Humane Executions

An interesting thought from Mark Kleiman about capital punishment. I'm in favor of capital punishment, although I'm also in favor of making damn sure that the executed prisoner really was guilty, and too often our criminal justice system demonstrates more arrogance than confidence in the results of its process. Also on the subject of crime and punishment, Steve Martin offers his take on the "72 Virgins" myth of Muslim paradise -- predictably, it's not quite so pleasurable as first impressions might suggest.

The Kennel Effect

Because the dogs had been eating a lot of things they shouldn't in our absence, The Wife and I bought some wire crates for the dogs. The first crates we bought were a little small, so we supplemented them with a larger one. Now we've got good-sized crates for both dogs, and use the smallest one that we first bought for the cat who acts like a pest, leaving the quiet cat free to roam the house.

The critters have adapted very well to this new aspect of their lives. The dogs, after some initial resistance to the too-small cages, have decided that they like the kennels and go in there on their own. We found Karma sleeping in her kennel all on her own this morning.

The result is that we can sleep in the mornings without animals scratching at our bedroom doors -- or even leave the bedroom doors open and let the heat from the rest of the house in. On weekends, we can even sleep in. We can also leave for work and know that the dogs won't grab something off the coffee table and rip it to shreds.

I wouldn't have thought the animals would have liked being kenneled. But not only do they seem to like having their own secure space to sleep in, the dogs also seem to be behaving better when they're out of the cages -- there's less jockeying for dominance between them and even less begging for food while we're eating dinner. We should have done this a long time ago.

Proof That Giuliani Is The Front Runner

Rudy Giuliani has quickly, and without formally declaring his candidacy, become the front-runner for the Republican nomination for President in 2008. How do I know this is true? Because the New York Times has run its first hatchet job of the election cycle on him, and not on John McCain or Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich.

As Marc Schulman at Donklephant points out, the Times' analysis of the Giuliani Exploratory Committee's website provides only positive information about the candidate. Well, imagine that. The article points out that some New Yorkers had grown weary of Mayor Giuliani's "combativeness" and abrasive style, that the decline in crime which Giuliani takes credit for had begun prior to his taking office, and that the city had not become a utopia after eight years of his administration. Nor does the website discuss, as does the Times, Giuliani's personal life which does a few non-Ozzie and Harriet kinds of episodes. Now, these are certainly things one might say to criticize Giuliani. But they are most certainly not things that one would expect Giuliani to say about himself in a website designed to encourage people to support his candidacy for President.

For some reason, the Times is not taking Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton to task for failing to disclose possible negatives about Senator Clinton -- her campaign website does not mention a thing about Hillary's craven tolerance for her husband's very famous infidelities either before or during their White House years, or rumors of her verbal abuse of White House and Secret Service staff when she was First Lady (rumors which, for the record, I do not believe since they make no sense), or her involvement in shady real estate deals and other kinds of quasi-corruption when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, or the fact that America was not a paradise when her husband left office after having had all that critical policy and political support from his undeniably influential and powerful wife. The point is, you wouldn't expect Hillary to mention these things, and the New York Times doesn't see anything wrong with her failure to mention them on a website she created to promote her candidacy for President.

Why, then, is Giuliani's candidacy held to a different standard? Because this is the New York Times we're talking about here. It's the Paper Of Record, perhaps, and certainly a rich source of information about politics and national affairs. Smart people work there and I'm sure that they do try hard to get their facts right and exercise some care about filtering news out from non-news. But all the same, the product seems incurably left-wing and one-sided; they like Hillary better than Rudy, and in the judgement of these very smart, politically aware, and liberal people, Giuliani is the most prominent Republican candidate in the field and campaign season is officially underway.

They probably also feel that since both Clinton and Giuliani have links to New York, they are in a better position than most media outlets to opine on what's going on since they are, after all, the New York Times. So it's apparently time to start sharpening the axes.

The Pitch, Part V (Don't Sell Out, Rudy!)

To my immediate displeasure, I note that Rudy Giuliani dropped an important code word while being interviewed by Sean Hannity on Faux News: He said he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges to the Federal courts. Further, he seems to be softening his strong pro-choice stand in a few other ways, as the New York Times notes, with respect to parental notification laws.

Now, a very careful reading of what Giuliani is saying now compared to things he said in the past reveals no actual inconsistencies. Today, he is saying that the Constitution permits parental notification laws if there are judicial bypasses -- that is, if the minor seeking an abortion can get judicial permission instead of parental permission prior to undergoing the procedure. This is a correct statement of Constitutional law. It is also not inconsistent with a statement Giuliani made in 1997 that if he were in Congress or a state legislature, he would have voted against enacting exactly such a law. It is one thing to say that a law is Constitutional, it is another to say that it is a good idea.

