Dim Sum

Big case today.  Three lawyers from our firm, including me, in downtown L.A.  Afterwards, we went to Chinatown to get dim sum.  Fact is, I've never really had the dim sum experience before.

The place was busy, bustling with people.  I noticed that most of the patrons appeared to be Chinese, and took that as a good sign.  When we sat down, right away there was a lady pushing a cart by us.

"Would you like some duck?  Ve-e-ery good."

"Okay," I says.  I like duck.  It looked nicely-roasted, the color of tea.  Maybe this would be a stripped-down version of the famous Beijing Duck.  She put the duck down, marked our ticket, then picked up the plate of duck again and went away with it.

"What's up with that?" I asked my more experienced dim sum diners.

"She's heating it up." 

"Oh."

Then another lady with a cart came by.  She said something I simply could not understand at all.  My companions nodded their heads, and the lady reached into her cart and pulled out two metal pots to reveal within each four small orbs of variously-colored food, one of them covered in mushrooms and the other in what looked like chicken broth.  I took one of the darker orbs and found to my delight that it was ground pork with something inside that made it red-colored and gave it an interesting flavor, but not hot or spicy.

This pork meatball thing -- I'm sure someone told me what its name was but I forgot -- was about half the size of my fist.  There was absolutely no way I could have picked it up with chopsticks so I was trying to slice into it with a fork and reduce it into smaller-sized pieces that I could use chopsticks.  While I was doing this, still another lady came by and said in a loud voice right in my ear?  "Chao su baow?"

I turned away from trying to get into my food and looked, she had a bunch of wide, white rice noodles that had been stuffed with things.  "Thees is wit feesh, thees is wit porr, theese is wit chicken!  Try it, you like!"

"No, thanks," I said.  I wanted to eat this pork dumpling thing I hadn't even been able to slice open to get at yet.  Then, in my other, a fourth dim sum lady came by and said, "Dim sum?  I haaa dim sum!"

"Thees is vegetabo, very good.  I think you like, have some!"

"I haav with shrimm and scallo, ve-e-e-ry good."

"No thanks, " I said, and so did my friends.

Next thing I knew, my other friend had been given a plate with three white discs,  I took one of those and it was a steamed shell around bits of mushroom, bok choy, and carrots.  I grabbed one and he didn't seem to mind at all, so that worked out nicely.  Savory, if a little bland.

"No, is good!  You try, you like!"

"No, it have shrimm and scallo!"  She really put emphasis on the "scallop," as though if she said it louder, I'd understand.  "Fresh scallo!  Ve-e-ery good."

"Only good if I want to die," I said.  "I'm allergic to scallops."

"No, it good!  Here, you try."  And she put it down on the table and marked something on the bill.  Fortunately, one of my friends ate the scallop thing.

Then I turned around and there were more globular-looking food things at my other friend's side.  The duck had also re-appeared and was hot.  And tough -- a lesson I learned in Knoxville is don't microwave a duck. The meat is gamey and can't take that kind of abuse.  But they had warmed it up in a microwave and while it was warm and still had lots of good flavor, I didn't have a knife to cut through the meat.

"Shiny brokoee?"  The fifth or six dim sum cart I'd seen in less than three minutes was being pushed towards me with a set of brilliant green tentacles on top of it.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"Shiny brokoee!  Is good vegtabo!"

"Oh, sounds great!"  And it was.  The Chinese broccoli is very long, mostly stem, and it grows in mostly thin spears like asparagus.  The florette is very small and it is served with the leaves.  They had sauteed the broccoli in what seemed like a gallon of sesame oil and served it up in oyster sauce.  It tasted delicious.

"Chicken feets?  I have chicken feets if you want!"  This newest antagonist held up orange-colored puffy tridents in tongs.  They actually looked pretty tasty, and under other circumstances I'd have tried them.

But by now, although the food itself tasted quite good, I was fed up with the service.  I was being interrupted to be offered more and more food about every twelve seconds, and could not eat anything, which was quite annoying.  So I looked around to see what the non-English speakers were doing, and that seemed to be studiously ignoring the dim sum ladies altogether.  They weren't shouting in the Chinese peoples' ears, and the Chinese diners were enjoying their lunches

So I tried to ignore the dim sum ladies and just eat my food.  I felt rude but that seemed to be the only way to get these women to leave me alone so I could eat.  Several slices of duck (they butchered the duck oddly; I got a lot of bones and gristle in a few cuts), a shrimp shu mai, pork shu mai, that white vegetable puffy thing, and a lot of Chinese broccoli later I was quite full, and had liked the food.  But the service -- the loud cries in my ear, the pushing of food on my plate even when I said I did not want it, the hawking and constant interruptions -- substantially detracted from the whole experience.

The lesson here is that very bad service can ruin even good food.

Squib on KSM

A nicely-thought out piece on trying terrorists -- the emphasis should be on due process and justice, and those are concerns that do not change based on the identity of the defendant.

Mouse Dexterity

When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I was a whiz with the mouse.  It went right where I wanted it to go, every time.  These days, I seem to "just miss" my target a lot.  I wind up doing a lot of clicking on the icon right next to the one I want to click.  This is dangerous because I will sometimes close a window that I only wanted to minimize, save something I'm writing instead of clicking "Save As..." so that I can save it under a different name, and so on.

It's sad to feel my mouse dexterity ebbing away.

You'd Think This Would Be Enough For Most Guys...

Yes, you'd think that if a heterosexual man was married to ultra-hot Elin Nordegren, had a beautiful child with her, more money than he could ever possibly spend, a worldwide empire built around himself, a gorgeous and expansive home in Florida next to a golf course, and an extraordinarily successful career in which your job was literally to play golf all day, that would be enough to satisfy most guys.

But it turns out, not so much. (warning: link contains bizarre but highly entertaining Japanese animation re-enactments of marital dispute between world famous athlete husband and ultra-hot supermodel wife).

I'm not a divorce lawyer, nor have I ever had an extramarital affair.  So I'm not speaking from experience here.  But it seems to me that most extramarital affairs are not about either sex or love -- it seems to me that they're about ego.  Not ego in the sense of "look what a stud I am that I can sleep with all these people," but more like ego in the sense of having a partner express admiration and appreciation for you, having someone who is open about enjoying your presence.  And that doesn't have anything to do with looks, it doesn't have anything to do with sex, it doesn't have anything to do with money.

