Another Smart Critter

Uno!

For the first time in 131 competitions, a beagle has won the Westminster Dog Show. Fifteen inches long, playful when not performing, and the singer of a heart-melting "ahh-rooooh!" howl when he won earlier rounds of competition, cuter-than-can-be-believed Uno also earned a standing ovation when he won "Best in Show." Here's America's new top dog for you:


All at once now: Awwww!

Whan in Februar The Bishop Doth Speak

This is brilliant. It helps if you've read Chaucer (as will be immediately obvious upon clicking the link).

Potomac Primary (Updated)

The Potomac Primaries tonight settled two rather important points.

First, for the Republicans, the question was whether anti-McCain animosity was so great that GOP voters would pick "anyone but McCain." It wasn't likely, in my estimation, but now we have a resounding "nope." Huckabee is a strictly regional candidate. Virginia is a border state -- it's part Southern, part Mid-Atlantic. Huckabee got 41% and McCain 50%. Huckabee does worse the farther away from the Tennessee River one gets.

Second, for the Democrats... wait. Listen -- do you hear that? That's the sound of desparation from Camp Clinton. There is no doubt anymore that Barack Obama has overtaken Hillary Clinton and is now the front-runner. For many observers, this has been pretty obvious for some time -- but now, anyone's delegate count makes that clear. Superdelegates or not, Obama is ahead of the power curve and Hillary is behind it. Clinton is now campaigning in Texas, of all places, as a last-ditch effort to keep her candidacy viable.

I wonder what her victory strategy is at this point, how she can credibly tell her supporters that she could indeed get the nomination despite obviously having become the #2 choice. Yes, it still appears that the convention will be brokered, but it is becoming readily apparent to everyone that Democrats prefer Obama to Clinton. The superdelegates aren't dumb and there is every reason to believe that most of them will vote for the candidate who they think will first, give the Democrats the best chance of victory in November, and second, best reflect the wishes of the party as a whole.

That candidate will not be Hillary Rodham Clinton, until and unless Obama goes on Jimmy Kimmel and vivisects a puppy.

So although the conventions are months away still, it's about time to start really thinking about Vice-Presidential choices for Obama and McCain.

A little poking around in the history books reveals that only twice before -- in 1920, with Warren G. Harding and in 1960 with John F. Kennedy -- has a sitting Senator been elected President. We're in four our third time in 2008. What's more, this is the first time in American history that a sitting Senator will challenge another sitting Senator for the Presidency.

Update: Rick Moran at Pajamas Media suggests that the reason Hillary is going on is that she has an advantage in big states because of her larger, more well-established machinery. Given that the convention will be brokered, she would be able to make the argument that in November, she can carry those big states. Not an inconsiderable argument. But also not a particularly compelling one, as I see it. You don't need to be a special Democrat to carry California. It's highly unlikley that any Democrat will carry Texas. The fight will be in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Maybe Michigan. Hillary hasn't really proven her ability to carry Florida or Michigan in the primaries -- Obama honored his pledge to not campaign there.

Clinton's Plan "A" was "be inevitable and win every state without competition." Plan "B" was "win big on Super Duper Tuesday." Plan "C" is "win the big states and don't sweat the small stuff for the intervening month." Given that Clinton's Plan "C" has earned praise from Mike DuHaime, the author of Rudy Giuliani's "wait until Florida" strategy, I'm inclined to think that she needs to figure out a Plan "D." Turns out, momentum and the media drumbeat of losing-losing-losing still matters. She's headed down a road that leads her to not losing as badly in Texas and Ohio as she did in Virginia. That's not a path to victory.

Don't Expect An Invite To The Inaugural Ball, Rush

This is not just idiotic, but solipsitic. Rush Limbaugh says "I know I'm widely despised, so that means that by criticizing John McCain, I'm helping the Republican party!" And I'm sure that should Clinton get the nomination, she'll do something so awful that Ann Coulter will switch her allegiance back to McCain.

Growl Umm Numm Numm

I often marvel at how quickly my dog eats her food. It's as though she were starving; she wolfs it down as fast as possible. Whenever there is not a significant price difference, I buy the smaller-sized dog food so that there is less chance that she will choke on her food. I realize that she's very hungry, and lived part of her life as a stray before The Wife and I adopted her from the pound back in Tennessee.

Unfortunately for me, sometimes people resemble their dogs. I caught myself engaged in that kind of behavior today. I had to skip an employee's farewell lunch because I had committed to meet the kids on the mock trial team this afternoon and, frankly, I'd lost track of the fact that today was the day scheduled for that lunch. I like the departing employee just fine, but I was happy to skip the lunch anyway -- gathering twenty people around a table in a restaurant which already has not-so-fast service sounded like a big waste of time. And I wanted to get some work done before I met up with the kids.

So I popped out of the office and grabbed some drive-through (which I'm not thrilled with anyway, as I know it's high-calorie and high-fat, and I'm kind of trying to watch that sort of thing, at least on more days than I don't). Driving back to the office, I got to thinking more about the motion I was working on and what was going to go into it and how I would solve the problems that the case presented. I had actually completely forgotten about the farewell lunch, I was so mentally focused on the motion.