Nevertheless, this is bothersome to me. It bothers me in the same way that Jack Kemp's reversal of position on affirmative action bothered me when he was Robert Dole's running mate in 1996. Kemp had been in favor of some forms of affirmative action, but reversed himself to be more ideologically congruent with the Presidential candidate and the party's platform which provided for a near-blanket opposition to all forms of affirmative action. I'm not a fan of affirmative action myself, and I was actually more pleased with Kemp's ultimate position. But it sickened me to see Kemp sell out (especially when the Dole ticket was so obviously going to lose). Kemp got his credibility and appeal as a politician from being able to say that he had stood up for his principles for his entire political career. That doesn't mean he didn't compromise and take half a loaf sometimes out of political necessity, or that he was a rigid ideologue; it means he was always working towards the same ultimate goal. Suddenly reversing course on that issue took a lot of the moral authority out of his arguments on that issue -- and by extension, a lot of the moral force out of his arguments on other issues, too. It made him look craven and politically pliable.

I'd always respected Kemp for his convictions in favor of affirmative action even while I disagreed with them; I realized it was probably uncomfortable for him to maintain a position opposed to the majority of the party's but he did so anyway. I also liked Kemp quite a bit for his strong, principled positions on other issues where he and I did agree. Loyal Readers may recall that "flip-flopping" was a centerpiece attack of the President's campaign on John Kerry in 2004. And, come to think of it, against Al Gore in 2000. There is zero reason to believe that Democratic political operatives will not absolutely hammer Giuliani on a flip-flop on abortion, the Democrats' most prized, centerpiece issue, should such a flip-flop occur.

Look, Rudy Giuliani is pro-choice. There's no getting around that. The majority (but not all) of the GOP's base of activists and early-round voters are pro-life, and very passionately so. I understand reaching out to them and trying to appeal to them for support. But I fear that if Giuliani pushes much further in this direction, he will suffer the same loss of principled moral authority that Jack Kemp suffered in 1996. That would significantly detract from his appeal in other dimensions of his candidacy -- it's important to stand up for what you believe in, and be seen as having the courage of your convictions. That may mean alienating some primary voters and making the primary process more difficult than it would otherwise have been. But the prize for doing so is taking a huge weapon out of the hands of Democrats in the general election, and thereby gaining an advantage in a cycle where Republicans are going to need all the advantages they can get.

The pro-life contingent needs to be thrown a bone, I agree. They'll dislike being thrown a bone after they've been so affectionately courted by politicians in the past, it's true. But throwing them a bone is not the same thing as giving in to them, which carries a cost too steep to pay. A Republican primary voter motivated passionately by a strong pro-life position is never going to vote for you in the primaries anyway; such a voter will never really trust you no matter what you say. All you can realistically do is convince such a voter that he or she will be better off with you in the White House than a Democrat, and for that, a nod like this is all you need to accomplish that objective.

So don't sell out, Rudy! This far, and no farther.

Update 2/12/2007: For more on Rudy shifting rightward, read this week's article on that subject in Time magazine.

Lengthy Campaigns

Why are American Presidential campaigns so long? Because they are national. They aren't supposed to be easy. They're supposed to be difficult. They're supposed to be tests of the candidate's endurance, organizational skills, strategic thinking, political savvy, and speaking ability. Sadly, it seems that they are more tests of endurance and fundraising than of the more directly-applicable political skills.

The article praises European countries for short campaigns and European politicians for getting their messages out. That's all well and fine, but there are some very significant differences between European politics and U.S. politics.

First of all, most European countries have parliamentary systems. The U.S. government, however, is split into a bicameral Congress with a separately-elected executive.

Second (and related) European countries have much stronger political parties. Their members tend to vote in blocs when commanded; they promote a much more uniform ideology. Republicans in the U.S. have been better at party discipline than Democrats, with the exception of Democrats on the single issue of abortion.

Third, the parties are more or less continuously advocating their platforms on various issues through parliamentary debates. Americans, however, have little stomach for extended political debate and see issues more in terms of diametric opposites, even when the real issues are about shades of gray. This is not to say that Europeans are smarter than Americans, but it is to say that the average European is somewhat more nuanced about policy (as opposed to politics) than the average American.

Fourth, there are more parties, and they have more widely divergent general philosophies and resulting platforms. The result of this is that there is a continuous, low-level campaign going on in these countries, between political leaders speaking for more or less monolithic blocs. But over here, you can't get more than three Democrats or Republicans to agree on what to order on their a pizza.

Fifth, European countries are smaller, geographically and demographically, than the United States. Italy, for instance, is smaller than California. France is already only a little bit bigger than Texas. Granted, California's campaigns are longer than European national campaigns, but again, California lacks the strong party system of European countries.

Sixth, the job of leading the United States is fundamentally different than the job of leading a European country, or even the EU (although I'm not entire sure who exactly is doing that). Most of the rest of the world takes its cues -- whether positively or negatively -- from what the U.S. does in a variety of arenas. So leading the U.S. really does mean leading the world. This doesn't mean that it's a cakewalk running, say, Greece. Far from it; I'd rather pluck out all my own nose hairs with a needle-nosed pliers than try to reform the Greek economy.

