calls. A receptionist in her office said Ms. Lincoln would have no comment. The men have been indicted on numerous counts and are scheduled to appear in court in late February; they have already pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and failing to register as sex offenders.

[...]

"With boys it is a really tough deal," said Lt. Van Gillock of the Police Department in El Reno, Okla., where Mr. Rodreick is believed to have posed as a 12-year-old to ingratiate himself with boys at church. "If they did it voluntarily, they have the stigma of homosexuality, and if it is forced, well, boys are supposed to be tough and the things the boys have on them gives them an embarrassment factor."

[Link]

2007-01-30T18:03:00.000-05:00

Escape from Mexico: Joseph Pearson went to Mexico City to see what makes Mexico different from the U.S. We have the Protestants’ vision of progress, in the U.S., which says that we have simply progressed past the point of Mexico; but in a lot of ways, Pearson finds, it is more a vision of what we could become than of what we once were. It’s a travelogue, but implicit in it is the suggestion that the more we pursue our current path, the more we risk dragging ourselves down rather than elevating them. In Boston University’s AGNI:

Isn’t [Rivera’s triptych of murals at the Palacio Nacional] a similar idyll to that romanced in demonstrations by the disenfranchised indigenous just outside in the Zócalo? They propagandize the agenda of the Chiapas Zapatistas led by the former “subcommandante” turned “delegate” Marcos in his black ski-mask and rifle. The mass of demonstrators cannot easily enter the building, built by Cortéz and now a seat of government, that houses the murals of Marx positioned as God the Father in a great last judgment of capitalism.

On the square, I pass an upscale hotel bar where, untouchable through the glass, middle-aged gentlemen in three-piece suits watch American football and smoke. I saw flâneurs in the same anachronistic dress window-shopping at stationers that sell leather desk pads and fancy fountain pens — the tools of the gentleman to place conspicuously in a study to gain the esteem of the rank and file of the establishment. Around the doors of the Hotel Gran Ciudad de México, with its wondrous Art-Nouveau dome, are younger men in the casual uniform of Lacoste gold shirts tucked into khaki pants. They sport expensive watches in a city where wearing a plastic one is the only sure method to prevent being mugged. They pile into a taxi, and a tickle of fear rises up my neck. Disparities of wealth exist everywhere, but they are rarely so visible as in a city without a real middle class. I am afraid not because Mexico is unique in its share of misery. It’s not. I am afraid because Mexico is the future.

From the Zócalo with its enormous flag (never trust big flags) and its great square (which dubiously claims to be the second biggest in the world), and the nearby Latin American tower (again, called the tallest in the Latin world, when there are higher ones right in Mexico City, and certainly dozens in São Paolo), I walk from mighty claims through streets of vendors—shabby shops of taffeta dresses and yet more ubiquitous pen shops—to the metro which carries the people of the city. A boy in bare feet stands next to a gendarme with white gloves. I see an entire family squatting on a platform, together and destitute, all showing great hunger. I pass by their unified squalor and in my unease I neither stop nor give them a cent. They are like a fading constellation, the two adults behind, at different heights, then children before them — still — as if posed for a daguerreotype.

I get off at Insurgentes where on one corner are men windswept in stained clothes waiting for the bus, and on another is an elegant restaurant with a fortified entrance. I walk through the Zona Rosa, with its gay shops and cafes like a throwback from an era still wrapped in rainbow flags and bumper-stickers—another form of resistance or of conformity? A merry bubble of conversation, music and good living emerges from the open thresholds, and for a moment, the question does not really matter.

[Link]

2007-01-29T15:39:00.000-05:00

Rocket man: On Saturday, the Portland Aerial Tram opened for business, running from South Waterfront to Oregon Health Sciences University. It was a source of much contention six years ago, when they first announced the project, but in the intervening time a lot of the controversy has gone away. Now it's winning over riders with its incredible view of downtown, the East Side and the mountains on the way down from Marquam Hill, even at $4 a round-trip ticket. In a city with an unusual and sometimes uneven mix of mass transit -- buses, trains, a streetcar, and a fareless zone encompassing downtown, the Pearl District and the Convention Center -- this is just one more smart innovation, a way of turning a 15-minute zig-zag drive or bus ride up a hill into the triangle's hypotenuse. From the Oregonian:

People started talking openly about a $3 million tram as far as back as 1998. One neighborhood activist considered it crazy talk. As in, you'd be crazy to build a car hanging from wires to leap over Interstate 5 so it could connect a rusted industrial yard to OHSU's main campus.

Yet the idea kept climbing.

[...]

The silver, bubblelike tram cars, still wrapped in clear plastic, made their first flight on an unusually sunny November afternoon. The new transit option opened for OHSU employees in mid-December. [Saturday, January 27 was] the public opening, but when Portland got hit [in early January] by a snowstorm, the tram opened early to ferry people up and off the hill.

For the white-collar set, the tram is a sign of progress with billions of dollars spent on OHSU's expansion and the 130-acre South Waterfront revival.

For the skeptical, the tram is a reminder of lax government management. Quoted at $15.5 million in 2002, the tram today will land at $57 million. (The city says this time that it's not a penny more.)

For nonbelievers, the tram is a symbol of the growing separation between the wealth of downtown and the poverty of far North and East Portland.

[Link, and to the Times' coverage]

2007-01-28T22:12:00.000-05:00

Dancing's not the devil's work anymore: John Brown University, in Arkansas, is finally allowing dancing after 90 years. Apparently, they don't believe it's sin anymore. I never understood that curious attitude -- but it's fairly prevalent. So, here's to "Footloose" no more:

The school's "community covenant" had prohibited, in addition to smoking, sex outside of marriage, drinking and gambling, all on-campus dancing except "folk or square dancing and choreography as part of a dramatic production." Distinctions were not made -- the Viennese waltz was as forbidden as the electric slide, the achy-breaky as taboo as the lambada. The week before J.B.U.'s first dance, Tracie Faust, a senior, told me about one night her sophomore year when a popular song came on the radio. "And before you knew it," she said, "there were 10 of us dancing, and the R.A. came out of her room and told us to stop." The offending song? "Breakaway," by the adult-lite American Idol Kelly Clarkson.

J.B.U.'s about-face, while abrupt, was not totally unexpected. In the past 10 years, several of America’s most established evangelical schools, including Baylor University in Texas, Wheaton College in Illinois and Cornerstone University in Michigan, have lifted restrictions on dancing, even as they have kept various rules against activities like drinking, gambling, smoking and, of course, premarital sex. They are opting to allow formal dances, like swing or ballroom. Of course, it's unlikely there will be hip-hop or bump-and-grind at J.B.U. They will not be krumping. But for millions of evangelical Protestants, dancing has become increasingly acceptable. There are still conservative Christians, particularly in Baptist, Pentecostal and independent Bible-church traditions, who don't dance, but they are growing scarce. The old joke about why Baptists won't have sex standing up -- because people might think they’re dancing -- has become antiquated.

"I was part of a group of girls who would put on music in our rooms and dance, and were asked to stop," Jennifer Paulsen told me. Paulsen is the student-government president who helped persuade the trustees to overturn the ban. It was three days before the dance, and we were talking in the Walker Student Center, J.B.U.'s main hub. "We knew there was 'no social dancing,' but what did that mean? We knew folk and square dancing was allowed, and people will always move a little if a good song comes on, but how many people makes a dance?"

In my week at J.B.U., I met students who had never had a drink, had never kissed a boy or a girl and had no doubt that dinosaurs and men walked the earth at the same time. But I didn't meet a soul who thought dancing was sinful. And nearly all the students I spoke to danced in high school.

[Link]

2007-01-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

The American face of Islam: The moment a lot of multiculturalism-minded Americans are waiting for is the deradicalization, liberalization of Western Islam — for what happened to American Catholics and Jews to happen in the Muslim community. It may be, if the story of one imam who moved from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to suburban Jersey is any indication. Remember that this man ministers to the middle class and to the poor immigrants. In the Times today:

To be a successful suburban imam, he found, meant persuading doctors and lawyers not to rush from prayers to beat traffic. It meant connecting with teenagers who drove new cars, and who peppered their Arabic with “like” and “yeah.” It meant helping his daughter cope with mockery at school, in a predominantly white town that lost dozens of people on Sept. 11.

Mr. Shata knew from his years in Brooklyn that the job demanded more than preaching and leading prayers, the things for which he was trained in Egypt. In America, he helped to arrange marriages. He mediated between the F.B.I. and his people. He set up a makeshift Islamic court to resolve disputes among hot dog vendors.

[…]

Many Muslims were shocked to read [in a previous article in the Times] that the imam thought oral sex was permissible for married couples (even though respected Islamic scholars in the Middle East concurred with his opinion, he said). Others objected to his view that Muslims could sell liquor or pork if they could find no other work.

One critique of Mr. Shata on a jihadist Web site in England singled out his hometown, Kafr al Battikh, which is known for its watermelons. “Oh, Allah,” it read, “preserve Islam and Muslims from the evil people of watermelons.”

In Bay Ridge, the articles prompted a fistfight outside a Dunkin’ Donuts. Fliers warned in Arabic that the imam was “a devil.”

[Link]

2007-01-27T12:38:00.000-05:00

A tremendous failure (TimesSelect): Since I’ve already mentioned it, I unearthed Nicholas Kristof’s column about the failure of the development of the Great Plains, from September 2002. For those of you without TimesSelect access, I’m going to excerpt as much as I can and try to unearth the full text somewhere else for you. The lesson to take from this and from the story of Yubari, it seems to me, is that the government largesse that keeps Hokkaido, as well as the Great Plains, ticking is only an invitation for greater trouble later. It may be heartless, but someone has to say it: If you can innovate and make a future for yourself in small-town or rural Upper Midwest, go to it — but don’t ask me to pay for you to have the unsustainable life you have there now.

It’s time for us to acknowledge one of America’s greatest mistakes, a 140-year-old scheme that has failed at a cost of trillions of dollars, countless lives and immeasurable heartbreak: the settlement of the Great Plains.

The plains, which have overtaken places like Appalachia to become by far the poorest part of the country, represent a monumental failure in American history. To understand more I came here to Loup County, officially the poorest county in the United States, with a per capita income of $6,600 (New York County, or Manhattan, is the nation’s richest, at $90,900).

In fairness, Loup doesn’t look poor, and it’s so rich in warmth, community spirit and old-fashioned friendliness that it’s just about impossible for a stranger to pay for a meal here. The tiny school, the only one in the county, has student lockers with no locks; and outside, students’ cars are not only unlocked, but the keys are left in the ignition.

[…]

This vast region in the middle of America, more than five times the size of California, now meets the 19th-century definition of frontier, with six or fewer people per square mile. Instead of the frontier closing, as Frederick Jackson Turner declared a century ago, it is expanding, and we may look back on large-scale settlement of the Plains as a fluke, a temporary domination now receding again.

The aridity of the Great Plains is partly to blame for the failed land development here, but fault also lies in the vapidity of American farm programs — which President Bush and Congress are now expanding. It was, after all, a web of subsidies and government land promotion schemes that lured people to the Great Plains in the first place.

President Bush signed a $180 billion farm bill this year, with the backing of many Democrats as well as Republicans, after a gutless surrender to lobbyists for wealthy farmers. But the program will actually aggravate rural distress.

Subsidies do nothing to help hard-working ranchers here, because the money overwhelmingly goes to crop farmers rather than livestock owners. Worse, much of the money goes to the most prosperous families (47 percent of commodity payments go to farmers whose household income is more than $135,000), who use the cash to buy up more land. Subsidies thus accelerate the consolidation of farms that is already depopulating rural areas.

[Link]

2007-01-27T12:10:00.000-05:00

Forget but don’t forgive… their debt: The days of plenty in Japan are past, and with them trillions of yen in government largesse to outlying regions. The result is that towns like Yubari, on Hokkaido, are buried as much in debt as in snow. It’s the predictable consequence of meaningless government-works projects being showered on a town whose main economic source is dying; and it lends far more credence to the Nicholas Kristof view of redevelopment (TimesSelect) than to David Brooks’, to make a Times analogy. It’s an important lesson, too, for the Ohios and West Virginias. The Times says:

During Japan’s economic boom, Tokyo showered enormous subsidies on Yubari to build these huge though poorly thought-out tourist attractions, which drew few visitors, ran large deficits and saddled this city of 12,828 inhabitants with more than $500 million in debt.

At first it was a convenient arrangement: the hinterlands prospered, politically connected contractors had plenty of work and the government cemented the loyalty of rural voters. But the good times ended in the 1990s, and the government slowly closed the financial spigots, leaving Yubari and other rural cities increasingly desperate.

[…]

As part of its plan to file for bankruptcy, place itself in the hands of Tokyo and repay its debts over 20 years, Yubari has put History Village and about 20 other tourist attractions up for sale. About half of the 300 city workers are leaving, and those who stay face salary cuts ranging from 30 percent to 70 percent.

The city’s 11 schools will be consolidated into three or four; its hospital will become a clinic; its library, city hall branches and public baths will be shuttered. City bus discounts for the elderly will be reduced. Local taxes will rise. Already, snowfalls now have to total six inches, rather than four, before they are cleared.

No cost-cutting measure has been deemed too small. The toilet at the Yubari train station has been closed, forcing travelers to sneak into the adjoining hotel.