It wouldn't surprise me if the marriage that Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren have is actually one of some distance, one in which they are not so very often in physical proximity to one another.  He's on tour a lot, she's likely on shoots in various parts of the world a lot.  It doesn't matter how hot Tiger Woods' wife is if he never gets to see her.  And in fact, we don't know what their marriage is really like.  It doesn't matter how hot Tiger Woods' wife is if when he gets to see her, he finds her unpleasant to talk to.  Or if one of them doesn't really enjoy the other's company.  Sexiness, fame, money -- those things are ultimately not nearly as important as being happy together.  Sexiness, fame, and money are irrelevant compared to the things that matter.

I'm really enjoying nightly walks around the neighborhood with The Wife and our dogs.  That's the sort of thing that builds up a marriage and I'm digging it.  Maybe if Tiger and Elin walked their dogs together more often there wouldn't have been a scandal at all.

The Worst Student Loan Story Ever

A New York man who passed that state's bar exam will not be allowed to practice law, because he has over $500,000 in student loan debts.  He complains, perhaps with some justification, that he needs to have a job that will allow him to earn enough money to service that (non-dischargeable) debt -- which currently is running him a total of about $10,000 a month.  As I see it, in order to service that debt, pay rent for an apartment in New York, and eat, he needs to be making something on the order of $200,00 to $250,000 a year.  Which, without a license to practice law, will probably be something of a challenge for the guy.

How in the names of Tsai Shen Yeh, Mammon, and Juno combined does one accumulate half a million dollars in student loan debt?  The answer is it took him twenty-six years, during which time he's been given one associate's degree from a community college, one bacchalaurelate degree from an undergraduate college, and one juris doctorate.  If he was able to take just enough credits at any one time to qualify as a full-time student, he would have been able to defer making payments on past student loans that entire time -- although while payments are deferred, interest continues to accumulate.  Meanwhile, he's taking out more loans for more classes the whole time, so the principal increases all the way.  He took four tries to pass the New York bar exam, but I think maybe we ought not to read too much into that.

Twenty-six years for an A.A., B.A., and J.D. is a whole lot of time in school for not that much result. I can only compare that to my own experience -- I took six years to get a B.A. and a J.D. and wound up with about $75,000 in student loan debts for it (most of which has been paid off, but I'm in no hurry to pay it off any faster than I am, because it's the cheapest money out there; I'm paying more interest than that on my house).  So that's getting to the same result two decades faster and at a comparative savings of $425,000.  My guess is that perhaps this dude was not quite as serious about pursuing graduation as I was.

I'm also thinking a bit about seeing The Wife's experience as a student at University of Phoenix.  Each class came with its own student loan, and which automatically deferred the rest of the loans.  It looked like the "paperwork" to get all of that going was as simple as a few check-boxes on the UoP website.  The classes were expensive and so were the textbooks; after a while the total became a rather significant sum but since it was incurred only a few thousand dollars at a time, it kind of crept up on us.  And it sure seemed like she wasn't making any real progress towards getting the degree.  Fortunately we can handle it, but paying the residual finance charges for our respective educations is still a significant bite out of our monthly budgets.

One of the reasons I was dissatisfied with teaching at University of Phoenix was seeing this debt-accumulation machine at work; it didn't seem that a lot of education was being provided for the money; only the very motivated students would do the studying and actually learn much of anything.  But the price was very dear, which may well have contributed to the "If you pay, you get an A" mentality of so many of my students there -- which was another source of my dissatisfaction as a teacher.

So if this fella was doing University of Phoenix or an equivalent sort of education, I can see how he might have been effectively spinning his wheels for a long time.  If he was enrolled at a physical institution, he could have been taking very light loads -- the minimum needed to defer payments on existing loans.  And there's all sorts of career colleges and other places one can claim full-time student status (in exchange for a fee, which is available through financial aid) and gain deference on loan payment obligations with rather little work involved.  But now, the guy has hit the end of the road in terms of being a professional student forever -- he's got to be at least in his mid-forties by now, and finally, someone at a bank or a government agency or something like that said, "Enough.  You've got a professional graduate degree.  Time to start paying the money back."

What an incredible world of hurt.  But hey, it's a powerful object lesson to young people who are going through school now -- yes, you can borrow the money to get the educaiton you want, but it will all eventually come due, and if you're doing that, take the time to figure out a plan to become gainfully employed sooner rather than later.

Who's Watching Your Browsing?

While some of you blogwatchers out there are deeply worried about the public feud between a right-wing blogger and a formerly right-wing blogger who got fed up with the excesses of the more vocal elements of the conservative blogosphere and deciding whether you will follow suit or will instead excorciate the splitter (a navel-gazer of an issue if I've ever seen one, and at most a symptom of the growing polarization of our political dialogue), and others are deeply concerned that President Obama said at West Point today what he'd been saying for a week he was going to say there about a "surge" in the Afghanistan war (admittedly a deeply serious issue), and still others are taking up arms to fight the War on the War on Christmas (deliciously condemnable silliness just in time for the holidays, natch), I'd like to point out something that you might have missed.

You are very likely carrying around with you, in your pocket, briefcase, or purse, a device, for which you pay a private company money every month so that data can be broadcast to and from it.  Data like digital transmissions of your telephone conversations.  Data like where you are when you are having that conversation.  Data like how fast you are driving your car.  Data like where you car is going.  Data like how long you are to be found at any particular location.  Think about the accuracy of the GPS unit in your cell phone's mapping program -- mine gets me to within six feet of my actual location, every time and yours is probably at least as good.  Data like when you access the internet over the phone and what kind of websites you are cruising for information.  What Twitter feeds you read.  What txtmsgs u snd 2 yr frndz & hw oftn u snd them.  When you have alarms set on your phone to wake you up in the morning.  However you use your cell phone, it all is reduced to data.

Now, all of that data is sent through that private company's computers.  It doesn't matter whether you have Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, or whatever other company is out there.  It all goes in to a computer and you'd better believe it all gets recorded.  Even your phone calls.  How do you think you get your voice mail?  The voice messages are digitally recorded on the central computers.

