Lapplander

Just In Case You Don't Return My Phone Calls, Here's The Big News

2009-10-10T09:27:00.002-04:00

Starting Tuesday, since Monday is Columbus Day, I'm the communications director for Rep. Raul Grijalva from Arizona's seventh district. He co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and is, from what I can tell, a more serious thinker than Sarah Palin. Now you know why I keep calling you and leaving messages.

What this means, other than the obvious, is the following:

1) I quit bartending just in time for winter. No 2 a.m. trips home in a snowstorm on the bus.

2) I can finally afford brand-name toilet paper, not "the other kind."

3) I got a nice haircut. No more shaving my head clean every six months.

4) I have to know what I'm talking about from now on.

5) Time to go clothes shopping.

More as it develops.

A Tea Party Anecdote

2009-09-14T12:28:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, I bartend a few nights a week for extra cash, and there was a big all-day street festival yesterday on the block where I work, so I had to go in early to sling booze to the partiers. About five o'clock this Hispanic guy in his late twenties came in with a Buccaneers hat and ordered a shot of Cuervo, two limes and salt, and started talking about how much he loved the neighborhood and how he was lucky to be in town for the street fair. I asked him where he was from, and he told me he was going to school in Panama City, Florida, but was in town with his uncle for the 9/12 protest. "I don't really pay attention to politics," he said, "but my uncle is biiiiiiiiig into it. He'll talk to you for hours about this stuff. So he got me started watching Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, and I've started listening to their point of view on things, and I've been meeting all these people who are dissatisfied with Obama's health care agenda and what have you."

Another Cuervo.

"I'm Puerto Rican, Cuban and Cherokee Indian, and I have no problem with people who can speak English, but a lot of the people down in Florida, they speak Spanish but they don't speak English. I don't speak fluent Spanish, but I understand it all, and you need to be able to make yourself understood in English, you know what I mean? There's so many fuckin' Mexicans where I live. . ."

Another Cuervo.

"The conservatives are the ones who've done good in their life, they have a house, they have something to lose. The liberals are mostly on the poorer side of town, the blacks, the Mexicans. If you just want to sit on your ass and take other peoples' money, why can't everyone just do that? You know?" He talks to his uncle on his cell phone about how the town might be dead where their hotel is, but he's having a great time where he's at. Then he turns back to me.

"Someone brought a sign to the protest saying 'Public Opinion Now,' like, they don't think the protesters represent public opinion, and he was trying to provoke a fight, you know, to show that this was all just some violent thing. There were some of the stupider people there trying to get in his face, and the smarter people were, like, don't let him make you lose your temper, you know, stay peaceful and respectful."

The sign actually said "Public Option Now," and there was a picture in the Washington Post the next day of people screaming at him.

I say something about how I think anyone who objects to Obama's plan should have their own alternative to offer, because the status quo doesn't work. He nods and actually seems to take my point. "Man, I'm not embarrassed to say this. When I was a kid, there was a robber trying to get into my house, and I had a gun. I was going to the door, and I bumped into a dresser or something and shot a big hole in my foot. When I went to the hospital, they took the bullet out and put a pin in my toe so the bones would grow back straight, and when they grew back, two of them were fused together. You know how much that cost?" The point of his story is that it was expensive.

Then he surprised me: "I actually think there's a method to Obama's madness. I haven't given up on him yet. Hey, I'm going to go walk around the street some, but I'll be back later, okay?"

He came back later and had another two Cuervos. Good tipper.

How is Bosnia Today?

2009-08-24T14:45:00.002-04:00

Not so good. This article explains how the Republika Srpska, a semi-independent Serb-controlled region of Bosnia, is threatening secession, and how the country is still run by a "viceroy" (yes, they still call it that) from Austria with near-imperial powers to make a budget and fire public officials. One source in the story says it's almost boring to explain to outsiders how Bosnia works today, because it's the same dysfunctional story it's been for a long time.

Did Serbia Commmit Genocide?

2009-08-22T12:49:00.002-04:00

Not in Kosovo, from the available evidence. That was an ugly civil war, not a one-way slaughter. The genocide occurred several years earlier in Bosnia, especially the killing of about 8,000 unarmed Muslim civilians at Srebrenica. Noam Chomsky's doubts notwithstanding -- see the comments to the last post -- no sane jury would acquit the perpetrators of that atrocity, and the capture and trial of Radovan Karadzic will go a long way to establishing justice in that regard.

The presence of the Omarska and Keraterm concentration camps, where Serbs routinely raped non-Serb women and beat people to death whenever they felt like it, should be more than enough evidence of Serbia's intent at the time. From the Omarska link:

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, has found several individuals guilty of crimes against humanity perpetrated at Omarska. Murder, torture, rape, and abuse of prisoners was common. About 6,000 Bosniaks and Croats were held in appalling conditions at the camp for about five months in the spring and summer of 1992. Hundreds died of starvation, punishment beatings and ill-treatment. The prosecutors compared the camps to those run by Nazis.

I know it's hard to say anything is or was "similar" to Nazism, which has become the untouchable extreme extent of human evil, but the only difference in Serbia, from what we can tell, was the scale of the horror. The intent and behavior were the same.

War Crimes Justice -- The Wheels Grind, Slowly and Out of Sight

2009-08-13T10:14:00.002-04:00

No, this post isn't about the people screaming bloody murder at the health care town halls around the country. Let other people deal with that phenomenon. This is about recent successes at the war crimes tribunal set up after Milosevic perpetrated genocide in the Balkans.

I recently read the memoir of Carla del Ponte, who for years was the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). One passage stood out, and will probably never leave me: her description of the crimes of Milan Lukic, whom her prosecution team had dubbed "Lucifer" in its files. I won't recount them here, except to link to this item relating the happy news that he has actually been caught, tried and now sentenced to life in prison. His cousin Sredoje got 30 years, which was a light sentence.

As a side note, I loaned the book (Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations With Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity) to a Serb friend of mine whom I know to be, by American standards, a left-of-Kucinich raving socialist. I thought she'd appreciate the opportunity to hear about the international efforts to bring to justice the people who had ruined her country. Her verdict: "Oh, she hates Serbs." She thought the court was focusing too much on Serb perpetrators and not enough on others.

Let this tribalism be a lesson to us all.

A Career Track in These Unsettled Times: Working The "Head Table" at a Slaughterhouse

2009-06-08T15:59:00.004-04:00

I've been going through my old e-mails today, and I found one I sent to myself a while ago that I mean to write a blog post about but never got around to. There's no real short version of this story -- you really must read it all.

In a rapid-fire process that is noisy, smelly and bloody, severed pigs' heads are cut up at the head table at a rate of more than 1,100 an hour. Workers slice off the cheek and snout meat, then insert a nozzle in the head and blast air inside until the light pink mush that is the brain tissue squirts out from the base of the skull.

Kruse, whose job was to remove meat from the back of the animals' heads, said she doesn't recall any spray or mist from the de-braining. The head-table workers were protected by safety glasses, helmets, gloves and belly guards, but none wore anything over their mouths or noses, she said.

Why this interest in what they were wearing? Because 11 employees at the same plant in Minnesota got a strange nervous system disorder after working the head table shift one too many times, and they think it came from pig tissue.

Anyway, something to think about if you're tired of interviewing at Macy's.

The Weird Season

2009-04-08T11:50:00.002-04:00

I've started bartending for extra money, since I have no steady journalistic income right now, and I worked five nights last week. I was getting exhausted and even slightly depressed (from fatigue, not soul-crushing run-ins with drunken louts -- those have been rare). I will forever think back on this brief time, when I transitioned from journalist to gin jockey, as the Early Bartending Era, and I will remember how I got to bed late, woke up late, didn't make it to the gym -- my fitness regime has been totally derailed -- and didn't work on what little remains to be done for my novel.

I think now is the time to find a new equilibrium and get things back on track. Thankfully my official schedule, now that I'm done training, is down to two nights a week. According to the friend who got me the job, I should make at least enough to pay rent each month, so that should take the sting out of riding the bus through the ghetto every Sunday night and walking home down empty streets at three in the morning.

I'm an unlikely bartender, and will never love the work the way some people do, but the job is better than expected. It's either fast-paced enough that you don't have time to think or slow enough that you can chat with people and easily pass the time. I even get compliments; usually they're after a fifth shot of Woodford, but it's nice to be recognized for something. I already have a small store of "hilarious bar stories" that will only continue to grow. Now that I have some clarity on when I'll be working, instead of being at the night-to-night mercy of the manager's cell phone, I think I can integrate this into the rest of my life and move forward with a smile and some cash in my pocket.

I will never forget the exhausted feeling of falling into bed at 4:30 while Stephanie mumbles something about Battlestar Galactica. I hope that part's over. Now it's on to dropping hints at cocktail parties about how I can make that drink and bragging about how cool I am.

Arizona Republicans Vote Against Funding For -- You Guessed It -- Elderly Abuse Prevention

2009-02-13T23:22:00.002-05:00

When the voters don't want you in Congress any more, I guess you decide turnabout is fair play. Or something.

The House took up H.R. 448, the Elder Abuse Protection Act, which would establish specialized elder abuse prosecution and research programs to aid victims, and would provide training to prosecutors and other law enforcement personnel related to elder abuse prevention and protection, and establish programs to provide for emergency crisis response teams to combat elder abuse. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), passed on a 397-25 vote. [roll call 62] All members of the Nevada Congressional delegation voted in favor the measure. Our neighbors to the south may be interested to know that Congressman Flake (R-AZ) and Congressman Franks (R-AZ) were among the lonely 25 voting in opposition.

I'd suggest you call or write these men, but honestly, do you want to hear their reasons?

Vegetarianism: The Case We Can All Get Behind

2009-02-05T15:29:00.003-05:00

Over at Turn Left, where most of my political writing ends up, I'm haggling with another lefty about why on Earth anyone should be a vegetarian. Frankly, I think I'm winning, and this guy doesn't like to admit defeat.

One thing about his argument puzzles me: he doesn't see why he should care about inflicting pain on animals because they're not part of what he calls "the moral community." My latest riposte (of many) is reprinted here. Read the whole thread if you're curious about how we got to this pretty pass. His comments from an earlier post are in italics.

^^^

Pigs can navigate mazes but they can't speak. Where do you put that on any intelligence scale? It's difficult to assign any score or confidence level to something for which we so obviously lack a vocabulary. All we have are approximations, and anyway it's not like a lot of scientists devote their careers to pig cognition, so we have little overall data compared to, say, astrophysics. Which explains. . .

I've no idea why it took you this long when I've told you so many times exactly what you needed to do.

There isn't much in the way of the smoking gun you're after, which made me think the project was hopeless in the first place. I'm trying anyway because I think there's enough to go on to at least demonstrate the seriousness of the matter to anyone else reading this thread.

You're talking to a pacifist. I do have an aversion to unnecessary violence against people. But you've yet to convince me that pigs are people.

Yours is a limited and highly qualified pacifism. As Wikipedia tells us: "Pacifism covers a spectrum of views ranging from the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved; to calls for the abolition of the institutions of the military and war; to opposition to any organization of society through governmental force (anarchist or libertarian pacifism); to rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals; to the condemnation of force except in cases where it is absolutely necessary to advance the cause of peace; to opposition to violence under any circumstance, including defense of self and others." I usually consider pacifism as such to entail the penultimate if not ultimate definition, and the others as more good common sense and belief in democracy. You take things further than you realize in saying that you can't decide whether two-year-olds are people and wouldn't necessarily have an aversion to seeing them tortured. This isn't really pacifism at all. Any Quaker meeting would throw you out on your ear. I'm not saying you don't believe your own words, I'm just saying you're stretching the definition of pacifism pretty thin.

If not all pain is equal, then we should not presume that pig pain is morally equivalent to human pain.

You're turning a question of unnecessarily inflicted pain into an occasion for semantic niceties. How could I ever prove to you that pig pain is "morally equivalent" to human pain, given your standards of evidence? What do you want, to hear the pig say it out loud? You want someone to invent some universal pain-o-meter? You can see them squealing in horrible distress, see factory farm workers beating them with metal rods for no apparent reason, see them panting and covered in blood while they die standing up in tiny crates -- I confess, once again, that I don't know what else to tell you. The circumstantial evidence, which is all we'll ever have, indicates that they don't want to be beaten, kicked or killed, that they have an ingrained survival instinct (like nearly all animal life above the microscopic) and clearly cry out when they're injured. I can't invent a machine that will tell you more than you already know. You seriously want me to find some scholarly scientific papers discussing pig intelligence?

Our work shows that pigs have good spatial memory abilities that can be disrupted by common management procedures. If this extended to social memory, it could help explain increased aggression levels in previously familiar pigs after routine procedures. We have also found that pigs adjust their foraging behavior depending on the presence or absence of a subordinate, exploitable co-forager that knows where the food is.

But what will all this tell you that you don't have already? And anyway, why set your bar so strangely high? The intelligence of a three-year-old isn't a very meaningful barrier to compassion, especially for a "pacifist." In fact, I'd say it's arbitrarily and inappropriately high, given the conditions you've already seen in the videos.

If these animals were killed humanely, I'd still have a problem with the sheer waste but I wouldn't view it as so clearly and unnecessarily cruel. But not only are they not killed humanely, there's a lot of evidence that slaughterhouse employees become extremely desensitized and vicious over time.

"It's the same thing with an animal who pisses you off, except it is in the stick pit, you are going to kill it. Only you don't just kill it, you go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I'd be sticking, and I would just take my knife and -- eerk -- cut its eye out while it was just sitting there … One time I took my knife -- it's sharp enough -- and I sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of bologna … I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose … I stuck the salt right up the hog's ass … It's not anything anyone should be proud of … It was my way of taking out frustration."

How do you account for the pigs' aversion to being injured? Why do they run around and try to get away? Why do they get upset when you hit them? Is this just random behavior?

Inauguration: The View From A Porta-Potty

2009-01-20T14:17:00.005-05:00

It's not often you mount a public bathroom to get a better view of a black man on a JumboTron, but like the pundits are saying, these are exciting times. What better way to honor America and our new president's call to service than to climb on top of a reeking privy and try to see over the crowd, I said to myself, so that's what I did on Inauguration Day. It didn't really work.

I wouldn't have bothered, except that being such a shutterbug made me lose the rest of my entourage in the hustle and bustle. As many of you know, left to my own devices I usually gravitate to the least sensible option, so I pushed my way through the masses and hoisted my way up in the wake of a thirtysomething couple who'd had the same idea a moment before. We couldn't see any big screens or anything, which they'd sprinkled all over the Mall, but we could see the crowds better than anyone standing at ground level, so we just listened to the PA system and tried not to let too many others up there with us for fear of tipping the damn thing over.

I took a few pictures, including one of some National Guard soldiers trying in vain to direct foot traffic, but mostly there was nothing to do but wait and try not to get too cold. Then the characters started showing up. It wasn't exactly our Porta Potty, and we couldn't tell people not to come up unless actual collapse was imminent, so first one then another started joining us. (This was in a semicircle of maybe twenty identical units, all equally filling up with onlookers.) First came one guy with a few gold teeth and some very neatly pressed jeans, plus a cowboy hat and ranch boots, who called over and over for "Larry!" to join him. (I couldn't ever figure out who Larry was.) He tried to jump from the top of the bathroom into an overhanging tree, but gave up when he realized the branches wouldn't support him. It was weird being up there with that guy. He wouldn't sit down even when it was clear the roof was crumpling under his feet.

Some kids came up here and there. One woman handed me her little son, then her other little son, and I had to grip them (no doubt uncomfortably) under the armpits and hoist them up before she tried to follow. At that point it was pretty clear the thing was unstable, so I handed them back down and she left. Over the course of the festivities we had anywhere from two to five people up there -- I sort of straddled two of them by sitting where the tops touched. At the end, after I jumped back down, I looked into one of them to survey the damage and could see the roof had basically caved in. You couldn't stand up in there any more. Luckily, I never had to use one.

There wasn't a whole lot to do except listen the whole time. Rick Warren was obnoxious. The wind was cold. Obama's speech I thought was pretty average -- I think it may, in the history books, come off a little better on paper than it did in person. The musical number starring Yo-Yo Ma was great. I don't have a single favorite moment of pure being-there experience. The whole thing was awesome to see, especially because of the size of the crowd.

I'd post my pictures, but I'm so old-school that I only took black-and-white film shots. You'll have to come by if you want to see them.

My Eventful Trip Home

2009-01-06T15:09:00.002-05:00

I'll talk about my novel, Christmas and everything else shortly, but before I forget, a quick anecdote. My flight home on the third (Saturday) included not only Janet Napolitano sitting in first class -- I shook her hand, told her I volunteered for her in college and admonished her to "help fewer people die in the desert" -- but also myself sitting right next to newly minted freshman Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D), who took over the seat in the nothern part of the state formerly held by the corrupt Rick Renzi.

I didn't know it was her until we'd almost landed. She'd been in my window seat during takeoff, so I was sitting in the middle and Stephanie was sitting near the aisle, and I spent most of the time reading or sleeping or talking to Steph or trying not to step on the other woman's violin case, which was parked under the seat in front of me for space reasons. (She was at least nice about it.) Right before we landed, she mentioned she was trying to play more often and then said, "I'm about to start my first term in Congress, so I don't know how much time I'll have." I asked what her name was, she told me and I said with surprise, "You're Ann Kirkpatrick?" She said something like, "Oh, you don't really know. . ." But I cut her off and said "You took over Rick Renzi's seat." She was impressed that I knew who she was, and we talked for six or seven minutes about her kids reminding her that she's still their mom, not to get any ideas, etc. etc. and how, basically, I'm looking for a job. So I'm going to head into her office later in the week. She said she didn't know which positions her chief of staff had filled already, but I think I at least made a good impression.

Also, I can say with all honesty that she's a very nice person. She said her favorite freshman reps that she met during orientation are Leonard Lance (a Republican from New Jersey) and all the new Dems from New Mexico (Harry Teague, Marty Heinrich, one other I can't remember right now). She's trying to get on the Homeland Security Committee to work with Napolitano on border stuff, even though her district is about as far from the border as Arizona gets. When Steph and I were picking up our luggage, we saw her talking to Napolitano and her entourage and I wished I could go over there or had something substantial to say, but we just grabbed our bags and went home. Anyway, it was fun. I wish I'd known earlier who she was -- I could have bent her ear a little more.

The Weirdest Pro-Franco Blog You'll Ever Read

2008-12-11T14:42:00.002-05:00

I don't want to get into a shouting match with someone I don't know, but this guy -- a student at Assumption College -- is so readably eccentric and out of it that I wanted to bring his blog to everyone's attention. The short, short version (as told by himself) is that he grew up in an atheist family and converted to Catholicism at some point, and is now headed toward a political science degree. The slightly longer version?

I love this democratic Republic, but want to make it Roman Catholic. Although I support the restoration of those monarchies that were overthrown in the Masonic
revolutions of the 18th and 19th Centuries, our Nation would be, I believe, best served by a Malta-type Republic with Catholicism as the official religion.

While this is unorthodox enough (not to mention delightfully oddball), he's not done with the antiquated political rhetoric.

I feel like Franco. Although ever at the service of God, or rather attempting to be, I give my all in combating the forces of evil in the world (and occasionally throw a good punch), while I consistently find myself having no core philosophy. While I always try to follow all the defined dogmas of the Faith, and outside the bounds of doctrine to support whatever is reasonable and in favor of individual liberties, the marketplace of ideas is full of those claiming to represent the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth, to the exclusion of all other beliefs.

What a strange thing to say, no? But the more you read his posts, or save yourself the trouble and do a search for "Franco," the more you realize that Dear Leader isn't just some kind of model citizen to him, he's a secular saint. To spend time inside the mind of Leslie Higgins is to wonder how Spanish Carlist politics found its way to New England with the original slogans intact.

There's a certain twisted allure to outright fascism, with the military braid and the flags and the "unity of purpose" talk, but on a subtler level, if you're not careful, there's also the dangerous possibility of misunderstanding someone like Franco (who only died in 1975) as a merely conservative politician and statesman. I doubt Mr. Higgins wants to bring back the torture chambers, but from reading him, you can't tell whether he knows they existed in the first place. There are lots of soft-focus pictures of El Caudillo sprinkled here and there, and he comes off not as a bloody-minded opportunist but as the Catholic savior of virgins and nuns everywhere.

There are further oddities -- his love of Nicaraguan Contra Daniel Ortega, for instance, for being apparently pro-life ("some Marxists aren't even that bad") -- and his belief that his "homeboy" will be canonized is more than reason enough not to take him seriously. But if you ever wondered what a Franco/Coolidge Republican looks like, you owe it to yourself to give him five minutes.

Almost Done With The Novel

2008-12-07T17:20:00.003-05:00

From the time I woke up yesterday (Saturday) to the time I went to sleep around five this morning, I wrote two chapters in one long sitting. I took breaks, I watched some Arrested Development to clear my head, and of course I had to eat occasionally, but I wrote sixteen pages by forcing myself to work until I collapsed. If sixteen pages doesn't sound like a lot, consider how long an average double-spaced college paper is. Twenty pages? Twenty-five? Sixteen times two is, well, my eyes were too bloodshot to do the math on the piece of paper I'd started drawing doodles on with a magic marker, but you get the idea.

Why am I pushing so hard to finish it up? Because I want to have a draft done well before I go home for Christmas (so readers can read it and give me feedback), and also because I yearn for the day when I wake up and there's nothing left to write. I can just run around naked at the zoo and enjoy the freezing cold wind on my face, instead of holing up in the apartment or a cafe and writing writing writing. Even unemployment happens for a reason. I've always wanted to write a novel, and now I'm this close to finishing a first draft of a real, honest-to-God publishable book. I now steel myself for the climb up the final hill.

Narrating The Sarah Palin Turkey Slaughter

2008-11-26T00:18:00.002-05:00

Even if you're really, really busy, you have to take six minutes out of your frantic schedule to watch this. Imagine the surreal depths to which our great nation could have sunk, like a wounded octopus slowly descending into the blackness of an ocean trench, if the election had gone any differently.

