Accidental Blogger

Fun For Wordsmiths

December 11, 2006

Fellow blogger Matt of Cerulean Blue, would like to bring a new book to the attention of readers. He was contacted by author Murray Suid who wanted his book Words of a Feather featured on Matt’s blog. However, Cerulean Blue has now closed shop and Matt has no public venue where he can promote it. As a long time reader and commenter here, he asked me to post the review on A.B. I am happy to oblige because I used to enjoy Matt’s sense of humor and "word twisting" ability when he was writing and the book should be of interest to anyone who is into "words."

Here is Matt’s introduction:

"Linguistic mischief is one of the few things that can make me happy, so I’m in love with a new book called Words of a Feather, by Murray Suid. It provides the etymological history behind a variety of word pairings. Here’s a bit of the description from the website:

"What’s the connection between mortgage & mortician? How about the links between maneuver & manure? Pencil & penis? Dictator & dictionary? Or rectitude & rectum? Word lovers will find the answers to such questions in Murray Suid’s Words of a Feather, a zany, fact-filled collection of dual etymologies."

Oh my. I get all tingly when I read stuff like that. Also, if you think about it, this could possibly be the greatest Christmas gift ever. Smart people love conceptual traipsery of this sort, and the intellectually challenged can boost their IQ with it, so the book’s a suitable gift for anyone.

For the book’s main site click here. There’s even a quiz available here. Enjoy."
A Perfect Ideological Model. But Is It Science?

December 11, 2006

I have been sitting on this very interesting (and long) article by Christopher Hayes about his experience in a beginner economics class. His teacher was Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago, an ardent subscriber to the Milton Friedman school of "Free Market – Free Trade" economic theory. "Is a little economics a dangerous thing?" asks Hayes. "Is too much economics and too little philosophy, psychology and ethics the real danger?" is my question. Without the benefit (and harm) of my half baked analysis, find out here for yourself. An excerpt:

Efficiency is the Chicago School’s defining value. The free market economists who came before—most notably Austrian Friedrich Hayek—offered a philosophical critique of the political consequences of state regulation and control of the economy. But Milton Friedman, his colleague George Stigler and the entire Chicago School focused on the actual economic problems of state control, namely, inefficiency. They rejected Keynes’ contention that markets function best with routine government intervention and instead harkened back to Adam Smith’s classical conceptions of equilibrium. Chicago School theories gained popularity when global capitalism hit a major funk in the ’70s—a period of slow growth and high inflation. Friedman argued, plausibly, that it was too much government that had caused the problems.

What may seem a subtle rhetorical shift had major consequences. It transformed what had been conservatism’s moral argument about capitalism bestowing the most benefits on those who worked the hardest—and the inherent injustice of a coercive state forcibly redistributing capital—into a technical argument about the inefficiencies associated with non-free-market solutions and the perverse incentives that made any social programs destined to fail. Thus, arguments about the way the world should be were converted into assertions about how the world actually was. Or, to put in terms that economists favor, normative arguments became positive ones.

"In the textbook Sanderson uses, author Michael Parkin defines the difference this way: positive statements are about “what is” and they “might be right or wrong.” Normative statements are about “what ought to be” and because they depend on values, they can’t be tested. “Be on the lookout,” Parkin warns, “for normative propositions dressed up as positive propositions.”

Parkin’s warning, however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to heed. Neoclassical economics smuggles a great many normative wares underneath its positive trenchcoat, both in its assumptions about how humans operate—as individuals rationally maximizing their utility—and its implied preference for “markets in everything.” Because neoclassical economics always presents itself as a value-neutral description of the world, its ideological commitments can be adopted by those who learn it without any recognition that they are ideological. This is the source of some very spirited debate within the field itself. A growing global movement of “heterodox” economists has criticized the ideological confines and blindspots of the neoclassical approach. As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz put it, the dominance of the neoclassical model is a “triumph of ideology over science.”

In the popular press, however, such dissent is almost entirely absent. When protesters disrupted the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, WTO officials, mainstream economists and the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman ignored the fact that in much of the world neoclassical reforms had failed to produce the promised growth. Friedman went so far as to dismiss the protesters as “flat-earthers.” For Thomas Friedman (and, indeed, Allen Sanderson), people can’t “disagree” with neo-classical economics. They can only fail to understand it."
Help Wanted: In Running A Country

December 9, 2006

The beautiful island paradise of Fiji has been racked with political and ethnic discord in recent years. Last week saw yet another coup in which the military overthrew the government, accusing it of rampant corruption. Although the international community did not approve, the Fijians themselves are quite unperturbed.

Now the self installed Fijian military junta is looking to form a government. Like any other business in search of qualified candidates and in a show of "transparency", it has resorted to the time honored method of filling up job vacancies. The coup leader has placed "wanted" ads in the classified section of newspapers.

"SUVA, Fiji – Fiji’s coup leader ran want ads in local newspapers Saturday to fill vacant Cabinet jobs, trying to piece together a new government for the south Pacific country.

Army chief Frank Bainimarama has removed a swathe of senior civil servants, including top police officers, saying he is weeding out corruption entrenched in the administration of ousted Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase.

"Applicants must be of outstanding character and without any criminal records," the advertisements noted, asking aspirants to submit applications at military headquarters by Tuesday. "Each must not have been declared bankrupt."

"The deadline indicates the urgency in trying to get qualified people in to help in the running of the affairs of the state," Maj. Neumi Leweni, a military spokesman, told state-owned Fiji One News television. He added that the posts of finance and foreign affairs ministers would not be advertised."
Ownership & Slave Labor

December 8, 2006

(Portraits of Gypsies by Dina Gottliebova displayed at the Memorial Museum in Auschwitz-Birkenau)

Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, like all artists, wants to have a say in determining where her art work should hang. But she has been told that it is not up to her to make that decision because the art in question is the product of slave labor and as such, she has no proprietorial claim.