So, Johnny FBI comes along and says, "Hey there, Elaine The Sprint Data Librarian!  How's it going today?"  Johnny FBI smiles real nice.  He's handsome.  Then he says,  "I wonder if you could do me a favor.  My boss would like to review your company's data files showing the tracking location and data access usage ratio for, I dunno, about eight million of your customers.  We gotta look for them terorrists!" 

And then Elaine the Sprint Data Librarian says back, "Screw you, Johnny FBI!  If you want our customers' private information, why don't you go talk to Judge Brown down the street and get a warrant?"

Only, um, Elaine the Sprint Data Librarian didn't say that.  Instead, she said, "Here you go, Johnny FBI!  Ooh, you're cute!  And if you need more of our customers' private and personal data, come on back now, y'hear?"  And Johnny FBI happily perused this data obtained without a warrant and never made any public disclosures about it at all.

Oh, I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Wait!  No!  This can't be!  Johnny FBI wouldn't violate 18 USC section 3126!  That's the law!  He'd report on what he was doing to Congress."  Sadly, you'd be wrong -- as a matter of policy, Federal law enforcement agencies have deliberately disregarded this law since 2004.  In fact, all of the major private information providers -- whether they are cell phone companies, internet search engines, or cable companies -- have entire departments, open for business 24/7, who do nothing but respond to local and Federal law enforcement requests for information on how their customers are using their services.

I don't think you have to be a nutjob paranoid to be a little bit unsettled by this.  Nor is that sort of concern something that strikes me as particularly partisan.  Liberals and conservatives both ought to be distrustful of the government, distrustful of the government's motives, and distrustful of what the government does with this personal information to which it has functionally unfettered, unregulated, and unoverseen access. It's not a case of "Well, I don't have anything to hide."  Maybe you don't, but that doesn't mean you like the idea of some analyst deep within a dungeon of cubicles somewhere in Fort Meade, Maryland reconstructing your telephone calls with your friends because you jokes about politics with them, or a detective at your state trooper's office wondering why it was that your cell phone moved through a bad part of town at night and then reconstructing your travels for the previous month to see if your trip there was out of the ordinary.  Because next thing you know, you're on the "no-fly list" and have to explain that no, you're just a boring old insurance adjuster and don't mean any harm to anyone and no one believes you.

The point is, privacy policies are important.  And they have to be adhered to.  And the government has to have some checks on the exercise of its power.  This should concern you, even if you have nothing to hide.  The bad guys -- well, they're going to be bad guys no matter what we do.  If the government wants to get this data, they can -- with a warrant.  That's why we have the Fourth Amendment, and it isn't too much to ask that the government comply with it.

It All Depends On Whose Ox Is Being Gored

The Alliance Defense Fund took the California city of Merced to task for changing the name of its annual Christmas parade to the "Holiday" parade and then bowing to pressure from citizens to change the name back to the "Christmas" parade.  ADF's argument:  "It's ridiculous that the people of Merced have to think twice about whether it's OK to have a 'Christmas' parade. An overwhelming majority of Americans celebrate Christmas and are opposed to any kind of censorship of Christmas."  And astonishingly, ADF made this argument after the city's own internal political process resolved the issue in the manner most favorable to ADF's position.

The theme of the parade is, admittedly, not particularly religious:  "Sand, Surf & Santa;" any float or exhibition may display or make reference to any religion but presumably must adhere to guidelines of good taste and family-friendliness.  So a Jewish congregation could put a float in the Christmas parade if it wanted to and they'd be welcome, and I presume the good people of Merced would applaud their Jewish neighbors' efforts if they chose to engage in them.  More likely, though, the good Jewish people of Merced will likely say either, 1) "Ah, let the Christians have their parade, we'll sleep in that day," or 2) "The parade is on a Saturday -- we're going to Temple instead because we're, well, Jewish."

Bear in mind that Merced's Christmas parade was formerly organized and paid for by private sponsors.  Who, all will surely agree, can have a parade for pretty much any reason they want, and can call it whatever they want.  They can parade down the streets in full ecclesiastical robes, preaching from the Gospels, dispensing holy crackers, or whatever else they want to do.  But this year, they ran out of steam and money for the project and asked the city to take over.  Now the parade was in the hands of a public entity.  At the minimum, the city staff's caution about a sectarian reference in something the city was doing seems, well, prudent. 

In fact, I think they were right and ADF is wrong.  The city is sponsoring a Christmas parade.  It's one thing to recognize that most city workers are Christian and call Christmas a holiday to allow them to celebrate their religion -- giving non-Christians a day off work in the process.  It's something else to shut down the main streets of the city, divert law enforcement and medical response resources, spend tens of thousands of dollars on setup and cleanup, and take time away from providing municipal services to get city staff to plan and organize an activity intended to celebrate a holy day of one particular religion.  How would ADF feel if the City of Merced had a parade to celebrate Eid al-Adha?*  (ADF itself might remain silent about that, now that I think about it, but its members would likely fall into fits of apoplexy.)

But here's the insiduous thing.  ADF said that changing the name of the parade was a "kind of censorship of Christmas."  Censorship?  Here's the applicable rules, fellahs:

Rule 1:
The government is not a private party.

Rule 2:
Failure to support something is not the same thing as suppressing it.

Rule 3:
The Constitution limits the majority's ability to exercise power.

You don't have any problem with those concepts when we're talking about the NEA subsidizing an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs.  "That was an abuse of government money."  But when it comes to your own religion -- a religion that not everyone shares, need I remind you -- suddenly those ideas become foggy and indistinct.  So now, maybe you need a lawyer to put things together for you, and hey, guess what?  I'm a lawyer!  So here you go:

What a private party could do under his "Free Exercise" rights becomes an "Establishment" if the government does the same thing.  The government may not violate the Constitution, despite the wishes of the majority that it do so.  Having a "holiday" parade instead of a "Christmas" parade is not censorship of Christianity, it is a failure to Establish Christianity.

Any questions?

Hat tip to Howard Friedman.