Then, as I'm trying to turn left while taking a swig of my drink, my cell phone rings. I can't get it right away, so I execute the turn and then answer the phone. I can see from the caller ID that it's one of the partners, probably calling me to meet for lunch. I answer the phone but there is no response on the other end -- he's in the restaurant and it's loud, so he can't even hear me. (He lost some of his hearing in Vietnam, where he served in an artillery unit.) So that isn't doing any good. I park the car in the parking lot and grab my stuff.

Now my phone rings with two simultaneous calls because both partners want to know why I'm not at the lunch, and both my hands are full and I need to close and lock the door to my car. And I'd noticed I was almost out of gas, so I realized that I needed to leave work even earlier than I had initially thought, so I could fill up. And I had this great argument floating around in my head that I needed to write down (which I afterwards forgot in the crush of mental input). And I realized that I was skipping the lunch after all, and felt a tiny bit guilty about it. Too much to do all at once. Too much to think about. Information overload; short-term task demand overload; and my puny human brain begins to pressure-cook itself.

By the time I get back to my desk, I'm completely stressed out. So my response is to start wolfing down my food. Think about The Simpsons at dinnertime, too busy shoveling food into their faces to breathe, much less communicate with one another. Big bites and fast chews are also a choking and/or barfing hazard -- and I'm all alone in the office with no one to help me if I were to choke.

Only halfway through my already unhealthy meal do I realize what I'm doing and force myself to stop and pay attention. I'd already explained that I was skipping the lunch; I'd already gotten safely back to my office. It dawned on me all of that sudden that there was no need to gulp down an entire cheeseburger in a single mouthful. All of my other problems from the previous ten minutes had gone away. In fact, I realized that after eating half the burger, that was really probably enough for now anyway, and I set it aside to get back to work on my motion, which will at least mitigate the damage I did to my daily caloric intake versus exercise balance sheet.

The lesson here is, slow down. Eat your food; chew it like a real person and not a starving animal. People are not dogs. If you're an American, chances are good that you're not really that hungry to begin with. I kind of forgot that lesson this afternoon while experiencing short-term stress. Hopefully, I keep it in mind in the future myself.

Penn Says...

...Hillary doesn't have a chance. He knows because he told an offensive joke and didn't get the reaction he expected. Yes, that Penn, one of the guys who makes Bullshit! and does magic shows in Vegas. Well, what works in a Vegas lounge act is as good a pulse on the popular culture as any, I suppose.

The Chambersburg Billboard War of 2007-2008

The small city of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania has become the latest battleground in the apparently silly but ultimately consequential discussion about religion in public life in America. The whole thing started with a series of advertisements, which I first saw back when I lived in Knoxville, that look something like this:


Now, I have to admit, that when I first saw the billboard, my immediate response was a sarcastic "...unless he's gay." But I corrected myself; that was ungenerous. There are plenty of Christians who really do practice the idea of "hate the sin, love the sinner," and can at once embrace and love someone while still firmly maintaining that something they do is wrong. That must be difficult to do, and it's something to admire in those people. My sarcasm came from the fact that so many self-identified Christians seem unable to do this and instead are very clear that they hate the sinner, too.

So, such a billboard went up in Chambersburg. Like pretty much everywhere else in the country, there were atheists in the community who saw the sign and thought that they were being preached to and didn't care for that very much. So one guy bought a few weeks of billboard time, and he ran this ad by way of a donation to the Freedom From Religion Foundation:


This caused a bit of a stir out there in rural Pennsylvania. A very small bit, from what I can tell, from the sorts of people who would have been offended by any reminder that there were nonbelievers within their midst. Although "only a few calls" complaining about this ad were placed, the billboard company nevertheless took down that sign as soon as their contractual obligation was completed, and replaced it with this one:


The bottom line of the text is a bit difficult to read, but it is: "The previous sign posted at this location does not reflect the values or morals of our company. Thank you." So the company lost no time trying to separate itself from its customer, despite what seems to have been only a very few complaints.

But this was not enough. After hearing about the local controversy, a religious advocacy group got involved, and it bought another billboard in Chambersburg, just down the street from the original board that had shown the three signs illustrated above. This one, escalating the dispute dramatically, looks like this:


And that's where matters stand right now. Let's recap the story in four steps:

1. Christian advocacy group buys billboard as part of national pro-God advertising campaign, containing innocuous and morally positive message.

2. Local atheist has chip knocked off his shoulder, buys billboard suggesting that religion might not be so great after all.

3. Local Christians have chips knocked off their shoulders, complain. Billboard company executives recoil in terror from controversy and use company assets to proclaim that they aren't like atheists.

4. National advocacy group escalates local dispute by saying something seriously offensive about atheists (and promptly dress themselves up in the clothes of righteous moral indignation, as you might expect).

Now, I'm tempted to say that the line really got crossed at step #4, and not before. But then again, I would. I can't pretend to be entirely objective about this. What I can do is to suggest that what's going on is a trading of outrages is going on, being exploited by political advocacy groups. Let's at least understand that. And once we do understand that this is a manufactured controversy in which both sides find mutual benefit in antagonizing one another, we can take a step back, deny the wannabe politicians on both sides of the spat their money, and ask ourselves a few searching questions.