Seventh, the article suggests that American pundits and the American media enjoy great profits from the continuous campaign. This suggests that Americans have a great interest in politics (which is true) while Europeans do not (which is not true) for which Americans will pay and Europeans will not (which is nonsense). European media outlets profit from their countries' ongoing political debates just fine -- indeed, most of the media outlets in Europe are thinly-concealed partisan agitprop outlets catering to the predilections, preferences, and parties of their viewers and readers, and they make plenty of money.

Eighth, why is it such a bad thing that there be a lengthy debate about political issues in the context of selecting our leaders in the first place? It's unfortunate that we spend so much time in our campaigns concerned about things that are not important, like our politicians' extramarital affairs or pointing fingers at one another's underlings playing dirty tricks on one another. But we also wind up spending a lot of time talking about real issues, too.

Where I think Europeans have a leg up on us is that they have a wider range of options; our two-party system necessarily forces most people to make some amount of compromise in their voting. We have to not only choose between predetermined, arbitrary, and diametrically opposite sets of political agendas -- because we only have two such choices, we have to prioritize amongst items on those agendas. What's a pro-choice, low-tax, balanced-budget, civil-libertarian, environmentally-sensitive, pro-gun, pro-military, internationalist like me supposed to do? I have to decide which of those issues is most important. So ninth, we compromise more than they do in our voting patterns.

And here, we come to the tenth, final and most critical difference between a European election and an American one. Europeans elect parties. Americans elect people. After Tony Blair steps down and there's an election in the UK, Labour might win and if so, UK policy will likely not change noticeably at all from what it is now. But after Bush's term ends, even if another Republican becomes President after him, we would expect significantly different policies. A campaign, particularly a lengthy one, permits the voters to take the measure of the candidates and gauge how the politician will react to various situations if elected to office.

It's for that reason that I can comfortably be such an advocate for one Republican politician while such a critic of another -- these are very different kinds of men, and in this case I don't have to speculate about them based on their campaign behavior to take their measure. Both responded to 9/11 as leaders. One of them reacted to the planes hitting the towers by rushing to the scene, assessing and appreciating what was happening, and directing the emergency responses based upon a set of pre-planned contingency scenarios. The other got a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face and then decided to keep on reading the story about the baby goat to a handful of schoolchildren. Yes, the appropriate Federal response to the situation did eventually happen. But if there was ever a time to say, "I'm sorry kids, but something very important has come up and I'll have to finish this with you another time," that was it; instead, there was a misassessment of the situation and an inappropriate response.

So certainly it can seem silly to campaign for nearly two years. But it's important. It's not like anything else on the planet. And it's also a lot of fun.

Massive Stupidity (No, Not The War This Time)

Wow, this whole thing is really stupid, from start to finish. A stupid marketing idea. A stupid overreaction by local authorities. A stupid disregard for the law enforcement system by the marketers. Stupid overreporting of the incident by the national media. Most stupidly of all, it looks like it cost someone a pretty good job. I have no idea if the cartoon itself is stupid; I’ve never seen it and I have little interest in doing so.

Beardruff

While in a mediation this morning, I noticed an accumulation of what looked like dust on the lapels of my suit jacket. When I had a chance to examine a mirror later, I found that the dust was clustered in a pattern in my upper chest. There was nothing like it on my shoulders or sleeves. The only answer is could think of was dandruff from my beard and mustache.

Seems to me I have two options – shave off the beard, or find some product to fight this tragic condition. I like the beard, so the product search is my preferred option. I’m actually so-so on just the mustache because it’s difficult to trim and it catches liquid when I don’t use a straw, so I’m not going to keep just the mustache only. But only a beard with no mustache is a look that only a very few men can pull off successfully, and it helps to travel back in time to the nineteenth century to do it. Modern guys typically look really bad like that, and particularly for someone musing about one day being a judge, avoiding looking like this guy seems to be a wise move.

Google reveals that many other men also suffer from beardruff. Thing is, the local CVS does not have any products readily available and asking for assistance to locate a product like that from the easily-confused teenagers working there generates blank looks reminiscent of deer in headlights. So I may have to go shopping online later tonight. Hopefully, I can find a product that softens the whiskers, also, to honor a request by The Wife.

And no “same-sex marriage advocate with a beard” jokes in the comments section, please. I’m taking enough heat from my GOP friends for breaking ranks with them on that issue as it is. Such jokes would tend to irritate The Wife, and you’re supposed to be better than that, Loyal Readers. What would be helpful instead would be suggestions for where I might find a beard-softening, dandruff-fighting product to apply to my chin and upper lip.

