Uncle Johnny's reading list - part 1, Poe

See here for background.

What's not included in the comments is an off-line discussion with Steph in which I marveled at the breadth of Johnny's list and lamented my own illiteracy. That led to Steph's comment that the list could be read in six months and my comment that I was going to give it a try.

I have given various reading lists a go before, with little success, so we'll see.

In the comments to Steph's post I said I was going to start in chronological order (Hawthorne, Three Musketeers, Poe, Tom Sawyer and Prince and Pauper, and Treasure Island).

[All of the background/history noted below comes from my extensive research on Wikipedia or from the introductions to the Poe collection or The Scarlett Letter. The links below take you to the Wikipedia articles.]

Hawthorne and Poe were contemporaries (Poe even reviewed one of Hawthorne's short story collections). Poe died in 1849. Many of Hawthorne's better known short stories were published before then; however, The Scarlett Letter, which I'm reading now, was published in 1850. The Three Musketeers was published in 1844.

I found a Poe short story collection in my bookcase and so started with it. So the initial order will be Poe, Hawthorne, Musketeers, which is close enough to chronological.

Johnny's list called for four Edgar Allan Poe short stories.

I read The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold Bug, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter. I started The Fall of the House of Usher, but could not get past the convoluted sentence structure and overwhelming dreariness. How about a little sample?

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth--in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated--an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit--an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

[I'm not going to attempt to summarize the stories or critique them; the Wiki people can do that better than I.]

The first three in the list are very short "horror" stories with a twist at the end. The Gold Bug is one of the earliest "detective" stories and reflects the popularity of cryptology at the time.

The last three in the list star the first private detective in fiction, C. Auguste Dupin.

Wikipedia:

"As the first true detective in fiction, the Dupin character established many literary devices which would be used in future fictional detectives including Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Many later characters, for example, follow Poe's model of the brilliant detective, his personal friend who serves as narrator, and the final revelation being presented before the reasoning that leads up to it."

Add to those factors the bumbling city cop who relies on the detective for help and you see that Conan Doyle had the structure laid out for him by Poe.

All of Poe can be found on Gutenberg for reasons our copyright attorney can explain.

My general thoughts on reading Poe to follow.

Bated breath

World Wide Words says:

Q: From Steve Gearhart: Where does the term baited breath come from, as in: ‘I am waiting with baited breath for your answer’?
A: The correct spelling is actually bated breath but it’s so common these days to see it written as baited breath that there’s every chance that it will soon become the usual form, to the disgust of conservative speakers and the confusion of dictionary writers.
[Jump]
It’s easy to mock, but there’s a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the unstressed first vowel (a process called aphesis); it means “reduced, lessened, lowered in force”. So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing as a result of some strong emotion, such as terror or awe.

Annabel Lee

While we're waiting with baited bated breath for Michael to post something about his recent Poe readings, have a little Poe poetry.  This is Annabelle Annabel Lee in its entirety.  (Yay for expiration of copyright.)

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,
          In a kingdom by the sea,
    That a maiden there lived whom you may know
          By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
    And this maiden she lived with no other thought
          Than to love and be loved by me.

    I was a child and she was a child,
          In this kingdom by the sea;
    But we loved with a love that was more than love-
          I and my Annabel Lee;
    With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
          Coveted her and me.

    And this was the reason that, long ago,
          In this kingdom by the sea,
    A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
          My beautiful Annabel Lee;
    So that her highborn kinsman came
          And bore her away from me,
    To shut her up in a sepulchre
          In this kingdom by the sea.

    The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
          Went envying her and me-
    Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
          In this kingdom by the sea)
    That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
          Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

    But our love it was stronger by far than the love
          Of those who were older than we-
          Of many far wiser than we-
    And neither the angels in heaven above,
          Nor the demons down under the sea,
    Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
          Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

    For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
          Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
    And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
          Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
    And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
    Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
          In the sepulchre there by the sea,
          In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Imam Rauf on Larry King

I'm days late with this, but I just saw the rerun of Imam Rauf on Larry King last night.  I'd missed the original.

Imam Rauf was "interviewed" by Soledad O'Brien.  Those inclined to be hateful of him are willfully misunderstanding his words and twisting his meaning.  Soledad asked an annoying number of times: "Why build at this location when 71% of the American population is against putting the center at that location?"  He answered the question patiently over and over.  One of the many points he made was that he held concerns that if he aborted the mosque/community center project or moved it in response to protests, that it would be fuel for terrorism, that worldwide headlines that the project was disallowed by the American people would fuel anti-West sentiments and spur violent responses.  At one point he described that he feared there was greater danger from violent acts from radical Muslims than from the radical right.   It was an assessment that you would think the right would embrace:  he just characterized radical Muslims as more violent than radical Christians.  Isn't that what right-wing blogs shout every day? But no, the radical right has construed his comment as a threat.  It wasn't a threat. (Media Matter points out that Gen. Petraeus has said something similar.)

I want to give Imam Rauf credit for not losing his temper with Soledad.  Good grief.  She could not have been more hostile.  Kudos to him for pointing out that calling this location, blocks from Ground Zero, "sacred ground" when there's a strip club in the block is "inconsistent".

He also acknowledged that Hamas is responsible for terrorist acts and that he condemns all acts of terrorism.  I know, I know; he refused to say the sentence "I condemn Hamas" so his statement will be insufficient to prove to some that he's not...whatever horrible thing you think he is.  Knock yourself out with that, as long as you are also suspicious of people who say they condemn the child abuse committed by Catholic priests without being willing to say "I condemn the Catholic Church."

Meanwhile, Media Matters has prepared a timeline of the news stories about the Cordoba house.  It's instructive is you are wondering how to whip the public into a frenzy over something they weren't initially inclined to be opposed to.  It has, by the way, very little to do with uncovering new facts and much more to do with shading and characterizing the facts and playing Six Degrees of People Who Don't Eat Bacon.

Squirrel revenge

As K was walking through our back yard yesterday, an object fell out of a tree.  He looked into the tree and saw that a squirrel had dropped it.  K examined the object and identified it as one of Karma's bones.  That's right.  A squirrel stole Karma's bone and dragged it into the tree.

Since squirrels are vegetarians, I can only figure that the squirrel stole the bone to get back at Karma for killing its friends/relatives in the backyard.  She has caught and killed three squirrels in the back yard, and another two at the dog park, that I know of.

Winnie has a baby dragon

Welcome to the world, Draco Verta.

50 Cent

If you're not following 50 Cent on Twitter, you're missing out on a lot of amused-head-shaking.  I was going to offer some excerpts, but they're too full of banned words to show here.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon

Oy. I finally finished YPU.

