Accidental Blogger

End of the line

Dear Readers and Co-bloggers,

This is the farewell post I had contemplated writing several times in the past year but did not get around to doing. After noting the gradual decrease in readership and much slower rates of posting - mine and of others - I feel that the time has come to put an end to new writing on Accidental Blogger.

Blogging over the past many years has been a most enjoyable activity, both from the angle of creativity and social interactions that were interesting, thoughtful and fun.  We made many friends and hopefully, no enemies. I discovered much about others, the world and my own self that I did not know before. The format provided a perfect spot for the give and take of ideas and opinions with friends as well as strangers, many of whom subsequently became friends.

Accidental Blogger made its solo debut in October 2005 as a vehicle for recording my musings, mainly political commentary. On the way, it gathered a few more passengers.  Joe, Anna, Sujatha and Dean were among the early authors who joined A.B. to add their voices to mine. Andrew showed up soon after. Narayan and Prasad came on board midway during the blog's life. Norman, Jesse, Cyrus, Omar and John Ballard are among the more recent additions to the roster of authors. I am extremely grateful to my co-bloggers for their contributions and have enjoyed getting to know them. I also wish to acknowledge my sister-in-law Sukrita Paul Kumar and my good friends Elatia Harris and Nancy Hudson for writing an occasional piece here, thus making them honorary A.B. bloggers. Among the people mentioned, I have had the pleasure of meeting Sujatha, Anna, Elatia and Cyrus in real life. Perhaps in the future I will  bump into the rest also somewhere outside the virtual salon, on terra firma, and have a real cup of tea (or beer) with them.

Accidental Blogger owes its minor success in the blogosphere to a very large extent to the kindness of other bloggers who were already there and gave us a helping hand in the form of links and by featuring the site on their blogroll. Editors of vastly more popular blogs (Brian Leiter, Abbas Raza, Amardeep Singh, Bora Zivkovic, Razib Khan, Abhi Tripathi among others) introduced A.B. to their readers via links  to our articles and by adding it to the list of recommended blogs. Without those early assists, it is unlikely that I could have succeeded in spreading the word about A.B. on my own. Due mainly to the links from these widely read blogs, we were also occasionally pleasantly surprised to see our posts referred to on bigger, more mainstream sites such as Slate, Salon and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish which, for a few thrilling days brought in far more traffic than we were accustomed to.

Speaking of reading and writing on blogs, it has become increasingly clear to me in the last couple of years that many smaller, general interest blogs like A.B. are fading in popularity. (Professional and academic blogs probably haven't been affected) Writers, as well as readers are gradually gravitating towards other forms of social media. The brief and somewhat more casual mode of interactions at sites like Facebook and Twitter seems to have the attraction of instant communication that blogs don't generally afford. On the other hand, it is a bit ironic that mainstream publications, which initially expressed disdain for the proliferation of blogs started by amateur writers and non-journalists, now all have their own blogs. In any case, I don't know enough about the contents of the internet to comment authoritatively on the fate of individual blogs. But I do know that with a few exceptions, I don't have the same enthusiasm I once felt for writing or for reading many of the blogs that I used to visit regularly in the past. Most of the other A.B. writers (not you, John!) too have been absent for long periods, some longer than others. Some time ago, I had consulted with them about the prospect of keeping A.B. going. I got a mixed response. While some did not wish to see the blog die, others left it to me to make the decision of continuing or shutting it down. It has been a few months since then and I haven't seen much change in the health of the blog. Writing is infrequent and the readership has fallen precipitously in the last year or so. I am now convinced that rather than let A.B. languish, it is time to bring about a graceful end to its tenure. I will not delete the blog - there are many years' worth of interesting interactions recorded here. It will remain as an inactive archival site for the foreseeable future. 

Many thanks to all the readers who visited here over the years and encouraged us, sometimes privately, to write, think, inform and debate. Without their participation all of this would have been a lonely enterprise. After all, like many other public activities blogging too is a performative exercise. I hope to stay in touch with my co-bloggers via e-mail and Facebook. Those readers who have occasionally contacted me, please feel free to do so in the future if you wish. My contact information is available here.

The launch of Accidental Blogger was indeed accidental - an impulsive move that turned out to be a wonderful experience. The decision to end it however, is a deliberate and considered step. Among other things, blogging began for me as an exciting journey to a mostly unknown place. I had a vague idea of what I hoped to achieve but none whatsoever of what lay en route. The time, the place and the emerging technology of web based communications offered a ticket to ride and I set out with much anticipation and very little preparation. I always enjoyed writing and sharing my thoughts with anyone who would care to listen. Blogging was the perfect vehicle to pursue that interest. Now, after 7+ years, the trip is near the inevitable end. Again, the changes in time, place and technology, as also the diminished energy for the process of putting one's thoughts in order for a meaningful exchange with others, have played a role in the decision to apply the brakes, get off and move on.

Thanks again and best wishes for the upcoming Holiday Season.

Ruchira

P.S. I am attaching a portrait of my much younger self, painted years ago that shows me sitting with a cup of tea - alone. It is perhaps apt to post it here because the Table Talk (beverages implied) referred to in the title of the blog is now about to cease. Thanks everyone for a wonderful party!

 

Jamaica Spiced Black Fruitcake (John Ballard)

I have a confession to make. I am a fruitcake lover. Fruitcake jokes strike me as tired gestures of small minds which have run out of meaningful content. 
My love of fruitcake has roots in childhood when on special of occasions beloved family members or close friends broke out a few home-made versions which were served in too-small rationed portions, always leaving me wanting more than I was allowed.

Two such occasions remain fresh in my memory. The first was when I was about eleven years old, visiting with my parents an elderly woman of my grandparents generation one Sunday afternoon. After a little while she invited us to have a taste of her holiday fruitcake. It was so big it must have been from a recipe I'll tell about shortly, but it was by then over half gone, with evidence that it had been taken away a morsel at a time, leaving behind a crumbling ruin. It would never make a good magazine picture but it was delightful to see, a damaged tube cake under an old cotton towel, stained with whatever spirits kept it damp, with a dried up old half an apple or two in the opening of the tube. My Dad said that Gladys Maupin's black fruitcake was better than anyone else's and when she told people what was in it she never seemed to tell the same thing twice. It was so crumbly I at it with my fingers, but either the flavor or the occasion has remained in my memory.

The second was years later when our girls were involved with gymnastics. The last surviving aunt on my mother's side, an avid sports fan in her eighties, lived two hours away where a state-wide meet was being hosted. When we went by her apartment afterward she discretely invited me into her kitchen for a taste of her holiday fruitcake which by then was at least three months old. She had it wrapped carfully and hidden under a drop-leaf table in the kitchen and obviously didn't let anybody have any unless they were worthy in her judgment. I don't recall the cake as much as the occasion and the way it was treated, almost like a religious relic. 

