Sorry Advice

This article confirms something I have long strongly suspected -- doctors are discouraged from using phrases like "I'm sorry" by their malpractice insurance carriers (and the lawyers they employ). This is intended to avoid having the doctor make an admission of liability in the event of a malpractice suit (and the indignity of looking like an adorable puppy).

Now, we all know that doctors make mistakes like everyone else, and the law of malpractice is there to compensate the patients and their families who get hurt when that happens. (Contrary to a popular misunderstanding in the lay public, doctors are almost never hit with punitive damages in malpractice cases.) And no one suggests that doctors should enjoy a blanket immunity from tort liability if they do make mistakes.

But doctors win most medical malpractice lawsuits that go to trial -- you can look up the statistics on that yourself. You can probably also look up the amounts of money that are paid out in settlements and verdicts, and chances are, you'll find that settlements are higher than verdicts. That's because insurance companies and defense lawyers know when they have a real problem and when they have a case they can win, and they settle out the cases where there is a real issue. These are difficult cases for plaintiffs to win, for a lot of reasons, and there are already a lot of hurdles placed in the way of plaintiffs to pursue those kinds of remedies.

Having spent some time working the plaintiff's end of such lawsuits, I can tell you that a sane plaintiff's attorney is not going to put any significant weight on a doctor's statement of "I'm sorry." Other statements the doctor makes can be very significant, but "I'm sorry" is an inherently ambiguous remark; it can too easily be explained as expressing regret over the outcome of an unsuccessful procedure rather than as an admission of liability. In 99.99% of all cases, the jury will only get a second-hand description of the context and tone of that remark and they will give the benefit of the doubt to the doctor, every time. Doctors are sympathetic defendants as a general rule anyway -- that is, except for the doctors who are arrogant pricks. And refusing to say "I'm sorry" or otherwise express sympathy for the human emotions resulting from an unsuccessful procedure only feeds in to the stereotype of arrogance from which doctors (and other professionals, like attorneys) suffer.

The doctor interviewed by CNN in the linked article is lobbying for a law making statements of sympathy like "I'm sorry" inadmissible to prove negligence. This would open up a gigantic can of worms for a trial court judge, which would be better left to the lawyers and parties to sort out on their own. When is a doctor's remark an innocent expression of sympathy, and when does it evidence knowledge of a mistake? If the doctor knows he made a mistake, that seems like important evidence for the jury to hear and it should be admissible. If the doctor is trying to be nice, holding that effort at human decency against him will probably backfire against the plaintiff.

While it's rarely a surprise when a popular media report about the law misses some important details, the CNN article does an unusually terrible job of distinguishing an actual admission of negligence from a generalized statement of sympathy like "I'm sorry," and I suspect that is because the proposed law is similarly nebulous in its approach to making that distinction. This is as much proof as I need that this change in the law is a bad idea.

What needs to change is the advice that malpractice defense lawyers give their doctor clients.

The doctor in the CNN article linked above found that when he disregarded his lawyer's advice and told his patients "I'm sorry" after an unsuccessful procedure, he enhanced the bond of trust between doctor and patient, and was generally able to work with the patient further to get a good final result -- which is what both doctor and patient wanted all along. Had he used a more neutral, less caring remark like, "That's too bad," he would have angered his patient and increased his chances of being sued for medical malpractice -- before he had a chance to make the situation right.

I've had tens, if not hundreds, of clients say that they didn't want to go after a doctor who was nice to them -- even if it turned out that was the doctor who actually made a significant mistake. The doctor who cares is, by definition, a "good" doctor and not a target for litigation in the minds of most patients. It's the doctor who's an arrogant bastard who should get sued. The patient, my potential client, is not concerned with actual liability because figuring out which doctor is actually liable (if any doctor is at all) is far too difficult for a layperson to do. So they latch on to things they can understand instead, and what they do understand is whether they've been treated like human beings or sides of beef.

So based on that, when I have spoken with doctors, as individuals or in small groups, I've always encouraged them to use these kinds of phrases -- not to trick them into saying something that would realistically come back to haunt them, but to offer good-faith advice about how to avoid being in a situation like that in the first place. Good medical skills are important, making good medical decisions is important, having a large mass of medical knowledge in the doctor's brain and library is important. But the most effective tool a doctor has for avoiding a malpractice suit is her bedside manner, not her skills. Not once has a doctor ever said that this was bad advice, and most have admitted that a great many of their colleagues have terrible demeanors with patients.

So does a doctor face a risk by telling a patient "I'm sorry"? Yes, but the risk is minimal, and the rewards from that risk substantially outweigh the downside. Doctors shouldn't need a change in the law to start expressing sympathy for their patients -- they need to get better advice from their lawyers instead.