The Pitch, Part IV

From today’s New York Sun, authored by another name right-wingers will trust (R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr.):

…one knows a politician by the company he keeps, and Mr. Giuliani has around him the financial people who created the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute. …

One also knows a political leader by the action he takes. As mayor, Mr. Giuliani took on the nanny state that city government had become, reducing the dependency that had one in seven New Yorkers living off government support. As for New York's huge welfare rolls, he more than halved them and had more than 100,000 welfare recipients finding work annually by 1999. He cleaned up the crime-ridden streets, cutting crime by 64% and murder by 67%. By cutting spending and taxes, he turned an economic basket case into an economic marvel. In eight years he reduced or extinguished 23 taxes. Every year he was in office, New York City's economy grew faster than the nation's.

Then came September 11 and he displayed to the nation the traits he had so successfully displayed in reviving his city. He was decisive, efficient, prudent, and — something only those at his side in Gracie Mansion already knew — brave. … He had already demonstrated his awareness of the danger and nihilism of terrorists. In 1995 he expelled Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat from commemorations of the United Nations' 50th anniversary sponsored by the city, saying, "When we're having a party and a celebration, I would rather not have someone who has been implicated in the murders of Americans there." Mr. Giuliani's knowledge of international terrorism has steadily grown to the point that he is now acknowledged as one of the world's foremost authorities on terror. That alone in these times should commend him to the majority of the American electorate.

… Mr. Giuliani will be a formidable candidate for the presidency [; s]urely conservatives of all stripes will recognize this. What they need to hear next is where the mayor stands on conservative social issues.

(Note the inclusion of foreign policy credentials, something that Mitt Romney, for instance, sorely lacks.) Indeed it would be a shame if, as Tyrell hints, social issues were the only thing keeping the Republicans from nominating their obvious best shot at retaining the White House next year.

Dreaming Memories

One thing about a combination of insomnia, stress from work, and mental overloads has been a series of incredibly vivid, intense, and realistic dreams. Particularly disturbing have been times I've woken up with dreams that seem so real I wake up wondering if I was dreaming or remembering something that had happened to me. After some thought and careful reconstruction (in the middle of the night) the unreality of the dream can be ascertained, although being half-awake in the middle of the night trying to separate dreams from reality is not necessarily a pleasant experience.

The Wife has been under the weather; maybe I've caught a bit of whatever she has and this is the effect. Maybe it's just stress -- and when I stop and think about it, I really don't have much to be stressed about; just keeping up with work, something that I know is well within my capability. So it's just one of those things, I guess. But it's surreal waking up and having what feel like real memories of something that you realize could not possibly have happened.

Time in Court

Feels like I've been in court way too much recently. Nothing is getting done back in the office. There's been a new group of tenants-defense attorneys showing up, doing things that I have significant questions about -- soliciting clients in the hallways of the courtroom, mainly. They claim to be true believers; they won't stipulate to the commissioner and insist on having the trials before full judges. They've tried several cases and it really slows things down. The partners are convinced that in the long run, this is good for us, but it's quite frustrating.

This is compounded by the fact that the courts themselves have an overflow of criminal work recently. Two out of the last three days, the unlawful detainer court has been displaced by another court hearing overflow misdemeanor arraignments. All this morning, it was people driving without licenses while my clients sat around waiting for their cases to be called. My firm loses money, I lose time to get other work done, and my clients -- whether in contested matters or not -- wind up losing money.

I don't mind being in court, or trying cases. It's actually kind of fun. But it does seem like it's been chewing up a whole lot of my time. And I'm apparently missing out on important events. It's bad for the morale, especially when The Wife has been sick and not much fun at home and I've been hit with a bunch of teaching preparation to do for both my live and online classes. It makes me feel as though I'm losing some focus; being "ON," dealing with the pace of court, and the pressure of holding clients' hands and dealing with an occasionally pushy opposing counsel is draining.

Well, hopefully, this is just a spike in our workflow that will resolve in a few weeks.

See, That's Your Problem Right There

Here's a public service announcement for you. When trying to displace the government of a culture dramatically different than your own, which has only ever known brutal dictatorship for most of its history, and replacing that with a government that enacts and enforces the rule of law, you want to take some care in determining who is going to be elected to the government.

What you don't want is a terrorist capping off his quarter-century career of dealing death and destruction from his seat in your puppet Parliament. Tends to gum up the works.

Oh, and I'll add a... a codicil to that bit of statesman like advice. If you find yourself in the highly embarrassing situation of having mistakenly allowed such a person into the decision-making body of your client government, keep it quiet. That way, if you really need to, you can use your covert operatives to, shall we say, discreetly neutralize the problem.

No one possessed of their faculties will accept that here, finally, is the link between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Rather, they will wonder why you allowed such a person to run for office in the first place and what kind of attention you were paying to setting up your puppet government, increasing your perception as an incompetent leading a squadron of fellow incompetents down the Incompetence Interstate to Incompetent Island. Why hand your critics that kind of ammunition if you don't have to? (An unfortunate analogy, I belatedly realize.)

Under no circumstances should you allow this information to make it into the hands of the global media to be splashed all over the Internet so any fool can link to the story from his silly little blog thingy.

