Rebuttal to Criticism

My posts on Oval Office are supposed to be objective thoughts about the race. This post is advocacy, so it goes here.

Rudy Giuliani is going to take some criticism for his handling of 9/11 in the next few days – inadequate radio communication between NYPD and FDNY; the Mayor walking the streets instead of hunkering down in a safe bunker with communication equipment; locating an emergency command center within the World Trade Center after it had been attacked in 1993. There is lingering resentment over the pace of the clean-up operations and the failure of the SAR parties to extract all the human remains from Ground Zero before major debris removal began. And, there will be criticism of him that he lacks substantial governmental experience; his official resume is as the #3 guy in the Justice Department, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and then Mayor of New York City; that he badly estimated Bernie Kerik’s corruption; and everything else Rudy has been saying about himself has been exploiting 9/11.

My expectation is that, especially if Rudy posts impressive numbers in tomorrow’s FEC fundraising disclosures, these attacks will intensify.

It seems to me that substantial defenses can be offered to all of the criticisms. Last one first, you don’t really get to know the quality of a person until you see them in extreme circumstances. We got that with Rudy and everyone was, and remains, impressed. It’s simply not exploiting 9/11 to remind people that Rudy did a good job leading New York City through some extraordinarily difficult times. Rudy acquitted himself very well and he is right to extol his accomplishments on that day – he has always been extraordinarily respectful of the memories of those who lost their lives that day and continues to be so. I defy partisans of any of the other candidates to proffer reasons why their people would have done any better than Rudy if they had been mayor. Most of the other candidates’ leadership skills have been demonstrated by leading their own legislative staffers to happy hour at the Palm on Capitol Hill.

Locating the emergency response center in the WTC in retrospect posed some significant disadvantages as things actually unfolded. But remember that the 1993 attack on the WTC failed to achieve any kind of structural damage to the building. Remember how unthinkable the actual event was when you watched it on TV. No one anticipated this sort of thing outside the realm of military fiction. Without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, this was not a bad decision to have made.

Should Rudy have gone to a safe location? I think it was a good thing that Rudy was on the ground, seeing things with his own eyes – communications networks were disrupted anyway, so Rudy in a bunker would have been even more blind and deaf than he was several blocks away from where the buildings were coming down. He did the right thing by going to the scene.

Communications among the first responders? NYPD and FDNY didn’t want compatible radio systems and actively resisted the idea when it was floated. Should Rudy have forced them, kicking and screaming, to integrate their systems? I question exactly how much good that would have done. Would more firefighters and police have been saved had they been able to talk to one another directly rather than relaying information through a command center? The sad answer is, probably not.

Bernie Kerik? Yeah, turns out he was not altogether a good guy, which I realize is something of an understatement. But then again, we’ve seen plenty of Presidents in the recent past have people who aren’t such good guys around them, too. Scooter Libby. Sandy Berger. David Rosen. And other candidates have personal involvement in some questionable dealings in their pasts. Others lack many years of substantial political experience, at least at the federal level, on both sides of the aisle. If you’re going to hold Rudy Giuliani accountable for not having held Federal elected office in the past, you need to also criticize the relative inexperience with Federal politics of Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, or John Edwards, and the lack of executive or managerial experience against John McCain or Hillary Clinton. So none of the major candidates offers the kind of substantial Federal executive background that, for instance, a Vice-President or Secretary of State could offer.

As for the cleanup, that had to start at some point. Cleanup crews are still finding body parts in the rubble at Fresh Kills and even at Ground Zero. If the city had waited until all the body parts had been found, the ruins of the site would still be there today. It wasn’t disrespectful to the fallen to start clearing the area; but it would have been disrespectful to the living to not get up and start rebuilding. It was a triage situation. There was simply no other choice to be made.

The criticisms I’ve heard floated so far seem to be demanding perfection. No one can offer that – not the current President, not Giuliani, not Clinton, not anyone. It’s all well and good to criticize the response to the disaster in retrospect. But the real measure of Rudy’s leadership in those dark hours should be based on the information available at the time. We cannot know the challenges that the future will throw at us as a nation. But we can, this one time, know the quality of the person we pick to lead us through those challenges.

Prayer and Medicine

We've seen this story before; the only "news" in it is that the study demonstrating that there was no appreciable effect of prayer on patients undergoing heart surgery (indeed, in terms of raw numbers, the prayed-for patients actually did worse) is being published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, which I assume has some prestige within the medical academy.