[Link]

2007-01-26T22:27:00.000-05:00

Fighting crime, a dollar at a time: When the state of Arizona noticed that more than $90,000 a month was changing hands at a Western Union in Douglas, Ariz., they got suspicious. After all, Douglas is a small city with an almost pathetically poor population. It is, however, near the Arizona-Sonora border, and it turns out that Douglas was the lynchpin of a huge immigrant-smuggling ring. The Washington Post reports:

People across the country, prosecutors said, were sending money to the little Western Union shop in Douglas — and scores others like it in Arizona — to pay smugglers to sneak illegal immigrants into the United States.

To fight back, Attorney General Terry Goddard employed a controversial technique known as a damming warrant to seize $17 million in money transfers into hundreds of Western Union locations in Arizona, prosecute scores of immigrant smugglers and deport hundreds of people in a program he marvels at because of its “elegant simplicity.”

[…]

So on Sept. 21, Goddard expanded the program, issuing a warrant blocking all Western Union money transfers of $500 and above from 26 states with a significant population of illegal immigrants to a group of Western Union outlets in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. He also planned on issuing warrants blocking money transfers through Western Union to nearby states such as Nevada.

[Link]

2007-01-25T22:01:00.000-05:00

Burning down the house: A wealthy Palm Beach homeowner rented his $8.5 million, 9,000-square-foot house out to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers club vice president and his wife, and found it trashed to the tune of $100,000 after only six weeks. Apparently having money doesn’t make you a good tenant. I give you the Palm Beach Post:

“Mr. Henderson still has a hard time believing the extent of the damage done in such a short period of time,” said Mike Powers, Henderson’s spokesman. “At first, he didn’t want to rent the place out. He’s upset he let himself be talked into it.”

Through his lawyer, Justus Reid, Henderson is now suing the Glazers in a Palm Beach County court. He wants the $300,000 back rent plus damages. Those also included: the removal and improper storage of 14 rare Oriental rugs and wall-to-wall carpeting; breaking of every window screen on the first floor; permanent opening of windows for two weeks at a time during the rainy season; removal of $30,000, 14-foot draperies and storage in cardboard boxes; drilling of holes throughout the home for DIRECTV installation; removal of landscaping; and repainting of walls in colors that didn’t match.

[…]

Powers said Henderson received several complaints from Angela concerning air quality. She claimed there was mold throughout the house and dog hair in the rugs, even though Henderson spent $8,000 on sanitizing before the Glazers moved in.

“She complained a lot about the Henderson dog because she spotted it while touring the house,” Powers said. “But we’re talking about a 6-pound Maltese named Bling-Bling, and he’s hypoallergenic.”

[Link]

2007-01-25T10:15:00.000-05:00

Houston, we have a problem: Apparently, none of the posts I have been making in the last four days have shown up in Blogger’s database. In addition, none of them are stored on my computer anywhere. So. They are gone… Damn. I’m sorry, guys. I didn’t even think to check if they were showing up. Hopefully today we’ll be back on our regular schedule, without glitches, if I can figure out what was causing the posts to disappear.

2007-01-21T12:50:00.000-05:00

Lies and the lying liars who tell them: A reader writes Andrew Sullivan to tell him Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ conceit that habeas corpus may be denied to certain prisoners literally ignores the whole history of the United States:

[G]o back and look at Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address: [Jefferson] says very clearly that habeas is one of the basic premises of our entire system of government; that it’s a fundamental right that shores up all the others. Elsewhere he identifies habeas as one of the “four pillars” of our constitutional system. You’re not going to convince me that the Founding Fathers didn’t view habeas as “grandfathered” into the US system — that’s simply obvious. So why are we now being subjected to this Stalinist historical revisionism? Why does the Attorney General of the United States make comments like this in such a public forum? He would only make them because he needs them for cover, i.e., because he has advocated and implemented a consistent policy of violating habeas corpus rights that rests on each of these niggling distinctions. Which is why one should stop scrutinizing the footnotes of law review articles and be worried.

[Link]

2007-01-21T12:45:00.000-05:00

Once more into the breach: As I alluded to yesterday, Bill Richardson’s been mulling running for president. For as long as I can remember, honestly: He was rumored as a Gore running mate in 2000, before Gore chose disastrous Joe Lieberman; and he seriously considered a 2004 run. Now he’s throwing his hat into the ‘08 ring. It’s gonna be one doozy of a primary season:

In his statement, Richardson stressed his foreign affairs experience, said he wanted U.S. troops to return quickly from Iraq and urged a change of leadership in Washington that would work to bridge a wide partisan divide.

“The next president of the United States must get our troops out of Iraq without delay,” Richardson said. “I know the Middle East well and it’s clear that our presence in Iraq isn’t helping any longer.”

He added that the next president “must be able to bring a country together that is divided and partisan. It is clear that Washington is broken and it’s going to take a return to bipartisanship and simple respect for each other’s views to get it fixed.”

Most policy innovations are coming these days from governors, Richardson said. “On issues like the environment, jobs, and health care, state governments are leading the way. And that’s because we can’t be partisan or we won’t get our jobs done. That’s a lesson I’ve learned as governor and that’s what I’ll do as president.”

[Link]

2007-01-20T16:23:00.000-05:00

Movin’ on up: This week, CNN reported that Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Barack Obama (D-IL) will be running for president. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) is expected to announce tomorrow. It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: a Democratic primary between a Clinton, a Clintonite and a New New Democrat. A Democratic primary between a woman, an African American and a Latino. It’s almost as good as the Saints playing for the chance to go to the Super Bowl tomorrow! (Almost.) On Clinton:

Bringing “the right end” to the war in Iraq, reducing the deficit, making the country energy independent and health care affordable were issues Clinton touted in her announcement, speaking on a video posted on her site.

“After six years of George Bush, it is time to renew the promise of America,” she said.

“I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America, and we believed in that promise,” the 59-year-old Chicago native said.

“I still do. I’ve spent my entire life trying to make good on it, whether it was fighting for women’s basic rights or children’s basic health care, protecting our social security or protecting our soldiers.”

On Sunday she’ll appear at the Ryan Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center to discuss legislation that would expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The center bears the names of the two Manhattan neighborhoods it serves — Chelsea and Clinton — coincidentally, Chelsea Clinton is the senator’s daughter’s name.

And on Obama:

“The decisions that have been made in Washington over the past six years and the problems that have been ignored have put our country in a precarious place,” he said in the video.

In addition to citing “the tragic and costly war that should never have been waged,” Obama mentioned health care, pensions, college tuition and “our continued dependence on oil” as issues that need work.

But he said it is the “smallness of our politics” that most bothers him. (Watch Obama try to turn a potential negative into a positive )

“Today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common-sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan and gummed up by money and influence that we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions, and that’s what we have to change.”

Obama said his final decision will be made based on what he learns over the next several weeks as he travels the country “listening and learning about the challenges we face as a nation.”

[Links to the Obama story and the Clinton story]

2007-01-19T19:24:00.000-05:00

The Saints are coming…: As a lifelong New Orleans Saints fan, I’ve known my share of misery and disappointment. There’s a thread right now, on Saints Report, called “Win It For,” and one poor guy laid out the whole chronology of misery. The Saints have been bad his entire life. Now, they’re 60 minutes from the Super Bowl. All I have to say: Geaux Saints!

Win it for the sixteen year old who cried when Hank Stram became the head coach, because that sixteen year old knew beyond all doubt that his Saints would finally become the winners he always believed they could be.

Win it for the seventeen year old who took the jeers of all of his classmates as he continued to cheer for “Thunder and Lightning” despite a futile record.

Win it for the eighteen year old who finally saw his hero get the recognition he deserved, as Archie won NFC MVP honors, despite playing for a losing team.

Win it for the nineteen year old, for whom Archie signed a football to be auctioned off in a benefit to raise money to care for the nineteen year old’s dying grandmother.

Win it for the twenty year old, who refused to wear a bag and held his head high as he fervently believed in his team.

[Link]

2007-01-18T00:56:00.000-05:00

Life is fragile: Alejandro Iñárritu makes movies that are seemingly about how miserable and dark life is. But, he says, they’re all about hope. Alice O’Keefe, in The New Statesman, asks what exactly he means by that:

The new film returns to a question raised in 21 Grams: how do you measure the value of a human life? “The New York Times says that 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq, and 600,000 Iraqis. Imagine if that number of Americans had died. It is inconceivable. The value of American lives is [high], but in Africa, a million people can die and there’s no reaction.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this message has had a mixed reception in the States, where the film premièred in October. One critic objected to “Iñárritu and [his screenwriter Guillermo] Arriaga’s aggressive suggestion that we Americans and white Europeans are something less than exemplary citizens of the world, particularly in times of crisis”. It was a response that came as little surprise to the director. “Unfortunately, there is a certain type of American who thinks that this film is a criticism, when it’s not. It is simply a commentary on the reality,” he says. “It is a very American sentiment, which interprets any kind of criticism as an attack. It’s like the position of Bush: you’re either with me or against me; there’s no dialogue. Many people have felt attacked — sadly, because it was never intended to be an attack.”

As the title suggests, one of Babel’s central conceits is the difficulty of cross-cultural communication. But although the encounters between cultures in it are characterised by fear and mistrust, all the characters have the same fundamental priorities: family and the search for love. Like Iñárritu’s previous two films, it is fundamentally about “parents and children, that is the nucleus. And through this microcosm you can observe the macrocosm; you do a biopsy on the cell to see how the body is working.”

It is, perhaps, a simplistic vision that steers well clear of areas of deep inter-cultural conflict such as religion. But it is one that Iñárritu insists cinema can and should articulate. “The beauty of cinema is that it is the universal language,” he says. “I decided to make this film using very few words, as I was striving for a very pure kind of film. The visual language takes audiences, without words or translations, into places they could never reach in reality.”

[Link]

2007-01-16T11:18:00.000-05:00

Who says ‘authoritative touch’ anyway? Ashley Cross, a Columbia student, wrote Saturday in the Times’ “Modern Love” column about the experience of dating a fellow student who had been accused of rape at Harvard. She seems to have no sense of the rape at all, only anger at boyfriend who had been somehow ‘neutered’ by the rehabilitative process. This is the world’s worst relationship writing I have ever read. Why do women always defend men like this?

The larger point, it seems to me, is that what she wanted was sex a little more aggressive than a boyfriend who had just been accused of rape and felt remorse for it, and now she’s kvetching about it in a national newspaper, but I’ll let you all judge:

One evening, as we were sharing coffee and cigarettes at a local diner while trading quips from “Casablanca,” he subtly blew smoke in my face. For all I knew it was unintentional, but I smiled at the gesture.

“If you were Humphrey Bogart,” I said, “then you’d know that blowing smoke in a woman’s face is an invitation for sex.”

Rather than smile back, he blanched. “I didn’t know that,” he said, then changed the subject.

[…]

Almost all of his close friends were girls. From what I knew, he had a strong relationship with his parents, who were progressive and intelligent and nurturing. He was a rule follower, a brilliant and dedicated student, a chronic people pleaser. He had a history of serial monogamy. I simply couldn’t reconcile the smart, gentle guy I knew with this startling revelation.

As I peppered him with questions, he talked me through the fateful night of only a few months before, when he and the girl, who’d been a friend, had mingled at a party and drifted off drunk together before winding up back in her room, where, several hours later, they had sex. She became hysterical, claiming he forced himself on her. He left, bewildered and distraught. That night he wrote her a letter apologizing for upsetting her and left it at her door. He told me the letter was an attempt to salvage the friendship.

“Did you rape her?” I asked.

“We had sex,” he said. “But I didn’t mean to hurt her, no.”

Nothing he had done that summer made me disbelieve him. Later, as events unfolded, I would learn everything I could about the case, not only from all the news media coverage but also from visiting Harvard and talking to mutual friends and co-workers of theirs. At the urging of his parole officer, I read the accuser’s statement of what had happened. Still, I believed him and supported him. (Ed. note: The complaint was summarized by the Harvard Crimson is still in the Crimson’s online archive. It seems pretty clearly rape.)

[…]

Already he felt the shame of the charge and conviction. With the sexual evaluations, he was forced to question the normalcy of his impulses. Now the rehabilitation extinguished the remaining spark he had left, the irreverence I’d originally fallen in love with, replacing it with a generic “respect” for others that in reality was a kind of bland and suffocating politeness.

[…]

Desire, once joyful, became a source of stress, something dangerous and potentially ugly that needed to be suppressed, and an awkward civility overtook our love life. Anything sexual between us became for him an urge not of primitive pleasure but of apologetic shame.

Regardless of how much I reassured him that everything was fine, he grew increasingly afraid of touching me in an authoritative way. In public, we stopped kissing or even holding hands. And during sex, any sound I made alarmed him, and he’d recoil, so I learned to stay silent.

Even so, he began asking, constantly, if I was O.K. But I didn’t want to be O.K. — I wanted to have bold, carefree, shameless sex with the man I wanted. One night I grew so tired of him asking me if I was all right that I snapped: “Don’t ask me that ever again! I’m fine. Don’t ask me that.” Which, of course, only led him to apologize about asking me, and then to apologize about apologizing — “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

[Link], and hat-tips to Shakespeare’s Sister’s and Adam B.’s analyses

2007-01-16T09:56:00.000-05:00

For shame: The United States is still holding 393 detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Some of them are bound to be dangerous to the United States; but if someone can explain to me why we’re still holding Gholam Ruhani and Shakhrukh Hamiduva, I’d love to hear it. The Washington Post explains the saga of the many low-profile inmates from the war in Afghanistan:

Gholam Ruhani was among them, the prison’s third official inmate, flown in by cargo plane with the first group of 20 men. The 23-year-old Afghan shopkeeper, who spoke a little English, was seized near his hometown of Ghazni when he agreed to translate for a Taliban government official seeking a meeting with a U.S. soldier.

