Economic Dating

In a post that belongs on favorite relationship-analysis website Bobvis, the Freakonomics Blog at NYT presents a remarkably shallow exchange of remarkably clear economic thought: The Gold-Digger versus the Heartless Hedge Fund Veep.

Parliament Opens

I absolutely love the pomp and circumstance the British put into their government. We have nothing remotely like it in the United States. It's silly and doesn't really affect anything, but it's fun to watch. No one does ceremony as well as the British.

Today, the Queen fulfilled one of her very few official duties, and opened the new session of Parliament. She went into the House of Lords and read a speech that had been written for her by the new Prime Minister and his minions. We have no real way of knowing if Her Majesty agreed with a word of the speech, nor any particular reason to care.

But the details from the story are great:

Lawmakers are summoned from the Commons by an official known as Black Rod — but only after they slam the door in his face to symbolize their independence.

In another symbol of the traditional hostility between Commons and crown, a lawmaker is held at Buckingham Palace as a "hostage" during the ceremony to ensure the monarch's safe return.

That's awesome beyond description. Oy! Well done, m'lords!

Being the "hostage" in Buckingham Palace probably wouldn't be so bad, at least these days. I imagine the tea service and snacks are pretty good. You know, a step up from those cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. You get to hang out with Prince Phil or maybe with Chuck and Camilla, who I'm sure are brilliant conversationalists. While on its exterior, Buckingham Palace looks like a prison, I'll bet the interior decorations are posh. So you can count on a decent meal in some nice digs. Maybe you can bring the wife and kids with you, give them a special tour, take some photos for the album. And, added bonus, you don't have to sit through a dull speech.

Then, the whole opening of Parliament thing includes a ceremonial insult. Super, super cool. The American equivalent, the State of the Union address, involves nothing so much as a sycophantic and elaborately-scripted hour of what seems like nearly nonstop applause. You know, we like our President and all that (well, not this one, so much, whose polling numbers are now lower than Nixon's were the week before he resigned) but it just isn't natural and it certainly doesn't buttress the idea of separation of powers. Now, if the President showed up to give his speech, and the Speaker directed that he not be allowed on the floor until the Congress voted to let him in, that would be akin to what the Brits have going on every time a new Parliament meets.

Best of all, some guy has the job of being "the Black Rod." How awesome does that look on your resume? The current "Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod" is named Michael Willcocks, a former Lieutenant General in Her Majesty's armed forces; the Black Rod has been a military man continuously since 1920. The potential for gay porn titles is endless. Summoned by the Black Rod. How the Black Rod Got in the East End. The Black Rod Does Manchester United. I could go on, but that's what the comments section is for.

ENDA: The First Act Ends

Should a religious bookstore have to hire people who are gay?  In the debate on passage of ENDA, the anti-homosexual discrimination law that the House of Representatives passed today, this seems to have been the strongest argument offered against the proposal.  Nevertheless, passage in the Senate is uncertain and apparently, the Administration has threatened a veto.  The 235-184 vote is not, on its face, enough to override the veto.  So, should a religious bookstore have to hire people who are gay?  “We’re all sinners” when they want to overlook someone’s misdeeds – or to change the focus of a conversation from someone’s misdeeds to the central idea of Christianity, which (correct me if I’m wrong here, Christians) is forgiveness through the redemption granted by God through Jesus Christ.  But “That’s against God’s teachings” is what they say about someone’s misdeeds when they want to be judgmental about them. 

 

Again, correct me if I’m wrong here, Christians, but isn’t everyone a sinner?  Why is the sin of being gay qualitatively different than the sins of blasphemy, adultery, lying, or theft – to the point that it prevents someone from being able to put a book on a shelf or cashier out a customer’s order?  It doesn’t, of course; a gay person can do the job of working in a bookstore as well as a straight person or an asexual one.  The opposition to the bill is based on the idea that it’s okay to use religion as a smokescreen for prejudice against gay people.  That, in my view, cheapens the potential of religions to guide their adherents to behave in a moral fashion, and it is one of the reasons I have become so very critical of the way religion is being used in public life these days. 