I'm sure it's great; I just had a very hard time getting through it. No doubt that's more of a comment on my mental state than on the novel. Because I wasn't reading as attentively as I ought to have been, I didn't remember the characters that show up again in the last quarter of the novel and are crucial to the religious-political aspects of the plot.

I loved the what-if premise of a Jewish settlement established post WWII in Alaska.  I loved the genre-bending; it' a noir murder mystery, historical sci-fi and a love story rolled into one. I appreciated the cynical take on how the expectation of a messiah can be used and exploited, by those trying to make a buck and by governments.  There was way too much convenient coincidence to suit me, although that's maybe a nod to its noir platform.

Trivia: I noticed that Chabon gives Nabokov (Speak, Memory) a h/t for devising the Zugzwang (the condition of having no good moves) of Mendel Shpilman.

Spoilers behind the cut.

Questions for Imam Rauf From an American Muslim

[Dr. M. Zudhi Jasser, a medical doctor and a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Ariz.]

After a long absence while controversy over the mosque near Ground Zero smoldered, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf finally held forth this week both in the New York Times and on CNN.

Imam Rauf and his supporters are clearly more interested in making a political statement in relation to Islam than in the mosque's potential for causing community division and pain to those who lost loved ones on 9/11. That division is already bitterly obvious.

As someone who has been involved in building mosques around the country, and who has dealt with his fair share of unjustified opposition, I ask of Imam Rauf and all his supporters, "Where is your sense of fairness and common decency?" In relation to Ground Zero, I am an American first, a Muslim second, just as I would be at Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy Beach, Pearl Harbor or any other battlefield where my fellow countrymen lost their lives.

I must ask Imam Rauf: For what do you stand—what's best for Americans overall, or for what you think is best for Islam? What have you said and argued to Muslim-majority nations to address their need for reform? You have said that Islam does not need reform, despite the stoning of women in Muslim countries, death sentences for apostates, and oppression of reformist Muslims and non-Muslims.

You now lecture Americans that WTC mosque protests are "politically motivated" and "go against the American principle of church and state." Yet you ignore the wide global prevalence of far more dangerous theo-political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and all of its violent and nonviolent offshoots.

In your book, "What's Right With Islam," you cite the Brotherhood's radical longtime spiritual leader Imam Yusuf Qaradawi as a "moderate." Reformist American Muslims are not afraid to name Mr. Qaradawi and his ilk as radical. We Muslims should first separate mosque and state before lecturing Americans about church and state.

Imam, tell me if you can look into the eyes of children who lost a parent on 9/11 and convince them that this immodest Islamic center benefits them. How will it in any way aid counterterrorism efforts or keep one American any safer? You willfully ignore what American Muslims most need—an open call for reformation that unravels the bigoted and shoddy framework of political Islam and separates mosque and state.

There are certainly those who are prejudiced against Muslims and who are against mosques being built anywhere, and even a few who wish to burn the Quran. But most voices in this case have been very clear that for every American freedom of religion is a right, but that it is not right to make one's religion a global political statement with a towering Islamic edifice that casts a shadow over the memorials of Ground Zero.

As an American Muslim, I look at that pit of devastation and contemplate the thousands of lives undone there within seconds. I pray for the ongoing strength to fight the fanatics who did this, and who continue their war against my country with both overt violence and covert strategies that aim to undo the very freedoms for which so many have fought and died.

Imam Rauf may not appear to the untrained eye to be an Islamist, but by making Ground Zero an Islamic rather than an American issue, and by failing to firmly condemn terrorist groups like Hamas, he shows his true allegiance.

Islamists in "moderate" disguise are still Islamists. In their own more subtle ways, the WTC mosque organizers end up serving the same aims of the separatist and supremacist wings of political Islam. In this epic struggle of the 21st century, we cannot afford to ignore the continuum between nonviolent political Islam and the militancy it ultimately fuels among the jihadists.

Silence

Let me just note that neither of the Christians writing here have used this public space to condemn the Koran-burning event. Should I infer that you approve of the event? And if not, then may we please put an end to giving any credence to new reports or analysis that draw conclusions about Muslim "support" for violent criminals simply because they haven't uttered their condemnation to a reporter whose publication wanted to print it?

Heroes: Susan Retik and Patti Quigley

In the midst of all the hatred and vitriol and Islamophobia and Koran-burning, my faith that humans can behave humanely was restored by Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, whose husbands died in the 9/11 attack.

So at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives.

The organization they started, Beyond the 11th, has now assisted more than 1,000 Afghan widows in starting tiny businesses. It’s an effort both to help some of the world’s neediest people and to fight back at the distrust, hatred and unemployment that sustain the Taliban.

Kristof tells their story here.

Bolton in 2012?

Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower...

was apparently made into some kind of documentary. Did anybody see it on HBO this week? I think it was called My Trip to Al-Qaeda.

Bobcat spotted in Pearland

Home of the Little League Champs [of the the contiguous 48] and just across the freeway from us.

Re: More perceived threats

Another thing that gets the shorts of some of us on the right side of things all in a bunch is the dread EMP. Here's the [link to the] recent report of STRATFOR on the subject by Scott Stewart and Nate Huges.

[Hmmm, for some reason I'm unable to paste the article even though I'm allowed to reprint. Guess anyone who's interested will just have to go read the thing at their site so I'll double check the link.]

My only minor gripe with the article is that I'm not certain the US would or should treat (in terms of retaliation) an EMP attack as a conventional nukular attack.

Bottom line is that an EMP threat is pretty darned remote.

Threats, real and perceived

Because so much of public policy is driven by fear, it's important to have an accurate understanding of the likelihood of harm from perceived threats.

NPR's blog offers a reality check about threats to kids.

Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:

1. Kidnapping
2. School snipers
3. Terrorists
4. Dangerous strangers
5. Drugs

But how do children really get hurt or killed?

1. Car accidents
2. Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
3. Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Drowning

Parents are busy worrying about all the wrong things.  It matters to all of us because parents who are worried about their children being killed by terrorists will vote in line with candidates who reflect that fear and make promises to keep them safe from terrorists, an unlikely threat.  Meanwhile, a candidate who advocates for greater spending on mental health professionals to guard against suicides, a more likely threat, will be dismissed.

(Warning: NPR's post contains not-fully explained statistics.  The threat of death for everyone is 100%.  Period.  I think the writer means "the threat of death before the age of 18..." or something like that.)

H/t Supraluxe.

Internet fun

Since you all are enjoying Xtranormal, I thought I'd offer links to all the fun free tools I know about on the web.

Memes, Macros, Etc.