Election Day Victories For Animal Rights

2008-11-08T14:38:00.002-05:00

As a vegetarian, I don't often get to see one of my biggest pet issues hashed out in an election year. But Nov. 4 brought with it two major wins for animal rights, and may point the way to further victories in coming years. The Humane Society and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are wising up big time about electoral strategy, using the pocketbook rather than an infrequently successful moral appeal as their weapon of choice. The New Republic has the story:

I spoke with Michael Markarian, Executive Vice President of the Humane Society of the United States, who said that such ballot measures, introduced in states where they are likely to pass, do much more than reform a single states' animal treatment laws. They are a message to American industry as a whole that considering animal welfare is increasingly within their economic self-interest. California agribusinesses, fearing a rise in operating costs, spent heavily to combat Proposition 2 and have nothing to show for it. Markarian is hoping that all animal-related businesses will draw the lesson that it is simply cheaper to improve animal treatment of their own accord, rather than risk a costly political fight they will probably lose.

Proposition 2, which passed with 63 percent of the vote (63 percent!), says that confined animals must now be able to "lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely." If you've ever seen a vegetarian information pamphlet, you'll know how impossible this currently is given factory farming practices.

Animal rights aren't by any means a political issue per se. There are a few notable Republican animal rights activists (even a Bushie or two). It's a good day for everyone when we outlaw veal crates and battery cages, no matter who you voted for.

Just The Thing To Keep The Good Mood Going

2008-11-05T13:57:00.002-05:00

I've been at the apartment all morning because maintenance had to come by -- apparently the last seventy people to live here liked to smear grease inside the walls of our oven, which smokes like the fires of hell every time we turn it on, so hopefully that's taken care of. Anyway, I'm heading out soon to finish chapter 11 (halfway done!) of my novel, but while I'm here I've been looking around at the morning-after coverage and this tickled me in a way the pundits never could.

As long as you're there, scroll down into the comments a bit. There are a few priceless pictures. You'll see what I mean.

I Partied At The White House

2008-11-05T12:44:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you've all heard or read about the celebration outside the White House last night. After seeing some local news footage, with Obama already declared the winner and little left to worry about, I decided to leave my apartment and go join in the fun.

I've seen crowd estimates settle around 1,000, and although I have no talent for estimating these things I'd say it was more like double that, especially considering the stragglers and people at the margins of the glut. I'd also say, from the time I spent there, that it was about 90 percent college students, something I'm not sure has been mentioned in the press reports. So, enough with the dry statistics. . .

It was fun as hell. Knots formed in the generally milling crowd and started chanting or singing at the drop of a hat. A lot of girls were riding around on guys' shoulders, and pot use was pretty open, but there was none of the stupidity and tawdriness of spring break shitkickers. Everyone was there to celebrate, not just to get wasted, and people were for the most part sober except for being really happy. I found the best way to enjoy the whole thing was to make my way back and forth through the crowd from one end to the other, stopping whenever I saw a group I wanted to join or it looked like one would form. We sang "Ole, ole ole ole" and the national anthem (a lot) and God Bless America. On too many occasions to count, people would start up cries of "Yes we can!" or "No more Bush!" or "O-ba-ma" or the occasional "Si se puede!" and the next twenty people in each direction would join in. One game that emerged was spotting the bright white glare of a television camera and trying to get through the crowd to make it into the shot. No one pushed. There were no fights. It was all in good fun. I never got interviewed, but I'm positive I ended up cheering and chanting on one Canadian broadcast. After the correspondent signed off, everyone in the crowd went nuts around him with cheers and he smiled and, frankly, joined the party for a moment before having to leave.

As the night wore on I started to see a few middle-aged and older people in the crowd, including one guy who was shouting "You fascist motherfucker!" and balling his fists with victorious glee, facing down the White House like the Scots taunting the British in the middle of "Braveheart." I ended up on a home video being made by Frank from Winona, Illinois, who asked me as I passed him why I'm so happy to be rid of Bush. My answer, as best I can recall (with a big grin on my face): "Oh, man, there are a million and one reasons, I could never get to it all. I thought I wouldn't have a job when I graduated college. I thought there would be a hole in the sun by the time he left. But now, not only are we getting rid of Bush, we're replacing him with someone who actually knows what he's doing. Save this tape. You'll remember this." Then we introduced ourselves, shook hands, he said he totally agreed with me and we kept going our separate ways.

Most of the fun came from just being there. It felt good. Everyone was partying for the best of reasons. A few people carried Obama cutouts above their heads, making for good photo ops when they lined up nicely with the White House. Two or three people crowd-surfed, prompting someone next to me to say to his friend, "Come on, this isn't a Hootie concert." At one point a big group had formed and started singing, of all things, the Georgetown Hoyas fight song. I was standing right there but didn't know the words. One college guy was smoking a cigar and sprayed his Heineken beer foam over his head, splashing everyone around him, but no one seemed to mind very much.

For the record, there were a lot of sexy coeds. I spotted a few guys I thought might have been there to pick up chicks, but I didn't see anything happen. Everyone there seemed to be with a group of friends, and people would often link hands and go through the crowd in fours and fives. I never saw anyone I knew, so I was free to kind of roam the scene and stop to sing or whatever or, once, join a temporary drumming dance circle. The snipers were visible on the White House roof despite it being the middle of the night and completely overcast, but they didn't ruin the picture for us -- everyone seemed to take it all in good fun, as if to say, "Ha ha, we get that roof now." At one point, I think probably around 1:15, the White House floodlights went off for the night and everyone took it as a chance to start chanting "No more Bush!" at the top of their lungs. I shouted "Address the nation, George!" and a few people laughed.

Anyway, I could go on, but you get the picture. When I left at 1:30 it showed no signs of slowing down, and several hours later, watching the local news hoping to get some late Senate election returns, I saw that by 4:00 it had finally petered out. Every account I've read of it includes quotes from security guards or police or whoever saying they'd "never seen anything like it." I hope we keep seeing that kind of jubilation on election day from now on, because that's how people should feel.

The Clown Prince of The Hill

2008-09-23T15:20:00.004-04:00

Anyone who hasn't been following the budding career of Bill Sali, the rootin'-tootinest Republican in Congress, can do themselves a favor and start watching now, because the next two months are going to be hilarious.

It took these clowns twenty-six days to figure out how to file their report (the law gives you 15), and even then it was still a shambles - just like the rest of Sali's campaign. He opened an office in - I kid you not - the wrong congressional district (Idaho's only got two). But the best was announced just recently: as a cornerstone of his fundraising plan, Bill Sali plans to hold yard sales to fill his campaign coffers. No word yet if Plan B is to rummage through the county dump for some discarded treasures - but I think we can assume that's probably on the list.

Believe it or not, this doesn't even scratch the surface. Idaho's other representative, Mike Simpson, threatened to throw Sali out a window. People back home hate him. It's really all too much to take in one sitting.

Hey, Remember That Sordid Torture Issue? It's Back

2008-09-08T13:18:00.004-04:00

This is a must-read article, whatever your political persuasion.

At Bagram, Lasseter wrote, guards kicked, kneed, and punched prisoners with systematic brutality. Former guards as well as detainees told McClatchy reporters about what Lasseter called sadistic violence. According to them, the brutality reached a peak in December 2002, when two Afghans were hung from ceiling chains by their wrists and beaten to death by American soldiers.

Two soldiers were prosecuted for those killings. Specialist Willie Brand admitted that he hit one of the Afghan men thirty-seven times. He was sentenced to be reduced in rank to private. The other person prosecuted was Captain Christopher Beiring, who commanded an army reserve military police company. He was given a letter of reprimand.

The army lawyer who investigated Beiring, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Berg, urged leniency because "the government failed to present any evidence of what are 'approved tactics, techniques and procedures in detainee operations.'" In other words, members of the United States Army are no longer expected to know that beating a prisoner to death is against the rules.

Why were the guards so brutal? Anger at the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Lasseter suggests - and a sense that their superiors in Washington wanted "the gloves off." President Bush's decision to eliminate the protection of the Geneva Conventions sent the message that there were no rules.
[...]
Another notable point made by the McClatchy articles was that the mistreatment of prisoners made some who had no previous connection with anti-American movements profoundly angry at the United States. It is hardly a surprising result to report, but the articles gave chapter and verse. They quoted a Pakistani intelligence report on men released from Guantánamo as saying that they had "extreme feelings of resentment and hatred against USA."

It's important to understand that at this late date, we now know for a fact that torture was official policy coming directly from the Pentagon. Military officials called it other things, but there was constant consternation that the Red Cross would blow the whistle or that one day a legal decision would shut them down. Any excuses made for this unconscionable behavior come in one of two flavors, the "bad-apple" theory and the idea that everyone we tortured was a hard-core terrorist and somehow deserved it. We now know that neither of those excuses is even remotely defensible.

I wouldn't post this -- it's depressing enough to read without the thought that the perpetrators will probably go unpunished for the rest of their lives -- but it's important to keep these things in mind when you vote, donate or decide just how politically engaged to be this year. These things were done in the name of keeping us safe. How does that make you feel?

Sarah Palin: Not Even Bringing In The Hillary Voters

2008-09-02T12:56:00.003-04:00

I have precious little to add to the ever-growing tornado of awesomeness that is Sarah Palin's demise, except to point out that even if you strip away all the weird stories about the Alaskan Independence Party and her pregnant daughter and her wanting to ban books when she was mayor (look that one up). . . Even if you ignore all that and pretend she was a good choice, you still have to admit that she's not doing what she was picked to do: attract Hillary voters.

There's a lot of good analysis and fresh news at that link, and I can't summarize it all, but I will say this: in a recent Rasmussen poll, 75 percent of respondents say they think McCain picked her because he thought a woman on the ticket would help him win. Female voters said 48 percent to 25 percent that Palin isn't ready to be president.

Now, the important thing to remember is that the idea of Hillary supporters flocking to McCain en masse in November was always a media creation with little substance. Unless you think woman are dumb, you have to account for the fact that they vote, like everyone else, on the basis of whose policies they agree with. When the Hillary so-close soap opera was winding down and Obama was obviously going to get the nod, The Media (C) decided to give it one last push and put together a scenario in which "disgruntled" Hillary voters were so furious at their candidate's fate that they'd walk out and vote for McCain because. . .

We never really heard the end of that sentence, but one person was apparently convinced, and he picked Sarah Palin to help the process along. However, after only a week of the media asking questions about this newcomer, those 17 disgruntled Hillary supporters and the rest of us now know what an odd pick she was, for the following reasons:

1) She wants to teach creationism in public schools.

2) She not only belonged to the Alaskan Independence Party up to 1994, she taped a support message for them earlier this year telling them to keep up the good work -- despite the fact that the party thinks the U. S. government is unconstitutional.

3) As mayor, she looked into starting a book-banning campaign at the small local library.

4) There are serious questions about the circumstances of her fifth child's birth and whether it was hers or her daughter's. [I don't post this out of malice, and frankly I wouldn't blame her if she's covering an uncomfortable family situation, but the situation adds to the PR problem nonetheless.]

5) She basically has no relevant experience, and even CNN -- which loooooves John McCain in most circumstances -- is starting to ask a few simple questions that the campaign can't answer. To whit: Campbell Brown asking a McCain spokesman to name a single "foreign policy" decision Palin has made as head of the Alaska National Guard, something Republicans have started using as a talking point. Short version: he spends four minutes coming up with nothing.

The gimmick didn't work. The Hail Mary pass fell a few yards short. In other words, after eight years of Bush, the Republican Party is slowly imploding in on itself like a dying star. I confess to a certain amount of malicious giddiness. Not only do I now feel more confident than ever that Obama is going to win -- and I'm on record with all my friends as never having had any doubts -- but I think the GOP is headed for a stint in the political wilderness, much like Democrats during most of this decade. Their house, dear reader, is not in order.

Writing A Book

2008-08-27T11:52:00.002-04:00

As many of you know, I've finished a draft of the first four chapters of the novel I'm working on while I'm unemployed. (Don't feel bad if you didn't know -- I don't keep in personal contact with everyone as much as I'd like, and at first I even forgot to send a copy to Mom.) This is going really well, but writing feels a lot like sitting on your ass even if in the long run you're being "productive," and it can be hard to convince myself to continue before I've gotten things more settled in the immediate term. Nevertheless my confidence in the value of artistic genius is stronger than my fear.

I'm about to head out for another smackdown with the Muse at this place I like where they let you sit on the couches and listen to music all day. Sort of like home, but without a TV or anything to distract you. If you've ever thought about writing a novel or a short story or anything creative, you should really try it. It's fun once you get the hang of having a story already in place before you get going. This has always been my problem before -- 50 pages in and then, uh oh, what's supposed to happen? I never really knew. Now I know. This is why I am going to be a millionaire and everyone will read my book on the beach next summer. You wait and see.

Romulans Will Soon Appear Off The Port Bow

2008-08-10T20:52:00.003-04:00

Invisibility isn't science fiction any more, and we're getting closer, according to stuff some scientists just found out.

One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level.

Both are so-called metamaterials -- artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index.

The two teams were working separately under the direction of Xiang Zhang of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley with U.S. government funding. One team reported its findings in the journal Science and the other in the journal Nature.

Each new material works to reverse light in limited wavelengths, so no one will be using them to hide buildings from satellites, said Jason Valentine, who worked on one of the projects.

I'd like to just quote the whole story, but I'll trust you to read it. The Klingons are already way ahead of the curve here, so you kind of owe it to your species to keep up.

In other news, I've finished the first two chapters of the first draft of my novel and have sent them to a few people for feedback. I have a plan to send chapters 1-4 to a second group, etc. and get (hopefully somewhat ) continuous input while I keep moving forward, rather than waiting weeks for everyone to chime in. I've clocked my pace on a pages per day basis, and if I'm as diligent as I'm capable of -- not that I don't get distracted -- I can have a full draft of a 400-page novel ready in November. It'll require discipline, but I'm steadily becoming more disciplined. My life is largely going to the gym, practicing kung fu and trying to write. I wouldn't mind it if I were even more of a monk at this point, to be honest, but I'm happy with the balance I've struck.

So what about y'all? Drop me a line or leave a comment.

We Finally Caught The Son of a Bitch

2008-07-22T11:27:00.002-04:00

I've been alternately obsessed with and merely very interested in the status of Balkan war criminal fugitives for many years now -- a few readers will remember the old "Is Ante Gotovina a war criminal" dispute I got into with a stray Croat who thought of himself as a patriot. Anyway, for someone like me, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives he ruined, today is sort of like Christmas.

[Radovan] Karadzic, the wartime leader of Bosnian Serbs, was arrested Monday night in a Belgrade suburb, officials said. A judge has ordered his transfer to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, to face genocide charges, war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said.
Karadzic has three days to appeal the ruling. His lawyer, Sveta Vujacic, said he will launch the process to fight extradition on the last day, Friday, to thwart authorities' wishes for his immediate transfer.
Karadzic — a psychiatrist accused of masterminding the deadly wartime siege of Sarajevo and the executions of up to 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, Europe's worst massacre since World War II — had topped the tribunal's most-wanted list for years.

It's excellent news that he's finally been caught, but there are several sort of complicating factors here. The tribunal in The Hague is set to shut its doors fairly soon, which has always been a concern, and Karadzic's military right hand, Ratko Mladic, is still at large. Karadzic made a lot of the war-time decisions to rape this and pillage that, but Mladic carried them out and is no less guilty. It's never been clear, from all that I've read, what the plan is if Karadzic or Mladic happen to be caught without enough time to prepare for a trial.

Another interested facet of this bloody diamond is that no one in their right minds expected Karadzic to be captured first, or even at all. There's been fairly consistent chatter about Mladic being found by some government or other, secret negotiations for his surrender, his family being pressured for information about his location, etc. etc. Karadzic, it's been assumed, has been so well hidden and so far underground somewhere in the former Soviet bloc that he'll never appear. Apparently finding him was an accident that happened because law enforcement was hot on Mladic's trail.

Serbian security services found Karadzic, 63, on Monday while looking for another top war crimes suspect facing genocide charges, Bosnian Serb wartime commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, Ljajic said.
Karadzic "was arrested Monday evening near Belgrade while changing locations," he said. "International pressure was to arrest Mladic, and a few had expected that Karadzic would be captured."

It's never made a lot of sense to me why the focus has always been Mladic, but I don't pretend to understand the ins and outs of international law enforcement. I thought grabbing Hitler would be at least as important as grabbing Rommel, but that just shows why I'm not working at the U.N.

Anyway, why am I so fixated on this? It's easy to forget that once upon a time, the whole world watched as the worst human rights atrocities in Europe since World War II unfolded on television. I was about the age when you first start paying attention to the world, and for me it was a formative experience to realize that there's still horror in every corner of civilization, most of it inflicted by people on other people. The rallying cry of The Hague, which has had a lot of critics for being slow, costly and inefficient, has always been, "Human rights violations do not go unpunished." After years of questions about why so many war criminals have yet to be captured, this is a moment for human rights watchers to savor.

The worst massacre was in Srebrenica in 1995, when Serb troops led by Mladic overran the U.N.-protected enclave sheltering Bosnian Muslims. Mladic's troops rounded up the entire population and took the men away for execution.
By war's end in late 1995, an estimated 250,000 people were dead and another 1.8 million driven from their homes.
Under the U.N. indictment, Karadzic faces 11 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities committed between 1992 to 1996.

If they can catch Mladic in time to try him, maybe the Balkans can talk about joining the EU and a page, for once, can really be turned.

By Popular Demand: Lapp Art

2008-06-23T12:08:00.003-04:00

In response to a groundswell of popular demand, I have decided to provide more photos. Should these prove entertaining to you all, and should the groundswell continue to swell, I may go take some more pictures one day. This is from a trip to Maui several years ago. You want more Africa? You'll have to keep coming back.

Again, Back From The Wilderness

2008-06-21T13:51:00.006-04:00

I sort of don't know what to do with this blog right now. The life I was living when I started it is no longer my life, and keeping people abreast of the inside baseball I was quietly enjoying at my job is no longer a possibility. I don't have the tons of free time I used to have, since I now live with my girlfriend instead of with strangers, and my daily habits are much different than they used to be -- for instance, I don't go sit in cafes and just type for hours at a time.

So, what am I going to do with Lapplander? I'm really not sure. But I'm not shutting it down, and I can't see that being a possibility in the foreseeable future. I like having a blog too much, for one thing, even if it's kind of quiet right now. And updating everyone on my escapades is still something I'd like to be able to do without making a million phone calls; I just need to decide how much of a priority I'm going to make it, and let people know that it's worthwhile to check in here once in a while. I've also considered posting more of my photography, since it's been getting some good notices. To whit: here is a Tanzanian warthog. And here is a very well-composed shot of a pond and some storks. Here is a Zanzibari sunrise. Look around. There's something for everyone.

In personal news, I had a ridiculous few days in Atlantic City this week. I got in on Tuesday, won $350 in a few hours at the poker tables, went to sleep, lost $1250 on Wednesday taking one bad beat drubbing after another, went to sleep, and won $1310 on Thursday, leaving me up $410 for the trip (I tipped the cashier!). I can take the swings. It makes me stronger than oak. Tonight Stephanie and I are going to a poker dinner party where I fully expect to win everyone's money.

Also, I'm about to start looking for another job and also finally about to start writing a novel I concocted while the two of us were traveling around Italy a few weeks ago. More information on these exploits will be forthcoming as they develop.

Hey, World, Look Who's Back Writing A Blog

2008-05-18T12:49:00.004-04:00

I won't even bother to apologize for not having written here sooner. Suffice to say I survived Africa and haven't found anything in the last few months back home that involves as much sun.

Just a quick note for now to say I'll try to be here more often again, and to bring to everyone's attention the consensus Worst Poet In History. The article ends with one of his most famous poems, which is truly a ridiculous piece of work.

And I'm Off

2008-01-09T14:36:00.000-05:00

My last lunch: Three vegetarian burgers (just the patties), a pear and a handful of organic cherry tomatoes. From now on it's Tiger's Milk bars, powdered hydration mix, bottled water and a dash of whatever else I can find. I feel very lucky at this moment -- reading travel books can make it seem as though everyone is seeing the world, but in fact few people ever leave their front porch.

Freedom Of Several Kinds

2007-12-23T12:21:00.001-05:00

This is the first time I've written for this blog since I left my job, and also the first time in six weeks. When I started it in 2005 it was because, more than any other single reason, I wanted people to be able to keep up with what was going on in a new chapter of my life. I used to be quite a phone person, but that's faded since high school and I don't always relish the thought of verbally recounting anecdotes, episodes and impressions just so someone knows what's been keeping me busy. I also have not been very good at writing letters or e-mails, unless some particular reason exists, so the blog was meant as a bulletin board for general day-to-day information for parents, friends and anyone else who was curious what I was up to.

That has changed somewhat, for reasons I haven't really given much thought to until now. I seem to keep up well enough over the phone or in person with most of the people I think want to know what I'm up to, so the blog has morphed mostly into a place for long-form extemporizing, and as such hasn't seen much recent use. I've received lots of compliments to the effect that the blog is well-written, which I'm happy to hear; but I never really know what to write any more, or why to sit down and do it. The events of my life are a fairly open book and I'm always keen to keep the grapevine up to date, but the blog isn't really a factor in that equation any longer. So, what to do with Lapplander?

I still don't really know. If you look back at the archive there was my fairly remarkable exchange about Balkan war crimes with an impassioned visitor who has since moved on, among other memorable moments, but also a lot of news dumps that I no longer am very interested in pursuing. In fact, for now, I'm kind of burned out on journalism. I can't stand talking head TV shows, not the least reason for which is that they're mostly about the insecurities and buffoonish opinions of the people talking rather than what's actually going on in the world. I don't hate newspapers but don't count them as a reliable source of in-depth information. Magazines are fairly predictable and I don't make the time to read them anyway. The events of the world can unfold without my constant attention for a little while, and you don't need me to tell you what's going on -- if you care, you'll find out yourself, and if not, try as I might, I can't make you. So, I still enjoy writing here and I'll continue to do it, but like me, the blog is changing.