Seven of Babbitt's paintings are part of the Holocaust Memorial-Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau and she would like them back. Babbitt painted those pictures to save her life – literally. A concentration camp prisoner during WWII in Auschwitz, Babbitt (then Gottliebova) was a trained artist and her artistic skills were discovered when she painted a mural for the children in the camp. Subsequently, she was commissioned to paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners by Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted notorious racial experiments on Jewish and Gypsy prisoners. Mengele wanted color portraits of the Gypsy subjects for his study because they captured "the skin tone" better than his photographs. Babbitt agreed and in return for the favor was able to save her own and her mother's life. To her amazement, the artist, now living in Northern California, learnt in 1973 that some of those portraits had survived and were part of the the museum in Auschwitz. She wanted her art back saying that as the artist, she has the right to decide where the paintings should be displayed and she did not want them in Auschwitz. The officials at the Auschwitz Memorial have declined to return Babbitt's works, claiming that the paintings belong in the museum as documents of history and Babbitt cannot claim ownership because she made the paintings as part of prison labor and not as a voluntary artistic endeavor.

"FELTON, CALIF. — The little wooden house surrounded by redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains is more than 6,000 miles and 60 years away from the horrors of Auschwitz. But on an easel in the sunny living room is a small portrait that Dina Gottliebova Babbitt recently painted of a fellow prisoner in that Nazi death camp. The picture is a modified copy of one she was forced to paint in 1944 as part of Josef Mengele's murderous theorizing about racial differences. Mengele had plucked Babbitt, a Czech Jew, from a group headed to the gas chambers and ordered the artist to produce portraits of doomed Gypsies that would capture skin tone better than his photographs did.

"I painted what I saw, very definitely," recalls Babbitt, now 83 and a retired Hollywood animator. "And what I saw was despair and sadness."

In 1973, Babbitt was stunned to learn that seven of those nine watercolors had survived and were in the museum at the former concentration camp in Poland. Since then, she has been trying to retrieve them — a quest that raises painful questions about ownership of the products of slave labor as well as the artworks' role in documenting Holocaust history.

Babbitt's supporters say she has moral and legal rights to the art. But Auschwitz museum officials disagree, and leaders in the American Jewish community describe the issues as more complex than in many instances of art looted by Nazis.

For Babbitt and her mother, the art truly was a lifesaver. The work afforded them extra bread amid starvation and time to keep death at bay. She wants the paintings now, not to sell, she says, but to briefly hold and then lend to a museum of her choice.

"I wouldn't be alive if it hadn't been for those paintings, and my kids wouldn't be here. And they know that," said Babbitt, who has two daughters and three grandchildren. "This is something that belongs to our family more than anything else I can possibly think of."

The officials at Museum-Memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau hold a different view on the matter of the ownership of the portraits. Auschwitz, they claim, is not a garden variety art museum. It is the site most closely associated with Nazi atrocities in the minds of most people. As such, it is the vital archive that bears witness to a crucial piece of human history that must be preserved scrupulously. The following statement from the museum explains why the paintings should remain in Auschwitz. According to this view, much of the extensive body of documents and artifacts (including the gate leading to the camp), currently preserved there are in one way or the other, products of prison slave labor employed by the Nazis. Returning them to those who produced them, would result in the dismantling of the museum.

"In the light of law, the rightful owner of the seven Gypsy portraits is the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. In what regards the author property rights, they belong to Ms. Gottliebova. The Museum being the rightful owner, but without the property rights, is allowed to use them within the limits of permissible public use of protected artifacts, determined in regulation regarding author rights and relative rights.

The Museum fully understands the emotional attitude of Ms. Gottliebova to the works made in the past in conditions which undoubtedly influenced her life. However, realizing its statutory tasks the Museum is profoundly convinced that the water-colors should remain in Oświęcim. From the moment of its establishment, this institution has been – with great effort – collecting and preserving most various post-camp remains, doing everything for them to survive and certify about the crimes committed by the Nazis in the place they are most closely connected with. Both death certificates, prisoner cards, etc., produced in large number by scrupulous Nazi camp bureaucracy and works of art created in the camp, either made by prisoners on orders of the SS or illegally, are a unique document and piece of evidence, having the biggest meaning, significance and impact in the place of their creation.

Seven water-colors painted by Ms. Gottliebova is only a small fraction of the rich collections of the Museum. There are a few thousand artifacts – works of art – in the Museum’s Collections Department. About two thousand of them were made in the camp by the prisoners.

It should be also stressed that our institution is not just a "regular" museum. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is unique of its kind. Every square yard of it is covered with blood of the victims of the Nazis: Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and other people murdered here. The main objective of this site is to make it available to hundreds of thousands of pilgrims as well as researchers, and to document as widely as possible the crimes committed here.

The latter activity obliges us morally to preserve all evidence dating back to the wartime and related with the Auschwitz concentration and death camp and to prevent this evidence from being dispersed in any way. Once again we want to stress: every single loss of even the smallest part of the documentation will be an irreparable loss and a shadow on the memory of Auschwitz Concentration Camp victims."

My question: Does Babbitt have the right of ownership to the artwork she had produced at Joseph Mengele's behest or does it rightfully belong to the museum as part of Holocaust history?
Altruism – It’s Good For Your Health

December 8, 2006

"He ain’t heavy, Father … he’s m’ brother."

( Motto, Boys Town – Omaha, Nebraska)

In a recent post on biologist Marc D. Hauser’s hypothesis about the innate nature of human morality, I said the following to explain our moral and ethical instincts, noting that our morality is not a quality that is as pure, rare or other worldly as we often make it out to be. I don’t also fully subscribe to the commonly held dogma that evolutionary advantage is bestowed upon us exclusively through choices that benefit the self (selfish gene). Once we figure out that the advantage for the self (competition) and benefit to others (cooperation) are not so much at loggerheads, both being essential for survival of social animals like humans, the conflict appears less inexplicable. In other words, altruism too is a selfish instinct.

