Taking Chance Home

Good for HBO.

Hat tip to Sister Toldjah.

Bail Out Big Porn

What with all the governmental intervention in big finance, big auto manufacturing, big insurance, and big real estate, there are no doubt a lot of important industries that have been left behind. No one is offering to bail out big law firms that are struggling the way that big financial houses have been assisted, for instance -- and what will happen to the nation if Arrogant, Expensive & Condescending LLP has to consolidate its Midtown and Wall Street Manhattan office locations? Why isn't there any outcry of support for speedboat manufacturers or our embattled wine industry?

Well, there are leaders in at least one major industry who aren't going to stand by and let themselves get left behind the way these other guys did -- they are boldly and patriotically standing up next to their industrial and financial brethren and sticking their hands out for public money to get them through the tough times that could otherwise run them into the ground. They're going to stand up for themselves, their thousands of stockholders, and the tens of thousands of people who work hard, every day, to make life better for Americans and people everywhere.

I'm talking, of course, about the adult entertainment industry.

See, the guys behind Hustler Magazine and Girls Gone Wild want five billion dollars from the government to keep their production and distribution operations viable. DVD and magazine sales are down! What will happen in a world in which domestic producers of erotica are all squeezed out by the credit shortage and Americans are required to import all of our smut from Sweden and Vietnam?

See, it's just not the same thing when you read a story that begins with "Jag är en elev vid ett litet universitet nära Köpenhamn, och du kommer aldrig tro detta men det som verkligen hände!!!"* And you can forget about special issues like "Girls of the SEC," let me tell you what!

Judging by how much money Americans spend on pornography, this must be a pretty important industry. So, let's dig the national debt even deeper by making Larry Flynt even richer than he already is with our hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

Or maybe we could come to our senses about literally lighting our collective money on fire. Not a penny spent on subsidizing banks, insurance companies, auto manufacturers, or mortgage lenders is going to do us the remotest bit of good. Banks have literally no idea where the money they took has gone. General Motors can't possibly turn itself into a profit-producer in the 90 days that our tax dollars bought it. So let's just bite the bullet already and get through this thing so that we can emerge from our troubles financially stronger than we were going in to it.


* "I am a student at a small college just outside of Copenhagen, and you'll never believe this but it really happened to me!!!"

Oh, To Be A Fly On That Wall

All of our Presidents do not get together at one place or one time very often. The last time was for Gerald Ford's funeral. They did it again today -- an Oval Office meeting with President-Elect Obama, both Presidents Bush, President Carter, and President Clinton. That was probably about the most fascinating conversation in the world today.

Hopefully it was nothing along the lines of "Barack, the bathroom over here, you gotta jiggle the handle on the toilet to get it to flush right." But I could see something like, "Dude, get the kitchen to make you a chicken salad sandwich some time, it's out of this world," or "Don't let the press corps steal all the wet-naps from Air Force One, you know, the ones that have the cool Presidential seal on them. You've gotta have some of those to give away when you meet people after you get to where you're going." Advice like that.

Interestingly, it seems that the only real bad blood in the room is between Carter and Clinton. I suppose that makes some sense -- this is certainly the most elite club in the United States and just about the most elite club in the whole world. With the passage of time and departure (for three of them) from the rough-and-tumble of daily political life, these guys probably see a lot more in common between themselves than differences.

A Cup Of Joe Before The Inauguration

There's nothing like having a talented, experienced, significant member of your team who has your back when you're under fire. That's a great feeling of support and a powerful show of strength, one that you can use to your advantage to prevail against adversity. Too bad for Barack Obama that he isn't getting that from Vice President-Elect Joe Biden.

Biden, in a frankly unsurprising and presaged show of his contrarian and arrogant personality, showed up to be sworn in as a United States Senator for his seventh term and began to use his fiffteen days in Congress to start building up legislative support for his President's honeymoon legislative proposals.*

Which, as it turns out, consists of calling Obama's choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA "a mistake," declared September's financial markets collapse the equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and declared the nation "at war" as a result, and revealing that he's about to take a state trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (this information was still under wraps for security reasons). Wow. Talk about being on board with the big guy's plans. Obama had to know that he'd wind up butting heads with his former colleagues in Congress at some point. He just didn't expect one of the first salvos to come from his running mate.

