anguswit

Globed

2006-02-05T20:45:00.000-05:00

My first article in the Boston Globe appeared today. Yay!

The Sensible Choice

2006-02-05T20:41:00.000-05:00

Buried in the second-to-last paragraph of Richard Posner's recent essay in The New Republic is the first public expression of a solution I have long proposed to the controversy surrounding government wiretaps of private communications. Let the government wiretap to its heart's content with one proviso: the intelligence gathered can only be used in a terrorism case. Posner fomulates is thus:

Permit surveillance intended to detect and prevent terrorist activity but flatly forbid the use of information gleaned by such surveillance for any purpose other than to protect national security. So, if the government discovered, in the course of surveillance, that an American was not a terrorist but was evading income tax, it could not use the discovery to prosecute him for tax evasion or sue him for back taxes.

Isn't this the perfect solution?

Roots Rock Reggae

2006-01-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

Just when you thought he couldn't get any bigger. Unless you've been living under a rock, you better know who Matisyahu is. If not, click here for my last post about him.

I was impressed a year ago when he showed up in full sartorial splendor on the front page of the Metro section. Slightly more so when he opened for Trey (is that confirmed?) and even more so when he was the only Orthodox Jew to play a reggae festival at Randal's Island (uh, yeah). And since trading my Metrocard for a Jetta, I've grown accustomed to hearing him on WBCN, the rock of Boston, urging on Moshiach.

And now: tomorrow night, Matisyahu is gonna be on Letterman. The first Jewish musician to ever achieve genuine crossover success is a black-clad Lubavitcher from Brooklyn. Whouda thunk?

Scientology's Top Gun

2005-12-17T23:33:00.000-05:00

I was riveted by this story in the Los Angeles Times about Tom Cruise's role in scientology. By far, the craziest thing about this crazy "religion" is the seemingly lucid celebrities it has attracted, like Beck and Jenna Elfman. I once tried to figure out what scientology was about online, and found the experience rather unsatisfying, so I was especially grateful for this little nugget, which seems to sum it all up.

In his own spiritual life, Cruise has continued to climb the "Bridge to Total Freedom," Scientology's path to enlightenment. International Scientology News, a church magazine, reported last year that the actor had embarked on one of the highest levels of training, "OT VII" — for Operating Thetan VII.

At these higher levels — and at a potential cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars — Scientologists learn Hubbard's secret theory of human suffering, which he traces to a galactic battle waged 75 million years ago by an evil tyrant named Xenu.

According to court documents made public by The Times in the 1980s, Hubbard espoused the belief that Xenu captured the souls, or thetans, of enemies and electronically implanted false concepts in them to keep them confused about his dirty work. The goal of these advanced courses is to become aware of the trauma and free of its effects.

Absence makes the heart grow ....

2005-11-12T17:44:00.000-05:00

Reading through some older posts and comments, I realized I miss blogging.

The armpit of New England

2005-09-18T22:54:00.000-04:00

All the news and pictures coming out of New Orleans in recent weeks have made the region's poverty a major issue in the Hurrican Katrina saga. I was surprised to discover, however, that New Orleans is hardly the most impoverished city in the country. My own hometown of Hartford, CT, is actually poorer than New Orleans, according to a study cited in this Boston Globe story. (Yes, I have been reading the Globe since moving up here, but not for long).

To be sure, it is easy to read too much into the ''Southernness" of Katrina, and some historians warn that such a focus simply reinforces what they see as the centuries-old effort to use the South as a scapegoat, focusing on its ills while ignoring what are in fact national problems. There are other parts of the country, they note, that are just as poor-according to the 2000 Census, for example, Hartford, Conn., is poorer than New Orleans.

Anybody still listening?

2005-09-12T20:30:00.000-04:00

Well, if you are, clap your hands and say 'yeah'.

So I took a little break from blogging. And I didn't make any announcement, which isn't cool. But I had a good excuse: Last week I moved to lovely Cambridge, Mass. to become the editor of a small (but soon to be legendary) newspaper on the north shore of Boston. I'm not going to offer the name, so as to maintain some boundary between my writing lives.

But I have not given up blogging and this post is to serve notice that I'm climbing back on the horse. My new responsibilities are manifold and I cannot make promises as to the frequency of my posts, but if any of my readers are still out there, please make yourselves known as I'm sure that will encourage me to check in more regularly. And as I do, I hope you will too.