Follow-up at 4:28 p.m.: Holy crap. This looks like an even bigger problem. That "incompetence train" may well have sent ten billion dollars cash -- that means currency, so much of it that it had to be loaded on pallets on multiple cargo planes -- was sent into the middle of a war zone, with the intention of delivering it into the hands of the new Iraqi government, which we now know for a fact includes terrorists and Iranian agents, not to mention subjecting this money to the frankly-to-be-expected cupidity of obviously corrupt Iraqi governmental officials. It's a bit late in the day and I need to finish a complaint before I go teach, so I'll have to sputter my outrage later tonight or tomorrow. Suffice to say that when nearly nine billion dollars goes missing, that, too, is a very bad thing, but perhaps one that takes the wonder out of the question "Where are the insurgents getting the money to pay for all their activity?"

Reductio ad Absurdum

Preface: If I part company with my fellow Republicans on this issue (I do claim some libertarian tendencies, after all) or otherwise earn unpopularity for my stand, so be it. Part of what I do in this virtual space is write about what I think is right and publicly exercise my moral convictions. And this issue really gets under my skin for some reason.

With that said, I note with interest that a proposed initiative in Washington State would require heterosexual couples to prove their biological ability to bear children before a marriage license could issue to them, and require a license to lapse within three years of issuance if there are no children resulting from the marriage. Ridiculous, I know. It's supposed to be ridiculous. It's intended to fail at the ballot box, but along the way to its intended defeat,* it will accomplish its real goal: demonstrating the falseness of the claim that marriage is about procreation.

Take, for instance, The Wife and I. We're married. We've got the piece of paper that proves it. We've got the joint tax returns that demonstrate that the government recognizes that fact. But, no kids, no plans to have kids. But guess what? Still married. And we should stay that way, because that's the way we want to live our lives. We've chosen to live our lives together and form a family, and that's a right that should belong to every American citizen.

The government supports that choice and even encourages (straight) people to make that choice by giving them joint economic rights -- rights in one another's social security, for instance, the ability to file joint tax returns, and the presumption of mutual ownership of property to increase the earnings and wealth-accumulation power of a household. Kids have nothing to do with it, and more than do pets or houses or cars or political or religious preference.

But if The Wife and I were both men, or both women, we could not do these things, because the government would not recognize that relationship. And as long as the government continues to subsidize and support the joint existence of ordinary-looking hetero people like The Wife and I, and not our similarly-situated gay neighbors, that is an inequality and an injustice, and it is every bit as un-American as a separate water fountain for the Black kids.

Not the most burning issue facing our society, perhaps, but one that ought to be taken seriously nevertheless. If activity "X" hurts someone, then it ought not to be allowed. Same-sex marriage hurts no one. If my gay neighbors marry, The Wife and I are going to stay just as married as we are right now.

Holding on to a "tradition" of marriage only for straight people may have some vague inherent value which has never been articulated well to me; but even if that is the case, it's important to understand what that adds to our society, what beneficial purpose that tradition serves. Slavery was a tradition for a long time, and in the end its value was found to be less than its moral cost. We look back on history and rightly condemn the defenders of slavery and of its bastard child Jim Crow, because the moral cost of such unequal treatment so far exceeded whatever benefit of social and economic continuity they provided. And as between straights and gays, history will not judge contemporary society by how we treat the heterosexuals.

If I part company with my fellow Republicans on this issue and earn unpopularity, so be it. What's right is what's right. Equal rights for all ought to be the presumptive position whenever we are dealing with what the government does to people. The government needs a damn good reason to depart from that default. Such reasons may exist in other circumstances, but no such good reason can be identified with respect to same-sex couples as opposed to opposite-sex couples. And that's what this initative up in Washington is all about -- making us all ask the question of what the government's involvement in marriage is all about, anyway.


* Query if the use of an initiative intended to fail was what was really what was contemplated by the creators of such political devices, or if this sort of thing is another symptom of our national political dialogue run amok. An easy criticism to make when you oppose the initiative at issue; a harder one to make when you support its overall intent, as I do in this instance.

Yesterday I Was In Short Sleeves At Night

But it turns out that not everyone was so fortunate as us Californians. Suck it up, Great Lakes States!

First and Second Thoughts About A Sad Story

A 29-year old man who lives in Malaysia has discovered that he is actualy the descendant of Chinese parents. All well and good, except now he wants to renounce Islam and become a Buddhist.

My first reaction is, "It's an awful thing that he can't do this." Malaysia is a Muslim country and non-Muslims are lucky if their religious observances are tolerated at all. So reading this story -- he has to hire lobbyists and lawyers to even switch religions, and he can't move to certain states within Malaysia because those states have criminalized apostasy. Kind of makes you grateful if you live in a country that respects freedom of individual religious conscience, doesn't it?