Well, he does have a much higher IQ than you, so you really ought to listen carefully to what this very smart man has to say. After all, he understands the grave threat that high fructose corn syrup represents to the average American.

Some people who follow politics worry that there's not enough news to follow at a point like this. You've gotta write about something and for the most part, Cabinet picks are not that interesting subjects. But Joe Biden is the new administration's gift to them.


* The Constitution provides that the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, which this year fell on a Saturday, so the new Congress took office on the next business day, which was Monday the 5th. But the Constitution also provides that the new President is sworn in on January 20. So there's a little bit more than two weeks' time between the new Congress convening and the new President taking office. In addition to winning election as Vice President, Biden also won his bid for re-election as Delaware's senior Senator because a Delaware law allows a candidate to run for a national office simultaneous to running for statewide office. So, Biden was re-elected Senator and elected Vice President; he gets to be Delaware's Senator until he takes his oath of office as the Vice President.

Photographs From The Old West

These look like they were taken around the Black Hills in maybe the 1870's or 1880's. As far as I can tell, they're genuine.

Whoomp. There It Is.

Chris Hallquist has it down -- why evangelicals are so scared of same-sex marriage. I can add nothing more to his already-crystalline analysis.

Sanjay Gupta Teaches Me A Lesson

This appears to be real, not a joke. Dr. Gupta from CNN's "House Calls" is apparently President-Elect Obama's choice to be the Surgeon General of the United States. My immediate reaction was disappointment. "What, just because he's a pretty face with a TV gig, he gets a sub-Cabinet position? Damn, I should have signed up to be an Assistant Attorney General!" My reaction was that it had to be some kind of a joke.

Turns out, Dr. Gupta is not just good-looking (although he was named one of the 50 sexiest men alive by People Magazine, ranked between Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt). His medical qualifications are that he is an accomplished neurosurgeon with some publications under his belt; he is also a professor of neurosurgery at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta who, while embedded as a journalist with a medical corps during the Gulf War, performed brain surgery on an Iraqi child in a combat zone. Maybe not the most academically-qualified doctor out there, but not a complete nonentity, either.

But of course he's famous for his television activities. Which is why I assumed he was something of an intellectual lightweight. After all, not all doctors are uncannily smart, like the ones who solve mysteries better than the police or provide piercing insights into the human condition like they do on television shows.

Now, in some ways, Gupta's TV experience makes him a pretty canny choice. Whatever it was historically, the SG-USA's main job has become serving as the spokesman for the government's health and medical policies. He is a figurehead for popularizing information and encouraging people to be healthier. Since Gupta's main career for the last ten years or so has been in front of a camera as a journalist (of sorts) rather than as a doctor, he's pretty well-suited for that.

And the level of generality at which broad-scale health advice is dispensed is pretty basic. Your basic internist or G.P. can put together a pretty good generalized set of guidelines that will work well for most people. You don't need a neurosurgery professor to tell you that you probably ought to eat more fruits and vegetables and to exercise regularly. So for the ceremonial and P.R. stuff, he's actually a good choice. And that's a significant part of this job.

Now, one thing you may not know about Gupta is that he was a White House Fellow in the early 1990's, working with the health care reform efforts under Hilary Clinton that ultimately came to nothing. So it's not like he's got zero public policy experience; he's got more public policy under his belt than at least 90% of his fellow M.D.s. But he hasn't succeeded in his career because of that, at least not directly. No, to succeed as he has, Gupta has needed to be bright and ambitious, get a medical degree, show up on time, smile on cue, look attractive, and read his lines clearly. How much of the writing of those lines is properly credited to him is an open question. But he also has enough background to prepare him for the role of helping fashion broad health policies.

