This is the predictable result when you put government bureaucrats in control. Canada's National Post and the Washington Post have articles. In the Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon summarizes:
"In Ontario, car pooling is a prohibited activity that can only be allowed under strict government control, as determined by a government regulatory agency set up to oversee such conduct. Those who violate the law – as did a nonplused outfit called PickupPal — can and will be punished with the full force of the law. With the government's blessings, you can share expenses by car pooling from home to work and back again, but only under certain conditions. You have crossed the line if you try to car pool to work across a municipal boundary — the government frowns upon suburbanites who commute this way. As for car pooling for a frivolous, non-work purpose — to school, to the hockey arena, to the doctor’s office — this is outlawed outright, regardless of whether you cross a municipal boundary."
The more power you hand to regulators, the more often you get back-room back-scratching that protects other members of the in-guild (in this case, a bus company). Sometimes, there's enough public outrage to overturn it. Most of the time, there isn't.
Interesting bit that Nortius Maximus sent my way, about some modern psychology research by Paul Zak, "neuroeconomist". Key takeaway, in he gender non-specific "he":
"....The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you."
Read more here including an interesting video of the classic "pigeon drop" con.
It's early Thanksgiving morning, and everyone else is asleep. I've washed the pots and pans from the dishes we prepped last night, and before the holiday madhouse begins, I thought I'd take a moment to express my public thanks - as opposed to the private ones I'll be making at supper later today.
I am first and foremost thankful to the great nation that I'm a part of; humanity's hopes given material shape. No one will kick in my door today, no matter what I write here, and I do not need to censor what I say or think because I fear what will happen if I do not. Rent Perseopolis sometime soon, and appreciate what we have achieved here.
I am thankful that we all see what we have achieved as a nation is imperfect and flawed, because that means that all of us follow the standards of being uncertain in our rightness and so willing to listen and learn. And because it gives all of us purpose in contributing however we can to making things better.
I am thankful for everyone who has struggled and suffered to give me and mine what we all enjoy today. From the earliest immigrants to the Founders to the poor soldiers of the Revolution and every soldier and worker and shopkeeper and engineer and lawyer - and yes, even every politician. We live on the shoulders of giants, and we all have a patrimony that we should be grateful for and thinking hard how we can improve.
I am thankful today for the women and men who endure hardship in my name; who wear the colors of my country and who have chosen to stand between my family and those who would harm them. Their mistakes are mine - because they are grounded in the political leaders I and others like me have chosen - and their honor is their own.
I am impossibly grateful for the explosion of ideas - good, bad, and insane - that have sprouted as all of us have been given the ability to speak out using tools like this blog. I have thought more, learned more, been more outraged, and seen my fellow humans better in the last six years of my life than in the other 49.
And I'm thankful for this place, where I've been able to think out loud, been challenged, corrected, changed my mind and stood firm and where I've forged my deepest friendships. I have learned so much here over the last few years, and that is the greatest gift of all to me - to refresh my ability to learn, to refresh my beginner's mind.
Finally, and personally, I will thank my family - because they are my family and I'm so grateful to them for loving and accepting me - and because for all the crazy fits and starts, we have done three things very right - my son Eric who is far away, and his brothers Luc and Isaac who are asleep close at hand - who have grown into such wonderful young men and boys that I cannot find words enough to express how proud I am of them. So I'm thankful for Tenacious G, who married into this complex, crazy mess and to the boy's two biological moms, who joined me in deciding that we were all parents first.
OK, enough of this - I've got stuffing to finish! Don't forget to scroll down and donate to Project Valour-IT and give some wounded soldiers something to be thankful for today.
Update 2: It's almost Thanksgiving and this is about to wrap up - if I can ask you to reach and consider donating if you haven't - or consider on the the eBay auctions that are being held to benefit Valour-IT - everything you spend will go to helping wounded soldiers.
Update: We need more donors!! Donate, comment, and recognize that you're doing a Really Good Thing.
Even before I had a soldier of my own, I've been a big supporter of Soldier's Angels, the peer-to-peer organization that allows each of us to support the men and women of our military.
They are the kind of organization that is a no-brainer to get behind, regardless of your politics - because it's about providing support to the soldiers and their families.