Here is what I had to say:

"I do believe that indeed we are born with an innate sense of right and wrong (more correctly, beneficial and harmful) choices, which may or may not be generated by a "morality organ" but is probably rather more intimately related to our sense of survival and our tendency to choose reward over punishment. Neither do I believe that our morality is in some fundamental way superior to etiquette.

Both reviews [of Hauser’s hypothesis in Washington Post and NYT] focus on the conflict between the accepted paradigm of evolutionary biology (selfish gene) and what Hauser calls "group selection" in case of social animals like apes and humans who are more overtly capable of empathy. This clash and constant tug of war in our minds between our own needs and that of others is precisely why human morality is so complex and why we look upon it with such awe. Yet as thoroughly social animals, we cannot ignore either. In case of humans, the death of the group spells doom for the individual almost as surely his own demise."

Scientific American has an article in its Dec 7, 2006 issue which backs up my conjecture.

"Natural selection argues against cooperation. If all organisms, including humans, are pitted in a ceaseless struggle for survival and sex, those who help others would quickly find themselves swamped in a rising tide of selfishness, especially if those they helped bore no relation to them. Yet, most humans reflexively help another person in need even if there are no family ties or a direct benefit to be gained. This conundrum has puzzled evolutionary biologists since the time of Darwin, but a new study shows how internecine warfare among early humans might have allowed for the spread of a dominant group of altruistic tribes.

Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute examines the evolutionary forces at work on early human populations. He posits two distinct groups: the altruistic and the selfish, divided into many different tribes, which Bowles refers to as demes. Altruists are disposed to take an action helping others, but such actions have a specific cost. For example, an altruist might jump into the river to save a drowning child at the cost of her own life but to the overall benefit of the tribe. Reducing these sets of conditions to a mathematical equation reveals that altruists can only prosper if their altruism enables their group to acquire more territory.

One of the primary ways that humans–indeed all primates–acquire territory is through "contests," or war. By sharing the costs of war, as well as its benefits, a group of altruists typically outnumbers and therefore defeats a less cohesive band of individuals. Thus, whereas individual natural selection would argue for the rise of the selfish, larger group dynamics showcase the triumph of the altruists. This latter type of selection also relies on that group sharing a large proportion of similar genes, because, in that case, altruists’ genetic material persists in some form if they sacrifice themselves for others in war. This is the solution offered by Darwin in The Descent of Man and Bowles in a paper published in the December 8 Science."
Cry, The Beloved Country

December 7, 2006

Whatever I may think of presidential father George H.W. Bush’s politics, I always found the senior Bush’s ability and willingness to shed tears in public, rather endearing. I have seen him cry at least half a dozen times, mostly while talking about his family, including the tragic loss of a daughter to childhood leukemia . Poppy Bush also tears up when speaking about the "honor" of his "boys", two of whom are successful politicians. This particular emotional display I always find strange. But he is a loving father and I, a partisan critic, so naturally we don’t see eye to eye on this matter. Father Bush too is given to "Bushism," quite distinct from his son’s but intriguing nonetheless. When he was president, I heard Bush Sr. say some pretty weird, quaint things (Dana Carvey used to do a hilarious impersonation on Saturday Night Live) which left one puzzling over what he had really meant to say. I remember one particularly peculiar Evita moment during a campaign stop in 1992 when George H.W. thoroughly confounded his audience with the following parting shot : "… So don’t feel sorry for — don’t cry for me, Argentina. Message: I care."

In light of his enigmatic speech (and thought?) pattern, I began to wonder when I watched Bush Sr. cry again – this time reminiscing about his son Jeb Bush’s ability to handle defeat with grace. The defeat he was referring to, was Jeb’s unsuccessful 1994 gubernatorial bid in Florida – twelve years ago! Jeb has been a successful governor since 1998. So why was Daddy feeling sad for an event in the distant past? Could it be that the tears were really for the more recent political fortunes of his other son, Jeb’s older brother, George W.? And also for what that son has done to the country? The tearful episode took place one day before the Iraq Study Group’s report was to be released. Senior Bush had to know what his good friend Jim Baker was about to make public regarding his older son’s performance as president. Surely that is enough to make any parent burst into tears. Or am I just being unnecessarily cynical and suspicious?

"Former President George H.W. Bush broke down in tears as he cited his son, Gov. Jeb Bush, as an example of leadership. He said he was proud of how his son handled losing the 1994 governor’s race to popular incumbent Democrat Lawton Chiles, and vaguely referred to dirty tricks in the campaign.

"He didn’t whine about it. He didn’t complain," the former president said before choking up. As he tried to continue, he let out a sob and put a handkerchief to his face. When he spoke again, his words were broken up by pauses as he tried to regain composure.

"A true measure of a man is how you handle victory and how you handle defeat, so in ’94 Floridians chose to rehire the governor. They took note of his worthy opponent, who showed with not only words but with actions what decency he had," Bush said before again sobbing."

Note: The title of the post is borrowed from Alan Paton’s famous book. And here is a link to Senior Bush’s version of Bushism.
Godwin’s Law

December 6, 2006

One big plus of having interesting co-bloggers is that you learn something new from your discussions with them. Even when you disagree.

