Turns Out, It Really Is Intentional

You sometimes wonder whether talking heads say offensive things intentionally or whether gaffes pop out of them more or less at random.

For instance, I could be persuaded that Bill O'Reilly suggesting that a little boy saw an upside to being kidnapped from his parents and repeatedly raped was a statement made out of ignorance rather than malice; it's possible that, at the time O'Reilly said those things it was not entirely certain whether the abducted child had simply been held or whether his kidnapper was molesting him.

But it's something else entirely when someone points out, "Dude, you just put your foot right in it," and gives the person in question a chance to retract or apologize. When the person in question not only repeats but then inflates their originally offensive statements, that's evidence that the statement is a real look into the person's intentions. So when Anne Coulter said that America would be a better place if everyone were Christian, the host of the program (Donny Deutsch, who is Jewish) gave Coulter that out. She didn't take it and instead proceeded to dig further:

"No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say."

"Wow, you didn't really say that, did you," Deutsch said.

"Yeah, no,” Coulter replied. “That’s what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. We know we're all sinners.

Deutsch said he was personally offended.

"No. I'm sorry. It is not intended to be," [Coulter replied]. "I don't think you should take it that way, but that is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews."

There's more; go ahead and read the whole thing. It's astonishing, and it's about as conclusive proof as I need to be satisfied that this "opinion leader" is really, honestly, maliciously a bigot. Coulter may not necessarily be off the mark when she says that "liberals prefer invective to engagement" but she's hardly in a position to cast that stone in the first place.

It would be easy to dismiss Coulter as an irrelevant "shock-jock" of public debate, a political pornographer and nothing more. But it matters because she is an opinion leader, a lightning rod for the issues we discuss. Somehow, she's been put in a position where she and a few other elites like her pose the questions that the rest of us answer and debate amongst ourselves. Having one of those questions be, "Should we all be Christian?" means "Should we get rid of all the Jews and Hindus?" and from there it's only a very short step to "Should we all be Baptist Christians?" and the theological and ideological narrowing process only continues from there. And that's a very unhealthy debate to be having.

DIY Blues, Part II

Why is it that every project involved in getting this house into move-in condition takes twice as long and costs twice as much as we had originally budgeted?  That weekend we were out of the house because of the check is really costing us now in terms of time, which in turn costs us more in terms of money.  We’re trying to do the job right, and early, since we intend to be in this house for a long time and the improvements are for our enjoyment as well as to enhance the value of the house.  Our pre-move projects are:

 

1.  Paint the entire interior of the house (except for the ceilings).  This is mostly done, thanks to my mother-in-law and my wife (I did some of this, too, but not nearly as much as they).  Uncompleted portions are above the kitchen soffit, the vault above the hallway, and the vault above the master shower.  Also, the WC in the master suite is still builder-white, but I don’t think painting that is a real high priority.

 

2.  Place crown moulding on the ceiling and walls of the front rooms and the master suite.  We got the moulding at Lowe’s last night – and I had to rent a truck to get it to the house, because Lowe’s won’t cut the moulding to size.  “The chop saw is only for plywood,” I was told, as if the chop saw wouldn’t work on moulding.  Tonight’s project will be painting 232 feet of moulding.  Good times.

 

3.  Strip and re-stain all of the the kitchen cabinetry.  This has proven to be immensely more work than we had originally calculated on.  We’ve burned through one hand sander and at least two different kinds of chemical stripper.  We finally gave up and are having new unfinished cabinet doors made, and are waiting for estimates on those from various vendors.

 

4.  Replace the old tacky blinds with nice-looking window covers.  We had the blinds guy out to the house last night, and found out that the blinds we were looking at would cost a total of about three times what I’d hoped to spend.  So we’ll do one room at a time and live with the tacky old blinds in some of the other rooms for a few months until we can afford to replace all the blinds.

 

We’re also looking for a few art pieces to put on the walls.  Because of the color choices and some of our preferences, one thing that I’d really like would be a Japanese calligraphy – preferably on rice paper or something else that looked nice.  The Wife would also like to replace our furniture, but we are going to be out of dough as it is, so that’s going to have to wait.  She also needs a new computer; her desktop tower is more than five years old and has recently manifested some performance issues.  So there’s no shortage of things to spend the bucks on.

Eight Random Facts About TL

1.       I do not like ketchup.  For some people, not liking ketchup would be like not liking sex.  But I really dislike the stuff.  Oh, it’s nasty, I gag just thinking about it.  On or in anything.  If I am at a fast-food place and I get a cheeseburger and it has ketchup on it, I will send it back, even at McDonald’s.  I’m not a huge fan of mustard or mayonnaise on a cheeseburger, either, but while I’ll sometimes put up with mustard and mayo, I have zero tolerance for ketchup.  I don’t think there has been any ketchup in my fridge for a year and a half.

 

2.       My lowest grade in college was in geography.  I love geography.  I get about 90% of the geography questions in Trivial Pursuit right; I endlessly study maps and I think Google Earth is about the coolest computer application ever.  And, my geography class in college was taught by an interesting, engaging professor; I read the book religiously; I went to all my classes.  But at the end of the day, I had no idea what it was that the professor was talking about, looking for, or how he was grading his finals, and so I wound up with a C+ in a subject I thought would be an easy “A” for me.  I struggled with Spanish in college, too, but I got better grades in it than I did in that damned “physical geography for liberal arts majors” class.