Boiled Custard Recipe (John Ballard)

Reblogged here from my old blog. Four years ago I posted this recipe while taking a break from Thanksgiving kitchen duties. It was noticed by the Google robots and appears among the first links when I search for "boiled custard recipe." (Algorithms are crafted to reflect a variety of preferences so results may vary.)

~~~~~§§§~~~~~~

No Thanksgiving or Christmas is complete at our house without boiled custard. I just made two batches which yielded just over a quart and a half after I enjoyed the cook's tasting portion along the way. It took less than an hour, and if family members don't get too much while it is still warm, there should be enough left to serve chilled with dessert later today.

This is a Southern thing but mostly from the border states. My family is from Kentucky, so we have had boiled custard for generations. Think eggnog without the nog. This delectable treat is nothing more than milk, eggs and sugar with vanilla added for flavor. Like all wonderful foods, handling is more important than the recipe. This is how I make boiled custard.

The ingredients are simple...

4 Eggs
1 Cup Sugar
1 Quart Milk
Vanilla to taste

...but that's not the recipe. The recipe is how to put them together.

1. Heat the milk in a double boiler, stirring enough that it won't leave cooked milk at the bottom as it heats. I have found that a small boiler making one quart at a time works better than doing a large batch. I use a pocket thermometer to check the temperature.
2. While the milk is getting hot, break the eggs into another container and mix in the sugar. A small hand whip works well for this. No need to mess up an electric mixer. When the milk shows about 120 degrees, put some into the egg-sugar mixture, mix it in to make it all pour better, then pour it all into the hot milk, stirring all the time.  
3. Continue to stir and monitor the custard as it heats to 180 degrees. As it gets hot, the eggs will be cooking and it will want to stick to the bottom of the boiler, so keep stirring. A wooden spoon is good, but I just use the same whip that I used to mix the sugar and eggs.  
4. Pour the hot custard through a sieve into some other container. I use a two-quart plastic kitchen measure with handle and pouring spout. It makes it easier to pour into jars to cool.  
5. Vanilla always goes into anything at the end. If you put it in as it is cooking the flavor will not be as good. (This is also true of herbs and most spices. The delicate aromas and flavors are never improved by too much boiling, baking or poaching.) I use about a teaspoon and the aroma makes me immediately pour off a little into a juice glass to make certain I didn't make any mistakes. 

This sweet, simple treat will serve wonderfully with almost any dessert. Pound Cake or sweet potato pie comes to mind. Later in the day, I have been known to enrich boiled custard with something alcoholic. Bourbon is traditional, but liqueurs of all kinds are a possibility. The mind reels. Enjoy.

Literature, locality and locomotion (prasad)

Just a link dump, sorry, but this is a remarkable piece of writing:

If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense. What this means for how we read—and how we are taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.

Thought provoking.

Petraeus Footnote -- Col. Ted Westhusing's Suicide, 2007 (John Ballard)

The career of General David Petraeus is under the microscope.  At the risk of being a scandal-monger I have to drag out the skeleton of Col. Ted Westhusing, a field-grade officer in Iraq who committed suicide in June, 2005. The story of his death did not get close scrutiny for hearly half a year when investigative journalists attempted to connect his suicide with some very unsavory events that occurred about the time of his death. Questions were raised at the time which remain to this day about a coverup of those events which included soft-pedaling Westhusing's suicide. Petraeus was his commanding officer. 

This is the opening of a lengthy article appearing in the LA Times at the time.

The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.

His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.

Readers can do their own investigation from here.
This is what I said about it at the time. 

There is something wrong with this picture. Very wrong.

I have seen other reports of "straight as an arrow" career military types associated with other stories that do not exactly, shall we say, support the official spin that policy-makers or commanders would have them present. But I don't recall anyone ranked as high as Colonel among them. (There may have been a General or two, but at that level I start to think in terms of political ambitions beyond military careers so arguments about policy take on a different implication.)

A lot of media reporters are "embedded" with the military, which turns out to have been a good thing over all. But I don't know how many media types are embedded with the private sector over there. My guess is that there are very few. And the few that may be there might well be in-bed-with rather than embedded with their host entity. I just don't know.

Letters home and conversations he had with others prior to his death indicate that the man was conflicted about what appears in retrospect to have been a delibrate cover-up of savage behavior on the part of American civilian contractors. No need to go into the details here. At this late date details of those events, though horrible, were long ago tossed into the cesspool of military history, dismissed along with the rest of the bloody mess as the price we pay for "protecting liberty." 

I can't say about the rest, but my suspicions about the closeness of embedded journalists was prescient. 

I'm not the only one not to have forgotten. These comments appeared this morning in one of Juan Cole's FB posts.

==>   I remember being troubled about Petraeus when I read the news item about Ted Westhusing in 2007.
==>  Yeah the Ted Westhusing thing is absolutely wild. I hope the people are willing to get to the bottom of all this.

And last year in The Nation Greg Mitchell wrote a piece, General Petraeus's Link to a Troubling Suicide in Iraq: The Ted Westhusing Story.

A Visual Aid (Sujatha)

To the unfolding soap opera of the Generals and their paramours

(From Gawker):

Paging Oliver Stone. On second thoughts, not enough battlefield scenes. Maybe we should get Baz Luhrmann to turn this into a Moulin Rouge-like spectacle.

 

 

Twitter as Poetry -- Sandmonkey's Vision (John Ballard)

Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey spins out a poetic vision of the future via Twitter.  
I'm tagging this "Poetry" because Tweets (140 characters) remind me of haiku (17 sylables)  or sonnet form (14 lines).  I know Ruchira (and others, I'm sure) has an aversion to Twitter, but think of it liquor or hot sauce -- an occasional taste won't hurt.
Besides, I have no idea who "frymaster" is but his spontaneous Palin cheer ("Follow Sandmonkey. He can see the future from his house!") was an inspiration.

postapocalyptic movies show a future where pollution is everywhere, no state control, random violence & good shortages.

so, the question becomes, since we do meet all of these criterion, how will the postapocalypse look like in egypt exactly?

And why are we not selling the world on "postapocalyptic tourism" to Egypt? Experience the Future, come to Egypt! :D

I would pioneer postapocalyptic tourism...I would take the tourists to Giza square & leave them there for 3 hours... That shud do it!

The Rapture talks about a time when the best people go to heaven & all that are left are the rest to live in misery & fight each other. hmm.

Dear Western countries, Egypt is not turning into an Islamic state. We are going the faithless route. Just watch us!

The Islamists have no executive power, can't control the streets, & can't enforce their will. They are getting that, will try anyway & fail.

Meanwhile, our government is being run by merchants who don't understand what economy means or the scope of the country they are ruling.

The Secualrists are not becoming any more organized, but they are becoming more determined, & understand that terrorist attacks are coming

Segmentation is taking lace, localization of people into their areas is happening, people are not leaving their neghbourhoods more & more

Everyone is expanding their local neighbourhood network, due to secuirty concerns & traffic, & go out more there..

This localization & informal neighborhood networks are forcing people to think about their neighbourhoods first & work on them..

Soon, the informal local networks will replace the government support on the ground, & replace it in most functions..

Those networks will form coordinators, who will link up with other coordinators, & a true social & political movment will emerge...

But until then there will be no parties, no politics, & no government. Also, call me crazy, but art will be the only way to unify us.

Many of you can't see it from all the beards, but a dynamic egypt is being built right now.

We are doing it the hard way, but it's happening And the best part, it is happening without our interference or guidance, organically, & none of us twitter activist will matter.

All those symbols, all of those leaders, all of them on all sides will not survive next year. People will look for those who do the work.

Those who do the work will have local networks that can function & mobilize their areas... those will lead us, not those in the media.

I see a truly amalgamted culture forming, I see mindsets changing, I see the future, & it doesn't belong to the Islamists at all..

Veterans Day Reading (John Ballard)

Veterans Day is tomorrow. I have two readings to recommend. 
The first frustrates me so bad I can't say anything rational about it. Read it for yourself.