Happy Easter?

Asking an atheist how his Easter was is kind of like asking a Hindu what she did for Passover. It just doesn’t apply. But, this hasn’t stopped many people at the office, who know full well that I am not religious and that I go to a Zen Buddhist mediation with the partners of the firm every week, from asking me “How was your Easter?” The truth of the matter is, I was barely conscious it was Easter at all until The Wife reminded me of that fact at about 3:00 that afternoon when we wondered why so many stores were closed.

Now, we had written Easter cards last week to our family, in a nod to the holiday that we know most of them celebrate even if we do not. But after I put the cards in the mail, that box got checked off and was no longer on my list of things to think about and the concept of “Easter” vanished from my mind as completely as had my recollection of what I’d eaten for breakfast (if anything) on February 17.

My Easter Sunday was not particularly enjoyable, as it turns out, although that had nothing whatsoever to do with the coincidence that a string of annoyance occurred on a morning coinciding with a Christian religious holiday. But you don’t respond to a social question like “How are you?” with an honest, detailed answer; no one really wants to know that, for instance, you just can’t get rid of that uncomfortable piece of earwax or you’re still mad about your husband leaving the toilet seat up in the middle of the night.

So I figured that a blow-by-blow of my many minor travails on Easter Sunday was not what people at the office wanted to hear and told them I had a relaxing day with my wife and a nice dinner. If I told them the truth, I might have drawn a lecture about how none of those bad things would have happened to me had I gone to church -- as if that could possibly have kept the cat from shitting all over her pillow. The cat didn’t know it was Easter, either.

Most of the people asking this question, by the way, seem to have had unremarkable Easters themselves. They pretty much all went to church and then ate ham with their families. Aside from the eerily uniform choice of main course for the big meal of the day, that isn’t really all that much different than most other Sundays for observant Christians, is it?

1865 - 2007

On this day, one hundred and forty-two years ago, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, effectively ending the United States Civil War. Confederate soldiers, commanded to surrender their arms and colors, took out scissors and bayonets and cut up the Confederate battle flag rather than hand the stars and bars to the Yankees.

Modern enthusiasts will gather at Appomattox Courthouse today to re-create that scene, and the ones assigned to wear the gray uniforms will cry real tears when they surrender their cut-up strips of red and blue fabric.

What's interesting to me today are the issues that led to the war in the first place. The dominant issue was, of course, slavery. Certainly as a society we have reached a consensus that slavery is a bad thing, but race relations is a far from settled issue. We have made some progress here, but largely because of the blood and efforts of people in the 1950's and 1960's rather than the appalling number of deaths wreaked in the previous century.

The more ancillary issues (which Southern apologists claim actually dominated the Confederate motivation to fight) are still very much alive and very much unsettled seven score years later. Think about these kinds of issues: federalism, the scope of Presidential power, the importance of the decisions made by the President, the manner of our country's projection of force outside its borders, the use of taxes and social welfare programs to benefit some Americans at the expense of others, and the balance of civil rights of citizens (and others) against the need to preserve national unity and prosecute national interests.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but if you pay attention, it rhymes a lot.

These days, we aren't shooting each other because of these things (very much), for which we all can be grateful. No foreign enemy has ever proven so effective at killing Americans as we proved ourselves to be, including in later years when our enemies had much better military technology at their disposal.

But while we Americans aren't resolving these political differences on the battlefield and instead are simply shouting at one another, we are polarizing more now than we have even since the 1980's, which was a big part of the problem in the 1840's and 1850's. Back then, political differences of opinion became so polarized that agreement and compromise became impossible. Today, there are still people who call George W. Bush "the Governor" because they continue to dispute his legitimate election to the Presidency (both times), and who maintain that he ought to be impeached. Today, there are people who think that advocates of civil rights and a pluralistic society are traitors to the United States. The "America, love it or leave it!" bumper stickers I see from time to time are par tof the problem. Geraldo Rivera and Bill O'Reilly's recent played-up-for-ratings shouting match about crime and immigration is a result of reducing political disagreement to a form of entertainment rather than productive democratic discourse. Leaders of Congress conducting their own foreign policy in the Middle East are taking our disagreements beyond the water's edge and making us look disturbingly like the Romans did two thousand years ago, when their generals conducted contradictory foreign policies and wound up spending more time killing their fellow Romans in civil wars for political ascendancy than advancing the interests of their nation.

This is strong stuff, both sides are to blame, and we need to tone it down and remember that we're all Americans and committed to a civil society where our disagreements are played out through the peaceful, legitimate mechanisms of a republican government. That doesn't mean anyone has to back down from their core arguments; it means only maintaining a minimal level of mutual respect for one another.