Ruhani is still at Guantanamo, marking the fifth anniversary of the prison and his own captivity. He remains as stunned about his fate, according to transcripts of his conversations with military officers, as he was when U.S. military police led him inside the razor wire on Jan. 11, 2002, and accused him of being America’s enemy.

“I never had a war against the United States, and I am surprised I’m here,” Ruhani told his captors during his first chance to hear the military’s reasons for holding him, three years after he arrived at Guantanamo. “I tried to cooperate with Americans. I am no enemy of yours.”

[…]

“We of course had to make snap judgments in the battlefield,” said one administration official involved in reviewing Guantanamo cases, who spoke anonymously to avoid angering superiors. “Where we had problems was that once we had individuals in custody, no one along the layers of review wanted to take a risk. So they would take a shred of evidence that a detainee was associated with another bad person and say that’s a reason to keep them.”

[…]

One is Shakhrukh Hamiduva, an 18-year-old Uzbek refugee who fled his country after the government there killed one of his uncles and jailed other relatives. He tried to cross the border from Afghanistan when U.S. bombs started falling but was captured by a tribal leader and sold to U.S. forces for a bounty. He said soldiers told him he would be released, but instead he ended up in Cuba.

“We went after small fries at every turn,” said Neal Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who helped argue the Supreme Court case last June that struck down the government’s original plan for military trials. “Gitmo blew our credibility. And it’s going to take a long time to get it back.”

Link

2007-01-15T15:02:00.001-05:00

Vive la reine! Who would have thought that the land of sauteed frog's legs and bouillabaisse would propose marriage with the island mostly known for burnt roast beef and "pies" with meat and vegetables in them. Yes, that's right: France once proposed entering the United Kingdom, in 1956, according to documents in the British National Archives. The AP reports:

[British PM] Eden rejected the idea of a union but was more favorable to a French proposal to join the Commonwealth, according to the documents. One document added that [French PM] Mollet ''had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty (Queen Elizabeth II).''
While the two nations -- separated by a thin body of water -- have been bitter rivals since the Middle Ages, the two EU partners now concentrate on trading tourists rather than arrows. What animosity remains has been relegated to world culinary name-calling, with the French and British reduced to froggies and rosbifs (roast beef) respectively.
[...]
But even under the circumstances, the suggestion that France accept the British queen struck historians as bizarre.
Mollet was a Socialist, and left-wing Frenchmen looked to the execution of French King Louis XVI as one of the crowning achievements of the French Revolution. They would have been unlikely to welcome a foreign monarch with open arms. ''It must have been some kind of eccentric gesture,'' Vinen said.

The former French leader's memoirs showed nothing about the proposal, said Francois Lafon, a history professor at La Sorbonne in Paris and a Mollet biographer. Lafon suggested it was probably a political tactic to pressure the British to firm up their role for the imminent attack on Egypt.

[Link]

2007-01-15T14:13:00.001-05:00

Mine eyes have seen the glory (PDF): Since I mentioned it earlier, today's as good a day as any to post the immortal last public words of Dr. King. "Morning Edition" played the last minute, or so, this morning, and, as every year, when I hear it I feel the tingling of the knife-tip pointed at King's aorta, which he references earlier; and I feel the goose-flesh of knowing that words so powerful as these were the great civil rights legend's last. From Stanford University's excellent compilation of his most important sermons, speeches and letters:

It doesn't really matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane—there were six of us—the pilot said over the public address system: "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."
And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out, or what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.
Well, I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

[Link]

2007-01-15T13:55:00.001-05:00

'We shall overcome': Martin Luther King, in his last Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., exhorted his audience to continue the fight against racism. He also responded sharply to those who attacked him for progressing too quickly: America, he said, was all but poisoned by racism. The sermon, from Passion Sunday, is one of his finest, and, like the vastly more legendary "I've Been to the Mountain Top" (PDF) speech in Memphis a week later, also strangely prophetic. We have all felt, listening to his words, the chill of knowing that he would be dead just a few days later. But in this sermon, unlike the "Mountain Top" address, he lashes out:

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.
One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."
There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."
Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

[Link]

2007-01-15T13:26:00.001-05:00

My baby, she wrote me an e-mail: A dimension to the shift to electronic communications I hadn't considered is the impact on historians and novelists. We are losing not just an entire genre, that of the epistolary novel, but also a valuable research tool. In the era of e-mail, people simply don't write letters the way they used to. Worse still, email are much more likely to be lost. Physics World muses on this brave new world:

Historians at the American Institute of Physics (AIP), who are working on a project to document the history of physics in industry, have encountered hints of how the Internet and computers are transforming scientific communication.
E-mail is, of course, cheaper and encourages quicker thought, and it introduces a peculiar blend of the personal and professional. The AIP historians have also detected a decline in the use of lab notebooks, finding that data are often stored directly into computer files. Finally, they have noted the influence of PowerPoint, which can stultify scientific discussion and make it less free-wheeling; information also tends to be dumbed down when scientists submit PowerPoint presentations in place of formal reports.
Generally, though, these new communications techniques are good for scientists, encouraging rapid communication and stripping out hierarchies. But for historians, they are a mixed blessing. It is not just that searching through a hard disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old letters in an archive. Nor is it that the information in e-mails differs in kind from that in letters. Far more worrying is the question of whether e-mail and other electronic data will be preserved at all.
One can lose letters, of course, a classic case being much of Planck's correspondence thanks to an Allied bomb in the Second World War. But the challenges of electronic preservation are more extensive and immediate. As AIP historian Spencer Weart notes: "We have paper from 2000 but we can't read the first e-mail ever sent. We have the data, and the magnetic tape – but the format is lost." Weart is fond of quoting RAND researcher Jeff Rothenberg's remark that "it is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever – or five years, whichever comes first", meaning that information lasts only if regularly migrated to another format.

[Link]

2007-01-15T13:05:00.001-05:00

Free at last, free at last: Today is Martin Luther King Day. In honor of the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who for some reason gets shortened into just three names, I am posting Mark Liberman's fascinating analysis of the phonetics of the famous "I Have a Dream" speech. He notes the sharp difference in the phonetics of the speaking styles of John F. Kennedy and King, for instance. It's a good read. From Language Log:

His timing is eloquent: he speeds up and slows down in a way that conveys how his sentences are put together. Every fluent speaker does this to some extent, and he does it abundantly and at the same time precisely. But within most phrases in this speech, his pitch is relatively level, almost as if he were chanting or singing rather than speaking.
In particular, his phrases often end with a sustained or slightly falling pitch, instead of the steeper relaxation to low pitch that English phrases usually have. Because the expected falls are missing, some of his sutained final syllables (e.g. "today" in the opening phrases) may sound to some people as if they go up. But listen carefully, and look at the pitch contours

[...]

Of course, King's individual phrases in this speech do have a melody -- though sometimes a subtle one -- that helps convey his message. And he varied the overall pitch range much more widely from section to section of the speech, as effective speakers since time immemorial have done to embody the ebb and flow of ideas and emotions. But there was something about the way that he chanted each phrase, like a song or a prayer, that commanded attention and memory.

[Link]

2007-01-14T10:31:00.000-05:00

There is a house in New Orleans…: I’m taking the day off to celebrate the Saints victory, ladies and gentlemen. I have no voice, I have no energy, I have a mild hang-over, and I hurt my elbow pounding on the counter at One Eyed Jack’s, which happens to have three enormous big screens showing the game. So all I have left today is rest, commemorative rest. 27-24 is all that matters today, be it here in Orlando, or in New Orleans.

Tomorrow, I’ll do my usual Sunday-style posting, from the Sunday Times.

2007-01-14T01:37:00.000-05:00

When the Saints go marching in: Tonight, my oldest sports loyalty of all finally paid off. I’ve been a fan of the New Orleans Saints my entire life — unlike, say, the Blazers, the Ducks, the ‘Cats, the Cubs, the Suns or the D’backs, I was born to the Saints — and tonight, the Saints beat the Eagles 27-24 to pull within one game of the Super Bowl for the first time. Saints fans have a special chant for that: “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? Who dat! Who dat!” And tonight, I screamed that, at the top of my lungs, in a bar in downtown Orlando. From the Associated Press:

To constant chants of “DEUCE!” or “REG-GIE! REG-GIE!” the Saints used an assortment of spectacular plays to beat the Philadelphia Eagles 27-24.

“This year, some things have happened for us and it’s like, wow, this may be destiny,” McAllister said.

“It means everything,” Bush said. “All that stuff we went through as a team, these are the type of games we live for. And this game is even bigger for the city.”

The Saints are the first team in NFL history to make a conference championship after losing 13 or more games the previous season.

With victory secured for the Saints (11-6) on McAllister’s powerful rushes for a clinching first down to run out the clock, team owner Tom Benson did his “Benson Boogie” on the field. The players hugged and saluted their long-suffering fans while a jazz band belted out tunes.

“I think it means a tremendous amount,” quarterback Drew Brees said. “You could see it and feel it after the game, people still standing and yelling and screaming.”

[Link]

2007-01-13T19:15:00.001-05:00

Take your cod liver oil: Americans eat spectacularly badly, and we've ruined the food chain of the animals we eat, to boot. So food manufacturers have long added artificially derived nutritional supplements to processed foods — but not everything could be added easily and cheaply. Until now. Arrive the Omega-3 craze:

Yet that has not stopped [executives from Martek, who sell an algae-based Omega-3 additive] from promoting DHA’s potential health benefits more broadly. “If you have a product that reduces your chance of Alzheimer’s,” Mr. Dubin said, “if it improves your cardiovascular, if it improves your eyesight, if it improves the health of your baby, then I have to think consumers will say that’s worth an extra 25 or 50 cents a day for these benefits.”

He may be right. After all, this is a country where people concerned about their cholesterol will cut their egg intake in half but then consume four times as many servings of a fat-rich superpremium ice cream. Our tortured relationship to food might just help Martek’s cause.

“My experience in nutrition is that single nutrients rarely produce miracles,” said Marion Nestle, a professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of “What to Eat,” published last year. “But it’s also been my experience that companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it.”

For a long time, the typical American diet contained plenty of omega-3, DHA included. But that was when cattle were not trapped in pens and actually roamed the prairies and grazed on grass, which is a good source of omega-3s, rather than eating feed-lot corn and soy, which are not. Eggs, too, used to be a strong source, but chickens have undergone a similar lifestyle change.

[Link]

2007-01-13T12:53:00.000-05:00

You can’t handle the truth: The House passed a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour on Wednesday. Over the next few weeks, as the Senate considers the law, we’re sure to hear much commentary about how minimum wage earners are not supporting families, and how it’s going to be an enormous hardship for businesses to pay more. But both the Times and the Washington Post are calling these commentators out on the mat. From the Times:

Nearly a decade ago, when voters in Washington approved a measure that would give the state’s lowest-paid workers a raise nearly every year, many business leaders predicted that small towns on this side of the state line would suffer.

But instead of shriveling up, small-business owners in Washington say they have prospered far beyond their expectations. In fact, as a significant increase in the national minimum wage heads toward law, businesses here at the dividing line between two economies — a real-life laboratory for the debate — have found that raising prices to compensate for higher wages does not necessarily lead to losses in jobs and profits.

[…]

Business owners say they have had to increase prices somewhat to keep up. But both states are among the nation’s leaders in the growth of jobs and personal income, suggesting that an increase in the minimum wage has not hurt the overall economy.

“We’re paying the highest wage we’ve ever had to pay, and our business is still up more than 11 percent over last year,” said Tom Singleton, who manages a Papa Murphy’s takeout pizza store here, with 13 employees.

His store is flooded with job applicants from Idaho, Mr. Singleton said. Like other business managers in Washington, he said he had less turnover because the jobs paid more.

By contrast, an Idaho restaurant owner, Rob Elder, said he paid more than the minimum wage because he could not find anyone to work for the Idaho minimum at his Post Falls restaurant, the Hot Rod Cafe.

“At $5.15 an hour, I get zero applicants — or maybe a guy with one leg who wouldn’t pass a drug test and wouldn’t show up on Saturday night because he wants to get drunk with his buddies,” Mr. Elder said.

[Times Link]

And from the Post, how even $7.25 an hour doesn’t exactly make life grand:

Robert Iles has his own version of a dollar’s meaning, learned last February when Bower took him aside and said he would be getting a pay raise to $7.25. “Okay,” Iles remembers replying, wanting to seem businesslike. “But inside I was doing the cha-cha-cha,” he said. “It was like going from lower class to lower middle class.”

Soon after, he bought his car, a used 2005 Dodge Neon, and just about every workday since then he has spent his lunch break in the driver’s seat, eating a bologna sandwich with the engine off to save gas, even in winter. An hour later, he was back behind the cash register, telling customers “Thank you and have a nice day” again and again.

[…]

Seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour equals $15,080 per year, and out of that comes $313 for the car loan and $100 for car insurance, Iles said, going over his monthly bills. An additional $90 for the 1995 car with 135,000 miles on it that he is buying from a friend for his mother, $150 for the family phone bills, $35 on his credit card, $100 for gas, $100 toward the mortgage on the trailer. “That’s about it. Oh yeah, $20 in doctors’ bills,” he said, and totaled it up on fingers scarred by surgical stitches. Nine hundred and eight dollars. “I bring home 900 a month,” he said. “So I very rarely have any money for myself.”