The second is nostalgic but excellent. It appeals to my pacifist sensibilities at a deep level.  

►Lost to History: Missing War Records Complicate Benefit Claims by Iraq, Afghanistan Veterans

Stories come from unexpected places. This one emerged from a war resigned to memory but revived by a personal favor I wanted to do for some soldiers.

In the fall of 2011, I decided to write an account of the battle at As Samawah, Iraq, during the invasion of 2003. I was one of the embedded reporters during that invasion, working for The Oregonian newspaper in Portland and attached to the 2nd Combat Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. Contemporary histories had skipped over the week of fighting in that city, as most people then and now misunderstood its significance. I wanted to honor the soldiers I had known there with the story of what they endured.

[...]

As my reporting went forward, my historical writing morphed into a return to journalism as I realized the magnitude of the problem. Historians within and without the U.S. Army told me repeatedly that the missing records problem extended far beyond one soldier. In fact, they said, it covered two wars and entire Army brigades.

►Burial at Sea by LtCol George Goodson, USMC (Ret)

I came across this man's memorable recollectios several years ago and drag it out when I think of it on Memorial Day or Veterans Day. My version at the old blog is better formatted and easier to read, but the link above has a long comments thread with far more in the way of solid content. 

About That "Fiscal Cliff" (John Ballard)

Jonathan Chait, writing a few weeks ago (October 14), spun out a lengthy string of reflections and predictions well before Hurricane Sandy and Election Day. Not knowing what the outcome of the election might be he covered a lot of ground and several scenarios. Overshadowing them all was the ominous spectre of that fiscal cliff now being featured any time talking heads, politicians or just about anybody runs out of anything else to say. Those references always seem to carry the fatalistic attitude of "Well, we're all gonna die some day anyhow..."

Next time that term comes around, Chait's explanation here will help you remember to take a breath calm down a little and stop rolling your eyes.

Are votes actually for sale? (prasad)

Here's a question for the 6th of November, now that we've all been through two years of electioneering, but before the actual results influence (corrupt?) intuitions: did Citizen's United actually change anything big? There are many ways of getting at that question, and the answer probably depends on what you value, but my instinctive response is to say no, it didn't matter much, at least in terms of partisan outcomes:

1. If the metric is election outcomes, then I claim the impact has been negligible. Both Romney and Obama raised and spent more money, but it was basically a standoff. They both have demonstrated the ability to raise the ~billion dollars of money needed to wage a campaign.

2. I suspect campaign spending is hitting diminishing returns already in terms of ability to influence outcomes. The recent swings I remember from this election (Clinton's speech, Romney's 47% video, the first debate, Sandy and Christie) all had nothing to do with money. Basically, we've moved to a new equilibrium with ~twice as much spending, but the issues influencing elections *differentially* in favor of one candidate continue to be one or more of:

- pretty low-information: random goof-ups, media controversies and similar tripe

- largely stochastic: economy crash, bin Laden death, Libya, hurricane

- cultural and strongly emotion/values driven, pretty resistant to *monetary* influence: rape/contraception, religion, gays.

3. If you worry about the wastage of a billion odd dollars of money, then sure, this is an issue. I would argue that it doesn't underwrite the amount of panicked/outraged commentary that decision generated. To set a scale, we're *comfortably* in sub-chewing gum territory.

I'm being rather too blunt here; if I spent ten more minutes on this post I'd be able to write down a para on ways that the spending rise (and more importantly, the composition of this rise) has mattered. But it's useful to make zeroth order statements at the outset, and it sure seems like Citizen's United and campaign finance have mattered rather less than people were forecasting back in 2010.

Voting About Life and Death (John Ballard)

In the interest of full disclosure I should say that my position of beginning-of-life and end-of-life issues is that in most cases it's no one's business but that of the family and whatever professionals they solicit in making those decisions. "Beginning of life" means everything from contraception to viability (in the case of an unborn baby) and "end of life" means whenever an individual or their designated agent for medical decisions decides that death is or should be eminent. These limits are subject to legal and/or criminal considerations but respecting a profound diversity of social and religious opinions there must be a bright line protecting private decisions from what various faiths and society might deem normative for everyone. 

Considering mankind's history of wanton killing of one another, matters of life and death should be way down the list of inflammatory subjects. But I suppose since those two realities are universal to the human condition, we are prone to personalize them more than any other experience. There cannot be one without the other. Having said all that, I can now link to a post at The Health Care Blog discussing briefly a ballot issue to be voted on tomorrow in Massachusetts, The Massachusetts Death With Dignity Act.

As described by the state secretary, “This proposed law would allow a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at a terminally ill patient’s request, to end that patient’s life. To qualify, a patient would have to be an adult resident who (1) is medically determined to be mentally capable of making and communicating health care decisions; (2) has been diagnosed by attending and consulting physicians as having an incurable, irreversible disease that will, within reasonable medical judgment, cause death within six months; and (3) voluntarily expresses a wish to die and has made an informed decision.”

There are, of course, a number of other safeguards built in, such as the need to make the request twice, separated by 15 days, in the presence of witnesses. However, there could probably be stronger safeguards to protect individuals who are experiencing depression and anxiety, and might have preferable alternatives to physician-assisted death.

Oregon and Washington State have already enacted legislation commonly called "assisted suicide", apparently with little evidence of abuse. One commenter at the link made the point that...

It’s really interesting how close the outcome was in Oregon back in 1994: 51.3% in favor, 48.7% against. Then 60% were against repeal in 1997.

Last year one of my high school classmates killed himself after being diagnosed with cancer which had by then metastasized. Prior to his death he took care of as many details as he could to help his wife after he was gone. Although they lived in Oregon I am told he opted to use a gun, outdoors in the back yard while lying on a towel, perhaps to minimize cleanup. His son told me his father was aware of the "cocktail" which is available in Oregon. He commented that it was comforting to know that the option was available. There is no way to know why he opted for a gun, but it may have been fear that a drug would prolong the dying experience. 

 

Poem Without a Name by John Ballard

In a few hours I'm having lunch with an old classmate whom I haven't seen for many years. So last night I was digging through a box of keepsakes from high school and college days and came across something I wrote in high school. 

I totally forgot about this poem. It is in my handwriting on notebook paper that I recognize. And as I typed it to make a digital record the scene became vaguely familiar, and reference to “the Chumbley place” meant that it had to have been a product of my imagination. Finally the odd words pinen and pecanen were the clues that made me remember. They were my own invention, made to match oaken as wood types. The characters were Sandra and her husband Cass. Together they spell Cassandra, a name that tells the future. 

Since there is no chance it will ever be published by anyone else, in the interest of vanity I'm publishing it myself.
I'm also vain enough to think it has held up pretty well after fifty years.

Chemo is Palliative, not Curative (John Ballard)

I'm not posting this just to make the day gloomier, only to help us all be well-informed. Misconceptions prevail because they make us feel better but a relective person feels stronger when better-informed. 

This brief message from Dr. Gawande should get more attention.
Take a moment to read the comments/ replies.

70+% of terminal cancer pts believe, wrongly, that they're on chemo to cure them. Who is to blame? Via @incidentalecon  goo.gl/fb/BVonY — Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) October 25, 2012

This feels like the flip side of yesterday’s post, where big effects were often found to be outliers. In this study, patients were asked about their expectations for chemotherapy for metastatic lung or colorectal cancer. The bad news is that these cancers have terrible prognoses. Chemotherapy is still the treatment of choice, but the effect we’re hoping for is an extension of life by weeks to months. Maybe you’ll see some relief of symptoms. But it’s not going to be curative. There are also, of course, significant side effects.

This NEJM report spells out some hard truths.

Chemotherapy for metastatic lung or colorectal cancer can prolong life by weeks or months and may provide palliation, but it is not curative.