 

3.       I forget that seven times eight is fifty-six.  You’d think that after what is approaching forty years of life, I’d have just memorized that surprisingly crucial fact.  But no, I have to figure it out in my head each time and for whatever reason, it’s difficult to do.  And I don’t have a problem with the challenges of multiplying other single-digit numbers.  I keep a calculator handy for when I need to multiply seven and eight.

 

4.       Birthdays don’t matter to me.  Unless you’re my wife or my parents, this likely includes you, and it certainly includes me.  I don’t care much about my own birthday, so why should anyone else’s matter, either?  Please don’t take offense – it’s not that I don’t like you, it’s that it doesn’t occur to me to celebrate the day you were born any more than it occurs to me to celebrate the anniversary of your vehicle’s registration.  I’m grateful when others take notice of my birthday, and I realize that for whatever reason, this sort of thing really matters to other people.  I try to remember my family members’ birthdays, but I have to accept that this is just one of those arbitrary things out there in the world that I’ll never be able to really understand.  I know very few of my friends’ birthdays.  It seems that the majority of my male friends were born in May, but really, that’s kind of a guess on my part.

 

5.       I don’t pay much attention to college football.  You’d think I would.  I know that college games are often very exciting and when I do watch one, I usually enjoy it.  Sometimes a game here or a game there catches my interest.  I tried to become a Vols van when I lived in Knoxville.  I occasionally checked in on Carson Palmer’s career at USC with more than passing interest.  I’ve had a great time every time I’ve gone to a big college game.  But I just can’t get into it at home and somehow, even when I’m surfing a sports site, NCAA Football is pretty low on my ‘click-to’ agenda.  Maybe it’s because when I was in college there, the students at UC Santa Barbara voted the football program out of existence for lack of interest.

 

6.       I often forget that I possess pills that can remedy my various discomforts.  I’ll get a headache or strain a muscle or suffer a sneezing fit, and it will simply never occur to me that I can just take an aspirin or two and it will make these problems either go away or at least reduced in intensity.  It’s not that I don’t feel the pain, and it’s not that I like sneezing uncontrollably, it’s not that I distrust the pills, and it’s not that I don’t know that the pills exist.  It’s just that I don’t associate my own physical sensations with the pills, and therefore I wind up enduring discomfort rather than alleviating it.

 

7.       I’ve seen a few human corpses, but I’ve never touched one.  Both at funerals and in evidence viewings for cases, I’ve seen dead bodies.  I suspect I’ve seen a few on the street at crime or accident scenes, but I don’t stop to find out.  I’ve never had occasion to handle human remains, though, and I’ve never actually seen anyone die.

 

8.       I wish more racquetball courts had survived the 1980’s.  I don’t know why racquetball went out of style; it’s a lot of fun, very competitive, and a good workout.  But now it’s associated with white guys wearing Jheri-curled mullets, cop mustaches, terry-cloth headbands, and dangerously loose dolphin shorts.  It didn’t have to be that way; racquetball is a perfectly good sport.  I don’t think there’s a racquetball court within fifty miles of my house that I might conceivably use.  If racquetball had stayed a sport that a lot of people played, I’d probably be in better shape today than I am because I haven’t found any other kind of exercise I like quite as much as it.  But as it is, my enjoyment of racquetball is not indulged nearly as often as that of, say, Sheena Easton songs or James Bond movies starring Roger Moore.

Not My Idea Of A Good Time

If you enjoy air travel, you’ll see the genius in this Indian entrepreneur’s new business.  For those of us who would prefer a night in a Turkish prison to contemporary air travel, it is beyond perversity.

Courage, Personified

Aayan Hirsi Ali is the modern face of courage and enlightenment. The political leaders of the Netherlands, by contrast, are proving themselves to be craven and short-sighted.

A quick biography: Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, the daughter of a politician, who was jailed for opposition to the military dictatorship there. He escaped from prison and fled with his family to Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and then Kenya. Taught in Kenya by a madrassa-trained Islamic fundamentalist, in her youth she sympathized with Muslim extremists, but she also read Nancy Drew stories and was impressed with the possibilities of what a smart young woman with freedom could accomplish.

In 1992, she says that she resisted her father's attempts to force her in to an arranged marriage, and sought asylum in Holland. Her family has denied this version of events, but somehow she eventually naturalized into the Netherlands. She initially worked as a maid there, but after she learned Dutch, her fluency in six languages became marketable and she became a translator servicing the substantial Somali expatriate and refugee population in the Netherlands.

She eventually went to college at Leiden University and obtained a Master's degree in political science. She was pursuing early-stage doctoral studies on 9/11, and shortly thereafter looked for Osama bin Laden's "words of justification" in the Koran, and was unimpressed. Shortly thereafter, she abandoned her faith altogether and now describes herself as an atheist. Despite the powerful moral problems of 9/11, she describes the revelation of her nonbelief coming more prosaically, as she drank a glass of wine: "...I asked myself: Why should I burn in hell just because I'm drinking this? But what prompted me even more was the fact that the killers of 9/11 all believed in the same God I believed in." (To me, this rings true -- as a former Catholic, I actually found it easier to confront the misguided and horrific acts of the Inquisition or the various Crusades, great historical evils, than with the claim that God actually cared enough about me touching myself -- something that obviously would not hurt anyone at all -- that He would condemn me to eternal damnation.) However, she does also continue to call herself a "Muslim," likely referring to her ancestry, culture of origination, and personal identity rather than as a statement of her faith.