[Post Link]

2007-01-10T21:46:00.000-05:00

How many coincidences?: In Fayetteville, Ark., on New Year’s Day, police caught two young men driving a 1991 Ford Econoline van, weaving, with possession of marijuana and a loaded gun. Turns out one of them was the architect of the 1998 Jonesboro school shootings — and the other shot his father with a crossbow in 1999. What’s the likelihood that they’re roommates now?! More in the News You Can’t Make Up category. From the AP:

One of two boys convicted in the 1998 Jonesboro school shootings was found with a loaded gun and marijuana on New Year’s Day, along with his roommate, a man incarcerated for three years as a teen for killing his father with a crossbow.

Mitchell Johnson, now 22, was 13 when he and classmate Andrew Golden killed four girls and a teacher in a March 24, 1998, shooting at Jonesboro Westside Middle School. Justin Trammell was 15 when convicted of killing his father in 1999.

Trammell was driving Johnson’s 1991 Ford Econoline van a few blocks from their residence at the Appleby Apartments, 2918 N. Gregg St. in Fayetteville, when a sheriff’s officer noticed it weaving about 8 p.m. New Year’s Day. Washington County Deputy Jak Kimball said Cpl. Steven Hulsey smelled marijuana and asked to search the van.

[…]

Brent Davis, who prosecuted the 1998 case against Johnson and Golden, said the fact Johnson has a clean criminal record shows the law was “woefully inadequate” when dealing with juveniles who commit brutal crimes.

“It’s not like he’s on parole or probation or any restrictions, as odd as it seems, in light of what he’s previously been involved in,” Davis said.

Mitchell’s arrest and “the fact that his past is not considered is just another example of the inadequacy of the law that we had to deal with,” Davis said.

[Link]

2007-01-09T20:56:00.000-05:00

A hand for the noodle man: Yesterday, Momofuku Ando died. Normally this might not be the occasion for a blog post; but Mr. Ando was a pioneer: He invented instant ramen noodles. For this, he is, or should be, revered by everyone who ever attended university in the United States, including those of us who could afford to eat better, for his food’s remarkably low cost and filling Asian taste. The world is forever in debt to Mr. Ando, as Lawrence Downes writes in the Times:

Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company’s Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Aggregate servings of the company’s signature brand, Cup Noodles, reached 25 billion worldwide in 2006.

There are other versions of fast noodles. There is spaghetti in a can. It is sweetish and gloppy and a first cousin of dog food. Macaroni and cheese in a box is a convenience product requiring several inconvenient steps. You have to boil the macaroni, stir it to prevent sticking and determine through some previously obtained expertise when it is “done.” You must separate water from noodles using a specialized tool, a colander, and to complete the dish — such an insult — you have to measure and add the fatty deliciousness yourself, in the form of butter and milk that Kraft assumes you already have on hand. All that effort, plus the cleanup, is hardly worth it.

Ramen noodles, by contrast, are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.

[…]

But those are minor quibbles. Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything.

[Link]

2007-01-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

Just one huge more thing: Steve Jobs just shocked everyone on Earth, I think, by introducing a combined cell phone-slash-iPod-slash-PDA. This thing is ridiculous. I can’t do it justice. (I promised that I would eat my hat if the iPhone rumor was true, so I guess I’m going to have to find a fork and knife.) And the entire rest of the cellular industry is going to have to catch up to their stiffest competition, just like the mobile-music industry — but there’s a lot more money on the line right now. The Times says:

In an exclusive partnership with Cingular, the nation’s largest cellular phone carrier, Mr. Jobs brought his legendary product design sense to bear on one of the world’s most ubiquitous products. He said Apple had set the goal of taking 1 percent of the world market for cell phones, or 10 million phones per year, by the end of 2008.

Underscoring the transformation of a quirky computer maker that during the past half decade has come to dominate the world of digital music, and signaling his ambition to become a force in new markets, Mr. Jobs announced that the Apple was dropping the “computer” from its name and would henceforth become Apple Inc.

[…]

Touting the fact that the new iPhone is powered by the same core OS X operating system that runs Macintosh computers, Mr. Jobs showed a series of applications including e-mail, advanced voice mail, photo collections and visually appealing Web searching all on a device that will be priced beginning at $499. That model will have four gigabytes of storage, and an eight-gigabyte model will be available for $599.

The iPhone will offer five hours of operating time and 16 hours of audio playback, Mr. Jobs said. The phone will be compatible with Cingular’s digital EDGE data network as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks.

[Link]

2007-01-09T16:01:00.000-05:00

Covered: California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have finally redeemed himself in the eyes of the Golden State’s Democrats. (Fortunately, he still can’t run for president.) He’s proposing a universal health care system for California, along the lines of Massachusetts’, and if he gets it through he might be known as something other than the Governator someday. In the Times:

Under Mr. Schwarzenegger’s proposal, Medi-Cal would be extended to adults who earn as much as 100 percent above the federal poverty line and to children, regardless of their immigration status, living in homes where the family income is as much as 300 percent above that line, about $60,000 a year for a family of four. Medi-Cal is currently limited to adults with children, and children with documented residency are covered if their family’s income is up to 250 percent above of the poverty line.

Adult illegal immigrants would continue to be barred from Medicaid benefits but would still be entitled to health services from their counties and the state’s hospital system.

Employers would have new responsibilities as well. Businesses with 10 or more workers that choose not to offer coverage would be required to pay 4 percent of their total Social Security wages to a state fund that would be created to subsidize the purchase of coverage by the working uninsured. The cost of such coverage would be measured on a sliding scale depending on what an employee earned, and employees would be able to pay for it using pretax dollars.

[…]

On the provider side, the governor’s plan contains privileges and responsibilities. Doctors and hospitals, which have long complained about Medi-Cal’s low reimbursement rates, would benefit from a $4 billion increase in annual reimbursement. But the state would tax doctors 2 percent of their total revenues, and hospitals 4 percent, to help pay for the greater reimbursement.

[…]

Aides to the governor said financing for the program would come from roughly $5 billion in federal money the state believes it will be owed through restructuring of its health care programs, and through a redirection of state money that now goes toward what is basically charity care, among other measures.

The chief executive of Blue Shield of California, Bruce G. Bodaken, described what might happen once the Legislature began to debate the governor’s proposal.

“Taking each part separately, there’s something for everyone to hate,” Mr. Bodaken said. “But taken as a whole, there’s a lot to like.”

[Link]

2007-01-08T12:08:00.001-05:00

An everyman indeed: The Times follows up today on Wesley Autrey, the man who leapt onto the subway tracks to save a man's life. They want to know, could any of us do the same thing? Would we? The answer, it seems to be, is... probably:

People wondered, because they had asked themselves, “Could I have done what he did?” and very often the answer was no. Mr. Autrey, 50, a construction worker and Navy veteran, leapt in front of a train to rescue a stranger who had suffered a seizure and fallen onto the tracks. He covered the stranger’s body with his own as the train passed overhead. Both men lived.
Mr. Autrey, who left two young daughters on the platform when he jumped, later chalked up his actions to a simple compulsion to help another in distress.
But is there something in Mr. Autrey that the rest of us lack? Probably not, experts say. Except for sociopaths, humans are built to feel and act out of empathy, said Stephen G. Post, a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University’s medical school and co-author of “Why Good Things Happen to Good People,” scheduled to be published in May. Social support has always been important to survival, and people with strong social networks thrive more than those who are isolated.

[Link]

2007-01-06T17:54:00.000-05:00

Save his brain for research: Richard Dawkins argues, on his website, that hanging Saddam Hussein was a terrible decision, because it cost us who knows how much valuable research. It’s a persuasive argument:

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion. Uniquely privileged evidence on the American government’s enthusiastic arming of Saddam before they switched loyalties is now snuffed out at the tug of a rope (no doubt to the relief of Donald Rumsfeld and other guilty parties — it is surely no accident that the trial of Saddam neglected those of his crimes that might — no, would — have implicated them).

Political scientists of the future, studying the processes by which unscrupulous leaders arise and take over national institutions, have now lost key evidence forever. But perhaps the most important research in which a living Saddam Hussein could have helped is psychological. Most people can’t even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Saddam Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient support to take over an entire country. What were the formative influences on these men? Was it something in their childhood that turned them bad? In their genes? In their testosterone levels? Could the danger have been nipped in the bud by an alert psychiatrist before it was too late? How would Hitler, or Saddam Hussein have responded to a different style of education? We don’t have a clear answer to these questions. We need to do the research.

[Link]

2007-01-06T13:32:00.000-05:00

The Everyman to the rescue: The “Spider-Man” franchise is successful because Spidey is an Everyman. He could be you, or me, except for a chance accident. So, where Bruce Wayne is an obscenely wealthy man hellbent on vengeance, and Superman was born on another planet, Peter Parker just happened to get bitten by a research spider. And so the legend was born.

Another legend was born in New York City on Wednesday. Wesley Autrey helped save the life of a man who was having an epileptic seizure, by leaping onto the tracks after the man fell onto the tracks in front of a coming subway train. He pinned the man, Cameron Hollopeter, in the tiny drainage trough between the bottom of the car’s undercarriage and the tracks, between the wheels. They narrowly avoided the Third Rail, and not the metaphorical one, but the actual one that powers the train. What a hero. USA Today has a fantastic graphic depicting the rescue, and this harrowing account:

On Tuesday afternoon Autrey leaped down from a subway station platform after Cameron Hollopeter, 20, apparently suffered a seizure and fell between the tracks.

Autrey had to leave his two daughters, ages 4 and 6, on the platform. It was that, he said, or have the girls see a man run over by a subway train.

Down on the tracks, Autrey saw a train’s headlights in the tunnel. He shoved the disoriented student into the only space where they had a chance to survive — the shallow, grimy drainage trough between the tracks.

The train passed over them, with about 2 inches’ clearance. Autrey later showed reporters grease stains on his wool hat that he said came from the train’s undercarriage.

On Wednesday Autrey got the day off from work at a Brooklyn construction site and visited the New York Film Academy, where Hollopeter is a student.

“We don’t have a red carpet, but we gave him a red carpet reception,” said Anita Tovich, one of Hollopeter’s professors. Jerry Sherlock, director of the school, presented Autrey with a check for $5,000.

[Link]

2007-01-06T01:25:00.001-05:00

Ain't no place to roam, no place to park: In San Francisco, parking has long been a nightmare, a disaster told in legend. But it gets worse each year, as more people move in and wish to have somewhere to put their vehicles, that curiously Californian obsession. The Times reports on the epidemic:

Burdened with one of the densest downtowns in the country and a Californian love for moving vehicles, San Franciscans have been shocked in recent months by crimes related to finding places to park, including an attack in September in which a young man was killed trying to defend a spot he had found. [...]
People in the field say abuse is common, often frightening and, occasionally, humiliating. In November, an officer was spat on, another was punched through the window of his Geo Metro, and an irate illegal parker smashed the windshield of another officer’s golf-cart-like vehicle.
“Just driving down the street, you get yelled at,” said Lawanna Preston, staff director for Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents parking control officers.
[...]
“Any city that is worth visiting is going to have a terrible parking problem,” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, a public policy center. “If you don’t want it to be Disneyland or Houston, you’re going to be experiencing a parking shortage.”
Mr. Metcalf added, however, that the density of San Francisco, with an estimated 740,000 residents in 49 square miles, also put in a different category from New York, which is also known for its parking nightmares.

[Link]

2007-01-05T15:54:00.000-05:00

Good-bye to All That: Today, Bill Cowher bid goodbye to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the franchise he’d coached for 15 years. It’s amazing to think that anyone could coach a pro football team that long; the next-longest-tenured coach might very well be Bill Belichik, though I’d have to look it up. He is only the franchise’s second coach, and has a career record of 161-99-1 and a Super Bowl ring. And on the same day, the Raiders fired Art Shell for the second time in his career, this time after a disastrous 2-14 season during which time Shell may not have spoken a word. Goodbye, Bill Cowher; and good riddance, Art Shell. The AP on Cowher, a living legend:

“History will look back on Bill Cowher as one of the great coaches of all time,” Steelers chairman Dan Rooney said.

[…]

Cowher, one of the NFL’s most recognizable faces and successful coaches, has weighed resigning since shortly after the Steelers finally won the Super Bowl in February. But he wouldn’t say Friday he is retiring — meaning he could return to an NFL sideline some day, though he wouldn’t discuss that at his final Steelers news conference.

“That makes you feel old,” Cowher said of the word retirement.

Before winning the Super Bowl, Cowher always said his one goal was to hand Rooney the Lombardi Trophy. Rooney returned the favor Friday, handing Cowher a miniature silver trophy at his going-away news conference.

One of the NFL’s rarest events now will occur — a Steelers coaching search. They have had only two coaches since 1969, when they still were playing in Pitt Stadium: Chuck Noll (23 seasons) and Cowher. The Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts have had 15 coaches during that time.

[Link]

And ESPN’s Mark Kreidler on the reliably disastrous Second Art Shell Era:

Ye olde problem is beginning to sharpen into focus, isn’t it? The Raiders are 15-49 over the past four seasons. They just completed a campaign that featured the worst offensive performance in the history of the franchise. They had as one of their coordinators a man whose most recent job (this is true) had been running a bed-and-breakfast in Idaho. And Al Davis is reminiscing about the time Jim Plunkett threw over the top of the coverage for that 63-yard touchdown.

Davis is also marking the passage of the days, though, and from a Raider Nation standpoint, that is more significant now than ever. The respective tenures of the past four Oakland head coaches go like this: Jon Gruden, four years; Bill Callahan, two; Norv Turner, two; Shell, one empty campaign. There is no time for patience. Shell was a Raiders guy from the ghost of Raiders past, a pure Al Davis choice, and he still got the boot after a single season, albeit an unmitigated disaster, in which Jerry Porter was essentially banished and Randy Moss might as well have been. (Maybe Jim Plunkett isn’t such a bad place to start, after all.)