• Create your own motivational posters
• Meme generator
• Create a word cloud at Wordle (upload text and it'll size words according to how often they're used in the text)
• Custom animated text. There are oodles of sites that provide this. Here's one. And another.
• Add caption bubbles to an image.
• Add text to photo using popular ROLFBOT.
• Sign generator. Again, there are oodles, but here's one.
• Gif animations.
• Graphs that are easy to make and embed at Graphomatic

Artsy stuff

• Make-a-Flake
• Tartan plaid generator
• Make and color patterns at ColourLovers
• Draw "pencil" animations at Pencil
• Make your own cartoons at GoAnimate
• Textures

Less fun but useful is this html testbed.

I will update this post occasionally, without any update notation, as I learn of new things.

A scene from Brett's life

Another shady character at the GZM

Hisham Elzanaty.

Scenes from my life

I've always wanted to be a movie director.....




I need to work on my sets and pacing. But overall, a fairly good effort I think.
I'm addicted to this site now...

Party Post...

HAPPY 5th BIRTHDAY, SSJ



I baked us a cake, figuratively speaking. You'll be familiar with the dialogue:



Lastly, pretend our name is Terrance:

Guess who

For instance, she asks venue owners to “utilize…non-petroleum cups” and other “alternatives to Styrofoam” for backstage drinks. She requests they reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by using “renewable sources and/or to [buying] sustainable energy credits where possible.” She actually asked them to check with their local utility companies to see if there’s a “green power” option they can switch to during her concert. She asks for “eco-friendly cleaning and bathroom products [and] post-consumer recycled toilet paper and paper [towels].”

Answer here.

This is how you handle nuts.

The gunman was reportedly motivated by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth eco-propaganda. Guess what? I’m not playing that opportunistic blame game here. It’s not Al Gore’s fault when an enviro-nut goes off unhinged (and I’ve said that before). The blame in this case lies with the crazy man who terrorized the Discovery Channel employees. Period.

Michelle Malkin

Update: Jim Treacher's headline:

Gun-wielding ecoterrorist calls for reduction in human population, gets wish

Venn Diagrams, part 2

I see your Venn diagram and raise you:

Re: SSJ Birthday

I remember its, er, conception as if it were yesterday.

Did anyone notice...

SSJ has it's fifth birthday tomorrow?

Silence of Left

Remember all the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing on the left during the Bush years about how horrible the deficit was? And all the blather about how expensive the Iraq war was?

We don't hear that kind of thing so much anymore.

Exactly my point

Cool Venn diagram here that makes the same point I made earlier:

Mosque developer Sharif El-Gamal

I haven't followed it closely enough to know that this guy was involved, but it looks like there is more than one shady character behind the GZM. Steph, the link is to MSM so it's safe to click through...

Rauf is a slumlord

Not only is he a shady imam, he's a slumlord to boot.

Not All Muslims

Jim Treacher:

Two men taken off a Chicago-to-Amsterdam United Airlines flight in the Netherlands have been charged by Dutch police with “preparation of a terrorist attack,” U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.

U.S. officials said the two appeared to be traveling with what were termed “mock bombs” in their luggage. “This was almost certainly a dry run, a test,” said one senior law enforcement official…

The men were identified as Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, of Detroit, MI, and Hezem al Murisi, the officials said.

I knew it. Mormons.

All kidding aside, what’s up with this anti-Muslim bigotry? I’ve long advocated the “Not All” rule for these types of stories:

Not All Muslims Arrested on ‘Preparation of a Terrorist Attack’ in Amsterdam
Not All Muslims Kill 14 in Fort Hood Shooting Rampage
Not All Muslims Put Bombs in Underpants and Book Transatlantic Flight
Not All Muslims Fly Planes into World Trade Center, Murdering Thousands

But instead we have this 21st Century lynching party. Do you really want to live in a world where the cops can arrest guys just because they happen to be Muslim and happen to be carrying stuff that looks like bombs? And I’m sure the arresting officers will deny up and down that they’re racists.

Be advised, America: This is what happens when you let your drunks wander into mosques and pee on stuff. This is your fault.

Awww

I answer my own call to find something cuter than the baby elephant in a pool:



The videos playing on the phone are clips of Adam on Idol. The kisses at the end are the cutest thing ever.

This is old, but I was just reminded of its existence.

NPR's 50 Great Voices Series

As noted below, NPR is doing a series on great voices in recorded music over the decades. One episode airs each week. Here's who they've covered so far:

1. Radmilla Cody: Two Cultures, One Voice (May 10, 2010)
2. Enrico Caruso: And Confessions of an Operaholic (May 17, 2010)
3. Lydia Mendoza: The First Lady of Tejano (May 24, 2010)
4. Janis Joplin: The Queen of Rock (June 7, 2010)
5. Sandy Denny: Mercurial Queen of British Folk Rock (June 14, 2010)
6. Donny Hathaway: Neglected Heart of Soul (June 21, 2010)
7. Lauren Hill: The Many Voices of... (June 28, 2010)
8. Fairuz: Lebanon's Voice of Hope (July 12, 2010)
9. John McCormack: The Charming Irish Tenor (July 19, 2010)
10. Khaled: The King of Rai (July 26, 2010)
11. Biggie Smalls: The Voice that Influenced a Generation (August 2, 2010)
12. Bjork: A Celestial Voice (August 7, 2010)
13. Twinkie Clark: Riffing on Gospel (August 23, 2010)
14. Ima Thomas: The Soul Queen of New Orleans (August 23, 2010)
15. Freddie Mercury: Rock 'N' Roll's Humble Showman (August 30, 2010)

TBC

Freddie Mercury

NPR is doing a series on great voices across the decades. Today aired an episode about Freddie Mercury. Adam is one of the people interviewed. He talks about his study of Freddie's voice. He demonstrates a little something about the long-held "wooooorrlld" in We Are the Champions.

Re: This just in

I hope that for today at least that percentage is somewhat better than 99.9% of 1.5B.

I'm not really inclined to jump in to anything GZ Mosque related due to deep ambivalence.

BUT, I met a jenuwine Islamophobe the other day. She's an occasional bridge partner of my mom's and she stopped by after they last played.

She lived in Rhodesia, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Egypt during the 60s, 70s and 80s and had the misfortune of witnessing a couple of behandings.

Granted seeing that could color anybody's opinion but she loathes anything Muslim of any stripe.

To make things a little more interesting, she's also an atheist, Randian libertarian.

Judea Pearl has an explanation

While I await Steph's explanation of what she means by "unconstitutional" reasons, here's Judea's Pearl take:

I have been trying hard to find an explanation for the intense controversy surrounding the Cordoba Initiative, whereby 71 percent of Americans object to the proposed project of building a mosque next to Ground Zero.

I cannot agree with the theory that such broad resistance represents Islamophobic sentiments, nor that it is a product of a “rightwing” smear campaign against one imam or another.

Americans are neither bigots nor gullible.

Deep sensitivity to the families of 9/11 victims was cited as yet another explanation, but this too does not answer the core question.