Hirsi Ali entered politics and became elected to the Dutch Parliament. She also became friends with, and a collaborator of, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. They jointly created a movie critical of the manner in which Muslim culture represses women. Van Gogh, a descendant of the famous painter, was murdered and nearly decapitated in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004. A note threatening the life of Hirsi Ali was found attached to a knife plunged into Van Gogh's body. Since Van Gogh's murder, she was under police protection because of the threats on her life.

Eventually, at the suggestion of the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, she went to the United States, where she has since obtained a green card and lives in seclusion. Despite the ongoing threats on her life, she has found a position with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and published two books, one a polemic criticism of Islam and the other an autobiography. She is working on another book in which she fictionalizes a visit by the prophet Muhammed to the New York Public Library and he confronts the writings of Enlightenment authors, which I would be very interested in reading.

She writes eloquently and powerfully, openly criticizes the religion of people who have tried to kill her, has rebelled against a repressive culture, and attained no small measure of personal enlightenment.

The Dutch government has withdrawn its protection of her, despite the fact that death threats against her continue. Nevertheless, she has vowed to continue her work.

Maybe He Ought To Avoid The College Circuit Altogether

My favorite new prominent international villain, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, received a chillier, and more sharply critical, reception today at Tehran University than he got at Columbia a few weeks ago.

 

By the way, the word “villain” traces its etymology to the 14th Century, when it meant an “inhabitant of a farm; peasant; churl, boor; clown; miser; knave, scoundrel.”  Many of these would apply to Ahmadinejad, although I don’t think he was a farm boy before becoming a revolutionary in the late seventies.

DIY Blues

I couldn't figure out how to mount the light fixtures. It looked to me like some genius installed the original (ugly) bathroom light fixtures in Soffit House with three-inch conduit. You could run a municipal electrical main with conduit that size. And more importantly, conduit that size requires a hole to be punched in the drywall larger than the mounting plate for the replacement fixtures that The Wife had tasked me with installing.

After a lot of puzzling over the problem, I did eventually figure out how to get the fixtures installed. So we have better-looking light fixtures in our bathrooms now. Alas, the process took a long time and I could have spent that time painting, sanding, or staining. And along the way, I managed to slice open my ring finger pretty good, as well as giving my hands a number of other bruises and blisters. That's okay, what do I use my hands for anyway?

The ceiling in Soffit House is vaulted even more than we had originally thought, and painting up there is a big challenge. We simply can't reach up to the top, even with a thirteen-foot ladder. I can get myself into a position where I could climb onto the soffit which defines the house, but I'm not at all sure that it will support my weight. That makes completing the painting -- and putting up the crown moulding The Wife has in mind -- a big, big challenge. I improvised a duster with the old shower curtain rod and today I'll try that with the paint roller.

My all of me hurts. The Wife has a similar complaint. We may need to replace our sander -- it's been running more or less nonstop since we decided the liquid sandpaper we bought was not really useful for stripping off the golden oak varnish on the woodwork -- but when we're done, with the darker stain on the cabinets and the caramel color for the walls, that kitchen is going to look fantastic.

So we're going back to it in a few minutes. It's duty and a mess right now, but in a week we'll be living in it. And it's going to look great.

Unholy Three-Way Marriage

A major, industrialized country, armed with nuclear weapons, elects a fundamentalist religious leader, and is defended by a military staffed with religious fanatics. A small group of self-selected religious elites directs the ideology from which the political and military leadership takes their cues, and based upon a literal interpretation of their holy texts, believes that history is moving towards a global holy war in which their nation has a vital role to play.

This sounds more than a little bit like Iran. But what I am describing is, in fact, the vision that a large number of people have for the United States of America in just a few years.

The idea that there might soon be an explicitly religious political party in this country is disturbing. It's particularly problematic because it indicates that the former Republicans who would form this party are simply unwilling to compromise or work with other Republicans who see things a little bit differently than them -- in other words, they require an ideology so pure that they will not make common cause even with other Republicans.

But "disturbing" reaches a new level when one considers the extent to which the military is being used as a stomping ground for those same evangelical, millenialist Christians who are considering a schism from the GOP. An incident in the linked article describes a Jewish cadet showing up after receiving an appointment to the Air Force Academy and being evangelized so aggressively that he withdrew. There are ministries which explicitly try to reach out to the military and obtain converts within the ranks of professional soldiers.

The prospect of religious warriors, subscribing to the teachings of a small group of religious leaders who also direct the ideology of a significant political party, resembles the Shi'ite clerics who sit in Iran's Council of Guardians and use their positions of religious influence to control the country's policies. The marriage of religion, politics, and military power in that country has created a static social environment, a necessarily aggressive and militant foreign policy, and a culture which, if the elites have their way, will revert to that of the seventh century.

While some Christians might see the analogous drift here in the U.S. as more benign, I see no reason to think that such a transformation -- which could very well include in its development a revolution every bit as traumatic as Iran's was -- would produce a result any different here than what happened to Persia a generation ago.

We were warned about this by our fourth President: "In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people." "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

The proposed and evolving three-way marriage between the evangelical Christian pulpit, the hearts and minds of the military, and the explicit assertion of Christian political power is a path headed directly towards theocracy. "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries." I see nothing benign at all about a Christian theocracy running the United States. I see only danger and violence.