But dumping Shell is the easy part, intellectually if not emotionally. Beyond that move, Davis wakes up today in the same situation as when the regular season ended: He has an offense that scored 12 touchdowns in 16 games; he has a feud with Porter in which Davis very publicly has taken an extreme position (he said he’d trade Porter only if Porter paid back a massive chunk of his up-front contract money); he has an unhappy Moss and a pockmarked O-line; and he has a Raiders fan base that is becoming more exclusive by the game.

[Link]

2007-01-05T11:22:00.000-05:00

Green no more: For half a century, there has been controversy swirling around a map that purports to be a 14th-century Viking map depicting settlements in the New World. The question is, of course, could they have known what the map shows — that, for instance, Greenland is an island? Doesn’t sound likely. From Strange Maps:

In 1960, archeological excavations at L’Anse-aux-Meadows on Newfoundland turn up the remains of a Viking camp. For the first time, scientists establish that Vikings actually did cross the Atlantic. Interest in all things Vinland soars. Yale University buys the map in 1965, has it insured for $25 million and publishes it in that same year. That was the starting point for two debates that rage to this day: Where is Vinland? And: Is the map real?

[…]

While the map has been radiocarbon-dated to between 1423 and 1445, it appears to have been coated with an unknown substance in the 1950s. This could be an undocumented attempt at preservation, or it could be part of a forger’s attempt to draw a new map over an old one. It’s unclear whether this substance is over or under some of the ink on the page…

The ink itself has been chemically analysed, and dated to after 1923 due to the presence of anatase – a synthetic pigment in use only since the 1920s. Natural anatase has been demonstrated in various Mediaeval manuscripts, though.

As for the content of the map, a number of questions challenge the age of the document. Greenland is presented as an island – a fact not physically proven until the turn of the 20th century and unknown to the Vikings, who mostly thought it a peninsula descending from the north. Several passages in the text are equally anomalous.

[Link]

2007-01-05T11:11:00.000-05:00

O’er the land of the mostly free? Newly elected Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, from Minnesota, is a Muslim. He elected to have a Koran present at his unofficial swearing-in for his first term, in lieu of a Bible. Republican Rep. Virgil Goode, from Virginia, seems to think this will mean the downfall of the Republic. Now, Ellison was sworn in yesterday using Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran; but this gesture from one of our Founding Fathers, and a man from Goode’s home state, was lost on the good folk of Charlottesville, it seems. In the world view of this letter-writer to the Charlottesville Daily Progress, religious freedom is only for Christians:

This is not a Muslim country but a Christian country and a different God we worship.

We do not want the Quran but the Bible. He owes no one an apology.

Freedom of speech is one of the basics of our country. Yes, we have freedom of religion but not for people aspiring to run our country.

I attend Christian conferences and one that stands out in my memory is the Northern Ohio Christian Conference held at Oberlin College, winter and summer. One summer, a Christian from the Middle East traveled from Asia to Europe to America to address the conference, which he was permitted to do. His message was: The Communists are not your enemy but the Muslims.

As Virgil Goode stated, when you take an oath in this country or are being sworn in to serve the country, your right hand is upon a Bible. I believe this is true in a jury trial.

You swear to tell the truth and the Bible represents the truth to most of us.

Americans fought the Revolutionary War to gain their freedoms and we are not about to let any immigrants strip it away from us.

Yes, Virginia, people like this actually exist.

[Link]

2007-01-03T14:38:00.000-05:00

Tangled up in who? Lately, it has seemed as though everyone on Earth with an Internet connection has already seen the video of the execution of Saddam Hussein, except me. But it turns out I have a fellow compatriot, of a sort: the President of the United States of America. We have different motivations, I’m sure, because I’m a pacifist, and squeamish, and George is, to quote Reuters, “focused on ‘the way forward’ in Iraq.” Cue the Jon Stewart Face:

The White House said U.S. concerns about the way Saddam’s execution was carried out were expressed to the Iraqi government through the U.S. Embassy and military officials in Baghdad.

Bush’s focus was on the judicial process that was followed in Iraq and “the way forward,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

“The president has said that he was pleased that the Iraqi people carried forward a judicial process, tried someone who has murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and carried forward justice that was unimaginable during his reign. And that’s where the president’s focus was,” he said.

Asked why Bush had not seen the video, Stanzel replied: “Because that’s not his focus.”

[Link]

2007-01-03T14:20:00.000-05:00

We tripped the light fantastic: Adam Gopnik, also in this week’s New Yorker, muses on what Michael Bloomberg’s plans for the city might mean for the future of New York. The old New York, on which I will have to trust authorities like Gopnik, was the kind of place where heterogeneity was not just prized but literally part of the city. The new New York is just a much more dense suburb:

What seemed a little odd about the plan, and the speech, though, is that the one thing that leaves many New Yorkers worried, or at least uneasy, was nowhere mentioned — perhaps because the Mayor doesn’t notice it, perhaps because that worry is a little metaphysical and almost poetic, resistant to oratory or city budget numbers. It is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other. Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid. In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city—much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond—each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other. Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

[Link]

2007-01-02T23:29:00.001-05:00

I'm so ronery, so ronery and sadry arone: In Portland, my hometown, a dog boarded a local bus in Gresham and rode all the way to the Gresham Transit Center, where he was picked up by police. No one has any idea who he belongs to. Poor dog. From the Oregonian:

The dog boarded the bus the same time as a passenger did -- about 2:30 p.m. -- at Northeast 168th Avenue and Sandy Boulevard, according to TriMet spokesman Bruce Solberg.

Pets are not allowed unless they are in a carrier, or they are service animals for disabled passengers. When the bus driver asked the man if the dog was a service animal, the man said the dog wasn’t his.

The dog was well-behaved, Solberg said. After reporting the situation, the driver allowed the dog to ride to the Gresham Transit Center where a Portland police officer picked him up and brought him to the Oregon Human Society, which then turned him over to Multnomah County Animal Services.

At the humane society, the staff nicknamed the dog "Buster," spokesman David Lytle said.

[Link]

2007-01-02T22:42:00.001-05:00

In the Navy! Among democratic military powers, the United States is alone in banning openly gay men and women from serving in the military. But the new Democratic Congress is set to take up a repeal of the Clinton-era "don't ask-don't tell" policy, and with President Bush looking to add a lot more troops to Iraq, that would be a cheap and easy way to get a few thousand more soldiers. Repealing might just happen, in other words. Retired Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Clinton administration, makes the case in the New York Times op-ed pages today (TimesSelect):

When I was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I supported the current policy because I believed that implementing a change in the rules at that time would have been too burdensome for our troops and commanders. I still believe that to have been true. The concern among many in the military was that given the longstanding view that homosexuality was incompatible with service, letting people who were openly gay serve would lower morale, harm recruitment and undermine unit cohesion.

[...]

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.

[Link]

2007-01-02T15:54:00.000-05:00

Singing in the shower: Sometimes, the New Yorker publishes essays with virtually no news value at all, just for the sake of keeping up their reputation for snark and sarcasm. This week, they succeed with a brilliant “Shouts and Murmurs,” from Ian Frazier, about how to use a shower:

Keep in mind that normal bathing will cause you unavoidably to bump against shower curtain, which may cling to you for a moment owing to the natural adhesiveness of water. Some guests find the sensation of wet plastic on their naked flesh upsetting, and overreact to it. Instead, pinch the shower curtain between your thumb and forefinger near where it is adhering to you and simply move away from it until it is disengaged. Then, with the ends of your fingers, push it back to where it is supposed to be.

If shower curtain reattaches itself to you, repeat process above. Under certain atmospheric conditions, a convection effect creates air currents outside shower curtain which will press it against you on all sides no matter what you do. If this happens, stand directly under showerhead until bathroom microclimate stabilizes.

Many guests are surprised to learn that all water pipes in our system run off a single riser. This means that the opening of any hot or cold tap, or the flushing of a toilet, interrupts flow to shower. If you find water becoming extremely hot (or cold), exit tub promptly while using a sweeping motion with one arm to push shower curtain aside.

[Link]

2007-01-02T13:37:00.000-05:00

Money can’t buy you divorce: Divorce is messy. Isn’t that the way it always goes? The other day I watched “The Squid and the Whale,” which is all about a teenager struggling to cope with his parents’ divorce. And if Barack Obama should someday be elected president of the United States of America, they should thank the Chicago Tribune and a California judge for unsealing Jack Ryan’s divorce records. But apparently, two billionaire Californians decided they were going to make things a lot less miserable for everyone:

When [Tim and Edra Blixseth] decided to divorce, they spent a single afternoon in the Beverly Hills Hotel, dividing it all up. With just two notebooks and a bottle of wine, the Blixseths — California real-estate tycoons and founders of the famed Yellowstone Club — finished the job in a matter of hours.

No attorneys. No accountants. No judges.

She kept their 420-acre estate. He got the house in Mexico. He kept his land businesses. She kept the dogs. They each got a Rolls Royce, and they will share their three private jets.

[…]

Rather than fighting over every piece of silver, the Blixseths decided to keep what’s most important to each of them and split the difference. Life’s too short, they figured. And why give the lawyers all the money if you can work it out yourselves?

Link

2007-01-02T01:02:00.001-05:00

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning: Microsoft, VeriSign and the other members of the Certification Authority/Browser Forum have a new strategy to combat phishing scams. They are going to add a green bar to sites that have an extra layer of certificate-checking, above and beyond the traditional gold padlock that was developed by Netscape in the mid-'90s. The idea seems smart enough, but not everyone is falling over themselves to praise this new system:

... VeriSign and its competitors will be required to perform extensive checks to verify that the business is legally recognized by a government agency and that the address registered for the certificate is valid, such as by matching it with a government filing or visiting the business in person.
Certificate issuers also must make sure that the company owns the domain name and that the individual requesting the certificate is authorized.

[...]

Although [Texas businesswoman Claudia Race's] MadLeap.com was registered as a limited liability company in Delaware, it's so new that it might not appear in enough databases, making her business difficult to verify, according to officials at Comodo.
Smaller and newer companies could lose business if consumers leave for larger, established merchants with green bars.
"It is the small merchants who really need the ability to say, `I am trusted. Come and do business with me,'" said Melih Abdulhayoglu, chief executive of Comodo. "The big guys who have the brands already have established trust because of brand awareness."

Link

2007-01-01T21:47:00.001-05:00

A river no longer runs through it: In Arizona and New Mexico, dry rivers are common, but in cheery, watery southern California, that's reason for concern. Los Angeles recently began diverting a portion of its principal water source, the Owens River, to feed a lake that had been literally sucked dry by the City of Angels' insatiable thirst for agua. It seems that plant and animal life can come back, even in the midst of a landscape as barren as the far side of the moon:

To restore the river, Los Angeles built automated gates at the point where the river veers into the aqueduct. The gates steer some water into the original riverbed, setting the stage for the growth of cottonwood trees and other plants and the return of waterfowl and other animals.
Much of the water eventually returns to the aqueduct, though some of it is being used for lake irrigation and other projects.
Environmentalists here say they are keeping an eye on Los Angeles for backsliding, but they acknowledge that the new efforts will make a significant difference.
As winds whipped across Owens Lake on a recent afternoon, Mike Prather of the Owens Valley Committee, which along with the Sierra Club took Los Angeles to court over the environmental fallout of its water policies, marveled at sandpipers, American avocets and other birds frolicking in the shallow pools created by the irrigation.
“This work will bring back more and more of them,” Mr. Prather said, savoring the twist in the battle that means water once intended for Los Angeles will feed the lake.
“It’s Owens Valley’s turn to stick its straw in L.A.’s water,” he said.

Link

2007-01-01T14:57:00.000-05:00

Separate but not equal: The World Bank has been stunningly optimistic about economic growth worldwide in the next 25 years. But Michael Blim at 3 Quarks Daily writes, in his Monday column, that one of the problems is the focus on middle-class growth. The way that the world population is growing, the population living in poverty will grow much faster than the middle-class population:

The news gets worse. Economic growth through 2030 will only slightly close the income gap between rich and poor countries. For every positive economic stride taken by poor countries, for every climb on the income ladder made by this new middle class in poor countries, rich countries and most importantly their rich citizens, take two steps forward. By 2030, the rich will have increased their proportion of the world’s income from 58% in 2000 to 69%. Thus far, massive industrialization in poor countries has not really shifted the economic balance of power. “Five decades of development have done little to bring the average incomes of developing countries closer to those of OECD (rich) countries,” says the Bank, practically in an outburst of unusual clarity.

Moreover, inequality inside poor countries is likely to worsen. This has been happening in rich countries since the seventies. In poor countries, the new middle class will be pulling away from everyone else, working class and poor alike.

Still another cloud noted by the Bank itself casts a shadow over its sunny optimism. Between now and 2030, the world economic growth rate will stagnate at 3%, a point lower than the period between 2004 and 2006, and significantly lower than the 4.5% rate that created the rich country middle class between 1960 and 1980. Developing countries will grow at a 4% rate, a point above the world rate, but the increment must outrace any population growth while motoring an economic catch-up rate to rich countries much greater than heretofore seen. The remarkable rise of China, as well as its remarkable size, disguises the probable fates of other poor countries that will not grow at China’s astronomical rates. Their improvements will be in increments too small to pull up incomes generally.