Religionists: Is it really appropriate to make a mass-media display of religiosity like this? In particular for the Christians, didn't Jesus exhort his followers to pray in secret rather than in public? And from a practical point of view, you must realize that a preachy outreach program like this will both gain some converts and turn some people off to the point that they will reject the religion. Do you really have a net gain of converts to the religion as opposed to away from it by doing this? What do you hope to accomplish, other than demonizing atheists?

Atheists: What on earth is so bad about telling people to be nice to their neighbors? If it's done in God's name by people who believe in God (as is their right), why is that so awful? And aren't the religious advocates within their rights to buy advertising if they think it's to their advantage to do so? Are we going to win "converts" to atheism with a mass-media campaign anyway -- aren't atheists better off explaining themselves and their world view on an individual basis and letting people make up their own minds? What do we hope to accomplish with a PR campaign anyway?

With all that said, I think it's clear that the last sign has gone too far for anyone's comfort. The final sign conflates patriotism with religion. Let us all acknowledge that these are different things. Atheists do not hate America -- no more than Christians do. I suspect a Christian would enthusiastically agree with the proposition that Jesus Christ is the best hope for the salvation of all humanity, and the proper object of a Christian's ultimate love and loyalty. If that statement is true, then the United States of America is not the best hope for the salvation of all humanity, and the proper object of a Christian's ultimate love and loyalty. Believing in Jesus is not incompatible, though, with believing that the United States is a pretty damn special place and that it is (for the most part) engaged in morally praiseworthy activities as a nation, as a government, and as a people.

So too does a lack of belief in God not automatically equate to a lack of patriotism. The greatest martyr to freedom in America's history, Abraham Lincoln, overtly eschewed religion in general and specifically Christianity, as attested to by many of his closest friends after his death. Lots of atheists have served in the military and made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. Their deaths were as motivated by love of country as those of their Christian and Jewish comrades; their memories are as worthy of our honor and respect today. Yes, there are too atheists in foxholes; so I am assured by an atheist who really was in a foxhole in Vietnam during an artillery barrage. Pat Tillman was an atheist and he walked away from a million-dollar-a-year NFL contract to join the Army; he got killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire. What that any less noble than a believer's decision to serve? How does his lack of faith diminish the impact of his story or the value of his service?

I think that the idea of a discussion about the proper role of religion in our collective public life is both healthy and overdue. But name-calling and tribalism aren't good tools to advance that debate, and the whole billboard thing, from start to finish, has left the discussion poorer. So while I suggested before that the final sign crossed a line from merely challenging to openly insulting, perhaps the real problem was the first one, for officiously preaching to an audience that maybe didn't care to hear the message in the first place. At minimum, I take this as an object lesson that humanists need to adopt a different approach to their public relations efforts than do religionists, because this sort of tit-for-tat makes everyone involved looks juvenile.

Much Ado About A Mediocre Movie

Apparently, there is a gigantic shitstorm of social criticism about Juno -- there is backlash against the movie and counter-backlash against the backlash. I thought it started out as a humorously funny movie which got far too weepy for my taste at the end. I didn't think it was anything particularly remarkable aside from stepping into the normally-distasteful ground of teen pregnancy with some level of grace and acceptance.

I didn't think the movie was remarkable enough to review here in this blog. I figured some very morally uptight people would get upset because the movie "glamorized" teen pregnancy when in fact it did nothing of the sort -- indeed, it looked like a generally unpleasant experience for the protagonist. But aside from that, the movie left my consciousness as quickly as a poorly-told joke.

Apparently, I was living in a cave.

Who in the hell nominated Juno for Best Picture anyway? Who thought that this movie belongs in the same pantheon as The Lord of the Rings, Schindler's List, Amadeus, Gandhi, The Godfather, and Casablanca? Juno doesn't hold a candle these movies. Juno, on the other hand, would have been an unusually good made-for-TV movie, and about average for a made-for-HBO movie. It's not that Juno was particularly awful, it's just that it wasn't that great.

Nominating Juno for Best Picture is like saying the greatest rock bands ever were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Nirvana, and Steeley Dan. "Hey, Nineteen" is a nice enough song but it isn't exactly "Sympathy for the Devil."

Nominating Juno for Best Picture is like saying America's greatest leaders were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George H.W. Bush the Elder. In retrospect, Bush the Elder doesn't seem like he was so bad (especially compared to his son), but he was kind of a weenie and really just not all that remarkable one way or the other. Even his fans wouldn't suggest carving his face into Mount Rushmore.

The 2005 Seattle Seahawks do not deserve to be mentioned in a list of "greatest NFL teams of all time." They were okay; they at least made it to the Super Bowl, which is more than 30 other teams that year could say, but it would be a really tough sell to say they're among the greatest of all time.

Pistachio does not make that many peoples' "top five" lists for favorite flavors of ice cream. I doubt that butterscotch does, either.

The most interesting cities to visit in Europe may include London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Prague, and a few others. But for most people, that list probably doesn't include Copenhagen. Not that there's anything particularly unpleasant about Copenhagen, and I'm sure if you're a tourist there you'll find some interesting things to see and do. But Copenhagen isn't the sort of destination that leaps to the American mind when her friend says "I'm taking a trip to Europe." That's Juno -- the Copenhagen of movies released in 2007.