He's Just Gonna Have To Swallow This One

Senator Larry Craig’s petition to withdraw his plea of guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct in a Minneapolis airport restroom has been denied.  The judge was not kind to the Senator’s petition, characterized as “illogical”:  “During the two months between the arrest and the guilty plea, the Defendant had several rational and methodical conversations with the prosecutor, including one in which the prosecutor extended a plea offer and advised the Defendant to consult an attorney. … The Defendant, a career politician with a college education, is of, at least, above-average intelligence.  He knew what he was saying, reading, and signing.”   furthermore, the court found that any political pressure that Senator Craig may have felt was not the result of any misconduct on the part of an actor within the Minnesota criminal justice system. 

 

Interestingly, the ACLU filed a brief in support of Senator Craig, arguing that Craig’s conduct should not constitute a crime.  The Court disagreed and upheld the constitutionality of the admittedly broadly-worded disorderly conduct statute, as other Minnesota courts have interpreted it.  The ACLU is often accused of being effectively a partisan liberal organization, but here, it advocated for a Republican, albeit a Republican who had engaged in an attempted gay frolic.*  But it’s only very rarely upstanding people doing admirable things who are in need of the ACLU and reliance on their Constitutional rights.  Instead, it’s people like Larry Craig who need to explore the limits of the protections afforded by the law.

 

Craig had said that if his petition to withdraw his guilty plea were denied, he would resign.  We’ll see how that actually plays out.  It won’t affect the political balance of power at all – a Democrat couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Idaho – but it does constitute another bit of political baggage Republicans really don’t need to be carrying right about now.

                                                            

* That’s a great word, “frolic,” isn’t it?  Precise, distinctive, and vaguely onomatopoeic.

Mmmm... Doritos!

The description of this product makes me drool like Homer Simpson.  Where do I get me some of these?

More New Nukes!

I’ve thought, since at least my college years, that we need more nuclear power plants in this country. Reading this week’s New York Times Freakonomics column – which cleverly blames Jane Fonda for global warming – only reinforces that belief. Nuclear power provides about one-fifth of our national electrical power; coal provides more than three-quarters. (Alternative sources like hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, and solar power total the remaining less than one-twentieth of the watts powering your computer right now.) As a functional matter, we burn no oil for household or commercial electricity – every drop of oil burned in America is used to power vehicles and other kinds of internal combustion engines, because until we make cheap, tiny cold fusion reactors to put in everything from airplanes to weed whackers, there just isn’t going to be any substitute for oil-based fuel for energy density and portability. Sure, we can create more windmills and solar panels, but we’ve capped off all the geysers we’re ever going to and we’re tearing down dams rather than building new ones. And our demand for electricity is only going to increase in the future as our population grows and our industries continue to transform.

Nuclear power carries risk, to be sure. But if the Greenland ice cap continues to melt, the runoff into the ocean could raise sea levels as much as 23 feet within a century. (That doesn’t count the melting that would take place in Antarctica or on the polar cap in the Northern Ocean – because if Greenland heats up and melts, so will those areas.) I don’t want to join the chorus of global warming alarmists, but the fact of the matter is that global warming is happening. Proof: the legendary Northwest Passage has opened. Maybe this is not happening because of anything humanity is doing, maybe there’s nothing we can do to stop it. But I suspect that reality will turn out to involve a complex dynamic and that three centuries of industrialization will turn out to play a part in it – so if this phenomenon is going to be abated, there needs to be some kind of change in the way industrial activity takes place. Most of the scientists studying this seem to think that burning carbon-based fuel is a big factor in this – and nuclear power does not burn carbon-based fuel.

Burning less coal and more uranium would result in less carbon going into the atmosphere, and the risks of pumping more carbon into our air seems to exceed the risk of a Chernobyl-like disaster occuring in the U.S. And you know, if we’d been burning more uranium and less coal since Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas’s hysterical anti-nuke rant in 1979, things might be substantially less bad today than they are now.

Diplomatic Restraint

As it turns out, the U.S. and Britain almost went to war in the 1850's. A few young hotheads in uniform, making undisciplined choices nearly brought the U.S. and Britain to war in the 1850's, and cool heads were in short supply. Other exigencies -- the Indian Mutiny and the American Civil War -- prevented it from happening; neither the U.S. nor Britain could afford war with one another.

Similar problems are happening today. Hans Island, a one-square-kilometer bit of barren rock, sits smack dab in the middle of the Kennedy Strait. Both Canada and Denmark (which maintains nominal sovereignty over Greenland) have laid claim to the island, and supported those claims with military expeditions and flag-posting contests in recent years. Fortunately, it seems that these two NATO allies will resolve their dispute over this potentialy-important island (it could establish navigation rights over the opening Northwest Passage) with lawyers and geographers instead of marines and warships.

Diplomacy Works Sometimes

North Korea agreed today, in exchange for a total of one million tons of fuel oil, to shut down its main nuclear reactor, account for the rest of its nuclear program, and permit IAEA inspectors to enter and verify their actions. This agreement was made as part of the lengthy six-party disarmament talks.

Let it not be said that the United States has no interest in peaceful attempts to avoid war. Let it not be said that the United States cannot work productively with its allies, trading partners, and even its adversaries. Let it not be said that the United States does not possess the patience, prestige, power, or predisposition to use diplomatic means to solve serious international and national security problems. Here's your proof that the United States -- even the U.S. under the leadership of George W. "Cowboy" Bush -- does exactly those things.