Right now, they are running a fundraiser for Project Valour-IT, which provides speech-controlled laptops to wounded soldiers. I was at an event where Chuck Z talked about what it meant to him, as a wounded and recovering solder - to suddenly be able to send and get email, to surf the web, to write letters. What it meant to no longer be helpless in one area of his life and to begin the long walk to independence and recovery of himself. When you listen to stories like that, it's suddenly easy to understand why this is important.
The latest NIE regarding Afghanistan is reportedly not good - to put things midly. As we've discussed here before, Al-Qaeda lost in Afghanistan but won in Pakistan, where the classic "friendly dictator" strategy and the "democracy will solve" approaches have both come a-cropper. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban control a large section of western Pakistan, complete with training camps that are larger and more extensive than Afghanistan pre-9/11. Pakistan itself is in the middle of an insurgency that's far more serious than Iraq's, and key elements of the state continue to work with Al-Qaeda and with that insurgency. Others are willing to be bought. The inherent coup possibilities should be obvious.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan remains a long way away from being a functioning country, as any sane person would expect. And NATO allies continue to come up short in men, equipment, and promised aid. There are some notable exceptions (Australians, British, Canadians, Dutch, French, and Polish) - some of whom (Canadians, Dutch) are getting extremely tired of shouldering the combat load while larger countries like Italy, Germany, Spain, et. al. do so little. To Pakistan's nukes and a resurgent al-Qaeda, add "the future of NATO" to the things at stake in Afghanistan-Pakistan.
Obama has said that Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area would become a greater focus of his Presidency. Maybe that's just the standard lie told so often by people who do not wish to fight their co-belligerents anywhere, and always push "somewhere else" in order to conceal that fact ("jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today"). Or, maybe he's serious.
If he is serious, he'll need a viable strategy.
Winds of Change mission statement 2.0:
What challenges will face the U.S., the West, the rest of the world that aren't being discussed everywhere every day?
What opportunities exist - to these challenges or the widely discussed ones - that should be pursued?
What isn't being talked about in the chattering class that should be? Winds should be a place where questions that are slightly off-center can be asked, and where answers that aren't obvious should be proposed.
For the next four years, we're going to hear endless partisan chatter from people who care a lot about it in publications and on sites where that is the focus. Winds isn't one of those sites, and "impeaching Obama" or "destroying the GOP" aren't going to be core topics here.
The goal for Winds, as I see it, is to be a place for interesting conversation about issues that possibly shows them in a new light.
Note that interesting conversation comes first; that means respectful engagement with the rest of us.
To that end, we're working on Winds 2.0 which I hope will launch in early December (my attention and time are the throttling issues). I hope we'll have an interesting lineup of writers (a lot of whom are people you se here today) and I truly hope that those of you who have participated will continue to do so, and will step up and occasionally author a piece here.
There will be some new rules - we'll require registration from commenters - and, I hope, some new ideas.
Since I only have a limited about of bandwidth to devote to Winds, it will have to be split between blogging and managing the changeover. So both will get less than I'd like.
If you have author privileges at Winds today, please read this, think about it a bit, and drop me a note that sets out your interest in participating and some of the ideas you'd like to bring to the table.
While Winds isn't a hugely popular blog, it’s got a pretty respectable level of traffic, and I'd like to see if we can find some smaller, interesting bloggers and reach out to them about joining us here - either by moving here, or by using it like Totten does as a way to put interesting posts out into the world and pull more people to his blog. So what new voices are out there that we ought to reach out to?
My goal is to port the site to the new platform (which will be MT 4.2 based) by the 1st week in December, then spend December establishing the lineup of authors and start the new year with a refurbished set of digs (and maybe Diggs) for all of us.
by Valentina Colombo.
“I am fully ready to have a public debate with Tariq Ramadan to make it patently clear that the man does not know 1% of what a world-class scholar must know.” The challenge comes from an another Tarek, the Egyptian intellectual Tarek Heggy. When you tell Heggy about the expansion of Islamic extremism in Europe, but most of all when you pronounce Ramadan’s name he flies into a rage. He wonders why Europe keeps on listening to people like him and why many European intellectuals and politicians consider him the best Islamic intellectual. This is the reason why I asked Heggy to comment some quotes from Ramadan’s speeches, books and videos. Here you find the result that should teach us something very important: we cannot trust Tariq while we should trust Tarek!
I'd bookmarked this to blog, finally got some time, and discovered that Ann Althouse had written pretty much word for word what I intended to write:
Deal with it, you candy-asses. If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too.
Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan has been arrested by Iranian security (h/t Harry's Place).
Hoder - as he was widely known in the blogs is another OG blogger who has lived in Canada for some time to keep himself out of the hands of the Iranian police. While anti-mullah, he's resolutely pro-Iranian, and we've actually knocked heads a bit on that.
The Guardian writes:
A prominent Iranian blogger has been arrested in Tehran and accused of spying for Israel after visiting the country with the aim of being "a bridge between Iranian and Israeli people".
Hossein Derakhshan, 33, was reported by the Iranian website Jahan News to have confessed during initial interrogations to being involved in espionage.
The Jahan News site, which is widely believed to be linked to the Iranian intelligence services, also said he had been described in Jewish newspaper articles as a "friend of Israel".
Derakhshan is known in Iran as the Blogfather after effectively launching the country's craze for blogging. He has claimed 20,000 people a day read his postings.
He holds joint Iranian-Canadian citizenship and left Tehran for Toronto in 2000 after hardline opponents of then president, Mohammad Khatami, closed down the reformist newspapers he worked on. He also lived in London for a while.
Derakhshan had returned to Tehran three weeks ago. His blogs, in Persian and English, have been suspended.
You'd think that the party with a massively biased media dead-set against it might be the one doing the most innovation in terms of new channels and approaches. You'd be wrong, of course. The GOP leadership still sees the Internet as a cheaper way to send pres releases, with partial research materials sent as a concession to bloggers. I have yet to see anything approaching a party communication and mobilization strategy for the GOP itself, let alone outreach beyond its base or input into the communication and policy process.
Obama led in all these areas, and this MarketingVOX piece talks about their continuation into governance, alongside the immediately-available "change.gov."
Marc's startlingly naive election-period posts re: "McCain should have run a better campaign in the face of a deeply slanted media" missed a point that no veteran of politics should have missed. Candidates don't have alternative channels to leverage - and it's stupid to expect that. Parties might have them, if they build and tend them beforehand. The GOP has been remarkably deficient in that area, despite the clear writing on the wall for over 7 years, as part of a much larger disconnect from its base. While the GOP begins to sort out its leadership problems, therefore, Obama will continue full-speed ahead - building on his existing advantage in case his fawning media sycophants ever decide to start, you know, doing their jobs.
In "The Next Tech Boom is Underway," Greg Ness says it may be something much more prosaic and fundamental than the clean tech startups attracting so much venture capital money these days:
"Until the current network evolves into a more dynamic infrastructure, all bets are off on the payoffs of pretty much every major IT initiative on the horizon today, including cost-cutting measures that would be employed in order to shrink operating costs without shrinking the network.... even with the simple act of managing an enterprise network’s IP addresses, which is critical to the availability and proper functioning of the network, expense and labor requirements actually go up as IP addresses are added. As TCP/IP continues to spread and take productivity to new heights, management costs are already escalating.... If something as simple and straightforward as IP address management doesn’t scale, imagine the impacts of more complex network management tasks, like those involved with consolidation, compliance, security, and virtualization.
....The cloudplex will utilize racks of commodity servers populated with VMs that can scale up as needed in order to save electricity and make IT more flexible. That makes incredibly good sense, but are we really there yet? No.... For the network to be dynamic, for example, it needs continuous, dynamic connectivity at the core network services level. Network, endpoint and application intelligence will all depend upon connectivity intelligence in order to evolve into dynamic, automated systems that don’t require escalating manual intervention in the face of network expansion and rising system and endpoint demands."
The article as a whole goes into more depth concerning these challenges, as well as some potential winners in this race. Is this the next tech boom? And is it really underway?
This post is inspired by fiona patten's comment (link):
"Yep we [the Australian Sex Party] are not going to be all things to all people- but hopefully we can make some positive change."
Prince Charles, who will in time be King of Australia as he will be of the United Kingdom, wants to take the opposite tack. He wanted to be Defender of Faiths when he becomes King, rather than Defender of the Faith, that is, a particular faith (originally the Roman Catholic faith). That proved controversial, particularly with the Church that he would be the formal head of, but no longer the defender of. So, he's had a new idea (link).
In a compromise he has now opted for Defender of Faith which he hopes will unite the different strands of society, and their beliefs, at his Coronation.