* Eid al-Adha is a Muslim holiday intended to celebrate the "great sacrifice," which is the Patriarch Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to Allah.  It's the same story in the Jewish and Christian traditions, with the only difference being the identity of the son in question.  If you believe the story, Abraham took a knife to his own son's throat and was ready to slice it open and kill the boy upon God's command, and it was all a test to see how loyal Abraham really was to God, and at the last second God was "merciful" and allowed Abraham to sacrifice a sheep instead of the utterly terrified child whose very life had been threatened by his own father moments before.  This story is in at least the top ten of the most horrible, detestable, and morally awful stories in the entire Bible -- and moving the story from the Bible to the Koran and changing the innocent child's name from "Isaac" to "Ishamel" doesn't help things at all.  If someone today took a knife to his own son's throat because he heard a disembodied voice telling him to do so, we'd call him a "schizophrenic" and lock him up for his own safety and that of others.  Making a holiday out of this story is positively barbaric.  But of course, I am socially obliged to "respect" other people's religions so, Eid Mubarek, Muslim Readers! You may call fatwa down upon me now.

Who Dat Gonna Beat Dem Saints?

Looking at the results of what should have been the toughest game on New Orleans' schedule, my guess would be no one, at least not in the regular season.  (Congratulations to Drew Brees for throwing a statistically perfect game, only the twenty-sixth quarterback to do so since 1980.)  Their remaining five games are at Washington (3-8); at Atlanta (6-5); home versus Dallas (8-3); home versus Tampa Bay (1-10); and finishing at Carolina (4-7).  No game is easy in the NFL but only Dallas looks like it will even be a challenge for them.  It seems a foregone conclusion that they will play Minnesota in the NFC championship game and, I guess, Indianapolis in the Super-Big Game At The End Of The Season(r).

Don't Rush To Judgment On Huckabee's Pardon

I’m not entirely sure Mike Huckabee can be blamed for the apparently-continued criminal activities of Maurice Clemons, who allegedly shot four police officers in Washington State to death over the weekend. To be sure, then-Governor Huckabee granted clemency to Clemons, who at the time was serving a 95-year sentence in an Arkansas prison. But we can’t reconstruct Clemons’ file now, whether he and his lawyers were able to put together enough evidence and argument such that Governor Huckabee might reasonably have thought that Clemons did not represent a continuing threat to society or even that he might have been rehabilitated from his former crimes.

Chief executives are given the power to pardon, commute, or otherwise excuse judicial punishments for a multitude of very good reasons, including a situation in which the black-letter law imposes an unjustly long or harsh punishment or when a prisoner demonstrates that clemency is called for. I’m not saying that was necessarily the case for Clemons, but it might have been. In Clemons’ case, it wasn’t just Huckabee who thought he should be let go, either -- a parole board independently reached the same conclusion, as Huckabee points out on his own PAC's website, although his press release does not admit of Huckabee being involved at all.

Obviously, Clemons’ crime in Washington is dreadful and terrifying. Our hearts should go out to the families of the slain officers. Assuming Clemons is guilty (and there is every reason to think he is), he deserves and will surely receive the harshest punishment that Washington State can mete out under its laws -- I don’t know offhand whether Washington has capital punishment or not.

It's easy to criticize the decision based on the results.  And fairly or not, right-wingers are using this opportunity to demonstrate that they can criticize one of their own, putting a damper on the presumed Presidential ambitions of Huckabee in 2012.  But the political question ought to be whether Huckabee exercised bad judgment in letting Clemons go based on the information available to him at the time, and that’s not such an easy decision to have made prospectively. And Clemons was out on bail from Washington State, where he also had a record and charges were pending against him there. After all, no one is pointing any fingers at the Washington judge who authorized bail in his case; bail can be denied entirely if there are good reasons to think the defendant will commit other crimes if freed.

UPDATE:  It's been pointed out to me that what Huckabee did was to commute Clemons' sentence, not to pardon him. The commutation rendered Clemons eligible for parole - and then the parole board, acting separately from Huckabee, went ahead and paroled him. That's not a pardon, although at this point that's a purely academic distinction.

Never-Ending War Tax

Representative David Obey has proposed a “war tax” in the Share Our Sacrifice Act.  This is, I presume, a progressive's idea of fiscal responsibility.  Most families would pay an additional 1% of their net income as a surtax to their 1040 form income taxes, with exemptions for families with an immediate member of the household who actually served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 attacks, or who lost an immediate relative in either the attacks or in military operations in one of those two theaters.  Progressively higher surtaxes would kick in for families with below-the-line income of over $150,000.

I am in favor of supporting America’s war efforts, and I am in support of deficit reduction. But Obey’s proposal is not a good idea, either from the standpoint of the war effort, or from the standpoint of deficit reduction.  But I will nevertheless indulge in a pluck at low-hanging fruit here, and point out why this is a bad idea.

This “war” is unlike any “war” we’ve ever been involved in. We are “at war” with… what or whom? Al-Qaeda? Islamo-facism? Terrorism? Terrorism is a tactic; al-Qaeda is a network of terrorists with vaguely similar sorts of political agendas; Islamo-fascism is an (ill-defined) ideology which we are prepared to tolerate in an ally (read: Egypt, the House of Saud) while still using as a rallying cry against our enemies (read: Iran, al-Qaeda). These are not things that we can be “at war” against, at least not in the traditional meaning of a war in that there is no organized political, national, or military opponent against which we can deploy our military.

I’ve previously floated the idea that maybe we were at war with the nascent Caliphate of Osama bin Laden, which would be one of the first times I can think of in history that one nation went to war not to a) displace the government of a hostile nation-state, b) suppress a rebellion against its own government, or c) conquer geographic territory but rather to prevent a nation-state from being created. Perhaps Muslim resistance to the Frankish Crusades would count as another such effort to prevent the creation of a new nation-state (they failed and had to wait 200 years and several internal political realignments to reconquer that territory), and maybe the Boer War would count for that, too.

Maybe U.S. military efforts to capture Pancho Villa, who had political aspirations above his banditry, are the most similar to what we’re doing now. Those actions were on both sides of the Rio Grande and we didn’t exactly have permission of the Mexican government to conduct military activities within their borders, although the Mexicans were hardly in a position to object. But that was all over relatively quickly.