 

Religious folks:  you don’t have to back down from saying gay sex is a sin.  This law would make you distinguish between a person’s private life and their ability to do a job.  That’s something that you probably already do on a selective basis anyway.

 

ENDA probably will pass the Senate, but all that we* can do is hope that Bush doesn’t have the balls to actually veto it.  Although frankly, I don’t see what he has to lose by doing exactly that.  Are gay people going to like him even less?  This general defender of Republican ideas would, but for the most part, Bush would lose support if he didn’t veto ENDA.  And the Democrats do not (yet) have enough support to override the veto – they will have to wait until (um, I mean “if”) Hillary Clinton becomes President to get the bill passed into law.

 

*  By “we,” of course, I mean people who think that there is no good reason to treat gays any differently than straights.

Not Just An Excuse To Post A Picture Of Nicole Kidman

Is The Golden Compass an atheist counterpoint to The Chronicles of Narnia? Is it trying to "peddle atheism to kids"?

The author says "no," now, but according to some Christian media, he sang a different tune a few years ago. Asked about his intent in a press junket for the movie, he said "My point is that religion is at its best – it does most good – when it is farthest away from political power, and that when it gets hold of the power to send armies to war or to condemn people to death, or to rule every aspect of our lives, it rapidly goes bad." Apparently, there is a character in the movie who calls himself "God" and is killed in the end, after being exposed as a fake. Religionists who have read the book, particularly Catholics, have said there are a lot of anti-Church elements to it, and not having read it myself, I really can't comment any further. But, I do now have an excuse to post a picture of Nicole Kidman on my blog, which is pretty much always a good thing.

Question: If Christianity (or Islam, or any other kind of theism) is true, why should it fear a fantasy story with atheist elements to it?

Second Question: If Christianity gets all kinds of chances to be peddled to kids, why doesn't atheism get equal treatment? Shouldn't kids be at least made aware that there are people who don't believe in God and get to make up their own minds?

Counterpoint on Pakistan

In Slate, Lee Smith argues for an ideologically cohesive foreign policy strategy which sounds suspiciously like "nation-building." He takes the Bush Administration, and particularly Secretary Rice, to task for sending mixed messages to the world about what we want them to do and how we want them to do it; and for failing to define "democracy."

His argument is that democracy in Pakistan, as in any other nation-state, requires that there be the rule of law and strong enough governmental institutions so as to allow a democracy to function. No one but Musharraf has the strength to build such a society, and in order to do that, he must use his military power. What's more, the military in Pakistan is the most secular of all the segments of that society, and the last thing we want is a less secular Pakistan (good point, that last one). In other words, "democracy" (however that term is defined) is an end result of a stabilized society, and not really our goal for foreign policy.

I'd agree with that to some extent. Whether our allies abroad are democratically-governed or not, our foreign policy objectives are first and foremost, that they support our strategic and military efforts; second, that they develop economically and become good trade partners, and (a very distant) third, that they generally respect human rights, or at least keep their human rights abuses discreet and moderately defensible. The development of European-style democracy as a form of government is simply one attribute of the third, and least important, of those foreign policy objectives. Smith correctly points out that Musharraf is providing us with the first and most important objective, namely, he is cooperating to a significant degree with U.S. military and strategic objectives for that region of the world by 1) not nuking India, 2) tolerating U.S. efforts to root out al-Qaeda and even doing some of that work himself, and 3) not permitting radical Islamists to take over the government there. Trade and human rights are insignificant in comparison to these concerns.

And democracy is only a good thing in our allies if the result of a democratic election there is a leadership that is more or less congruent to these other, more important interests. In other words, letting people in other countries choose their own leaders is a good thing, if they make the right choices.

Oddly, though, this is a "realist" analysis of the situation, but it winds up being critical of a lack of ideological coherence, which is the sort of thing one would expect from a neocon. But I think the real criticism is that the Bush administration, taking its cue from its leader, has failed to articulate things clearly.