Link

2007-01-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2007. I hope that this year brings more cheer for you, and that somehow this year is better than last. This involves hoping for the nearly impossible, like success in Iraq, but I will indeed hold out hope. And to you: Good luck, and enjoy yourself on this holiday. I’ll be at work.

2006-12-31T12:42:00.000-05:00

God Save the Queen: Scotland is a country which, at one time, was a proud and independent little sliver of land; but since the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland's been little more than a hand-puppet of England. But unlike Wales, which has been all but part and parcel with England for seven centuries, the Act of Union has long stuck in the craw of the Scots. Some ten years ago, Scotland voted in a national referendum for what the British call 'devolution,' which gave Scotland a parliament with about as much power as the state government of Florida. My brother was an intern in the Scottish Parliament last year, while he was doing the usual collegiate junior year abroad, and he worked for an MP in the Scottish National Party, which believes that Scotland ought to be separate from the Union.

It seems that the SNP aren't the only ones who believe that Scotland should stand alone, now; some 51% of Scots support a referendum that would remove Scotland from the Union (and which would, I guess, dissolve the Union outright, since there would be no more Great Britain in "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"). Matthew Parris, writing in the Times of London, sees the parallels between Catalunya and Scotland, both proud would-be nations whose contributions to the larger country are vastly beyond their population impact -- though I should note that Barcelona is Spain's second-largest city and that Catalunya makes up 15 percent of Spain's population, versus Scotland's 6 percent. I've always thought that independence for Scotland was a monumentally wrong-headed idea, that Catalunya represents such a huge chunk of the Spanish national economy that it might well have a higher per-capita GDP, independent, than the rest of Spain; but that Scotland's is an economy overwhelmingly dependent on banking, services and tourism, and that does not a successful First World country make. It would be like Delaware seceding from the United States. But I'm not the one voting on the referendum.

Anyway, Parris wonders that, given their history, neither Catalunya nor Scotland has any conservatives. He argues that the problem is that, for so long, conservatives have viewed devolutionist movements as dangerous and radical, and that this is not only silly but condemns them to marginalization:

So why, by persistently (and unsuccessfully) pouring cold water on the nationalisms of small nations, should conservative politics lose the affections of millions of inherently conservative people? Why hand the initiative to opportunistic single-cause nationalistic movements? When, as a conservative party, you have so few votes to lose in a devolved part of the kingdom, why not surrender to reality and embrace what no conservative should have difficulty in embracing: a people’s sense of nationhood? I have slipped unintentionally into talking about Scotland and the Tories. Good. Other columnists, too, have been writing about the apparent rise in separatist sentiment there. They rage entertainingly against Alex Salmond and the SNP. It is not difficult to rage against Mr Salmond but it is not enough and it will not do.

Among English commentators the default position (never quite stated but never far beneath the surface) is that separatist politicians are dishonest opportunists and it is about time the Scots grew up and realised which side their bread is buttered on. Among Scottish commentators in our national British media the view tends to be that separatist politicians are dishonest opportunists and it is really rather sad that they want Scotland to turn its back on so much that we in the United Kingdom can share.

The Conservative Party should arm itself against both approaches. We should ask why, if the Scots Nationalists are such transparently dishonest opportunists, they are doing so well. Naturally a separatist party will pick up what grievances it can find lying around and make hay with them. Naturally it will sow mischief and trade on resentment. Naturally it will gloss over inconsistencies in its vision for the future, fudge logic, shun hard choices and play to emotion. That is what independence movements do. If Mr Salmond is to be indicted for rabble-rousing, playing up the promise and playing down the difficulty, he must share the dock with George Washington, Jomo Kenyatta and Nelson Mandela.

If a people are treated like children, we must not be surprised if their politicians do not always play politics like grown-ups. Until a people start visualising themselves as a country — not just in the realms of the patriotic imagination, but at the practical level of tax, law and administration — there will of course be a romantic unrealism, and a negativism too, in the attitudes they strike.

Link

2006-12-31T11:21:00.000-05:00

The death of a language: There is an interesting strain of study right now in linguistics, of attempting to preserve in some way the languages that are dying before our very eyes, constantly. There are estimated to be some 6,000 languages today, which is a reduced number, but globalization means that there will be vastly fewer in the future. I read a magnificent New Yorker profile in springtime lasty ear (not online, but see the June 6, 2005 issue), about the last speaker of a particular Native American language, Eyak. It was a poignant illustration of the homogenization of language. But there always one astonishing counterexample: Hebrew. From the New York Sun, as unlikely a source as any:

Yet the extinctions cannot be stopped, for the most part. Trying to teach people to speak their ancestral languages, for example, will almost never get far beyond the starting gate. Some years ago, I spent some weeks teaching Native Americans their ancestral language. To the extent that the exercise helped give them a feeling of connection to their ancestors, it was time well spent.

However, it was clear that there was no way that they would learn more than some words and expressions. Languages are hard to learn for adults, especially ones as different from English as Native American ones. In Pomo, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. There are sounds it’s hard to make when you’re not born to them. For busy people with jobs and families, how far were they ever going to be able to get mastering a language whose word for eye is ‘uyqh abe?

Yes, there was Hebrew. But that was because of an unusual combination: religion, a new nation, and the superhuman dedication of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who settled in Palestine and insisted on speaking only Hebrew to all Jews, including his infant son. But this extended to reducing his wife to tears when he caught her singing a lullaby to the child in her native Russian. Clearly Ben-Yehuda’s was one of those once-in-a-lifetime personalities.

[…]

Thinking about the broad heterogeneity of people using this language, it is obvious that the answer [to the question of what cultural outlook English offers] is none, and the academic literature on the topic yields little but queer little shards of faint support for the “language is culture” idea. Which brings us back to languages as, simply, languages.

Link

2006-12-29T23:51:00.000-05:00

Hanged: Saddam Hussein, formerly one of the most powerful men in the Middle East, was hanged today for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during his rule in Iraq. What a stunning fall for a man who, three years ago, was surviving quite fine in spite of American sanctions:

“Saddam Hussein was hanged until death ensued. A black page in the history of Iraq has been turned,” it added in a second news flash, as joyful popular music filled the airwaves.

Even as the execution appeared inevitable, many were skeptical or disbelieving that the noose could drop around Mr. Hussein’s neck so soon. One Western official said that some of the American legal advisers working on the case appeared stunned at the hasty pace of events late Friday as they walked through the corridors of the Republican Palace, once Mr. Hussein’s grandiose center of power.

2006-12-29T17:06:00.001-05:00

Nixon, Nixon, pants on fire: Christopher Hitchens is positively scathing of this week's bumper crop of obituaries for the late Gerald Ford. In Slate, he writes what might be the most condemning indictment of the Ford administration's pardon of Richard Nixon, that White House's original sin:

You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

2006-12-29T10:40:00.000-05:00

City of zombies: In the Times of London today, a kind of retrospective-cum-review on 19th-century Belgian novelist Georges Rodenbach, one of the great ‘dead-city’ novelists of his era. For some reason, it was fashionable in those days to see cities as in decay, like a lot of literature in the U.S. in the late ’70s. So far, there has always been a resurgence; but that didn’t change Rodenbach’s outlook. After all, he had at hand the example of Bruges, a once-great port ruined by the fates of nature, like New Orleans, and what had been left might as well have been dead:

[Rodenbach] has also been at the fin-de-siècle medicine cabinet for his metaphors of the city’s economic decline: Bruges is “consumptive”, “spits out her stones as from her lungs” and has the “pallor” and “lethargy” of the terminally sick. For all this dramatic imagery, Rodenbach had a point: Bruges had once been a great port connected to the sea by the Zwijn. One day in 1475, the North Sea retreated, and the Zwijn dried up, cutting the city off from the water that had sustained it. In the words of Ernest Reynaud, one of many who tried their hands at writing a Bruges poem, the place became an “estuaire inutile oublié par la mer”, a useless estuary abandoned by the sea. Baudelaire’s ports are buzzing with colours, smells and sounds, they are gateways to other worlds; Rodenbach’s Bruges is both relic and reliquary, tomb and stricken corpse. In his last novel, Le Carillonneur (1897), the hero wants to preserve the old Bruges, Bruges as museum-cum-mausoleum, against the civic authorities’ hope to bring the water back to the city and create a new port. Today’s Zeebrugge, a complex of duty-free hangars and late-night bars, is the result of their wishes, and in Le Carillonneur Rodenbach allows himself a degree of attention to contemporary social reality that is almost absent from Bruges-la-Morte.

2006-12-29T10:21:00.000-05:00

Falsetto: A friend of mine, in college, had the world’s most hilariously artificial-sounding deep voice. Now, it turns out that that really is his natural voice, but I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t asked a mutual acquaintance who knew him in high school. It should come as no surprise that male humans do that kind of thing all the time, to reassert their alpha-male status and to pick up chicks, as it were. But the Times science section reminds us that, in this, humans are all just apples falling not very far from the tree:

A croak is how male green frogs tell other frogs how big they are. The bigger the male, the deeper the croak. The sound of a big male is enough to scare off other males from challenging him for his territory.

While most croaks are honest, some are not. Some small males lower their voices to make themselves sound bigger. Their big-bodied croaks intimidate frogs that would beat them in a fair fight.

Green frogs are only one deceptive species among many. Dishonesty has been documented in creatures ranging from birds to crustaceans to primates, including, of course, Homo sapiens. “When you think of human communication, it’s rife with deception,” said Stephen Nowicki, a biologist at Duke University and the co-author of the 2005 book “The Evolution of Animal Communication.” “You just need to read a Shakespeare play or two to see that.”

2006-12-24T20:32:00.001-05:00

I'll be home for Christmas: OK, so I'm Jewish. I'm still taking a break for Christmas Eve Day and Christmas Day. There's nothing actually in the news, so rather than gin up something meaningless to post, I am taking what I believe to be a much-deserved break. See you all on Dec. 26!

2006-12-23T23:32:00.001-05:00

Hedwig and the Angry Picometer: The Times reported today that Nature had published a study that found very, very, very small microbes, smaller than anyone ever found before, living in highly acidic drainage water in a mine in northern California. There's hope for extraterrestrial life yet, it seems:

The microbes, members of an ancient family of organisms known as archaea, formed a pink scum on green pools of hot mine water laden with toxic metals, including arsenic.
"It was amazing,” said Jillian F. Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the discovery team. "These were totally new." In their paper, the scientists call the microbes "smaller than any other known cellular life form."
Scientists say the discovery could bear on estimates of the pervasiveness of exotic microbial life, which some experts suspect forms a hidden biosphere extending down miles whose total mass may exceed that of all surface life.
It may also influence the search for microscopic life forms elsewhere in the solar system, a discovery that would prove that life in the universe is not unique to Earth but an inherent property of matter.

2006-12-23T12:28:00.000-05:00

The quick brown clerk jumped over the lazy one: Productive workers tend to spur their colleagues to be more productive, too, or at least so says an interesting survey reported in Slate. This suggests to me that hyperproductive workers are really labor-breaking scabs, moles planted by Corporate HR to get more out of the same employees. (OK, so I kid.) It’s fascinating research. Consider finding the fastest checker in the entire supermarket, and then go shopping at that time of day, when you can:

Since shoppers can and do move to fast-moving lines, a quick worker will tend to lighten the burden on their colleagues. That might encourage them to slack off, or it might encourage them to work harder. The positive effect dominates, according to Mas and Moretti: They find that a shop assistant sitting near someone who is 10 percent quicker than average will raise her own game by 1.7 percent.

This might be an illusory effect. Perhaps at busy times, all workers increase their speed and managers also throw on the fastest workers. What looks like a peer effect would be the coordination of two different responses to a rush of shoppers. But Mas and Moretti can tell which times are busy and which times are not; they also know that checkout staff, not managers, choose their hours (one of the few benefits of the job); and they are measuring productivity changes every 10 minutes, not over the course of an entire shift. They are convinced that the positive peer effect is real.

But why? There are, broadly, two explanations. One is that workers are spurred to greater efforts when contemplating the superior speed of their colleague. This is psychologically plausible but economically irrational. A more cynical explanation is that workers do not like it when faster colleagues are looking at them, because they fear being accused of slacking off.

2006-12-23T12:08:00.000-05:00

Lord, I’m too tall to live in a FEMA trailer: Apparently, it’s only taken more than a year for FEMA to get its act together and start finding ways to replace the trailers that will for generations be synonymous with hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The new housing will be, to say the least, housing, although it will still be disaster-relief housing, i.e., easy to assemble and prefabricated. Unstated in the article is that the trailers should probably be incinerated after the hurricane, as a symbol of disastrous federal incompetence. But somebody still doesn’t get it in Washington: Louisiana is only getting $75 million, versus $280 million for Mississippi. From the Times:

The program will offer new housing from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to thousands of families, among the 100,000 still living in trailers across the Gulf Coast, by placing them over the coming year in these studier, roomier, better ventilated homes, many of which have front porches, large windows and even small attics.

Mississippi came out on top in the contest for the grants, receiving $280.8 million, compared with $74.5 million for Louisiana, $16.5 million for Texas and $15.7 million for Alabama.

Officials in Louisiana were furious, saying their state, which suffered the greatest losses in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year, had been shortchanged.

[…]

The grants come from an appropriation in which Congress directed FEMA to take an alternative approach to the customary trailers. The biggest single grant will finance the construction of units in Mississippi that look like A-roofed cottages, featuring a compact front porch, windows on three sides, more storage space and better ventilation. Like the existing trailers, they will be set up on wheels, so they can be driven into a disaster zone.