Skeptical Audiophile Challenge

Skeptics are sometimes accused of being too critical of religion and not critical of other things. Not true -- skeptics have been in the forefront of efforts to debunk multi-level marketing and other fraudulent advertising, junk science, phony psychics, and quack medicine. And here's an interesting example of a skeptic debunking another kind of bullshit that is being sold to the masses: audiophiles who are told that seven thousand dollar speaker cables are somehow worth it. The James Randi Educational Foundation is offering a million dollars to someone who can prove, in a double-blind, scientifically controlled test, that these astonishingly expensive pieces of audio equipment are materially any better than equivalent high-end cables sold for under $100. So you see, it's not just religion that comes under the fire of rationalism. There's all kinds of nonsense being sold to a gullible public, at premium prices.

John McCain Sucks Up To Special Interest Groups With A Pleasing Inaccuracy

John McCain blatantly sucked up to the Religious Right yesterday, telling a group called Beliefnet that ”the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation".   I wonder, Senator, if you could point me to the section of the Constitution you were thinking of?  I know I’ve read the document once or twice, and I don’t think the word “Christian” appears anywhere in it.  I can, however, think of one provision that looks a whole lot like a prohibition against the establishment of a national religion.  To be fair to the Senator, he made that remark while also stating that although he would prefer to see a President of his own faith, he could also imagine a Muslim President doing a good job.  Nevertheless, this is a meme that needs confronting because it keeps on cropping up everywhere.  McCain’s “clarifying” remark later was “We are a nation that was based on Judeo-Christian values. That means respect for all of human rights and dignity. That's my principle values and ideas, and that's what I think motivated our founding fathers," but that’s a) not quite the same thing, and b) that’s still not quite true.

 

Senator, if you’re saying that America is a “Christian nation” because its founding was based on “respect for all of human rights and dignity,” consider Bhutan.  A man with as much experience on the world stage as you must surely know that this is also a country that has great respect for human rights and dignity both in law and in practice (which is not to say that this nation is beyond criticism in this arena, but no nation on Earth is), but is most assuredly not Judeo-Christian in origin.  You also surely know that Judeo-Christians do not have a monopoly on good moral behavior or on treating people well; those are universal ethics and people of all races, creeds, religions, and beliefs variously fulfill or fall short of realizing those moral goals.  And let’s also not forget that slavery was tolerated and regulated by the original Constitution (and by the Christian Bible) although today we hold slavery to be a gross violation of human rights and dignity – which is to say that reference to Biblical authority does not guarantee moral righteousness.

 

Now, maybe you could argue that “Judeo-Christian values” are more complex than just treating other people well, and if so, I would agree.  It seems to me that “Judeo-Christian values” by definition involve the mandatory worship of Jehovah.  But it also seems to me that the Constitution is quite clear that no one can make me worship Jehovah if I don’t want to, and that there should be no penalties to my standing as a citizen regardless of my choice.  Thus, the “Judeo-Christian value” of worshipping Jehovah as a moral requirement stands in opposition to at least one of the core principles of America – to wit, religious liberty.  As Americans, we must balance our personal faiths with our acceptance of those who differ from us.

 

Or maybe, Senator, you’re referring to the ethical, philosophical, intellectual, educational, and religious background of the Founders and the universe in which they operated.  That would be the ethical, philosophical, intellectual, educational, and religious background of the European Age of Enlightenment.  Many of the prominent thinkers and philosophers of that era were Christian, to be sure, but there were also many (including many of the Founders) who were Deists if not outright atheists.  Which most certainly did not make them evil men; quite the contrary, these were intelligent, moral men infused with the spirit of their times (what we today call “liberalism”), a love of learning and morality, and the principles to defend and act on their beliefs.

 

The meme that America was created to be a “Christian nation” is one that keeps on cropping up (particularly during an election) and continues to be profoundly objectionable to me.  Why?  Saying that this is a “Christian nation” excludes me, a non-Christian, from full participation in the civic life of the country; unlike members of the Christian majority, I am somehow not a “real” American because I refuse to believe in or worship the god of the majority.  I refuse to accept that – particularly when I know that people like me, meaning lawyers who were very skeptical about religion – were present in abundance at the drafting of the Constitution.

City Names

The coolest city name, as determined by this week's poll, is the city so nice, they named it twice: Walla Walla, Washington, the capital of Washington State's wine country.

I have to agree with the poll-takers -- of all of the city names I found, it's the most fun to say. There's so many cool names from Wisconsin, it was hard to narrow the choices down to one, but I settled on Oconomowoc there (Sheboygan and Wauwatosa didn't make the cut) because I thought that there should only be one from a particular state for geographic fairness.

Congratulations, Walla Walla, Washington!

Demographic Disparity

Yesterday, I sat in the morning session of traffic court. Up here, they do arraignments in the morning and trials in the afternoon. The arraignment calendar is, predictably, very long. There are also a lot of preliminary matters that the clerk deals with before the judge (yesterday, that was me) comes out to actually hear the various cases. So it was nearly quarter to ten before I took the bench and had to deal with a calendar of between 100 to 120 cases.

The basic arraignment process is simple -- I read the defendant's name and the charges made against them, and take a plea. If the plea is "not guilty," the clerk advises me of the trial date, and in some cases bail is set. If the plea is "guilty" or "no contest," I advise the defendant of his or her Constitutional right to a trial, to have an attorney at the trial, to present evidence and to cross-examine the police officer who wrote the ticket. The defendant waives those rights, and I refer the defendant to the clerk to compute the amount of their fine. If the defendant doesn't answer when I call their case, it's a non-appearance and I issue a bench warrant. The clerk tells me the amount of bail, which is usually between $25,000 to $75,000. I must have issued bail orders amounting to a total of over half a million dollars yesterday.