What caught my eye in this story was the wealth of column space given to religious people attempting to rebut the results of the story. "Critics said the question of God's reaction to prayers simply can't be explored by scientific study. '[W]hy would God change his plans for a particular person just because they're in a research study?' ¶ Science 'is not designed to study the supernatural.'"

This is a slippery and deceptive response. Science studies facts, phenomena, and causes. Either prayer has some effect on the objective, external world, or it does not. That is a factual proposition. The hypothesis that prayer has the power to change the objective, external world can be objectively measured and tested. It can be disproven. That makes it susceptible to scientific study.

Looking to prayer -- saying words, thinking hopeful thoughts, begging for divine intercession in a desperate situation -- this doesn't seem like religion or faith to me. I would call it "magic." Wave or hold your hands in a particular way, say certain magic words, exercise your willpower in a certain way, and the laws of physics and biology will be temporarily altered according to your desires. It should surprise no one that upon statistical analysis, this sort of thing works no more often than would be expected by the operation of chance.

Magic is religion in its most primitive form, if it is even properly considered religion at all. Substituting magic for medicine is antiscience.

If science is incapable of studying the supernatural, so too is religion is not designed or intended to study matters within the realm of the objectively factual. Religion is intended at its best, to offer insights into the study of human behavior and morality. At its worst, religion is an instrument of political control used to subvert morality. Most of the time, it's somewhere in between -- sometimes benign (like when it encourages people to give to charity) and sometimes malign (like when it encourages people to strap dynamite to their chests and blow themselves up in the hopes of taking a few infidels out, too).

But religion is mostly about the numinous -- it's about the fate of things that are incapable of verification or measurement, and their relationship to other things equally incapable of being observed. Religion concerns itself with matters that by definition are beyond human comprehension or experience. "God works in mysterious ways" or "God has a plan and a purpose that we don't fully understand" are common phrases offered by the faithful when they are unable to explain something otherwise -- when a religious person relies on these kinds of statements, they are really saying, "I give up, there is no rational answer to your question." And indeed, particularly given the existence of an unmeasurable, unseen, infinitely powerful, infinitely intelligent, and apparently infinitely subtle actor interfering with a variety of observable phenomena, it's astonishing that any scientific observation has taken place at all.

So I must conclude that religion and science are, at the end of the day, incompatible. I reach this conclusion sadly; I know there are many religious scientists and many people who hope for a happy and productive social dialog between the faithful and the scientific. But religion is based on irrational experiences and irrational thoughts. (That doesn't mean these thoughts or experiences are bad, by the way.) It is emotional. Science is, in those terms, the opposite of religion -- science must be as rational as it can be, it must be as unemotional as it can be.

Science advances by the act of disproving previously-advanced propositions in response to newly-gathered information. Religion is based upon the act of maintaining the truth of previously-advanced propositions no matter what information is proffered against it.

In this case, the question is whether prayer has the power to heal. As objectively measured, it does not. Those who hold a religious belief in the power of prayer will simply not care about the objective facts of this study. "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!" is perfectly good logic to the religious person. (To religious readers: substitute "Lenin" or some other name you want for "God" in that sentence and you may begin to understand the reason why I recoil from such 'logic'.) So to the religious, the study simply doesn't matter; science is incapable of measuring the power of prayer. But to the scientific, the study is devastating to the hypothesis that prayer affects the external world at all. A hypothesis was advanced and disproved. Science marches on.

Prayer may help a sick or suffering person cope with their situation. It may help those who love and care for the sick person cope, as well. This palliative effect ought not to be ignored and the easing of people's pain and suffering should be a significant focus of enlightened, moral medical practice. But this should not be confused with a cure. And religion should not be confused with science.

An Act Of War

Imagine this. The Iranian Navy sends a boat out from its far-western port of Bandar-e Mahshahr to patrol against smugglers. The boat finds a Saudi-flagged ship it does not recognize in their territorial waters, and sends over a boarding party to inspect the cargo. Then, the USS Bataan enters Iranian seas, seizes the Iranian inspection craft, and arrests the Iranian sailors. Then, it sails back into international waters. The U.S. insists that the Saudi ship was in Iraqi waters and that the Iranians appeared to have “accidentally” boarded it, but that the captain of the Bataan couldn’t be quite sure that the Iranians weren’t trying to engage in some act of sabotage.

Would you consider this to be an act of war by the U.S. against Iran? Would you not expect the entire world to be howling in outraged protest against this act of naked, barefaced American aggression? Of course you would. And if the U.S. published two sets of locations indicating where there seizure took place, the first one being clearly within Iranian territory, you would say that the U.S. military are not only liars, but bad liars at that, and expect even greater outrage from world opinion.