The real problem is that by stomping down on the institutions that can foster the development of the rule of law (the judiciary), Musharraf may well be playing into the hands of the Islamists. By taking control of the courts and suspending Pakistan's constitution in order to squelch militant Islamic extremists, he has driven the pro-democracy reformers (personified now in Benizar Bhutto) against him and forced them to stand side-by-side with the very religious fanatics he is trying to keep in check. The result may be that if and when there are elections, the result will be something like what happened with Palestine -- a bungling of domestic policy by the allies of the U.S. will result in the people making a bad choice.

It is now more likely than ever that Pakistan will suffer an attempted revolution by Islamic extremists. This might be aimed directly at Musharraf and his junta; it might be the result of an alliance with Bhutto and her supporters, and a subsequent unwillingness by the religious extremists to share power with her once Musharraf has been set aside. But either way, that revolution looks like it's coming, and its success would be a huge blow to U.S. interests in central Asia. Sadly, with the military already over-extended in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with talk of military activity against Iran, it does not seem there are any military assets left over for use in Pakistan should that become necessary.

Noble Pakistani Lawyers

The headline reads (or at least it used to read):  “Lawyers Battle Police In Pakistan.”  I’ve had to “do battle” with police officers before.  When you have to cross-examine someone to get certain facts out to the jury, that’s what you do, even if it means impeaching a police officer’s credibility.  (Especially if it means impeaching a police officer’s credibility, for some kinds of cases.)  In a war of words, the lawyer is almost always going to be better-armed than the police.

 

But I’ve never had to literally battle police in order to be a lawyer.  In a battle of guns, tear gas, and nightsticks, the police are going to win every time.  I’m particularly disturbed by the note in the story that the police were paid “cash bonuses” for beating up and then rounding up the protesting lawyers, who have been called “terrorists” for supporting the existence of an independent judiciary.

 

This, President Musharraf, is not the way to protect democracy.  Nor is it a way to make yourself (or your protégé, should you ever select one) look better than Benazir Bhutto, who has managed to do what seems to be an excellent job of positioning herself as the savior of moderate, secular democracy in the critically dangerous nation of Pakistan.

 

It occurs to me that it’s likely that these lawyers are out there, getting arrested and beaten up and maybe even killed, because they want to have a democratic government that respects the rule of law.  That makes them heroes in my book.  That’s what our Founding Fathers fought the British for six years to get.  I wonder if Americans today are made of the same kind of stuff that motivates these Pakistani lawyers, and that motivated our ancestors, to step up to the plate and fight for this stuff.

 

Now, it also occurs to me that some elements of Pakistan’s society wants to see the government in Pakistan destabilized so that a theocracy can take its place.  Certainly that’s a problem, because if the Musharraf government falls, what replaces it?  Who gets to control those nuclear weapons aimed at the world’s most populous democracy?  Who gets to decide whether American troops are welcome to operate or support operations to find the real bad guys hanging out somewhere with a line of sight to the Khyber Pass?

 

It’s hard to imagine, though, religious extremists backing up lawyers and courts, and so far I’ve not heard of any overtly religious rhetoric – or even anti-American propaganda – associated with the protests against the deposition of the Pakistani courts.  So while the situation in Karachi and Islamabad looks very dangerous and violent, that’s not the same thing as a breeding ground for a new Islamic revolution to take place. 

 

Pervez Musharraf is a military man, and he seems to have a secular bent towards the government and society in general.  He seems to enjoy power and does not understand why holding two different kinds of leadership positions within both the military and political structures of his country is a problem.  He has no time for the kinds of people who threaten America (in this case, Al-Qaeda and militant Muslim extremists) and therefore is a useful ally in our efforts to wipe out our enemies.  In all of this, he sounds a little bit like someone else in the Muslim world that the U.S. held its nose and quietly supported in the past; ultimately, that didn’t work out too well for anyone involved.

 

Let’s hope that the Pakistanis find a way to make the flower of democracy bloom without reverting to either religious primitivism or military dictatorship, either of which could easily hamstring an otherwise critical player on the world stage.  If I’m right about the kind of people these lawyers protesting in the streets really are, there is a hard core of people who are really dedicated to the ideas of liberty which are at the core of our own set of national ideals.  After all, as a politician who I used to admire once said, “Freedom is contagious”.