During court, my focus was on trying to get through the calendar in a reasonable time. Because there were so many preliminary matters, half of the time in the morning session was consumed before I could go to work, so I'm not surprised that we ran long. I didn't have a lot of time to think globally about what was going on while I was doing it; I just tried to be efficient and respectful of everyone and to do what I needed to do so the court's business could get done.

But when describing things to The Wife last night, something struck me. Something like a third to half of all the defendants I saw yesterday were Black. The vast bulk of the rest were Latino. Whites and Asians made up a very small number of the cases I saw; I doubt if I saw 20 defendants who were from those two racial groups. According to the U.S. Census, Lancaster is a little bit under three-quarters White, less than 13% Black, and less than 15% Latino. Palmdale's demographics are within a percentage point in all of these categories.

Whites were dramatically underrepresented in the traffic court; Blacks and Latinos were dramatically overrepresented. What theories might explain this? I came up with four, none of which are necessarily mutually exclusive to the others:

1. The police are racists.

2. The police patrol more frequently in areas where Blacks and Latinos congregate.

3. Blacks and Latinos drive in a manner to attract more tickets than other racial groups.

4. Whites and Asians tend to mail in and forfeit their bail rather than show up for arraignment on a traffic ticket.

I recognize that theory #3 is, itself, a racist theory. That does not mean that we can dismiss it out of hand, but it does mean that its validity is particularly suspect. The likely validity of theory #1 also probably depends on your race; if you are Black, you will tend to be more likely to consider that theory valid than if you are White.

But it seems to me that the more profitable and useful areas of inquiry are theories #2 and #4. The explanation underlying those theories would certainly be more pleasing to me than the theories that involve someone (either the theorizer or the police who are the subjects of the theory) being a racist. And, #2 and #4 dovetail into other observations I've made about the behavior of people.

Specifically, it's that a person's economic status is the most powerful governor and predictor of their behavior. Race matters less than money.

The police have noticed that economically disadvantaged areas have higher rates of violent, property, and drug-related crime and therefore they patrol those areas much more frequently, because that's where the crime is. It also happens to be the case that Blacks and Latinos are more frequently economically disadvantaged (for some fairly sinister historical reasons, we must concede) and therefore they are, disproportionately, the subjects of those patrols. Traffic citations provide a sample of the results of police patrols.

Combine this with the idea that Whites and Asians are more economically advantaged, and therefore will tend to have more disposable income. As a result, when people with some money get traffic tickets, they may find it easier to simply mail in a check with their bail money (which is equal to their anticipated fine) and forfeit the bail. These people value their time more than their money, and would rather give up a few hundred dollars than take the time to appear in court and plead "guilty." They also have easier access to financial devices -- mainly checking accounts -- that make such a transaction convenient.

They thereby avoid the experience of going to court altogether. To them, the court is an envelope and maybe a phone call or a visit to a website. It is not a long line to get through the weapons screen in a large, intimidating building, a lengthy and tedious lecture about legal procedures and paperwork, nor a scary call before the bar to face a stranger wearing a black robe sitting on an elevated bench.

So, great, you say. You've figured out that Blacks and Latinos tend to be less rich than Whites and Asians. Woo. Big insight there, TL -- thanks for playing!

But no, I've also observed one of the tangible non-monetary effects of that economic disparity -- which is having to physically go to court, or not, to handle the same sort of legal problem. Given that the fines are the same as the bail, on a violation-per-violation basis the monetary cost of going to court is the same for everyone. But Blacks and Latinos face an added cost of having to spend time in court as well.

Closing

Our check cleared. We get the keys tomorrow. That's good, because we bought over $400 worth of painting supplies yesterday. I'm relieved, The Wife is ecstatic. As of tomorrow, we're homeowners again!

George Mason Goes Negative

In a blog I very much enjoy, the author take Rudy Giuliani to task for referencing 9/11 too much by putting that style in George Washington's mouth. But what if Washington had faced opposition like there is today? What if he had people second-guessing his in-the-moment decisions, the way Giuliani faces today? Maybe if Washington's former friend, George Mason, had tried to mount a meaningful campaign against his fellow Virginian:

"I stand before you today to ask for your vote for the Presidency. Though I opposed enactment of our new Constitution last year, today I ask you to trust me with its most powerful office -- because you, good people, can be certain that if given this power, I will not abuse it, as I think it ought not to be used in the first place.

"The same cannot be said for my opponent and fellow Virginian, General Washington. His record shows a career of abuse of power.

"In the 1750's, some of you will recall that we enjoyed peaceful relations with England; that we had delegates lobbying Parliament and paid fair levels of taxes to His Majesty's government. We enjoyed general peace, a high degree of colonial autonomy, and prospered in our trades.

"Then, a young man in the military, Captain George Washington, created a dispute with a French trading post and seven French soldiers were scalped. Captain Washington swore afterwards that it was Indians under his command who did this without his knowledge or his authorization. Yet even if we believe his word, this still represents a failure of his leadership, resulting in atrocious acts of torture and death.

"A world war erupted because of this incident in the far western woods of Pennsylvania -- because Captain Washington failed as a leader.