If one accepts that the 19 fanatics who flew planes into the Twin Towers were merely self-proclaimed Muslims who, by their very act, proved themselves incapable of acting in the name of “true Islam,” then building a mosque at Ground Zero should evoke no emotion whatsoever; it should not be viewed differently than, say, building a church, a community center or a druid shrine.

A more realistic explanation is that most Americans do not buy the 19 fanatics story, but view the the 9/11 assault as a product of an anti- American ideology that, for good and bad reasons, has found a fertile breeding ground in the hearts and minds of many Muslim youngsters who see their Muslim identity inextricably tied with this anti-American ideology.

THE GROUND Zero mosque is being equated with that ideology. Public objection to the mosque thus represents a vote of no confidence in mainstream American Muslim leadership which, on the one hand, refuses to acknowledge the alarming dimension that anti-Americanism has taken in their community and, paradoxically, blames America for its creation.

The American Muslim leadership has had nine years to build up trust by taking proactive steps against the spread of anti-American terror-breeding ideologies, here and abroad.

Evidently, however, a sizable segment of the American public is not convinced that this leadership is doing an effective job of confidence building.

In public, Muslim spokespersons praise America as the best country for Muslims to live and practice their faith. But in sermons, speeches, rallies, classrooms, conferences and books sold at those conferences, the narrative is often different. There, Noam Chomsky’s conspiracy theory is the dominant paradigm, and America’s foreign policy is one long chain of “crimes” against humanity, especially against Muslims.

Affirmation of these conspiratorial theories sends mixed messages to young Muslims, engendering anger and helplessness: America and Israel are the first to be blamed for Muslim failings, sufferings and violence.

Terrorist acts, whenever condemned, are immediately “contextually explicated” (to quote Tariq Ramadan); spiritual legitimizers of suicide bombings (e.g. Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar) are revered beyond criticism; Hamas and Hizbullah are permanently shielded from the label of “terrorist.”

Overall, the message that emerges from this discourse is implicit, but can hardly be missed: When Muslim grievance is at question, America is the culprit and violence is justified, if not obligatory.

True, we have not helped Muslims in the confidence-building process. Treating homegrown terror acts as isolated incidents of psychological disturbances while denying their ideological roots has given American Muslim leaders the illusion that they can achieve public acceptance without engaging in serious introspection and responsibility sharing for allowing victimhood, anger and entitlement to spawn such acts.

The construction of the Ground Zero mosque would further prolong this illusion.

If I were New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, I would reassert Muslims’ right to build the Islamic center and the mosque, but I would expend the same energy, not one iota less, in trying to convince them to put it somewhere else, or replace it with a community-managed all-faiths center in honor of the 9/11 victims.

Fellow Muslim Americans will benefit more from co-ownership of consensual projects than sole ownership of confrontational ones.

[Emphasis added]

This just in

About 1.5 BILLION Muslims did nothing violent today. Or yesterday. Or the day before that . . .

Imagining with reason

Paul Mirengoff:

Since [9/11], we have learned that the radical ideology behind 9/11 is not quite as alien as we thought. Some portion of the American Muslim community - presumably small, but we don't know how small - is drawn to it.

Moreover, what looks like a considerable portion of those who hold themselves out (and are held out by the MSM) as leaders of American Muslims refuse to disassociate themselves from terrorist groups. They don't countenance al Qaeda, though they do blame America for that outfit's terrorist acts. But they won't repudiate other bloody terrorists, notably Hamas.

Thus, while only the most highly informed Americans probably could have imagined terrorist plotting or even pro-terrorist rhetoric in an American place of worship back in 2001, many can imagine it now, and with reason.

Agility training: Tracy Sklenar

I’ve now had two episodes of having my mind blown about dog training. The first was the first time I saw free-shaping demonstrated. (We’ve talked about free-shaping here several times.) The second was last weekend. I audited one day of a weekend course given by Tracy Sklenar on handling skills for agility. Tracy is a nationally-known expert who has competed with her own dogs at world championship levels.

Before I describe what I learned, though, you need a little background. Before I started agility training, the only agility competition I’d seen was the very high level competition that gets television coverage. I was amazed at two things: that a dog can be trained to weave in and out of poles and that a dog can be trained to run across a teeter totter. While these are the most challenging obstacles to master, teaching a dog these maneuvers is a piece of cake compared to what the core of the training is about. The real challenge is “handling” which is communicating to your dog where they’re supposed to go as they run the course and for this communication to be timed right and clear made clear so that the dog can run the course as fast as possible without making mistakes.

What I’ve been taught to do and what I’ve been doing to date has been pointing at obstacles and calling its name as I run the course (“Jump!” “Tunnel!” “Teeter!”). Tracy Sklenar teaches that you should instead only point and call out the names of obstacles in specific circumstances, and never point or name obstacles when the obstacles are on a line that you’re already running or a gentle arc. So that seems impossible, right? How will the dog know where to go if you don’t point at things or call out obstacles?

She teaches that your dog should have two modes when running a course: extension (running all out) and collection (wherein your dog slows, gathers its feet and gets its balance to be able to turn or jump). She teaches that you cue extension entirely through the way you move your own body. It needs to look to the dog like you are running all out. You should be in a leaning-forward posture and should pump your arms and take big steps. If you don’t have room to run all out, then fake it, taking high steps, rather than long ones. Your dog, partly as a result of practicing this but largely as a result of what he/she has observed about how humans run, will understand that this means “run as fast as possible along a generally straight or gently-curved line, taking any obstacles in this line. If I need you to turn, I will let you know.” By not using your arm when you’re running on straight lines your dog doesn’t have to turn his head to focus on your arm and can confidently run straight ahead.

To cue the dog to collect, you use a deceleration cue. The “decel” cue is to stand straight up and put out an arm or finger. At all times when running agility, you should be watching your dog, but you may need to be especially intense about it (i.e. turn your shoulders toward the dog, lower your chin to your shoulder or chest so that your face is square to them) during a decel cue.

I tried this with Karma at practice this week. Even though we’d never practiced running without pointing/naming, we didn’t have a single miscue when running in extension mode. This was completely amazing to me.

Lots more for another day.

I KNEW that Republicans/conservatives were mean, stupid, and evil.

Krauthammer:

And now the mosque near ground zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" - blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims - a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

Tracy Jordan's repressed childhood memories

And now for something completely different . . .

On the rerun of 30 Rock that aired last night (Season 4, Episode 21), Tracy Morgan's character, Tracy Jordan, visited his childhood home and was flooded with repressed childhood memories. It's essentially a list of some of the best "we were so poor" jokes ever written. Tracy's delivery, of course, made them all the more funny.

As transcribed by Everything Tracy Jordan Said:

It’s all coming back to me, oh my God.

I slept on an old dog bed stuffed with wigs.

I watched a prostitute stab a clown.