Juno is a Ford Taurus of a movie -- it was okay, it got the job done, but nothing to get all that excited about one way or the other. It raised few social issues worthy of commentary; there were no particular insights into the human condition that it offered; it did nothing particularly new from an artistic sense. On the scale of movie greatness, with the best being "A movie that will forever change filmmaking" to the worst being Manos, The Hands of Fate, this was a pretty ordinary movie.

So what are the other movies nominated? Atonement. No Country For Old Men. Michael Clayton. There Will Be Blood. I haven't seen any of these.

But it looks like this year's set of nominees is unusually weak so maybe the real reason Juno was nominated is it really was one of the five best movies of the year -- not because it was so good but because everything else wasn't even mediocre. Was it that bad a year in Hollywood that this was up there with the cream of the crop?

Hitchens Against UK Sharia

More discussion of the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks from Christopher Hitchens here. Hitchens provides an extreme example of why the public interest should be taken into account when a court decides whether or not to enforce a "parallel" court that incorporates religious ideas into its decision matrix:

Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear. She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight. What she ought to be able to say is, "I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced." But what she will often be told is, "Your problem is better handled within the community." And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country's official spiritual authority.

This young woman would not have "opted in" to the religious court, and even if she had, there is ample reason to believe that such an "opt-in" would have been neither knowing nor voluntary. This young woman would have come to Britain with little, if any, knowledge about the extent to which British law protects against against the sort of domestic violence described in the story; she would naturally assume that the law there would be similar to that of her home and believe herself to be without a remedy. She would have been confronted with a number of forms upon entering the UK, which she would have signed without really understanding what they were and likely without any functional knowledge of English.

More importantly, though, Hitchens' example illustrates exactly the sort of danger that I wrote about, and that others writing on the issue have written about. In a court's eager rush to approve and encourage extrajudicial resolution of disputes, courts should not turn a blind eye to gross injustices done in the name of following religious laws -- and then enforcing them as the equivalent of laws of general application.

Hitchens is also right to point out that while this sort of situation seems very unlikely to arise in a Christian or Jewish "court," a Muslim "court" would not engender the same kind of trust on the part of the general population -- would a Sharia "court" come to the aid of this young woman? I have my doubts. That's not to say that a general civil or criminal court would be much better, but at least those courts would take her side and, potentially and eventually, get law enforcement personnel involved on the ground before she really is killed. So if we aren't going to trust Muslims with these courts, that means that no religion can have such courts.

Mixing church and state is not a good idea. The idea of mixing not just the state but particularly the courts with religion produces a hybrid which becomes more offensive the more I consider it.

Delegate Counts

Presidential primaries are not about winning votes, they're about winning delegates to the party's conventions. I still think, therefore, that Barack Obama won New Hampshire, not Hillary Clinton, because he got more delegates from that state than she did. Annoyingly, though, no one seems to have a good bead on what the exact delegate count is. While some news organizations apologize for this and others simply acknowledge it, the result is wildly differing vote counts based on who you go to for results. As of this morning, I've found these delegate counts for the race to the Democratic nomination:

Source	Clinton	Obama
CNN	1,148	1,121
Democratic Convention Watch	1,108	1,065
Fox News	1,136	1,108
Los Angeles Fish Wrapper	1,136	1,108
New York Times	912	741
MSNBC	859	943
Washington Post	1,136	1,108

In particular, note that MSNBC has Obama leading, while the rest have Clinton ahead -- all by slim margins, except for the Gray Lady, which claims to only count committed delegates and its count shows Clinton clearly but not comfortably ahead. I don't know why the Fish Wrapper, the WaPo, and Fox News, which institutionally do not seem to like one another much, nevertheless have the same count. Perhaps they are drawing from the same reporter or using the same analyst; perhaps they have teamed up on this venture; perhaps it's just a coincidence. But given the wide variance between these information outlets, it's remarkable that they agree at all.

I've heard tell that the AP has the most accurate delegate count. But I don't know how to get at it, unless some other news outlet reprints it from the wire service. The AP website does not have any direct links to the news feed, which makes sense, since the AP is in the business of selling its news, rather than of using the news to attract eyeballs and then selling advertising.

So what's going on? Who's winning? The right answer is, "No one really knows." Not very satisfying -- but the idea that the Democrats are headed to a brokered convention in Denver, with unelected superdelegates annointing their preferred candidate after meetings in smoke-filled rooms, has got to have Democrats tied up in knots and Republicans dancing little jigs of joy. If the Democrats could get their act together and pick one of these two, they could get back to recovering the huge advantage they would otherwise be enjoying in the general election. As it is, this murky process appears to be playing right into McCain's hands. In the meantime, I don't think anyone, including most Democrats, wants to think that Donna Brazile will be the person who picks our next President. Sure, she gets a vote, but why is she so special?

It's more critical for the Democrats but the same thing is happening for the Republicans; while everyone agrees that McCain is way out in front of Huckabee the exact numbers aren't known there, either.