So. If moving to Washington opened a chapter in my life, that chapter is either closing or taking a radical turn. When I go back (about which more in a moment) I'll go back a different person than I was when I came, and also than who I thought I'd be at this point when I first made the jump. I expected to be knee-deep in the journalistic-political roundelay after two years in the Big City. I've seen a lot of it up close and it didn't quite grab me the way I had planned. I've never cared about politicians' personal lives, foibles, gaffes, minutiae and plastic surgeries, and if the last two years are any indication, journalism in Washington is about these things at least as much as it's about torture, lying and the Constitution. Editors actually think this stuff is interesting and good fodder for party conversation. Which is fine for them, but it seems to inform a lot of the journalism that gets practiced, in both obvious (read The Politico some time) and subtle ways, and it's not something I want to deal with for the rest of my life. I know you can still be a serious journalist and get things done, but it frightens me to think of spending the next fifteen years wading a minefield of colleagues and higher-ups who think speculating about Barbara Boxer's nip-tuck is funny, revealing and meaningful in some larger sense.

This, in large part, is why I decided to go to Africa. That and the fact that I can afford it. It's time to do something extraordinary, I told myself (a line I find myself repeating when people ask). Before I bought my ticket I thought it would just be fun to take a trip, but in thinking about it I realized I need a fundamental step back from my approach to living as much as I want to see the world when a chance comes my way. This may sound very twenties-ish and melodramatic, but a lot of my assumptions and ambitions have been scrutinized and rebutted in the last two years and I can tell I'm headed somewhere I didn't intend. This is doubly strange for me because I've always prized having direction. I now feel like I don't have as much direction as I frequently give myself credit for. This is a recent phenomenon and I'm glad it's happened now rather than in my mid-thirties when it seems to hit everyone else, if Hollywood is any guide.

Because I'm financially secure -- the greatest gift anyone can give anyone else, other than love, by the way -- I now have the luxury of making certain decisions at my own pace, which has always been, let's say, very fast but not without contemplation. I have to decide what I want to do next professionally. I have to decide whether I just want to be a writer or whether I'm going to start doing it. I also have to choose who I really want to be and why, which for me has to be a conscious choice as much as a natural result of the millions of accident in one's life. I have to make a lot of decisions. I'm not traveling to avoid them, I'm traveling to help me make them. Just so you all are satisfied on that point.

I'll update this again before I leave.

What To Do With All The Brush

2007-11-10T10:34:00.000-05:00

The title has two meanings. I will address them in order.

1) There is some brush to be cleared in terms of mentioning a few episodes I meant to write about much earlier but didn't get around to. The weekend of Oct. 20 will long live in memory for the dinner party Stephanie and I threw, which was a smashing success and deserves even more praise than we've heard from the attendees, which I must tell you has been considerable. The full menu, more or less:

- Salad with a variety of small heirloom tomatoes. I chopped them up into a nice bowl of fall-colored deliciosity with blue cheese and served them with a light dressing. Everyone applauded.

- Hors d'oeuvres including chopped peppers, snap peas, garlic bean dip (like hummus, only different), etc.

- Creamy polenta with fake meatballs for some, turkey balls for others. Everyone applauded.

- Asparagus cooked with parmesan, lemon, salt and pepper on a tray. It nicely complemented the polenta.

- Roasted red and white onions with a dijon vinaigrette.

- Lavender honey ice cream with a lemon yogurt cake that tasted ten thousand times better than it sounds, because it's not just white cake covered in yellow yogurt. It's white cake covered in a lemony white frosting, and the whole thing does what I can only describe as "melting solidly" in your mouth. I wish English had words for what foods do when you eat them, but we have to make do with "melting solidly" and "fills your mouth thinly yet with gusto." Which describes...

- The barrelfuls of wine we drank. Most guests were kind enough to bring a few bottles, but by the end of the night we had to crack into our private stash. One friend who shall remain nameless, to avoid embarrassing him over an unpaid debt, promised drunkenly to buy us more wine to make up for this. It won't happen.

After dinner we played Cranium, which was all Stephanie's idea and went off like firecrackers, especially when it came time for me to draw as quickly as possible. I still don't know what some of those things were supposed to look like.

Anyway, that was the dinner party. I have pictures, but some of them I should really be there to explain, lest anyone get the wrong impression about what that thing is.

The night before the party, I fulfilled a more or less lifelong dream and saw the Mediaeval Baebes. You have every reason in the world to have heard of them, because they are the best thing to happen to music ever. I don't say this about most bands, but I literally cannot imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't discovered them. This is sort of how people felt about Led Zeppelin, so you may understand when I say the concert was like when John Bonham died, except the "Mediaeval Baebes" decided to use a bunch of ringers instead of disband as a unit. I'm glad they still exist, but they're not the band I fell in love with any more. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has left over the last 10 years except Katharine Blake, who founded the group and is sort of indispensable. The lineup is now her and six people I'd never heard of until Stephanie and I showed up at the Institute for Musical Traditions in Silver Spring. They still sound very good, and I shouldn't complain -- it's just the principle of the thing. And there was a weird coda to the evening: during the mid-concert break I bought a t-shirt and their live CD, and after the show was over I got in line to get them signed. Never mind that half the band on the live CD has already been replaced. Anyway, Stephanie was waiting patiently next to me while I trudged through the line -- a line full of, how shall I put it, old people who clearly had no idea who the Mediaeval Baebes were -- and when it came time to hand out my goods, everything went fine until I reached the last few band members at the end of the table, one of whom (I couldn't tell you which, because who are these people?) eyed me up and down, apparently liked what she saw, and said "Are you two related?"

Now, I can't prove that she said this out of optimistic romantic interest instead of a sheer lack of common sense. I thought I caught a twinkle in her eye. I don't really know. Part of their schtick is to be flirty, and I was the only visible guy within 20 years of any of them, so she might have just blurted something out because her brain had a sudden rush of blood. Anyway, it was the PERFECT opportunity to come up with some kind of witty retort. After the fact, I thought of several, including kissing Stephanie and saying "You wish" or something like that. But because I was not expecting to have to say something clever, and I was still singing one of the last songs over in my head, I was caught up very, very short. In the event, I said, "Are we related? No, we're not related." I could have left well enough alone. But I followed up that zinger with, "What a flattering question. Are you related?"

What the hell was I talking about? You tell me. If Jimmy Page had asked you and your boyfriend if you were related, what would you have said? "No, he's my lover, but you should come over later and look at our record collection." The most intriguing answer, to my mind, is "Why do you ask, Mr. Page?" But I was a little too flat-footed to come up with anything. I found myself wondering, even floating in this weird, socially awkward void that smelled faintly of the geriatric, whether one of the original band members would have said this, or if the replacement killer was just accidentally an airhead. Anyway, one of the other girls looked at me and said, playing her band member character to perfection, "Yes, unfortunately. Karmically." So the band is held together with costumes and some unfortunate karmic glue. As Steph and I began to move on from the table, the original instigator lost track of whether she was signing my CD or someone else's and we had to go through a little pantomime of "Oh, is this yours?" "I'm not sure." "I think this is it, ha ha." One of the other girls, now involving one whole end of the table, turned to her and said "Did you ask if they're related? Why would you say that?" This carried on, I can't remember the exact order of events but you get the idea, for a few more seconds and we walked out (into the rain, I might add) never to get those few precious moments back.

Afterward, as I said, I was kicking myself for not reacting better, but what do you expect when you've been listening to your favorite songs all night and aren't in the right frame of mind for a game of Words? Anyway, if you're reading this, I have determined that you were Bev Lee Harling. I am open to suggestions for how to make matters right between us.

2) Before too much longer I'm going to do more in the brush than just clear it, because I am going to Africa and you are not. My aforementioned departure from my job will now, since I rather impulsively bought an online ticket, be followed up by two months in L'Afrique -- which if I were a white rapper I would find a way to refer to as The Freak -- from January to March. I don't have any set itinerary, but more details on this front will become available here as I make my plans. In the meantime, feel free to tell me I'm going to be the victim of crimes. I've traveled plenty already and I'm not afraid of you.

How DID Sherlock Holmes Kick Ass, Anyway?

2007-10-12T23:51:00.000-04:00

The debate has finally been settled.

Jesus Christ, Where Have I Been All This Time?

2007-10-12T22:26:00.000-04:00

No, no, I'm not dead. It's just that things have been moving very fast lately, and I haven't made time to do a lot of things that men of leisure get to do. I have not been smoking my pipe or enjoying my usual snifters of pre-war cognac. I have not told my diary about the long fishing jags with Papa Hemingway. I have not even written a novel. I have been careening from one thing to the next without taking what The Onion once so memorably called, speaking of George Bush's (probably real) request, "just a goddamn minute, you know?"

So, to sum up: I have announced to all and sundry that I am leaving my job in December. Some of you know this, most of you don't. I have filled my head with visions of what I will do when I get out, which is exactly the correct turn of phrase. (I told one ex-colleague who asked what prompted my leaving that I don't want to become a barnacle and that it's time to try new things. This is essentially true, but polite.) I have been covering the federal government and environmental policy from what amounts to an offal-ridden foxhole for two years now, and it's time to breathe the fresh air again. I intend to see my family around Christmas and to travel, and then we'll see what I've managed to line up in the way of a triumphant return. I have my heart set on nothing in particular, other than hopefully a gig with one of the congressional oversight committees. Believe it or not, my experience is perfect for that kind of thing. I have been looking around for contacts and have several irons in the fire. More on this as it develops.

A brief final note here: At some point in the nearish future, it may be possible to print a few of the more colorful anecdotes from my time at my current position. Until then, those will have to wait for what I think are obvious reasons, especially my desire to stay on good terms with my employers (who after all have paid me to do a job I always found pretty easy to do well). There will be no further mention of my current career, unless it's discussing the relative merits of my professional photography exhibition. Which does (note the singular) not exist.

Furthermore, I have been studying a variety of kung fu every Wednesday after work, which used to be the slowest day of the week for some reason, especially after hours, but is now all Hung Gar, all the time. I will provide the lineage of my teachers etc. upon private request, especially if someone is working on a biography or something. We meet in a park near my office for an hour once a week (yes, ha ha ha), after which I am to go home and practice what I've learned so I'm not the same rank amateur every time he sees me. I can report that whatever you think about having strong legs is a load of butter-flavored crap, because he has strong legs and I don't. He has this amazing trick of making it look like he's sitting on a low stool, but there's no stool in sight. It's just his quadriceps holding him up like some sort of ass-kicking mime. And you should see him work out his shins (during my favorite part of the evening, "bone conditioning") on the cement lamp post. That baby rocks and rolls like the Titanic hitting its last iceberg. Come by some time and I'll show you where he accidentally tickled my nerve during two-man arm strength drills. Suffice to say I am having a lot of real fun so far. It's different than the Hwa Rang Do I studied in college, particularly in emphasizing basics before you move any further (whereas HRD, at least what I learned -- and this from a black belt I liked very much -- sort of taught you the scrub version of everything first and only later served the real meat). One day I may actually be able to defend myself from those guys who mugged me back in middle school. Man, that was weird.

I've made a point of keeping in touch with all my old friends, some of whom have recently moved to New York City, where I spent a few good days last weekend (getting Columbus Day off reminded me of third grade). My friend Paul and I spent a lot of time wandering around Manhattan not really sure what to do -- he's going to Sarah Lawrence, which if you'll recall was an all-girls school for a very, very long time and is out in the countryside -- and among other things came very close to the International Center of Photography without knowing where it was or what we could expect if we found it. Just seeing the posters with that famous picture of Robert Capa holding a movie camera was exciting enough, although now I really am kicking myself because I started reading his biography just this morning and remembered what an interesting guy he was. If you don't know who I'm talking about, that's because you're not a dilettante like I am. Funnily enough, I bought the biography (a snappy affair written by Alex Kershaw) on a previous trip to NYC in a fantastic bookstore I'll probably never find again, where I also bought a coffee table book full of reproductions of the first pages of a bunch of French manuscripts. I still don't ever want to live there, but it sort of makes you think sometimes.

Anyway, I'd like to give a shout out to my people on the block. You know who you are. Brooklyn represent. Etc. etc. etc.

Back in the Cap, which is what I just now started calling DC, Stephanie and I have been having occasional dinner parties as a way to be more sophisticated and fun and because we both are starting to like cooking good food. The next one is going to be a real set piece with more guests than usual. You are all invited. It's the night of the 20th. I'll understand if not everyone makes it. But there will be squash fritters and I don't even know what else yet. The menu is in flux; but one thing I can certainly vouch for is the decor. I found some old Mao posters. I'm saying no more until the curtain drops.

In and out of the Cap, particularly in New York, I have been engaged in a furiously paced reading contest with Stephanie for some time now, which has been one of the major reasons I haven't written a damn thing outside the office for a long time. The premise, which I have probably described here before but am going to repeat now: she has to read all seven Harry Potter books before I read seven books of my choosing, of roughly the same overall length give or take whatever. Everyone, and I mean everyone, predicted a rout in her favor. "I don't know, they're all pretty short," you said to me. "They're deceptively short pages," you told me. "You cannot win. You will lose." All of which is true, except that at 1:31 EDT last Sunday I proved the haters wrong when I closed the book, so to speak, on The Return of the King and called to announce my victory. It was that much sweeter because the bitter tears and wretched cries of the doubters rang clear as a bell to the four corners of the Earth at that moment. Remember all of this when you next tell me I cannot do something faster than someone else. Sit lower, that's another story. But I do things very fast.

The list, in order (of reading, not literary merit, which I leave to you):

1. The Merry Month of May by James Jones
2. Dune by Frank Herbert
3. New Spring by Robert Jordan (who very recently died, leaving his massive series unfinished)
4. Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend by Michael Dregni (a biography of Django Reinhardt)
5-7. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

It was never a particularly hard slog, because the books were all stuff I'd wanted to read for one reason or another, but you can probably tell there's not coherent theme, and I forbade myself to read any other books until this race was wrapped up one way or another, so I've had a head full of bizarre and disjointed themes and characters for a while now. (With the exception of the last three, which were better than expected except at the very end, which keeps ending every few pages only to not end yet again.) I don't want to overstate this too much, but you try reading seven books grabbed on the fly one more or less right after the other and then tell me what you learned. Journalism probably helped keep away the worst excesses of this, because policy covererage is the exact, manichaen opposite of imagination.

Stephanie has been at a classical quartet concert most of the night. I would have had to pay, so I came home. I should sign off for now. A last thought: wake up early once in a while. Don't overextend it, but this is among the keys to happiness.

Also next time I'll tell you all about the good wine I've been drinking lately.

From The Wilderness of the Hot Jazz Underground

2007-09-09T12:46:00.000-04:00

I promise to write a lengthier post soon, but in the meantime I was getting worried they'd cancel my account unless I at least twitched a little and breathed out a slight groan to let them know I'm still alive. I have been immersed in a biography of Django Reinhardt, which I finished this morning before a sumptuous pancake breakfast -- it's hard not to read about him and just put the book down to listen to one of his records. I bought a new load of music yesterday, including two Djangos, while Stephanie and I went on a shopping spree (my first in months or years, I forget which), and the day culminated in an impromptu wine and cheese plate evening in the living room watching the new Miami Vice movie, which is impossible to describe without sounding like an idiot. ("Never mind the plot, look at the COLORS! Listen to the MUSIC!")

All in all things have been good lately. Steph and I went to Boston for Labor Day and took a few extra days off to stay with our friends, one of whom -- my genius best friend from middle school -- is at Harvard trying to make motor fuel out of yeast cultures. The fact that he isn't drummed out of the Ivy League for practicing alchemy is an indication of how far our culture has fallen. I'll sum up this trip in a future post.

I'm taking classes in a style of kung fu from southern China called Hung Gar. I'll spare you the detailed history -- all of which is available in various degrees of accuracy on Ted Stevens' series of tubes -- but suffice to say I'll eventually learn how to fight like a tiger, a crane, a dragon, a sloth and a hedgehog. Two of those are fake; I'll let you puzzle out which. My classes are with a private instructor once a week for an hour at the park near work, where I am frequently bitten by mosquitos and end up sweating like a pig in heat. More on this as it develops. Suffice to say it feels good to be studying martial arts again, after my abortive attempt to find a Hwa Rang Do teacher in DC who turned out to have moved away or never existed.

My next reading project is the Lord of the Rings trilogy, straight through. I will bring you up to date, gentle reader, when I feel the time is right. Until then, stay warm and healthy and drink plenty of tea. If you can't find any, do NOT just boil some roots and put them in a pot. The effect is lost in translation somehow.

The Difference Between Falling Asleep and Dancing a Jig

2007-08-15T08:45:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning, Stephanie and I were about to leave the house to have breakfast in DC by ourselves when our friend John called. He was at the Best Buy down the street shopping for (you guessed it) all three extended Fellowship of the Ring movies and thought he could pick us up. So we piled in his car and headed straight into disaster.

We went to Cafe Saint Ex, which has nice outdoor seating and a weird tendency to kick up a lot of wind whenever I eat there. We sat outside and were having a good time and I thought it was a good sign when the wind rather mightily appeared on what was probably the calmest, mildest days in weeks. Perhaps in retrospect I was wrong. Anyway, we had two pitchers of mimosas. I think John was flirting with the waitress.

From there, we thought it would be fun, in this order, to: go wine shopping; buy five bottles, including a $35 bottle of Tokay, which has become one of my favorite vices; go back to John's place to drink it; decide we needed fancy cheeses to go with all this wine; go to the street market and buy three different large cheese hunks and some grapes; go back to John's and lay everything out; and then watch The Fellowship of the Ring (looong version) while we drank wine and ate cheese and felt very proud of ourselves.

I'm not sure at what scene I lost consciousness -- I think Orlando Bloom had just shot some orc through the eyes from an impossible distance -- but I passed out. I can't say I fell asleep; I passed the eff out. My body could not take any more wine and cheese. I woke up half an hour later, with the ending credits rolling, with a terrific headache, wondering why all the wine was gone. (In our defense, two bottles had been stored away for safekeeping; naturally we will never see them again.) What did I learn? Apparently I have a lower tolerance for the good life than I thought. We spent most of the afternoon agreeing that this is exactly how French peasants spend their lunch hours, and kind of half-believing ourselves (I've never met any, and not for lack of trying), but at the end of the day it didn't really matter because I simply cannot do that again for a while. It was a lot of cheese. And we ate it on slices of a large baguette. We should have at least had some tomato or something to cut the sheer cheese of it all.

And speaking of fun, last night Stephanie and I went to see the Young Dubliners at the Birchmere. It's kind of hard to briefly explain them without referencing other bands you also probably don't listen to: maybe a cross between Flogging Molly and Ashley MacIsaac. I only own their most recent album, which is really good, so I didn't know what else to expect, but I recognized about two-thirds of the set, and the rest (minus one or two mediocre songs) was just as fun, including an unexpected sort of free-form jazz odyssey they launched into near the end replete with a Braveheart riff from a guy sitting in his chair holding the Irish bagpipe. If you like really upbeat Irish rock and a large sasquatch playing the fiddle as though his life depended on it, you should catch their show.

Human Rights Abuses Make Great Dinner Theater

2007-07-22T01:57:00.000-04:00

Stephanie was at a party tonight, so I went to dinner with a friend at Busboys & Poets near U Street. I don't know if you've ever been, those of you that live here -- it's a restaurant and bookstore with a bar and a screening room and a lounge etc. etc. Sort of a throwback all-purpose hangout spot, with a heavy dose of lefty politics sort of floating vaguely in the air. They show documentaries, host poetry nights, have guest speakers and book lectures; anyway, you get the idea. My friend and I didn't know it, but when we came for dinner we got seated in the Langston Room (three guesses which Langston they're talking about) and they were gearing up for the regularly scheduled 11:00 p.m. Saturday movie series, which on this occasion was a few documentaries about the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is the former Zaire that Mobutu Sese Seko used as a piggy bank and essentially flushed down the toilet when he was finished.

If you don't know what's going on there today -- well, not to trivialize suffering anywhere, but Darfur is like a street fight compared to the DRC's Holocaust. Between 3 and 4 million people have died in the last six years, almost all innocent civilians, and the women that do survive have been raped and abducted on a regular basis, including girls and women as old as 80. This is because of persistent superstitions that having sex with the very young or very old give men special powers. Just read that sentence again.

If I sound like I'm reading from an activist's notebook, it's because it made an impression. I'd heard about the fighting in the DRC before, but never in much detail, so a lot of it was freshly shocking even as I drank my hot chocolate and ate my bread pudding. (The restaurant continued serving.) My friend and I left feeling kind of terrible, and more than a little bewildered that no one does or says anything about this. The sheer scale of the fighting makes you wonder at the conspiracy of silence. The death toll is, as one of the films described it, "an Asian tsunami every six months." Stretch that out over six years, and keep the world in the dark about it, and you have some idea what these people have been through.

The fighting is mostly about controlling land with lots of valuable natural resources, including minerals that you'll find in your cell phone and computer. A quick, quick primer is here, with much more useful information widely available. I have to say, when you hear about something like this and don't do anything about it you've really got to slap yourself in the face. If you only ever donate or volunteer for a single humanitarian cause, make this your choice. The country could be stable and prosperous if a few relatively straightforward steps were taken, including sanctioning companies that do business with rebel groups for their own profit. A report on this is available here, and is by no means the only one of its kind.

When American corporations prop up militias who literally kill civilians to control gold mines, you have to wonder who's letting them get away with it.

P.S. - See this article for more on why "genocide scholars" (I shudder to think what their conventions are like) are pessimistic about the future, especially with regard to international law. Darfur is mentioned prominently. You won't read anything about the DRC.

Supreme Court Chief Justice: Unpopular Even With Other Conservatives Now

2007-07-15T21:40:00.001-04:00

This is an about-face, or at least unexpected. (But not underreported. For instance, see my own brilliant summation of the relevant case here.)

Signing onto a Roberts decision that helps gut the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, Scalia scolded the chief justice [John Roberts] for effectively overturning an earlier ruling without owning up to it. "This faux judicial restraint is judicial obfuscation," Scalia protested.