Montessori

2005-08-26T11:05:00.000-04:00

My long-awaited piece on Jewish Montessori schools came out in the Forward this week. Read it here.

(sorry -- it requires registration)

Restricting Speech

2005-08-25T10:01:00.000-04:00

In the era of terrorism, both critics of the left and right acknowledge the existence of a continuum between civil liberties and effective counter-terrorism measures-- if you increase one you tend to get less of the other. Most of our debates boil down to an argument over where the line between the two should be drawn.

After London, the conservative punditocracy was outraged at how lax the Brits had become, allowing home-grown terror cells to germinate on English soil. But these criticisms, justified as they may be, fail to recognize the difficulty in acting against individuals who haven't actually done anything other than talk (a difficulty substantially reduced by Britain's new list of deportable terrorism-related offenses). Freedom of speech is a cherished ideal in Western democracies -- arguably, it is the ideal upon which all others rest.

Thankfully someone has finally acknowledged the problem. In an op-ed two weeks ago in the Times, Geoffrey Stone argues that even radical Islamists who rail against the government and extol the virtues of terrorism should be protected under the law. The distinction he draws is between speaking admirably of suicide bombing and outright incitement to violence. The former should be protected, the latter outlawed.

Stone's distinction is a hollow one. Islamists have declared war on the West and the growing roster of terrorist atrocities attest to their seriousness. A Muslim cleric who encourages suicidal terrorism is virtually indistinct from one who merely praises it. And yet, with those restrictions in place it becomes nearly impossible for a Muslim to severely criticize the government lest he be accused of inciting violence. But still, I think, it needs to be done. Noam Chomsky might make equally radical claims about the evils of British foreign policy or the legitimacy of terrorist grievances, but the fact is he has no followers with a distinguished history of putting those ideas into bloody practice. As is often the case, context matters.

This rather uncomfortable truth rubs up against another cherished democratic value, namely equality before the law. We shudder to think that a person's race or religion might be a factor in a court of law, or determine what views that person is permitted to express -- and rightly so. Guilt should be guilt, regardless of the ethnicity of the criminal.

What we are essentially weighing here is two competing democratic values -- free speech and color-blindedness -- and it is no simple matter to determine which should take precedence.

Dropping the Bomb

2005-08-19T22:19:00.000-04:00

Here is Krauthammer's plan for dealing with Palestinian rocket attacks following the withdrawal from Gaza:

Israel should announce that henceforth any rocket launched from Palestinian territory will immediately trigger a mechanically automatic response in which five Israeli rockets will be fired back. There will be no human intervention in the loop. Every Palestinian rocket landing in Israel will instantly trigger sensors and preset counter-launchers. Any Palestinian terrorist firing up a rocket will know that he is triggering six: one Palestinian and five Israeli.

Israel would decide how these five would be programmed to respond. Perhaps three aimed at the launch site and vicinity and two at a list of predetermined military and strategic assets of the Palestinian militias.

The idea of automated bomb launches is frighteningly Strangelove-esque, but the principle of massive retaliation is the correct strategy, and the only one. Israel's only other recourse would be to reinvade Gaza and go after the rocket launchers itself, thus negating the significance of the withdrawal it is now completing, at great costs to the treasury and Israeli morale.

As almost everyone seems to agree, the withdrawal is an enormous opportunity for the Palestinians to demonstrate they can responsibly govern themselves. Whether or not Gaza becomes even more of a haven for terrorists than it already is will be a pretty reliable benchmark of their success. Unfortunately, as they have time and again throughout their tortured history, the Palestinians are setting themselves up for failure, seemingly so comfortable playing the victims that they are incapable of taking responsibility for their own future. Their two most articulate spokespeople have been assiduously laying the groudwork for the excuses to come when the PA fails to step up to the plate, telling the media all week that the disengagement is meaningless -- at best an empty gesture while Israel continues to control the borders and airspace; at worst, a cover for a major landgrab in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Hamas has been busy claiming victory for bombing the Israelis out and promising more of the same, while the UN has been so preoccupied with financing anti-Israel propaganda that they have neglected to explore the development opportunities posed by Israel's abandonment of miles of prime Gaza beachfront real estate. And Abbas, well, where the hell has Abbas been?

After nearly four decades of occupation, dismantling the Palestinian culture of victimhood is proving far more difficult than dismantling the terrorist networks that pose the greatest threat to Palestinian self-governance and Israeli security. At this rate, I predict 5 rockets will be landing somewhere in Gaza by the middle of next week.