Now, the Surgeon General is also the head of a 6,000-employee bureaucracy. This means that he needs some degree of administrative expertise and ability to manage others. He hasn't had to fight other politicians to protect his budget or make the kinds of choices and do the kinds of things necessary to keep him in his bosses' good graces. And, the Surgeon General holds the rank of Vice Admiral (that's a three-star general for you landlubbers out there). The medical corps of the various branches of the military ostensibly report to him. I suppose Dr. Gupta could delegate the military things to the careerists who do the day-to-day running of their respective medical branches of the various services and confine his involvement to ceremonial work. The career military doctors in question would probably like that just fine, come to think of it. But there is some administrative and political work -- he'll be holding a sub-Cabinet-level position, reporting to the Secretary of Health and Human Services,* the largest civilian bureaucracy in the world. So there is some reason to question whether he can be an effective head of a governmental agency in the midst of the deepest part of the bureaucratic jungle that is Washington despite his other qualifications.

I think what's really interesting here is not whether Gupta is actually a good pick or not. It was my assumption that because he's an attractive talking head on television, he must be an intellectual and political lightweight, that he's only being picked for the job to be the public policy equivalent of Vanna White. (Maybe it's a residual effect from seeing this movie.) But after looking into his background a little bit, I find that he's actually got a creditable resume with good academic and professional qualifications and some public policy experience. Considering that the job is heavily P.R. based, it's overall not a bad mix. So I pre-judged the man unfairly and I'm glad I took the time to look deeper.

Didn't it used to be that we assumed people on TV news knew what they were talking about, that they were worthy of respect? America used to take guys like Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid and Edward Murrow seriously? You know, guys like, um, Mike Wallace. But somewhere along the way, I got it in my head that the main reason people are "reporting" the news on broadcast media has nothing to do with their intelligence but rather with their screen or media presence. I came to think that real journalism was done behind the scenes by smart but unattractive people, whose work was given a pretty public face by well-groomed readers whose primary qualification for the job was good diction.

I've learned a valuable lesson here. Just because he's on TV doesn't necessarily mean that Dr. Gupta is some kind of an empty suit, that he doesn't have all that much intellectual firepower to bring to the table. It appears that, to the contrary, he may have been a good choice even if he hadn't been a TV personality.

UPDATE: And, anyone who pisses off Paul Krugman because he formerly dared to criticize Michael Moore can't be all bad.


* For those of you playing the home game, administration of that agency is expected to be awarded to... former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Why I Gave Up On Day By Day

Day by Day purports to be a right-leaning political comic strip and has pretentions of being the conservative Doonesbury. Sadly, it is not so good as that. Doonesbury is only about a 4 out of 10 on the funny scale on a good day anymore (that's somewhere between a smirk and a chuckle), and Day by Day is, well, competitive with that.

The problem is, Chris Muir misses more than he's hitting with the political commentary side of things. Garry Trudeau at least is paying attention to what's going on, even if he can only rarely find something funny to say about it. Muir seems to either have a tin ear to political phenomena or is getting his talking points from Red-Colored Kool-Aid Central. Take today's strip, for instance. Now, come on. The Senate's refusal to seat Senator-Designate Burris is quite obviously unrelated to his race. Attempting to paint Harry Reid as a racist for this falls deadly flat. It's not accurate and it's not funny. (If it were accurate, it might be funny.) There are a lot of other things you can criticize Reid for. He's apparently incapable of gracefully handling controversy. He's a partisan blowhard. He's hardly the most effective leader Senate Democrats could have chosen for themselves. He's kind of a dork, or at least dorky-looking. But racist? No, he's not that.

I hadn't followed Day by Day for several months after giving up on it in February, and recently I tried to give it another chance. I figured that with a Democrat coming in to power, there might be more material for him to work with. Muir seems to be focusing on Barack Obama's arrogance and the media's sycopancy of him, which are quickly becoming yesterday's news.

See, the thing of it is that Obama is being humbled -- the Bill Richardson flap, the suggestion that Rahm Emanuel may have been caught up in the Blagojevich corruption, and today, criticism that Leon Panetta may not be a good choice to lead the CIA. He is not being humbled all at once, but that's not how these things work. It's the beginning of the torture of a thousand cuts rather than a sudden disgrace à la Monica Lewinsky. There seems to me to be decent raw material for humor there. Apparently, though, this isn't good enough -- Obama must be brought down completely and immediately, before he is even inaugurated. Maybe Muir is part of a radical pro-Biden splinter group of comic strip authors; that would certainly explain things.