Nowhere does Scalia's critique of Roberts's style apply more forcefully than with regard to the Court's recent ruling in Parents Involved v. Seattle. Roberts's plurality opinion in the high-profile desegregation case elbows aside some 50 years of precedent while affecting a posture of doe-eyed innocence. If the phrase "What, little ole me?" doesn't appear anywhere in the text, that's only because it wasn't necessary. It is implied in practically every word.

[...]

At heart, Roberts's opinion is an assault on Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 desegregation case, masquerading as an attempt to redeem it. Under its mainstream interpretation, Brown required school boards to actively integrate themselves, rather than merely abolish rules that prevented black students from attending white schools. In Roberts's view, however, the problem with the pre-Brown regime wasn't racial isolation per se, merely that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin." To appreciate how significant a reinterpretation this is, ask yourself the following: If, post-Brown, a school board in Alabama had ended formal segregation while nonetheless preventing black students from attending white schools--say, by barring children from predominantly black neighborhoods from enrolling--would the Court have been satisfied? Of course not. (In fact, the Court more or less said as much in 1968, after Southern segregationists pursued a variation on this strategy.) But such efforts would have been consistent with Roberts's reading of the decision.

I doubt this means Scalia is going to start a whispering campaign about Roberts' taste in womens' clothes, but you don't see something like this every day on the Supreme Court from supposed political and ideological allies.

Uh Oh, He Got Into The News Again

2007-07-11T08:21:00.000-04:00

A few choice tidbits from around the globe:

750,000 Die Every Year From Chinese Pollution

If you think this country is polluted, and parts of it still really are, consider how much worse it could be.

Beijing engineered the removal of nearly a third of a World Bank report on pollution in China because of concerns that findings on premature deaths could provoke “social unrest”.

The report, produced in co-operation with Chinese government ministries over several years, found about 750,000 people die prematurely in China each year, mainly from air pollution in large cities.

China’s State Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) and health ministry asked the World Bank to cut the calculations of premature deaths from the report when a draft was finished last year, according to Bank advisers and Chinese officials.

Advisers to the research team said ministries told them this information, including a detailed map showing which parts of the country suffered the most deaths, was too sensitive.

China is trying to improve its image in the West, in part because no one wants another Cold War over oil rights, and things like this just don't help.

The Chamber of Commerce Owns The Supreme Court

They even brag about it. This is a June 2007 press release.

The National Chamber Litigation Center (NCLC), the legal arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ended the Supreme Court term with a record number of victories in cases critical to the business community.

"This year's record of 13 victories is an all-time high for our Supreme Court practice," said Robin Conrad, NCLC executive vice president. "We've been representing the business community before the Supreme Court for 30 years, and
this is our strongest showing since the inception of NCLC."

[...]

"In case after case, the Court this term understood the business community's need for clarity and predictability in the law," Conrad stated. "The Litigation Center will continue to press these concerns in the Supreme Court and in the lower courts."

What else does the Chamber of Commerce believe in (besides lobbying like crazy)? Go and find out for yourself.

White House "Unsure" if Libby Got Special Treatment

They're very up front about their confusion. You really need to read this whole link.

It wasn't a trick question: should Americans lie to the FBI during a criminal investigation? Apparently, Bush doesn't have an opinion on the matter.

Shortly thereafter, a reporter asked Tony Snow during a press briefing, "If there are more than 3,000 current petitions for commutation -- not pardons, but commutation -- in the federal system, under President Bush, will all 3,000 of those be held to the same standard that the president applied to Scooter Libby?"

Snow replied, "I don't know."

In other words, the White House press secretary isn't sure whether there's one standard of criminal justice for the president's friends, and another for everyone else. Maybe he can find out and get back to us? I'm sure there are thousands of American convicts and their families who would love to know why the White House no longer believes we're all equal under the law.

Kind of speaks for itself. I hope this information takes on a life beyond the blogosphere.

Anyway, more as the world turns.

Where I will be spending the Fourth of July

2007-07-03T20:14:00.000-04:00

From the department of, "you said it, I didn't."

2007-07-02T14:23:00.000-04:00

"I'm more of a man than any liberal."

ANN COULTER
talking with Bill O'Reilly on his Fox show about her aggressive stance toward politicians like John Edwards

Update -- the link no longer works. She really did say that, though.

Elections Have Consequences, Supreme Court-Style

2007-06-29T02:10:00.000-04:00

Charvakan has always been of the opinion that the Supreme Court, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't really matter all that much. "Let them overturn Roe v. Wade," he's said. "The Republicans would run out of issues and the Democrats would win in a landslide." That may be true on the merits or not, but the question of the Supreme Court's importance is a separate matter. It literally makes or breaks the law. The idea that the makeup of the court isn't important is like thinking it doesn't matter if you have a blind umpire working the World Series. Even if Congress is swinging a hot bat, all it takes is a few dumb calls to ruin the whole thing.

To whit, among other decisions: the recent call on affirmative action in schools. I'm not a scholar on the issue by any means, and I can't speak knowingly about the legal and historial precedents at work here. But the result is objectively reactionary and regressive -- essentially returning us to a time before Brown v. Board of Education -- and it's no coincidence that the 5-4 vote came with the help of Bush's two Supreme Court picks. The Washington Monthly blog points out that of the recent spate of rulings (all 5-4, all conservative victories), Roberts has written three opinions and Alito the other two. And in a bit of understatement, it calls the rulings "one of those elections-have-consequences moments."

A Case of Emotion

2007-06-24T22:51:00.000-04:00

I don't know how many of you saw "Anchorman," but the title of this post is not really used in the same sense as Will Ferrell's "glass case of emotion" line. I just kind of like the symmetry, is all.

Anyway, two Friday nights ago now, the 15th, I had an existential episode I thought I'd share. I'm not sure why I haven't updated the blog much lately, other than a general lack of extraordinary things to say. Waiting to find out if the Washington Monthly has made its decision isn't a very deep well of anecdote. However, all the same occasionally something interesting happens to all of us, and this story is replete with different characters and an epiphany. It did unfortunately stem from booze. It was very real all the same.

Here is the gist: Stephanie was out with some friends from work that night while I was separately at a friend from work's house for dinner. Stephanie et al were having a "staff retreat" that was really an excuse for the bigwigs to pick up a three-day bar tab. In the end I'm not sure it even brought anyone closer together, at least not to upper management, although it sounded like fun. Anyway, I was over at a friend's watching The Big Easy, probably one of the best bad movies ever made, and eating Cajun food for effect (and because, at least at The New Orleans Cafe in Adams Morgan, it is delicious), and working my way through a bottle of $20 French wine I had originally bought for three, thinking Steph would be arriving shortly and my friend would be interested. As is sometimes the case, I had to improvise by drinking it all myself because... we'll call him Al. Al wasn't interested and Stephanie was nowhere to be found. So I drank it all myself. It went down with my jambalaya very nicely.

After the movie ended and Stephanie remained indisposed at a cocktail lounge somewhere, I was unceremoniously shown the door and left to my own devices. This will mean less to some than to others, but I walked from 17th and U St. to Dupont Circle -- here is a decent map -- to wander the aisles at Kramerbooks while I waited for Stephanie's head to clear and for her to call me again. I was a little disoriented all the way there, which ended up being a longer route than necessary, for one thing (see how I didn't need to go all the way to Massachussetts?) , and yet seemed not to take any time at all. When I arrived, I kept dropping things, especially books and once my cell phone, but I mostly sat down and behaved myself and pretended to be considering some children's book about elephants while I waited waited waited for my drunk missing girlfriend to let me know what was up. I eventually gave up on this plan when it became obvious it wasn't working and headed for the actual circle, which has a large fountain in the middle and a lot of picnic tables where patzers play chess, sometimes well into the evening. I have played there myself. My record is an even .500, but that's another story.

Imagine a fountain, at night, while you're somewhat drunk, with dark figures sitting here and there on the rim or on benches nearby, and then lie down on your back on the rim yourself and try to clear your head by letting the fountain splash you. Add a thirtyish black woman with a good, plaintive singing voice sitting at your feet with a guitar sharing her sad love songs. Then a teenage couple at your head murmuring to each other. Then try to figure out how you got there in the first place, why you went to that bookstore, why you left, where your girlfriend could be and what time it is. But then don't really bother with any of that and notice that single star you can see through the clouds. Kind of let the singing and the darkness and the sound of the water fill up your head. Keep looking at the star and suddenly feel, for no particular reason, that you haven't really cried, not for any reason, in maybe five years. You kind of start to wonder about that, and then your mind drifts to all the other stars out there, and because you're not entirely in control of your thoughts, and the night sky is on your mind, your head starts running wild with visions of what's going on in the universe: galaxies literally colliding with each other, huge gaseous clouds drifting through forgotten solar systems, stars exploding at the very moment you're looking up into the sky that we won't know about for thousands of years. And then, in a second bizarre mental leap, jump to thinking about how small and ridiculous -- how really, truly small and comically (that's comically) unimportant -- you are in the scope of all of that, in the length and breadth of infinite creation, in a cosmos of impossible and ever-growing size, a borderless expanse of black holes and time-bending supernovas and giant comets tailing through space so far away we will never see them. Let that sink in while you're not really in control of your faculties.

Then, to put you over the edge, in a further leap of mental gymnastics, think about all the poor and wretched people on this planet who -- your mind tells you in a strange moment of clarity -- do not ever think this way because they cannot or do not have the luxury or have not been told how. People whose needs could so easily be met if things worked differently.

Then the woman's singing, at the most felicitous moment, reaches a point where you cannot hold back your crying any longer. Although you are not in any formal sense religious, you cannot help but feel you have seen through to something that you know will not last. You are moved beyond your capacity to rationalize: you put your hands together, because your brain is reacting purely on impulse, and you cry and cry and say "Oh god, oh god, oh god," over and over. You realize, somewhere in the remaining conscious, clear-headed portion of your brain, that you look to everyone like you are on drugs or are at least suffering from withdrawal, probably from some exotic toad serum. But because the feeling persists that you've hit the cosmic nail on the head, and because you don't really care about anything else, you keep crying and muttering for five minutes. Maybe six. It's not an epic, drawn-out affair. But it lasts as long as it needs to.

Then, when you've collected yourself, you wonder what happened and whether it will happen again. You want to tell your girlfriend about it. But when you catch up with her, a scant ten minutes after you've composed yourself, she is too drunk and giddy to understand your story. So you go home and sleep it off.

In the morning, somehow, everything has returned to normal and for a while you feel disappointed. But you realize, if you lived every moment of every day thinking about the size of the universe, you'd be committed to a mental hospital.

photo dump

2007-06-12T20:18:00.000-04:00

These are just from around the yard. Bigger pics would just show how much work I have to do.

See the bee? If not, click on the pic to get a bigger version.

Hobart Smith

2007-06-08T01:40:00.001-04:00

I have a confession to make -- I am a passionate aficionado of roots music, and as such I think all music aficionados should be aware of (and should appreciate) Hobart Smith. He was one of the great old time fiddlers, and it's hard to appreciate his virtuosity (or his contribution to music) without hearing him.

Have fun, and look for more of his stuff.

Anyone not following this scandal

2007-06-07T21:54:00.000-04:00

Is missing the true depravity of the current administration. The extent to which the current administration is willing to use its prosecutorial power to advance its political ends is unrivaled by any U.S. administration in the past 100 years, and possibly ever. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (and his crack staff) have all the details, and it would be presumptious (not to mention duplicative) for me to repeat it.

Latest details here.

Where The Eff Has Lapplander Been?

2007-06-02T09:55:00.000-04:00

I often e-mail myself links to stories that I want to subsequently post on the blog, but my mailbox is now so full of so many outdated little nuggets that I'm going to scrap the whole enterprise for now and just tell a few stories that may or may not make you grin. You have no idea what a relief this is.

To begin: The Washington Monthly, where I had a stint as a proofreader when I first got to town, is hiring a new staff reporter/editor and I am applying. I already called one of the people I "know" there -- the one who sort of brought me on board in the first place -- and I hope to have some exciting news soon. Of course there are no guarantees, but I can't help thinking it must help a LITTLE that they all know me already.

To continue: Pirates of the Caribbean is a huge mess, as you've probably heard by now. What isn't a mess, and what you must see if you get the chance, is Once, a very well-told story about a street musician in Dublin making friends with a girl who hears him playing and what happens in their lives, especially him trying to better himself and her trying to help him. It's one of those things you can't explain succinctly without cliches, but I remember one review saying it "will reinvent the movie musical genre," which would be the truth if only more people would pay attention. All the music in the movie is part of the story and is blended seamlessly in with what is happening. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.

Also surprisingly good is Knocked Up, which I invite you to learn more about at your leisure. Every fear you could fear about it being crass or trite -- all wrong.

Moving further: I've been writing scripts for a sitcom my friend and I are trying to develop the last several months. This has taken up many of my weekends. Unfortunately, I have it from a trusted critic that my plots have lacked a little needed structure. I haven't decided what to do with this, at least not entirely, but I think the scripts might go on the back burner for a while. I've been thinking and thinking I should start a new novel I've been planning. If there's anything you should do when you hear your plots are too loose, it's start a much bigger project with more plots to handle. There's no time like the present, right? It's not like I can go to plot camp and come back ready for battle. If someone told Hemingway his plots were loose, he probably would have slugged a whiskey, shot an elephant and written The Sun Also Rises just to prove them wrong. We are very different people, Hemingway and I, and The Sun Also Rises has a very loose plot, but I can at least tangentially learn from his mythical example. I will not discuss this novel of mine unless it goes well. Then you might hear a few hints. I've always wanted to be a writer, as many of you probably know, and I've tried a few times before (in college, when most people just are not ready to write a novel), so I feel good about this new project. A lot of the spadework has already been done in my head.

An aside: My new yet older-model camera is working fantastically. There were several weekends when it ruined my and Stephanie's day because it would jam or something, and then I'd get hot with it, and then I'd be in a sour mood because it kept happening for no apparent reason and I like taking pictures. Anyway, that's all over now. It's a film camera, so don't expect a ton of photoblogging, but maybe there's a way to transfer a particularly good roll to CD or something. I'd like to be able to share a few that I think are especially good. I don't think DC has its official photo chronicler yet. Maybe I could step into those shoes.

Further along: Tomorrow my friends and I are planning to go to a wine tasting out in the countryside. Twenty dollars all you can "taste." More after that develops.

And at the moment: Stephanie volunteered for an event at work this morning, so I'm here in the room listening to new music. Please see these lyrics and set them to an upbeat Irish rock setting to have some idea of what my mind is reeling from.

Look, I spared you any mention of current events! You might not be so lucky next time...

Memorial Day Cat Blogging

2007-05-28T22:43:00.001-04:00

My friend Lauren's bengal, Dr. Zaius, in the garden.

Jerry Falwell -- RIP

2007-05-15T15:30:00.001-04:00

Conceive in The Summer, Get a Dumb Kid; or, Why My Job Is Alarming

2007-05-09T08:21:00.000-04:00

You'd be forgiven for thinking a news story about how the season a child was conceived is linked to intelligence is a bunch of crump, as JW so memorably called the ethanol study I linked to. But that would only be because you couldn't possibly guess the scientific reason it's probably accurate: pesticide spraying.

When researchers linked standardized test scores of 1,667,391 Indiana students in grades 3 through 10 with the month in which each student had been conceived, they found that children conceived May through August scored significantly lower on math and language tests than children conceived during other months of the year.

The correlation between test scores and conception season held regardless of race, gender, and grade level.

Why might this be? According to Dr. Paul Winchester of Indiana University School of Medicine who led the study, says the evidence points to environmental pesticides, used most often in the summer months, as a possible player.

The lower test scores correlated with higher levels of pesticides and nitrates in the surface water (nearby streams and other bodies of water) during that same time period, he told Reuters Health.

Haunted Manuscripts! The United Nations! The Future of The Novel!

2007-05-08T20:30:00.000-04:00

I'm going through an active patch in my free time, so I haven't set aside a good chunk for the old blogorino in a while. Until I finish another book -- although I can't recommend Christopher Isherwood's "The Berlin Stories" highly enough, which I read in the evenings to get through a conference in a strange city -- I might not be able to tell you about any deep feelings or whatever they're called, but I can tell you what's going on in the world. You know what to do.

U.N. Says Biofuels Will Probably Hurt People

This comes on the heels of my other recent post about ethanol, which is a pig in a poke no matter what anyone tells you.

Biofuels like ethanol can help reduce global warming and create jobs for the rural poor, but the benefits may be offset by serious environmental problems and increased food prices for the hungry, the U.N. said Tuesday in its first major report on bioenergy.

[...]

The report said bioenergy represents an "extraordinary opportunity" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But it warned that "rapid growth in liquid biofuel production will make substantial demands on the world's land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly."

Changes in the carbon content of soils and carbon stocks in forests and peat lands might offset some or all of the benefits of the greenhouse gas reductions, it said.

"Use of large-scale monocropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion and nutrient leaching," it said, adding that investments in bioenergy must be managed carefully, at national, regional and local levels to avoid new environmental and social problems "some of which could have irreversible consequences."

It noted that soaring palm oil demand has already led to the clearing of tropical forests in southeast Asia.

John Steinbeck Manuscript Found in Dumpy Little Closet

I predicted this in a fever dream several months ago after drinking a bottle of champagne and eating a bar of soap. Ask around.

A handwritten draft of John Steinbeck's novel "Sweet Thursday," along with an unpublished story and other works, will be auctioned by a writer who says they were sitting in a closet for 50 years.

[...]

Eisenberg found a 188-page manuscript of "Sweet Thursday," the sequel to Steinbeck's famous "Cannery Row"; a manuscript from another book, "The Log from
the Sea of Cortez"; an unpublished story, "If This Be Treason," set during the McCarthy era; the unfinished draft of a musical comedy called "The Bear Flag Cafe" and carbon copies of 13 Steinbeck letters from 1953.

The collection will be auctioned May 24 in San Francisco in two lots. The auction could generate more than $500,000.

The Novel Is Headed For Oblivion, But Is Better Than TV

This essay is the kind of thing I read all the time, which is why my head is manured with ideas about art and literature rather than pop culture trivia that would probably make for better conversation.

In our Man Booker Prize judging for 2006, however carefully we analyzed our books, however good we agreed our preferred choices were (and we could easily have had a long list of thirty rather than nineteen novels), in the end our arguments came down to matters of taste. The most hotly debated novels on our list (for instance by Nadine Gordimer, Barry Unsworth, Howard Jacobson, Andrew O'Hagan, and Edward St. Aubyn) divided us, finally, not because of objective aesthetic judgements, but because some of us disliked the moral atmosphere of the books, or found them claustrophobic or overinsistent, or were unable to enjoy a particular style of historical recreation, or were irritated by the narrative voice. And there is no accounting for boredom. The critic Jonathan Zwicker writes, in Moretti's collection, of a marginal note scribbled by an anonymous Japanese reader in a 1908 library copy of Tolstoy's newly translated Kreutzer Sonata, whose title in translation was "Chôkon," meaning "long resentment." The marginal note read: "A boring book. Where is the long resentment? The resentment is in having read the book. There is no value in its being translated."

That early-twentieth-century Japanese reader of Tolstoy, just like any judging panel or reading group today, shows that coming to conclusions about the novel is as impure a process as writing one. Indeed that is one of the few aspects of the novel generally agreed on in all these books. "The novel thrives on the impurity of its forms." "Novel writing is not pure." Impurity makes categorization and classification difficult. Yet this is one of the favorite activities of commentators on the novel, at every level. Bookstores organize themselves by genre (Sutherland lists some examples of current British "genres within genres" as "chicklit, ladlit, weepies, creepies, shopping and fucking, docuthrillers.") Reviewers will often reach quickly for typecasting—magical realist, Jamesian, Faulknerian. (It's a mark of fame when an author's surname turns into a genre—Rushdiesque—and of neglect when that usage begins to fade away. You don't hear many writers being referred to now as "Murdochian.") Jacket-copy writers love nothing so much as summing up a new book with a reassuring cliché and placing it in its stable. Reading the formulaic publicity apparatus that came with the Booker-submitted novels, I lost count of the number of times I encountered the "X meets Y" formula, as in "Ian McEwan meets John le Carré" or "Roddy Doyle meets Angela Carter."

Mitt Romney, Torn Between Two Cults

As long as you count Scientology as a cult.

Did Mitt Romney really declare L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth his favorite novel? Apparently he did.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Iraq

But first, a banana souffle to the first one who tells me where I got the wording of this headline.

This post from the good people at Talking Points Memo, who consistently do some of the best journalism and reportage around, lays out exactly what we need to remember when we're thinking about the state of Iraq. It's nice to be reminded of all the dots and how they connect. To whit (although there's a lot more):

With Harry Reid's controversial 'war is lost' quote and with various other pols weighing in on whether we can 'win' or whether it's 'lost', it's a good time to consider what the hell we're actually talking about. Frankly, the whole question is stupid. Or at least it's a very stilted way of understanding what's happening, geared to guarantee President Bush's goal of staying in Iraq forever. A more realistic description is President Bush's long twilight struggle to see just how far he can go into one brown paper bag.

We had a war. It was relatively brief and it took place in the spring of 2003. The critical event is what happened in the three to six months after the conventional war ended. The supporters of the war had two basic premises about what it would accomplish: a) the US would eliminate Iraq's threatening weapons of mass destruction, b) the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves with the US.

Rationale 'A' quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate.

Chimps Have Evolved More Than Humans -- No Joke

Not much to add, although you should definitely read the whole thing.

Changes in DNA that affect the making of proteins are considered functional changes, while “silent” changes do not affect the proteins. “If we see an excess of functional changes (compared to silent changes) the inference is these functional changes occurred because they were positively selected, because they were useful in some way to the organism,” said study team member Margaret Bakewell, also of UM.

Bakewell, Zhang and a colleague found that substantially more genes in chimps evolved in ways that were beneficial than was the case with human genes. The results could be due to the fact that over the long term humans have had a smaller effective population size compared with chimps.