Best Hit Ad In The Race So Far

Does Hillary Clinton waffle on issues? John Edwards sure thinks so, and there's some pretty good evidence to that effect:

Cut Lip

Shaving in a hurry is a bad idea. I cut my lower lip yesterday while shaving in a hurry; it was exquisitely painful (on par with the kidney stone) and the wound bled for more than an hour and there's still an unsightly dark spot where the clot rests. Maybe it's time to switch to an electric razor?

By the way, judging from the poll results, there is no consensus whatsoever about how to deal with insomnia. Thanks for nothing, Readers.

More Shamless Pandering

In Kentucky, the incumbent Republican governor is trailing in the polls by more than ten points.

Is it a coincidence, then, that the day before the election (which is today) he should have ordered that a display of the Ten Commandments be erected within the state capitol building? Seriously, isn't pandering for votes at this level insultingly obvious?

According to the article, the Ten C's are going up alongside the Magna Charta, the Mayflower Compact, and a variety of other "great historical laws." Many reason that this somehow diminishes the religious element of the Decalogue and therefore makes the display Constitutional, since the Supreme Court used that reasoning to justify its own artwork, which includes Moses and the Ten C's. I might be wiling to go along with that logic if the words on the tablets are not clearly discernable -- because the First Commandment is not something that the government should be telling people, and if the contents of that Commandment are only referred to in an most oblique fashion (for instance, with a single Roman numeral or Hebrew character) then the message of the sculpture is likely to be more focused on the act of Moses serving as a lawgiver rather than the explicitly religious content of the law itself.

But I'd really prefer it if courts weren't asked to make those kinds of artistic judgments at all. Judges are no more art critics than they are engineers or doctors, and it seems silly indeed to have to rely upon experts to interpret art and weigh their competing -- and in the case of art, highly subjective -- evaluations of such things. It's also slightly disgraceful to see the kind of intellectual convolutions that backers of government-funded displays of religion will go to in order to dodge the obvious conclusion that they are using public money and public prestige to support a religion. I continue to be irritated that the Supreme Court felt it necessary to be led down that intellectual rabbit hole rather than commission a new frieze and give the old one to the Smithsonian.

Maybe I'm just upset because no one is pandering to me for my vote.

Remember, Remember

To the right is a portrait of a religious fanatic and a terrorist. Sure, he looks like a pilgrim ready to make nice with the Indians over some turkey and cranberries, but this was not a nice man. 402 years ago today, Guy Fawkes was caught in the act of attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament, in the famous Gunpowder Plot. Here's the famous poem about that even still recited today:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up King and Parliament.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow.
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Huzzah boys, huzzah boys, let the bells ring.
Huzzah boys, huzzah boys, God save the King!
A penny loaf to feed the Pope,
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down,
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar,
Burn him like a blazing star,
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah! Hip hip hoorah, hoorah!

Starts out good, but it gets kind of ugly fast, doesn't it? Remember, this is Christian-on-Christian violence we're talking about here, and only a few years after Queen Elizabeth died. The King who was the target of the assassination attempt was James I (of England), an outspoken Protestant; Fawkes and his co-conspirators hoped to engineer a Catholic restoration of the throne.

Today, we would call Fawkes a terrorist, and a religious fanatic at that. His enemies were no better. The Protestant-versus-Catholic wars that trace their roots back to a German nailing a demand for religious reform on a church door on Halloween of 1517 and the bizarre doctrines of extreme Calvinists writ large upon the body politic of Europe today seem very odd to us. We tend to smooth over the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants today.

To me it seems particularly pointless. It seems a lot like Star Wars fans arguing over whether Han or Greedo shot first. (Han did, but the movie is still enjoyable if Greedo shot first and missed. Remember the best line from the MST3K song: "You should really just relax.") It's a work of fiction; it's not worth it to kill someone who has a different take on The Scarlet Letter than you, so why would it be worth it to kill someone who interprets the Book of Jeremiah differently than you?