However, there would be huge obstacles to overcome before the Prince can fulfil his wish which he has discussed with some of his closest advisers. It would require Parliament to agree to amend the 1953 Royal Titles Act which came into law after changes were made for the Queen's Coronation in the same year. A senior source told The Daily Telegraph: "There have been lots of discussions. He would like to be known as the Defender of Faith which is a subtle but hugely symbolic shift."
The Australian Sex Party is online (link).
In the context of preferential voting and proportional representation in the Senate, this could become a viable little protest party.
Or rather an anti-protest, anti-pressure group party. It's appeal is straightforward:
"If you're sick of religious and anti-sex politicians like Steve Fielding, Brian Harradine and Fred Nile threatening to block legislation in the Senate and State Upper Houses unless they get their way on sex and gender issues, vote for someone who understands this rort."
Given the damage that Brian Harradine alone caused, and how little Australians like wowsers (that is, people who are obnoxiously puritanical and feel a need to legislate restrictive drinking hours, anti-sex censorship and so on), that's a good pitch.
I have been studying the Arab mindset for the last four decades from several perspectives. For a start, I myself am a product of this Arabic-speaking region and was able to study the phenomenon from the perspective of an 'insider' as it were, as well as from my vantage point as a researcher who has had twenty books published in Arabic and English (including five devoted exclusively to the Arab mindset and Arab culture). I also had the opportunity to interact with the Arab mindset and culture from a different angle during my years as chairman & CEO of a multinational oil company in the Arab region, when I worked in close proximity with the end product of Arab culture, so to speak – the Arabic-speaking worker in the work environment. The fourth and final perspective from which I interacted with Arab culture and the Arab mindset was when I was called upon to lecture to post-graduate students at a number of universities in various Arab countries on subjects related to modern management sciences and techniques.
...that's not my heavy breathing in the background, it's windy as heck (which is why the fires were so much trouble).
The panels are up and connected. We're waiting for the final city inspection and then we'll throw the (very large) switches.
At $68/month it's a screaming deal. I'll post more as the system comes online.
In retrospect, isn't Barack Obama's charge that electing John McCain meant more of George W. Bush more plausible, now that we see the Republican Party embroiled in a toxic post-defeat fight, and John McCain, the leader of the Republican Party, taking it easy, starting to restore his personal image, and doing nothing either for his party or for his candidate to be Vice-President?
My request to embed with the U.S. Army in Baghdad has been approved, and it turns out that I need to leave a bit earlier than I expected. It will take a while before I actually get there – I need to be in Kuwait four days in advance for paperwork and “processing,” and I’m going to stop in New York City for two days on the way to Kuwait. But I’ll be there soon enough and will have a large batch of fresh dispatches for you about what is hopefully the end of the war.
I haven’t spent any quality time in Baghdad for over a year. The first time I visited Iraq’s capital was shortly after General David Petraeus unleashed his surge of counterinsurgency forces. It was impossible to determine whether or not he would succeed at the time. Sometimes the surge seemed a smashing success in the making. Other times Iraq looked despairingly broken beyond repair. The country was still so mind-bogglingly dysfunctional it was sometimes hard for me to believe it was real.
A year ago I went to Fallujah and had to spend a day in Baghdad’s Green Zone filling out paperwork to get myself credentialed. While waiting to be processed I sat outside on the lawn next to the Iraqi parliament building and listened to a 45-minute fire fight just on the other side of the wall in the Red Zone. The BRRRRRAP of automatic AK-47 fire was punctuated by the sound of explosions. Police car sirens wailed, and I remember feeling relieved that at least the Iraqi Police were rushing toward, instead of away from, the fight. I remember hearing a car bomb explode two miles away. It sounded like it exploded mere blocks away. Baghdad in 2007 was still not a place you would want to be.
Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com
Here's a picture taken of my Great Grandfather with his grandson just before the latter embarked to Europe during the "Great War." The firearms they carry are obviously not indicative of those that were used in Europe at the time, but it provides an interesting continuity.
What follows is a brief account of my Great Grandfather's experience, transcribed by my Great Uncle, in what was called at the time the "War Between the States," because we didn't realize how typical it would become. Just for the sake of recollection and to provide a sense of how easy it isn't. If you'd like to consult an historical review of the events recounted in my Great Grandfather's narrative check out a book by Charles Bracelen Flood entitled, Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War.