[...]

Overall, 69% of patients with lung cancer and 81% of those with colorectal cancer did not report understanding that chemotherapy was not at all likely to cure their cancer.

[...]

Many patients receiving chemotherapy for incurable cancers may not understand that chemotherapy is unlikely to be curative, which could compromise their ability to make informed treatment decisions that are consonant with their preferences. Physicians may be able to improve patients' understanding, but this may come at the cost of patients' satisfaction with them.

Obamacare Will Survive (John Ballard)

Maggie Mahar sez...

Mitt Romney’s web site makes a bold promise: “On his first day in office, Mitt Romney will issue an executive order that paves the way for the federal government to issue Obamacare waivers to all 50 states. He will then work with Congress to repeal the full legislation as quickly as possible.”

Many of Romney’s supporters assume that this is what will happen if he wins. But in truth, even if Republicans take both the White House and the Senate, Romney wouldn’t have the power to “repeal the full legislation.” Nor could a new president grant waivers that would let states ignore the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We live in a nation ruled by law, not magic wands.

She refers readers to Dr. Timothy Jost and Health Affairs for the explanation.

There are no “Obamacare waivers” that could be issued by executive order. Section 1332 of the ACA permits “waivers for state innovation,” but these waivers, which only affect certain provisions of the law and can only be granted if specific substantive and procedural requirements are met, cannot be granted prior to January 1, 2017. Even in 2017, a state seeking a waiver would have to show that it had a plan to provide coverage that is at least as comprehensive and affordable and that covers at least as many people as the ACA (without increasing the deficit), not exactly what Governor Romney has in mind.

Legislation has been introduced in Congress that would accelerate these waivers to 2014, indeed President Obama announced support for such legislation, but it has gone nowhere. There are other provisions in the ACA permitting waivers or adjustments from specific requirements, such as waivers on the ban on annual dollar limits prior to 2014, but the time for granting these has already expired, and in any event they would have only a trivial effect on the law.

What about repeal? As every American remembers from middle-school civics, the president cannot unilaterally repeal a law. Under Article I of the Constitution, a bill must be passed by both the House and Senate and signed by the president to become law. This happened with the ACA, and the ACA remains the law of the land until it is repealed through this process. Under the Senate rules, a bill must pass the Senate by a three-fifths majority if it is filibustered, and an ACA repeal certainly would be. At this point in time, no one is predicting that the Republicans will pick up a 60 vote majority in the Senate, so repeal as such seems off the table.

This is also true for repeal and replace. Etc.

Lots more at the link for anybody who needs more evidence. There are likely a number of staff and support personnel who are more conversant with the minutiae of the law, but Dr. Jost followed the legislation from the outset and probably knows more about ACA than anybody in Congress. Whatever he says is solid as a rock.

He includes a concise summary of the Byrd Rule and how it acts as a constraint on Reconciliation. It should be remembered that ACA is a product of Reconciliation which opponents like to depict as some kind of parliamentary sleight of hand.

Budget reconciliation bills in the Senate are subject to the “Byrd rule,” which is in fact a federal statute. The Byrd rule allows any senator to raise a point of order objecting to any “extraneous provisions” in a reconciliation bill. If the Senate parliamentarian upholds the point of order, a three-fifths majority of the Senate is necessary for the provision to remain in the legislation.

As a reminder, the famous COBRA law (mandating employer-provided group insurance availability for six months following anyone's discharge from a job) is an acronym for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act.

Of all the lies and promises that have come from the mouth of Mitt Romney, his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare is perhaps the most egregious and he knows it. (If he doesn't know it, we're in even worse shape than I thought.)

Malala Footnote (John Ballard)

Thanks to an ambitious international press, always eager to report feel-good "human interest" stories, most of the literate world now knows the story of Malala.  For anybody who may have been living in isolation for the last week or so, Angelina Jolie's We Are All Malala will get you up to speed. 

This comment left at that story deserves wider exposure. 

Ms. Jolie, in addition to Malala, perhaps the Nobel committee might want to consider two other girls named Shazia and Kainat, Malala's companions who when confronted by the Taliban thugs, refused to identify her, and were shot as well. Malala's story is an inspiration no doubt. But the selfless loyalty of her two friends, one of whom remains in critical condition fighting for her life, elevates this story to epic proportions, and defines the meaning of the phrase "I am Malala".

She includes a link to Dawn.

ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari on Saturday inquired after the conditions of the two girls who were also injured during the attack on Malala Yousufzai — Shazia and Kainat, DawnNews reported.

The president moreover ordered the concerned authorities to ensure provision of medical treatment to both girls on the government’s behalf. He also summoned a report from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on the conditions of the two girls.

Spokesperson to President Zardari, Senator Farhatullah Babar said the president today enquired about the health of Shazia and Kainat and said the quest for knowledge of all these children despite threats had illumined the path for all.  

"They represented the true face of Pakistan, were a national asset and had raised collective national consciousness against the barbarism of militants and extremists," he said. President Zardari also prayed for the early recovery of Malala, Shazia and Kainat.

Malala Yousufzai was shot and seriously wounded on Tuesday as she was leaving her school in her hometown Mingora, in the Swat valley.

The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) later claimed responsibility for the attack saying she was pro-West and had opposed the Taliban. — DawnNews/APP

Presidential Debates

The Onion perspective :-)

 

If you like Campbell's Soup, you may also like Andy Warhol

Came across this article in the NYT about "art genome mapping." The idea is to create a massive data base of art through the ages which supposedly can analyze your artistic inclinations and direct you to works of art you may enjoy. Amazon has done this for years with books and Netflix does it with films and Pandora with music. Most internet sites selling things do the same to an extent. For some reason, I feel that the algorithm for predicting taste in visual art may be harder to crack than music and literature. We rarely can say what exactly catches our eye in a painting - the color, the composition, the subject matter, the light, the shadow, the reputation of the artist and sometimes even whether one comes across it in a tasteful museum setting or a roadside flea market. We can to a fair degree of accuracy say for ourselves or about others the *style* of artwork that could have an aesthetic appeal for a particular viewer but not a specific painting. I suppose the Art.sy project will be useful in putting a person in a particular artsy 'box' of sorts but I will wait to see how often its You may also like... recommendation hits the mark with art  browsers.

I have written a fair number of times here what I think about formulaic thinking about visual aesthetics. Here is an old post which may be relevant to Art.sy's analytic scope.  

United States of Starbucks (John Ballard)

I'm not sure what this means but it seems to be something of a milestone. 

I go to Starbucks from time to time, but there is apparently a subset of the population that virtually lives there. During the time I was in Korea I saw endless tearooms and met lots of Koreans, but can only recall being in someone's home very few times. The tearoom was the social equivalent to a living room. It was polite without being intrusive, and unlike Starbucks was often economical enough that even someone on a tight budget could pick up the tab.

I'm looking forward to a Starbucks that has table service and brings moist towels to refresh the weary customer, warm in cold weather and soothingly cool in the summer. 

Shooting Schoolgirls in the head for the glory of Islam (omar ali)

(Originally posted at brownpundits.com)

Many ideologies are dreadful but this one takes the cake (at least in this day and age). Malala's school van was stopped by 2 gunmen. They asked the driver to show them who Malala is. He said he couldnt show his girls to strangers (exact dialog uncertain, but something like that..brave man..btw, will codepink protest this use of patriarchal honor codes to try and protect a girl from terrorists? one wonders). One gunman asked the girls in the van. They looked towards Malala, he shot her in the head (and shot two other girls for good measure). Details here.

 

The Taliban have taken the time to explain why they shot her and how shooting a 14 year old girl as she comes home from school is the Islamic thing to do (argument from Quran and Hadith, with references):  https://www.facebook.com/boltapakistan1/posts/408721602528919