Irritating Morning

I seem to have lost the ability to sleep in, even on the weekends. This is unfortunate, because I could really use the sleep as only rarely in my life have I had the ability to fall asleep at an appropriate time.

So from the time I woke up at 6:30 this morning, I was already irritated because I could have used more sleep than I got. But the critters need to be fed, so I figured I'd do that and see how things went from there.

We moved the kennels last night to what used to be my office. The Wife wanted to rearrange things yesterday so her computer was out in the living room and her back room was just for her crafts. She also wanted the kennels to be out of sight for guests who drop in from time to time. (Like we have a lot of guests who drop in.) So we did that, and put the kennels up in the bedroom that we had set aside for my use. I now have no office.

So I set up all the food for the critters and went into their room to let them out of their kennels. There, on Jordan's bed, was a large pile of "kitty pebbles." For whatever reason, the cat had decided to shit all over her pillow. Dogs will not defecate where they sleep. Cats -- or at least this particular cat -- apparently lacks any such inhibition.

The dogs were very confused and didn't know why they were being let out of their cages, and got so excited at being free and having a people around that they forgot how to get to their feeding station. I had to guide them there.

So after getting the dogs fed and put outside, I decided to teach my online class rather than confront the pile of cat shit in Jordan's kennel. As I observed last week, my crop of students this cycle is particularly dim and that was frustrating, too.

Eventually, The Wife pointed out that someone would have to clean up the cat shit, so I did that, and put the cat pillow back in the washing machine (we had washed it the previous day to eliminate the smell of cat urine) and the rinse cycle didn't work.

Then, over breakfast, we played trivia and scrabble. I forgot that the Dodger pitcher whose bobblehead included a bouncing arm was Tommy John (for whom the surgery is named) and then in scrabble, The Wife cleaned my clock. She got two 50-point bonuses in a row, which was quite discouraging. Normally I try and be a good sport but after the first one (which was on a triple word score) it was apparent that I had no realistic hope of winning, and the game was only half done.

My reward for getting my ass waxed in scrabble was an hour of poop patrol out in the back yard. The Wife was nice and kept me company, serving as my spotter. It went faster with her assistance, but picking up dog shit is never a pleasant proposition under the best of circumstances, and while having my wife with me usually makes most circumstances better, this chore is only ever going to become so pleasant.

After that, I discovered that my cell phone had run out of battery and that I had left a smear of dog mess on my shoes.

Then, I sat down to try and read the news and blogs. Someone, somewhere, had posed an interesting question about distributive justice and political theory, and I wanted to respond to it. But The Wife wanted to discuss what to do about our friends' wedding. To answer her questions required using Google Maps, and that led me to discover that the internet connection had failed. So that meant fixing the connection, which involved taking apart all of the modem and router assemblies which are in The Wife's office and located in an "out-of-sight" area so she doesn't have to look at a bunch of cords and peripherals.

In the middle of all this, Jordan sat down in another cat bed and pissed in it. Is this cat house-trained at all? Shortly after that, Jordan initiated a vicious fight with Ginger, producing hissing and spitting and emerging with a big hunk of Ginger's fur in her mouth. Makes me wonder if she's turning feral.

After fixing the internet problem, we and wound up quarreling over what to do about the trip to Denver. We were both looking at a variety of travel options at the same time and there were too many different options pending at any one time for either of us to keep things straight. Since we were considering going to Lake Tahoe that same week, we tried to put together a three-leg trip, which is far too complex for any of the travel planning sites we were using. It looks like we'll have to forego our planned trip to Lake Tahoe altogether in order to go to the wedding. Eventually, we agreed for the sake of marital harmony to hire a travel agent tomorrow rather than try and plan things ourselves. The good news is that it looks like we'll be able to fly directly out of Palmdale rather than going to Burbank or Los Angeles.

But, it's now nearly 1:30 and I think maybe my best course of conduct is to just resign myself to today not being a particularly good one and look forward to a better tomorrow.

Tennessee Stud

A few thoughts at Oval Office 2008 about the Fred Thompson phenomenon, for those of you who come here for the politics.

Jessica's Law Goes Too Far

It's no secret that some of the least popular people in America are convicted sex offenders. There are websites that tell you where they live, many of which show their photographs and give detailed information about their convictions. There are restrictions about where they can live. Sometimes it seems as though politicians compete with one another to impose harsher and harsher restrictions on these ex-felons, because there is no political downside to doing so -- there is no lobbying group representing convicted sex offenders -- and every politician wants to "protect children" and be "tough on crime."