Louisiana officials, meanwhile, intend to use their grant to build what they are calling Katrina Cottages — compact single-family homes made of prefabricated panels, with a porch and up to three bedrooms — in heavily hit areas of New Orleans like Jackson Barracks.

2006-12-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

Unregulated predators: Payday loans are a controversial subject in much of the West, where the lack of financial infrastructure and vast, nearly invisible rural poverty condemns many workers to massive interest. The typical interest paid on such a loan is $15 for every $100, which, the Times says in a report today, works out to 520 percent per annum, if the loan is rolled over. (Federally licensed long-term lenders may only lend at 17 percent or less.)

In Oregon, my home state, a law this year capped interest on short-term loans at 36 percent per annum, or 10 cents per diem on a two-week loan, and the Pentagon recently issued the same regulation for lenders to military employees. Eleven states ban payday loans outright, under usury laws. But the Times is reporting from New Mexico, which has no laws regulating this vulture-like behavior:

[Earl] Milford is chronically broke because each month, in what he calls “my ritual,” he travels 30 miles to Gallup and visits 16 storefront money-lending shops. Mr. Milford, who is 59 and receives a civil service pension and veteran’s disability benefits, doles out some $1,500 monthly to the lenders just to cover the interest on what he had intended several years ago to be short-term “payday loans.”

Mr. Milford said he had stopped taking out new loans, but many other residents of the Gallup area and countless more people across the country are visiting payday lenders this month, places with names like Cash Cow, Payday Plus and Fast Buck, to get advances of a few hundred dollars to help with holiday expenses.

[…]

The loans are quick and easy. Customers are usually required to leave a predated personal check that the lender can cash on the next payday, two or four weeks later. They must show a pay stub or proof of regular income, like Social Security, but there is no credit check, which leads to some defaults but, more often, continued extension of the loan, with repeated fees.

In many states, including New Mexico, lenders also make no effort to see if customers have borrowed elsewhere, which is how Mr. Milford could take out so many loans at once. If they repay on time, borrowers pay fees ranging from $15 per $100 borrowed in some states to, in New Mexico, often $20 or more per $100, which translates into an annualized interest rate, for a two-week loan, of 520 percent or more.

2006-12-22T11:06:00.000-05:00

What about Lawrence v. Texas? The San Francisco Chronicle’s Web operation, SFGate.com, has a fantastic column called “Open Source Sex.” Today’s is about the wild tales surrounding the domain sex.com, which apparently has everything but a partridge and a pear tree. Another submission for the News That Is Simply Not Believable category:

The only thing missing from the Sex.com story is a dead stripper found with a rubber alligator lodged in her throat — though, by all estimates, to add this to the URL’s outrageous legacy wouldn’t be a huge shocker. It would only be adding some sex to the mix — especially considering the Sex.com story includes a fugitive seized by U.S. marshals, hard-luck convicted felons hiding millions in Mexican shrimp farms and strip clubs, the fugitive’s daughter caught smuggling over 200 pounds of pot, one multimillionaire dot-com scammer speed fiend with a Stanford MBA, a bizarre bid to buy Caesars Palace and a recent Tijuana gangland-style assassination attempt on a lawyer (nicknamed “The Toad”) that left a Mexican cabbie and a 4-year-old boy wounded.

Like mobile-home scammers in Florida and billboard plastic surgeons in Los Angeles, URL grifters are part of the sleazy yet entertaining Bay Area tech-industry zoo. And so when a guy like Gary Kremen snags URLs like Match.com and Sex.com and dabbles in brokering far-reaching Web page patents and “Internet consulting” while (according to a 2005 CNN interview) working on a nice speed habit, he just sort of blends in with the rest of the money-grubbing, VC-chasing dot-com herd. Like most startup cowboys, Kremen sat on the Sex.com URL as an undeveloped property — until a con man named Stephen M. Cohen came along and swindled VeriSign/Network Solutions out of Sex.com with fast talk and forgeries.

2006-12-21T23:29:00.001-05:00

Anti-immigration today, anti-immigration tomorrow, anti-immigration forever! Apparently, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) doesn't think that Muslims can be Americans. He sent out a letter to his constituents informing them that we will be getting many more Muslims, and that they threaten 'Americans,' in reference to freshman Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a Muslim:

In [Goode's] letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”
“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.
Mr. Goode declined Wednesday to comment on his letter, which quickly stirred a furor among some Congressional Democrats and Muslim Americans, who accused him of bigotry and intolerance.
They noted that the Constitution specifically bars any religious screening of members of Congress and that the actual swearing in of those lawmakers occurs without any religious texts. The use of the Bible or Koran occurs only in private ceremonial events that take place after lawmakers have officially sworn to uphold the Constitution.
Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

2006-12-21T16:50:00.000-05:00

Storm the Bastille!: When Augusto Pinochet died the week before last, a lot of the lunatic fringe of the right wing in America celebrated his free-market reforms in Chile. In a nice touch, some generous Americans can’t understand why he’s vilified. Having said that, at least the Weekly Standard gets it:

His embrace of economic reform seems unlikely to have sprung from a commitment to freedom, given the overarching contempt for liberty that characterized the rest of his government. Rather, in order to insulate himself from the consequences of his murderous seizure of power, Pinochet sought out political allies, and his free market reforms helped him to garner support domestically on the right, and also among members of the international community. One must be careful not to fall into Pinochet’s trap—accepting his brutal seizure of power and tyrannical rule as a natural accompaniment of free market reforms. Propagandists on the left lost no time in seeking to discredit economic freedom by associating it with Pinochet. To this day, we hear from Moscow that it takes a Pinochet to implement economic reforms successfully; Vladimir Putin seems all too willing to have Pinochet’s uniform taken in a few sizes so he can try it on.

Pinochet and his apologists argue thus: “Castro and the far left are worse than Pinochet, they kill more people and deliver fewer benefits than did the military government of Chile.” Are we to admire Pinochet because his murderous regime was more efficient than tyrants on the left at producing higher GDP? Without the torture, rape, and killing, would economic and political freedom have been impossible in Chile? Hardly! But this is the argument insinuated by Pinochet. He successfully appropriated the utilitarian fallacy to which many on the left fall prey: that murder and torture are acceptable if they hasten the advent of the utopia implied by one’s ideological model. That fallacy probably killed more people during the 20th century than typhus, and it stands to do so again in this century if we do not inoculate ourselves against it.

2006-12-21T16:37:00.000-05:00

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”: In another follow-up, the Times editorializes about the Genarlow Wilson case. They call it “an obvious miscarriage of justice.” I am inclined to agree:

The sexual act took place during a party involving sex, marijuana and alcohol, all captured on a graphic videotape. But that does not make Mr. Wilson a child molester. When high school students engage in consensual sexual activity, that is not the same as an adult molesting a teenager or a teenager molesting a child.

What makes this case more absurd is that if Mr. Wilson and the young woman had sexual intercourse, he would have been guilty only of a misdemeanor and not required to register as a sex offender, thanks to a provision in the law meant to avoid just this type of draconian punishment for consensual youthful indiscretions, the “Romeo and Juliet” exception. And since Mr. Wilson’s conviction, the law has been changed to exempt oral sex as well. But the courts say that can’t help Mr. Wilson retroactively.

His lawyer is planning to file a habeas petition seeking his release. The courts need to grant it and expunge his record so that Mr. Wilson can return to his family and his once promising academic career. Legislators in other states should take notice and make sure that their own laws do not catch children in dragnets designed for predatory adults.

2006-12-21T16:35:00.000-05:00

Maybe AT&T will get their way: A few days ago, I posted about AT&T’s decision to try and move in on the markets in suburban Chicago. It hasn’t been going very well. But there’s something to the idea that there’s no competition in the cable market. The Times reports today that the FCC is insisting that municipalities give phone companies like AT&T a swift hearing at a minimum:

Arguing that cable television rates have surged in the absence of robust competition, federal regulators moved to speed up the local approval process for phone companies seeking to compete.

The action came in a 3-to-2 vote by the Federal Communications Commission. The ruling does not force municipalities to grant phone companies a video franchise, but it does require a decision within 90 days.

Phone carriers, notably Verizon, have asserted that some municipalities are slow to grant approvals, often in the face of cable industry lobbying.

2006-12-20T14:36:00.000-05:00

This town don’t look good in snow: The National Arbor Day Foundation’s national map is still more evidence that global warming is creeping up on us. In 1990, Washington, D.C., was essentially at the climactic Mason-Dixon Line, separating South from North. No longer. You might say that the South has its final revenge, between stealing Americans away from Northern cities to live in the eerie eternal paradise of the Sunbelt, and then foisting its climate on the rest of us. Global warming means we’re losing the remnants of the ancient price Persephone paid. I kid you not, you can now grow southern magnolias in parts of Michigan, and it looks like Chicago jumped up a zone, and Minneapolis two (viz., the change map):

In a revised map of “hardiness zones” — bands of similar temperatures where similar trees are likely to grow in winter — the foundation reclassified the entire Washington area in the same zone as parts of North Carolina and Texas. In 1990, the region was on the border of northern and southern growing zones, but a foundation official said that has changed after 15 years of balmy winter weather.

The foundation’s findings provide a window into the local effects of climate change, scaled down to lawn level. Colorado blue spruce and hemlock, at home in the cold, might have a harder time. Crape myrtles and camellias will have it easier.

[…]

But at the Botanic Garden, [U.S. Botanic Garden curator Bill] McLaughlin had mixed feelings. He was glad to find that such species as the needle palm or the yaupon, a holly native to areas farther south, could be raised more easily. But then, he said, he thought of the impact on the species that belong here: native plants that might find their growing seasons shifted, their life cycles out of sync with pollinating insects, if warming trends continued to affect them.

2006-12-20T10:34:00.000-05:00

Nibble, nibble: The Village Voice takes a long, hard look at the latest bedbug infestation in New York City this week. It turns out that their numbers are vastly overstated; but, like an act of terrorism, bedbugs don’t discriminate in their attacks. I’m grateful not to have to worry about this:

In a city where people already depend on Ambien for a good night’s sleep, the thought of bedbugs has wreaked havoc on circadian rhythms from homeless shelters to $2 million loft apartments. The thought of them is making people itch—not the bedbugs themselves, whose numbers don’t even quite live up to the media hype. What has yet to be quantified—but what has become an urban infestation of its own—is the paranoia that the bedbug craze has produced. It turns out, perhaps no surprise in a city as neurotically obsessed as New York, that something as small as a bedbug can grow colossal in the minds of millions.

The stigma alone is enough to make hardened city dwellers cringe and cry on Eisenberg’s shoulder. He begins each office visit by walking new clients over to a sliver of mirror around the corner from his desk. “Repeat after me,” he says as he forces the victims to study their reflection. “I’m not a dirty person.” Then he offers them a shot of scotch from a bottle he keeps in his filing cabinet. It’s an equal-opportunity bug, he explains. The bugs find a 40-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon on the Lower East Side equally appetizing as a 27-year-old comedian in midtown. In the world of bedbugs, a big-time entrepreneur on the Upper East Side has nothing on a twentysomething unemployed actor. A successful movie director on the Upper West Side shares equal ground with a 22-year-old starving grad student. All the bugs are looking for is a drop of blood, and each of us has about five liters. In a city of 8 million, that’s 10,566,882 gallons of bedbug food. Is it any wonder we’re terrified?

2006-12-19T13:23:00.000-05:00

I feel the Earth move under my feet: About half an hour ago, an Orange Line train in Chicago derailed in the South Loop. Not many details are available, but the Tribune reports:

Six ambulances were sent to the scene of a derailed northbound CTA Orange Line train along elevated tracks in the South Loop, officials said.

The derailment was reported around 11:40 a.m. near Roosevelt Road and Wabash Avenue, but there have been no reports of injuries, fire department spokesman Kevin MacGregor said.

Power was temporarily shut off along the tracks, and the CTA was providing a shuttle bus for stranded commuters, said Chicago Transit Authority spokeswoman Wanda Taylor. She said service along the Orange and Green Lines would be affected by the derailment, but could not elaborate.

2006-12-19T11:57:00.000-05:00

‘Cause I was gooooooooood: The alma mater announced their commencement speaker for the Class of 2007 today. I’m jealous: It’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus! (Though not too jealous, since my class had senator and future president Barack Obama.) The press release is surprisingly dry: Update: Turns out they made this announcement a month ago. I just got an alumni update email today.

Louis-Dreyfus, who attended the School of Communication, went on to earn critical acclaim and recognition for her portrayal of Elaine Benes in the hit television series “Seinfeld.” She received an Emmy award in 1996 as Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. During the show’s nine-year run, she also received a Golden Globe award, five Screen Actors Guild awards and four American Comedy Awards. Most recently, she won an Emmy Award as Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series for her lead role in “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”

Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Louis-Dreyfus studied theater at Northwestern. As a student, she performed twice in the Mee-Ow Show, Northwestern’s satirical comedy theater group. She was a member of the Practical Theater Company and subsequently joined Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe.

2006-12-19T10:15:00.000-05:00

Focus on the homework: The L.A. Times interviews the first generation of kids diagnosed with ADD to come of adulthood about the role of medication in treating the disorder. Unsurprisingly, their feelings are mixed. It’s a powerful read, for someone who does not suffer from ADD:

“It was kind of like weirdly amazing… You get excited about monotonous work, honestly. Like, translating Spanish becomes totally fun…. The thing is, it works. But why are we forcing people to be in the position that they should like something that they wouldn’t ordinarily? … But kids just aren’t going to be equally good at all [subjects], and I think Ritalin is a way of trying to get kids to be good at everything.”