OK. I know about riots in India. I know child soldiers and suicide bombers were used by the Tamil Tigers. Thousands of Bengalis and Biharis and Punjabis and Balochis have died for Islam, Pakistan, Hindustan, whatever. MANY thousands more die of poverty, disease, malnutrition etc. Police beat up more people every day than the Taliban do. But in which case has a supposedly modern state failed for more than 10 years to even identify its enemies? Pakistan is a special case. That doesnt mean any of Zachary's posts about the great capitalist/IT/education/whatever success stories of Pakistan are wrong. Its still people. 200 million of them. Its a big economy. Its home to ancient cultures that developed many sound survival mechanisms, including our much maligned nepotism and pragmatic determination to help our kith and kin even when they have sinned. But the state ideology was confused and dangerous from day one and the elite's inability to change course has put more pressure on our ancient strengths than those ancient strengths can bear. The elite will have to wake up before its too late.

I think they will. But they will do it as late as possible. I want them to hurry up a little. Take a few short cuts instead of waiting for every bad idea to blow up in our face before we decide to dump it. Dont take my advice. Take Zachary's. But please, dont take Ahmed Qureshi's and Imran Khan's. Actually, even take Imran Khan's advice if thats the only way left. A number of Western commentators (especially journalists from cricketing nations; Bob Crilly, I am looking at you) seem to have decided that the poor retarded brown people cannot do any better and its Imran Khan or bust. Maybe they are right. White people sometimes are. Maybe he is exactly the kind of confused moron we need to put up as a distraction while the army changes course more thoroughly. Allah works in mysterious ways. But please, lets not have codepink visit us again for a few years. And if their need for street cred in NYC overwhelms them again, can we please send them to guard girls schools in FATA instead of making the poor souls suffer without toilets in SUVs on the bumpy road to Tank? I was going to say nasty things about our upperclass university pomo poco bullshitters as well, but better sense prevailed. It is our fault for paying attention to them. Let them discuss Humera Iqtedar's thesis (summarized with some creative license by history buff Shahid Saeed as: "TTP attacked b/c Malala promoting secularism. She is promoting secularism b/c of Taliban attacks. TTP secularizing public space" ) and let them congratulate each other and thrill to the applause of other equally Western educated members of the elite. More urgent problems deserve attention.

 

btw, here is the great white hope himself: Imran Khan on live with Talat. Watch near the end (36 minute mark onwards):

From "Innocence" to Mohammed Joyce by Omar Ali

Originally posted at 3qd.

Postscript: Today, 9th October, (afternoon in Pakistan) the Pakistani Taliban sent a gunman (or gunmen) to shoot a 14 year old girl who had become an icon of anti-Taliban resistance in her area after speaking up for female education. Yes, Codepink darlings on your way back from a faux protest march to Waziristan, education! NOT LGBT rights. NOT even complete gender equality. Just the right to go to school and aspire to a role in public life. She is now fighting for her life in a hospital. Another schoolgirl was also shot in the attack. There are reports that the driver of the school van was asked "who is Malala?"; he reportedly tried to stave them off by saying he couldn't identify girls for an outsider (Codepink may wish to protest this attempt to use patriarchal codes of female "honor" to save her life). Details are still murky. The story may change in some ways. But whatever the details, the Taliban's spokesman has called newspapers and proudly taken responsibility. She was shot for certain things she said and kept saying. That's it. She had done nothing else. She had not gone topless or thrown paint at a congressman or organized a little study circle of Tariq Ali's Trotskyite world resistance. She had, in short, committed no other crime even in the eyes of the Taliban. Inability to publicly say what you believe out of fear of this kind of violence is the ultimate restriction on free speech. I know it's too much to expect Codepink to have a clue, but others may wish to keep this in mind while reading this article. (Yes, I am picking on Codepink. In fact, I want to pick on most of the postcolonial-upperclass-university-retard crowd... I know they are mostly irrelevant, but I still want to pick on them, so there. I am probably putting my own happy relationship with the Pakistani super-elite at risk but sometimes you have to upset your friends.)

Potted Crow Recipe (John Ballard)

I found this recipe in our file. It may be useful sometime over the next few weeks. 
Note the date and notes at the end.
This recipe can be recycled one way or another after every election... 

Saturday, November 18, 2006

New recipe just in time for Thanksgiving: Potted Crow

For those who have been looking, either for themselves or to feed to someone else...Potted Crow

• 6 crows 
• 3 bacon slices 
• stuffing of your choice 
• 1 diced carrot 
• 1 diced onion
• chopped parsley 
• hot water or stock 
• 1/4 cup shortening 
• 1/4 cup flour
• buttered toast

Clean and dress crows; stuff and place them upright in stew-pan on the slices of bacon. Add the carrot, onion and a little parsley, and cover with boiling water or stock. Cover the pot and let simmer for 2-3 hours, or until tender, adding boiling water or stock when necessary.Make a sauce of the shortening and flour and 2 cups of the stock remaining in the pan. Serve each crow on a thin slice of moistened toast, and pour gravy over all.

**For future reference, the Democrats took the election, winning control of both houses of Congress, breaking a twelve year lock on all three branches. Lotta pundits eating crow now. With Bush a lame duck, the future looks good for Democrats. Of course they can snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory. It won't be the first time.

Sure enough, they did, four years later, midterm elections of 2010. Even having elected Barack Obama to the White House Democrats fell to a blistering loss of power in both houses.

 

Safdarjung Hospital -- A Study in Professional Pride (John Ballard)

I'm linking here a post from The Health Care Blog which reminds me of a conversation I had with our pediatrician when our children were born in the Seventies. Having selected what was then one of the metro area's best hospital, I mentioned casually that it seemed to be the best in town. He replied that yes, it was very good, but for any kind of neonatal complications Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital would be the place of choice. This surprised me because Grady was (and still is) the treatment center for indigents. But precisely because it is a "charity hospital" the volume of all types of trauma and complications gives the staff and support facility far more experience "practicing" medicine than most other hospitals. Other than TV programs and a limited time as an Army Medic in Korea in the Sixties, that is my only background regarding high-volume, low-budget hospitals. 

Pain After Death (John Ballard)

This was from Dr. Salwitz' post Friday. Go read the whole thing. He's an oncologist and knows more about death than most people. 

A poorly managed end-of-life experience can transform families for generations. I recently heard of a young man who suffered a miserable protracted death from cancer. This resulted in his wife becoming chronically depressed and isolated from her family. She committed suicide, leaving their son a life as an alcoholic and drug addict. The ripples from that one cancer spread out and, through the network of that family, caused pain for many more.

Thomas Jefferson's Tawdry Final Chapter (John Ballard)

I finally got around to reading the Smithsonian article, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson. I'm guilty of too much scanning of material, enough to catch the drift, without taking time to get mired in details that I will forget anyway. But this time I printed it out, some ten or so pages, and took time to let it sink in and it was a sad and disturbing experience.  

I already knew, as any good Liberal knows, that Jefferson was by no means the Godly Christian that Evangelical and Tea Party types like to paint. He had a personal copy of the Koran and was a student of scripture of all kinds. His intellect was mammoth. One commenter at the end of the article recalled John Kennedy's quip to a group of notables at a White House dinner that "there has never been a greater concentration of intellectual power here at the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined alone."  I also knew of the Jefferson Bible, his revision of the New Testament which not only attempted to reconcile the contradictions among the synoptic Gospels but meticulously removed the miracles as fables which he felt were invented by the original scribes, products of their superstitious imaginations. And of course the history and recent stories of Sally Hemmings are by now well-known to most readers.

Open Adoption and Other Matters (John Ballard)

Story Corps Atlanta aired a great audio snapshot this morning well worth the three and a half minutes it takes to listen. 

This summer and fall, 41 year old Atlanta attorney Kirsten Widner has been living with her biological son, Alex Locke, for the first time.

Alex is now 19 years old. He was adopted as an infant to the parents he calls Mom and Dad, and he grew up on the other side of the country. At StoryCorps Atlanta, Kirsten told Alex about her decision to put Alex in an open adoption, in which they’d still have the possibility of a relationship.