Somewhere down that path, however, society crosses a line and it starts to become unreasonable. Florida has crossed that line -- there is nowhere that these people can live other than under a bridge, sleeping in lawn chairs to avoid being bitten by rats. I agree with the proposition that such criminals need to be watched because of the danger of recidivism. But if these people are ever going to re-integrate into society in any meaningful way, there have to be better opportunities available than this. The alternative is that they remain not only pariahs but drains on the social welfare system, for the rest of their lives.

Query as to whether any of this slows down real sex offenders from committing their crimes again -- if they really do suffer from irresistible impulses to do these things, court orders and websites are not going to stop a determined criminal. So sure, exercising unthinking, punitive control over the despised to no particular purpose is lots of fun from a public policy perspective, but at best, this is only part of the solution.

No Punchline For This One

Will eating pancakes with your fellow Christians alleviate your addiction to pornography? Skeptics across the world are curious!

Quite An Unusual Holding

As it turns out, using reclaimed sewage water for snowmaking in a Federally-licensed ski resort violates the Free Exercise Clause.

Umm, the Free Exercise Clause? The one about religion? That’s a rather surprising conclusion to me; I didn’t know there were religions that could not be practiced in the presence of mildly icky environmental decisions and the religions in question appear to be Native American beliefs of some kind or another, since one of the parties to the lawsuit is the Navajo Nation.

So I’ll read the opinion in more detail later and figure out why that might be the case. It may make an interesting footnote to my upcoming class discussing environmental law.

Minefield in New Hampshire

The State of New Hampshire's House of Representatives (the lower house of its bicameral Legislature) voted overwhelmingly to create “spousal unions” for same-sex couples yesterday.

Not known as a hotbed of liberal activism, New Hampshire does nevertheless seem to constantly insist on doing things its own way. It’s been pointed out that the language of the bill itself is a new phrase, “spousal union.” What, then, is the difference between a “domestic partnership,” “civil union,” “spousal union,” “marital union,” and “marriage”? Why do these semantics matter so much?

Perhaps more interesting to note is that New Hampshire is a early stop in the Presidential primary schedule. This action will likely require the candidates of both parties to explain their positions on this issue in a state with a strong libertarian streak running through both of its political parties – creating a huge political minefield for candidates who want to do well in New Hampshire to show “momentum,” but who also do not want to alienate that segment of the electorate that cares so intensely about the semantic issues raised in the previous paragraph.

Atheism Debate

An interesting debate at Donklephant about the existence of God. Not the usual stuff for that site, which is usually about separating the pressure of partisan politics from determining good public policy.

The question is whether reason and faith are incompatible. Ultimately, they are.

Faith is the assertion of the truth of a proposition in the absence of supporting evidence. Reason is the application of logic to evidence in order to ascertain the truth. Faith begins with truth and then disregards evidence. Reason begins with evidence and determines the truth from it, or not.

If the proposition is the existence of the supernatural, what we have is an absence of evidence. Granted, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- but in the absence of evidence, reason cannot lead us to any kind of conclusion and a hypothesis must be downgraded to a mere guess.

The proponent of a proposition is the one who bears the burden of proving its truth. It is not generally possible to prove a negative, so if an atheist offers the proposition, "God does not exist," that results in a logical parlor game with no end -- because God might be infinitely subtle, powerful, and knowledgeable, and therefore able to create and govern the universe in ways that defy the laws of physics (God being able to alter them at will) and therefore escape proof. Just as the "brain in the bottle" proposition is incapable of being disproven, so too is the existence of God. An intellectually honest atheist must admit that he cannot disprove God's existence.

However, a failure to disprove is not the same thing as proof. An atheist's failure to disprove the existence of God is no more meaningful than a phenomenologist's failure to disprove the "brain in a bottle" theory. (By the way, if the brain in the bottle -- who by definition must be you, Loyal Reader -- is the only conscious entity in existence, that means you are God, and God is delusional. a very happy ending to that story, is it?) So it does no good to the debate to say that an atheist can't disprove God's existence. That merely means that God might exist; it says nothing about the likelihood of God's existence. There could be a .00000001% chance of his existence, or a 99.9999999% chance of his existence, and we have no way of knowing from this parlor game where on that continuum the true probability lies. But the proposition of God's certain existence must be advanced by the theist or the debate ends there, inconclusively.

So, the burden shifts and now the theist says, "God exists." The honest atheist's response should not be, "No, he doesn't;" instead, it should be, "What's your proof?" If the theist's desire is to convince the atheist of the proof of the proposition, his response to that challenge can only be a citation of some fact that is objectively verifiable. The theist will either succeed or fail in offering such a fact.

In theory, if the theist could identify objectively verifiable facts that do demonstrate the existence of God, the theist has reasoned himself out of the realm of faith entirely. Now, do not need faith to know that my car is painted green or that my dog has once again eaten the toilet paper. I have evidence of these facts. Let's sidestep the problem of using sense evidence as reliable facts, please, as assume that indeed the car and the toilet paper and the dog do exist and that I am accurately sensing the existence of these things.