The Vanishing

2005-08-05T02:19:00.000-04:00

Take 100 Orthodox Jews, 100 Modern Orthodox Jews, 100 Conservative Jews, 100 Reform Jews and 100 Unaffiliated Jews. In four generations, how many will be left of each?

According to a new study based on current intermarriage and birth rates, 100 Orthodox Jews will yield a staggering 2,588 Jews! Modern Orthodox fare slightly less well, with 346 Jews. For Conservative, Reform and Unaffiliated, the projections are downright disheartening. After four generations there will be 24, 13 and 5 left respectively.

There are a couple of obvious problems with this study -- current intermarriage and birth rates will not necessarily remain constant; there is no evidence that the offspring of each denomination will remain in that denomination; there is no accounting for other factors that might actually lead to growth in the numbers of Reform and Conservative Jews.

And then there's the biggest problem of all -- this is not news. Even with its methodological and conceptual flaws, the thrust of the study is basically correct. Orthodox Jews are far better at increasing their numbers than non-Orthodox Jews. A far more interesting question is therefore what effect this will have on the demographics of the Jewish people. Over time, the Orthodox will substantially increase their representation as a fraction of total world Jewry, a development that has serious implications for Jewish communal life. The authors of the study would have contributed much more to our understanding by addressing that question than by interpreting the numbers as an ode to the virtues of Orthodox education.

Bad News

2005-08-03T01:01:00.000-04:00

If there's any doubt that Richard Posner is one of America's most indispensible public intellectuals, his essay in this week's Times Book Review should dispel it. Posner expertly untangles the issues surrounding the decline in both the reputation and the audience of the mainstream media (or MSM in blogger parlance), and he does so with a shrewd cost-based analysis. It is not fundamental biases or the general coarsening of our public discourse that have degraded the news media's reputation, but shifting cost structures. In short, given the declining costs of putting out a newspaper of producing a news broadcast, media outlets can turn a profit with a smaller audience. That in turn leads them to abandon their longstanding attempts to capture the elusive middle ground, making it inevitable that they will be more niche-oriented, more partisan, and more polarized. And increased polarization explains the most curious aspect of the current media wars -- both liberals and conservatives feel the other side is biased against it.

The proliferation of media outlets means the market is more competitive, and markets being what they are, more options means a greater likelihood that consumers will have their needs catered to. Those needs, the evidence suggests, is less for informed commentary than for entertainment and for validation of pre-existing prejudices. Hence, Fox News. Or blogs.

Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded - it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media. A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error - like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources - that cost it many scoops.

Blogs don't have these worries. Their only cost is the time of the blogger, and that cost may actually be negative if the blogger can use the publicity that he obtains from blogging to generate lecture fees and book royalties. Having no staff, the blogger is not expected to be accurate. Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his punches. And not needing a large circulation to cover costs, he can target a segment of the reading public much narrower than a newspaper or a television news channel could aim for. He may even be able to pry that segment away from the conventional media. Blogs pick off the mainstream media's customers one by one, as it were.

Posner also makes quick work of the most frequent criticism of blogs, that they play fast and loose with the facts:

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

The Sky is Falling

2005-07-22T01:33:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, New York City police officers are set to randomly inspect bags being brought onto the subway. It is an unprecedented move in the face of an unprecedented threat. Unfortunately, political correctness ensures that the NYPD will be looking at elderly grandmothers just as carefully as twenty-something Muslim men, according to this Times account.

People who do not submit to a search will be allowed to leave, but will not be permitted into the subway station. The police commissioner said officers would take pains to avoid singling people out for searches based on race or ethnicity.

"No racial profiling will be allowed," Mr. Kelly said. "It's against our policies. But it will be a systematized approach."

He added, "We'll give some very specific and detailed instructions to our officers on how to do it in accordance with our laws and the Constitution."

This confounds the brain. It is an indisputable fact that the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks of this type are committed by young Muslim men. How is it racist to be more concerned over a young Muslim with a bag than with a middle-aged white woman? Ray Kelly is way smarter than this and I can only pray he was saying what reporters want to hear.

Lucky for Kelly, his critics are even more insipid.