But there is a more or less direct modern counterpart in Shi'ite-versus-Sunni violence in the Muslim world. So it's not as though this is a dead letter. Quite the opposite. And while it's not violent, there is a fair amount of intolerance going on still in American Christian circles -- there are questions about whether Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, or Mitt Romney are "Christian enough" (or in Romney's case, whether he is a Christian at all) to be acceptable to Christian evangelicals.

It seems like such an astonishing waste of brainpower, effort, emotion, and blood to have theological disputes. Guy Fawkes was willing to kill his King in order to have a Catholic rule the country, and plenty of Iraqis are willing to each other (and us) so that their sect can enjoy greater political power to oppress the other sect. I challenge any Christian reading this to explain to me why a debate between Catholics and Protestants over Christian theology is any different than a debate between Sunnis and Shi'ites, or why either Guy Fawkes or his Protestant executioners who wrote that charming poem above were any better than the Muslims keeping Iraq in anarchy today.

A Collection of Random Thoughts

1. The Wife "quit" Toastmasters last week. I'm only four speeches towards getting the basic certification, and I think I'd like to finish it, if only to have actually finished it rather than stopping going because The Wife did. She got burnt out, I think, because she did way too much, too fast, and got way too frustrated with others in the club who did not approach their tasks in a fashion which she thought was professional. So somewhere along the way, she stopped having fun with it. As for me, I have to admit I get an ego stroke when I win a blue "best speech" ribbon, which I've done three out of the four times I've spoken -- I get the ego stroke even though sometimes it seems as though the level of competition is not high enough to justify it.

2. Pakistan is a country that scares the hell out of me. It seems to be packed full of Muslim fundamentalists hell-bent on forcibly converting the world to their religion (and their style of that religion) and its Northwest Frontier Province is functionally an anarchy. This weekend, the President -- who is also the active-duty head of the armed forces -- suspended the Constitution there. It's also a place where lawyers protesting in the streets over an independent judiciary were able to foment such a serious threat to the stability of the government that the President of the country took that step. And it's a place where somebody was so threatened by the former President -- a woman -- returning to her home country from a years-long exile that there was a spectacular assassination attempt on her. So I know that there is a substantial secular segment of that society; that there are people there who strongly desire and respect the rule of law, in addition to the crazed fanatics who so rightly inspire fear in the West. Oh, and the country has nuclear weapons, and a three-generations-old grudge with a similarly nuclear-armed India that includes a live territorial dispute over Kashmir. Why isn't America working harder to constructively stabilize Pakistan?

3. Furniture is expensive. Replacing the sectional couch we've inherited from my parents (which looks great but is difficult to attach and too low to get into and out of comfortably) is looking to be a more costly task than I'd hoped it would be.

4. The Green Bay Packers are 7-1, and so are the Dallas Cowboys. The Packers play at Dallas on Thanksgiving Day. Especially if both teams continue to do well, it should be a very good game; at least as good as the Patriots-Colts game today. I note, though, that the Packers have only a four-day turnaround before playing Carolina the Thursday before Thanksgiving. The short week left over from Monday night's game really showed up in some poor play-calling decisions at the end of the first half today. Brett Favre joins Peyton Manning and Tom Brady as the only quarterbacks to ever beat all 31 other NFL teams; Manning and Brady only reached those milestones last week. So it's a good year to be a Packer fan so far.

5. I haven't written for Oval Office 2008 in more than a month. I don't miss it. I have more time on my hands to write about politics there now, but I've less interest in doing so. It seemed all I ever got by way of feedback was criticism, if not outright trolling. I don't need the abuse, and I'll take my time before writing there again. Does this mean I'm not cut out to be a pundit after all?

6. Was Buddha an atheist? It's hard to say.

7. NASA insists there's a comet visible from even urban environments, and it should be about a third the size of the full moon since the coma and the tail are visible head-on right now. I went outside to look for it tonight and all I saw were bright stars. Maybe I'm too close to urban street lighting after all. I'll try to remember to look again tomorrow night after class.