But I Still Wouldn't Be Able To Buy A Six-Pack Before An NFL Game In Blount County, Tennessee

It's a good thing to see stupid beer regulation laws slowly going off the books. Pennsylvania is considering getting rid of its "case laws," which require that beer stores (which are, as I take it, different than liquor stores) only sell beer by the case -- only "taverns" can sell six-packs, and then only two at a time. To make it even more stupid, there is no time limit on the turnaround time between a single customer's visits to buy these six-packs, so you can buy two six-packs at a tavern, put them in your car, and walk right back in and buy two more. For those of us who might like to sample different varieties of beer, this is an inconvenience that does not seem to advance any identifiable state purpose. Pennsylvanians should be happy that these stupid laws are going to go away soon.

Which, of course, is how I felt about the beer and liquor laws in Tennessee. Grocery stores could sell beer but not wine. Liquor stores couldn't sell beer. In Blount County, I couldn't buy a six-pack of beer before noon on Sunday. (But I could do so in Knox County, that notorious den of debauchery and vice.)

Those laws did little to reduce overall alcohol consumption, so far as I could tell; only guys like me who had failed to plan ahead to buy their beer in time for the game were slowed down. But I wasn't going to church anyway (the game was on, after all) and I don't think the state should be in the business of encouraging people to go to church in the first place (there should be no penalty for going to church, but not penalizing conduct is not the same thing as encouraging it).

I like the California system much better -- the store can carry anything it likes, based on what it thinks its customers want to buy. Convenient, encourages commerce and thus collection of taxes, and it trusts grownups to make their own decisions.

Islamic Law Applies In The U.S.

Seems that my thoughts yesterday about the potential for a U.S. court to enforce Islamic law were shared by Prof. Eugene Volokh. It was, I thought, one of my more thought-provoking finds recently. Prof. Volokh, however, has considerably more research tools (and, I'm quite sure, skill) and he found three instances of U.S. courts enforcing arbitration agreements in which the parties had agreed to apply Sharia law and have the dispute heard before a Muslim arbitrator. The first, in Texas, applied Sharia principles to a family law dispute. The second, in Minnesota, distributed a small business according to the decisions of a Muslim court. The third, in New Jersey, I haven't found a link to and haven't read.

In both of the cases that I read, the courts asked to affirm the decisions of the Muslim religious arbitrators did not spend any appreciable time or effort attempting to determine whether the Sharia law applied was fundamentally fair or legitimate. Nor were any public interest kinds of concerns a factor. With respect to the distribution of the small business, that may well have been appropriate. But since the child custody dispute in Texas involved the welfare of the children of the divorcing couple, that would seem to have some public interest issues that I think a court ought not to simply delegate to an arbitrator, whether the arbitrator is religious or not. (Perhaps Texas law does not concern itself with the welfare of the child in a child custody dispute; I am neither a family lawyer nor versed in Texas law enough to know for sure.)

The courts in these case seem to be saying to the litigants, "Hey, you picked this as the way to resolve your disputes and now you have to live with the results. If you don't want to have religious courts enforce their decisions, don't agree to submit your decisions to them." This is a defensible position, and perhaps the concerns I have raised would be more timely addressed should a party resist submitting the dispute to religious arbitration in the first place rather than on appeal from an adverse decision, once reached.

But what I had feared seems to be indicated by these opinions -- they are purely procedural in nature, and concerned with matters like the voluntariness of the parties entering into the agreement and the court's jurisdiction over the agreement, rather than 1) the substantive fairness of the arbitration mechanism, 2) the effect on the public interest of enforcing religiously-derived agreements; or 3) whether doing so constitutes an (indirect, perhaps) establishment of these religious tribunals as courts exercising government power. Maybe my concerns are ultimately less important than the need to provide for and allow people the ability to enter into arbitration agreements of any nature and thus relieve the burden on the courts, and there are lots of reasons why people might choose to have their disputes resolved along religious lines rather than in the regular courts.

Creation Myths

Today, I watched Chinatown with a movie club. What a great movie that was. Every detail fits nicely into place. The movie club analyzes the movies from a psychological perspective, and more specifically from a Freudian perspective. But I have interest in history and mythology, so I kept on seeing the movie from a different direction at the same time that the Oedipal issues (both classical and psychological) were being raised.

Because in addition to being a story about what happens when one is unable to resolve id and superego (not an angle I had considered before), Chinatown is also a dark retelling of the creation myth of Los Angeles. The prevailing mythology is that Los Angeles was a small town on the edge of the desert and the ocean, which would have been condemned to obscurity had not a small group of men diverted water from other parts of California in order to let the city grow (and to enrich themselves in the process).

Chinatown takes the story a step further, and splits the grand architect of that water diversion into two characters -- one good, one bad. In real life, William Mulholland was both a supremely skilled engineer and a great visionary of what Los Angeles could become, and also a cynical corruptor of power and a man motivated by a seemingly unbounded cupdity for money and influence. By taking the good and bad elements of the real man and portraying the personification of his dark side as supremely powerful, Chinatown asks the viewer, particular the viewer who has personal connections to Los Angeles, to come to grips with the concept that the city was born and grew prosperous not because of the industry or creativity of its people, or because of the blessings of its geography and natural abundance. Rather, if you poke around the roots of Los Angeles you will find illicit sex, prostitution, theft, deception, and corruption.