But my second reaction was a little different. There isn't any individual religious conscience going on here at all. Just because this guy was born into a Muslim family, why does that mean he should have to be a Muslim himself? Clearly Islam is a bad fit for him. But even more ridiculous is his own attitude -- now that he has found out that his birth parents are Chinese Buddhists, he wants to become a Buddhist himself. If Buddhism calls him for whatever reason, that's a good thing. But he seems to think he's got to be a Buddhist for the same reason he has black hair, because his biological parents are that way.

This is an issue with more direct application to a liberal, Western society like my United States. Certainly, if this man lived here, he would simply stop attending his mosque and start an association with a temple, monastery, or stupa. There would be no lawyers, no involvement by the government whatsoever. But that does not mean that people in our society enjoy the practical freedom to find a religion that suits them.

Many people who live in small communities are only vaguely aware that there are religions other than their own out there. I recall that in Knoxville, people wore their Christianity on their sleeve, and when they said "I'm a Christian," that meant "I'm a Baptist." But this does not seem like a big issue to me; those who find themselves somehow dissatisfied with the options available in their communities do have options to look elsewhere, especially in the Internet age.

But as a practical matter, people are raised within families that teach their parents' religions, and by and large these religions are taught in absolutist terms ("We're right, other kinds of people are wrong"). Considering the subject of the story above, it's to be expected that the family of this young man, who did what they thought was right and raised this boy as a Muslim, is probably quite upset that their son is leaving what they consider to be the true faith. This may seem particularly insulting because he is doing it to be like biological "parents" whom he never knew until recently.

Depending on the closeness of one's relationship to such people, it can take an act of tremendous courage to "come out" to family members and admit a different view of religion. One friend of ours in Tennessee eventually felt the need to explain his atheism to his wife and children, all of whom were very observent, knowing that he risked divorce and maybe not being able to see or be with his kids again. It seems as though he was able to preserve his family, but it must have been tough all around.

The thing of it is, there is nothing genetic about religion. You are not born Christian or Muslim or athiest or Hindu. Instead, you are indoctrinated into your religion. Parents impose their religion on their children -- because of the parents' desire to obey their own religious instruction. A society imposes its religious view on its members to encourage them to conform. Often, there are good intentions for doing so, but at the same time one must recognize that religious belief is ultimately internal and irrational. As I've written to some correspondents on the blog recently, faith is at its root an emotional experience, not a logical decision based on evidence. Indeed, from my perspective faith often seems to be a decision to adopt a world view despite the state of available evidence that would seem to contradict that world view.

Maybe it's easy for me to be critical of this issue because to me, one religion looks pretty much as valid as any other; to me it carries the significance of picking one flavor of ice cream over another and there is no "correct" choice, simply a personal preference. Maybe to someone who sees both Buddhism and Islam as incorrect choices, this story looks a little bit different.

But regardless, respecting the rights of others means recognizing that people have these emotional experiences, which are often simply part of being human. People need to respond to these emotions and should be given the latitude to act on them. Social rejection, particularly from close friends and intimate family members, can be an even more powerful inhibitor on a person's ability to have these emotional experiences than the oppressive and ultimately nonsensical restrictions on religious alienation that theocratic (or just plain intolerant) governments can impose.

Atheists are well familiar with the idea of religious-based social rejection. Demanding tolerance for my own world view requires that I give that tolerance to others in return. But at another level, I have to wonder if respecting individual rights means leaving people, particularly children, free to make up their own minds.

So the story is sad for a couple of reasons. It's sad because this guy is in a prison of a society that won't let him change religions even though he has already abandoned his faith. But it's even sadder because he's in a prison of his own mind, a social construct he's bought into that says he has to be one thing or the other not because of anything within himself but rather because of people who he's never even met. The idea that he could decide how (or whether) to worship for himself seems to have never entered his mind, or for that matter anyone else's, either.

Told You So. Sort Of.

I did caution Loyal Readers that they might want to run with Indianapolis, seeing as I picked Chicago to win the Super Bowl.

The Music of My Youth

Normally, I'm not particularly concerned about television commercials. They are typicaly innocuous, if a bit loud, and since getting the TV recorder, they are largely a thing of the past. But listening to a thin-reeded waif cover Sonic Youth to hawk GMC SUV's was decidedly odd.

The Tragedy of Blepharitis and the Ocular Hygiene Bully

This weekend was my trip to the optometrist. I get new contacts every year, but it's been a long time since I got new glasses, so that's what I decided for this time around. So after the assistant's examination, the optometrist himself sees me.

The first thing he says after introductions and putting his magnifying lenses on, is "You know, you suffer from an incurable condition called blepharitis."

"Ugh. That sounds scary."

"It's just the result of consistently poor hygiene," the optometrist said in response. But wait, wait! Is this a scary condition or not? Am I going to go blind?

Turns out, no, this is not such a big deal. It's basically a heavier-than-usual buildup of crud from the tear ducts that accumulates on the eyelids and eyelashes. I've been brushing this stuff away for weeks without really thinking about it very much. And allergic reactions to airborne allergens may well play a part in it as well as not adhering to the elaborate rituals prescribed for resolving the condition.