Our basketball hoop was a rib cage! A RIB CAGE!!!

Why did you bring me here? I blocked all this stuff out for a reason. Oh, Lord. Some guy with dreads electrocuted my fish!

All my life I’ve tried to forget the things I’ve seen. a crackhead breast-feeding a rat, a homeless man cooking a Hot Pocket on a third rail of the G train! The G train, Nermal!

I’ve seen a blind guy bite a police horse.

A puppy committed suicide after he saw our bathroom.

I once bit into a burrito and there was a child’s shoe in it.

I’ve seen a hooker eat a tire.

A pack of wild dogs took over and successfully ran a Wendy’s.

The sewer people stole my skateboard.

The projects I lived in were named after Zachary Taylor, generally considered to be one of the worst presidents of all time.

I once saw a baby give another baby a tattoo! They were very drunk!

Thoughts on the Ahem discussion

In the comments of Steph's Ahem post, SupraLuxe and I had an exchange that didn't go well. I was all set to write a snarky, blazing Fisk and in fact started something yesterday morning but got bogged down in diversions and formatting chores before I had to get B to the bus stop.

After thinking about it for a day, I don't want to do that. I'd rather make just a couple of comments.

First, when I told SupraL that Freereplublic and World Net Daily were NOT "leading conservative websites," he took offense. It was not my intention to criticize SuperL's research skills or his choice of sources. However, SupraL's characterization of the Freepers and WND as "leading conservative websites" told me (1) that he hasn't spent much time looking at conservative websites, and (2) he thinks conservatives are crazy. (Note for SupraL: Until fairly recently, I was a hard-core lefty. I proudly called myself a socialist, which lefties seldom do these days, even if they are. I KNEW that Republicans/conservatives were mean, stupid, and evil.) I don't expect that anything SupraL reads here or on any conservative website will change his mind about any of the topics we discuss. But to the extent that SupraL is curious about what conservatives think, I wanted to steer him away from the Freepers and WND and to a place where conservative thoughts are expressed sanely and intelligently; NRO is one of those, there are many others.

Second, a note to SupraL on argument. When in the course of a discussion/argument you find yourself questioning the motivation or character or sanity of your opponent, you are engaging in an ad hominem attack, and it generally means you have run out of thoughtful things to say on the subject. Ad hominem attacks are fun (I know because I do it all the time*) but rarely productive if your goal is a meaningful discussion.

*See, for instance, in the same comments, where I told Steph she was "beyond the bend."**

**But she provocated me.

Curious

I'm curious to know whether my Republican blog brothers regard Sarah Palin's success in helping candidates get elected as a good thing for your party.

Emerson's tapes

My post "Imam Rauf to be exposed..." linked to Ace's post, which linked to a post on Weasel Zippers, which linked to the original post on Pam Geller's Atlas Shrugged. If you go to the original post on Atlas Shrugged and read since then, you'll find the tapes. I haven't read most of it, but what I have read you will not find controversial and will probably agree with. To you it won't be any big deal, and certainly no expose. Others, including me, will disagree with you.

How's that for sourcing?

Tapes

Any sign of the tapes yet? How long does it take to upload 13 hours worth of recordings? It's been almost a week. Maybe we could all chip in to buy Steve Emerson a faster internet connection.

Here's my prediction: there's nothing clearly problematic on those tapes (assuming there are tapes at all). If there were anything offensive in the tapes, the tapes would be published already.

Ahem

Haven't there been some revelations about Imam Rauf's nefarious connections that you want to share, Michael?  I rely on you for such news, so I was disappointed to have to get it from Jon Stewart.

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I think maybe NOW I'm opposed to the building of the mosque because of its frightening connections to Fox News.

Tags

Can I talk you gentlemen into tagging your own posts from now on?   (You're also welcome to go back and tag historical posts. I went back as far as 2/19/09.)

I started the tagging project because I wanted to find all the book posts.  Because they don't necessarily contain the word "book", there's no way to find them easily.

There are tags for the broad topics of: Economics, Politics, Religion, Books, Music (Other than Adam), Movies, Food, Dramatic Life Events.  If that's all you use, it'd be something.  Pixels are free, though, so feel free to include everything you'd ever want to use to find something.  Also, I see tags as an opportunity for editorial comment.  Feel free to create tags.

With regard to names, I've included people's first names and have not included titles. The result is that you can find them under their first name in the alphabetical list of tags.

Tip: Blogger interprets a comma as the end of one tag and the start of another.  Thus, if you tried to tag something with "Lambert, Adam", it would bear two tags, one for Adam and one for Lambert.

Tag away.

Update moments later:  Also, consider adding tags to reflect what's in the comments.

Steampunk

Iranian style.

What if...

A friend poses the following: Imagine that there really were these fundamentalist Christian terror cells all over the United States, as the Department of Homeland Security imagines. Let’s say a group of five of these terrorists hijacked a plane, flew it to Mecca, and plowed it into the Kaaba.

Now let’s say a group of well-meaning, well-funded Christians — Christians whose full-time job was missionary work — decided that the best way to promote healing would be to pressure the Saudi government to drop its prohibition against permitting non-Muslims into Mecca so that these well-meaning, well-funded Christian missionaries could build a $100 million dollar church and community center a stone’s throw from where the Kaaba used to be — you know, as a bridge-building gesture of interfaith understanding.

What do you suppose President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, the New York Times, and other Ground Zero mosque proponents would say about the insensitive, provocative nature of the proposal?

Do you think the State Department would make the leader of the Christian missionaries a special emissary and send him to represent the United States on diplomatic business overseas?

What do you suppose the Saudi reaction would be?

What do you suppose those ecumenical GZ mosque proponents at Hamas would say?

What do you suppose Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders would say?

What do you suppose imam Feisal Rauf and his friends at CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and the various other Muslim Brotherhood affiliates would say?

How would building the church/community center in Mecca affect Saudi Arabia’s standing in imam Rauf’s Sharia Index Project?

Andy McCarthy at The Corner.

Play Date

Mom wanted to play hookie (sp?) from church today so it's a ROAD TRIP!!! Ok, less a road trip and more of a play date to Nacogdoches.

Internet Mysteries

Now that I've been pulled back in, how do they do this?

I get letters in my email addressed to my late father. Dad never darkened a computer keyboard in his life unless one counts his ancient HP calculator that cost about $300 in 1972. He certainly never got on the internet and never even saw my computer.

Two outfits email me constantly: a pool supply company and the AARP. A copy of the latter's "webletter" came this morning.

How do they do this? I do use Mom's cable modem and wireless router. I'm pretty sure she's never been to either site.

I know I've never been to either site (until today when I clicked on the AARP note to get the link). And before there are any snide remarks, I did not do an internet search for "Sexual Fantasies over 45" or any related topic.