We were at war with Iraq and Afghanistan -- we displaced the governments of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and replaced them with governments friendlier to us. We occupied those nations militarily after succeeding in those efforts, and an insurgency against our puppet governments bred underneath us. So now, we’re supporting those governments from insurgents who would topple them. So what we are doing now is not war, it’s something else, something which lacks a concise moniker. Let’s call it “nation-building.” Our record at doing this sort of thing isn’t all that great, but that doesn’t mean this is necessarily a bad thing to do or that we can’t succeed. The nations we are building in Afghanistan and Iraq are significantly friendlier to us than those which preceded them and we will be better-off strategically if they succeed enough to the point that they can defend themselves (but not if they grow so powerful they become regional powers in their own right).

So the “war” that Obey wants us all to pay a supplemental tax on is a chimera, not a “war” in the true sense of the word, the sense meant by the Constitution when it gives Congress the power to declare war and the President the power to make war. This “war” will never really be over until and unless we decide it is. We get to decide when Iraq and Afghanistan are strong enough to stand or fall without our involvement. And they probably never will be as long as anyone still lives who reads this post on the date of its publication -- at least, I predict that no one alive today will ever again see a day when there are not active-duty U.S. military forces deployed to Iraq in significant numbers. I’m not so confident about making such a prediction in Afghanistan, a nation with little strategic significance and few natural resources.

Congressman Obey is one of the most liberal members of Congress* and so he is hoping, I suspect, to make the public groan under the pressure of this tax and demand that the “war” come to an end so the tax will end also. He is deceiving himself, and in the process, unwittingly proposing a deception on the American people -- because even if this were an honest “war” tax, the “war” will never really end and therefore it will become a permanent tax. 

If Congressman Obey thinks the American people are undertaxed, let him say so.  If he thinks that we must raise taxes to solve our governmental deficit, let him say so.  A credible, non-frivolous argument can be made to support such a claim.  Myself, I'd prefer to see some cuts in government spending, but David Obey never saw a non-military spending cut he didn't detest with the same sort of virulent hatred which normal people would reserve for pederasts.  And if I'm going to be made to pay more taxes, I want to see the government being more responsible with that money than it has proven to be.  Giving a government run by the likes of Obey more money strikes me as about as wise as giving a packet of matches to a developmentally-handicapped child who is already playing with gasoline.


*  Wisconsin is a weird place -- you can represent an almost completely rural district, like Obey does, and still be so ultra-liberal guys like Michael Moore tell you, "Whoa, dude, dial it back a little bit."

Weekend Weirdness, Volume VII

Yeah, I pretty much took off the weekend, except to talk about food.  But I wasn't going to leave you without your weirdness.  100% apolitical this weekend.

Consider, for example, the transvestite (female dressing as male) jazz musician who over the course of 54 years fooled at least two wives and three girlfriends in bed, one of whom thought she had been impregnated by her husband.

A better bar bet than "Albuquerque."  Home of the Indians!

Having trouble with your take-aways?  Call 911!

More zombies.  Like cowbell, you can never have too many zombies.

If you don't like your creepiness urban and English-speaking, may I suggest a visit to La Isla de la Munecas?

Stop.  Hammertime!

Good design isn't just for cheese-eaters any more -- it's a national security issue.  The "eye watching you" is not a "really comforting feeling," by the way.

Finally, one guy figured out yet another way to piss off his annoying neighbors.

Food Tips For The Holiday

Tip #1: If you're just having a few people for your Thanksgiving, you only need a turkey breast or a small ham. I used a 7-pound turkey breast and when I got it home, it was frozen solid and in a mesh bag -- you could have killed a man with that thing. After cooking, we're going to get probably 20,000 calories and five pound of meat off of this guy. That's plenty.

Tip #2: Start your bird at about 450 degrees and after about ten minutes, drop the temperature in your oven to 350. This sears the outside but still cooks the bird slow. Give yourself 20 minutes of roasting for every pound of bird, including bone and stuffing, that you've got in there. Then, give yourself an extra hour for basting and checking on internal temperature. Don't pull the bird from the oven to rest until the meat temperature close to the bone is 160 degrees. Use a probe thermometer to get there.

Tip #3: Drape your bird in bacon. Oh, yeah. Actually, this is a good suggestion -- turkey is naturally a relatively lean and dry meat and the bacon adds fat (as well as smoky, bacony flavor) and therefore moisture. If you do it right, your turkey will fall be so tender and moist it will fall apart when you use harsh language at it.

Tip #4: Use your pan drippings in the gravy. Mix it with chicken stock (or turkey stock if you can get it) and flour. Mix the stock and flour first, while the stock is cold, and then add only small amounts of flour to thicken until you get the consistency you want in your gravy because some like it thick and some like it thin.

Tip #5: If at all possible, try to have one chef in charge of the cooking and everyone else is "helping out" -- which means they are acting under the direction of the chef. "Chef" means "chief" and cooking is not a democracy. Further to that end, do try to avoid having your wife get into a rivalry with the wife of the other couple you're sharing Thanksgiving with about how and where things are going to be done. The Revolutionary Government in France was run by Committee after the Revolution, and things didn't work out so well. One chef per meal, please.

Tip #6: You don't have to wait until the food is served to break out the alcohol. Unless your family has a propensity to domestic violence, in which case I suggest no booze at all. But if you're dealing with a lot of unnecessary social tension, a martini while the bird is roasting really takes the edge off.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1620

I can feel confident that everyone reading this has one thing in common: internet access. That means that everyone reading this also has at least access to a computer. This means that everyone reading this possesses at least sufficient affluence to be able to access this blog in the electronic medium which is the sole manner of its publication. That means that if you are reading this, you are not destitute and you likely possess sufficient material wealth to not be hungry.

So on this day of thanksgiving (in the United States at least, although Readers from beyond the U.S. are of course welcome here) take a moment to consider what things were like back in the day. The pilgrims landed on what is today Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the late summer of 1620. Nearly 400 years ago, this was (to them) wilderness territory, overgrown with a forbidding forest and little available foodstuffs. The legend goes that they made friends with the Indians and shared a multicultural feast.

If such a thing ever actually happened, we have no real record of it. What we have are records that the Puritans who came to America to seek religious and functional political liberty planted some quick-growing vegetables like cabbage, cucumbers, and carrots, learned how to hunt local game like deer and quail, and fished. The first Thanskgiving, if such a thing occurred, was really the first harvest of quick-growing winter vegetables, whatever forage could be found, and if they were lucky, the Puritans found some venison and smoked cod (which were then plentiful in the waters off New England; sadly, cod have been overfished and are now tightly controlled so they do not go extinct in the face of voracious humans who find them delicious).