Next question: "How long do you wear your contacts for?"

Me: "Oh, about three weeks, which I know is perhaps longer than I should."

Mean Optometrist: "Perhaps? Those lenses are designed for two weeks, period. You need to stop that. Stop it now. Look, they're your eyes but you won't lose your vision for lack of my advice."

Me: "Erm..."

MO: "If you want a contact-lens prescription, you ought to have the responsibility to wear the lenses the way they're supposed to be worn. Throw them away twice a month. The first and the fifteenth. No exceptions. Got it?"

Me: "Okay, doc. I got it."

MO: "Do you wear sunglasses?"

Me: "No, I keep sitting on them so I gave up on them last summer."

MO: "Bad idea, my friend, and I suggest you change your ways. Wear sunglasses when you're out and about."

Me: "Okay..."

MO: "Do I have to pull out the pictures of the kinds of things that fly into unprotected eyes? It's quite a horror show."

Me: "No! I believe you."

MO: "Right. Look in here and read the bottom line in the third set of lines."

Me: "20/30."

MO: "That's what I'm testing for. Read the bottom line of letters and numbers."

Me: "N - H - O - X - 2."

MO: "You got one wrong. The second to the last one."

Me: "Um... S?"

MO: "Good. Now, the good news is your blood pressure is fine, from what I can tell. What kind of solution do you use to store the lenses in at night?"

Me: "My wife and I were using the Bausch & Lomb ReNu, but after the fungus scare, we switched to generic versions of the same product."

MO: "So you're still using ReNu. Quit it."

Me: "I know it's a similar product, but--."

MO: "It's the same product. It's not the right product for your lenses and these things are very sensitive to small chemical imbalances. You get burning sensations in your eyes at night?"

Me: "Sometimes, yeah."

MO: "It's the ReNu product, chemically reacting with your lenses, irritating the tissues of your eye. I try and get all of my patients off that product, because it produces such terrible results."

Me: "I had no idea. Wow."

MO: "Here's a starter of a different product. Throw away all your generic ReNu when you get home. Got it? ReNu - bad! And here's how you wash your eyelids."

So after describing a ten-minute ritual involving more hot washcloths, baby shampoo, and eyelid massage than I'd ever heard suggested other than on Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, the mean optometrist gave me some contacts to wear temporarily that worked great. My distance vision was sharp, clear, and easy. I'm getting new glasses but the lenses will come soon enough. And every night I'm massaging my eyelids. No cucumber slices on the eyes (yet) but I've got to figure out a way to lie on my back with a hot, wet washcloth over my eyes that doesn't drip water all over my bed, or have me walking around with a damp blindfold.

I have to go back in two weeks to get my pupils dilated by this mean optometrist. I'm a little bit nervous.

Exciting News

Another year!

Not Much Of A Joiner

An attorney at the firm asked me today if I'd found any groups in the area since moving here that I wanted to join. The Wife has done well in this regard, having found a Toastmasters group that she likes. I've not. I also got asked today in a phone call with my folks back in Tennessee what I'd been up to lately.

The answer was "more of the same," in essence. I find my work is pretty well consuming during the day, and my teaching activities keep me pretty busy in the evenings. With a new online class starting Tuesday, I'll have some early-morning teaching work in my future, too.

Of course, I do have hobbies -- writing this blog is a hobby. Writing generally is a hobby. I'm a news freak, so I obsessively read news websites and watch shows for current events and politics. And yes, there are days that the majority of my news consumption does come from watching the Daily Show. When properly motivated, or more often on the weekends, I cook nice meals, which is a very enjoyable thing to do as well as one that can produce scrumptious food. Every once in a great while, The Wife and I even try and build things; I have an incomplete project out in the garage for her right now. For pastimes, I can goof off with a computer game or play with the critters. (I would not call these things "hobbies.") So it's not that I lack for things to do; far from it.

And most weeks, I have dinner with friends from the firm, the newspaper, and the Zendo, followed by a half hour or so of meditation. There is fellowship there, and a few moments of peace and mental calm which seems to be quite helpful in a variety of ways that are difficult to quantify.

Last weekend, The Wife and I went house hunting. We also played Trivial Pursuit (I won, but she did quite well and could have beat me with better luck on the dice) and Scrabble (neck and neck, and she won in the end). We enjoyed these things enough that we bought more games and will go house hunting again in a couple of weeks. (Well, The Wife loves house hunting; I am indifferent to it but I like seeing her happy and I like spending time with her.)

It's just that this seems like it's about all I do. There's enough variety in these things that for day-to-day, week-to-week existence, I feel that I'm not stuck in any kind of a rut or that this list of activities is monotonous. But when asked questions about what's been going on in my life, it seems like there is a relative constancy of response. I'm working, I'm teaching, I'm writing, I'm cooking, I'm spending time with my wife and my pets. Which is, after all, pretty much what I did last week.