"For seven years, we fought and bled for His Majesty's government against the French. The new king took power after war's end, and to pay for the war, England raised taxes on us. Thus, Captain Washington -- late promoted to Colonel, despite participating in no major engagements other than the aforementioned precipitating atrocity -- suffered the tyrrany of the young new king upon us all.

"And though I served in the House of Burgesses and in the Continental Congress for longer than Colonel Washington, 'twas he who showed up, and silently sat in the back, wearing his military uniform. As the best men among us labored to push for independence and liberty, Colonel Washington hungered for more military command. And he won it, too, the handsome devil. We made him commander of all our forces.

"Now General, my opponent for the Presidency began his command by making a foolhardy attack upon a fortified British position in Brooklyn Heights, on a fool's errand to try and capture New York. The best that can be said for him was that he organized an orderly retreat after it was plain that he could not prevail.

"To be sure, Valley Forge was the finest moment under this man's command. Let no one here, not I nor anyone else, take away anything from the terrible suffering and great bravery shown by all the soldiers who waited in the bitter winter, and fought even on Christmas Day.

"And then? Washington played a waiting game, moving his troops to Yorktown in time to pick up Lord Cornwallis' surrender, obtained not at the point of Washington's gun but rather facing the ships of Talleyrand and the French Navy. One might say that perhaps Washington was not a good tactician, but he had the strategic vision to win the war -- yet his strategy was, in essence, to wait for the French to come and bail him out. And his troops nearly deserted him anyway; he had to resort to a cheap trick, insulting to even a child's intelligence, to keep them fighting.

"So today, General Washington, a man with scant experience holding elective office under either the colonial or the confederate systems of government, wishes to step, immediately, into the most powerful position of government these states in America have yet known. All he truly has to acquaint him with the exercise of such power is his status as the very richest man in all the thirteen states and the running of a plantation on the Potomac River. His track record is one of impetuous, bloody, and disastrous abuse of power; that we have been successful is despite and not because of any of his achievements, and we may expect more of the same from him should he take office this March in Philadelphia."

So the record is clear -- this is a hypothetical exercise, and in real life, I'd have resisted any such attempts to disparage Washington's military and governmental achievements in this fashion. Washington's military, political, and diplomatic strategy was much more elaborate, effective, and powerful than this hypothetical negative speech would have suggested; the battle of Brooklyn Heights was a far more daring thing than the speech suggests, credit for the survival and victories of the army at Valley Forge rests at least as much with the sound leadership Washington provided as with the bravery and fortitude of the soldiers who fought under him. His rally to unpaid patriot troops was no cheap trick, it was a sincere and subtle gesture (he had to announce that Congress was unable to pay the troops for another month in hard currency, and put on his reading glasses to do so, showing how the war had wearied and aged him, as it had the troops) and the march to Yorktown was a brilliant side of an amphibious pincher movement against the well-fortified and effective Cornwallis.

So, it was an interesting exercise writing a hypothetical negative speech about our most revered national figure, just to show it could have been done, and given today's political environment, even someone like Big George would be subject to that sort of attack.

Big George is and remains my favorite of all the Presidents. Sure, he had flaws, mainly owning slaves, but George Mason could hardly have thrown that particular rock in my imaginary negative speech (Mason owned slaves but was opposed to the slave trade). Nor could Mason have attacked Washington for being a member of the Freemasons, as Mason was a Mason also. (There must be a better way to write that). It seems likely that Washington cheated on Martha, which would have been, both then and today, fair game for an attack.

Had Mason actualy delivered this speech, impugning the astonishing military achievements of George Washington and unfairly blaming him for the Seven Years' War, it would have been at least as disgraceful as the speeches which are the subject of the Giuliani parody. (George Mason, in fact, had much more class than to have delivered a speech like this.) No one claims that Washington was a perfect leader, but he was a remarkably effective one, and to nitpick a decision here or there, a tactic that did not work here or there, or to characterize him as a foolhardy adventurer stands in sharp contrast to reality.

And the analogy continues. Giuliani is right to point out that he accomplished something significant on 9/11 and in its wake. He kept the city calm and under control; he got the city to healing and rebuilding almost immediately; he was able to use the tools at his disposal to get the many complex organs of government to work together and start accomplishing something. He did, in short, exactly what needed doing, at a time when a lot of people didn't know what to do at all. His achievements in government before that are also impressive and of note; he took on the Mafia, he streamlined New York's government, and under his leadership, America's biggest, dirtiest, and most violent city became one of the cleanest, safest urban environments in North America. Not a utopia, not free from all of its problems, and not every decision Giuliani made worked out well.

But the Big Apple was much, much better than it had been eight years before. I can remember a time I would have been deathly afraid to go to New York; I considered it a concentration of East Coast urban rot and believed I'd be as likely to be shot to death there as I would have been in Detroit. But in 2000, I chose to travel there as a tourist, because I felt like it would be a good place to be, where nothing bad would happen to me and I'd have lots of things to do that I would enjoy. I felt safe the entire time I was there (granted, I only left Manhattan to go to a Yankees game and to get on the shuttle to the Newark airport) and indeed, I can't recall even seeing any of the sketchy sorts of folks who I see lurking around in bad neighborhoods in Los Angeles... or even here in Palmdale. So why shouldn't Giuliani talk about these achievements in his stump speech; why shouldn't he point out his accomplishments as qualifications for a larger, more difficult job?

The point of the parody, of course, was that Giuliani's reference to the events is disgraceful for the frequency of the references. I doubt the author would begrudge an "appropriate" amount of 9/11 references to Hizzonner, but he thinks it's over the line. I'm still not quite over the phone call, but that's a different matter.