I spent the weekend with Ehren Murburg's dad, Mike, who I consider a new friend. We ate, drank, and talked, and Saturday night a college friend of his from Princeton was in town, so dropped by for a few hours and we talked about everything except the thing which brought us together.
We wound up talking about - shockingly - patriotism, and going back and forth (both Mike and his friend Steve are forthright liberals) on the need for a patriotic liberalism. I told them that in my view, liberalism had become identified with a cosmopolitan view that denied the unique place that America has in the world and that wanted badly to reduce America to a country among others.
Steve offered the notion that America is an idea, and that that idea is inherently welcoming, and I chimed in supporting him; we are not a nation of blood or land, we are a nation of an idea, and possibly the first great nation that can say that.
We need - as liberals, as Americans - to embrace those ideas which are our patrimony, to accept their greatness and the imperfections of the realizations. Just as we recognize the greatness and flaws of our children.
Mike Murburg's son Ehren was buried under an American flag, and like all of those who died and were buried under that flag wearing the uniform of our country, he died for a set of ideas. Those ideas are not liberal, not conservative - they contain American liberalism and conservatism and so are greater than either.
I am an American liberal, and as such, I owe my first loyalty to my country.
And because of that - like many modern liberals - I have no problem being grateful to those who died, were wounded, who simply or heroically served in defense of our flag and the ideals it represents.
So on this Veteran's Day, let me - belatedly - say once again to all those serving and their families:
So thanks, veterans. Thanks soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen. Thanks for doing your jobs and I hope you all come home hale and whole, every one of you.
Thank you Ehren. And Mike, for loaning him to us.
And finally, thank you to Eric, my son. For protecting me and the rest of us, and for choosing to wear the uniform and defend the ideas that make this country what it is - great. May we and all our leaders be worthy of you and all your colleagues.
This is to acknowledge that in the recent elections the pro-choice side has been victorious everywhere, and the pro-life side has been defeated comprehensively. To all supporters of choice: congratulations.
In one final day of voting:
Sorry for being inattentive. I'm in Florida hanging with Ethan Murburg's dad, and real life trumps the blog today.
Should be back Sunday night...
A.L.
IEEE originally stood for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, but the organization's scope of interest has expanded into so many related fields that it's now known only by its acronym. One field of intense interest to many IEEE members is the defense industry, and a recent IEEE Spectrum Magazine special offers a number of features that attempt to come to grips with current trends.
Right now, the current trends are not good. The US Navy is smaller than it has been in decades, currently has no viable shipbuilding programs for surface combatants, and has credibility issues in Washington. The US Army has a clear modernization strategy, but faces a maintenance overhang, challenges with both program management of its $160 billion Future Combat Systems meta-program and the very premises behind it, and other issues. The USAF has become concerned about its institutional future, even as its aircraft continue to see their average ages rise and respected outside organizations slam its procurement plans as fantasy. A recent Pentagon Defense Business Board report that examined programs from 2000 - 2007 throws the problem into stark relief: cost increases on 5 major weapons programs accounted for $206 billion, or 22%, of the total jump in spending for new arms so far this decade. The Defense Procurement Death Spiral is biting, hard, across the board.
There is plenty of blame to go around, from requirements definition problems and skewed incentives within the Pentagon, to Congressional interference and overhead - though the latter isn't discussed much at Capitol Hill hearings. The IEEE Spectrum articles in this series offer a quick third party view. They are all relatively short, and include:
I'm absolutely happy that the margin (for almost all the races) was wide enough that it was not only outside the margin of error, but outside the plausible margin of any kind of fraud.
All the same, I'm developing an idea about crowdsourcing some post-election audits to try and see if we can generate enough data to either confirm that there were irregularities - or make a convincing argument that there were not.
So I'm at an airport again, headed to Florida to give another talk and have dinner with Ethan Murburg's dad.
And after reading a bunch of papers, and talking to a bunch of friends, I want to set out some quick thoughts about our having elected Obama. Depending on how sober I am this weekend, I may have time to do some more in-depth writing. But quickly:
This isn't about Obama's policies, which the staffing rumors hint suggest may make me much happier than Ezra Klein.
It's about the notion that, first of all, America has overwhelmingly elected a black man to be President. And how unremarkable that seems, and how absolutely remarkable that unremarkability is.
And about the fact that a young, ambitious man - with no family assets, no inherited connections nothing except the relationships he chose and created himself - managed to rise up over a period of 15 years and make himself President.