[…]

“I told myself, ‘I don’t need to be on a medication, I can do this myself.’ I did that for years… I just wanted to be normal, and normal people don’t need this… Now, being able to look back on it, seeing the difference between the two [being on medication and being off], I would never get off my medication … I’m much more productive and much better for society” on Adderall. … Two-thirds of the equation is the medicine … I have a motor that goes 24/7. I get up at 6, leave at 7 and come home at 10 … That’s by choice. I have a schedule. I have every hour, every 15 minutes planned out. I take notes on who I have to call… That’s my life. When I’m not on my meds, I won’t even do that.”

2006-12-18T17:38:00.000-05:00

I hope her milkshake brings all the boys: I need a special category, on this site — if I had categories — for “news that is simply not believable.” (Although we here at Particle and Parcel believe that all our news is surprising, or riveting, it need not be unbelievable.)

As a high school student, I sometimes worried about prosecution under statutory rape laws, but it certainly was a low-level fear. But not so, for a 17-year-old Georgian boy who is going to spend the next 10 years of his life in prison for getting what I sincerely hope was the best hummer of his short life, from a 15-year-old. He was convicted of aggravated child molestation for, I kid you not, oral sodomy. (?!) The case was just upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court, after he appealed. The great irony is that at the time underage genital sex would have been a misdemeanor, but underage oral sex was a felony; and the Legislature changed the law, after the sexcapade, but neglected to make the law apply retroactively. Via the Volokh Conspiracy, the Georgia Court’s opinion:

[Genarlow] Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation based upon an act of oral sodomy performed on him by victim T.C., which was documented on videotape and seems to show that the victim’s participation in the act was voluntary. Wilson was 17 years old at the time of the act; the victim was 15 years old. Pursuant to the version of the aggravated child molestation statute then in effect, Wilson was sentenced to ten years imprisonment without possibility of parole…

In 2006, the Legislature amended [the relevant Georgia law] to provide, inter alia, that aggravated child molestation involving an act of sodomy is only a misdemeanor when the victim is between 13 and 16 years of age and the convicted person is 18 years of age or younger and is no more than four years older than the victim. … [T]he Legislature expressly chose not to allow the provisions of the new amendments to affect persons convicted under the previous version of the statute… Accordingly, while I am very sympathetic to Wilson’s argument regarding the injustice of sentencing this promising young man with good grades and no criminal history to ten years in prison without parole and a lifetime registration as a sexual offender because he engaged in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old victim only two years his junior, this Court is bound by the Legislature’s determination that young persons in Wilson’s situation are not entitled to the misdemeanor treatment now accorded to identical behavior under [the relevant Georgia law]. (Emph. mine.)

P.S.: Read the comments on Volokh’s blog entry. Some are well worth reading, if you ask me.

2006-12-18T14:05:00.000-05:00

Now that takes talent: Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader and never one to mince words, gave an interview to Texas Monthly in which he really tears apart the new Republican minority. (An aside: They are now in the minority in the House by exactly the same number that they were in the majority on Nov. 6.) Among other things, he is both mesmerized and repulsed by the way in which the Republicans guaranteed that they would lose:

One of the arguments that I always made was, “The idea is bigger than the man, the idea is bigger than the party, the idea is bigger than the moment, and the idea is bigger than me.” If we’re not serving ideas, we’re missing the point of our being here in the first place. … That’s exactly what they have been failing to do. They have served themselves through a partisan orientation. Basically the governing question from which they define their behavior has been, What can I do in this job for myself and my political future and my future in public office? What does it mean to my desire to be the next chairman? What does it mean to my desire to be the next Speaker or the next majority leader or the next whatever?

Left out of the equation are the constituents they’re supposed to be serving. In fact, in many of the races in which incumbent Republicans just lost, they were shocked to discover very late in the election that their constituents had turned against them.

Right. Take a look, for example, at [Arizona congressman] J. D. Hayworth, a long-term incumbent who lost his seat in the House. I think just about everybody who has examined that race has concluded that his very harsh rhetoric on immigration was instrumental to his loss.

And here he is in a state that’s enormously affected by that issue.

Who is the genius that said, “Now that we’ve identified that [the Hispanic community] is the fastest-growing demographic in America, let’s do everything we can to make sure we offend them”? Who is the genius that came up with that bright idea?

Let me ask you about some of the geniuses who are at least partly responsible for allowing the House to get to a point where that’s one of the operating principles. Start with your old friend Denny Hastert. You still support the outgoing Speaker personally?

Denny Hastert is an excellent person. He’s a real decent human being, a man with no secret, selfish agenda. But the fact is, he didn’t do his job very well.

What did he do wrong?

He didn’t take ownership of the responsibilities of the House. Long before it happened—for the good of the institution, for the good of the party, for the good of governance—there was a time when somebody needed to tell Tom DeLay, “Tom, it’s time for you to leave.” People came to me, but particularly with my personal history with Tom it was very difficult for me to say anything critical of him, because it would be so easily misconstrued as a personal vendetta.

2006-12-18T13:54:00.000-05:00

Off the clock: The Washington Post took a long, hard look (in Friday’s paper) at the timeshare market, by coming to the timeshares capital of America, Orlando. Local color does not, somewhat surprisingly, include writer Carol Sottili stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-Drive at 3 a.m. Sottili tries out six different sales pitches, and finds them to be hopelessly complex — not to mention probably a waste of your money:

Disney, like many timeshare companies, uses a point system. Audrey says I’d need to buy at least 242 points for my family of four, which would cost about $24,442 ($101 a point), plus about $963 a year in maintenance fees. She whips out a calculator and shows me how this is quite clearly the deal of the century: Divide the $101 cost per point by 48 (the number of years of the timeshare deed), which works out to $2.10; add the annual dues of $3.98 per point and, voila, each point actually costs $6.08 a year. Multiply that by the number of points you spend to stay in a studio in the lowest season — 11 points — and you’re spending just $66.88 per night to stay at an upscale Disney property.

[…]

Intrigued by the ubiquitous billboards offering timeshare resales, I stop at International Properties/GMAC Real Estate on International Drive, one of the many companies in Orlando that specialize in reselling timeshares. The timeshare agents I’ve talked to have all emphasized that buying a timeshare should not be viewed as a monetary investment, but rather as an investment in family and quality of life. And they’ve all carefully sidestepped my questions about resale values, probably because reselling a timeshare is not easy.

The Federal Trade Commission states, “Don’t assume you’ll recoup your purchase price for your timeshare, especially if you’ve owned it for less than five years and the location is less than well-known.” Bill Rogers, founder of the Timeshare User’s Group, an organization composed of timeshare owners, is even more blunt: “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but selling a timeshare is very, very difficult and in some cases almost impossible,” he states on his Web site, http://www.tug2.net/. “The main reason is supply and demand. The supply of timeshare resales greatly exceeds the demand for resales.”

2006-12-18T13:40:00.000-05:00

Give me a schtickle of fluoride: The relevance of Zionism is a debate that has a lot of currency in the Jewish community, since the collapse of the peace program in 2001 and the second intifada. Jewcy, a forthcoming magazine for intellectually minded young American Jews, posts a surprisingly intelligent dialogue between David Shneer and Stefan Kanfer. Shneer is of the belief that Zionism and the notion of Israel as the epicenter of Judaism doesn’t make any sense in an era when New York is as hospitable to and less dangerous for Jews than the Holy Land is:

Then why are [your French-Jewish friends] thinking about going to Canada and the United States? I presume you think that those two countries will soon be conquered by antisemitic Muslims running amok (they’ve already managed to manipulate Congressional representatives from Michigan [in not condemning Hezbollah for its attacks on Israel], or so you suggest), and then your French friends will have to leave for Israel anyway, no?

The actions of French Jews, many of whom feel more embattled now than they have in many years, show that, as I said in my opening letter, Israel is one part of a complicated Jewish map. It is a unique place with a unique culture that makes some Jews feel at home and drives other Jews up a wall. Some French Jews choose Israel, while others choose New York, Montreal, or other places. You would presumably tell those who don’t choose Israel that they should “wake up” (as you told me, again sounding like a turn-of-the-century Jewish ideologue).

I choose not to judge people’s decisions about where to call home. I choose to describe, rather than prescribe, and your French Jewish friends show that the world is much more complicated than you, or your hundred-year-old Zionism, would have it.

But Kanfer makes the point, worth noting even though I disagree, that the only way to guarantee safety for the Jews is for them to have their own country. He’s very concerned about the Muslim population in America and Europe, though he insists on describing it in the most xenophobic terms. For Kanfer, assimilation into American society is no guarantee at all.

But enough history lessons. Let’s concentrate on today, and the greatest danger to Jews, and eventually to the Western world itself, radical Islam. I realize that “diversity” is a favored term in academia, but that word has its limits, and those limits are growing more pronounced by the day.

Not to recognize that the U.S. is a safer haven to Jews today because it has only a small percentage of Muslims, and that most (though by no means all) of those Muslims are absorbed into American society, is to wear blinders.

In August, Britain reported the foiling of a plot to send planes to the U.S. where they would be blown up, either in mid-air or on the ground. Who do you suppose was involved in the plot? Ubangis?

Right now the world is at war. Israel is on the front lines. There is no more relevant group of Jews in the world than those in the Jewish State, and deriding the sentiments of the early Zionists, and failing to see the parallel with today’s events is a strange way to teach.

In any case, welcome home. Perhaps when you are settled in, back in Denver, you can look across the sea and realize that the enemy is as close as the officers who stripped Alfred Dreyfus of his medals in a public ceremony, while through the fence at the Hotel de Ville, a bearded Jew made notes…

2006-12-18T12:18:00.000-05:00

No more no-fly lists: Writing in the Times, Randall Stross pillories the “security theater” of the Transportation Security Administration’s hilarious security procedures. If we just make everyone empty their pockets, maybe we can catch the next al Qaeda hijackers, the idea goes. And this idea has some credence, that if we only screen dark-skinned single men with beards, the next bomber will be someone’s grandmother. But there’s no reason to believe that making them empty their pockets and walk through a metal detector will do the trick. El Al and MI5 do not necessarily rely on racial profiling, but they use standard counterterrorism police profiling, and they seem to do a good job of it. (Yes, I know. John Kerry, that cheese-eating surrender monkey, thought we should treat counterterrorism as a police operation. And since he lost, clearly he was wrong.) All the TSA’s wasted energy and money strips us of the investigative capacity to detect and deter real terrorism, or so Stross and security guru Bruce Schneier say:

As passengers, we tender our boarding passes and IDs when asked. We stand in lines. We empty pockets. We take off shoes. We do whatever is asked of us in these mass rites of purification. We play our assigned parts, comforted in the belief that only those whose motives are good and true will be permitted to pass through.

Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student [who built a boarding-pass generator].

[…]

Richard L. Adams, the T.S.A.’s acting federal security director, said [the student Christopher Soghoian’s] generator “could pose a threat to aviation security.”

But Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at BT Counterpane, a security consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., emphatically disagreed. Anybody with Photoshop could create a fake boarding pass, he said. Mr. Soghoian’s Web site simply eliminated the need to use Photoshop. The T.S.A.’s profession of outrage is nothing but “security theater,” Mr. Schneier said, using the phrase he coined in 2003 to describe some of the agency’s procedures.

[…]

The root problem, as some experts see it, is the T.S.A.’s reliance on IDs that are so easily obtained under false pretenses. “It would be wonderful if Osama bin Laden carried a photo ID that listed his occupation of ‘Evildoer,’ ” permitting the authorities to pluck him from a line, Mr. Schneier said. “The problem is, we try to pretend that identity maps to intentionality. But it doesn’t.”

[…]

WHEN I asked Mr. Schneier of BT Counterpane what he would do if he were appointed leader of the T.S.A., he said he would return to the basic procedures for passenger screening used before the 2001 terrorist attacks, which was designed to do nothing more ambitious than “catch the sloppy and the stupid.”

He said he would also ensure that passengers’ bags fly only if the passenger does, improve emergency response capabilities and do away entirely with ID checks and secret databases and no-fly and selectee lists. He added that he would shift funds into basic investigation and intelligence work, which he believes produces results like the arrests of the London bomb suspects. “Put smart, trained officers in plainclothes, wandering in airports — that is by far the best thing the T.S.A. could do,” he said.

2006-12-18T10:59:00.000-05:00

Trader Mohammed’s: In the last few years, Dubai has built a reputation as an international playground. That’s all very fine and well, but in addition, it’s setting up the infrastructure to be a major financial center, a sort of Geneva with warm weather, or Hong Kong without an autocratic, communist national government. This is not without precedent, says The Economist, but you have to look back in history:

Dubai’s third advantage is a history of pulling off grand schemes. Blessed with fewer oil or gas deposits than its neighbours, the emirate has long sought other ways to make a living and has thrived as a trading entrepot living off its wits. “When I look at Dubai, I think of Amsterdam in the 16th century,” says Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, who studies global cities. “Dubai is not a six-month miracle.”

Dubai’s big successes include the Jebel Ali container port; a world-class airport; a leading airline in Emirates; duty-free stores that would exhaust the most indefatigable shopper; the world’s first seven-star hotel; luxury beach resorts; regional centres for media and health care; as well as more unusual projects, including man-made islands in fantastic shapes. The world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai, is also under construction. All this helps to attract celebrities, from Saudi princes to Russian plutocrats and professional footballers, who often buy homes. Although some find it all a bit tacky, Dubai has shown imagination, a knack for getting things done, and an ability to harness capital and use top international talent.