Maybe I'm too tough a crowd. But preachy comedy is rarely funny. And sometimes it takes a while before comedians figure out what's funny about someone. Clinton and Bush the Younger were pretty easy; Saturday Night Live figured out very quickly what made them funny. But what about Bush the Elder? It took nearly a year of his administration before Dana Carvey started hitting the impression just right and found the elements of his personality and mannerisms that were subject to comedic exaggeration. Obama may just be a tougher nut to crack than Bush the Younger or Clinton were. And his arrogance is almost certainly only a small part of it.

Author Of DOMA Desires Its Repeal

One of the things that I admire the most about people is when they realize that they were wrong and admit it. Bob Barr is doing that now. No flaming liberal, no culture warrior he. Bob Barr was a Republican Congressman from Georgia when he authored the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, he thinks it should be repealed. His basic argument is that DOMA is used to prevent extending benefits to same-sex couples even in situations where there seems to be a political desire to extend those benefits.

In the absence of DOMA, it's not clear whether the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution would compel one state (California, for instance) to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state (Massachusetts or Connecticut). I would tend to think so, but the interposition of state constitutional amendments like Proposition 8 would be a powerful block to that.

I doubt DOMA will be repealed. I'd be pleasantly surprised if it were. But how about this instead? Allow a same-sex couple who are registered as domestic partners or in a civil union according to the laws of their state to file a joint tax return with the IRS. Just that, nothing more, to start with. Watch and observe as the world does not stop revolving around its axis, as no impact on federal revenues takes place, and children are not forcibly converted to homosexuality. Then, a few years later, maybe we allow joint bankruptcy filing. And after that, who knows? By the end of the day, being in a domestic partnership could be nearly the legal equivalent of being in a marriage. And at that point, maybe it really will be just a matter of semantics.

Conservatives Re-Discover The Importance Of Checks And Balances

John Yoo and John Bolton, two former second-tier Bush Administration officials, who used their time in office to advocate all kinds of unilateral authority for President Bush in the realm of foreign policy. Yoo was the principal author and researcher of a number of legal memoranda signed by Attorney General Gonzalez indicating that the President, alone and unchecked, had the power to authorize whatever he wanted at Guantanamo Bay, including torture, and notwithstanding any treaties to which the United States was signatory. Bolton made his name in the Reagan Administration invoking executive privilege against judicial and congressional inquiries relating to a wide variety of issues and his mark as a diplomat by, without even any Congressional debate on the subject, "unsigning" the United States from the Rome Convention and the International Criminal Court it created.

I'm not suggesting here that all of these were necessarily bad policy positions. From a normative perspective, I do criticize Yoo for suggesting that torture is legally permissible, but I'm far from sure that Bolton's positions, either on executive privilege or the Rome Convention, are ill-taken. I don't think the U.S. needs to be part of the International Criminal Court; we have a thriving and fair justice system here and we do prosecute our own people for war crimes when they go astray. My point has to do with their advocacy of unilateral executive power rather than the use with which they would have made of that power.

Because what these positions all have in common is an enlarged and functionally unchecked vision of what the President can do. Can the President pull the country out of a treaty? That's a pretty remarkable claim to power, considering that 1) treaties require the ratification of the Senate under the Constitution, and 2) treaties are our highest law short of the Constitution itself. Bolton in particular was a big fan of "executive agreements" taking the place of treaties; an "executive agreement" is just like a treaty between the U.S. and some other nation, only it doesn't require the Senate to debate it.

But amazingly, now that President Bush is going out of office and President Obama is moving in to take his place, Yoo and Bolton have suddenly re-discovered the Constitution. Checks and balances are suddenly quite important. For the future, we should make sure that the President's powers are limited and circumscribed by a Congress vigilant of its own role in our Constitutional system, including limiting the role of "executive agreements" in foreign policy.