"The police can and should be aggressively investigating anyone they suspect is trying to bring explosives into the subway," said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union. "However, random police searches of people without any suspicion of wrongdoing are contrary to our most basic constitutional values. This is a very troubling announcement."

Please explain this one to me. When you board an aircraft, they search you even if you haven't done anything wrong. But doing it in the subway is unconstitutional? As I've confessed before, I'm not a constitutional lawyer, so perhaps it is, though I can't for the life of me imagine why. It's one thing to stop someone walking down the street, quite another when they try to enter the mass transit system. And if, due to some unimaginable legal precept, it is in fact unconstitional, that should merely serve to accelerate a long overdue debate we must have over the applicability of principles drafted over 200 years ago to the fight against terror. If checking bags when you enter the subway is counter to the Constitution, then it's the latter that has to bend.

craigslist

2005-07-19T23:43:00.000-04:00

I had a succesful sale of an old bookshelf today and the guy sent me this nice note:

Subject: Thank you

For being patient, and more than reasonable. Two tortoises have a bigger apartment now. Happy living!

~Kevin

Modern Love

2005-07-19T18:39:00.000-04:00

Some dedicated readers may recall a post from several months back that inagurated my infatuation with the Modern Love column in the Times Style section. The piece that did me in was a tale of one blogger dating another blogger who was cheating on blogger #1 with still a third blogger. Blogger #1 tracked blogger #2's infidelities on the website of blogger #3. Confused?

This week's installment is a similar tale, this time of a woman who tracks her nannies drug use and sex adventures on the nanny's blog. The story is here, the nanny's blog here. Quick link to nanny's fantasies of Tucker Carlson here.

New Republic

2005-07-12T11:38:00.000-04:00

TNR has had a string of great content on its site, particulary these two pieces. The first is a chronicle of the murderous career of Che Guevara, the poster child for leftist revolutionaries the world over and now the favored icon of capitalist chic. Though there is little in this piece that hasn't been known previously, its publication is particularly prescient at a time when celebrities of all stripes have taken to wearing Che's likeness on t-shirts despite his history of cold-blooded killing.

In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine." Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim "was really guilty enough to deserve death," he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: "He had to pay the price." At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.

The second piece is a roundup of contemporary conservative opinion on evolution. Some representative snippets:

Tucker Carlson, MSNBC

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I think God's responsible for the existence of the universe and everything in it. ... I think God is probably clever enough to think up evolution. ... It's plausible to me that God designed evolution; I don't know why that's outside the realm. It's not in my view."

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I don't discuss personal opinions. ... I'm familiar with what's obviously true about it as well as what's problematic. ... I'm not a scientist. ... It's like me asking you whether you believe in the Big Bang."

How evolution should be taught in public schools: "I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks."

Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I've never understood how an eye evolves."

What he thinks of intelligent design: "Put me down for the intelligent design people."

How evolution should be taught in public schools: "The real problem here is that you shouldn't have government-run schools. ... Given that we have to spend all our time crushing the capital gains tax I don't have much time for this issue."

And finally, as evidence of why the non-ideological Charles Krauthammer is one of the very few conservative writers worth reading, I offer this:

Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "Of course."

What he thinks of intelligent design: "At most, interesting."

Whether intelligent design should be taught in public schools: "The idea that [intelligent design] should be taught as a competing theory to evolution is ridiculous. ... The entire structure of modern biology, and every branch of it [is] built around evolution and to teach anything but evolution would be a tremendous disservice to scientific education. If you wanna have one lecture at the end of your year on evolutionary biology, on intelligent design as a way to understand evolution, that's fine. But the idea that there are these two competing scientific schools is ridiculous."

More thoughts on the London bombings

2005-07-09T12:07:00.000-04:00

There are people out there who maintain that jihadist terrorism against the West is a product of Western policies. Many who advance this line of thinking do so because it reinforces their preconceptions that the West is an exploitative, profit-hungry monster whose every action is intended to enrich itself, or its elites, at the expense of the less fortunate societies of the world. But occasionally, we hear rhetoric of this kind accompanied by genuine arguments. Such is the case with Robert Pape, a professor of political science at Chicago, who penned an op-ed in today's Times. Because Pape's views are grounded in argument, not ideology, they are particularly ripe for refutation.

His essential point is this: most Al Qaeda suicide attacks since 2002 have been perpetrated by citizens of countries allied with the U.S., or in which the U.S. maintains a substantial military presence, and against the citizens of the U.S. and allied countries. He concludes that Al Qaeda's principal aim is to drive America and its allies out of Muslim countries and that Al Qaeda may well collapse if it were not able to draw recruits from such countries.