But the whole story also reminded me of a legend from my study of classical history. One of the many parts of the Roman creation myth is the Rape of the Sabine Women. It's important to know that the word rapare in Latin means "to take" or "to steal." The story goes like this -- the Romans were encamped in their new city, a band of warriors under Romulus' leadership. Knowing that they would need to start families to become a city rather than an encampment, Romulus made overtures to the nearby tribe of the Sabines to form alliances by way of his men marrying the Sabines' daughters. The Sabine king rebuffed Romulus' suggestion, but agreed to have a joint religious celebration with the Romans. After much wine had been drunk, Romulus gave a signal, and his men attacked and repelled the Sabine men, and then they abducted the Sabine women back to their encampment on what is today the Palatine Hill. There, Romulus spoke to each of the women and promised them that they would have property rights and would be mothers to free men, and the women agreed to stay on with their new husbands. The Sabines then came and began to make war on the Romans, but upon seeing their daughters call out to their husbands in battle, they despaired and retired from the field.

This is a rather curious myth to serve as a foundation for a great city. Don't forget, the other major part of the Romans' creation myths about their own civilization was that their ancestors were the losers of the Battle of Troy, who had fled that great city as it was being sacked by the Romans. So the Romans saw themselves the children of the losers of one of history's great battles, and the product of an act of gross deception, violence, and kidnapping. What does this tell us about Romans?

And in that light, what does Chinatown tell us about Los Angeles?

Another message of Chinatown is that because of this, it is not good to dwell overmuch on the past, either historical or personal in nature, because only pain and death will come of it. In that sense, the movie offers an emotional justification for what seems at times to be Los Angeles' intermittent rejection of its own past. Where Socrates enjoined that an unexamined life was not worth living, Chinatown says that the examined life is an unhappy one. I have to think that is not right. If it's a choice between the red pill and the blue pill in The Matrix, that's no choice at all; reality is, by virtue of being real, infinitely preferable to a pleasant delusion. I get the idea, though, that Roman Polanski might have chosen to go back to sleep.

But the fact that Los Angeles was built by land developers does not, by itself, make it a bad place, nor does it make the developers bad men. They may have been bad for other reasons, but most of them, like their king William Mulholland, were both very good and very bad. At the end of the day, these figures from history, like the myths that surround them and the reality they were instrumental in creating, are ambiguous. Which is why their stories are so beguiling.

The Weakening Dollar, or, Looks Like A Long Time Until We Can Go Back To Europe

It's a measure of the relative economic strengths of a country as to which nation's currency enjoys wider acceptance. This makes it very disturbing to see that stores and restaraunts in New York City have begun accepting payment in Euros.

Historically, it was hugely to the advantage of the United States since the end of World War II to have the U.S. dollar be the preferred currency for the rest of the world. Before that, the British enjoyed a century of economic power reflected in the fact that the Pound Sterling was almost universally accepted. Before that, there were Guilders and Ducats and Florins -- which were accepted as legal tender for transactions as far away as China and India.

Now, though, a sustained poor fiscal policy -- and the manipulation of our monetary policy to make up for it -- has weakened the U.S. Dollar so much that in the very citadel of American capitalism, a foreign currency is becoming welcome.

Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama -- how do you plan to make the dollar strong again? Or do you even care?

What A Surprise: A Headline In The Fish Wrapper Doesn't Accurately Describe The Article's Importance

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the equivalent of the Pope for the Church of England, says that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the United Kingdom is "inevitable."

This seems like the best we could hope for would be a failed joke on his part -- but it both isn't and it also is less cause for alarm than you might think. Still, it's an attention-grabbing headline -- the Archbishop of Canterbury stating that it's "inevitable" that Sharia law apply in the UK. It leaves you at once horrified that the spectre of a Taliban-like legal regime would take hold there, and saddened that so powerful a culture and legal tradition would erode so quickly in the face of less than one generation of immigration. It makes you fear for what could happen in the USA.

But hold on a second. Let's take a look at what Archbishop Williams actually said:

[Williams] stepped into the Sharia debate with open eyes in a widely publicized lecture Thursday night at the Royal Courts of Justice, and a lengthy interview with the BBC, in which he argued that the traditions of other religious communities often have a foothold in law, while Muslims may be forced into conflict between their traditions and the law of the land.

"If what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of diverse and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable," he said in his speech before about 1,000 people, mostly lawyers.

"We have Orthodox Jewish courts operating in this country legally and in a regulated way because there are modes of dispute resolution and customary provisions which apply there in the light of Talmud," he said.

"It's not a new problem, not to mention the questions . . . about how the consciences of Catholics, Anglicans and others who have difficulty over issues like abortion are accommodated within the law; so the whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways in which the law of the land pays respect to custom and community, that's already there."

This is still kind of remarkable, but a far cry from the grand old traditions of Parliament and democracy being supplanted by national supplication to the seventh-century cultural traditions of Arabia -- and it requires some independent knowledge beyond even that. One thing that the Fish Wrapper article never reminds the reader of is that the UK does not have the tradition of separation of church and state that we do here. Quite contrary to our Constitutional prohibition against the establishment of a state religion, I think that the Anglican Church is still the state religion of the UK -- a Catholic cannot be King, to this day.