“Although there are now many more humans than chimps, in the past, human populations were much smaller, and may have been fragmented into even smaller groups,” Bakewell told LiveScience.

Is Freakonomics Any Good? and Who Won the GOP Debate?

First the book, which I haven't even read but am told is very enlightening in a funky sort of way.

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about how too many academic economists are doing cute and clever work instead of tackling weighty questions. I placed some of the blame for this on Steve Levitt, the University of Chicago professor and author of Freakonomics. Levitt, I argued, was both a leading practitioner of cute-and-clever and a role model to top young economists. Now Levitt has responded with a blog post so strange and incoherent it is almost hard to believe he wrote it.

It's worth pointing out that I wrote my piece feeling ambivalent about Levitt. For one thing, I'm a fan of his work in general and Freakonomics in particular. His papers are consistently entertaining and his book was engrossing, something I'd be hard-pressed to say about most journalists, much less a first-rate economist. For another thing, based on my limited experience talking with Levitt and people who know him, I didn't find him to be anything other than a total mensch. Finally, having briefly languished in a graduate economics program several years ago, I actually thought the profession needed a little spicing up along the lines of what Levitt had introduced. All of these sentiments were reflected in my piece. My concern was simply that, while one or two Levitts were clearly a good thing, diminishing returns had set in as more and more economists had begun to imitate him. Hardly the kind of claim that should make anyone sputter.

Now the reactionary squawk-fest, which was noticeable for the number of people on the stage who raised their hand to say they didn't believe in evolution (I'll let you find out, but the answer is not one or two). There's something for everyone in this analysis:

It was great to hear Mitt Romney speak about a fundamentalist religions like Islam and then praise the “God-loving Americans.” Governor Huckabee, on the other hand, was more subtle on his attack directed towards Romney. According to Huckabee, if a person says their faith doesn’t affect their decision-making (as Romney has said), it implies that their faith isn’t strong enough to affect their decision-making process. Senator Brownback was quick to point out that even Jews like Senator Lieberman are people of faith.

The sense of the group was not to change the Constitution to allow distinguished Governors like Arnold to run the President. Congressman Ron Paul left no doubt that he was the most fiscally conservative candidate on the stage. Congressman Paul who is the only candidate who is a doctor, gave the least medically-based answer to a question about stem-cell research. And Congressman Tancredo left no doubt he hated illegal immigrants more than any of the other candidates.

My Shameful Philosophical Ignorance, At Last Dispelled

2007-05-03T08:53:00.000-04:00

I always sort of wondered whether my ideas about things had a dignified intellectual pedigree. If so, I thought, what is it? If not, how did I cobble together this bunch of nonsense?

It turns out, at least in one important respect, they do have a history, although a sordid and unwelcome one: Immanuel Kant.

"Because a ... community widely prevails among the Earth's peoples," Kant remarked, "a transgression of rights in one place in the world is felt everywhere." John Rawls argued that we should choose society's main rules as if we did not even know which family or ethnic group we belong to. To a pure liberal, if people are dying in a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing, all that matters is that people are dying.

The article, which is actually a New Republic book review, goes on to point out that in practice this doesn't work politically, but it captures exactly how I've always felt. In fact I took it for granted that everyone felt this way. I guess I'm wrong. But I can blame it on an obscurantist, doddering old Prussian now.

No, We Still Haven't Found WMDs

2007-04-18T10:00:00.001-04:00

Don't let them fool you -- the Washington Post did not report Iraq has chemical weapons.

New Study Says Ethanol Literally Kills People

2007-04-18T08:45:00.000-04:00

In my reporting, I'm often confronted with dubious, incomplete and potentially inaccurate information. I have to decide what's verifiable and logically sound enough to include in a story. It's usually not that hard, but sometimes the value judgments about how to describe something can be tricky. That having been said, I don't think this study is one of those pieces of information. Hopefully sooner or later the ethanol craze will die and we'll move on to more practical solutions.

WASHINGTON - Switching from gasoline to ethanol — touted as a green alternative at the pump — may create dirtier air, causing slightly more smog-related deaths, a new study says.

Nearly 200 more people would die yearly from respiratory problems if all vehicles in the United States ran on a mostly ethanol fuel blend by 2020, the research concludes. Of course, the study author acknowledges that such a quick and monumental shift to plant-based fuels is next to impossible.

Each year, about 4,700 people, according to the study's author, die from respiratory problems from ozone, the unseen component of smog along with small particles. Ethanol would raise ozone levels, particularly in certain regions of the country, including the Northeast and Los Angeles.

"It's not green in terms of air pollution," said study author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor. "If you want to use ethanol, fine, but don't do it based on health grounds. It's no better than gasoline, apparently slightly worse."

If 200 a year doesn't sound like a lot, just stretch it out over a decade, and then over a person's lifetime, and then over centuries. It adds up quickly. "Deaths averted per year" is actually how the EPA measures the benefits of its regulations, as in, "Setting such-and-such a limit on the amount of mercury allowed from smokestacks saved X lives last year." It's usually in hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. It's very hard to measure with pinpoint accuracy, but this sort of study gibes with a lot of others I've written about. There's a huge debate going on right now at the EPA about whether ozone actually kills people, and if it does how to regulate it, but that's another story.

As a final thought, I'd just like to point out that turning the vast majority of the country into a cornfield will not only be an obscenely profitable boon to big agribusiness, it will take away land needed for other crops. Furthermore, corn demands a lot of nutrients to grow. No one has ever actually studied the economic implications of this.

The Mother of All News Updates

2007-04-15T16:58:00.000-04:00

This is a clearing of the decks, which have been piling up with unannounced news from around the world for a while now, but it's also a way to move the global warming ball forward a little. Bearing in mind that I drew attention to the fact in the first place (and don't think anyone occupies the moral high ground here) the implications of traveling by airplane are getting impossible to ignore in good conscience.

Demand For Travel Rising; Airplane CO2 Impact Sort of Explained

And the ball moves forward.

-- Surging use of cars and planes will push up greenhouse gas emissions in coming decades, making the transport sector a black spot in a fight against global warming, according to a draft U.N. report.

[...]

About 2 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions from human activities come from aviation. Emissions from this sector are likely to rise by 3-4 percent a year given projected annual traffic growth of 5 percent outpacing annual improvements in aircraft fuel efficiency of 1-2 percent, it says.

Planes also damage the climate in other ways, partly by emitting heat-trapping nitrous oxides at high altitude. "These effects are estimated to be about 2 to 4 times greater than those of aviation's CO2 alone," it says.

Extra charges for fuel or the inclusion of the aviation sector into a greenhouse gas trading system "would have the potential to reduce emissions considerably," it says.

Republican Florida Legislators Mandate Statues of Jeb Bush

No, this is not a joke.

-- Two weeks ago, the University of Florida voted to deny Jeb Bush an honorary degree. By a 38-28 vote, the faculty Senate rejected the former governor's nomination, citing concerns about some of Bush's education initiatives, including his dismantling of affirmative action programs in the state.

[...]

Upset by this lack of Jeb Bush adoration, the conservative-controlled House Schools & Learning Council voted yesterday to force the university to rename its education school the "Jeb Bush College of Education."

Over the faculty's opposition, the school will now have "to erect 'suitable markers' noting the college's new name and include the revised name in all university documents, including catalogues and brochures." The lawmakers acknowledge they "came up with the idea as an answer" to the faculty's denial of Bush's honorary degree.

EPA Nominees Withdraw Their Nominations

Suffice to say I know who these two are.

Russia Beats up Demonstrators, Arrests Kasparov

Remember when I pointed to an article about a month ago saying reigning world chess potentate Garry Kasparov had taken the reins of the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin? Well, they're not going easy on him, whatever he might be doing for the tourism industry. (I don't have any hard numbers on that.)

-- ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Riot police beat and detained dozens of anti-Kremlin demonstrators Sunday on a second day of protests that tested the weak opposition's ability to challenge widely popular President Vladimir Putin.

As in Moscow a day earlier, only a few thousand people turned out in St. Petersburg to criticize the government. Opposition leaders called that a heartening response in the face of the huge police forces massed against both rallies.

Putin's foes said the harsh handling of demonstrators, who included many elderly people, would fuel a growing sense that the leader is strangling democracy ahead of parliamentary elections in December and a presidential vote next spring.

But the opposition is in severe straits. Opinion polls rate Putin as Russia's most popular political figure by far, thanks to newfound political stability and rapid economic growth fueled by high world oil prices. That popularity has cowed mainstream politicians in parliament and allowed Putin to strengthen the Kremlin's powers.

[...]

Opposition leaders said they were determined to push ahead. Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion who has become the most prominent figure in opposition factions loosely allied in the Other Russia coalition, called it "truly amazing" that 2,000 protesters would turn out in Moscow to face 9,000 police and interior ministry troops.

"It shows that the apathy in Russian society is gradually being replaced by very active, vocal protest," he told The Associated Press.

Oil Operations Expanding Without More Safety Measures; Workers Keep Dying

This expose from High Country News is a perfect example of how the media should do its job. It reminds me of the series the Chicago Tribune ran on the Middle East traffic in moveable employees that often ends in poor but relatively well-educated Yemenis or Africans (or whatever) dying in Iraq working for contractors that don't look out for them.

-- Joe Laster’s death received almost no news coverage. The Associated Press published a few basics, a total of 101 words. Two investigators from Wyoming’s workplace overseer, the Department of Employment’s Workers’ Safety and Compensation Division, completed an investigation months later. The agency found that Tyvo LLC had violated safety regulations, citing the company for failing to have a guard on the driveshaft that grabbed Laster’s glove, for inadequate training, and for having no first-aid supplies at the site. The agency slapped Tyvo with a fine: $3,375.

That doesn’t begin to satisfy Peggy Laster. She is tormented by thoughts that her son’s death has been swept into the brush. She wants a lot more investigation. She talks of the Flight for Life helicopter landing in the wrong place and then doubling back, which a map in a sheriff’s report indicates. Joe had years of experience on drill rigs, she says; he knew this one was a disaster waiting to happen. “It was a Mickey Mouse operation,” says Ken Laster. “He called us (a few days before the accident) and said he wasn’t happy working there.”

[...]

Across town, bosses still swing by the corrections center and pick up inmates and then head out to all sorts of jobs, some of them in the oil and gas fields.

[...]

There is a federal agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, assigned to look out for worker safety. It either handles each state’s workplaces directly, or hands off the duty to state agencies. But the federal and state safety cops don’t seem particularly tough. They can’t do many workplace inspections, because typically there are no more of them now than 20 years ago, straining to cover an explosion in the numbers of workplaces of all types that comes with the West’s population growth. And when workers die in the oil and gas fields, the safety cops levy fines that are so low, compared to the profits being reaped, that families often view the penalties as insulting and outrageous.

Other aspects of state laws also appear to be rigged against accident victims and their families, making it all but impossible for them to sue even in the face of apparently extraordinary management negligence. At times, the industry and the whole government system treat tenaciously loyal workers as if they were as disposable as a broken drill bit. The victims’ own character traits — from stoicism to lack of formal education to a tendency to use alcohol or drugs or both — often set them up to take the hit.

[...]

Kaylee explains why she agreed to go through Colton’s story with me: “I just hope it does some good for other families.” She advises those who consider sending a loved one into the oil and gas fields: “Keep ’em out of it.” She sums up some companies’ philosophy, with no audible commas: “A big fat wallet.”

[By the way, the comment section following the article is notable for apparently being infiltrated by oil industry robots.]

Carbon Emissions: The Merits of Cap-And-Trade Vs. Taxing It

Never mind where carbon dioxide comes from -- what do we do about it?

-- "The prognosis isn't exactly terminal - Europe's still working to iron out the wrinkles, and U.S. policymakers are trying to learn from their mistakes - but it's clear that most carbon-trading programs will inevitably allow for a certain amount of monkey business.

[...]

I think, agree that if we want to reduce carbon emissions, a simple carbon tax would be easier to administer - and harder to cheat - than a cap-and-trade system (although lord knows companies are perfectly capable of lobbying for tax loopholes, too). The catch, though, is that most politicians see a carbon tax as a total non-starter, especially after the BTU-tax debacle in 1993. And legislators like the opacity of cap-and-trade, because it shields them from voter anger over price increases. That's why all the major climate-change bills in the Senate right now involve carbon trading."

[The post ends with the prospect of "some bizarre alliance between greens, right-wing economists, and libertarians on the issue," which actually doesn't sound impossible if you look at it from all sides.]

American Voters: A Zombie for President Before an Atheist?

We're told Christianity is under attack in this country. Is that true?

-- "American voters’ level of support for a hypothetical atheist president has doubled since 1959 but actually declined between 1999 and 2007, from 49 to 45 percent.

[...]

I know very well that some atheists can get downright annoying in their insistence that they have have objectively demonstrated the nonexistence of God using simple algebra and a household magnifying glass. Fine. I grant these things. But I see no evidence whatsoever that 'persons of faith' are discouraged in any way from testifying to their faith in American political life, which is why complaints about Democrats’ indifference or hostility to religion strike me as so very disingenuous. These complaints can’t possibly be about hostility to religion in American politics, I think. And when they come from the left side of the spectrum, they can’t possibly be about trying to win over voters on the religious right. Nor do they seem to be centrally concerned about issues of war and peace -- or even the minimum wage. Nor do I see religious progressives arguing for greater discrimination against gays and lesbians. So I’m left to wonder: is this conversation-stopping conversation all about abortion, in the end?"

On The Paranormal Front... Reincarnation Doesn't Happen

Whatever other crazy things I may think, I haven't bought reincarnation for a long time. In fact, if you look at Buddhism -- which is supposed to be reincarnation central -- it seems like Siddhartha Buddha never really talked about reincarnation as it's understood in the past life regression sense but of rebirth in a metaphorical sense (I'm sure anyone who wanted to throw the book at me could do so, and I'd have some homework to do to catch up). He said, for one thing, that even a soul was an illusion and never taught that it literally transferred to another living thing after death. You can take or leave it as you like, but the point is that a convincing new study on past life memories shows that, like many alien abductee reports, they're based on brain chemistry and suggestibility.

-- People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

John McCain's Trip to Baghdad: He Had an Army Behind Him

I sort of missed the details of the whole "McCain to Baghdad" flap when it first happened, so if you did too, here's the deal.

So, what's going on in your neck of the woods? Keep up the cat-blogging.

Ah, But Would YOU Have Stopped That Morning?

2007-04-08T23:41:00.000-04:00

This is one of the more interesting stories I've ever read in a weekend newspaper magazine. The New York Times Magazine is all well and good, but you have to read this Washington Post thing about Joshua Bell playing in a subway station. Alienated by not knowing who Joshua Bell is? Good. That's the point.

The Gentleman on The Left Needs to Update His Invective

2007-04-08T00:36:00.000-04:00

Miklas (also known as mikeswanson) has called me out again -- see here -- for a pair of alleged sins, neither of which I feel warrant the sort of House of Commons abuse he is fond of hurling like so many cow pies. To whit: I did not respond to his latest comment about Ralph Nader, about whom, in my experience, it is absolutely pointless to converse. The subject draws an instant and uncrossable line between the conversants. I am willing to stipulate that on the level of speaking extemporaneously about issues rather than doing anything concrete, Ralph Nader is my favorite candidate. But this will require Miklas to stipulate that Ralph Nader fudged his way through the last seven years pretending that getting Bush elected was either a) a good thing because it made people realize how horrible the country had become, a horrendous and tautological position; or b) no big deal because electing Gore would have been no better. I could flood this blog with references to make my point, but the whole idea is that I don't want to and the "debate" isn't worth having.

The other issue he brings up is that I should not be willing to travel by airplane to South America, or anywhere, given the link I posted about the ecological horrors of air travel. Leaving aside that my erstwhile Motorcycle Diaries would likely be written via train anyway, I take his point that airplanes contribute to global warming. (At work, one of the energy reporters told me jet fuel is the waste product that no other industrial sector will take, not even the power companies, and they'll pretty much run on soiled wood chips and broken furniture.) Does that mean I'm going to swear off air travel? No. Should the government mandate better fuel standards? Yes. How many airplane trips do I take in a year? Maybe two. Will everyone sitting at home for the rest of their lives stop global warming? No. Does traveling have benefits other than frivolous passing of time? I'd argue yes, but I can't really prove that objectively. It does make you smarter about other cultures, and teaches you things you can't learn any other way. Anyway, think about it like this: you contribute to a lot of social ills every day without even realizing it. The best you can do is buy organic, pick up other peoples' trash, ride your bike everywhere (buses contribute to air pollution; so does light rail that runs on electricity), never eat food or drink coffee or tea that isn't farmed locally (otherwise it was shipped in, tsk tsk), don't read books printed on paper pulp, never use any lights in your house, etc. etc. etc. It goes on and on and on trying to do the right thing and be consumer conscious. On balance, I'd say I already waste less and contribute more environmentally than most people in my age and income brackets. I own almost nothing -- certainly not a car -- and do in fact pick up other peoples' trash. Ask around. So if taking a trip once every five years to see the world still makes me the bad guy, I'm going to bite a bullet and do it. We can't stop global warming singlehandedly. We can feel better about our choices for one reason or another. Other than that, it comes down to politics and commerce. Now what is Miklas doing on those fronts?

Because all the cool kids do it -- Friday cat blogging

2007-04-06T21:11:00.000-04:00

What News Am I Reading? What Should You Know?

2007-04-01T12:20:00.000-04:00

The news dump is the one abiding "feature" of the House of Lapp. It's time.

EU Tells Everyone to Stop Traveling So Much

"In the near future, people are going to become increasingly aware that aircraft emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases, far more than cars or trains," said Manfred Stock, a researcher at the climate research centre in Potsdam outside Berlin.

"If we add to that the fact that in coming decades our summers are going to get warmer and warmer, holiday-makers would do better to head for Sylt, in the North Sea, than to fly to the Seychelles," he added.

Germans are the world leaders in expenditure on foreign travel, with 2006 figures showing they accounted for 11 percent of global spending on trips abroad, but they do not seem opposed to the suggestion.

[...]

Stephen Bakan, a researcher at the Max Planck institute who attended a round table discussion on the subject, predicted that the weather changes wrought by global warming would dramatically change people's preferred holiday travel destinations.

"Travellers are in for a change of scene," he said.

"The Alps will see less and less snow in the winter, so people will go skiing in Scandinavia instead, and the Mediterranean will have to compete with beach resorts in the north."

Full text here.

High School Students Are Bored Bored Bored

According to a new study, many high school students in the United States are bored in class and have considered dropping out. The High School Survey of Student Engagement, conducted by Indiana University, surveyed 81,000 students from 110 public and private schools.

Seventy-five percent of participants attributed their boredom to a lack of interest in the material presented in class. The study also revealed that nearly a third of respondents had no interaction with their teacher. Ethan Yazzie-Mintz, the project's director suggested that student boredom stems from the teaching style used in the classroom and recommended interactive methods of teaching to engage students, like discussion and debate instead of lectures.

Full text here.

One Conservative Literally Asks For Middle Ages To Come Back

"As D'Souza continues his campaign in op-eds, speaking engagements, and television appearances, you can see the coherence of his case. There is a difference only in degree, after all, between Islamism's view of the role of women and that of James Dobson or Tim LaHaye. Very, very few women control any religious institutions on the religious right. Patriarchy rules there as it rules in Pakistan. There is only a difference in degree between Islamism's view of the relationship between mosque and state and Christianism's view of the relationship between church and state. If law cannot be neutral between competing moral ideals, and if it must reflect God's will regardless of the views of religious minorities, then you can see why D'Souza is so affronted by Turkey's secularism, and why he sees the Declaration of Independence as an essentially religious document. Any space for non-believers is, in the Islamist and Christianist view, an assault on belief itself. The notion that blasphemy, pornography, or homosexuality should be protected, let alone celebrated, is anathema to Islamists and Christianists alike. D'Souza's sole sin is to say so publicly in a way no one can misunderstand. He has blown the medievals' cover."

Full text here (you have to register, but it's free and very much worth it).

Caring For The Fate of the Montagnards (See: Vietnam War)

I had a longish debate back in the day with charvakan about the relative merits of what he called "caring about the Montagnards," which he thinks is sort of the geopolitical equivalent of selling ice to the eskimos (if I'm wrong, I'm willing to hear about it in comments). Anyway, in my travels through the labyrinthine Iraq War spending bill now being "considered" by the president, I recently found the Senate had snuck this in (the Karen are an ethnic minority fighting the Burmese junta):

"In the Senate emergency war supplemental: AUTOMATIC RELIEF FOR THE HMONG AND OTHER GROUPS THAT DO NOT POSE A THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES- Section 212(a)(3)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B)) is amended-- (1) in clause (vi) in the matter preceding section (I), by striking 'As' and inserting 'Except as provided in clause (vii), as'; and (2) by adding at the end the following new clause:

'(vii) Notwithstanding clause (vi), for purposes of this section the Hmong, the Montagnards, the Karen National Union/Karen Liberation Army (KNU/KNLA), the Chin National Front/Chin National Army (CNF/CNA), the Chin National League for Democracy (CNLD), the Kayan New Land Party (KNLP), the Arakan Liberation Party (ALP), the Mustangs, the Alzados, and the Karenni National Progressive Party shall not be considered to be a terrorist organization on the basis of any act or event occurring before the date of enactment of this section. Nothing in this subsection may be construed to alter or limit the authority of the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security to exercise their discretionary authority pursuant to 212(d)(3)(B)(i) (8 U.S.C.1182(d)(3)(B)(i)).); and the Karenni National Progressive Party shall not be considered to be a terrorist organization on the basis of any act or event occurring before the date of enactment of this section. Nothing in this subsection may be construed to alter or limit the authority of the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security to exercise their discretionary authority pursuant to 212(d)(3)(B)(i) (8 U.S.C.1182(d)(3)(B)(i)).'."

Learning about the law is like watching sausage get made -- you may like the result, but you don't actually want to watch the process.