Doing this is that it renders God subject to objectively verifiable facts and evidence, and transforms God from a supernatural to a natural entity -- and thereby eliminating his divinity. So in objectively proving God's existence, the theist destroys God. Again, not a happy ending to the theist's struggle.

Conversely, if the theist's desire is to assert the true nature of religion, the theist avoids that debate entirely and replies to the atheist's demand for proof with a statement like, "God's existence is incapable of being proven. You just have to take it on faith." This the atheist will refuse to do and thus ends the debate. Neither the atheist nor the theist have changed their minds because neither has offered any reason for the other to do so.

The existence of God is simply not provable by use of reason. It can only be supported by faith. Faith and reason, although they can be partially reconciled through the use of sophistry, are ultimately incompatible. Accepting the existence of God is by definition not an act of reason. One's choice is whether to subliminate one's reason to one's emotional desire for God to exist, or not.

I choose "not."

I Suppose He Wants A Nobel Prize For This

Iran has found yet another way to polarize world opinion and engage in self-aggrandizement. In one of the more transparent tissues of spin I can recall, the government of Iran has "pardoned" the 15 British sailors and marines and promised to return them to the British Embassy safely as a "gift to the British people." Happy Persian New Year, Your Majesty!

Why, one wonders, did need a pardon? They didn't intrude on Iranian waters. They were operating under a U.N. mandate for military action. They did nothing wrong and were arrested and held hostage for two weeks. Although the announcement has been made that they would be released "quickly," CNN is currently reporting that their release is "planned" for sometime tomorrow.

In the meantime, the Iranian kid who led the arrest is getting a medal for bravery and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is acting as though this "gift" is a magnanimous gesture of Iranian desire for peace and international cooperation. The presence of three U.S. aircraft carrier groups off of his shores had nothing to do with Iran's decision to back down, oh no!

You parents out there, tell me what you would think of this statement: "Daddy, Daddy! I took all of Mommy's jewelry out of her dresser and put it in the kitchen sink, but you should give me a cookie because I put it all back later." You don't reward wrongful conduct with praise and adulation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it looks like war will be averted. But once the sailors are safely home, I sincerely hope that the sailors tell everyone all about the coercion that was really going on, and that Prime Minister Tony Blair extends an invitation to President Ahmadinejad to kiss the Queen's wrinkly royal ass.

An Inland California Travelogue

I woke up very early this morning to make an appearance on the morning calendar in Kern County Superior Court. To get there, I drove through several permutations of California’s amazingly varied topography. Sadly, I did not have my camera with me so I have no pictures. Loyal Readers will have to use their imaginations based on my descriptions.

Of course, I begin my day in the Antelope Valley, which is not really a valley at all but a triangle-shaped plateau representing the western edge of the Mojave Desert. These days, it is adorned with more housing developments than anything else, but driving west along highway 138, I se more of its normal state since the rainy season is now past. It is not lifeless, although at first glance it can appear nearly so. Manzanita and juniper bushes abound, and in areas that have not been cleared for housing or farming, so do Joshua trees. Some Joshua trees are in bloom; like their genetic relatives the yuccas, their blooms are long stalks of white flowers. Big-eared jackrabbits run across the road many times. To my great pleasure, I see a whole family of roadrunners darting from one side of the road to another. This after only complaining on Sunday to The Wife that there didn’t seem to be any roadrunners in the area anymore – I’m very pleased to be proven wrong.

Upon reaching the Frazier Park/Gorman area, I enter the Tejon Pass, where the Santa Susanna Mountains meet the Tehachapi Range. This is definitely the one week out of the year to be there – there has been enough rainfall that the mountains are green with fresh grass and lots of trees are in bloom. (Loyal Readers from, say, Tennessee may take the greenness of mountains and the presence of vegetation on them for granted. But eleven months out of the year, the grasses are dormant and are a dull, dirty gold color.) The steepness and rugged beauty of these mountains is difficult to overstate – many of them have sheer cliffs and many more have steep rises with tops rounded by the fierce winds. There are natural streams and lakes in the mountains, augmented by the hand of Man to provide water for the thirsty city to our south. Along the way, I pass by Quail Lake (which is very low at the moment) and Lebec Lake (which Google Earth calls “Castac Lake” but which I think is too confusing a name with nearby Castaic Lake). The trip through the scenic Tejon Pass is far too brief for my preference, and ends at the Grapevine Grade, a steep downhill descent out of the mountains.