In other words, foreign occupation by America and its allies is the problem. Ending foreign occupation is the solution.

To begin with, Pape's sample is fundamentally skewed: he considers only attacks that have occurred since April 2002, and only one very specific type of terrorism - suicide bombing. The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole, both World Trade Center attacks -- all of these occurred prior to the massive American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. Could it be that Al Qaeda's recent choice of targets is purely tactical? Is it possible that it has assumed the mantle of resisting foreign occupation because it is such a resonant idea in a part of the world that has been regressing for the past 1,000 years? Because it excites the minds of normally secular Arab nationalists? Because it wins them sympathy in certain quarters within the West?

If ending the presence of foreigners in their territory is the goal of Muslim extremists, they have pursued exactly the wrong course of action. Islamic terrorism against the West has brought far greater Western meddling in the affairs of Muslim states than before. It has transformed what should have been (to paraphrase Friedman) a Muslim-Muslim problem into a Muslim-Western problem.

Consider the case of the Palestinians: Hamas and Islamic Jihad are two of the most prolific terrorist groups in operation in the world today. They have successfully convinced many that their actions are a response to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. But here again, Palestinian terrorism (if not suicide terrorism) long predates the occupation, which began in 1967. Moreover, if the goal is to remove Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza, blowing up busses in Jerusalem is precisely the wrong strategy. The second intifada has destroyed the Israeli peace movement, brought a hard-line general to power, undermined worldwide sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and made Palestinian independence -- in the West Bank at least -- a much more remote possibility. The more pragmatic amongst the Palestinians realized this long ago. But still, the attacks continue. Israeli occupation is not the cause of Palestinian terrorism, it is the excuse for it. Just as Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon did not quell the Hezbollah terrorists intent on Israel's destruction, so the Gaza withdrawal is unlikely to satiate the blood lust of terrorists there - if anything, it will increase it. (This does not mean I oppose the Gaza disengagement, but that's another story).

Israel's occupation that began in 1967 provided terrorists with a workable justification for their acts. The same is true of Al Qaeda. After Iraq and Afghanistan, any attack on the West could now be construed as a response to American atrocities committed against Muslims.

The fundamentalists who kill and murder masses of civilians are far more ambitious than Pape gives them credit for. Like Palestinian terrorist groups, Al Qaeda seeks the establishment of an Islamo-fascist theocracy, the reinstatement of the caliphate, and the rollback of Western norms of tolerance, pluralism and democracy. We need look no further than the Taliban to see what Al Qaeda victory would bequeath to the world.

It is imperative to understand the relationship between American policies and Islamic terror that writers like Pape are so intent on obscuring. American policies in the Middle East may increase the attractiveness of radical theology, but it isn't responsible for its very existence. I might agree that when Israel attacks a terrorist operative, or when America launches an offensive in Falluja, it heightens anti-American feeling in the Arab world. But that anti-American feeling, manifest in terrorist atrocities in Western cities, existed long before. Just as any change in Israeli policy will only whet the appetite of the Islamists (nothing will encourage them more than perceived victory), any change in American policy will only exacerbate the problem. That is not to say that we needn't constantly re-evaluate our policies, particularly when they effect such murderous outcomes. Nor is it to say that American should not push Israel to end its occupation, or that American troops should stay in the Middle East indefinitely, or that America should not end its support for tyrannical regimes, work to end poverty or alienation or any of the other reasons often cited for the anger of many Muslim youth. We should do all these things, but we should do them because they are the right things to do and on our own terms, not because we think they are effective counter-terrorism strategies. And we should begin those efforts in the parts of the world that are the most pacified to show that it is those societies that don't dispatch their youth to kill Westerners that are going to reap the benefits of Western assistance. America must show the world that terrorism is a losing strategy, not an effective way to elicit political changes.

Pape writes that after 9/11, Al Qaeda recognized that "it would be more effective to attack America's European allies, thus coercing them to withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing the economic and military burdens that the United States would have to bear."

That is the most compelling reason of all for the Europeans NOT to withdraw.

London Calling

2005-07-09T01:16:00.000-04:00

The bombings in London this week have revived a litany of arguments that ought to be familiar to anyone who was in America on September 11th. I've been following the debates there with a mixture of hope and revulsion similar to that I experienced in New York four years ago.