The Question of When To Do It And Where To Go

2007-04-01T11:25:00.000-04:00

I don't always believe in the importance of "coincidence," especially because everything interesting happens more or less at random anyway and isn't part of a plan that we can't see -- thinking the universe is trying to tell you something smacks of being crazy, as far as I'm concerned -- but still, looking back on certain decisions, you have to wonder whether your subconscious is thinking further ahead than the rest of you. Yes, I just finished another book. The right book at the right time. But first the back story.

To make what could be a longer riff much shorter, my friend Philippe has been talking for a long time about taking a long trip through South America with me. He speaks Spanish, having learned it while spending a year down there after high school (never mind why he was able to do this), and it's always sounded fun, especially since the only South America I've ever seen was the stable, clean, tourist-friendly Costa Rica, and the rest of the hemisphere seems like a good place to really start in on a new era of traveling. We've always considered this idea in the context of me getting paid to write about the trip as it happens, or at least after we get back, to get a return on whatever it costs.

The hitch is that Philippe wants to be let in on whatever profits may accrue. I don't really know how I feel about this, but since the trip won't happen without him -- I'm in no shape with my Spanish to do it myself, and if I tried I would immediately be frustrated with how limited the trip would be -- I'm inclined to just go for it and see what happens. This has been floating in the back of my mind for a while, but I never really knew what shape such a trip would take, or had a good sense of what we'd do or see. I like the idea of wandering and going where the wind takes you, but you also need to know you won't just fall off the end of the earth.

Then, like a tiny nugget of wisdom tucked in a large pile of rags, I found Sara Wheeler's Travels in a Thin Country. More on this shortly.

This was about five months ago in Tucson, when I was buying used books as usual and for no good reason (I have hundreds I haven't gotten to yet). Picking through masses of printed detritus for sale puts me in one of two moods: either elated in some strange way, as the very thought of "books" and "writers" gives me butterflies -- a feeling I can't justify without sounding like a dork -- or clapped-out and depressed, as I think of how I need to start writing myself pretty soon or else end up a beachcomber who rambles to anyone who will listen about the Big One he never finished. My last six months, at least, have mostly been devoted to a sitcom I'm still talking about with a friend from college. The scripts are fun and relatively easy to write (although, bad sign, they don't always make Stephanie laugh very much) and are the proverbial siren singing me the lures of Hollywood fame as I let my other projects gather dust. I know I could always be doing more. This travel book project has stood out in my mind as a saving grace in the distance. I'm good at keeping travel journals but have never made a trip long enough to make into a book. Things are supposed to work out differently next time. South America is a good setting. (I won't say subject -- I don't have much to add about the politics. We'd be, I expect, passive observers, not commentators.) I like getting around and getting lost. It's perfect.

But how to do it? What would I actually write? I've read travel books before, including a few by unofficial reigning master Paul Theroux, an appreciation for whom I share with mikeswanson, but have never really felt connected to the process I felt went into the making of them. They always seemed so improbably well-turned and guided by the author's ability to do whatever he or she felt like. Was it raining? Some spectral local turned up with an umbrella and an invitation to tea. (Why do these things happen in travel books?) Did you need help with a visa? Somebody the author "knew back home" comes through with a phone call to the embassy; problem solved. I dislike the idea that traveling worth writing about only happens if you have connections. Che Guevara is my kind of travel writer.

Now Sara Wheeler is too. Remarkably, she has connections in spades -- journalists, businessmen, diplomats even -- and yet she doesn't really trade on them to grease her path through Chile, at least not in this book. She uses her credentials as a writer/reporter (never really explained to the reader, although you gather she deserves them somehow), and her status as an unexpected sort of traveler wherever she turns up, to try to get on boats that don't originally intend to take her places, but I have no problem with this. Other than that, she writes about traveling the way it really feels to travel: the people you meet, the places you see, the friends you make and the annoying hangers-on that gather around any boarding house, it's all here. And she makes her territory sound real, even when she's blown away by it (the chapter on traveling to the glaciers near Tierra del Fuego is intimidatingly good) and especially when there's nothing spectacular to say (the top of the country is hundreds of miles of sand, which somehow sound enticing in her version). This is how you tell someone about a trip. This is how you make art out of it. I'd like to do this.

For those of you who like your coincidences, there's this, too: the other day Stephanie and I went to see "The Namesake," based on a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri (who I've never read). The flashback sequence has a whole section on a young man being told on a train by this older fellow to "Pack your pillow and blanket. See the world. [Dramatic pause with a grin.] You will not regret it." It's not much, but these things do seem to happen in bunches to me all at once.

tom waits- Chocolate Jesus

2007-03-30T10:34:00.001-04:00

In honor of the latest religious scandal.

Sad Kermit

2007-03-29T20:45:00.000-04:00

Catch it before the Jim Henson estate gets wind of it (not to mention Trent Reznor):

See what you made me do?

2007-03-17T13:06:00.000-04:00

I swear I was going to come up with an intelligent and well-reasoned post on a topic of great relevance, but then I found this excellent gun control debate video. Quicktime and an appreciation of Halo 2 are required.

Obama, Nader and Lapp

2007-03-17T03:01:00.000-04:00

Mikeswanson called me out recently on calling Ralph Nader "an unreasonable man" (see here), which I feel contrained to point out I never did but can respond to nonetheless.

Without rehashing the dreaded Nader Wars of circa 2001-02, when the entire leftern half of the political spectrum joined the circular firing squad and emptied its barrels until everyone was dead, I will say that Nader can be very right when he is right and very wrong when he is wrong. His being admirably acute in calling a spade a spade when Democrats fail to live up to their potential cannot make up for the fact that even during the 2000 campaign, when I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, he ran on the dubious claim that there was no difference between (center-left) Al Gore and (zealous corporatist) George Bush, which has been shown to be so spectacularly wrong that Nader has to work doubly hard to get any respect from me these days. He sold his supporters on the idea that it didn't matter who won in 2000, that the candidates were two sides of the same corrupt coin; this was implausible enough at the time, and at this late date, anyone who believes it isn't worth debating. So why listen to him?

He speaks the truth on some issues, such as health care. But a lot of other candidates are doing that as well these days. (Obama has called loudly for single-payer, including in his book, which I just finished.) He served a needed purpose, in some capacity, in reminding voters that triangulation isn't the be-all end-all of politics, that there are serious issues at stake that cannot honestly be ignored or poll-tested. I have always admired his dedication to workplace and environmental issues. I find him persuasive when he talks about the military budget. But when he starts talking about almost anything else, I start to chafe and wonder why he's still rehashing his 2000 campaign themes. I also don't like his style and think his supporters ought to get off their high horse. This theme was expounded well by Joshua Micah Marshall (of the very good, and journalistically ambitious, TalkingPointsMemo) in his review of Nader's book "Crashing the Party":

Nader's supporters (invariably described as "thoughtful") are set against a pitiful cast of sellouts, hacks, turncoats, and cowards, which constitutes more or less everyone else on the leftward side of the political universe. To be sure, Nader and his crew were treated to no small amount of derision by Al Gore's supporters in 2000. But none of it matches Nader's intensity of denunciation, the facile opportunism of many of his political gambits, or the breezy thoughtlessness of many of his attacks.

Ultimately, Marshall echoes my own feelings about Nader:

Nader's supporters will no doubt argue that these recent revelations [about the Enron scandal] show that we very much need the Ralph Nader who first sounded the alarm against corporate malfeasance in the 1960s and 1970s.

They're right. We do. Too bad the 21st-century Ralph Nader is the one we're stuck with.

I think it's fine to defend Nader as a man who was right about a lot of things at one point or another in his life. But if you're looking for someone to trust, someone to support -- in short, if you're looking for a candidate -- it's time to look elsewhere. Ralph Nader is essentially a spent force, and it's not worth it to keep wishing he'll make a comeback.

Chivas!

2007-03-17T02:09:00.000-04:00

I suspect most of you aren't familiar with CONCACAF, the premier boundary-crossing soccer league for the western hemisphere. Well, poo on you, because I went to my first CONCACAF game Thursday night, and it was even better than watching MLS on television. Why could I do this? Because D.C. has cultural opportunities that Phoenix, for instance -- despite its tragicomic population boom -- cannot compete with. More on that shortly.

Stephanie and I thought we'd mistakenly been seated in the Chivas Guadalajara area when we got to our seats and began to wonder where the D.C. United fans were. We needn't have bothered: the "Chivas area" could more accurately be called "the stadium," and despite technically being the home team, United were outnumbered in the stands about six to one. This included people with Mexican flags, Chivas bandanas, beer, jerseys, cigarettes (near enough to smell that flavorful tar!) and plenty of chants we weren't able to follow. At first it was nice just to know a U.S. club team was worth inviting to the championship tournament, but once we realized D.C. could actually win it was hard not to watch intently and freak out when things went wrong, sort of the way you see rowdy English fans hit things on TV.

United got two yellow cards early, one of which -- unless the halfback threw that banana peel -- was patently bogus. It was raining and everyone was sliding every which way, and the replays were pretty clear that nothing had really happened, but you know how those referees like to show they're not going to give the locals a break. It was fun watching Chivas fans go nuts whenever something interesting happened until they actually scored early in the second half. By that point I was emotionally invested and couldn't be happy just to watch good sportsmanship. I considered hurling abuse.

United equalized a few minutes before the game ended with a header off a chip shot penalty kick from the right side, getting Ben Olsen off the hook for his hilariously inaccurate open shot on goal seven minutes earlier. The goalie watched the ball sail ten feet wide and twelve high and probably had time for a few jumping jacks before it landed in the mud under the bleachers.

It ended in a tie. Their songs are better than ours. The next game is April 3.

Anyway, this contrasted nicely with the Sibelius concert Stephanie and I went to a few days before. The program included the violin concerto, which is probably one of the most interesting pieces of classical music ever written, and I don't mean in any technically intricate or professional way so much as in terms of just listening to it. It sounds, alternately, like gypsy music, frantic pagan drumming, Sherlock Holmes at the fireplace and sometimes like a caveman standing over a newly slain antelope, crudely proud of himself for doing something important. This was a good birthday present -- even better than the Dwight Schrute bobblehead doll -- and probably could not have been given back in the home state, where we don't get a lot of Sibelius and certainly don't have concertgoers with nearly as expensive or musty an air about them.

You see, this is why I came here, this and the journalism. And Stephanie is fun enough to share each of these interests with me. If I can get her playing poker, we may have to get married. At the Vegas Bellaggio, if we do well. Or maybe the Westin Casuarina, where we'll be in May for a vacation. They have a Web site. Look them up.

Vaino's Diatribe

2007-03-11T16:55:00.000-04:00

This is being posted courtesy of Vaino, who was more active here in days of yore. You should look up Vaino in Finnish mythology -- for instance, the Kalevala -- to see how much wisdom is attached to his pronouncements.

^^^

Is this the end of the Republican Party? Has their greed, hypocrisy and sleaze finally brought them to just ends? Or is this the beginning of the end of American civilization? I fear that despite our outsized economy and military, our influence on the rest of the world has already begun to wane. American policy in the Muslim world had been a complete disaster from propping up the Shah in Iran, to providing chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, to Narco-Warlords and the Taliban taking over control of Afghanistan. We are making all of Osama Bin Laden's predictions come true. In Latin America, the Milton Friedman economic experiment has been a failure everywhere. Other than a dumping ground for cheap manufacturing goods from overseas, the United States is becoming irrelevant. (And our foreign debt is being financed by the sale of bonds primarily to foreign countries.) In twenty years, China's economy will be as big as ours and they will wield more international political influence. This turnaround is a direct result of neocon policies, starting with Reagan but really coming to full implementation with Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. Their arrogance and utter ruthlessness will be the final undoing of America.

No More YouTube Posts, Eh?

2007-03-11T16:37:00.001-04:00

This is my own first foray into direct YouTube linking, and if it's even moderately successful, I would implore everyone (including Nolo) to use this blog as a "best of" board for stuff we should be watching. Boring or average material, obviously, will lead to namecalling and ridicule, not to mention calls to step down from whatever imaginary public post you hold in the Lappland bureaucracy. (Charvakan, for instance, is Minister of Produce, and he'll think twice before he gives up that plum little assignment.)
The link below is from a Bollywood film. The song is very catchy and the whole enterprise is legitimate, I assure you.

Longest Journalist Imprisonment in U.S. History

2007-03-11T15:55:00.000-04:00

I don't know anything about this case and it certainly isn't one of my pet issues -- which is actually why I'm linking to it, because it struck me that nobody else knows about this guy either.

An embarrassment of riches (and someone I used to know)

2007-03-09T23:35:00.000-05:00

Andy Cohen.

Friday music post

2007-03-09T23:27:00.000-05:00

I have no idea if this will work, but I'm gonna try:

An Unreasonable Man: A Tale of Three Movies and a Bookstore

2007-03-04T12:43:00.000-05:00

Two Saturdays ago Stephanie and I tried to see "The Lives of Others" at E Street, which we are learning will constantly sell out movies hours ahead of time. If you don't know the movie, it won Best Foreign Film this year, so do you live in a cave with your ears shut and a bag over your head? Because that's one explanation.

Anyway, it was sold out. We stamped our feet and threw a little tantrum and wondered, oh, wondered -- what do we do for fun? Then we noticed that a film with much less critical acclaim was playing around the same time; we went for it. I can say the following about "Amazing Grace," starring Ioan Gruffudd of "King Arthur" fame: it would have made a very good four-hour miniseries on the BBC. As it is, it feels like a BBC miniseries somewhat awkwardly adapted to the screen. There are the usual powdered wigs, the ridiculous accents (is Ciaran Hinds really that plummy? Who can say!?), the English countryside, the bountiful bosoms and all the rest. It is saved by the fact that the English abolitionist movement is an interesting and not well understood phenomenon that makes for a good, if predictable and one-sided, historicoromance, which is a word I had to make up to describe it.

On our way out of the theater, we saw Ralph Nader sitting at a table in the lobby.

We didn't know exactly what he was doing there, but the documentary about him was playing (presumably opening) at the same theater that night, and he was there to sign his new book and maybe -- we weren't there -- to talk before or after the film played. To be honest, I agree with about maybe half of what he says and find him insufferable for the rest, so I wasn't particularly starstruck, especially because living here has completely desensitized me to seeing public figures. (Although catching Trent Lott in the halls of Congress with his toupee slightly askew will always be with me.) I wondered what to do, as a good journalist would, but ended up staring at him from about his 4 o'clock as he talked to a few people until Stephanie got out of the bathroom. Then we left. I figured he was gone.

Yesterday we passed him on our way up to the second floor of the Metro Center Barnes & Noble. He was downscalatering to the info booth. Maybe there was a problem with the bathroom tissue. I don't know. Or it could have had to do with their treatment of him as he tried to hold a book signing. Perhaps the chair was uncomfortable.

We finally saw "The Lives of Others." It's very good. We also, since then, saw "Avenue Montaigne," which is hard to excuse on any but the most optimistically romantic pretext. It's a harmless way to pass the time, but don't be fooled by critics who try to make it sound like anything better than that. It wasn't made with ideas in mind. Paris sure is pretty, though.

We Have a Throwdown

2007-03-04T12:40:00.000-05:00

Everyone, direct your attention to the comments for Nolo's most recent post. (The one having to do, among other things, with guns. The title begins with the word "Kicking.") A commenter has taken exception to Nolo's opinion. He also thinks I wrote the post, which is understandable. He also has a bit of snark in his tone. If Nolo chooses to respond, I think this blog should be the place. It's been a while since we had a good back-and-forth -- not since the great Croatian war crimes debate of early '06 has the blood really boiled over.

The Welfare Reform Debate: Never Settled, But Evidence is Coming In

2007-02-25T23:55:00.000-05:00

And it's not terrifically good news. People are "off the welfare rolls" in that direct cash outlays are down, but more people are on Medicaid and food stamps to make up for that and it's especially difficult for people coming off welfare to receive education and job training after last year's re-overhaul of the laws. At the bottom, the story notes that things have gotten worse "since the beginning of the decade," in a perhaps too decorous nod to the fact that the Bush administration doesn't care about poor people.

Kicking the tires on the new Blogger

2007-02-24T11:47:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm sitting here in the office on a Saturday trying to get excited about the project du jour, and it's not working. So I thought I might post a small link farm.

At Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz notices the propensity of gun advocates to eat their own. Quel suprise that folks who think it's sportsmanlike to take out prairie dogs with AR-15s would be a little defensive.

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Lemieux posts a thoughtful response to Russell Arben Fox's assertion that abortion access is (a) mostly a middle-class issue and (b) erodes the integrity of the social fabric. At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte posits that abortion is a moral good, spawning a predictably lively debate in the comments.

Also at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte gives her final comment on her short, fractious tour of duty with the Edwards campaign. On a related note, at TPMCafe, Katha Pollitt shares her thoughts on the compatibility of blog-style punditry and the political trail in a column titled "Your Blog Will Come Back to Haunt You."

And finally, the boys at Sadly, No! discuss the conservative case for unicorns.

Incidentally, This Is What Heaven Looks Like

2007-02-22T00:36:00.001-05:00

Third in an occasional series. I can't help showing this one off.

Pawns, Political and Wooden

2007-02-21T21:35:00.000-05:00

Garry Kasparov, my old hero from my chess-playing days (which ended, for all practical purposes, in elementary school, when I was good), is apparently leading the opposition to Putin in Russia. He seems to have an almost freakish genius for organization and strategy, which you'd think is too comically literal to be true, but it is. It remains to be seen whether he'll actually achieve much, but in the interim it's interesting to note how in Russia they still do things like this because they're necessary, whereas here... well, you know the rest.

You Be The Judge, Except You Can't Really

2007-02-19T21:09:00.000-05:00

Stephanie and I had breakfast (at 2:30) a few days ago, thanks to the three-day weekend, at one of those faux-bohemian hangouts on U Street, and who should we see sitting there wondering how long it would take to translate Camus into Esperanto but the spitting image of Gustav Mahler if you threw a little Egon Schiele in the mix. Here are the two most persuasive images I could find. Due credit to classical.net and Young-ah Seong at the University of Tokyo, respectively. Sorry about the spacing -- you get the idea. Anyway this guy would muse into the middle distance for maybe, and I'm not kidding, a minute at a time. You had to be there.

Just a Tree, Or The Answer to This Blogger's Prayers?

2007-02-12T23:53:00.001-05:00

If you think this is nice, trust me, finally seeing the correct format come through on this clunky, cheap-as-tacks autoblog feature is much nicer for me.

Bo, The Bang Bang

2007-02-12T23:39:00.001-05:00

I can't, for obvious reasons, post too many terribly revealing pictures, but this one captures the majesty of my recent travels without giving anything precious away. Incidentally, more will follow.

P.S. - The post title is something my old roommate and gambling rival in college used to say. I never understood it.

Keeping House, Keeping House

2007-02-11T21:24:00.000-05:00

If you ever saw "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" -- and there's really every reason in the world you shouldn't have bothered -- you'll know what I'm talking about when I say you should hear the name of this post in your head being sung by young Jay to the tune of that song at the beginning when he's outside the convenience store. The rest of you just go about your business.

I switched to New Blogger, which has something to do with Gmail. I'm going to give it a few days to make sure everyone can read and post here without trouble. A few test posts would be appreciated before I inundate you with any further news.

Godspeed.

A Great Weight Has Been Lifted

2007-02-04T12:27:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I updated this puppy, obviously, and I'd like to share a few reasons for that before spilling any further hot beans.

1) I have been out of my normal routine for some time now. I was back home and then on a fabulous adventure with my girlfriend in Hawaii -- as most of you readers already know -- and have just now, after a few weeks back at work, been able to calm my overstimulated nerves to the point that I can focus on anything more complicated than bright colors.

2) I also didn't exactly know where my computer was when I got back home.

3) My girlfriend has moved in and man, what a time-killer that's been. "Let's get groceries." "Let's see a movie." "Let's leave the house." "Let's talk to our friends." Honestly, she had no reason to know how comfortably I'd become a shriveled old coot in the last year, but it's just ridiculous how living with someone who shares your interests will make you do things.

4) I have been trying and trying and trying and trying to finish My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk -- soon to be declared a modern classic, much as TNT does for its Wednesday night lineup of televised crime dramas -- and haven't really allowed myself the pleasure of reading or writing anything else until I finished. Things just kept coming up, even when I thought I had it in the bag; it seemed as though I had been cursed by some mischievous djinn. (If you're not familiar with this pernicious phenomenon, you could read the book, although the same thing might happen to you, and how many layers of irony would that be?)

So, in order, I am back into a groove, I found my computer, the immediate novelty of the city has given way to the cold, cold winter chill, keeping us from being overly ambitious, and I finished the book in bed this morning. Then I had corn dogs. Then we watched a taped episode of The Office from Thursday. Now I'm finally writing. I haven't written in a good long time.

And in the manner of the postmodern novelists I do so abhor, I'll bring you up to date by first telling you what just happened: Stephanie appeared, read the title of this post and said "Oh, I thought it was about me." I had meant for it to refer to finishing the book, and also to stand in for the metaphorical significance I'd attached to it, but we see what trouble that's gotten me in. By way of excusing my behavior, let me just say this: being alone here for the last year wasn't a weight so much as a strange hollow feeling, which you can't exactly lift away. I wasn't crushed by it; I wasn't burdened with it. You know how you don't feel nice and then you feel nice? It was like that. I probably could have muddled through with my own resources for quite some time, really, but it wouldn't have been nice at all. You don't lift off a feeling like that. You fill it in and make it full and then it disappears.

In order to really express what the last month or so has been like, I'd have to go into detail, and whenever I sit down to the keyboard I'm suddenly appalled by the thought of going into detail. I could try for the better part of a day to "write" about Hawaii, paint word pictures, dib and dab little spots of color into the blank canvas of your imaginations, but it's just such a lot of bloody effort. We've put the pictures online. If I know you, you'll be e-mailed a way to find them. It's sort of like a treasure hunt with no money at the end of the rainbow, to coin a phrase.

I will say that Glenn's hospitality in chopping me up that coconut and giving me a bamboo straw to drink the milk on the treacherous road to Hana will not be forgotten. I will also say, of rainbows, that I had never before seen two at once, neither of which were connected to land at either end, both of which seemed to exist as a fantastic extension of the spray coming off the tops of gigantic waves. And standing on the beach at night, after Stephanie had fallen asleep and I'd walked there by myself, staring at the palm treetops in the moonlight -- well, you don't forget those moments right away.