The local Indian population might not yet have figured out why so many of their children and elders were getting sick. But the cause was the trades for seemingly high quality blankets and clothing they had made with the recent European arrivals. They could not have had a clue that all of those blankets were infiltrated with the variola major virus, which would cause them to all contract smallpox. Their European trading partners were all either smallpox survivors or had become environmentally inoculated to the virus because of its pervasive presence throughout urban Western Europe.

Whether the Puritans traded the blankets to the Indians knowing that they were engaged in what today would be called biological warfare or not is questionable, but it doesn't matter. The arrival of the Europeans was, by all accounts, an existential disaster for the people who were already here. For my part, I choose to believe that most of the European settlers didn't really know that they were trading death to the people with whom they dealt, because of course they didn't know about germs or how disease spread; they unconsciously cloaked their ignorance in religion and concluded that God must have somehow disapproved of these people -- perhaps because having heard the word of the Lord from their new neighbors, they chose to keep to their old ways.

We can't help the tragedy that struck those people. At the same time, as you sit in relative affluence and (I hope) health, give a thought the European colonists too. I will suggest to you that for the most part, these were good people, who had sincere beliefs and a desire to do good. They also had been driven from both their homeland and their temporary place of exile in the Netherlands by a desire to live their lives in a way that they thought was better than what they could get in the ancien regime. They were willing to brave a very hazardous and long crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, possible starvation, the daunting task of building homes out of the wilderness, and being away from friends and family, to pursue the dream of liberty. And in doing this, they brought their way of life with them, a way of life which remains fundamental to our society. They were brave, hardworking, and good people, and while we may criticize some things about them now, we do so from the comfort of our computer screens and from within the affluent, comfortable society that they built in much more difficult circumstances than we can even imagine. They deserve our honor and respect today, because in a very real way, what we have to be thankful for is the product of their labor and investment in the future.

Deferred Success

Sometimes it's hard to tell parody from what it's parodying. Take this for instance:

Now, I found this on comedy site failblog.org.   That's a good place to go to see things like people not setting their parking brakes, teenagers running out of talent,  criminally bad parental priority-setting, and other sorts of cruel humor.  Almost always good for a laugh.

But there is a good purpose to using a harsh word like "fail."  Some people are simply too dense to understand that being told that your efforts have resulted in "deferred success" means that you haven't succeeded.  To be sure, kids especially will experience a visceral emotional reaction when they are told that they have failed, that their performance is unacceptable.  But how else are they going to know they need to do better next time?

While I can't be sure this isn't a joke about this sort of thing rather than the actual subject of such a joke, it's simply too realistic for me to dismiss it as parody.  But parody is a very good way to demonstrate the problem here:

A doctor who told her patients that they are in a state of "deferred health" would be talking nonsense and potentially putting her patient's lives at risk.  "You are ill," the doctor should say, "and here's how you get better."

A professional athlete who does not win a game has not "deferred victory." He has "lost."

Similarly, a lawyer does not tell her client that the judge has "deferred awarding you a favorable ruling." A lawyer defending an accused rapist with the claim that her client merely "deferred obtaining consent for sex" probably ought not to be in that line of work.

An accountant ought not advise his client that "You are experiencing a state of deferred profits" or it seems that you have deferred responding to a tax liability."  Sadly, this is exactly the sort of language that some accountants do use when breaking that bad news.  The clients need to hear, in plain English, what they need to do.  Just say it:  "You are operating at a loss."  "You owe taxes."  Good accountants break the bad news to their clients straight.

 Of course telling someone they've failed produces an unpleasant emotional reaction; that is the point.  That's how you get someone's attention.  "This isn't good enough."  I get that response sometimes too -- from judges, from clients,* from my employers, from my wife.  I don't like it, especially from my wife.  But without it, I don't know that where I'm going is not where I'm expected to be.  With it, I'm alerted to the fact that I need to straighten up my act and do better.  Learning to accept acknowledge and correct one's own shortcomings is a function of being a mature adult.

I'm also aware from my own experiences as an employer, and as a teacher, that delivering a message of failure is unpleasant.  I work on underperforming students ten times as much as I do on the ones who meet or exceed expectations.  I dread addressing the angst of students who think they have performed well when in fact they did not.  Combine that with grade inflation, in which there are only two grades, "A" and everything else, and then I need to deal with failure-angst coming from students whose performance is acceptable as well, and you've got the real down side of teaching.  But at the end of the day, particularly at a collegiate level, students have to own their own educations, and while I work hard to give the underperforming students ways to do that, the most valuable tool in my arsenal to get them to perform well is the ability to tell them that they haven't performed well.

When a teacher calls a student's performance a "deferred success," the student will not hear the word "deferred" but only hear the word "success," and combined with removing the emotional sting of the word "failure" from the response, this is a sure-fire recipe for additional results of the same unacceptable level.


*  I get it from opposing counsel, too, but that I disregard.

A Sweet Dinner At The White House

It seems hard to believe that there hasn't been an official state dinner at the White House yet during the Obama Administration.  I thought those were fairly regular sorts of occurrences for visiting ambassadors and heads of state of other nations, but in fact this seems to be the first one, to honor the visit of the Prime Minister of India.  And this is the menu:

Potato and Eggplant Salad
White House Arugula with Onion Seed Vinaigrette

2008 Sauvignon Blanc, Modus Oprendi, Napa Valley, California

Red Lentil Soup with Fresh Cheese
2008 Riesling Brooks "Ara", Willamette Valley, Oregon

Roasted Potato Dumplings with Tomato Chutney
Chick Peas and Okra
or
Green Curry Prawns
Carmelized Salsify with Smoked Collard Greens and Coconut Aged Basmati
2007 Granache, Beckman Vineyards, Santa Ynez, California

Pumpkin Pie Tart
Pear Tatin
Whipped Cream and Caramel Sauce
Sparkling Chardonay, Thibaut Janisson Brut, Monticello, Virginia

[With coffee]

Petits Fours and Coffee
Cashew Brittle
Pecan Pralines
Passion Fruit and Vanilla Gelees
Chocolate Dipped Fruit

First off, let me concur with Stephen Bainbridge that the Grenache paired with the prawns sounds like a disaster in the making.  I've had the Beckmen Grenache and while I think well of it and I'm excited to see a maker I've patronized get this sort of publicity, I think the White House sommelier could have made a better choice in this case.  It's a lighter, sweeter red, to be sure, but it is still going to be way more powerful than those shrimps.  I'd serve it with a salmon, a char, or some other robust pink-meated fish that had been simply grilled, but otherwise I'd reserve it for a stand-alone drink.