From there, the scenery changes dramatically and suddenly. I am now in California’s Central Valley, a mostly agricultural area. At over 42,750 square miles in size, the Central Valley is the same size as the entire state of Virginia. It is the salad bar of the world. All manner of fruits, vegetables, and nuts are grown here and there is a good chance that no matter where you are in the United States, you are eating food from this part of the world on a regular basis. The southern end of the valley is also an oil-producing region, and it is quite common to see a field of beans or an orange grove studded with the rocking hammers of oil wells. There is always dust and haze in the air, and often in this area there can be found the remnants of the tense Tule fog that further north obstructs visibility so badly that driving becomes impossible. Within a few miles of the Grapevine, I have lost sight of the 7,000 foot high mountains that surround the valley floor. I drive past trucks of all sizes through fields of cotton, oranges, grapes, almonds, dates, rice, cherries, celery, broccoli, cabbage, and lemons. The noxious smells of diesel exhaust, raw petroleum, and steer manure permeates everything, even with my car’s air conditioner system set to recycle.

Bakersfield is the regional urban center of the southern valley. I am forcefully reminded of Knoxville – the same kinds of stores and restaurants are here (including places like Sonic and Mimi’s Café, which I’ve not seen anywhere else in the “Southland”) and the same sort of randomness to its urban layout once the central core of the “downtown” area is left behind. (However, there are about half again as many people in Bakersfield as there are in Knoxville.) Bakersfield calls itself California’s Capital of Country Music. There is heavy traffic during the morning rush hour, and woefully inadequate infrastructure to handle it. A major rail route runs directly through the middle of the city and not all the streets have overpasses or underpasses to permit traffic to flow freely. I drive by Bakersfield High School, jammed between the busiest street in the city and the rail tracks, with a large image of its mascot (the “Drillers”) on the side of its auditorium. The petroleum-manure smell persists even here in the middle of the city. I find the center of the city, park and walk a block to court to make my appearance. In court, the judge moves lazily through his calendar and speaks with what sounds like a well-muted Appalachian lilt. The judge rules against me, in favor of a local, despite the absence of any apparent merit to the position he has taken in response to my motion, although he is very courteous to me. It really does feel like Knoxville, 2,000 miles away.

To vary my trip, I leave on the eastbound Highway 58. I drive through east Bakersfield’s industrial zone and through the foothills of the mountains before ascending into the Tehachapi Mountains. These, too, are steep mountains with forbidding rock outcrops, but blessed at this time of year by fresh rains and a coat of inviting, lush green. The cattle grazing in the ranches are obviously enjoying fresh greens, when they are not laying down to rest in the shade of the thousands of oak trees that stud the mountainside. As my route ascends into the mountains, I notice that the trees all grow on only the west slopes of the mountains; the east slopes are nearly bare of trees. This is a natural phenomenon, not an artificial one; I wonder what process makes that happen. The forest thickens and varies, with pines and firs mixing in with the oaks and sycamores. There is still snow in the very upper reaches of the Tehachapis, although only in the valleys near the peaks of the mountains on their northern faces where it is never exposed to the direct rays of the sun. I am reminded of the cinematography of the Shire and the Misty Mountains from the Lord of the Rings movies.

The terrain changes as I near the city of Tehachapi, which sits on a plateau within the mountain range. There, I pass an impressive mining operation to my left and drive past an immense farm of windmills. The mine is part of the Monolith Cement Works, which provided the concrete that today is Hoover Dam. It certainly looks as though Monolith Mining has removed about half of an entire mountain. There are at least four sizes of the three-armed pinwheels, and most are operating today, keeping the skyline in constant hypnotic motion. The landscape begins to yellow as I drive downslope towards Mojave. Gradually but steadily, the quantity and quality of the vegetation declines as I move into the Mojave Desert.

Now, again, there are sagebrush, tumbleweeds, and Joshua trees along with the poverty grasses capable of surviving the long dormant period between rains and relentless winds of the desert. This area of the desert is even more barren than the Antelope Valley region; there are wider spaces with fewer trees and bushes, and such that survive here are shorter and stouter. The land is sandy and brown. The sky is immense, and the view goes until the earth curves away from my view, revealing the remainder of the mountain range to my left, curving to the north to become the mighty Sierra Nevadas. Ahead is a flat, empty plain of the sort Dante wrote about centuries ago; it may not be particularly warm outside just yet (it is only early April, after all) but it looks miserably hot anyway. Here, mankind has come to dwell and build the future at the same place it leaves the derelict remains of its industrial past – the "Mojave Spaceport" is the fancy name for the new use given to the old airplane graveyard, within a few miles of the other half of the wind farm, and also within a few miles of some dilapidated old dwellings and roadfront businesses that have been left unrefurbished since the 1950’s, all plopped here in the nearly-lunar landscape of southern Kern County.