Now, I do miss our group back in Tennessee. It was a good mix of people, who were all friendly and smart and interesting. We had diverse enough interests that there was always something new, as well as enough common ground to have a communal identity. The fellowship counted for as much as the exchange of ideas. I would like it very much if there was a similar sort of humanist or rationalist group here in the Antelope Valley, but I've seen no evidence of one yet. Nor have I seen evidence of a group that does the kind of teach-one-another activities that were so intellectually stimulating.

The time I tried to go to a book club I found that it had been cancelled.

Is the Antelope Valley simply not very intellectually active? This seems unlikely. There are a wide variety of people who live here, many with high levels of education and undoubtedly a diversity of intellectual interests. But they don't seem to form any real groups.

Not being religious, or even a believer at all, I wouldn't feel right joining a church. The fellowship is great, but I'd be a big old hypocrite to claim belief where there is none, and as soon as someone in the church learned of my atheism, I'd be looked at very differently. No, better to let the church people have their churches and for me to go my own way.

We talked about some service or community groups, like Rotary, Kiwanis, or the Chamber of Commerce. All of these are of somewhat limited utility, too -- my colleague found that each of these got boring after a relatively short time. Chamber of Commerce is good if you want some drinking buddies; Rotary or Kiwanis would be OK if you want to do some charity work or community service but I can see how it would get old fast.

I'm hardly exceptional in this regard. People across the country are working harder than they have in the past, spending more of their free time at home, and spending less time in organized groups or clubs. The Wife and I try to have people over for dinner at least once a month; sometimes that turns in to a bigger deal than I would like it to be but it usually works out okay in the end.

I'm blessed with a rich, full, comfortable life, with many friends both old and new and lots of things going on. So what if I'm not much of a joiner? There is little doubt in my mind that in later years, this will seem like a happy, good time in our lives.

The Pitch, Part III

Baseball Crank likes Rudy, too. This is useful to note because he describes himself as a pro-life “Reaganite,” and seems to care a great deal about social issues. So, acknowledging that Rudy starts out to the left of himself, he nevertheless thinks that Giuliani is the best choice in the field right now and even an acceptable choice for social conservatives. Now, this guy is looking at the decision from a very different perspective than me. But he argues very well (yes, Baseball Crank is a lawyer) for America’s Mayor. Highlights from his pitch include the following:

...far and away the most important [issue in the election will be] the global battle against international terrorism and radical jihad… If there is one candidate we can depend on not to bend to Beltway pundit fatigue on this issue, it's Mayor Giuliani - he was there on the ground when this war came to our shores, he was almost killed himself that day, he went to the funerals of the firemen and cops he had bonded with over his prior 7 and a half years as mayor. It's personal.

Rudy will show himself to be the best campaigner in the GOP field - he's quick-witted, funny, and long accustomed to the hot lights of the national stage… He's also tough enough to come out swinging at whatever the most likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, can throw at him.

Rudy's liberal record on social issues like abortion and gay rights will cost him some votes nationally, but mainly in states that are not going to break for an arch-liberal Democrat like Hillary or Obama. And Rudy will play well in Florida and put in play key Northeastern states the Democrats can't win without: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, possibly even Rhode Island (which has a huge Italian-American population), and make the GOP ticket at least competitive in the Empire State (though he would probably only win NY if the Dems nominate Edwards). This is, after all, a man who won two terms in a city that's 80% Democrat.

With the significant exception of his years in the POW camp, McCain has never been a leader. … [He] is a triangulator, a "maverick" who glories in contrasting himself to the people he would need to lead. … McCain has, too often, opened fire on his own [political] troops. [But] With the exception of his ill-fated endorsement of Mario Cuomo over George Pataki,* Rudy has not made a practice of attacking his own party, a fact that sets him quite apart from many other moderate/liberal Northeastern Republicans. Virtually all the major battles of his mayoralty were with people to his left. Conservatives may not like where Rudy's starting point is on every issue, but they know when they get behind him they will all be facing in the same direction.

Rudy's record on fiscal, economic, law enforcement and education issues, his battles against racial preferences and the city's relentless race hucksters, and his outspoken stance on the war on terror, are all the stuff that should excite conservatives about his candidacy. … [T]here is, thus far, every indication that Rudy is both willing to appoint conservative judges and able to sell them against a hostile Senate - he's spoken favorably of John Roberts and Samuel Alito … . [Not that he] would be necessarily better at appointing judges than Romney or McCain, but (1) it's a close contest and (2) he'd obviously be better than any Democrat.

It's interesting that this would be the call for a pro-life, social conservative. Based on some of the other candidates that he praises lavishy, it's evident that this is a calculated decision, and one that he can get behind with some enthusiasm.

* The word on the street was that Giuliani’s endorsement was in exchange for Cuomo funnelling state dollars to solve the city’s budget and crime problems. Both he and Cuomo deny that; but Giuliani did pick the wrong horse, though, since Pataki won and hasn’t forgiven Rudy since.