8. Sometimes I really like litigation. Sometimes I really dislike it. Part of it has to do with whether I'm winning or at least feel like I've got a good chance at winning; then I really enjoy it. Part of it has to do with whether I feel like I'm working with people (clients and adversaries, not my colleagues at work who are great) who are reasonable and honorable, which also contributes to my enjoyment of it. When those things are not present, it's harder for me to get pleasure out of the job -- and it seems that the quality of the people I work with, and the merits of the positions I get to take, are factors completely out of my control.

9. The water treatment plant, which draws the bulk of the Antelope Valley's drinking water from the aqueduct, was shut down for most of last week. I was being very careful about our water use; I avoided washing my clothes and otherwise limited personal use of water. The agency in charge of such things turned on the spigots again Saturday. Now we can return to our
wasteful ways and pour buckets of clean, potable water directly into storm drains by the gallon, just like people who have health insurance can intentionally jump on rusty nails and used syringes.

10. Once again, I have to drive to Los Angeles tomorrow. I should have called my old tailor to meet up with him and have him take my measurements so I can get a new suit. Two of my old suits, alas, suffered irreversible waistband shrinkage not at all unrelated to my diet and exercise habits. I'd like a suit that has braces, so I can wear suspenders again. Suspenders can look very sharp when done with a nicely-pressed monochromatic shirt and the right tie.

11. Why did you think this list would be limited to ten posts? Down with the tyranny of decimal thinking!

12. I'd like it if we had more social friends who did things like hung out on the weekends, or came over for dinner, or things like that. But I see so little of The Wife as it is -- Monday nights I teach, Wednesday nights I have my dinner meeting, Thursday nights is the Toastmasters club that I joined in no small part to do something with my wife. We seem to spend so much of the weekend doing projects that we don't get a lot of time to just hang out together. Tonight we did for a while, and I enjoyed that even if we didn't have to do a lot of chattering. We have many friends in Los Angeles but that's just far enough away that it makes a spontaneous visit ("Hey, you guys want to get together for dinner tonight?") very difficult.

13. Henry VII is England's most underrated monarch. Overshadowed by his charismatic son, no doubt. But Hank 7 pulled off a significant trick by balancing the various claims to the throne and to power behind it, and restoring both peace and financial stability to England after a century of civil war, as well as proving his ability to lead armies during the closing acts of that same war.

14. William of Normandy, in 1066, was not the last successful invader of England. William of Orange was. Hitler would have done it too, if England hadn't been smart enough to pick Winston Churchill and to follow his lead during the dark days of 1939.

15. Almonds are good to eat. So are grapefruit. They're not really good together, although pears are good with either.

16. When you have to drink a lot of water all the time, you have to go to the bathroom all the time. This is not good for someone who craves the prospect of eight continuous hours of sleep. I don't think I've had eight continuous hours of sleep for several months now -- I did pretty good when The Wife and I were on vacation in Colorado and we didn't have to attend to animals. Maybe replacing our mattress should take a higher priority to replacing our couch; but I don't think the mattress (or the constantly deflating pillows) are the substantial factor in my periodic bouts of insomnia.

17. How much money would it take to solve all your problems? Pay off your mortgage, replace your cars, pay off your debts, fix up things around your house, get the computer you want, all of that. Call that amount of money "X" dollars. Add 40% to it because you'd need to pay taxes on it once you got all that money and, let's face it, you probably didn't take taxes into consideration when you figured out what "X" would be. So let's assume you acquired $1.4"X" somehow. Would that make you happy? Yes, I think it would -- at least for a while, because you'd be able to resolve a lot of your stresses. But I think $1.5"X" would not make you happy, because the extra money would get spent on something, and then new problems would arise from that.

18. How many links would you have to click to get from the wikipedia entry on Kerguelen Cabbage to the wikipedia entry for Kyra Sedgewick? And how much money do you think a tony restaurant in London or Paris or New York would charge for a Kerguelen Cabbage salad? Are we ever going to see "Battle Kerguelen Cabbage" on Iron Chef?