But sometimes, the U.S. and in this case, one of its allies, are the victims of treatment like this. In real life, it’s our good friends in the UK who have to deal with the situation. And it’s outrageous.

The exact geographic coordinates of the location at which the fifteen British sailors and marines were taken by Iran is 29° 50’ 36” north, 48° 43’ 8” east. The map to the right, produced by the British Ministry of Defence (note the delightfully British spelling of that word), illustrates the two locations that the Iranian government has given for where they say they took the sailors. “In Iranian waters,” my ass. The British had every legal right to be in Iraqi waters and conduct coastal defense operations there, including inspecting Indian-flagged cargo ships for contraband – which is what these sailors were doing when the Iranians arrested them.

Now, riddle me this. If the Iranian government is so convinced that this so-called invasion of their territorial waters was an “accident,” why don’t they condemn the clumsy navigation of the British sailors and let them go? An accident is obviously not an act of war, it is by definition something done unintentionally. So why hold fifteen sailors hostage until their government admits that they made a mistake? (Which they didn’t, but that’s beside the point now, isn’t it?)

I realize that we Americans are not in the best position possible to provide guidance about getting Iran to release hostages. And let’s not forget, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad knows a thing or two about the value of taking western hostages. But unlike 1979, both the US and the UK do have basically all of our military right across the Shatt al-Arab.

I realize that the U.N. Security Council today expressed "grave concerns" with the situation, but somehow, that does not satisfy. What’s the U.N. going to do to Iran? Sanction Iran some more? Ooooh. Ahmadinejad’s gotta be shitting himself now.

I realize that diplomatic solutions must be used to resolve disputes before military force is undertaken. The UK Government is right to try and use talk and legal pressure to get their people released first.

And finally, I realize that we need to tread with great caution with respect to Iran, which is a powerful, wealthy, and sophisticated nation and one which has complex internal dynamics of its own which are even less well-understood to us now than those of Iraq were in 2003. I understand that a good argument can be made that this is exactly how we got into the mess we are in right now and we should proceed cautiously. And I accept that argument's validity.

But a big part of me wants to see the Iranian government taught that Jimmy Carter isn't calling the shots any more.

New Post on Oval Office

Senators Obama and McCain are using one another as foils to appeal to their parties' ideologically-motivated elements. I ask, are they wise for executing traditional "run outside, then run inside" strategies?

Worst Team Ever

The 1899 Cleveland Spiders finished their season with a 20-134 record. On today's 162-game schedule, that would be a record of 21-141.

Version 2.4

A few minor changes in the blog, mostly a subtle color scheme change, a new graphic, and updated links to other pages. Most importantly, the links now include my father's new blog. Check it out -- my folks just got themselves a really cute Yorkshire Terrier. I've also got a link there to Oval Office 2008, to easily cross-post when I analyze the progress of the election.

Going to the Oval Office

It’s official; I’m now a blogger on Oval Office 2008. It should be fun co-blogging with a bunch of other political junkies, especially ones of a variety of political persuasions and backgrounds. The blogmaster is British, which gives him an outsider’s perspective on U.S. political developments. My first post on Oval Office is up right now.

New Name For A Used Car

By the way, since it turns out that we've picked a really lame name for the new car, there seems to be a need to come up with a new one. Suggestions from the Loyal Readers are welcome. A reminder, the car looks like this:

Now It's Done

It's easy to let time slip through your fingers, and that's a bad thing for lawyers to do. Fortunately, I can log in remotely from home and find the time, and juggle that with teaching my online class. Now, I've got to actually get to work and start generating new time! As Sui Generis says, it's time to "go forth and bill!"

My Morning Project

It's got to be done.

Losing Sucks

It's not quite as good as winning. Not much more to say than that.

Submitted

Waiting for a jury verdict sucks. There's nothing to do but sit around and be anxiously idle. And tired.

All Along The Watchtower

Us fanboys (and a few fangirls, like The Wife) have been waiting for a while for a really, really good episode of the best show on television. Tonight, the writers delivered, in a big way. Good acting, good writing, plot twists, plot points resolved and new ones opened up, and a gigantic cliffhanger of a season finale. The next episode won't be until 2008. That's, like, a long time from now.

There will be a straight to DVD movie that will provide background to the story arc. I may not be able to resist the impulse to buy it when it hits the stores, because I'll be starved for more by the time it's there.