Turning south, I drive home, again watching a gradual change in the landscape back to its familiar blend vegetation in the Antelope Valley proper, divided as it is by a regular graph-paper grid design of unimaginatively named roads and streets. Over the last five miles of my drive, the desert swiftly evolves into the suburban sprawl of Lancaster. It is 11:30 and I meet my colleagues for lunch and then back to the office. My route has taken me roughly in a square, covering circuit of a bit more than one-half a degree of latitude and almost a full degree of longitude. My travel time along Highways 138 and 99 into Bakersfield has taken me effectively the same amount of time as my travel along Highways 58 and 14 back to a point within a few miles of where I started.

Movies and TV

The DVR program guide went out a few days ago. Rebooting hasn't fixed it. And Time Warner can't fix it. We haven't had the ability to see what's on TV except by actually watching the channels. The recording function doesn't work. So The Wife wants to cancel the cable TV altogether. I'm beginning to think that's a good idea myself.

On a perhaps related note, "Knife Set" won last week's poll for the best wedding gift of all my admittedly unoriginal ideas. So now, I'm wondering about movies.

We just saw a pretty good one last week -- a manly libertarian action fantasy -- so that whetted my appetite for movies. Looking ahead to the big movies for the summer, I notice almost all of them are sequels. So, what do you Loyal Readers think will be good this summer?

Mohawk

Since when did Mohawks become fashionable again? I've seen several dudes out and about sporting the 'Hawk, some with the hair grown out into ponytails. Mostly white dudes and Latinos, not so much the Asians or African-Americans. Even more odd are the people who give Mohawk haircuts to their young boys, including some infants. They sometimes get a semi-Hawk, which is when the hair is cut really short except for the strip down the middle, which is allowed to grow longer and often combed up towards the centerline on either side. I don't get it. At all.

Cultural Miscalculation

I was given a very intriguing idea today. The U.S. and its European allies have been, until quite recently, quarreling about continued military activity in Iraq. But for the past week or so, there has been remarkable solidarity amongst the NATO nations and those in their immediate orbit. This galvanizing effect, of course, has been an immediate and nearly reflexive closing of ranks to support the British in their righteous demand for the immediate and safe return of their young men and women seized illegally in Iraqi waters by an overreaching Iranian military and held as human shields by an unwise and apparently desperate regime.

Seeing a deep and powerful disagreement between the U.S. and European countries, and seeing substantial dissent and disagreement within these nations played out in the media, perhaps the Iranians sensed a chance to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies, and to weaken the political resolve of all of the western nations to continue their involvement in the Persian Gulf.

George W. Bush and his coterie of advisers have fallen under great criticism for failing to appreciate the cultural structure of Iraq prior to invading it. But there is nothing unique about America and its leaders in projecting their own cultural view of the world elsewhere, and perhaps the Iranian leadership is similarly guilty of misapprehending the nature of western nations' relationships to one another.

Is it possible that to the Persians who are calling the shots in Tehran misunderstand the nature of Western culture? That they misunderstood the deep and passionate disagreements amongst us westerners for a genuine fragmentation of our society? That they really thought that we would not stand shoulder to shoulder with the British in demanding the return of their sailors? That we would not take the seizure of British sailors as personally as we would the seizure of our own?

I can't think of any enduring international alliances that the Iranians have made since 1979, when the mullahs took power. They have made short-term arrangements of convenience with other Muslim nations, and Iran is a member of OPEC. But there is also a sense that Iran has a history and a tradition of its own; Iranians are quick to point to the long and rich tradition of Persian culture and power. They really seem to have a go-it-alone, every-nation-for-itself outlook on geopolitics -- Kissinger's realpolitik taken to its logical extreme.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that Persians lack enduring and powerful friendships, or that such friendships cannot take place on a larger than individual scale. I've had friends of Persian descent who have been intensely loyal and good people. Of course, the people my age or younger are culturally American, having been raised here; their parents and older siblings who spent substantial time in Iran tend to have done so prior to the revolution, and to have left during or shortly after 1979. So perhaps my experience with Persians is drawing from a limited sample unrepresentative of the kinds of people who live and vote and worship and make political decisions in Iran today.

But I am suggesting that there is a very atomized world view, at least at the high levels of Iranian policymaking. Without offering a normative evaluation, it is nevertheless a fact that there are some significant cultural differences between the Middle East and Europe (and here I am including the United States and Canada as, essentially, European in our outlook on the world, due to the powerful cultural heritage of our European ancestors). Just as we may have miscalculated the Iraqis' sense of nationalism relative to their religious affinities, so too the Iranians may have miscalculated the nature of political disagreements within and between European democracies. We have figured out how to disagree -- intensely, sometimes -- and not balkanize; there are still things that can unite rather than divide.