~~~~~§§§~~~~~

As I listened to yet another first-person account of how the idea of family has changed during our lifetime, I reflected on my own experience. Mine was a very traditional upbringing. Marriage on both sides meant "til death do you part" and I can't recall even whispers about anybody having to get married because they were "in trouble" (i.e. she got pregnant).  The oldest of my first cousins was the first person in the family to dare marry anyone who had been divorced, a woman with three children, and they never had any together. That was in the Fifties, and since then our family, like most, has come to terms with divorce and more, including gender orientation and racial differences. 

The difference between today's families and those of the past is more about facing realities that have always been there rather than discovering anything new. Attractions between cultural, religious and racial groups have always been around, and not always limited to young people either. The difference in today's global village is that we can no longer remain in denial because the numbers are simply too big. Those old bad apple and black sheep arguments no longer have credibility. 

Following my cousin's example, I married with a divorced woman with two children, one of whom had been adopted by her and her first husband, and we then had two more together, making a blended family of six. In the early years we were also licensed foster parents to several pre-adoptive newborns, one of which was a very promising little boy we hated parting with after more than a year when he was finally placed with his adoptive family. 

We persuaded the case workers to do adoptions from our home instead of the usual family services facilities which despite the toys and other stuff seemed too alien. It was a three-day process. The first day the adoptive parent came and met us as a family as well as the baby, and they spent as much time as possible with the baby. Second day any siblings came along and our two families spent a little time together, but the adoptive family might take the baby for a ride to have more time to bond. By the third day the baby would be going to a new home, not with total strangers but with people he had already known a little while. 

In the case of our last one we did the third day differently. We took our three girls out of school that day and delivered the baby to his new home where our kids played with their kids for a couple of hours before we left. In fact, they weny back once or twice later to visit before we lost touch. That baby would now be about thirty years old and we still think of him from time to time. 