Now, they're absolutely right. The President's powers are not and should not be unlimited. We have a Constitution that sets up a system of checks and balances and it's a good thing even if it's inefficient and sometimes cumbersome. But it's sheer hypocrisy to say that we should only have checks and balances if a Democrat is in office and there's no need of them when a Republican resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. We need them all the time.

I've said before, to conservatives, that if we didn't take care to police against the aggrandizement of executive power, we'd be very, very unhappy the day that Democrats won the White House again. That chicken came home to roost a little sooner than I would have preferred, but here it is and frankly, it was inevitable. This is why it should have behooved us all along to not only do the right thing but to do it the right way.

I suppose that hypocrisy isn't the worst thing in the world. But it does smell bad. And having insisted upon Constitutional government all along, I can take some measure of pride in not having to have compromised myself in the past when I inevitably criticize President Obama and his administration for overstepping his boundaries.

Romans In Hannover

Archaeologists have found the remains of a major set-piece battle from the second century between a tribe of Germans and a Roman legion. This is really interesting because it has been widely assumed that the Romans stopped major combat operations in the lands east of the Rhine after the massacre at the Teutoberg Forest in the year 9.

Hannover is pretty far in to Germany. At that time, they would very likely have been based out of what is today Trier. Those boys were a long way from home. That's about 220 (modern) miles away; at top speed, that's still nearly a month's march away from home base. And according to the preliminary analysis (the find was so rich the archaeologists think they can find the battle lines) it looks like they won.

And we're going to have to re-write the history books a little bit. That's pretty cool.

The Banality Of Obsessive Palin Disorder

For some reason that is not entirely clear to me, the bizarre and pointless campaign claim that Trig Palin was somehow Sarah Palin's grandson and not her son and there is some sort of massive conspiracy to conceal this fact has survived not only the initial flush of publicity surrounding the campaign, and indeed survived the campaign itself. And it's growing.

Just as a sample -- Tripp Johnston, who is (purportedly) Governor Palin's grandson and (purportedly) the son of her daughter Bristol Palin and boyfriend/fiance Levi Johnston, was born a few days ago. But the announcement did not hit the presses until three days after the birth and Half Sigma smells a rat. Megablogger Andrew Sullivan does, too. And on the horrendously overvalued Huffington Post, you can follow a breathless headline to a report about Johnston's mother's legal troubles.

Here's a bit of unpleasant truth for both Palin fans and the Palin-obsessed: The Palins are deeply banal people. Economically well-off, religious, embroiled in family and community disputes of various degrees of pettiness, politically and socially conservative, they are very much like the busybodies who inject themselves into suburban local politics -- yes, Sarah Palin is exceptionally good at that sort of game, which is how she got to Juneau. But it's the same insipid game you can see anywhere, including in your own town, church, or social circle.

Sarah Palin could be interesting if she had a political future or if she were a source of interesting ideas or if she were some sort of mythic figure. By "mythic" I don't mean she's the modern-day equivalent of Hercules; I mean someone whose story gives us something that the rest of us could use to pattern our lives around (or in opposition to, as the case might be). For instance, a lawyer at my firm tells a story of a woman who was giving a presentation to the board of directors of a major defense contractor. After she was introduced, she stood up and walked over to the podium to begin her talk, and the skirt of her suit fell down around her ankles. She stopped in her tracks, picked up the garment and put it back on, and said, "Now that I have your complete attention, let's begin." That's a mythic figure -- she provides an example of something that you might do in a tense, horribly embarrassing situation.

Sarah Palin has not, as far as I can tell, done or even been purported to have done, something with that sort of emotional resonance. If she will be remembered for anything, it will be for the absurdity of her claims to be qualified to lead the country. Palin did not actually say she could see Russia from her house (that was Tina Fey impersonating her), but she did say that her foreign policy credentials included Alaska's proximity to Russia -- and no one says that Rick Perry or Arnold Schwarzenegger are experts on foreign policy or immigration because their states border Mexico.

So if Palin is a mythic figure, she is one of opposition rather than emulation -- she is an example of what not to do.