Joe’s post about the current controversy under way at the University of Minnesota Law School over the hiring of Robert Delahunty, resulted in an impassioned discussion in the comments section. In my very first comment, I made allusions to the Nazi regime in order to make a point about Delahunty and the Bush administration. I was fully aware of the hyperbolic nature of the comparison I was making and admitted as much. In a subsequent comment Dean, gently (and artfully) brought to my attention Godwin’s Law, which states:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

This caused me to chuckle aloud even as I was concentrated on refuting some points made by other commenters, Dean included. In my own defense, I have to add that my comment does not quite fall within the purview of Godwin’s law. I brought up the comparison in my opening salvo and not as the discussion grew and not because my power of persuasion was skating over thin ice. So it was not an ad hominem I resorted to in desperation. The comparison was a considered one, even though I knew it was exaggerated. Nevertheless, Godwin’s Law made sense because I can easily see its veracity.

"Godwin’s Law does not dispute whether, in a particular instance, a reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be apt. It is precisely because such a reference or comparison may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin argues in his book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, that overuse of the Hitler/Nazi comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact."

Very true. That is why I was careful about bringing up Mengele and Goebbels (Heidegger and Wagner don’t quite measure up to the kind of villainy I had in mind). I agree that invoking Nazis, Hitler, fascists etc. carelessly and for posturing alone, has a diminutive effect on the true extent of the evil that they and their movements perpetrated on humankind. Yet we do it all the time . Tobacco Nazis (anti smoking groups), Yard Nazis (Home Owners’ Associations), Femi-Nazis (Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of feminists), Environmental Nazis (The Green Party) etc. etc. The Democrats and Republicans have exchanged charges of Nazism and fascism across the aisle a few times in recent times. When I lived in Germany, some older Germans said ruefully to me that no reasonable argument with the younger generation of Germans was possible for them because of the inevitable retort of "Du bist ein Nazi!" rolling off the youngsters’ angry tongues.

Does the casual banter about Nazis dilute the evil that the Third Reich really was? Perhaps not yet – not while veterans of WWII and survivors of Nazi atrocities are still alive and can bear testimony to the horrors. But once they are gone and Nazism is relegated to the dusty pages of history books? Will Nazism become just an evocative analogy to hark back to an unsavory and derogatory past which is no longer quite the threat it once was? Such as Byzantine, Ghenghis Khan, Bolsheviks or the Hottentots? I hope not. That is precisely the comfort level with evil that we should not develop. And that is why I think it is appropriate when we see our own institutions creeping towards those tendencies (as in numerous instances during the Bush-Cheney regime), it is prudent to invoke past evils as a cautionary signal. I was trying to do just that in my comment.

[A parenthetical thought. Am I, as a child of the seventies (Vietnam, Naxalbari, campus protests, sit-ins, shut downs) grown up in a culture acutely aware of the role that Gandhian non-cooperation played in bringing about India’s independence, more sympathetic to organized protest as a means to making a political or ideological statement than are my younger, American born co-bloggers?]

Update: Just in time for posting, Dean has sent me the following article as an illustration of the consequences of drawing inappropiate parallels to Nazis. The report concerns one of the two lefty academics I mentioned who ran afoul of mainstream sentiments – Ward Churchill of Colorado. Access to the article requires subscription – I will copy it here (see next page). Thanks Dean!

(more…)
Attention Revisited and Reviewed (Dean)

December 5, 2006

Back in June, I posted here a review of sorts of Richard Lanham’s The Economics of
Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, and in the
volley of ensuing commentary between Ruchira and me I mentioned works by
another author, Michael H. Goldhaber, who has been writing for roughly two
decades about what he calls the “economics of attention.” Goldhaber has now published his
review of Lanham’s book in the November issue of First Monday, so I’d like
to revisit the topic by reviewing Goldhaber’s review. (And if Ruchira thought Prof. Kuspit’s
remarks about Edward Hopper’s paintings
were redundant, she’s really going to wonder what’s going on here.)

Despite his laudatory opening paragraph, Goldhaber is mostly
disappointed with Lanham’s new work. I
enjoyed the book, yet I also think Goldhaber has many fair criticisms…as well
as many unfair ones. Nevertheless, I
share a number of his concerns. For
example, I certainly appreciate Goldhaber’s aside regarding the “highly
misleading” and confusing use of the term “information” to refer variously
to a component of knowledge or a bit or transaction of data. Like Golhaber, I am wary of the rigors of
economics, an opinion which in my case may simply be a function of
ignorance. Nevertheless, I tend to side
with Lanham, whose point in writing The Economics of Attention
is to identify economics as a species of rhetoric.

Goldhaber will have nothing to do with such a thesis. Instead, he is mildly fixated on the need to
tweak economic methods and practices—even the very so-called universal laws that
define the discipline—to account for the new form of currency it now should
measure. He holds that the reason for
the current acceleration in production of information we are
witnessing—“information” in the sense of floods of bits—is that “attention is
very desirable, in almost endless amounts, at least to some people,” and that
this newfangled breed of information is how one obtains it. (Lanham, on the other hand, views attention
as a commodity one seeks to allow one to rise above the flood, to achieve
salience.) Goldhaber is very likely
himself one of the people who finds attention very desirable, as he devotes
more than a paragraph to a demonstration that he is likely the first to have
come up with the eponymous topic he shares with Lanham and others. The attention one commands by virtue of being
the first to have done such-and-such is substantial, independent of the
intrinsic value of such-and-such. (For
an alternative take on the virtues of innovation, see this opinion piece,
a tepid reflection on the significance of the automobile in American history.)

(more…)
Obama = Osama?

December 5, 2006

Or rather, does it equal Saddam? You see, Senator Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein. Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ but has a distinctly Muslim (Arab actually) sounding middle name, perhaps in honor of his Muslim paternal grandfather. Now that Obama is a rising star in the Democratic Party and is widely believed to be giving serious thoughts to a presidential run in 2008, an interesting drama is developing around his name.