In the meantime, there have been grandchildren and step-grandchildren as the next generation multiplied, with the most recent count being ten, with ages from a few weeks to twenty-six years. The two youngest, aged three and infant, are the result of assisted reproduction because our youngest daughter has no need for a man in her life but wanted to be a mother. She did her homework, found a clinic specializing in these matters, selected a donor from a veritable catalog of candidates, and became pregnant via IUI. Intrauterine insemination or implantation is not the same as in vitro fertilization which most people know about in that there is no deselecting of fertilized eggs. With IUI sperm is injected and timed to coordinate with the mother's natural ovulation cycle.

It's an exciting time to be alive. But it's also a challenge for those of us pushing seventy. When a single mom decides that her firstborn might feel cheated if she doesn't have a sibling, all you can do is pray that all goes well in their lives for the next decade or two. One of the hard lessons we all learn is that you can't tell your adult children how to live their lives. The reassuring part is that we get to watch the drama unfold daily on Facebook where there are literally scores of supportive online contacts, many of whom may never have known each other except on line. It turns out there is a voluntary online registry of siblings for parents who want to compare pictures and experiences! Our two youngest grandchildren (who have the same donor father, by the way, so they are true biological siblings) have at least forty-plus other half-siblings with the same donor/ father. (They are geographically widespread and the donor has been "retired" because the clinic restricts the number of donations from any one donor.)

Now you know why this morning's Story Corps feature caught my attention.  

Women Scrubbed from the IKEA Catalog, KSA Edition (John Ballard)

Stuff you come across on Twitter.

Ikea removed women from the directory in Saudi Arabia
Ikea has removed virtually all women from the pictures in the catalog company in Saudi Arabia.

In most other countries the Ikea catalog quite the same. But furniture giant has made sure to create a separate version for Saudi Arabia, writes the Swedish newspaper Metro.

Here are almost all women, many girls airbrushed away from the pictures. While directories in other countries have four designers at the front, there are only three in the Saudi edition. A female designer is removed from the picture.

In another picture a woman with earrings, bare feet and a small neck had become a man with black socks.

The arch-conservative and strict Muslim Saudi Arabia, women not allowed to drive or walk alone on the streets. The Swedish Trade Minister Ewa Björling think Ikea pictures is a sad example of how the country has "a long way to go" when it comes to gender equality.

This is what happens when corporate profitability collides with social norms. Before we too quickly look down our noses at IKEA it might be better to examine the impact of other less conspicuous corporate policies. Child labor and environmental pollution in other countries come to mind but I'm sure the list is much longer.

Introducing Dr. Kleinke (John Ballard)

I became aware of J.D. Kleinke from a post about abortion at The Health Care Blog almost two years ago. I later learned he is the author of several books, one of which with the clever title, Catching Babies. Anybody who wants to slog around in the abortion debate is invited to read that post and comments (although the comments begin running off the rails about half way down, so don't let that take too much reading time). 

NY Times published a timely opinion piece by Dr. Kleinke yesterday that needs to be part of the ongoing arguments about PPACA. The Conservative Case for Obamacare spells out those market-driven, free-market principles embedded in the legislation. Even if force-fed to Republicans most would react like those with eating disorders with self-ionduced vomiting. But denial of his points won't make them any less accurate. Here is the opening...

IF Mitt Romney’s pivots on President’s Obama’s health care reform act have accelerated to a blur — from repealing on Day 1, to preserving this or that piece, to punting the decision to the states — it is for an odd reason buried beneath two and a half years of Republican political condemnations: the architecture of the Affordable Care Act is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas about individual responsibility and the power of market forces.

This fundamental ideological paradox, drowned out by partisan shouting since before the plan’s passage in 2010, explains why Obamacare has only lukewarm support from many liberals, who wanted a real, not imagined, “government takeover of health care.” It explains why Republicans have been unable since its passage to come up with anything better. And it explains why the law is nearly identical in design to the legislation Mr. Romney passed in Massachusetts while governor.

The core drivers of the health care act are market principles formulated by conservative economists, designed to correct structural flaws in our health insurance system — principles originally embraced by Republicans as a market alternative to the Clinton plan in the early 1990s. The president’s program extends the current health care system — mostly employer-based coverage, administered by commercial health insurers, with care delivered by fee-for-service doctors and hospitals — by removing the biggest obstacles to that system’s functioning like a competitive marketplace.

Read the rest and decide for yourself. 

I noticed Dr. Kleinke is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. As recently as two years ago I would have held that against him, me being an unreconstructed Sixties Liberal and all. But something has changed over the last couple of years. I can't decide if I am changing or the respectable old digs of the Grand Old Party have finally discovered that nut cases from the Extreme Right have infiltrated their ranks. They are only a few perilous steps short of having racists and others from the lunatic fringe  getting   keeping the upper hand in their base. 

Support the savage (prasad)

There's an ad you can see in New York subway stations, that says "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad." The NY subway authority initially refused to allow the ad, placed by Pamela Geller, saying it was demeaning, but a court ruled that the FIrst Amendment didn't allow them to apply that consideration. The (Muslim, liberal, feminist) columnist Mona Eltahawy didn't like the ad much, and got arrested while spray painting it. I haven't much to say about the speech issues here, or about whether Eltahawy should have been arrested. What I want to get at rather is the nature of her opposition to this ad. As far as I can tell, her objection is that it deems Arabs uncivilized, and uses a word like "savage." 

But here's the selfsame Eltahawy, from just three months ago:

So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.

But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either.[emphasis added]

 

Civilization metrics aren't unique; there are going to be radical incommensurabilities between my rankings and those produced by someone with a conception of the Good that's at root sharply divergent from mine. I cannot persuade the Salafi Imam that a life of sexual license and debauchery is better than one spent covered in drapes. Plus even people who broadly agree will disagree about the proper situational weighting of different goods. Still, any metric I could endorse for ranking the Israelis and the Arabs today by 'civilization' would almost certainly have to rank one of these rather higher than the other. In fact, Eltahawy endorses explicit rankings herself:

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, might be eons apart when it comes to GDP, but only four places separate them on the index, with the kingdom at 131 and Yemen coming in at 135 out of 135 countries. Morocco, often touted for its "progressive" family law (a 2005 report by Western "experts" called it "an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society"), ranks 129; according to Morocco's Ministry of Justice, 41,098 girls under age 18 were married there in 2010.

Any metric that'd appeal to an NY subway-goer viewing that ad would have to take some things very seriously indeed: things like religious freedom, the equality of men and women, impersonal but revisable standards for the treatment of people under law, the production and consumption of literature, science, music, art, cinema and mathematics; political freedom and the ability of man to exert some control over his political dispensation, robust and transparent institutions, and the treatment of minorities or outsiders. That last of course covers quite directly the treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis. But it's going to be very hard for Eltahawy to pretend the Israelis aren't more civilized than the people they oppress. She has issued her rankings already; she doesn't get to walk them back out of a simple dislike of Geller's rhetorical purpose in deploying them. Them's the civilizational rankings, and - to quote her - "the hell with political correctness." [Please take such obvious qualifiers as today/currently/contingently/non-essentially for given.]