Even more than back then, the web is awash in punditry, some inspired, some cringe-inducing. There is a notion, popular amongst those Brits who love to talk of how London "saw this coming", that this is the price of collusion with the American behemoth. And indeed it is. The question is what is to be done?

One thinks when hearing such talk that the sensible response is to stop colluding. This thinking mirrors those of the terrorists themselves, who chalk up their blood lust to Western aggression. But it is foolish to believe that by not antagonizing terrorists you won't draw their fire. If Britain goes the way of Spain, the jihadists will add another notch to their belt and set their sights on the next target.

Amir Taheri pretty much nails that thinking to the wall in the London Times.

Friedman had an unoriginal, but generally correct take -- ultimately, Western cities are most secure when Muslims are restraining their own, something they have done a remarkably poor job of, as demonstrated by Joseph Braudie in the New Republic.

Ian McEwan's piece is worth more than all the news accounts combined, but I desperately hope he's wrong. I think London will recover its confidence. And sooner than most people think.

Irrational Optimism

2005-07-06T10:07:00.000-04:00

Thomas Friedman is at it again. As is often the case, he starts off with promise, noting that Israelis and Palestinians are both enjoying the current period of calm as reflected by the "boom" in both their stock markets. But then he gets a little heady, arguing that this tiny crack in the iron wall of Middle East pessimism is enough to revive the peace process. Actually, withdrawal from Gaza and the construction of a security barrier in the West Bank are the most emphatic symbols that the peace process is dead, that no one in Israel anticipates anything resembling a peace settlement in the near future and are thus prepared to act unilaterally to strengthen their security posture.

Then Friedman goes positively wacko with this outrageous speculation:

Will the U.N. confirm the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as it did from Lebanon, creating an internationally recognized border that will also constitute what a Haaretz essayist, Ari Shavit, calls "an invisible wall of international legitimacy"? (Even terrorists today are deterred by the legality of the Israel-Lebanon border.)

The answer to that question is easy: No. The U.N. will do no such thing. And terrorists are deterred by the legality of the border? This is wrong on so many counts I don't know where to start. Well, yes I do. How about with the fact that Hezbollah terrorists infiltrated the 'border' just last week and have done so consistently for years? Or with the fact that the U.N. itself doesn't even consider the Israel-Lebanon line a border, but in fact adheres scrupulously to its legal definition as a line of withdrawal, or more colloquially as the Blue Line, after the imbeciles in blue helmets that supposedly keep the peace up there. Or how about the fact that terrorists don't recognize the legality of anything - that's what makes them terrorists!! They don't respect the Geneva Conventions, which are the most widely adhered to international treaties in history, but they respect the integrity of an arbitrary line drawn by a feckless international organization? Puh-leeze.

Department of Are-you-fucking-kidding-me?

2005-07-01T08:33:00.000-04:00

I would have had trouble believing this story if not for the incontrovertible photographic evidence: A woman has auctioned off on Ebay the advertising space on her forehead. For $10,000, online gambling site goldenpalace.com gets some unusual advertising real estate. According to the CNN story, even the tattoo artists tried to talk her out of it. She claims she did it for her son's education. Hearwarming. (Hat tip: Jewlicious)

The Times becomes eclectic

2005-06-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

The Times magazine had a fantastic feature last week on Los Angeles DJ and pop music tastemaker Nic Harcourt, host of KCRW's 'Morning Becomes Eclectic' (streaming available here). Like virtually every profile I read these days, the writer strains to brandish the subject's Horatio Alger credentials:

Harcourt was raised in Birmingham in the 1960's, the only child of a television-journalist father and a mother who worked in electrical wholesaling. He has few happy early memories, save for the times when his combative parents would put on Beatles records and dance around the living room. When they separated, he was 7. Harcourt remembers that when his mother broke the news that his father had moved out, he asked, ''Did he take the Beatles records?''

Harcourt says he began drinking heavily as a teenager, left school as soon as he could and drifted through his youth in an alcoholic haze, working construction and factory jobs and playing part time in a few struggling -- and, he notes, not very good -- rock bands. He followed a girlfriend to Australia, married her and spent the latter half of his 20's there. By then Harcourt was a dedicated postpunk partisan of the Clash and Gang of Four, and he quickly became enamored of INXS, Men at Work, the Hoodoo Gurus and the rest of the blossoming Australian music scene. When his marriage came to an acrimonious end in the fall of 1988, Harcourt washed up in Woodstock. Intending to visit for a couple of months with an old band mate, he wound up joining Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up and stayed for a decade. Talking about it now, he says simply: ''My life changed. In some ways, I'm 16 now.''