This is an open thread for discussing the brilliance and the many successes of Barack Obama, his Democratic colleagues and his supporters in the recently concluded elections.
As I said I would, I'm working up a top post and some ground rules for the promised American Exceptionalism thread.
So we were lucky enough to go to Sacramento Tues night - TG, BG (who is home on leave for two weeks) and I - where we got to watch the election results at the Secretary of State's office. The things you have to do when you don't have TV at home...
It's Obama, and by a bigger margin than I'd anticipated. Much bigger.
And the speeches - both McCain's and the President-Elect's - were magnificent.
John McCain is a helluva man, and he showed us why he deserved to be the Republican candidate, and why he deserved a better campaign.
Barack Obama's speech hit the right notes for me - inclusive, hopeful, determined.
I am hopeful that that's the keynote for his Administration. And watching, to see what my President will do.
So I have a Really Important Presentation this morning in Orange County, then a lunch, then have to fly to Sacramento to watch the results.
I had it all figured out- pick up the docs at the 24-hour Kinko's down the street, get to the polls right at 7, vote, head to the meeting.
Glitch - found an error in the book, so work with the graphic artist on the East Coast and drop off the revised pdf at 5:30.
Home, shower, dress, wake TG, drive over to the neighbor's house where we vote.
At 7:01 there were 42 people in line. Uh-Oh.
I can swing by on the way to the airport this afternoon...I hope.
Update: Made it!! The nice voting lady in her garage said that she was head-down until noon.
200 of us were already lined up by the time the polling place doors opened at 7 a.m. The queue moved quickly. At the sign-in table, the election judge found my name on her screen and handed me a smartcard.
"Do you want to see my I.D.?"
Frown. "We were told not to ask for identification."
"How do you know if am who I say I am?"
She looks up. "Please sign this slip. Bring it and the card to the official by the booths."
I print the letter "A" followed by a straight horizontal line. "This isn't a real signature."
A sigh. "I could go on for hours about the procedures we've been instructed to use this year, but there isn't time, you know..."
On to the booth. I inserted the smartcard into the hack-prone, no-audit-trail Diebold machine. Part of the matched set that our county bought at such expense a few years ago, and that will proceed to its well-deserved place on the scrapheap after today. Made my choices and touched "Cast Your Ballot."
I was back outside by 7:30; there were 150 more voters waiting to take their turns. Maryland will see a heavy turnout, because of--or despite--its deep Blue color.
Your story?
As every Canadian knows, Ti Kwan Leap is the timeless martial arts comedy skit performed by the 1990s comedy troupe The Frantics. It remains a classic. Today is election day, and I had resolved not to be involved in the American elections. Living here as a Canadian citizen, who can still vote in Canada, and did... just didn't feel right. Nevertheless, as an act of compassion I thought I'd contribute this classic bit of Canadiana to make you all laugh. Apparently, a kids' tae kwon do class somewhere was inspired to put it on as a play...
JK: So, we got a reader who submitted an article on Proposition 8, the California referendum that would define marriages as exclusively heterosexual. Marc and I don't agree with it, and his article speaks for both of us... but it was a different take, and we've published a number of guest columns from people we've disagreed with before. Add this to the pile.
No on Prop 8 is Anti-Feminist and Regressive
by Wayne Lusvardi, MSW, Pasadena, CA
As a former court protective services worker for abused and neglected children, I am in favor of Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage; however, I am unpersuaded by all the arguments for and against it.
The arguments in favor of the Prop 8 are overly defensive, conjectural, seemingly discriminatory and moralistic for the wrong reasons. Concern over a speculative future harm to children as the weakest members of society will not likely overcome the perception of actual discrimination against gays today in the eyes of much of the liberal public. Moreover, many people believe on religious and secular grounds that children should be taught not to discriminate against gays.
Conversely, the arguments against Prop 8 on the basis of injustice, unfairness and the unhappiness and social stigma inflicted on gays by denying them the sanction of marriage equally miss the mark. Gays have already mostly been granted rights and protections of quasi-marriage (power of attorney, family status for hospital visitation, benefits rollover). The social status of gay couples is essentially no different than that of anyone else who lives in an unmarried status, including widows.
The notion that progressive “change” will overcome the “centuries’ long struggle for civil rights” for gay marriage is historically myopic.