 

But this situation is extremely common! The history of cultural encounters between the civilized and the "savage" where the former are more powerful, IS very substantially the story of civilized people killing, enslaving, robbing and oppressing their less civilized fellows. Any American who's studied his history should know this viscerally. The important thing is to realize that there are two different valuable commodities here: ethics and culture. As important aspect of the first, we have how decently/fairly/kindly a people treat - and believe they ought to treat - those around them. This is not the only part of ethics - we must consider how they treat each other as Eltahawy v1.0 sees, and the values they espouse for all - but it's an important part. As proxy for the second, we may consider roughly their pedagogical/inspirational value: the books they write, their ideas and music and philosophy and whether they stared at the stars and proved theorems or traveled far and wide to discover wondrous new things and people. These are both important things, and they're not the same thing.

A word like 'civilization' conflates them both, and several things besides. Civilized people believe their intellectual and cultural accomplishments are worthier than those of others (less civilized people often agree with that assessment). They also believe (like all others) that their ethical values are superior. What civilization does is to introduce an extra element of hypocrisy to the mix: V.S. Naipaul gets at something important, about civilization and the lie, in A Bend in the River:

Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were more moral. We didn't lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn't think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everyone else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.

Civilized people realpolitik fully as coldly as anyone else. The Israeli strategy of placing many of their people in settler pockets is a transparently wicked land-grab. But civilized people don't like thinking such things about about themselves, and try to reorganize the intellectual landscape to suit them. So even though vastly more Palestinians are killed by Israelis each year than vice versa, the violent side is the Palestinians with their Hamas and terrorism. And this frame works because the Israelis are civilized and the Palestinians are not.

Surveying the history of European and American involvement in the Middle East, it would take a pretty brazen sort of person to insist that Middle Easterners aren't vastly more sinned against than sinning. Iran/Saudi Arabia/Yemen/Syria/Libya/Afghanistan haven't been overthrowing democratically elected US governments and bankrolling dictators, or carving out parcels of other peoples' land to compensate their own victims, or deeming the US too irresponsible to keep nukes while having and using their own, or maintaining hundred-to-one kill ratios. But those are the places that are dangerous festering grounds of instability. Because occasionally there is blow back, itself re-framed as hatred of "freedoms", which yes, Al Qaeda despises, but no, not enough to crash planes into buildings for. If Rage Boy were more civilized, he wouldn't be agitating over Muhammad cartoons. One of the more heartless ironies of being uncivilized is you don't even aim your rhetoric right.

Support the savage. Do so proudly; his treatment is shameful. But don't think he'd generate a society you'd like to live in. That's decades away, or more.

The Devil is in the Details (John Ballard)

Living in the South I don't follow very many Conservative media outlets. I don't need to. Their messages are like the weather -- like it or not I'm sure to be exposed to them. But via Twitter and Daily Caller I came upon something that had to go into my Facebook status.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS.

1.   And it came to pass that on on Sunday, October 7, in the Year of our Lord 2012, preachers in America were organized by politicians.
2.   On that day political types advanced the argument that the "Johnson amendment" to the Tax Code of 1954 was "unconstitutional."
3.   Those same political types, all have a political agenda, to allow and encourage church leaders to join Caesar and his forces in secular conflicts.

This was my inspiration.

In the classic movie “The Sting,” Paul Newman explains to Robert Redford that in the most sophisticated swindles, the victim never even figures out he’s been conned.

Well, America’s churches got swindled big time in 1954. They lost their freedom of speech and a significant part of their freedom of religion.

There are two separate scandals here. The first is that Lyndon Johnson surreptitiously snuck a provision into the tax code that requires the IRS to regulate the content of every pastor’s sermon in this free land, and to threaten the tax deductibility of donations to any church that lobbies or takes sides in elections.

The second scandal is the fact that the churches of America have allowed this blatantly unconstitutional government censorship to persist for 58 years. It’s the most sophisticated kind of sting. Our churches haven’t even recognized they’ve been had.

[snip] There was no notice, no hearings, and no debate. Johnson never mentioned churches. Congress has never voted to impose content censorship on America’s churches. But the IRS immediately swept churches into Johnson’s amendment.

And then the mainline denominations acquiesced in their own censorship! They didn’t stand up and fight for their right and obligation to provide moral leadership in American self-government. That abdication has led to a dramatic decline in those churches’ membership and America’s culture since 1954.

[snip]  Now a group of lawyers, The Alliance Defending Freedom, has organized a campaign to force a test case. For the last four years, pastors across America have banded together on Pulpit Freedom Sunday to speak out on elections one Sunday a year, and send their sermons to the IRS. Last year 539 pastors participated and the IRS blinked once again. This year’s PFS will be October 7. Every Pastor who believes his or her pulpit should be free from government censorship should sign up and participate at PulpitFreedom.org. 

Wise Words About Cancer Therapy (John Ballard)

Dr. Salwitz is a blogging oncologist. Anyone who has cancer, or has a friend or family member with cancer, may find his blog a good place to visit.

...There is confusion that the more side effects a chemotherapy agent produces the more likely it is too work. The patient is saying, “Reassure me that this therapy does have side effects, because I know they are important. I just want you to know I can take it. Doc, you can be the Mohammed Ali of oncology. “Float like a butterfly – Sting like a bee.” Slug me hard and slug my cancer harder. I want to live.”

However, this is like saying that the more pepper you put in the casserole, the more likely your guests are to enjoy it. Too much pepper and the whole mess becomes intolerable; chemotherapy is the same. Use the correct drug for the specific disease and give the correct amount; use too much and life becomes dominated by intolerable complications.

Fundamental Facts by C.M. Chumbley (John Ballard)

I lately discovered to my happy surprise that our new printer/copier/fax/scanner -- a Christmas gift from one of our kids -- has a feature that even someone at the local office supply store didn't know about: OCR. Optical character recognition is a scanner option which captures print content in character form (not a photo image) which can then be formatted and managed like any other print content. It's not an easy process because the program doesn't recognize all fonts accurately. Upper case "i" comes in as the numeral "1," for example, as well as a host of broken words, page headings, numbers and page breaks. It's probably easier and certainly less time-consuming to simply type a copy, but I'm not that good a typist so OCR is for me a technological marvel.  

That's a poor introduction for this post, but since I am lifting someone else's content directly from the printed page of a book it seems important. I'm not in violation of copyright laws since the book was published in 1936 and the author was my maternal grandfather. It may not be one of the great books of the Twentieth Century, but The Man Invincible, written and published nearly a decade before I was born, has been an important part of my personal heritage and intellectual development.