Unlike Prof. Bainbridge, I also think the potatoes in tomato chutney are a bad pairing for the Grenache.  Unless that chutney turns out very light and watery, or is made from naturally-sweet grape or pear tomatoes, then I think the Grenache won't stand up to it -- tomatoes carry a hearty, acidic, robust taste that Grenache won't be able to compete with.  And it's very bad form for the sommelier to misspell "Grenache."

Finally, this is heavy on the sweets and desserts.  The sweet end courses all sound good, to be sure.  But so many!  And in fact, all the wines are sweet.  I'd say the driest wine of the bunch is the Sauvignon Blanc they're serving with those famous White House arugulas -- and that's about a middle-of-the-road wine on the sweet-versus-dry scale.  Frankly, I'd have thought that sophisticates like the Obamas would have preferred drier wines than this.

Given that this is a dinner for the Prime Minister of India, the prominence of the vegetarian selection is wise.  And maybe the plethora of sweet tastes is intended to cater to the preferences of Prime Minister Singh (or his wife).  To be sure, Indian cuisine has a sweet component to which is generally lacking in the heartier, more savory fare of European or New World origins, a sweetness which mixes with the heat of peppers and curries to much pleasure.  But all the same, man, this sounds like it was a sugar-heavy meal for President Obama, Prime Minister Singh, their families, and 220 of their closest friends crammed on short notice into a too-small room in the East Wing.

Weekend Weirdness, Volume VI

Is that a meep I hear, young man?  Better not be!

Can your cat do this?  Mine would like to but we don't get house guests like this very often.  Well, at least they're not this lazy.

These aren't cake wrecks.  These were all quite intentional.  Some are actually disturbing.

I don't even know how to describe this.  It's, um, animation.  Uses a lot of odd currencies.  I enjoyed St. Thomas More and M.C. Hammer, and some of the music is quite soothing.

Carl Sagan orders pizza, wings, and sub sandwiches with billions and billions of calories -- and reluctantly tips the already-stoned driver in good single-malt Scotch.  Speaking of which, if you're too lazy to look up at the stars while you're surfing the net at night, this might help your urge to engage in amateur astronomy.

I dinna billiv it, Cappen!  This!  Did not!  Actually!  Happen!  Sadly, though, this all probably did.

The hearts are all the same color.

How would the President dress if he came to visit in your home town?  Depends on the weather!


Bad crab!  (He should share.)

Transparent aluminum -- not just for Star Trek movies anymore; it may help us develop practical fusion technology.

Vikings Fans Are Everywhere These Days

A National Guard unit from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin deployed to Iraq has encountered an unusual problem -- the Iraqi detainees under its custody have made known their affection for Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre.  If the fact that Iraqi terrorist suspects like Favre wearing purple is not proof postive that the Vikings' success is the product of a deal with Satan, I don't know what else I've got to do to prove that to you.

Senator Giuliani

So it appears that Rudy! Giuliani will run for Senate in 2010 and not Governor of New York.  This, I think, is not a good use of his skill set.  Rudy! is an executive; he has no experience in a deliberative body, no experience with the give-and-take logrolling that is inherently a part of legislative compromising.  I understand a desire to not be in Albany -- the New York Legislature is thoroughly controlled by someone who isn't Rudy! and there's no practical way to break in to that.

The Senate is, ultimately, a poor proving ground for grooming future Presidents.  It's not a partisan issue -- it's that the skill sets necessary for success in the Presidency are different than the skill sets necessary for success in the Legislature.  If Rudy! is thinking the Senate is a fine coda for his career, then fine.  But I can't believe he isn't thinking about challenging Obama in 2012.  Rudy! has charisma and is very smart, but his personality is ill-suited for the job.

Yesterday's News

This is one of the more conservative corners of California that I live in.  A Democrat hasn't been elected to represent this area in generations.  The central industry here is building aircraft for the Air Force and the nation's premier aircraft testing facility is located here.  Bear that in mind as I deliver this bit of news.

I had dinner tonight with a friend who works at the local Barnes & Noble, by far the largest and most prominent  bookstore in the area.  The store received a shipment of 144 copies of Going Rogue last Tuesday.  So far, the store has sold 8 copies of the book.  8/144 = 5.6%.  The book is moving so slowly they've already marked it down to the "40% off" category.

Maybe the book is selling really well online.

Six Options

I'm as committed as ever to the idea of due process.  I have plenty of intellectual companionship in saying that a trial is the right thing to do because indefinite detention is not a good option, and that we should have no fear of doing the right thing, as long as we do it the right way, but I'm also completely at a loss for what to do or thing when our government claims to be trying to do the right thing, but at the same time admits that it's all just for show. Having a show trial is worse than having no trial at all.  More thoughts from around the blogosphere more or less echoing this sentiment here, here, and here.

So now that I've argued passionately in favor of the rule of law even in a tough case like this one, I need to react to the fact that what I had been led to believe was a very legal, moral, and correct thing to do is revealed to be nothing but a sham.

One thing I'd point out -- in this exchange, Senator Grassley gets something wrong.  He says that our criminal law is "our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent."  I agree that our criminal law ought to be that clear.  But it's not -- a generation's worth of futzing around with the concept of "exigent circumstances" has transformed Miranda into a Swiss Cheese of a legal rule.  Now, if we tortured KSM, then yes, any evidence obtained thereafter is "fruit of the poisoned tree" and is properly excluded from the trial.  And while I labored mightily to not believe it was true, available evidence says that I was wrong before -- we did torture this particular prisoner.  But with the many "exigent circumstances" rules to Miranda, I have difficulty seeing a court excluding evidence of the confession he (purportedly) gave before the torturing started.  At this point, though, I'm not certain Miranda matters at all because the Constitution is evidently of little importance to the people in charge of solving the problem of what to do with these prisoners.