Reposted from November 1, 2004
This was posted four years ago, but I want to make sure people today keep it in mind.
Over the last few weeks, I've felt the pressure to get off the fence and declare for one candidate or the other. Commenters here, and people in my personal life, have pushed me to 'fess up that I'm a Bush supporter, or admit that I'm too much of a Democrat to cross the line.
Thinking about this feels kind of like having a chipped tooth. Every time your tongue curls over and touches it, you get a flash of pain, and yet you keep going back and doing it again.
Here's a fast roundup on my take on the current crop of California propositions...
This is a cross-post, but I expect it'll interest a few of you.
William McIntosh, the "White Warrior" of the Creek nation, had risen to the leadership of the Creeks in spite of being of mixed Creek and Scottish blood. That Scottish ancestry offered no shame to a warrior people: he was of the blood of John Mohr McIntosh (the Gaelic byname meaning, "the Great"). John Mohr was recruited by Georgia's own founder, the heroic Sir James Edward Oglethorpe, friend of the Yamicraw nation, to guard the early colony against Spanish raiders from the south. Chief William was of the blood also of General Lachlan McIntosh, who served with General Washington at Valley Forge and helped to negotiate treaties for the establishments of forts in the west during the Revolutionary war; he thereby opened the West to later expansion. General McIntosh also killed Declaration of Independence signatory Button Gwinnett in a duel. Finally, he was a direct descendant of William McIntosh, who was sent by the Revolutionary government to the Creeks to aid them in fighting the British.
Perhaps out of loyalty to this revolution, or out of loyalty to his fathers who fought for it, Chief William McIntosh made a deal that put the lands of the Creek Nation under the jurisdiction of the state of Georgia. Shortly thereafter, he was assassinated in his home by tomahawk; but the transfer of authority held in spite of his murder.
What had heretofore been forested country began to be cleared by homesteaders, who wanted a place to grow food for their families and crops to sell at market. As they cleared a particular patch of land in west central Georgia, they began to notice that the land began to erode far more than other lands in Georgia. The erosion was serious enough to be noteworthy in the 1830s. One can imagine the early farmers wondering how bad it would get. The topsoil, and their livelihood, was washing away: where would it stop?
Here.
There's a lot of heated words on Memeorandum on Obama's taped conversation with the SF Chronicle about coal, and I think they are unfair.
Here are some headlines:
Hidden Audio: Obama Tells SF Chronicle He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry
EXPLOSIVE NEW AUDIO-- Obama Promises San Francisco Audience He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry!!
OBAMA BRAGS ABOUT BANKRUPTING COAL POWER PLANT COMPANIES
...and so on.
They're kind of full of it.
I think this takes the cake - God, I certainly hope it does.
I sat down this evening to hand out candy and do a quick post on journalism - in the light of the Nir Rosen Rolling Stone piece - bringing up my usual "journalist vs. citizen" point, and ragging, in a pipe-smoking philosophical way, on Rosen's detachment and belief that he's somehow "more" than a citizen - he's a journalist.
Then I sat down to reread Bing West's attack on Rosen and the comment thread under it, and went ballistic.
Because Rosen didn't just embed with the Taliban on an operation - he used his journalistic credentials to help them get past an Afghan army guard.
i did not say i deceived the afghan soldier. on the contrary, both i and the taliban commanders i was with told the afghan soldiers that i was a journalist and in fact i showed him my passport. of course there is nothing wrong with deceiving anybody if its going to protect you, but it wasnt necessary in this case, and i did not claim to deceive them. i in fact had to persuade them that i was a journalist and not a suicide bomber, which is what they suspected at first.
I'd like to be speechless; instead what comes to mind is a string of invective that will get the blog blocked in corporate firewalls for quite some time.
If I, or the parent of another American soldier, ever meet Mr. Rosen, he'll be lucky to only get the contents of my drink in his face.
Mr. Rosen enjoys the protections of a US passport; he was born in New York City.
I'll let a better man than I have the final word.In the colloquium on journalistic ethics that I frequently cite, after the two leading journalists explained that they would stand by and roll tape as an American force was ambushed, an American soldier stood up. Col. George M. Connell said:
"I feel utter . . . contempt. " Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces--and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. The instant that happened he said, they wouldn't be "just journalists" any more. Then they would drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. "We'll do it!" Connell said. "And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get ... a couple of journalists." The last few words dripped with disgust.