Fingers are wagging in the political name calling. Republicans claim that the Dems started it all by calling the now defeated Senator Allen from Virginia by his full name, George "Felix" Allen and by slyly bringing up his Jewish heritage. I agree that Democrats are no babes in the woods when it comes to shrewd demagoguery. But that the Republicans are going to make much bigger political hay out of Obama’s name is an easy bet. After all, this is the party that has perfected race and religion baiting. The Willy Horton campaign ads used by Bush’s dad George H.W. Bush in 1988, racially charged ads against Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee as recently as the 2006 mid term elections or Rush Limbaugh never forgetting to call Bob Dylan by his birth name of Robert Zimmerman, come to mind. Even a French ancestry is enough to cast a pall of suspicion on a candidate in Republican circles. During the 1988 Republican primaries Bush Sr. (again!), pointedly addressed his opponent (Pierre du Pont) by his given name of Pierre instead of Pete, the name Mr. Du Pont preferred to go by.

A couple of examples of the first salvos being fired against Barack Hussein Obama (excerpt below) . Get ready for some early campaign fun. Does Hillary Clinton have an interesting middle name? Never mind, they already have a juicy tale about her first name.

Maureen Dowd is worried that the Republican smear machine is at it again, attacking Barack Obama by using…his middle name. It seems Ed Rogers referred to Obama by his full name on "Hardball" a while back, setting off indignation among some on the left. I don’t know why it came to Rogers’ mind, but it is true I included Obama’s middle name in an NR story (not available on the web) in early November:

"Obama has joked that he worried his political career was over after 9/11 because his name sounded too much like Osama. In fact, it’s better than that: Named after his father, his full name is Barack Hussein Obama Jr."

Whatever the source, Rogers’ comment caused MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann some distress. "We have this right-wing implication that you must have the right name or the right God to be American," Olbermann said. "This fellow Ed Rogers, among others, has taken to calling Senator Obama Barack Hussein Obama." Olbermann wondered what the proper response should be: "Is it to point out the racial element to this, or the religious element to this? Or is it just to say, this is beneath contempt and not worthy of any response?"

And now Dowd. "The Republicans are expert at tying Democrats to villains," she writes. "Mr. Rogers’s bad-boy mentor, Lee Atwater, yoked Willie Horton to Michael Dukakis. Mr. Atwater and his successors also liked to present their side as being more American."

Now, it is one thing to report Obama’s full name — that’s completely fair. In addition, it seems illustrative of the Obama phenomenon that so many Democrats have gotten so excited about him and don’t even know his name. On the other hand, it’s another thing to regularly refer to him by his full name when you would not otherwise do so — that is, were it not "Hussein." Hopefully that won’t catch on.

Of course, all this might generate a little more sympathy had not some Democrats in recent months become so fond of the name "George Felix Allen, Jr." During the campaign, winning Senate candidate James Webb routinely referred to his opponent as George Felix Allen, Jr. (just search for the name at webbforsenate.com.) Although it wasn’t even correct — Allen, whose father’s middle name was Herbert, wasn’t a junior — the use of Allen’s full name was clearly a campaign strategy, first, to diminish Allen, and then, after news of Allen’s Jewish ancestry emerged, to make an oblique reference to that.

So now Maureen Dowd, Olbermann, and others are upset about Barack Hussein Obama. Perhaps if they had criticized the whole George Felix Allen thing, they might have more credibility.
Revised Blog Roll

December 4, 2006

Now that Anna has introduced her Uncle Ed and his very interesting food site to us through her excellent post, I thought of drawing attention to the other new blogs added to our list recently. Since I opened the door to food on A.B. with my chicken recipe after Thanksgiving, I will look forward to gastronomical articles here from time to time. Anna and Dean seem to be fine chefs with a lot of food related ideas. I have added "Food and Drinks" to the categories list for everyone’s convenience.

Readers may not have noticed that I recently updated the blog roll on the left – deleting some blogs which have been discontinued, adding a couple of new ones and appending a short description of each blog . The first new blog added is Gene Expression which is a member of the immensely popular Science Seed Blog group (the two other science seed blogs on our list are Pharyngula and A Blog Around the Clock). GNXP tackles topics mostly related to genetics and anthropology. But its author, Razib is versatile enough to write knowledgably on history and cultural matters. He is also a cat lover who posts pictures of his cats every Friday under the heading "KAT."

The other blog added to the list may be of limited interest to most A.B. readers, if only for geographical reasons. Eating Out In Delhi, as is evident from its title, is a food review blog based in Delhi. The authors sample food at various eating joints and write of their experience. Inspite of having spent the first half of my life in Delhi, I must confess that all the eating places featured so far on EOID are unfamiliar to me. Perhaps I will have the time to try out some of the recommended eateries on my next trip. Those of you who will perhaps never visit Delhi, do check out the photographs of some unpretentious (but presumably serving delicious fare) eateries in the Indian capital.
Serious Eats (Anna)

December 4, 2006

While the jitney is a transportation fixture in much of the world, the only jitney I have ridden in the United States was on Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn, New York, around ten years ago. I was with my Uncle Ed, and he was on a hunt for superior Jamaican jerk chicken. Even in New York, a city that allowed me to avoid driving until I was 24 years old, public transportation couldn’t take us to the place Ed had in mind, to which he’d been tipped off by the friend of the dishwasher at the restaurant where the chef was the squash partner of…etc.

The jitney that picked us up near the subway stop for a dollar each was a low-riding, beige tank of a station wagon of indeterminate vintage, cruising with windows rolled down against the summer heat. We were the only passengers during the ride. Ed leaned forward in his amiable, lumbering way and started a conversation with the driver about the Al Green gospel album playing, which transitioned into Ed’s asking about where the driver, who was Jamaican, liked to eat in the neighborhood. We smelled our destination approaching us on the jitney’s route before we saw it: savory smoke billowed from large oil drums in an empty parking lot next to the small store front.