Personally, I find it unlikely that Sarah Palin will ever rise above the level of Governor of Alaska -- yes, being the Governor of a state is no small achievement, even with a relatively small population to whom one must appeal. But she got brought up from the AAA league into the majors before she was ready, and she amply demonstrated that in the Presidential campaign -- even to this observer, who tried to keep an open mind about her for a long time. She will need to re-make her image as some kind of a wonky policy wizard in order to overcome this problem; and in so doing, she will abandon the "Average Jane," small-town folksy persona that was the foundation of her charisma in the first place. So I think she's out.

And her family's tawdry affairs are, whether rightfully private or not, really kind of uninteresting. Those people who seem unable to let go of finding deeply personal ways to attack or malign her are something of a mystery to me. Dudes: SHE LOST! She's done. Out of the picture. Whatever it was about her that you hated so intensely, you've managed to purge it from the body politic. And the people who so intensely liked her back in the campaign and still do, take care to understand why you like her. Are you sure that it isn't just to piss off the people who continue to be negatively obsessed with her?

Point is, continuing to obsess about Sarah Palin and her family is really, really pointless and weird.

Really, Harry?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stands by his claim that George W. Bush was the worst President we've ever had.

Really, Senator Reid? Worse than James Buchanan? I don't notice the nation sliding into civil war as Bush departs the White House. However bad he might have been, Bush has managed to at least avoid that parting gift to the nation.

It Got Better

Scanning in three years' worth of old pay stubs and other personal records (a job still not yet completed, as there are home purchase contracts and another retirement account to go) has been a tedious job. But it was a cakewalk compared to ripping out the carpet in the spare bedroom to prepare it for a hardwood (or laminate? we haven't decided yet) floor. Our trash cans are full of dead leaves, shred, and scraps of old carpet. Household garbage is going to have to wait until next week.

...And that's how I spent my Christmas Vacation, by Transplanted Lawyer.

Anti-Dynasticism Is A Bipartisan Sentiment

Remember what I said about how we should all assess the possibility of Caroline Kennedy with a trace of negativity because of the many high governmental positions held by members of her immediate family? How it shouldn't automatically disqualify her, but it should raise the bar she has to meet in order to demonstrate that she's the right person to hold the office? And the reason why, remember that? The reason being that this is not a country of overt aristocracy, a country that firmly rejected the principle of hereditary monarchy and dynastic succession. We are all, or should be, rightfully proud of our republican (small "r" heritage).

Well, what I said for Caroline Kennedy goes the same for Jeb Bush. At least in my book, Governor Jeb is going to have a higher burden than someone else who has served two terms as Governor of a large state to earn my support for his candidacy for President. Now, I realize that he is not his brother or his dad. But we've had twelve years of that particular family running the show.

Scan and Shred

On New Year's Day, I raked up the back yard. About ninety minutes' worth of moderate physical labor produced a garbage can full to the brim with compacted willow and oak leaves (and no small amount of the results of having four dogs prowling the back yard). Today, you couldn't tell I'd done a thing. And my left hand is still numb from the work. By tomorrow the area under the willow will be covered again and it will be more winter raking for me next weekend.

So today I was given a different sort of task -- scanning and shredding our old files. It's 2:30 in the afternoon and I've made it through the "F" folders. The advantage, of course, is that the zeroes and ones on my hard drive -- soon to be backed up on an online archival service -- take up no space. The disadvantage is that getting all this stuff scanned in the first place is a tedious task. I'll be glad when it's all done and our personal files and archives will be totally paperless.

I've already generated an astonishing amount of shred. I suppose if I wanted to be perfectly safe about it, I'd burn the shred, but the chances of a piece of on-fire shred making it out the chimney are greater than I feel comfortable with. And that, too, is the problem with the leaves -- back in Tennessee, you were almost expected to either burn or mulch your leaves, rather than reducing them to trash. But here in the Antelope Valley of California, burning leaves is not an option, our yard is too small for a compost pile, and we lack a mulcher. So some of the trash is going to have to go out in waves, some this week and some next week.