Allocating Responsibility

A partner in the firm, who knows I’m interested in football, circulated this article about former NFL players becoming disabled.  It contains a moving description of Brian DeMarco, an offensive lineman who was, among other things, on the inaugural team of the Jacksonville Jaguars.  DeMarco was badly injured when an opposing linebacker tackled him, leading with his helmet.  He suffered a serious spinal injury, but was given lidocaine on the field, and he played again later that day.  He played again a few more times that season but ultimately was too badly-injured to return to the sport.  At 27 years of age, he had to retire from professional football.  Eight years later, he was 35 years old, still a mountain of a man but destitute; he was found by a charity worker in a house with no food for himself, his wife, or his child, and less than one dollar in currency as his only liquid asset.  The charity, whose motive force is the former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, got him some cash and stocked up the family’s pantry, and helped him re-apply for disability benefits with the NFL Player’s Association.  Apparently, only about 3% of such applications are granted – and nearly every player who plays professional football is never the same after the experience.  Knees, of course, get badly knocked around, and so do heads, as most players suffer serious concussions at one point or another in their careers.  In the NFL, they hit hard.

 

So the question is, how badly should we feel about this?  The article from Men’s Journal that the partner circulated describes players suffering terrible injuries, some of which last a lifetime, and a union with no meaningful disability coverage to help protect or compensate these players for their performances, which earn both the union and the league tremendous amounts of money.  Mike Ditka, the former Bears coach who is a motive force behind the charity for the injured former players, is right.  It is a great shame that football is not taking care of its own.  But the impression I get is that the union is in bed with management and therefore not doing its job to advocate for players.  There may be bad memories of the players’ strike from the 1980’s and how that strike emasculated the union, but that’s no excuse for the union not trying to assert itself, and getting meaningful results for its members.  The members of the union who earn the top salaries should be the leaders in helping take care of the other players who make their great performances possible and the union provides an effective and efficient mechanism to do that.  It could be that the union needs to set up a system, and charge more dues to fund that system, to support players like the guy described in the article.

 

Playing pro football is a very good job, one that pays well because (in part) the money is supposed to compensate the players for the physical risks they face.  For most players, the job involves a physically punishing task, and it would be impossible for players not to know this going in to their professional careers.  Perhaps they’re not as well-educated as they should be about the lasting effects of playing football at that level for a living, but they surely know that the job involves brutal, intense physical contact.  Maybe the league minimum salary is not really enough to adequately compensate the low-end players for the physical risks they face; the article certainly leaves the reader with that impression.  But the minimum salary in the NFL, even for a rookie, is $285,000 a year, and I’d have some difficulty with the argument that this is inadequate compensation for the work.

 

Because of this, the one partner here is not very sympathetic to the players because they have a choice to not pursue this career and therefore accept the risks inherent in it.  The other partner’s retort is that the players may not have a meaningful choice about playing football because of the incentives and the lifestyle in which the players find themselves.  I say, sure, the money and the women and the fame are all great while they last – but is this really any different a set of incentives than that of a drug dealer or a movie star, and with about the same odds of success and risks of failure along the way?  We all would agree that they have options available other than dealing drugs or acting, so why should playing sports be any different?  Yes, this is a career that these men have worked their whole lives for, true, but it’s not like they didn’t have alternatives and other opportunities available to them along the way.

 

The article also leaves the reader with the impression that there are only two fates for NFL players – they can end up like Dan Marino, continuing to make millions a year on television as a commentator, or they end up like the guy in the article, on the edge of homelessness and barely able to survive.  The truth is that almost all of these guys have college degrees and they could have, in theory, availed themselves of acquiring the actual education that those degrees are supposed to signify.  It’s facile to ignore that many football players are simply passed through college as part of a negotiated transaction, but college still provides them with an opportunity that they have to make careers for themselves.  Many have done exactly that – going on to have successful professional careers as lawyers, doctors, accountants, clergymen, or stockbrokers.  Some parlay their football experience into a publicity advantage for other kinds of business (i.e., Randall Cunningham used his fame as a journeyman quarterback to partner with a Nevada contractor, and quickly became the biggest supplier of solid-surface kitchen counters in Las Vegas).  A significant number become educators, and coach football at the high school or junior-college level; some coach at four-year colleges.  It’s no one’s fault but the players’ if they fail to avail themselves of those opportunities.  Yes, there may be hundreds of guys in bad financial straits, but there are hundreds, even thousands, who have had some measure of financial and personal success and don’t need the kind of charitable support that Ditka is talking about. 

 

That doesn’t excuse the union or the NFL for shirking their legitimate responsibilities, of course.  But the ultimate fault is not with football.  The problem is that these players have been let down by the professionals whom they have trusted to safeguard their welfare – most of all their union, but to lesser (yet significant) degrees the also their agents, their coaches, the more experienced leaders on their teams who ought to mentor them, and their professional financial, insurance, medical, and legal advisors.  I think we should feel as sorry for these guys as we do for anyone who is let down by the people who are supposed to help them, and as sorry as we would feel for anyone who suffers from a physical disability.  They deserve compassion and the ones who, like DeMarco, fall on truly hard times should have the same sort of opportunity to get some charitable help as anyone else.  But these guys also have some resources available to them, and the real injustice is that they do not seem to have any rights back against their union, which was once happy to take their dues but now has hung them out to dry.