I remember the unbelievably delicious jerk chicken we ate at the Flatbush joint as a revelation, having previously associated the item on menus with uninspiring, sweet, glop-covered meat. After ten years, I still remember a spicy cow hoof soup that we tried, though it sticks in my mind as an adventure more than something I’d seek out again. I remember the owner’s son, a handsome young man in dark glasses who was trying to make it as a reggae star (as we discovered in another Ed initiated conversation). But, my central memory remains the jitney ride, my uncle leaning forward in his seat, wholly comfortable in unfamiliar territory and engaged with where he was, driven on by an infectious enthusiasm for good things to eat.

Apparently other people admire this quality in Ed, as well. He’s written for publications including Gourmet and the New York Times; current Gourmet Editor and former NYT critic, Ruth Reichel, once referred to Ed as the "Missionary of the Delicious." So, there’s objective support for my, admittedly, biased plug for his new, comprehensive food website, Serious Eats, which officially launches tomorrow morning. The site includes links to many other sites, video, a chat board and much more. I encourage everyone to take a look.

Apart from my excitement over an outlet for my uncle’s charismatic passion for food, I’m pleased to have a new, centralized resource to seek out for food writing and information. While as a site of general interest perhaps not all of Accidental Blogger’s readers are as food obsessed as I am, I would recommend some of my favorite food writers to even the most indifferent eater out there. As an example to close this post, in a "Foreword" to her collection of essays, The Gastronomical Me (1943), M. F. K. Fisher offered an impassioned apologia for her choice of food as a literary subject that has long been one of my favorite passages of writing, on any topic:

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot write straightly of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it,…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?
Why I don’t watch CNN (Joe)

December 2, 2006

Facts are measured in terms of truth/non-truth. Interpretations and opinions are measured in terms of quality. Unless, of course, you’re Lou Dobbs.

“What you won’t see on our broadcast is ‘fair and balanced journalism.’
You will not see ‘objective journalism.’ The truth is not ‘fair and
balanced.’ ”

“Everything I believe, I believe unequivocally.”

Interesting, too, to observe in the New Yorker story how easily he switched from being pro-business when he professionally and personally/financially stood to benefit from that stance to the current angry populist and rabid anti-immigrant.

Regular viewers of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on CNN,
might be surprised at the venue that Dobbs chose for lunch not long
ago: the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, a midtown bastion of the very
same political and business “élites” that he denounces daily on his
television program. The Four Seasons is the enduring commissary of the
Old Guard, where Henry Kissinger waves to the former Citigroup C.E.O.
Sandy Weill, there is limo-lock at the side door, and the regulars have
their checks sent to the office. Dobbs’s Town Car left him at the door,
on East Fifty-second Street, and the restaurant’s co-owner, Julian
Nicolini, embraced him that day as warmly as when he welcomed, among
others, Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone
Group; Nelson Peltz, the C.E.O. of Trian Partners; Edgar Bronfman, Sr.,
the former chairman and C.E.O. of Seagram; and Mortimer Zuckerman, the
real-estate developer and publisher of the News. Nicolini led Dobbs to one of five choice banquettes, and Dobbs settled in, looking very much at home.

Dobbs
is sixty-one, and his chubby face has a rosy glow. His blond hair is
lacquered in place, his black wing tips are impeccably buffed. Other
club members having lunch that day—the Nobel Prize winner James Watson,
Bronfman, Peltz, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein—stopped at the
table to say hello. It is the kind of welcome that one might have
expected for an earlier incarnation of Lou Dobbs—the Harvard-educated
anchor of CNN’s “Moneyline,” which in the nineteen-nineties served as a
sort of video clubhouse for corporate America. But, in the past four
years or so, Dobbs has been reborn as a populist—a full-throated
champion of “the little guy,” an evangelical opponent of liberal
immigration laws. His hour-long program, which airs at six, features
Dobbs in a role that combines Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan. On the air,
he boomingly assails the upper management of corporate America for its
“outrageous” greed, pay packages, and corruption, its opposition to
increasing the minimum wage, its hiring of “illegal aliens,” its ties
to “Communist China,” and its eagerness to send American jobs overseas.

The new Lou Dobbs often surprises those who recall the old Lou Dobbs of “Moneyline.” Daniel Henninger, the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, wrote, “Old admirers are aghast. It’s as if whatever
made Linda Blair’s head spin around in ‘The Exorcist’ had invaded the
body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich,” a
reference to the left-wing Ohio congressman and former Presidential
aspirant. After an angry altercation on the show with James Glassman, a
former New Republic publisher and current
conservative supply-sider, Glassman said of Dobbs, “How did he
transform from a business sycophant to a raving populist?” Glassman’s
answer was that Dobbs had begun to “demagogue these issues.” (In
questioning Glassman’s economic theories on his program, Dobbs accused
him of talking “like a cult member.”) As if to answer such critics,
Dobbs has recently published a book whose title is almost as long as
the menu at the Grill Room: “War on the Middle Class: How the
Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on
the American Dream and HOW TO FIGHT BACK.”

On
the cover, Dobbs is standing—hands in pockets, feet apart—like a sentry
protecting the boundaries of decency and the nation. At CNN, alone
among the cable network’s anchors, he is allowed to express his
opinions without borders. “I’m never neutral on any issue that affects
the common good, our national interest, and working men and women of
this country,” he writes. In many ways, Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly, of Fox
News, who in 2003 wrote a book entitled “Who’s Looking Out for You?,”
are kindred spirits. Dobbs, who lives on a three-hundred-acre farm in a
prosperous part of New Jersey, admires his own capacity for compassion
and self-effacement. His audience, he writes, knows that he cares “more
about them and their lives than about being invited to the White House
or playing golf with C.E.O.s and celebrities.”