Reading to kids

Since Michael and I are on the topic of dads reading to kids and since we've been talking about my dad's reading tastes, I'll just share a bit about my dad reading to me when I was little.

I would, of course, want him to read Green Eggs and Ham or something like that to me. I would get my book and climb into his lap. He'd open my book and begin:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred...

I'd whine in exasperation, "DAAAAAADDYYYYYY, that's not how it goes."

He'd say, "Oh, I was on the wrong page.

 "Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'..."

Me: DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADDYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!! Read it RIGHT"

Dad:  Just listen:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;


Me:  MOOOMMMMYYYYYY!!! Daddy won't read it right.


He thought this exchange was hilarious and the madder I got the harder he laughed.

Yes, he knew many poems, or parts thereof, by heart, including Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade.

In the end, we'd often compromise and he'd read The Duel by Eugene Field or some Kipling.

In spite of our differences, which in later years were a bigger deal than getting him to read what I wanted to hear, I'm appreciative of the really cool stuff he exposed me to.

Imam Rauf to be exposed...

in 13 hours of audio tape. Now can we question his motives? Do you care about his motives?

The Debate is Over

Red hot and an intolerant neo-fascist wingnut. What’s not to love?

The 24-year-old Rima Fakih, is the first Muslim winner of the Miss USA contest and is preparing for the Miss Universe Pageant, scheduled for Monday in Las Vegas.

“I totally agree with President Obama with the statement on Constitutional rights of freedom of religion,” Fakih told “Inside Edition” in an interview that will air tonight.

“I also agree that it shouldn’t be so close to the World Trade Center. We should be more concerned with the tragedy than religion.”

From Allah.

Top 100 most skilled male rock vocalists from the DDD Music Forum

The Digital Dream Door music forum -- I have no idea who they are -- has generated a list of the top 100 most-skilled male rock vocalists. They place Adam second behind Jackie Wilson. There are 332 pages of comments on the thread wherein people debate the list's contents and order. It's, of course, an impossible silly task to rank musicians, as if what they do is quantifiable. It's fun reading, nevertheless, and they do work really hard to stay focused on the technical aspects of singing. Lots of links to performance video and audio are included so it's a treasure trove of great vocal performances.

There's a point by point breakdown comparing Adam and Freddie here. (H/t to Kate Ewing (aka Nolechica on Twitter) for the link to the list and h/t to Marjorie for getting me to the vicinity of the point by point discussion.)

Update: I see that by the time they get to page 331 in the comments, the group has changed the order and Adam is lower. But still in the top few no matter how you cut it.

Stewart doesn't begrudge the "sensitivity" issue. Otherwise, he makes perfect sense as usual.

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Who exactly is lacking common sense and decency?

The debate about the mosque discussion is typically formulated in two parts: 1) does the Constitution guarantee the right to put the Cordoba House sort of near Ground Zero? and 2) even if they have a Constitutional right to put it there, is it bad manners to choose that location.

Tim Fernholz writing at TAP gets to the heart of the manners question:

The debate demonstrates how the project's critics simply assume that it is offensive for Muslims to celebrate their faith two blocks from the World Trade Center, to the point where they simply take the proposition as self-evident. Cupp kept repeating the phrase "common sense and decency," as if those terms are defined a priori, but couldn't explain why it's common sense that Muslims worshipping near the World Trade Center is indecent. That's because it's not common sense -- unless you happen to blame the religion of Islam for what happened on 9/11. It's an ugly kind of bigotry to admit.

It's offensive to even entertain the manners question.

My Dad's Approved Reading List

I think I've told this story here before. Michael, my cool cousin six years my elder, influenced my reading choices when I was in junior high and he was in college. (That is a key job function of being a cool older cousin, right?)

My dad was none too happy that I was reading Breakfast of Champions in eighth grade; rather than forbid me from reading such things, Dad figured he could instead eat up all my reading time with other things -- books of his choosing -- if he offered big enough incentives. It was a move of parenting brilliance, I must admit. The deal he proposed was that for every book I read from a list of books he approved, I would get one flying lesson. I was going to try to solo before I got my driver's license.

I just found the book list. Here it is:

• A Farewell to Arms, E. Hemingway
• To Have and Have Not, E. Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he probably would have approved as a substitution)
• The Old Man and the Sea, E. Hemingway
• Tom Sawyer, M. Twain
• Test Pilot, J. Collins
• All Quiet on the Western Front, E.M. Remarque
• Any 1 (only) by Edna Ferber
• Any 2 (both count) by J. Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden)
• The Virginian, Owen Wister
• Any 2 of (both count) Ernest K. Gann (e.g. The Aviator, The High & the Mighty)
• The Caine Mutiny, H. Wouk
• 4 short stories, R. Lardner
• 4 short stories, E. Poe (Tell-tale Heart, Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher; Poems:  Lenore, Annabelle Lee, The Raven)
• 4 short stories or 1 novel, N. Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter)
• 4 short stories, D. Runyon (Blue Plate Special, Money From Home)
• Seventeen, B. Tarkington
• The Three Muskateers, A. Dumas
• 1 (only), Z. Grey
• 1 (only), M. Albrand [? Can't read this or figure out who this is]
• Up to 3, J. London (Call of the Wild, White Fang)
• 1 (only), L. Short
• 1 (only) J. Marquand
• We, C. Lindbergh
• Treasure Island, R. L. Stevenson
• The Prince & the Pauper, M. Twain

That is one heck of a great reading list . . . for adventure-seeking boys. I read the bolded ones, for sure, and maybe a few more. A couple of these we read for school, possibly even the previous year, but he gave me credit for those to get me started.

Update:  I added blue bolding for things I know I read eventually.   Musing:  Jack London was a socialist.  I wonder if schools still assign his novels.

Update 10/28/14:  I did read The Three Muskateers a couple years ago and liked it alot.

The Daily Show: on the mosque/community center

Daily Show on the mosque issue here.

Fernholz on Douthat: Mosque

Redux: Douthat's musings are like chum in shark-infested waters. My favorite liberal bloggers show up to feast.

Here now, Tim Fernholz, writing at The American Prospect:

In rejecting Cordoba House -- and saying that religious freedom doesn't apply to Muslims -- opponents of the Mosque are doing the exact opposite of encouraging assimilation. They're telling Muslims that even if you embrace religious liberty, we're not going to welcome you to our shores. What liberals worry about in the case -- aside from their normative support of religious liberty -- is the terrible message opposing the Mosque sends to Muslims around the globe about our country's values.

Picking up after Douthat. This time: the Ground Zero mosque/community center.

Ezra on the coverage of the mosque, here:

You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either. The test I try to use is this: Could I imagine a world in which this thing was happening but no one ever thought to comment on it?