19. The Wife did a good job setting up our bookcase, which is the focus of the living room. She's got the books stacked vertically and horizontally (piled atop one another) but there are plenty of interesting decorations -- wine bottles, little sculptures, my 2,000-year-old Roman reading lamp, and some pictures -- so that each rack of the bookcase is visually interesting and the whole thing gives a great impression of an intellectually interesting and artistic household. She really did a fine job of that. I'll post a picture one day.

Vicodin

I don't like it.

It dulls the pain, which is nice because then I don't have to feel it. And the pain can be distracting, at best. But I also don't know very well whether I actually still have a problem or not. I haven't seen or felt any stones pass. I still feel pressure from time to time but I can't be sure if that's just me psyching myself out or if it's the real thing.

Friday, after I took the Vike for the first time, I slept a long time and I had some really trippy dreams. Tonight, I took another one and I can't fall asleep. The Wife went to bed nearly two hours ago and I was tossing and turning and wide awake. Granted, it's still only quarter to ten and I don't have to be up for another eight hours, so I shouldn't be too frustrated.

Maybe the dosage isn't enough to induce sleep. Of course, it's not intended to be a sleep aid; it's supposed to be a painkiller with drowsiness as a prominent side-effect. But I'm certainly not experiencing any euphoria or deriving any pleasure from the drug; at best, like I said above, it dulls the pain from the kidney stone (assuming I still even have it, which as of right now I have no good idea one way or the other).

Now That I'm Teaching Again...

...I can look forward to more student complaints when they don't get "A" grades, as if it's somehow my fault.

A complaint like this, though, is extraordinary: the student complains that the professor fails to give sufficient direction, but also that he was too critical of the student's writing; the professor failed to tell his students what was being asked of them, yet he also taught students how to read things in too much detail. He claims to be a good writer, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary. (He's a generally competent writer, but one who does not understand that repetition does not equal quality.) And to make it that much worse, the professor's obvious efforts to be objective and respectful of differing points of view nevertheless caused the student to be offended and uncomfortable, so very uncomfortable that the student never once spoke up in class about his thoughts or even took time to visit the professor in his office hours.

My guess is that the student was disappointed in his grade, and chose to blame the professor rather than himself. There doesn't seem to be any specific thing that the professor did wrong that I can discern from the lengthy complaint. It's a lengthy, passive-aggressive beg for a higher grade.

This sort of thing is why I've abandoned asking my students to write much of anything when I teach. Objective testing has its drawbacks, to be sure, but at the end of the day the objective test answer is either right or it's wrong. Students complain that they were confused and they blame the way the question is written for why they got the question wrong. But it's so much easier for me to hide behind the textbook -- this is the question in the textbook, this is the answer in the textbook, this is where you could have found the answer in the textbook, and I let you take the test with your textbook right in front of you. It's not my fault if you don't know what's in the textbook.

Son of Kidney Stone

After another day of pain, this time accompanied by a lengthy navigation through a medical bureaucracy and a CAT scan, it has been confirmed that I have another kidney stone in me. This week's pain is localized in a somewhat more... masculine area. Los huevos started aching early this morning, bad enough to wake me up and again to drive me away from work.

So, only now do I get home with some drugs for the pain. Indeed, at 75 pills, it seems that the doctor was particularly generous with the candy, but hey, it was Halloween not too long ago so maybe that explains it. So until further notice, I get to pee through a strainer and hope that this two millimeter calcium crystal is smoothed rather than jagged. (If so, that makes me Beowulf, taking on the Mother of Kidney Stone as a second and greater challenge than the first.) And enjoy the gentle charms of Vicodin.

To make it worse, my buddy has an extra ticket for USC's homecoming tomorrow, which would be Big Fun, but there's no way I could have fun there like this. Here's hoping the little bugger passes soon -- and while I'm stoned on the Vike!

The Best Of All Possible Worlds

On November 1, 1755, a powerful earthquake rocked Lisbon, Portugal.  Tens of thousands died in building collapses, fires, and general rioting.  This inspired Voltaire to write Candide, one of the snarkiest and most powerful novels ever written.  In the first part of his novel, Voltaire suggested that both the world and human nature were unchangeable, with devastating effect.  In the second part, he sends his characters to “Utopia,” (literally “no-place”) and suggests that the kinds of perfected worlds we might long for, without war or greed, we might not be happy anyway.  Finally, he returns his characters to Europe and attempts to demonstrate why all of this does not make human endeavor futile – we can nevertheless do our best, and we can achieve happiness and love even in the face of a brutal world and even after having had made bad personal choices in our pasts.  If you haven’t read Candide, I recommend it to you wholeheartedly.