[ . . . ]

“It’s
very different from any program you’ll see on TV, by intention,” Dobbs
said, as we ordered the fifty-six-dollar Dover sole.

He must not be familiar with Bill O’Reilly’s show. Or else the two are "very different" because Dobbs alone is the speaker of truth.
Pigs Can’t Fly. But They Can Race

December 2, 2006

Perhaps I should have included humor in the category selection for this post. But it is no laughing matter. Religious clashes in public and civic matters hardly ever are. And that such senseless debates keep erupting with sickening regularity, makes me want to cry in frustration. Not far from my own home, in a suburb of Houston, a ridiculous drama involving a proposed mosque, surroundind homes and a shop owner has taken a bizarre turn. Pigs too are involved.

Craig Baker, a stone and marble shop owner in Katy, Texas, was asked to close his shop and move from the land that his family has owned since the 1800s. (I think the main thoroughfare in the area is named after his family.) The request came from the Katy Islamic Association who has acquired the land next to Baker’s where it plans to build an Islamic cultural complex which includes a mosque. Baker is outraged. To express his annoyance at the mosque builders, he has acquired some pigs and plans to race them every week on his land adjacent to the planned mosque during Friday prayers. The pig racing is not sitting well with the Islamic group which has denied asking Baker to move.

The proposed Islamic Center has also attracted negative attention from surrounding home owners who are worried about increased traffic on the two lane country road which is the only access to the site. I have no opinion on the conflict between the mosque and the neighborhood subdivisions. But on the matter between Baker and the mosque, my sympathies are with Baker if his claim is true; although he can easily hold his ground without the provocation of the racing pigs. The Islamic Association has no business in asking him to move his shop to make room for their religious activities.

Read the entire story about this hogwash here.

KATY — All snout and tail, the pink and brown pigs contentedly rooting in the wire pen behind Craig Baker’s stone shop seem piggishly comic. They’re racing pigs, after all, and that’s got to be funny.

But few in the sprawling subdivisions along Baker Road are laughing.

These pigs are subtle weapons, here to show the new neighbors — the Katy Islamic Association — they aren’t entirely welcome. Tension has been growing in this west Harris County community since September when the Muslim group announced it had purchased 11 acres south of Interstate 10 to build a mosque, school, community center and athletic facilities.

Hard feelings started when Baker met association officials, who, he said, advised him he should move his stone shop.

"They told me it was time for my family to pack up," said Baker, whose family has occupied its land since the early 1800s. "They said a mosque and a marble shop didn’t go too good together."

Angered by the perceived insult and aware of Islamic dietary laws banning pork consumption, Baker responded by announcing he would stage weekly pig races on his Muslim neighbors’ holiest day of prayer.

Since then, the conflict has escalated as residents called a town hall meeting to discuss the planned complex and an anti-mosque page featuring a cartoon pig and a running tally of terrorism victims was posted on the Internet. Numerous complaint calls have been made to county officials.

Claims and counterclaims have flown. Critics raise concerns about traffic congestion, flooding, possible adverse impact on property values and the "unknown."

"One of our concerns is what the mosque will look like," said Karen Olson, president of the 120-family Windsor Park Estates Neighborhood Association. " … We look at mosques in other parts of town and they have gold domes. They’re big white structures that stand out. We’re concerned about what we can do as a community to get a development that fits in and doesn’t ruin things."

Spokesmen for the Islamic group said the fears are unfounded, noting that they intend to comply with county building codes "110 percent" and that attendance at the largest services will probably not exceed 30 worshippers. Their Baker Road neighbors will be welcome to look at plans for the complex, they said, as the project is developed.

Traffic concerns, Olson said, top her group’s list of worries. Baker Road, she said, is a narrow, two-lane country thoroughfare, and she is concerned that frequent prayer services at the mosque could paralyze traffic in an area that already is home to four large subdivisions. She also worried that heavy traffic might increase maintenance costs for her association, which owns a stretch of a street connecting Fry and Baker roads."
The War of the Bibliophiles

December 2, 2006

Poor man! Soon after winning a seat in Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of the US House of Representatives was asked by a right wing blowhard to prove that he is not working with the enemy. Now he has raised the ire of conservative commentators Sean Hannity and Dennis Prager who fear that Ellison’s plan to take the oath of office by swearing on the Quran may unravel the fabric of American society. So alarmed are they by the possibility of anyone swearing on any book other than the Christian Bible, that they went on to define some spurious new religions and raised the specter of their unholy books. With characteristic attempt at distortion, Hannity waved the following red herring masquerading as a red flag:

"…you know, on what grounds will those of you defending this congressman’s decision and his right to choose his favorite book, you know, would you have allowed him to choose, you know, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which is the Nazi bible? In other words, where does this stop? Is there any limitations whatsoever?"

Dennis Prager, who is Jewish, asserts that the Christian Bible is the only book that all American lawmakers should swear by. When it was pointed out that several politicians including some US presidents have chosen to forgo swearing on any religious book and that Jewish Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg used the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, Prager back tracked a bit. He then uttered some feeble excuses about Quakers and the Old Testament etc. which like any other argument mixing religion and politics was hogwash. Before that however, he had fumed with indignation about the Quran, saying:

"… he will be doing more damage to the unity of America by using the Quran and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11….. The ceremony is, in fact, the important part. Remember, there have been congressmen and congresswomen of all different faiths. Mormons do not use the Book of Mormon. Secularists do not use the collected works of Voltaire or whatever secular text they want to use. Many people for whom the Bible is not their personal, great religious source have used the Bible, because they are all saying, "This book is the book from which America gets its values in the final analysis."