Most Important Figure In The Last Thousand Years

In a comment to this post celebrating Isaac Newton's birthday, a Reader asked me who was the even more influential person of the last thousand years. I thought it was an interesting question, so here's my answer: Christopher Columbus. "Christopher Columbus" is an Anglicization of the Latin form of his name, "Christophorus Columbus." In other countries he is known as "Cristóbal Colón," "Christovam Colom," or "Cristoforo Colombo," and probably what really counts is his name as it would have been said by his original countrymen, the Genoese -- "Christoffa Corombo." But I'm from the United States, and Columbus is the name by which he is known here, so that's what I'll call him.

Columbus is important, but not because he was the first European to discover the Americas. That was Bjarni Herjólfsson,* who sailed from Norway to Iceland in 985, got blown off course, and wound up exploring both the east and west sides of what is known today as the Davis Strait, which separates Greenland from Baffin Island in Canada. Herjólfsson, not Columbus, was the first European to sail to the Americas (and return home to tell the tale).

And if you believe some people, the Chinese sent trade and exploration ships to the Americas in 1421, and they started colonies (which either failed or became amalgamated into local populations). However, if this is true, the Chinese failed to follow up on their achievement because of changes in political and economic conditions back home, which left the field open for Europeans three generations later. There is some interesting evidence that conjecturally supports this theory. But when the Europeans came, they did not just bring their guns and their trade goods and their colonists. They also brought smallpox, bubonic plague, and a host of other diseases, which devastated the native population. Those diseases were known in China also; why, then, were there not the same massive deaths from contact with the Chinese that we know for a fact came after contact with the Europeans? That question makes it unclear in my mind as to whether the Chinese did discover the Americas. And if the Chinese did discover the Americas, they did not conquer and colonize like the Europeans did, so Zheng He does not deserve the same symbolic importance which I attribute to Columbus.

I pick Columbus as "man of the millenium" because he was the vanguard for the European expansion into the Americas. Herjólfsson's discovery was widely ignored for nearly a generation, and then Lief Ericsson and his followers attempts at forming a colony at what they called Vinland (at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland) failed. Columbus began a wave of settlement, beginning with the Spanish and the Portuguese and later included the French, Dutch, English, Swedish, and Russian peoples moving large, armed portions of their population to the New World, displacing the people who were already there and creating European-style societies in their place. Along with his brother Bartholomew, Columbus personally founded the first Spanish colonies in the New World, one of which (Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic) remains a vibrant city today.

To a lesser extent, the expansion of European civilization into Africa, India, and Australia also happened at more or less the time of Columbus and in the wake of his achievement. This two-hundred year long spasm of European expansion and conquest has forever transformed the world's politics and economy from just before 1500 to just after 1700. The European conquest and colonization of much of the rest of world is, in my opinion, the most significant event of the past millenium. It was too massive an action to be undertaken by one person, but one person, Columbus, serves quite well to symbolize that event.

If you think someone else was more influential than Columbus, in the time span from 1008 to today, I'd love to hear your opinion.

* Pronounced just like it's spelled.

Death By Comet

An archeaologist from my alma mater, working with his father, a paleooceanographer from the University of Oregon, have located a fairly consistent layer of nanodiamonds in soil samples from around North America. From this, they conclude that 12,900 years ago, a comet struck the continent and caused massive climate change -- initially melting a number of glaciers, and then triggering a global cooling period, resulting in significant extinctions worldwide and especially on the North American continent.

This is very interesting because I had been under the impression that a number of North American megafauna, like the woolly mammoth, went extinct because of overuse by human settlers who migrated here from eastern Asia. But if this report is right, then that might not be the case; instead, the extinctions were caused by force majeure. And upon close reading of the report, the report does not attribute mammoth extinction to the comet impact, but it does attribute the extinction of a number of other interesting mammals.

A couple of thoughts cross my mind here. First of all, these kinds of asteroid and comet impacts happen; anyone who's been to Arizona's Meteor Crater has seen powerful evidence of this and additional evidence of this accumulates every year. Yet nothing is being done by anyone about it because the chances of such a strike occurring in the very immediate future is remote.

Second, it's certainly the case that significant climate change is caused by things other than humans. It's also the case that humans can change their environment. Climate change is going on right now. Why that is happening is still mysterious, but the fact that is happening ought to be beyond reasonable dispute.