New Manager

The Los Angeles Dodgers have hired a new GM.  Now, we’ll get to see how good he really is – the Dodgers don’t have quite the same depth of raw athletic talent as he’s become accustomed to coaching.  And who knows?  He might just get to coach A-Rod again (although I think A-Rod will become an Angel, not a Dodger).  And it’s appropriate, I think, for the Dodgers to have a manager with a considerable level of personal celebrity.

Good Thought, Bad Call

A family sued the Westboro Baptist Church for disrupting the funeral of his son, a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, and won a significant verdict.

I have a very hard time feeling bad for the defendants. The excerable Fred Phelps and his extended family of aggressively offensive minions deserve the scorn, ridicule, and contempt of decent human beings everywhere. You do not go to the funeral of a war hero and loudly praise God for killing the man as a sign of the truth of the proposition that "God hates fags." I don't care how much you think that's what God really thinks. It's simply indecent. Let the family mourn in peace.

At the same time, I can't see how the First Amendment does anything but prohibit exactly this kind of verdict. There is no doubt that Phelps and his minions are -- crudely -- expressing a protected opinion about religion, politics, and society. They have a right to do that and a state cannot force them to pay for the exercise of that right.

I take comfort in the fact that Phelps, like so many other scuzzy products of the low level of American political discourse, can both enjoy the protection of the cherished rights we Americans stand for, while at the same time be robustly despised. People associated with major free-speech cases are pretty much a bunch of scuzballs. Paul Cohen is perhaps the most savory among them, and his free speech problem was that he wore a leather jacket that said "Fuck the Draft" while in the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse. Turns out, he can't be sent to jail for that. Moving a bit down the food chain, we find Larry Flynt, who ran a parody ad in Hustler Magazine accusing Jerry Falwell of, among other things, a drunken act of incest with his mother in an outhouse. Turns out, in order to recover money, Falwell would have had to have proven actual malice towards him rather than political commentary, and because no reasonable person would have taken the parody ad as actually portraying the truth, he could not recover damages. We can go further back the evolutionary ladder towards the primordial ooze looking at guys like Clarence Brandenburg, a leader of the KKK in Ohio, and the Minnesota cross-burner Robert Viktora.

The point is, freedom of speech isn't for people who say things that are polite and enjoy a lot of popular acceptance. Freedom of speech is for people who are likely to be punished for what they say. That tends not to be mainstream speech. The reason we have freedom of speech is because it's impossible to draw a line between Fred Phelps and Jerry Falwell; there is no objective way to say that Phelps has gone too far because soon enough, everyone who disagrees with the majority has gone too far. We have to let monsters like Phelps say these terrible things because if we don't, who's to say when a candidate for political office can or cannot be jailed for saying that the war should end?

So it sucks, but we have to void the verdict and give Fred Phelps and his ilk a meaningful opportunity to express themselves. We don't have to like it, but we do have to do it.

One in Eight

12% of Americans do not identify with any religious tradition or consider themselves to be secular or atheist. That's very close to one in eight Americans. Particularly interesting is that age groupings seem to remain constant over time, and nearly one in five Americans under 30 years of age do not consider themselves to be religious.

Footprints for Non-Christians

You know that sappy “Footprints” poem that Christians so adore, the one with the twist ending where it was Jesus all along?  Turns out some guy wrote an atheist version and a Zen Buddhist version.  Both are quite entertaining.

Litigation Is Like Combat...

…In that it consists of long stretches of boredom, randomly interspersed with very brief bursts of absolute terror.  The momentary mistaken belief that one has missed a deadline is one of those bursts of terror.  Similarly, the realization that no, it was the other guy who blew it, is one of the nicest ways imaginable to resolve that kind of tension.