Read the entire insane (and inane) exchange here.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if someone pointed out to these "great Americans" that America would be a pretty decent place if US lawmakers just swear by the one book that really matters to America – the US Constitution? Actually, someone did. During a Maryland senate debate about the influence of the Bible on modern American law, Jamie Ruskin a professor of constitutional law at the American University pointed out, "People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."
War Criminal or Academic Censorship? (Joe)

December 1, 2006

Who knew that my law school could be such a controversial and exciting place?

Robert Delahunty is in the national news (by which I mean Brian Leiter, not USNWR) these days. Wait, who? It’s just not a sexy name like "Yoo" or "Gonzales!"

Delahunty co-authored a Jan 9, 2002 memorandum with John Yoo for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to the Department of Defense (one of the infamous "torture memos"), in which they concluded that "neither the federal War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions would apply to the detention Conditions in Guantanamo Bay… or to trial by military commission of al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners," and that "customary international law has no binding legal effect on either the President or the military."

Delahunty’s obligation as an OLC attorney was to give an objective statement of the law, to tell the President (here, the DoD) whether conduct is lawful, knowing that the advice would be relied upon given the President’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law in accordance with the Constitution–due to the Supreme Court’s refusal to issue advisory opinions outside of triable cases or controversies, the OLC functions as a sort of "advisory Supreme Court" for the President (with the notable exception that for it, unlike the Court’s Justices, Supreme Court precedent is the binding law of the land). Unfortunately, that’s not what he did.

To me, the memo reads like an advocate’s argument for a desired outcome, which would be fine if that were his lawyerly responsibility, e.g. if he were defending Rumsfeld in court. It is widely agreed by legal scholars that the analysis in this memo is so bad that the authors are guilty either of incompetence or bad faith.

Delahunty helped to lay the legal groundwork for actual and foreseeable torture of detainees, i.e., war crimes and crimes against humanity. One might argue that his best defense is incompetence (like Yoo, however, he possesses sterling academic credentials and would otherwise seem to be highly intelligent and well-trained). Or maybe he just had his ideological blinders on–it can happen to anyone. Either way, it’s clear that there are grave concerns about Delahunty’s professional ethics.

Oh yeah, and the international community widely regards him as a war criminal.

(My own admittedly incomplete understanding of history, Nuremberg, and the international law of war crimes and crimes against humanity is such that he could, in this view, be convicted as a war criminal regardless of whether he merely "got it wrong" or intentionally twisted the law.)

Needless to say, this isn’t the sort of thing anyone wants to be associated with. Which is why there’s now a controversy at the University of Minnesota, albeit one which has perhaps not been reported quite accurately. Dean Charles was misquoted speaking about the students; 1L Jon Taylor–an organizing force behind the petition for the reconsideration of Delahunty’s hiring–was misquoted, somehow "It doesn’t have anything to do with ideology" incorrectly becoming "It has more to do with ideology." (This rather significant misquotation still flies proudly at Volokh, in addition to some other unfortunate posts.)

UMN law professors have published an open letter requesting that the Co-Deans "reconsider their decision to hire Mr. Delahunty as a temporary hire to teach constitutional law at the University of Minnesota Law School and to accomodate students who may have concerns about taking a mandatory course from such an individual." In the letter they express concern that the law school as an institution, the faculty, and the students will be tainted by association with the ethically suspect Delahunty. They also rightly rebuke Professor Paulsen for his embarrassing public comments: "We find these statements, and especially one who currently occupies the position of Associate Dean, deplorable."

It’s a sad situation. Here’s what happened: Dale Carpenter, who teaches a year-long 1L constitutional law course, requested leave for the spring semester to focus on his research and scholarship. The two-headed Dean Morrison and Charles (a two-headed Dean is not, sadly, quite as exciting as the worldwide hydra-headed enemy Justice Thomas imagines lurking everywhere in the shadows, but we’ll make do with what we’ve got), in an obvious hurry, hired Delahunty, who teaches at nearby St. Thomas Law School, to serve next semester as an adjunct lecturer. He had a seemingly impressive resume, was strongly recommended by one unnamed professor here, and teaches at a nearby accredited law school. The hiring process for adjuncts is naturally not as careful as that for tenure-track, or even visiting professor, appointments. Co-Deans Morrison and Charles did not know when they hired him that he wrote that particular memo. If they had, (I think) they would not have hired Mr. Delahunty.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, we (students) learned that Delahunty would replace Professor Carpenter next semester. Discovering who "some guy from St. Thomas" in fact turned out to be, students organized to voice their concern and dismay over the hiring of Robert Delahunty; a petition is currently circulating the school requesting his un-hiring. The problem is, the Co-Deans believe they lack (and presumably do lack) cause to fire him, even though they would (presumably) not have hired him in the first place had they been more adequately informed. I kind of feel sorry for them, because what are the odds of this happening? One in a million? They may come off looking worse than they deserve.

For now we’re kind of stuck. Many students and some faculty have publicly distanced themselves from Mr. Delahunty’s views and past work products. They also do not wish for him to join this institution, however temporarily, but Delahunty will very probably be here next semester teaching us. I expect the semester to go smoothly: students will study, teachers will teach, and nearly all of us are capable of being mature and professional individuals. In the interim (and admittedly, much to his credit), Delahunty will speak with his future students and attempt to address any concerns they might have.

So this is what happens when a war criminal is a professor! (I know, I know, presumption of innocence, due process, etc…. it sounds more interesting my way.)

And for the record, it’s quite disappointing that some individuals (both at the school and in the blogosphere) insist on denouncing this all as political trash. There are serious concerns that Delahunty gravely breached his ethical obligations as a government attorney, or that in the perhaps less plausible alternative, he merely produced incompetent legal analysis which was repudiated by the Supreme Court. This is sufficient to oppose bringing him on board. So please, leave aside the absurd cries you direct at those of us who oppose his hiring. "Partisans! Stop hating on conservatives!" "This is academic censorship!" You only make yourself look foolish.

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