Well, yes. I can't imagine that world for unemployment, or financial-regulation reform, or the Afghanistan Wikileaks. But it absolutely could've been the case that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf decided to build an Islamic community center and no one really noticed, or cared, and maybe a few local politicians from both parties showed up to help cut the ribbon. As it happened, a few opportunists went after it, which brought it to the attention of a few sensationalistic media outlets, and then some opportunistic politicians jumped on board, and then their colleagues felt compelled to comment, and then more legitimate media outlets had something to cover, and on and on. The story is a story because of the incentives of the people making it a story, not because there's something about an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero that just screams out for national attention.

Don't believe me? Then ask yourself why you've never heard anyone complain about the halal food carts parked outside the Ground Zero construction site. This didn't need to become a polarizing national issue. It was made into a polarizing national issue. And now the only thing to do is to wait for it to pass.

I'm inclinded to follow Ezra's example and not discuss the mosque mess, but, offline, Michael requested my response to Douthat's mosque piece, so I'll indulge him.

Douthat makes two common mistakes:

1) Treating the 9/11 terrorists as if their behavior informs us about Islam. It doesn't, any more than the bombing of abortion clinics by self-proclaimed Christians informs us about Christianity. There is an America that cannot get this concept through their heads and therefore insist on treating Muslims as a special class who are always suspect, who are not entitled to the freedoms that our country promises, who have to prove their trustworthiness in a way that non-Muslims do not, who are expected to employ more "sensitive" antennas than non-Muslims. It's THAT America that scares the sh*t out of me.

2) Watching and reading news stories and drawing the conclusion that what isn't presented there doesn't exist -- that if news stories don't present images and sound bites of Muslim Americans decrying the 9/11 terrorists, then that means Muslim Americans accept, support, and are in agreement with the 9/11 terrorists or other radicals. Douthat, and everyone else, needs to appreciate that the media doesn't give time or space to people spouting reasonable, temperate sentiments, so Muslims with reasonable, temperate sentiments are not going to be appearing in news stories or as talking heads in the proportions that they exist in the world. The Muslims being quoted or trotted out for inflammatory comments in news coverage are not a representative sample and that's what gives Douthat the impression that they "too often" do what they do. The real "too often" is that the news finds and quotes these folks but fails to quantify how prevalent their positions are. Also, "too often" the media automatically associates the views of an individual with those of an organization to which he/she belongs.

I don't know anything about Craig Berger writing at Future Majority, but he has already written a rebuttal to Douthat that addresses these points. He does a good job of putting the shoe on the other foot to illustrate the absurdity and unfairness of having an attitude that the events of 9/11 should have a bearing on selection of a mosque location.

I'm still calling him DOUGH HAT in my head. Will someone correct me if I've got that wrong, please? It's hard not to think derisively of someone you're calling DOUGH HAT.

Chabon is a subtitle generator extraordinaire

Noir is perfect for blog subtitles. About 50% of the sentences in Yiddish Policemen's Union work as subtitles.

Update moments later: Our previous subtitle ("Sparkling with epiphanic dew") came courtesy of Chabon too, from an essay about short fiction. Quoting a Wikipedia entry:

In a 2002 essay, Chabon decried the state of modern short fiction (including his own), saying that, with rare exceptions, it consisted solely of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." In an apparent reaction against these "plotless [stories] sparkling with epiphanic dew", Chabon's post-2000 work has been marked by an increased interest in genre fiction and plot. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was, like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, an essentially realistic, contemporary novel (whose plot happened to revolve around comic-book superheroes), Chabon's subsequent works — such as The Final Solution, his dabbling with comic-book writing, and the "swashbuckling adventure" of Gentlemen of the Road — have been almost exclusively devoted to mixing aspects of genre and literary fiction. Perhaps the most notable example of this is The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which won five genre awards, including the Hugo award and Nebula award. Chabon seeks to "annihilate" not the genres themselves, but the bias against certain genres of fiction such as fantasy, science fiction and romance.

Update another moment later: "An atmosphere of ruined festivity" by itself would have been more fitting for this blog, but the sentence as a whole is so great, it deserves full quotation.

Marriage in Minnesota is awfully "thin"

Neither K nor I are believers of any creed of any major religion, so we weren't married in a religious ceremony. We were married by a judge. In preparation for the ceremony, the judge provided us with the text of her typical marriage spiel for us to revise/edit as we wished. If we'd wanted to write it from scratch, she would have been happy to use our text.

The task made me wonder what EXACTLY were the vows that the state required. The state licenses marriage; the state uses the concept of marriage in a panoply of laws. Surely, I thought, the state must have minimum requirements for the promises exchanged in wedding vows in order for the marriage to be recognized by the state. What terms must be included in the marriage contract? No doubt, I thought, you'd have to express a life-long term to the contract ("until death") and probably a promise of fidelity ("forsaking all others").

But no. The State of Minnesota (and I suspect lots of other states) has almost no restrictions on or requirements for the promises that betrotheds must make in order to be legally married. You need not commit for life; you need not commit to fidelity. Besides a few technicalities (age, not already married, not related, not coerced), the only requisite vow is proscribed as follows:

517.09 SOLEMNIZATION.

No particular form is required to solemnize a marriage, except: the parties shall declare in the presence of a person authorized to solemnize marriages and two attending witnesses that they take each other as husband and wife; or the marriage shall be solemnized in a manner provided by section 517.18 [which deals with various religious authorities].

The only sentences in a Minnesota wedding ceremony that matter to the State are "I take you to be my husband/wife."

Minnesota's marriage statute (Chapter 517) is here.

That's an awfully "thin" definition of marriage, if I may abscond with Douthat's thin/thick lingo.

On a related note, I was surprised when we got our marriage license that there was no information provided by the State about the legal consequences of marriage. It seems to me that there should be a pamphlet or a required course in which the State identifies the legal consequences that flow from marriage. Minnesota does offer a discount on the license fee if you take a class that covers the soft topics of communication and conflict resolution. (Ugh. Well-intended, but even for this liberal, it strikes me as not an appropriate function for a governmental entity.) But there is no education about the hard aspects of property rights and the like. Who owns assets/debts you bring into marriage? Who owns what's earned during marriage? What does it take to dissolve a marriage? What happens to property on dissolution? What are one's obligations on tax liabilities incurred by earnings of spouse? That kind of information the state ought to provide to prospective wedders. (Weddees?)

North Dakota Bois are beautiful. And funny.

They should have used the zoo train, rather than the trolley.

Serwer on Douthat

Douthat's musings are like chum in shark-infested waters. My favorite liberal bloggers show up to feast.

Here now, Adam Serwer at The American Prospect.