Third, some really interesting books I've read by a UCLA anthopologist named Jared Diamond may be in need of revision if this theory pans out. In both Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, Prof. Diamond assumed that environmental factors caused civilizations in particular locations to succeed or fail, and points out the importance of geography as opposed to cultural variances between people in that question. He makes a number of case studies of pre-Columbian North American peoples and concludes that many of them overtaxed their environment, either through agriculture that was too intensive or through over-hunting game animals or other animals that could have been domesticated and used for labor. But Diamond's dismissal of the "noble savage in harmony with nature" myth may not be true -- it was hardly the fault of pre-Columbian North Americans if a comet hit their homeland.

Fourth, if there was an impact like this, where is the impact crater? Has it been eroded beyond sight? Obviously it's not as obvious an impact site as Meteor Crater or Lake Manicouagan in Quebec. The site of the But if there was an impact, it had to have happened somewhere. But Chicxulib Crater in the Yucatan -- the remnants of the Dinosaur Killer -- was not discovered until 1994, although of course it had been there all along, so there may still be discoveries to be made in the realm of geography despite our living in the world of high-detail satellite mapping of the world.

A Boy's Eyes Are Opened Almost Too Late

Shakirullah was a good boy. He came from a good family. He lived in a rural village in Pakistan and wanted to please his parents, who in turn wanted him to be a good Muslim. Knowing that they were not trained in Islam, they sent him to a school that promised to teach him about Islam and the teachings of the Prophet and how to be a good man.

But it wasn't a regular school. It was a madrassah run by radical clerics. They taught Shakirullah (like a lot of tribal people, he only has one name) how to recite the Koran in Arabic, despite the fact that the boy didn't know any Arabic and didn't understand what he was reciting. When he finished memorizing the whole thing, they said he was "ready" and told him that he needed to strap a bomb around his chest and go kill Americans and British in Afghanistan, "because they were killing Muslims."

Quite fortunately for him, he was caught while he was being trained to drive a car. His American captors sent him to a detention camp. There, he reflected on his experiences and now he realizes that the mullahs deceived him -- and probably deceived his parents, too. He understands now that the Koran's true instructions are to not murder, to not suicide. Of the mullahs, he says simply, "They cheated me."

I don't know why this story of all the many awful stories of terrorism and war and violence and death should get to me in particular. Maybe it was the heart-rending picture of a boy whose head was shaved to be in prison, warming himself in a blanket as best he can, too shy to make eye contact with the photographer. There are shy kids like that all over -- kids who want to please their parents and do the right thing. In the process of asking authority figures what that was, how best to do that, he was tricked and came perilously close to being killed.

It makes me wonder about his future. He's from Pakistan, a country with a deeply troubled near future. Will he return home? Will he see his family again? Will they learn of his fate? (There isn't a lot of reliable internet service in the North West Province, as I understand it.) Will he remain a Muslim, or give up his religion, and if so, will he adopt another? One can imagine that after this experience, he would be deeply distrustful of religious authority figures. Particularly given his circumstances, he should be.

Maybe it gets to me because it's a "near miss" sort of story. If he was being trained to drive a car, which is not that difficult a skill for a teenaged boy to acquire, that meant he was probably very close to being sent in to kill himself and take out allied troops with him -- weeks, if not days. Had he not been apprehended, he would have been killed.

And maybe it gets to me because once he was removed from the influence of the clerics, he was able to see with some clarity what they had done to him. The brainwashing. The twisting of his holy text and the torture of his fundamental morality. The callous, cynical manner in which the people who had been trusted with his life, his soul, and his mind treated him like they would a shotgun shell -- a disposable, nearly valueless object whose only utility was to accomplish an act of violence. He, too, would have been a victim of terrorism, even as he became the vehicle through which it would have been accomplished.

The men who did this to him are monsters. If I believed in hell, I would say it was too good for them.

Annus Horribilis

I don't think a lot of people are going to look back on 2008 and say, "Yeah. 2008 -- now, that was a good year."

Welcome to 2009. Hopefully it won't get any worse.