In Woodstock he discovered his calling. With no prior radio experience, and now in his early 30's, Harcourt talked his way into doing fill-ins on WDST, the area's local progressive FM station. Before long, he was doing a daily show and programming the station. At WDST, Harcourt earned a reputation for identifying hits far ahead of the curve, and was a crucial early advocate of Alanis Morissette, Moby and Garbage. In 1998, when the ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' slot opened up, Harcourt was chosen after a nationwide search.

oh no!

2005-06-26T01:53:00.000-04:00

First their was frumster, the more religious alternative to Jdate, which was itself the Jewish alternative to, well, every other dating site. Now along comes Almost Met Jew, the Jewish version of Craigslist missed connections. Frumster was funny (ever check out those pics? who knew there were so many ways to say orthodox?), but this is just sad.

Holy Shit!

2005-06-25T12:22:00.000-04:00

Never has that seemed like such an apt description.

The first thing that caught my attention at the Billy Graham crusade were the protesters, screaming that god hates faggots, that Billy is the surest road to hell. You know you're in an alternate universe when Billy Graham is accused of being too liberal.

Graham's defenders were not in short supply. "I rebuke you, Satan!" screamed one man, his face flushed with crimson.

From the moment I stepped off the 7 train at Shea Stadium, it was like being swept up in an ocean current. The people came in wave after wave and I, nervously eyeing my watch, tried to fight my way through to the press table.

It was just minutes until the program was scheduled to start and it seemed like I would drown in the whirl of humanity before I had secured a life vest (otherwise known as a press pass).

And then, as if from the heavens came my savior, in the form of a volunteer from a church in Orange County California offering to escort me to the press area. And just like that, the crowds parted like the Red Sea, and I was ushered across the grounds at Flushing Meadow to the check-in table.

Say what you will about evangelicals, but this is one dedicated bunch. Eyes closed, arms raised up to heaven, swaying to the music, accepting of the word, rapturous in ecstatic communion with Jesus. Personally, I can't even begin to fathom it, but for these dudes, it's the real thing.

One of the early speeches was from Billy Graham's finance minister. It reminded me of how often at the beginning of Yom Kippur, after one of the most stirring prayers in all of Jewish liturgy, the service is interrupted to auction off synagogue honors, much like cattle is sold at a county fair. The finance guy offered a lengthy exegesis on the crusade's finances, even promising a full and public audit to be published in that iniquitous rag, the New York Times. He read from Corinthians - he who sows generously will reap generously, or some such thing. And in case the message wasn't clear, he told worshippers to be sure and offer more than they do to their local parish. Billy Graham will accept cash, check, and all major credit cards, and will even offer a receipt for tax purposes. All in all, a rather seamless (and crass) marriage of the spiritual and the material.

Then comes the rock n' roll. The Latin band Salvador, who had a hit with that insufferable pop-tart 'How far is he-eh-ven?', also had one of the most memorable lines of the evening. "You know," said the lead singer, "if you can't tell by looking at us, we're Latin." Then came Christian superstar Steven Curtis Chapman, winner of like a gazillion Dove awards and possibly the whitest white man to ever pick up an electric guitar.

We were then treated to a testimony from Mel Graham, apparently the black sheep of the Graham clan. A slim, tanned, white-haired southern gent, Mel was apparently a godless real estate developer who tended to drink too much until, in a conversion eerily reminiscent of George W's, on one dark night he let Jesus into his heart. These people make it sound so easy.

Finally, it was time for the big man. Graham, hobbled by prostate cancer and other infirmities, gripped his walker and, with son Franklin's help, made his way to the podium to cries of "Thank you Jesus" and "Glory, Glory, Glory". Graham's sermon, if you could call it that, was funny and light, a sort of rambling old man with a lifetime of stories to tell. The climax came at the end, when he invited all who wished to come forward and dedicate their life to Jesus. It was an astonishing, and highly choreographed, affair. Although I was practically in awe of the whole spectacle, the emotions of the faithful were unmistakable. Virtually everyone who gathered up front had tears in their eyes as they pledged their lives to Jesus.