So, when there are issues that people prefer to resolve within the context of their religious traditions, in a country without something like America's First Amendment, there is no impediment to establishing a religious court and using the traditions and rules of that religion to settle the dispute. Things like divorce, child custody after the death of parents, allocation of property, tithing. Those can be enforced because all the people involved voluntarily submit to the religion and its dispute-resolution procedures -- in America, we would call this arbitration and we don't have any problem at all with enforcing private arbitration agreements. See my last two paragraphs, though, for some thoughts about this concept's application in the United States.

So, since there are Talmudic courts that resolve issues for the Jewish community in the UK (mainly in England, as I understand it) that means that the law has allowed for the creation of official judicial bodies that enforce these rules, within these communities. You can opt out of the community and its religious dispute resolution procedures at will, and then only the general civil and criminal laws of the UK would apply to you; the religious court would have no power over you whatsoever. But, if the Jewish community gets to have its own courts to supplement the regular courts, then that opportunity must logically be extended to any religion with its own legal code, and Islam is such a religion.

Read a few paragraphs further in the article, and note further that this sort of religious quasi-arbitration may not contradict the civil laws of general application of the United Kingdom. So, Sharia's requirement that a woman who has had sexual relations outside of marriage could not be stoned to death in a UK Sharia court; although she could be fined.

So it's not quite what it looks like at first glance. Sigh. Count on the Fish Wrapper to raise my blood pressure unnecessarily, and to bury context deep down in the article.

All the same, it makes me very, very happy to not live in a country that has to deal with that. The First Amendment's wisdom shines through very clearly here: don't mix the power of government with religious practices; doing so contaminates both. (Gasoline is good -- it is a powerful fuel and an excellent solvent for petroleum-based gunk. Wine is good -- it is mildly intoxicating and has wonderfully subtle tastes. But they shouldn't be mixed together in any context I can think of. So too with state power and religion.) So I have to wonder whether a U.S. court, if confronted with a "religious arbitration agreement," would enforce the result of that agreement. I once had deeply religious clients come to me looking for a lawyer to represent them in a "Christian Court," which upon closer examination turned out to be an arbitration agreement offered by the pastor of their church that would allow him to decide a property ownership dispute, "following and consistent with the teachings of the Christ." (Since one of the disputants was the pastor's cousin, I didn't think it was a good idea.)

U.S. courts have substantial amounts of civil law imperatives that need to be enforced regardless of litigants' religion -- for instance, a child custody dispute must be resolved with the best interests of the child in mind, and the results of a "religious arbitration" of a custody dispute would likely bow to the civil law of general application, meaning if the child's best interests were contrary to the religious court's decision, the religious court's decision would not be enforced. So given that, it seems to me that while a court's instinct would be to look to any sort of readily-available dispute resolution procedure, a thoughtful court would need to look very closely at the nature of the dispute, the generally-applicable law concerning that subject matter, and whether the parties to the dispute had really voluntarily submitted to that dispute resolution procedure. Willy-nilly accepting the pronouncements of a cleric as "binding arbitration awards" would be a big step towards enshrining such a religious forum as a "supplemental court," and thereby establishing it as a state religion.

Just When You Think You Know Los Angeles

Wow. Where have I been? I thought I knew Los Angeles. I thought I knew about all sorts of quirks.

I mean, I can point out where Gorky's used to be, from forty-six stories up on the Aon Tower, and calculate how long it would take Johnny Depp to walk from his refurbished loft across the street from the Federal Reserve Building to the Staples Center. I know where, when and how to buy 150 roses for forty bucks (which I did as an antecedent to proposing to my wife). I know the best ways in and out of Dodger Stadium. I can navigate directly from Bunker Hill to Palos Verdes from memory, without getting on a freeway or making a left turn until I hit Sepulveda. I learned how to shoot a handgun at the Beverly Hills Gun Club and I can show you where to watch silent movies in a theater.

But Los Angeles is about the food. And I ain't talking about health food, G:

• Do you like roasted chicken? Go to Zankou for the bird, and keep coming back for the garlic sauce.
• Randy's Donuts? Please -- that's for tourists. If you want serious donut action, you're going to Stan's and getting the peanut butter-chocolate donut.
• For my money, the best pastrami in town is Johnnie's in Culver City, although I realize that there are many who swear by Langer's -- but that's just because the Reuben was invented there. Johnnie's has tender, juicier meat, and the sandwich is about as big as a football.
• Get your French Dip on at Philippe and your green corn tamales at El Cholo.
• While it was a strange concept for the Waffle House in Knoxville, Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles offers an out of this world combination of tasty southern-fried chicken and waffles in sweet maple syrup.
• You want New York pizza? Lamonica's is so committed to getting the flavor of a New York pizza right, it imports not just the flour and sauce from the Big Apple, but even the water for mixing its dough comes from a supplier in Brooklyn. Fold that sucker and point it down and away from your nice suit when you eat it.
• When I was in law school, my roommate and I would study late into the mornings at the Won Kok Palace, which distinguished itself for having both the tastiest pork fried rice in Chinatown as well as the numerically lowest health code rating in the 213 area code.
• The concept of an Ethiopian banquet used to be a joke made in very poor taste. But one dinner at Nyala in Fairfax will change the way you think about that.
• Los Angeles invented the rock-and-roll Sushi Bar. And if you're going to do it, do it right at Tokyo Delves on Lankershim.