Speaking of which, I was at the very large anti-war demonstration in DC last weekend. If you're not against this war, what on Earth are you against? It's done nothing but kill hundreds of thousands of people and cost us badrillions of dollars. Think about it. CNN underreported the attendance, probably by a factor of ten, and I got into it with some Bush supporters who were hiding behind a barricade. One of them was wearing a gas mask and holding a sign that said "Hippies Smell." You don't win arguments with that kind of thing, but I guess you don't technically lose them either. Because what the hell are you talking about in the first place?

So, long story short, it was very good to see my family and my old friends again, have my birthday (I got presents!), travel the seven seas and return to work to find I've been transferred to a new publication. I am already getting more notices of my work in the last three weeks than I did my first year. Toiling away in obscurity is for the birds. Maybe this is a good sign of things to come.

But enough about me, dear reader... what have you been up to lately?

Note to Dinesh D'Souza (or, when you're already in a hole)

2007-01-29T13:24:00.000-05:00

Quit digging.

Holiday Wishes

2007-01-03T11:33:00.000-05:00

Our thoughts and prayers are with Nolo's cat, on whose health we expect to be updated regularly until the green mist lifts from her eyes. I lost a pure white cat I'd named Lightning when I was in first grade and it was one of the saddest things, honestly, that's ever happened to me. (He was eaten by wild animals. This is an indication of what a privileged life I've led so far.)

That Post-Holiday Waistline Shall Not Trouble Your Sleep

2007-01-03T11:10:00.000-05:00

This article is four years old (free registration required), and I have absolutely no idea why The New Republic decided to re-run it (on the front page of the Web site, no less), but it's still an enlightening read. It's comforting to think the science of health and nutrition has advanced beyond hype and mythology, but as this article shows, it's also sometimes wrong.

The most common way researchers determine whether someone is overweight is by using the "body mass index" (BMI), a simple and rather arbitrary mathematical formula that puts people of varying heights and weights on a single integrated scale. According to the government, you're "overweight" (that is, your weight becomes a significant health risk) if you have a BMI figure of 25 and "obese" (your weight becomes a major health risk) if your BMI is 30 or higher. A five-foot-four-inch woman is thus labeled "overweight" and "obese" at weights of 146 pounds and 175 pounds, respectively; a five-foot-ten-inch man crosses those thresholds at weights of 174 pounds and 210 pounds.

This is the catechism on our "obesity epidemic" -- your height and weight should align in some way that medicinicians have declared most healthy. It's conventional wisdom that everyone gets behind.

Yet, despite the intense campaign to place fat in the same category of public health hazards as smoking and drug abuse, there is in fact no medical basis for the government's BMI recommendations or the public health policies based on them. The most obvious flaw lies with the BMI itself, which is simply based on height and weight. The arbitrariness of these charts becomes clear as soon as one starts applying them to actual human beings. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out last July [this reference is as old as the rest of the article], taking the BMI charts seriously requires concluding that Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Michael Jordan are all "overweight," and that Sylvester Stallone and baseball star Sammy Sosa are "obese." [...] To be sure, even if the BMI categories can be spectacularly wrong in cases such as those involving professional athletes, they're often a pretty good indicator of how "fat" most people are in everyday life. The real question is whether being fat--as determined by the BMI or by any other measure--is actually a health risk. To answer this question, it's necessary to examine the epidemiological evidence. Since the measurable factors that affect whether someone contracts any particular disease or condition can easily number in the hundreds or thousands, it's often difficult to distinguish meaningful data from random statistical noise. And, even where there are clear correlations, establishing cause and effect can be a complicated matter. If researchers observe that fat people are more prone to contract, say, heart disease than thin people, this fact by itself doesn't tell them whether being fat contributes to acquiring heart disease. It could easily be the case that some other factor or set of factors--i.e., being sedentary or eating junk food or dieting aggressively--contributes both to being fat and to contracting heart disease.

Okay, but this mostly sounds like common sense. What's the bottom line?

In a decided majority of studies, groups of people labeled "overweight" by current standards are found to have equal or lower mortality rates than groups of supposedly ideal-weight individuals. University of Virginia professor Glenn Gaesser has estimated that three-quarters of all medical studies on the effects of weight on health between 1945 and 1995 concluded either that "excess" weight had no effect on health or that it was actually beneficial. And again, this remains the case even before one begins to take into account complicating factors such as sedentary lifestyle, poor nutrition, dieting and diet drugs, etc. "As of 2002," Gaesser points out in his book Big Fat Lies, "there has not been a single study that has truly evaluated the effects of weight alone on health, which means that 'thinner is healthier' is not a fact but an unsubstantiated hypothesis for which there is a wealth of evidence that suggests the reverse."

This doesn't mean that being overweight suddenly makes you healthy. Most reasons for gaining weight -- compulsive eating, bad diet, sedentary lifestyle, fad-dieting followed by binging -- are themselves not good for your system and over time will very likely make you feel unwell. But the point of the article is that the sheer fact of exceeding a body mass index threshold has absolutely nothing to do with how "healthy" you are. So what makes for a healthy person?

Of course, in a culture as anti-fat as ours, the whole notion of people who are both fat and fit seems contradictory. Yet the research done by Blair and others indicates that our belief that fatness and fitness are in fundamental tension is based on myths, not science. "Fitness" in Blair's work isn't defined by weight or body-fat percentage but rather by cardiovascular and aerobic endurance, as measured by treadmill stress tests. And he has found that people don't need to be marathon runners to garner the immense health benefits that follow from maintaining good fitness levels. Blair's research shows that to move into the fitness category that offers most of the health benefits of being active, people need merely to engage in some combination of daily activities equivalent to going for a brisk half-hour walk. To move into the top fitness category requires a bit more--the daily equivalent of jogging for perhaps 25 minutes or walking briskly for close to an hour. (Our true public health scandal has nothing to do with fat and everything to do with the fact that 80 percent of the population is so inactive that it doesn't even achieve the former modest fitness standard.)

So if you want to get some of that cold, sterile, 1984-style beauty goodness that Celine Dion is pushing, go ahead: eat less, exercise more, get that liposuction you've always wondered about. Just don't let celebrities tell you you're going to die any sooner than they are. Because you're not.

Update: Sure enough, I hustle over to the New York Times site and right on the front page is a (more up-to-date) essay by three doctors about the "epidemic of diagnoses" plaguing the medical industry these days.

Americans live longer than ever, yet more of us are told we are sick.
How can this be? One reason is that we devote more resources to medical care than any other country. Some of this investment is productive, curing disease and alleviating suffering. But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease.

This applies to things like sadness, occasional insomnia* and my favorite, a fake disease they call restless leg syndrome.

Two developments accelerate this process. First, advanced technology allows doctors to look really hard for things to be wrong. We can detect trace molecules in the blood. We can direct fiber-optic devices into every orifice. And CT scans, ultrasounds, M.R.I. and PET scans let doctors define subtle structural defects deep inside the body. These technologies make it possible to give a diagnosis to just about everybody: arthritis in people without joint pain, stomach damage in people without heartburn and prostate cancer in over a million people who, but for testing, would have lived as long without being a cancer patient.

Second, the rules are changing. Expert panels constantly expand what constitutes disease: thresholds for diagnosing diabetes, hypertension, osteoperosis and obesity have all fallen in the last few years. The criterion for normal cholesterol has dropped multiple times. With these changes, disease can now be diagnosed in more than half the population.

* - As opposed to my principled refusal to sleep. I just don't see the point. Rhubarb. Rghubarb. Rhourbab. Rhubaoyoyyrriy...........

pathetic personal post

2007-01-02T23:47:00.001-05:00

My cat is sick. This is a rough night.

Update: The prayers must have worked. After I spent lots of money on tests and whatnot, the cat sort of spontaneously got better.

A Pre-Christmas Anecdote

2006-12-29T12:13:00.000-05:00

With all the mishegas of the holiday season I haven't taken much time out for reading, writing or arithmetic. (Rush Limbaugh likes to say readin', 'ritin', 'rithmetic and Rush are the four Rs of a good education. I do love listening to him rant about how Democrats control the weather.) So to tide everyone over until I can get down to some serious 'ritin', here's a wee story from the week I was trying to get out of DC...

I had been trying to get an interview with Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-Tex.) for a few weeks, especially after the election, because he's in line to chair the House Armed Services readiness subcommittee next year and a lot of environmental issues flow through that august chamber. (It covers preparations for battle, including training range weapons firing involving eventual cleanup.) I had tried not to badger his office too much -- although he cruised to re-election, I don't doubt he had bigger fish to fry than my questions about the Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative -- but after the immediate election aftermath was over and I was looking for next-day stories I needed something to come through. I was about to start a fresh round of barely disguised pleading when his office called me and offered a phone interview the next day. This doesn't usually happen when you're in my position. You typically have to cajole press secretaries until they remember who you are through sheer attrition; so them calling me out of the blue was a nice gesture. The next day, sure enough, Ortiz calls me -- from his truck out on a highway in Texas somewhere. I can hear the air rushing through his window. His press person is conferenced in from Washington. There we all are, getting down to business, when the flack says "Excuse me, everyone. Mr. Ortiz, the Speaker-elect is looking for you." So I'm on hold for five minutes while he talks to Nancy Pelosi about who knows what. Then I get my interview.

This is not a story with a punchline. It's what my day is like when things are interesting.

When The Hammer Falls, It Falls Hard

2006-12-16T02:21:00.000-05:00

You'll remember, won't you, way back near the beginning of this bloggysey (I just made that up!) that I warned against the prospect of getting a Dooce dropped on me. If you're really suffering too much from postmodern ennui to follow the link, the term refers to getting fired for whatever it is you wrote on your blog. If you don't get why, look it up -- I don't normally send people on pop culture wild goose chases, so you know when I say it's okay, you can trust it's for real.

Anyway, the point is that while my career is perfectly safe, someone at the company got the proverbial Doocing last week. I won't go into the details for reasons too tangled and richly, ironically obvious to explore. Suffice to say this person had the gall to question management decisions in rather saucy terms -- without naming names or company affiliations, but clearly with enough cheek to launch the ship of an internal investigation that finally pulled into port around the time I ran into him at a bar on Tuesday with some friends, drinking and smoking and smoking and cursing and not shaving. After several years at the company, he had been unceremoniously shown the door. I tell this story only as an illustration that these things really happen.

He got a new, better-paying job already.

Vegetarianism Is A Sign of Intelligence, Say Scienticians

2006-12-16T02:16:00.000-05:00

Sorry, lamb-basters: the proof says you're not as smart as me.

British researchers have found that children's IQ predicts their likelihood of becoming vegetarians as young adults -- lowering their risk for cardiovascular disease in the process. The finding could explain the link between smarts and better health, the investigators say.

"Brighter people tend to have healthier dietary habits," concluded lead author Catharine Gale, a senior research fellow at the MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre of the University of Southampton and Southampton General Hospital.

Recent studies suggest that vegetarianism may be associated with lower cholesterol, reduced risk of obesity and heart disease. This might explain why children with high IQs tend to have a lower risk of heart disease in later life.

The report is published in the Dec. 15 online edition of the British Medical Journal.

Normally I'm not one to gloat, but I'd like to take this opportunity to shake my head in wonder and say how often I told you so. Go ahead and read the rest of it, if you even can. I'll wait over here nibbling my lettuce and letting my brain grow to enormous size.

First Real Post-Election News Dump

2006-12-06T20:46:00.000-05:00

The long-awaited News From Lappland:

Archer Daniels Midland May Undermine Global Warming Regulations

Corporate agriculture interests may decide to kill us all for their short-term profits. You have to follow the link if you really want to get the full picture -- it takes a surprisingly short amount of time -- but here's the gist of it:

Ethanol's revival is intimately linked to one company, the giant grain-trading firm Archer Daniels Midland, and one seemingly unrelated product, high-fructose corn syrup. The story centers on a man who arguably counts as corporate America's most generous and influential political donor of the second half of the 20th century, former ADM CEO Dwayne Andreas. To understand the weird and lucrative nexus between an industrial sweetener, a gas substitute, and a grain magnate, we need to go back to the days of disco.

[...]

Just how much does government manipulation on behalf of ADM's twin corn-processing units cost U.S. taxpayers and consumers? That's a tricky question, because the subsidy programs are so indirect and complex. For example, the corn subsidies that have kept ADM's feedstock of choice cheap for so long don't go to the company, but rather farmers. Nor does the sugar quota involve direct payments to ADM. Consumers pay the tab in the form of higher food prices. In addition to these difficulties, several states and even municipalities have put in place policies that favor corn processing.

In a landmark study this year for the Geneva*-based International Institute for Sustainable Development, researcher Doug Koplow attempted to come to terms with the situation. Here's how he described the "major challenge" of quantifying the value of government support for ethanol and other biofuel: "Virtually every production input and production stage of ethanol and biodiesel is subsidized somewhere in the country; in many locations, producers can tap into multiple subsidies at once.

After 50 pages of detailing seemingly every one of those supports, Koplow reaches his estimated bottom line: total government support for ethanol clocks in at somewhere between $6.3 billion and $8.7 billion per year.

Let's crunch numbers here. ADM controls a third of the ethanol market, so (taking Koplow's lower estimate) let's say it benefits from about $2 billion in government largesse. If we use its third-quarter profit report as a base, ADM can be expected to make about $700 million in profit from ethanol over the next year. That means that every dollar in profit ADM makes from ethanol costs the public about $2.85. Note that Koplow's analysis doesn't even attempt to reckon with the sugar quota, which has played such a powerful role in corn ethanol's ascent.

Bush May Lift Drilling Ban in Alaskan Bay

Keep your eye out for what happens on this the next few days and weeks. The outcome will be something of a harbinger on the future of oil vs. land conservation. Think of it as an under-the-radar ANWR.

Brazil Protects Great Swath of Amazon

This is happening in a state where the loggers usually call the shots, which makes it especially good news.

Known as the Guayana Shield, the 57,915-square-mile area contains more than 25 percent of the world's remaining humid tropical forests and the largest remaining unpolluted fresh water reserves in the American tropics.

The protected areas will link to existing reserves to form a vast preservation corridor eventually stretching into neighboring Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

Protester Immolation Virtually Unnoticed

It's hard to read things like this. Some people just cannot handle the way our country is being run.

Fox News Memo: Watch For Terrorists Crowing About Dem Election Victory

This speaks for itself, as though we really even needed any more proof that Fox is completely divorced from reality. It's depressing to think anyone watches, isn't it? I mean, really? What do they think they're getting out of it?

John LeCarre, Spy Novelist, Goes to The Congo

I've been meaning to post this for a while. It's a powerful story well told.

It was the strangest journey of my life and it always will be. I was looking for fictional characters I had invented, in a country I had never visited. The distant town of my imagination was Bukavu in Eastern Congo, known formerly as Costermansville and built in the early twentieth century by Belgian colonialists. It stands at the southern end of Lake Kivu, at 4,800 feet the highest and coolest of all Africa's Great Lakes. I had written my novel in a period when for personal reasons I had felt unable to leave England. Now, too late if my previous books were anything to go by, I was about to check its people and places against the reality.

* - See comments for a clarification on this. I can only point out that I didn't write the article, as this person -- who is unknown to me -- seems to think.

And Now... What This Means For The Country

2006-12-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

I keep promising it, now I'll spill it.

1) The election means I wait around the office wondering whether John Warner, a relatively sane but very conservative senator, will take the minority ranking member position on the Environment and Public Works Committee in the next Congress. (It's a mark of environmentalists' desperation and jungle fever anxiety that they've come down to rooting for him. Because...) If he doesn't, James Inhofe, global warming skeptic extraordinaire, will get that plum assignment, from where he can scuttle, filibuster, delay and undermine any kind of environmental policy Barbara Boxer may want to put forth. A consensus is growing in the gossip community that Warner, who floated the ranking member idea himself, has always had his eye on the Intelligence Committee instead and made a stink to ensure he got his way. This could be the case, for reasons having to do with many senators, several committees and an avalanche of personal interests, but we don't know yet. The bottom line is that with Inhofe, global warming legislation -- which, depending on your point of view, would either be a waste of money or a way to prevent living on Venus -- would face a terrific hurdle. And so we all wait.

2) On a related note, it means we won't have any more Inhofe-sponsored hearings on whether the media has done a good job covering "climate variation." I went to today's media circus as part of my job; it was newsworthy mostly in an Onion sort of way.

3) It means we'll finally know the truth, or at least more of it, about those damn prisons that were built with our tax money and run in the name of our security. Prisons where agents of our elected government continue to torture innocent people, deny "enemy combatants" basic human rights, let alone legal protections, and spread fear and resentment supposedly with our best interests in mind. If these operations have yielded a single really good piece of intelligence, don't you think we would have heard about it by now?

Speaking of which, several years ago my uncle got me a copy of Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which I hadn't ever sat down to until last week. I read it practically straight through. I cannot recommend it highly enough -- it's a quick read and very intellectually and morally stirring. He was the New York Times war correspondent for many years, and his stories go back to covering El Salvador. I didn't know this, but he was at one time a divinity student. His commentaries on war, patriotism, hate, love and death read like the classics. You cannot buy this book soon enough.

4) It means we can expect a five-day work week from Congress, as opposed to the current two days. According to the Washington Post:

Hoyer and other Democratic leaders say they are trying to repair the image of Congress, which was so anemic this year it could not meet a basic duty: to approve spending bills that fund government. By the time the gavel comes down on the 109th Congress on Friday, members will have worked a total of 103 days. That's seven days fewer than the infamous "Do-Nothing Congress" of 1948.

Hoyer said members can bid farewell to extended holidays, the kind that awarded them six weekdays to relax around Memorial Day, when most Americans get a single day off. He didn't mention the month-long August recess, the two-week April recess or the weeks off in February, March and July.

He said members need to spend more time in the Capitol to pass laws and oversee federal agencies. "We are going to meet sufficient times, so the committees can do their jobs on behalf of the American people," he said.

Next time you want to argue in favor of the GOP Congress From Hell's Intestine, think about that 103 days figure before you say something you can't take back. That's your money they're getting paid with.

5) It means I'll actually have Capitol Hill issues, bills and debates to cover rather than hustling bureaucrats for table leavings and giblets. That will be a nice departure, believe me.

6) Hopefully it means taking North Korean diplomacy seriously, as Bush has. . . uh, not done.

Remember how the whole premise of Bush administration North Korea policy was that we shouldn't be offering 'pay-offs' to the North Koreans in exchange for them giving up their nuclear program?

From today's Times:

"The United States has offered a detailed package of economic and energy assistance in exchange for North Korea’s giving up nuclear weapons and technology, American officials said Tuesday."

So after six long years of incompetence, arrogance, dithering and disaster, in which the president allowed the NKs to waltz into the nuclear club unimpeded, they're now back to the same policy they insisted on ditching in the first place. Only now with a hand infinitely weaker than it was in 2000 since back then the NKs didn't have the bomb.

7) It means this guy no longer has a place at the table and will just run for president on his way into the mists of time.

Hunter had wanted the island closed off for private hunting for several groups over the years. Hopefully with his quixotic run for the presidency in 2008 and the Dem majority, this will be the last we hear of this stupid hunting on Santa Rosa Island B.S.

I almost wrote a story about this once: Hunter, the outgoing chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wanted at one time to close off Santa Rosa Island, off the coast of his native California, to create a private hunting playground for himself and his friends. (No one liked the idea.) Now that he'll soon be in the minority party, he's throwing his hat into the ring, hoping to corner the reactionary and super-reactionary vote on his way to the White House.

It means plenty more, but you get the idea. Let the good times roll.

Elections, Work, Orwell, Girls, Agriculture, Etc.

2006-11-19T22:35:00.000-05:00

I won't lie to you: I haven't even tried to sit down to the blog for a while. Things have been moving at a pace both slower and faster than usual, and instead of trying to write it all down on the fly I thought I'd let it run its course and collect my thoughts afterward. Now is a good time, because not only do I have the bed (and for now the whole house) to myself again, I'm fortified with half a bottle of Freixenet and will probably finish the rest in due course, which does wonders for writer's block. The sparkling wine of bohemians and Spaniards -- grab your own bottle.

First order of business is a thank-you to Nolo, who as always rolled the ball forward when I wouldn't and brought the news that I couldn't. (I certainly don't subscribe to The Lancet, for instance. Although I did just send in my check for a year's subscription -- low holiday rate! -- to the London Review of Books. There's a story about a friend's drunken prank call to my girlfriend that involves that august publication, but I'll leave you hanging for now.) Most good blogs are joint ventures, I find, or at least go beyond the usual "thought for the day" formula that mediocre art seems to thrive on. The big political blogs are all communal or at least have a few regular contributors; the most exciting ones written by a single person are about a recognizable cast of familiar characters. Dooce, for example, has made a living writing about her family, especially her young daughter, in a way that transcends the God-awfulness of a dear diary. What I've so far hoped to do with this blog is tell stories about Washington from the eyes of a recent transplant that are more than the sum of their parts -- that is, do more than keep people up to date on what I did on a given day. It hasn't always been my premier artistic outlet, but it's at least a chance to practice my non-fiction chops in a way that doesn't feel like work. In time I hope it can become more than even that modest ambition suggests; at least, a place where several talented political writers I know can jointly spread the word about what's going on in their line of work, and at most a sort of mini-Kossackia, where people who didn't already know me come to read good work and learn things. I don't mind starting slow. So, thanks to Nolo for keeping the dream alive, as she has in the past.

Now, what have I been up to lately?