What I can do is say that it appears to me that as a nation, we have six viable options for how to proceed with this situation.  Here they are, in my order of preference.

So right now, it seems to me that the right thing to do is to have a military tribunal conduct the trial.  I absolutely agree that the trial must be venued in either New York City or Washington, D.C., because that's where the attacks took place.  (Having it in Pittsburgh, in recognition of the United Airlines Flight 11 flight in which passengers overpowered the hijackers, is silly because it appears that the target of that strike was going to be either the Capitol or the White House.)  And the trial should not be public, if we're going to be discussing classified evidence.  But the trial should be meaningful -- it should be before an unbiased panel (which I frankly think is more likely with a military court than a civilian one) and it should have a consequence one way or the other.  If there is an acquittal, then those charges are dismissed and the defendant goes free -- so long as he is not awaiting trial on some other crime.  Given that Eric Holder repeatedly and forcefully stepped on his own dick during yesterday's Senate hearings, this will now require that the Administration say publicly, loudly, and repeatedly that the Attorney General is being overruled by the President himself -- that if the trial results in acquittal, the result will be actual liberty for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  Such a statement will carry a heavy political price for the President to pay, but that's the consequence he must face for the singular error made by his hand-picked subordinate.  As a second-best alternative within this broad choice, hold the trial in a civilian court, but it appears that a military tribunal is a superior forum for this particular case, with the evidence at issue.  But either way, hold a real trial.

The next-best thing to do is to say that we have reviewed the available legal authority and find that the al-Qaeda prisoners in our custody right now are prisoners of war.  The necessary ingredient of being a prisoner of war is that the captive must have been engaged in the service of a foreign state and wearing a uniform of some kind; I do not think it an extraordinary or facile gloss on the situation to say that al-Qaeda was trying to create a new nation-state (to wit, the proposed Caliphate of Osama bin Laden) and that this nascent political entity had simply not issued uniforms to its warriors yet.  We could call the al-Qaeda detainees "prisoners of war" if we wanted to.  That would mean that ultimately, they will be charged with no crimes at all, and when al-Qaeda is no longer engaged in hostilities against the United States, they'll be let go.  That commits us to not torture these prisoners, which we shouldn't be doing anyway, and it gives them other rights while they're in custody under the Geneva Conventions.  And it bargains away our claim that these guys are nothing more fearsome than common criminals.  But it does make absolutely certain that there will be no trial and we will keep custody of them until the threat is gone.

The third-best thing to do would be to hold a Nuremburg-style trial for commission of "crimes against humanity."  For that, we'd need to enlist jurists and lawyers from other nations and have a public proceeding.  One of the useful precedents set by Nuremburg is that at those trials, the defense of tu quoque was not permitted -- so evidence of wrongdoing by the United States (i.e., torture of prisoners, use of military weapons causing civilian collateral damage) would be irrelevant and excluded.  The downside is that at Nuremburg, the lawyers and judges were making it up as they went along and the whole proceedings left the taste of a show trial to implement victor's justice.  But personally, I don't think they were actually show trials -- many of the Nuremburg defendants were acquitted and set free.

After that, we're out of options for dealing with these prisoners within the confines of the law.  So the fourth-best thing we could do, at this point, would be to just kill our prisoners.  Frankly, by the time we run out of good legal options, simple murder becomes the best political expedient.  I hope that no one is comfortable with that statement, by the way -- despite the fact that we are talking about people we're quite certain have a lot of blood on their hands and at least at one time were quite anxious to get more.  The reason for your discomfort with that statement is that it's quite evident that even if we did capture these bad guys "on the battlefield" and they aren't entitled to any Constitutional rights at all, they're our prisoners now and we have power over them.  My point about just killing them is that if we're going to dispense with actually complying with the law, and say that the only rule that applies to these guys is Rule .303, then we should do it right.  And then we must accept the moral and possibly legal consequences of doing so.  But this does have the two conveniences of intellectual consistency and and expedient result.  Again, I hope no one is comfortable with this.

Moving further down the list, the fifth option is to do nothing -- that is, to do what we have been doing, holding these guys indefinitely without charges, without presenting evidence, and in a legal limbo that we refuse to resolve.  That has many, many disadvantages in that it leaves open and unresolved this festering problem.  I found the status quo unacceptable under Bush, why should it be any more acceptable under Obama?

But the worst thing we can do is pretend to comply with the law when we're actually not doing it.  A show trial actually goes further than the status quo towards making a mockery of our legal system and offering evidence to the world that we are willing to disregard the rule of law when it is inconvenient for us to comply with it.  This is worse than legal limbo because it turns our courts into vehicles of fraud.  Not using our courts at all is bad enough -- but tainting them with the corruption of a show trial is worse because it deprives the courts of legitimacy as surely as the Executive branch has abdicated its own legitimacy already, twice now under two different Presidents of both major parties.

And this last choice is the option that the Administration has apparently chosen to pursue.

If nothing else, America ought to stand for the rule of law.  Insisting upon the rule of law is why we had our Revolution in the 1770's.  Insisting upon the rule of law has made this nation rich, powerful, and righteous.  We disregard the rule of law at our peril.  That would be the start of a historic cancer that will eat away at us from within as surely as the decision of the Roman citizenry to eschew and outsource military service led to the rot and sudden collapse of their empire, because like the Roman martial ethic, the American legal ethic is the taproot of our greatness. I fear that the highly-polarized political atmosphere of this country is an environment ripe for that cancer to metastasize.

I have not yet perceived an existential threat to the nation in the misguided policies of the Obama Administration.  I have perceived serious long-term problems with our economic health, advocacy of policies doomed to be expensively ineffectual, and evidence of managerial incompetence.  These are not good things, but they are the sorts of problems that our government can adapt to and against which the Constitutional system of government was built to withhstand.  But this is the first time I've seen this Administration take a truly dangerous stance, to point a dagger directly at the still-beating heart of what makes the United States of America a nation of which I can be proud to be a citizen.  It broke my heart when the last Administration did the same thing and it breaks my heart now that I see it happening again.