Yes, L.A. is about the food. Junk food, mainly, but on the other hand, if you need high-end dining -- white linen tablecloths, silver flatware, a powerful wine library and a stiff cocktail, prime rib and lobster, and Gran Marnier souffles -- and you want to walk in and get seated at quarter to four in the morning? Pacific Dining Car has two locations. If you're out at a more reasonable hour, downtown Pasadena offers the highest density of high-quality restaurants anywhere in the country -- including Manhattan and Chicago. If you make reservations, Urasawa is ready to help relieve you of the weight of all that excess money. And if you think that $20 a plate is a fine price to pay for meatloaf with a side of mac and cheese, Kate Mantilini will serve you expensive comfort food all night long with the promise of maybe seeing some celebrities sharing onion rings in the booth next to yours.

So I've got all this Los Angeles food lore floating around in my head, but I'd not heard of the Heart Attack Dog until tonight. The L.A. Weekly describes it in near-pornographic terms:

You can smell one from blocks away. The grilled bacon, twisted around a wiener, is topped with grilled onions and a mountaintop of diced tomatoes, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. Then one whole grilled green poblano chile is plopped impossibly on top. You take a bite and think, This is so good, no wonder it's illegal!

And, as the article describes, it really is illegal. Because the dogs are sold from push-carts, the health department makes the vendors steam the dogs so they cook all the way through. Alas, a grilled dog simply tastes better, as any true-blue Dodger fan can tell you. In fact, the "grilled" dogs at Chavez Ravine are boiled first, and then grilled so that some of the taste and texture of the meat coming into contact with hot metal can still be created. Still, it's better than nothing. And no one's wrapping a piece of raw bacon around the dog and then grilling it at the stadium. They're not doing it at Pink's, either -- although you can get a strip of bacon on the side of your dog there, which may not be quite the same thing but it is still a cardiologist's delicious nightmare.

Well, that's part of the joy of the big city -- there's always something else going on, something new, something you haven't discovered yet.

Day By Day Goes Off The Deep End

For a while, I had liked Day by Day, in part because it was a conservative-leaning comic and in part because I could syndicate it daily for free here on the blog. I'm happy to offer my readers additional content in exchange for giving the author of that content some publicity. But it hasn't been funny for a while and it's clear that the author is becoming one of the sour-grapes Republicans who think that McCain is an unmitigated disaster for the Republican party, and more importantly, who won't give it up and try to find some value to extract from the situation. Chris Muir and his ilk have drunk too deeply of the Kool-Aid and they should take a dose of clear-eyed reality.

I hardly mind it if people disagree with me. Indeed, I often invite it, because that keeps things interesting. But the right wing is really going off the deep end here. A strong military, pro-active aggression against terrorists, a balanced budget, pro-life (remember, I'm pro-choice myself), and pro-gun rights is not a liberal policy platform, and despite his several flaws, John McCain is not the political equivalent of Hillary Clinton. So in addition to not being funny, the strip has also become stupid.

Maybe in the future I'll re-syndicate his strip, but it's got to at least start being funny again.

Nightmare Scenario, Or, Denver PD Better Step Up

Someone leaked a forecast memo from the Obama campaign, forecasting the results of the complete Democratic primary. The projection is 1,806 delegates for Obama, and 1,789 for Clinton. Seems about right to me -- and that result is as close to a tie as could reasonably be imagined.

Note that to be nominated, one of the two of them would need 2,026 delegate votes. Two things would come into play that could put either of them over the top. As you will see, that means the advantage goes to Clinton.

The first is that Michigan and Florida have been stripped of their 366 delegates. If they are re-certified, the amount needed to win goes up by 183 delegates to 2,209 -- but Clinton would get the majority of those delegates. As I see it, taking the Obama campaign's leaked projection, along with the proportional delegates from those states, we'd wind up with Clinton having 1,980 votes, Obama with 1,876, and Edwards with 41.

The second, and more important factor, would be the superdelegates. If Michigan is recertified, then that would create an addition 70 uncommitted delegates, effectively raising the superdelegate count from 796 to 866. Only a small number of those people -- unelected Democratic party elites -- would then decide the nominee.

When something similar happened in 1968, there were riots in the streets of Chicago.

That's It For Mitt

This one I kind of did see coming. Mitt Romney just announced that he's "suspending" his campaign. This is probably preliminary to his appearance at CPAC this weekend, where he will likely end his campaign and grudgingly endorse John McCain. Putting his campaign in suspense today gives him a couple days to call McCain and his people and wrangle out some sort of benefit to him in exchange for that endorsement -- the price of which may be being named McCain's running mate, a move that makes sense on several levels. McCain didn't need to go over the top to clinch the nomination in order to force this. What's interesting is that it was Romney, instead of Huckabee, who blinked first.