There will be no spoilers here. But if you're a fan of the show -- and if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I've been exhorting you to watch it -- you need to see how the trial of Gaius Baltar ends... and what happens afterwards.

Poll Results

After a week, the votes are in. You Loyal Readers come here to read about:

Stories from California (5 votes)
Politics and News (2 votes)
Religion and Atheism (2 votes)
History (2 votes)
Writing (1 vote)
Education (1 vote)
Entertainment and Pop Culture (1 vote)
Law (1 vote)

Thanks for your votes and participation. My focus will shift somewhat -- but not completely -- in response to your voiced preferences. Hopefully the webmasters at Oval Office 2008 will get around to adding me to the authorship there, so that will provide a different forum for many of my political ramblings, which seem to only interest a fraction of the readers here.

So now we have a new poll. Some friends of ours are going to get married in a few months. Any gift ideas? Feel free to offer ideas not on the list in the comments to this post. No fair if you're the friends in question, and you know who you are!

UPDATE: The Wife says that the friends in question should be able to vote, too. I guess they're interested parties.

A Decision I Would Not Have Made

I can't say whether continuing his campaign for President is the right decision for John Edwards or not. That's a call that only he and his family can make, given his wife's very unfortunate medical condition.

Certainly they are well off and she will not want for good medical care, but her cancer is metastasized and that's not a good thing at all, whether you are well off and running for President, or financially challenged in obscurity. No one would want that sort of thing to happen in their lives, although of course thousands of people confront this very issue every day. Certainly it lends some urgency to Edwards' health care platform. But at a human level, obviously, Democrats and Republicans alike are wishing Elizabeth Edwards and their entire family the best in the face of bad news and trying circumstances.

For me, it would be an easy call -- I would want to be with my wife as much as possible, no matter what, and it would be a no-brainer, no-second-thoughts kind of decision. But when I mentioned this to The Wife last night, she said that if I were in that position, she would want me to pursue my dream and wouldn't want to feel responsible for holding me back.

I wonder if John and Elizabeth Edwards didn't have a similar sort of conversation, only for real, and the results were kind of the same. I can't imagine how it could be otherwise in a loving relationship. It would be a hard decision for a couple to make, that's for sure; obviously, they've decided that Senator Edwards should continue his campaign, and as the linked article says, they want people to evaluate the Senator on his merits, not on sympathy for Elizabeth's condition.

Like I said, I can't say whether this is the right decision or not; my family is not the Edwards family and they had to figure out what would be the right call for them. And maybe it's an easy decision for me to make, or at least to say I would make, because I do not have a burning desire to be President. But if it were me, I would have put the campaign into a low-key mode to be with my wife as much as I could.

Bye Bye Beater

We're going car shopping today.

Both The Wife and I are sick of the junker. Yes, it's paid for, but it's got close to 110,000 miles on it, no power steering, a seat that makes both of our backs ache when we drive it, the little three-banger engine doesn't have the pickup of a two-hamster exercise wheel, and The Wife knocked the left-side rear window off of it and the deductible on the repair is more than the repair itself. Leave aside cosmetic issues like the dings and dents on the door and the peeling paint on the rear fender -- the car is just not up to snuff any more and we can do better. When the summer really comes here in the desert, the air conditioner is almost certain to drain out any remaining power in the motor.

So we're going to go look for a reasonable used car. We'll see what we can get; when we're back this evening I'll finish up my trial preparations and get ready for my class Monday night. Until then, I'm wondering what we should get. Maybe a nice Toyota. I've never owned a Japanese car. I liked my BMW when I had that, but we're still a few steps away from getting back into a Beamer -- getting a house is more important than getting a BMW. That's the only non-American car I've ever owned; my experience was great and my impression of the mid-range car market is that Toyotas are the highest-quality and most-reliable cars we could get in the range we're at. But I'm open to anything that will be reliable and safe and be of reasonable quality. It doesn't have to be a status symbol. After all, B.B. the Saturn is not a great car but it's quite sufficient for our needs. All I'm really looking for is "good enough." "Good enough" means safe, reliable, and functional.

UPDATE: Six hours later, we are now the proud new owners (well, after the loan is paid off we will be) of the replacement to the junker. I was going to hold off on the naming process, but The Wife was impatient and gave the 2004 Nissan Altima a new sobriquet on the way home. So meet.... The Green Ninja!