Of course, I still hope that there will be a political and diplomatic resolution to the crisis. War with Iran is the last thing any sane Westerner would want. Not for fear of loss -- but for fear of what would come after the victory. The past four years have been a horrific lesson in the intensity of problems that arise after toppling an unfriendly but strong regime. The upcoming forty years may well prove the terrible effect of our diminished reputation within these national and religious quarters, and the last thing we need is to aggravate that hatred. But we also are both morally in the right to demand our people back -- and three aircraft carrier groups on high alert just outside of Iranian maritime claims later, it should be readily apparent that we consider the freedom of those sailors as valuable as if they wore the Stars and Stripes instead of the Union Jack.

It is Iran that needs to back down and not the West. They can claim that the "apologies" of the sailors themselves are sufficient to "save face," and let them go. That's the only way out of the terrible brinksmanship going on now that I can see.

Poppy Reserve

The Wife and I went to see a movie (Shooter, which we both enjoyed) and then with a little bit of extra time, we took a trip out to the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve. Unfortunately, the rains came too late and too little this year, and there were almost no poppies. We found the one poppy that was out there (pictured) and lots of lizards. But there were very few wildflowers of any kind. So that was kind of a disappointment. But it was still a nice trip to take with The Wife, even if we didn't get to see a whole lot of what we went out there for.

Really Bad Weekend Online

My online students for this class are not nearly as good as my last one. This weekend, I think most of them had big, heaping bowls of Stupid for breakfast. None of them seems able to solve a relatively simple problem. What's more, they're not talking to one another to work out the problem. So after having lots of stupid for breakfast, my guess is that they washed it down with some hot, steaming cups of Lame.

Give me live graduate students any day. Like the ones I'll be teaching tomorrow.

She Got "Riviera" on The Last Turn

This morning's Scrabble score:

The Wife	TL
10	44
26	14
11	22
24	29
15	14
9	16
16	22
40	17
38	31
14	15
35	26
15	19
74	-8
Total: 327	Total: 261

Grrr.

Official Language

I've resisted the idea of English being the official language of the United States in the past. While it's certainly the dominant language, this is a nation of immigrants and people bring their cultures with them here. Part of those cultures include their languages. We aren't Englishmen anymore; we are our own nation and we can decide for ourselves what languages we want to speak. That said, I am fluent only in English and I do not have enough Spanish to do more than fumble my way through basic situations like asking for directions or ordering food in a restaurant; I have a bit of very stale high school French, which was enough to cause Parisians to look at me with a mixture of contempt and sadness before volunteering "I have English, can I help you?"

I've a stronger command of Italian, from some study as an adult and experience traveling to Italy to visit and interact with family there. Of course, there isn't much demand for Italian in the U.S., but I can borrow from Italian when talking with a Spanish speaker and that seems to work out pretty well most of the time. But you can't live in California for long without encountering not only Spanish but also Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, and a variety of other languages, and you just have to learn to deal with it.

I also notice that I am in a distinct minority regarding the English-as-official-language issue. Most (English-speaking) Americans seem to feel quite strongly that we need an official language and that it might as well be the dominant language that most Americans speak. So there are official language laws in most states, including California. I am under explicit instructions when I sit as a pro tem judge to only conduct the proceedings in English, even if I know enough of the other language to communicate with litigants in a different tongue. (I've seen "real" judges break this rule all the time, particularly with Spanish.) So that's the law, and I have to accept that even if I would prefer the law be other than it is.

So it's delicious for me to see this story about Italian -- the non-English language I know best -- finally becoming, in 2006, the official language of Italy. Like the U.S., Italy is contending with issues arising out of immigration from other countries; Turks, Poles, Russians, Arabs, and other groups are coming to Italy to seek their fortunes and this displeases some Italians while others like it fine. Like the U.S., there is a very dominant language but many dialects, some so extreme they seem like languages unto themselves. (Sicilians and Venetians can barely understand one another.) And like the U.S., there are other languages spoken within Italy's political boundaries as a matter of tradition even without the influence of recent immigration; French is the dominant language in the Val d'Aosta and German is spoken in some other Alpine regions of the north, and Croatian is seeping in to the area around Trieste.

So the Italians seem to have found the same sort of solution to the same sorts of perceived social problems arising from a multiplicity of languages as most U.S. states. I still say that language is an easily-solved problem and it is sometimes a rather transparent tissue for xenophobia, whether it's in the U.S., Italy, or elsewhere. It's good to learn other languages and be able to speak with others on terms you're not 100% comfortable with; it keeps balance and perspective. But people do have to communicate, too, and this seems to be the way that the issue will be resolved, both here and elsewhere.

How's About Them Sailors Back?