My lovely girlfriend was in town until earlier today. Seeing her off wasn't as lousy an affair as usual -- I'll see her again soon enough when I fly back home for Thanksgiving -- but brought the same old sense of not knowing what the hell to do with myself, which usually leads to reading and feeling that nice friendly cloud of melancholia settle in for the evening. (Tonight was no exception, but for more interesting reasons than usual. More on that later.) I'll spare you most of the details of her visit, except to say the following:

1) I am very lucky to have a girlfriend who likes books as much as I do. Shortly before she arrived, but after the election, I finished the copy of From Here to Eternity she got me a few years ago -- who else would have made it a Valentine's Day gift, or a gift at all? -- and was left more or less devastated by it, which I feel few other people would understand as fully as she did. At the same time, who else would have bought me Orwell's Why I Write as a gift just because the election was coming up?

2) It's nice to have someone who shares your enthusiasms, even for things that don't greatly matter. I wish I could expand on this general thought I keep having -- about sharing enthusiasms, that is -- but I never really make the effort. A good case in point is both wanting to stay in bed and watch the few existing episodes of a show called Firefly that went off the air 11 installments after it premiered four years ago. We both love this show despite the fact that it mostly exists now as an Internet geek phenomenon.

3) Aside from having all the qualities you expect boyfriends to crow about, such as looks and charm (and good but not overly trendy fashion sense), I never feel she is merely tolerating me. When we're having fun, it's a very genuine fun unencumbered by apprehension or expectations, and when we're not -- which, as far as I could tell, was never the case this visit -- it's at least a committed disappointment or disagreement, rather than a resigned shrug of boredom. I don't know why I like this so much about our relationship, but I do. I like the highs and lows to be real rather than settle for a mushy middle. In general, it makes the highs better and the lows rarer, and it's a good sign that both people care about each other in an almost aesthetic way beyond merely enjoying each other's company. As in, "Really? You think that's good?" rather than "Whatever."

Anyway, enough fancy. We had a very good time, particularly by turning the basement into a bedroom and sleeping on the foldout couch (donated by Charvakan in one of his generous moods) and by hardly sharing my roommates' company for the week. We saw movies, ate and drank a good amount, slept in on the weekends, even clothes-shopped briefly. Because of an agreement I made with a coworker -- shortly before he left, incidentally -- I have to wear a suit to work every day until December 9, which will be a month after the Democrats officially took the Senate. So I need another suit.

Speaking of the Senate, a story about work: on Wednesday I was sent to Capitol Hill to cover the Senate environment committee's vote on the new nominee to be EPA inspector general, a fairly dull if inoffensive DOD bureaucrat named Alex Beehler. He used to work for Koch Industries, the country's worst single polluter (if memory serves), and for that reason Barbara Boxer opposes him with a passion. She's due to chair the environment committee when the next Congress is sworn in (because of the Dem majority) and has made sure, through what's called a hold, that Beehler won't make it to EPA IG under any foreseeable circumstances. The politicking isn't what's interesting -- I just want it clear how anticlimactic this vote was going to be. I was sent mostly in order to corner Boxer and ask her questions about her agenda for next year. I accomplished this, along with about five other reporters (including a former colleague, now the competition), but there was no vote on Beehler because the committee chair, James Inhofe of Oklahoma -- who believes global warming is a leftist hoax -- never showed up for the committee meeting. So it was postponed until later in the day, at which point I returned and waited for the vote to occur. Because of Senate procedure, the committee wasn't going to meet until after debate on the agriculture appropriations bill had ended, and when I got there Byron Dorgan of North Dakota -- a Democrat who has held useful hearings on contractor abuses in Iraq when the Republicans wouldn't -- was on a tirade about why the government should give farmers an extra $5 billion this year. He apparently does this every year, and it's always shot down at the same point in the process, so it wasn't clear why this year was any different; this sort of political kabuki goes on in a hundred ways on a hundred different issues. But from standing around in the Capitol Building press gallery long enough, I heard that Bill Frist promised him a vote on it and then decided not to grant the vote, so Dorgan was taking it out on the whole Senate by basically filibustering until he got his way. Kent Conrad, the (ahem) other North Dakota senator, at one point brought out what looked like the periodic table and started spouting nonsense, so I knew I wasn't going anywhere for a while. I wandered the halls looking for someone worth talking to, but it was near the end of the day and the best I could muster was bumping into a few people interviewing Trent Lott in an obscure hallway about being voted minority whip, which had happened that morning. His toupee looked slightly askew and no one seemed to mind that he is a well-known racist. I don't know what a journalist is supposed to do in the face of a politician he disagrees with -- you have to be a professional, after all, whatever your anarchic impulses -- but the sight of people laughing at his boring jokes just set my teeth on edge. They were all still there five minutes later when I made another pass. Dorgan was talking about how the only university in the country that can teach a boy to herd cattle is the American family farm. It was cold and dreary outside. My editor told me to "hurry up and wait" when I called the office. It was 5:30.

Finally I got a bright idea and called the environment committee main line from the press gallery phone, thereby "scooping" the competition with the news that the vote had been postponed until Thursday. And then on Thursday, the vote was postponed again until further notice. My editor, paid to cook up conspiracy theories and then tell other people to make calls until they're proved wrong, thought the farm bill filibuster could be "a smokescreen" for the administration to quietly kill the Beehler nomination. Never mind that Dorgan and Conrad are both Democrats. Smokescreen was the word. So that was Thursday morning. The name Alex Beehler is a funny gag around the office.

And swerving to the more recent past. After Stephanie left I went to Murky Coffee at Eastern Market -- no longer my favorite hangout, but always a solid second or third -- and read most of Why I Write, which was a rewarding experience to say the least. After that and Eternity, I feel I'm on a serious roll with the books that, if my luck holds, I can ride at least until spring. There's bound to be a dud or a disappointment eventually, but I've got a few reputed winners lined up and I anticipate a good reading season the next few months. Charvakan recently complimented me on setting aside time for reading -- his compliment is accepted but perhaps a bit misplaced. I don't tip my hat to him on account of his prolific drinking, for instance. We do what comes naturally. Some people start books and don't finish them. Others start one, then another, then another. Some people never read at all. Some people wish they read more. Some people read the wrong stuff. I read a lot. Char pours a mean Rusty Nail. I don't think either of us would have it any other way.

Reading Orwell, even essay-writing Orwell, makes you really feel that all things are possible with a good book. This is to say nothing of all the other good books I've read, and there have been a lot -- some day I'll write a purely literary screed about what you should read and what you shouldn't read and why. (That's a promise. You can skip it, but you'd miss out.) He's not my favorite writer, not even close, but he's one of the few that has never once disappointed me or written something I felt to be false. He rings unerringly true even when, in hindsight, you can see that his vision was sometimes objectively off somewhat. He brings the strength of agreeable conviction to everything he says, and reading him makes you feel the comparative lack of it today. Sitting in a cafe, reading his pronouncements about fascism, socialism, writing, the English language, history, etc. etc. while it gets darker and colder outside -- and then going into the night, still reading him by streetlight, wandering the chilly streets of an unfamiliar quiet neighborhood not quite done with him yet -- is somewhat gauche and cliche by modern standards but mentally exhilarating and very good for you. Thinking about how contemporary "political" writers, such as his self-proclaimed disciple Christopher Hitchens, stack up makes you shake your head in amazement that Orwell himself comes out well ahead even sixty years later. Especially in a bite-sized format, like the Penguin Great Ideas copy Stephanie got for me, such a dose of optimism in the face of long odds and belief in literature despite its obvious decline in popularity is just the thing for someone like me looking for a new Big Idea to come along. It doesn't have to be fully formed, or even have broad explanatory power -- it just has to make you believe in the future and that writing is worth it, which a lot of writing doesn't do. This is all to say that reading Why I Write, in the special context of this comfortably solitary evening, was the next best thing to still having a girlfriend around, despite now having to keep myself warm with nothing but the blankets tonight.

Bloody clock says it's late. Coming soon is an Orwell-sized pronouncement about the election and, as previously promised, What This Means For America.

Now there's a shock.

2006-11-01T16:30:00.000-05:00

The results of a world sex survey, published online today by the Lancet,* led the professionals who conducted it to the following conclusion:

"The selection of public-health messages needs to be guided by epidemiological evidence rather than myths and moral stances," . . . "The greatest challenge to sexual-health promotion in almost all countries comes from opposition from conservative forces to harm-reduction strategies."

Other stunning revelations include the observation that marriage does not safeguard sexual health and that "very early sexual experience within marriage can be coercive and traumatic" for young girls.

Fancy that.

*Sadly, the Lancet study itself is accessible online only to subscribers.

How Much Power Does The Military Have?

2006-10-31T01:49:00.000-05:00

Charvakan called me out -- gently -- for possibly overstating the power the military wields in Washington. I'll get to that in short order, because it's something I'm interested in considering in a little more detail, but for now I'll leave you to chew on this:

Pentagon memo reveals launch of new PR war

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is buttressing its public relations staff and starting an operation akin to a political campaign war room as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld faces intensifying criticism over the Iraq war.

In a memo obtained by the Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said new teams of people will "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record."

...Another branch would coordinate "surrogates." In political campaigns, surrogates are usually high-level politicians or key interest groups who speak or travel on behalf of a candidate or an issue.

The plan would focus more resources on so-called new media, such as the Internet and Weblogs. It would also include new workers to book civilian and military guests on television and radio shows.

Remember, this is the Pentagon, so this is all paid for by your tax dollars. Rumsfeld would rather use public money to wage his internal battle for political survival than face up to his errors and resign as he should.

Gay Porn King Donates to Republican Party

2006-10-29T11:57:00.000-05:00

Is this the weirdest campaign season in decades? I mean, in '04 it was about Iraq and Swift Boat character assassination, which is all kind of parallel universe, but only in the way that everything about the Bush presidency has been surreal. This year things are just plain upside down.

It turns out that the Republican National Committee is a regular recipient of political contributions from Nicholas T. Boyias, the owner and CEO of Marina Pacific Distributors, one of the largest producers and distributors of gay porn in the United States. [One] recent article on Marina Pacific's new marketing campaign from XBiz, a porn industry trade sheet, notes that, in addition to producing its own material, the "company acts as a distribution house to hundreds of lines, mostly gay, 40 of which can be purchased only through MPD."

The company actually seems to be a trendsetter in the industry. As Boyias recently noted, "We have always modeled ourselves after a Fortune-style company. They are the models of exceptional customer service. We have formed strategic alliances with our vendors and customers alike, offering them tools and marketing to assist them in succeeding with their business models. Our one-on-one interpersonal relationships have never been duplicated in the distribution industry."

When Galaxies Collide

2006-10-29T11:47:00.000-05:00

No, this isn't a misplaced Seinfeld reference -- sometimes galaxies do really collide, and this is what it looks like.

I'm working up the mojo to do a few more substantive posts, but things may be a little quiet around here until after the election, when I plan to post a long, gleeful, drunken rant about What This Means For America.

News Dump

2006-10-22T10:57:00.000-04:00

I originally meant to have a running feature here -- if you've been around since the blog started, you may remember it -- called "People in Suits Who Can't Read." My first one was David Brooks, who remains the paradigm example, but it sort of petered out. Anyway, the news dump has become a sort of de facto feature. It's not quite as regular as Daily Kos, but you still can't get all this news in one place anywhere else.

Just Remember There's a Whole Universe Out There

Parts of it look like this. I don't know why, but seeing this sort of thing makes me not care about looking especially trendy when I go outside.

New Searchable Database for Congressional Employee Salaries

You wouldn't believe how much wacky fun we have with this handy little doodad at work. We know most of these people and they're almost all alarmingly overpaid. Some of them should probably be in prison for their own protection instead of drawing a paycheck.

Unions Getting Busted Good and Proper

I'll let this speak for itself.

In a move that surprised exactly no one, the NLRB voted along party lines yesterday to reclassify 8 million workers as "supervisors" who will no longer have any protection under U.S. labor laws. It no longer matters whether you hire, fire, or discipline. If you do so much as make out a shift schedule or monitor the quality of other employees' work, bingo! You're a supervisor!

[...]

This is, by the way, the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say that Republicans have made it steadily harder over the years to organize unions. Most people will never hear about this ruling, just as most have never heard of the dozens of other under-the-radar rulings, laws, regulations, and court decisions that have slowly chipped away at the ability of unions to organize over the years. But believe me: business lobbies have. And since this ruling mostly affects service industries, they can't pretend that globalization has forced their hand. They just want to eliminate any organized pressure to pay their workers more.

Violence Against Children Generally Accepted Worldwide

Sad news from the U.N., but what is anyone doing about it? It's one of those things that reaaaally doesn't lend itself to a bumper sticker campaign. Cultural attitudes mashed together with economic depression and traditional religious beliefs make the child's lot in life, at this late stage of world development, still pretty bleak.

"Many people, even children, accept violence as an inevitable part of life," said the 45-page study by independent expert Paulo Sergio Pinheiro.

International Labor Organization data showed that in 2004 there were 218 million child laborers of whom 126 million did hazardous work, the report said. WHO estimates up to 140 million women and girls have undergone genital mutilation, it said.

"I urge states to prohibit all forms of violence against children, in all settings, including all corporal punishment, harmful traditional practices -- such as early and forced marriages, female genital mutilation and so-called honor crimes -- sexual violence and torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment," Pinheiro said.

The report also calls for the appointment of a U.N. special representative to act as a high profile global advocate to promote prevention and elimination of all violence against children.

Depleted Uranium is a War Crime

2006-10-19T00:05:00.000-04:00

Everyone knows about Abu Ghraib, the lack of Iraqi postwar planning, Guantanamo, having bin Laden get away, etc. etc. These issues are front and center. But what do they really mean for how people view the military itself, rather than its political masters? You can view it as a necessary evil, or you can hate it for being a death machine, or you can't imagine America without it, or you can wish it were twice as big and ten times as willing to kick ass. Or whatever.

But any way you slice it, the military per se doesn't take too much heat for its perceived failures. The blame goes (rightly) to the administration, to Rumsfeld, to Cheney, somewhat to Bush depending on how with it you think he is -- it doesn't go to the generals because they were following orders, which is what we expect generals to do. If we had a freelance military, we probably wouldn't have an election coming up. Rightly or wrongly, the generals and their subordinates get a pass. We cluck our tongues at how soldiers could possibly have at those torture victims with such apparent relish, and we shake our heads at how soldiers could possibly commit atrocities against civilians. We wonder how they sleep with themselves when we hear stories of innocent people getting caught up in sweeps and tortured for months without a trial.

But ultimately, it all comes back to the White House. The Bush clan and its army of evil flying monkey lawyers made it happen. The military was just doing what it was told. Case closed. Because the military just bucks up and follows orders.

Wrong wrong wrong.

I am here to tell you that the military basically runs this town. If the top brass wants something to happen, it happens. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be changing the street lights to hot pink. It could be changing the maps so Georgetown is called "Bonerland." Eating pot roast on Tuesday could become a felony and we'd all have to start using the word "coinkydink." It is mind-boggling what the military is capable of doing. A wave of its magic wand: wind farms no longer get built. A slight, goosey hiccup: years of health research are suddenly suspect and need another decade of review. A brief, kittenish thumb-twiddle: we spread cancer and death to civilians that had nothing to do with anything. And all this is made more sinister because the military doesn't sit around and wait for something to do. It needs to look busy. It comes up with new weapons, new demands for bigger and badder stuff (the Chinese menace is the number one excuse for outrageous spending projects, but there are others), new ways to make itself useful. Usually it's just a colossal giveaway to defense contractors. But sometimes the military machine, which is run by engineers and bureaucrats just as much as by HQ, comes up with a really especially bad idea and there is nothing we can do about it because we don't really ever know what the military is thinking until it's already been done.

Very few of you readers know the punk band Anti-Flag. They're not everyone's cup of hot tea, but whatever you want to say about whether they have a beat you can dance to, they get the political ball rolling instead of screaming about cops taking their skateboards.

Also, I interviewed Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) the other day, and he had a few things to say that made it into what I think was a well-written story in my latest issue. And a little bird tells me I'm onto something with this topic and that I should "keep looking," which is the second whiff of Woodward-and-Bernsteinism I've caught since I got this job. They're probably watching me in a tree with binoculars right now and I've already said too much.

What do all these crucial themes have in common? Click here to watch a video that makes the connection explicit.

Yikes

2006-10-12T22:55:00.000-04:00

Before I forget, a friend of mine from back in college called me completely out of the blue a few weeks ago and said she was here for two nights before leaving for the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. I met her at the airport after work -- on a Friday, mind you -- and I took her around town: we had dinner at Teaism in Dupont Circle, where incidentally they make a fine seaweed salad, and I walked her to the Pentagon because it was three blocks from her hotel. She was here for the remainder of the weekend but I never heard from her again and I assume she got there fine.

Except it's not fine, because here's what a book I have next to my bed has to say about Turkmenistan (I suspected this but didn't really appreciate the gravity of the situation):

[Honcho For Life] Saparmurat Niyazov insists that his countrymen refer to him as "Turkmenbashi": "Father of the Turkmen." He has gone to great lengths to intricately weave his personal history with the general national identity so that is it impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. Even before Turkmenistan became independent, Niyazov insisted that instruction in schools be carried out using the Turkmen language rather than Russian. . .

In December 1999, parliament amended the constitution to allow Niyazov to remain president for life. The following day Niyazov outlawed opposition parties for a period of ten years. . .

He has engaged in an escalating series of purges, which accelerated in the summer of 2001 and got so bad that the most qualified people for high-level positions turn down the promotions they are offered because accepting a high-level post means almost certain imprisonment down the line. Niyazov has also used public show trials and humiliated his enemies and imagined enemies on live television. . .

He renamed the month of January "Turkmenbashi," after himself; April "Gurbanosoltan Edzhe" after his mother; and September "Rukhnama" after the book he wrote.

He renamed all the streets in the capital with numbers and ordered citizens to fly the national flags over their homes.

He renamed the Caspian port city of Krasnovodok "Turkmenbashi."

He banned ballet, opera, and circus for being alien to Turkmen culture and he shut down the Academy of Science.

His face appears on every bank note.

His image is permanently displayed -- in gold -- in the upper right corner of the television screen during all broadcasts.

He ordered the erections of monuments of himself throughout the country including one of his mother holding him as a baby.

He spent $7 million on a seventy-five-meter-high Arch of Neutrality on top of which is a twelve-meter statue of himself that revolves during the day so that he is always facing the sun.

His face also appears on vodka bottles and tea boxes.

He created two brands of cologne, one of which is named after himself and the other after his mother.

In 2005, he banned car radios and lip-synching and forbade the playing of recorded music on television or at weddings.

He ordered doctors to stop taking the Hippocratic Oath and instead swear allegiance to him.

Comments and Housekeeping

2006-10-12T22:53:00.000-04:00

If you make a comment and you wonder whether I'll ever see it or say anything about it, wait until the next post is up. Despite evidence to the contrary, I do often read them and respond; I just don't do it until I get to the blog in general, which can take a few days. So think about that if you've been dying to know, for instance, whether I took a look at the Washington Monthly political blog. The answer is hidden deep, deep in the comment thread on If You Want to Be Hypnotized...

Glittering Prizes, Sweden and Eternal Fame

2006-10-12T22:32:00.000-04:00

What do they have in common, you may ask yourself. Orhan Pamuk is all. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature today, something I wait for like other people wait to see who won the Super Bowl or whether they'll ever catch that damn Lucky Charms leprechaun.

As is often the case, I was way ahead of the curve in buying his stuff, but I haven't read any of it. Yet. In fact I'm currently embroiled in two corkers, one of which -- From Here to Eternity -- they made a movie out of. The other is an incredible piece of historical research called The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles. Everyone who's ever gone through a Hemingway jag (I even read the letters, which are about as thick as a phone book) has got to read this book, and I don't italicize these things lightly. He was, in addition to being a complete ass, incredibly gullible and vain and stupid at times. Rather than telling you what the story involves, let me just say it's more compelling than To Have and Have Not. Which isn't saying much, but it does twist the knife in an interesting way.

And OP? He was charged by the Turkish government not too long ago for making unpatriotic statements but -- and what did they think would happen? -- everyone got on his side and they had to drop it. It was a black eye for Turkey, which it compounded when it tried to use the same charges recently against a second writer.

The Swedish Academy declared Pamuk the winner on a day when, to Turkey's fury, the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that the Armenian genocide had occurred.

In a what was seen as a test case for freedom of speech in Turkey, Pamuk was tried for insulting "Turkishness" after telling a Swiss paper last year that 1 million Armenians had died in Turkey during World War One and 30,000 Kurds had perished in recent decades.

The court dismissed the charges on a technicality, but other writers and journalists still are being prosecuted under the article and can face a jail sentence of up to three years.

If You're Looking to Be Hypnotized...

2006-10-03T01:16:00.000-04:00

Baraka is one of the best movies I've ever seen, and is not actually edited the way this video suggests. You can listen to the music or not, but given the options it's not a bad backdrop.

Oh, Beehler!

2006-10-01T13:33:00.000-04:00

It's an inside joke at the office. In fact the man has become a fictitious character with me and my friends, sort of an amalgamation of fact and fancy that only Washington journalists could or would come up with, let alone find funny.

Bush's nominee to be the new EPA inspector general, an invisible but hugely important post, currently works at the Defense Department as an environmental bureaucrat and used to work for Koch Industries (look them up). I've been writing about this guy like mad for the last six weeks, and I was at his Senate confirmation hearing. I can't share my work here, obviously, but you get the gist of it from this link.

Defense Department Must Now Regularly Report on Iraq Progress

2006-10-01T13:26:00.000-04:00

In the course of my duties as a journalist, I have to slog through a lot of documents that most people will never actually read. Usually it's a chore and makes me wonder what I'm doing, but occasionally you find things like this that make it all worthwhile. This is from this year's congressional report on the Defense Appropriations Act, which gives the military all that sweet, filthy lucre every year. This is binding, by the way.

"SEC. 9010.

(a) Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act and every 90 days thereafter through the end of fiscal year 2007, the Secretary of Defense shall set forth in a report to Congress a comprehensive set of performance indicators and measures for progress toward military and political stability in Iraq.

(b) The report shall include performance standards and goals for security, economic, and security force training objectives in Iraq together with a notional timetable for achieving these goals."

These might not change any Republican hearts and minds, but they will become political fodder like you've never seen if Democrats take over the House or Senate and hold oversight hearings.