A little more than I wanted to spend, and the payments are a little higher than I would have preferred, but the money involved is within our range of ability. The mileage is what you would expect for a car of its age and history (a former rental). The color is nice -- a kind of gray-green that I haven't seen on any other cars out there. We can get a key fob for remote entry from Nissan, and we'll have to order a replacement owner's manual, too. Tomorrow or the day after I'll research how often I have to change the oil and so on. But for now, the Green Ninja is ready for action. And we had no idea of the Urban Dictionary's meaning to the phrase "Green Ninja" when The Wife adopted it for the car.

What Wakes You Up In The Middle Of The Night?

I don't know what wakes up you Loyal Readers in the middle of the night and leaves you tossing and turning, unable to fall back asleep again. For me, a jury trial gone horribly out of control is one such thing.

Maybe one day I'll be able to explain the absolute horror show that this trial has become. Suffice to say that thinking about it still gets me very upset at our bench officer for allowing things to reach the point that they have, and I have some real concerns that need to be resolved in as discreet a fashion as I can get them resolved. I'm not mad at my adversary for doing his job or asking questions that have answers uncomfortable to my side of the case -- that's his job, after all, and I don't ever get mad at an attorney for doing his job. But it is awkward indeed with him being inexperienced and the bench officer's attitude about the proceedings. So, while I know that leaves you all wanting more details, I'm going to leave things at that because my concern is about the bench and not the bar.

Anyway, three days of jury trial is enough to get anyone on edge, especially when the trial should have taken about thirty minutes. And we're going into our fourth day on Monday. We've finished evidence but haven't got jury instructions read or final arguments submitted.

I feel terrible for my client, who is going to wind up spending five figures on something that ought to have been handled for less than a thousand dollars. That's something I'm moderately upset at my adversary about -- he could easily and efficiently have raised his client's arguments and evidence in a bench trial and quickly obtained a decision. Trying a case like this before a jury is a gigantic waste of everyone's time and effort, particularly the jury's.

That's part of why I woke up at one in the morning Friday night and couldn't fall back asleep again until four. After trying to get back asleep for half an hour, I realized it was no use, and came downstairs to write my closing argument, which took me until four, by which time I had both vented out my emotions, the arguments and issues running through my head, and reached the limit of what adrenaline and outrage will do to keep one awake while the sun is on the other side of the world.

The Wife had an event that she was speaking at Saturday morning. I wanted to go and support her but this kind of got in the way. She won her contest, and I regret not going; I like to support her and let her know that I'm proud of her achievements. But after the events of Friday I'm not surprised to have had the stress finally get to me, and I'm glad that it at least happened on the weekend when I could sleep it off the next morning and not have to be at court in the morning, well-rested and alert. Monday I'll be fine again and I'll be able to present my closing argument like a reasonable lawyer again, and hopefully consider the larger problem of what's going on up on the bench in a more rational way.

Introducing the Apple iRack!

Pessimistic but funny.

Finally, A Good Website!

If you've not checked out Rudy Giuliani's revised website yet, you should. The website is improved. Streaming video, a better look, better descriptions of the issues under debate right now, lots of pictures, lots of content. This looks like the website of a front-running candidate for President.

Vicissitudes of Jury Trials

Since Tuesday, I've been focusing all my work and energy on a single case. Today we finished picking a jury and I put forward my case in chief. I promised the jury a quick case, and I delivered. Now, if we hang around for a long time, it's the defendant's fault and not mine.

So far I'm feeling confident, although of course anything can happen. Tomorrow will be the bulk of the defendant's case, my cross-examination of the defendant, and my rebuttal case. Hopefully, we can close tomorrow, too. I've got some research to do tonight yet and another revision to my special verdict form and jury instructions.

The thing of it is, you can never know how it's going in the middle of it. There are some things that can feel good -- I think I drew a really good jury, for instance -- you never really know. My clients did great on the witness stand, I thought. I wonder whether my adversary thinks so, too. Certainly the jury is hungry to hear both sides of the case, and they haven't heard much from the defense yet. You generally don't have a trial unless both sides are convinced they're going to win and I've no way of knowing just how compelling the evidence is going to be.

So I can't really know until the verdict is in and I talk to the jurors who are willing to talk to me. In the meantime, I should quit procrastinating, turn off the tournament, and get back to work. Jury trials are all-consuming and while I've had some great support from my firm, the fact is that ultimately there are some things -- a lot of things -- that only the lead attorney can do, and that's me this time around.

It's a lot of work. But I'm having fun. We'll see if I still think it's fun after the verdict.