The meaning of marriage, anthropologically speaking

Those inclined to consider the purpose of marriage might want to hear what anthropologists have to say on the subject:

Arlington, Virginia--The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropologists, released the following statement on February 26, 2004 in response to President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

Ezra vs. Douthat - next rounds

Ezra yesterday:  

In other words, America does not currently conceive of marriage in the way that Douthat and Tushnet would like it to conceive of marriage, and in the way it would need to conceive of marriage in order for there to be a good reason the institution can't accommodate gays. So to oppose gay marriage, Douthat and Tushnet must first construct an alternative version of marriage, and then argue that if real marriage opens to gays, that's another step away from the idealized marriage that would be closed to gays.

I'm sticking to my assertion that not even Douthat conceives of marriage in the way he's put forth, because if he really, really did, then he'd advocate for marriage to be available only to the procreating. In fact, he'd need to advocate for the establishment of government sex panels to make sure married couples were engaging in practices that might result in procreation, or risk losing their marriage status. (Truly, I could go on and on with the absurdities that would follow if Douthat's notions of the real purpose of marriage were correct.)

Back to Ezra:

Deep into his essay, Douthat admits that this is a difficult argument to mount. "This thickness issue also helps explain what often sounds like tongue-tiedness and/or desperation from social conservatives when they’re asked to explain what, exactly, it is about marriage that makes it distinctively heterosexual," he says. That's an important insight, but I think it cuts in the other direction. When you hold a position that you feel very deeply but can't justify with persuasive facts or clear theory, it's generally a signal that something is awry in the underlying position.

Ezra analogizes that the move toward acceptance of gay marriage is like the shift from VCR to DVD.

Douthat responds to Ezra today:

Douthat quibbles with Ezra's pick for analogy and says it's more like Betamax vs. VCR.  

Like the Betamax supporters,  social conservatives are convinced that they have a superior product — in this case, a conception of marriage that ultimately leads to greater overall human flourishing than the newer, thinner understanding. But having a theoretically superior product isn’t always enough: You have to be able to persuade the world to buy it, or buy into it, and you have to adjust as the world changes and some of the forces that gave your model a structural advantage in the marketplace shrink or disappear. And on both fronts conservatives have been conspicuously failing.

Ezra on Douthat

Ezra on Twitter says: Ross Douthat's posts on gay marriage are convincing me there really isn't a critique of gay marriage that makes sense.

Could not agree more, Ezra. I tried to write a rebuttal to Douthat's column, but he had made so little sense there wasn't anything to say in response.

Douthat said that the real reason heteroseXual marriage deserved honor was that straight couples had the unique ability to bear biological children. OK. That's true. But so what? It's a tautology, not an argument.

Of all the letters, only X is an X. Does that mean it should be treated differently? Maybe we could always capitalize the X. Of all the ways there are to be parents, only heteroseXual couples can create children biological to both of them.

Fine. But Douthat needs to then make the case that that unique condition matters in order to have said something.

If you want to say that the real meaning and purpose of marriage is about procreation, then what are you going to do with all the marriages of people who can't procreate, don't want to procreate, or are done with their procreating days? What are you going to do with straight couples raising kids that are not biological to one or either of them? There's absolutely no way to construct a sensible rationale for the institution of marriage that honors procreation but not parenting of the non-biologically-procreated. (If we were short on people, then you could; but since we have plenty of people, you can't.) And, if you base your rationale on parenting, rather than procreating, then you have to open the door to same-seX couples who parent.

But the thing about Douthat's blathering about this issue that steams me isn't that it doesn't make any sense; it's that it's dishonest. If Douthat had ever in his life argued that marriage should be reserved for procreating couples and should not be available to straight couples who aren't procreating due to barrenness or age or lack of interest, then I would believe that he actually believes his own rationale for what marriage ought to honor. If he said, "That's right; no getting married for women past child-bearing years. No marriage for men who've had irreversible vasectomies. I really mean it -- marriage is for procreators." But no. He hasn't done any such thing. He's only conjured this position about how the real purpose of marriage is to honor procreators as a way to try to draw a distinction between straight couples and gay couples. He knows that if he focuses on parenting, he can't eXclude gay couples from access to marriage.

It's possible that there is no particularly good rationale for why the government ought to sanction marriage for anyone. Big topic for another day. I think there are some reasons why it makes sense, including but not limited to a structure for parenting, but if you make me pick between a) making marriage only available to straight couples or b) no marriage for anyone, I pick no marriage for anyone.

BTW, how do you pronounce Douthat? I'm calling him DOUGH HAT in my head.

Update: So I guess The American Prospect called out the problem of Douthat failing to explain why the uniqueness of heteroseXual couplings matters, and he's responded by saying that heteroseXual seX has consequences or the potential of consequences that same-seX seX doesn't have.  My charges of dishonesty still stand, since there are no potential consequences for barren/old/vasectomied people having seX and yet Douthat isn't suggesting these folks should be eXcluded from marriage.

Twentieth Century Boy

Adam took on T-Rex tonight for the first time in Erie, PA.


(Sound on this video is painfully distorted. Will substitute something better when it turns up.) Video from mndchngr.

Update 8/15/10 for Michael: By "took on T-Rex", I mean he sang a song originally recorded by the band T-Rex.

Update 8/15/10 pm: Another performance of the same song from 8/14/10 performance (Quebec), recorded by fan Addicted2AdamLambert:

Ezra does an informal survey on the Laffer curve

My boy, Ezra, did an interesting exercise.

The idea behind the Laffer Curve is that there is some percentage at which revenue generated from income tax can be maximized. With tax rates at 0%, obviously no revenue is generated. At 100%, no revenue is generated because there'd be no reason to work. Somewhere between 0 and 100 is a sweet spot where federal tax revenue is maximized.

Ezra surveyed a couple economists and a bunch of politicians about where they think the Laffer curve peaks and presents their answers here.

Answers from Republican politicians and folks who lean to the right politically, tended to be well below 50%; Democratic politicians (looks like only two of them) were up around 70%. The two economists he asked identified top rates of 69% and greater than 60%.

Of course, as Martin Feldstein, Harvard, answered, maximizing federal revenue shouldn't really be a goal of tax policy, so in that sense the question is pointless. Further, half of the pertinent equation is missing when you ponder just the government-revenue-generation portion of the effect of tax rates. You should also be considering the effect on GDP or growth or something reflecting the effect on private sector income or wealth or something. But, still, the question is interesting for revealing how far apart are politicians' views. If you really believe setting income tax rates above 19% causes a drag on the economy, then of course you're going to fret about raising the top bracket from 35 to 39%. If, though, you think that you can raise rates to 70% without being an economic drag, then an increase from 35 to 39% for the top bracket is really not a big deal.

Snakes as art

Gorgeous photos of snakes here. (I promise it's not pictures of Douthat.)

Marriage: "It Wasn't All Bad"

Douthat inspires me to post this.