"You've come to Jesus," Graham intoned. "He loves you. He forgives you. Can you think what he suffered for you?"

The only moment that made me genuinely uncomfortable came at the very end, when the MC introduced a representative of "god's chosen people." And thus came forth Mitch Glaser, who confessed to growing up a nice Jewish boy just a mile or so away in Queens. "Thank you," said Glaser to Graham, "on behalf of Jews who have come to know their Messiah through you."

Glaser then offered a closing benediction, beginning with the Hebrew words avinu shebashamayim, our father who art in heaven. My stomach convulsing, I quickly made my way out, towards the subway, back towards my city, possibly the last outpost of secularism left.

Tom Cruise is a really nice guy

2005-06-23T18:57:00.000-04:00

There was lots of coverage when Cruise recently had water splashed in his face by a paparazzi photographer. But here's the pretty amazing video of what happened next. Maybe all this Scientology stuff isn't so bad after all.

If these guys can't do it

2005-06-22T17:35:00.000-04:00

David Makovsky and Dennis Ross are two of the most seasoned American writers on the Middle East. In the Financial Times today they put forth an utterly unconvincing refutation of the most compelling argument against the Gaza disengagement plan – that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups will see the withdrawal as a victory and, as in Lebanon, be inspired to escalate their attacks on Israelis.

The Makovsky/Ross argument proceeds as follows:

First they try a technical argument: Palestinian terrorism emanates primarily from the West Bank, not Gaza, but it is Gaza that Israel is leaving. Ergo, terrorism is not being rewarded. To the fundamentalists, of course, such distinctions are immaterial - Gaza is just as much occupied territory as the West Bank, as Jerusalem, as Tel Aviv.

Next, they suggest that since Hamas leaders never made Gaza disengagement an objective, this is not a victory for them. Well, technically speaking that might be true. Hamas would like Israel to disengage from all of Palestine. Given that, it's hard to understand how Hamas won't see any Israeli withdrawal as a first step towards ultimate victory.

Finally, they trot out their most important point: if Israel doesn't withdraw, it's headed for demographic disaster because Palestinians are on course to outnumber Jews between the river and the sea before the decade is out. This is very true, and a compelling reason for Israel to settle its borders sooner rather than later. But it is not a reason why Hamas won't see the withdrawal as a victory. Indeed, just the opposite – like terrorism, Palestinian reproductive rates are another way to force Israel onto the defensive.

Besides the muddled thinking, a larger point emerges: If thinkers like Makovsky and Ross can't refute the Hamas victory argument, it probably can't be done. Disengagement will, inevitably, be seen as a victory for terrorism. That has to be accepted and weighed against the very real gains Israel will make in not having to protect 8,000 settlers in their foolish desire to plant themselves amongst 1.3 million hostile Palestinians.

The Preacher and the Showgirl

2005-06-22T01:54:00.000-04:00

EINY has posted a riotous account of a memorable subway ride last year.

Launched

2005-06-22T01:09:00.000-04:00

Ok, my new blog is officially live. First post goes up in a few minutes. It may take a few days to get on my feet, but feedback is most welcome.

New York, New Yorker

All the rage

2005-06-20T00:07:00.000-04:00

It seemed like the whole fucking borough was cooing over the dedication of an entire section of the Sunday paper to that phenomenon most of us know simply as Brooklyn. My favorite article by far was the one that resonated the most – Steven Kurutz's all-too-familiar account of how he fell in love with Brooklyn.

Quickly, however, and almost despite yourself, you find you are experiencing what can only be described as a budding love affair. You now live in an apartment in which the closets alone are about half the square footage of your old place in the city. That's another thing. You begin to refer to Manhattan as "the city," and not without a hint of disdain.

Every day you discover something about Brooklyn that you like more and something about Manhattan that you like less. Take Prospect Park. There's a grassy patch of land you can be proud of. It's a real park, too, not some well-landscaped singles club or a rest stop for tourists. There are families and poorly groomed dogs and sad-eyed men strolling around - it's all very democratic.

On your block, a group of old women wearing housecoats sit and gossip in front of a paint-chipped building; you get a kick out of it every time you walk by. "This neighborhood is so real!" you say to yourself (you know you're getting carried away, but you can't help it). And another thing: When Manhattan is mired in cold springs and even colder winters, you've noticed how it's warmer in Brooklyn. Maybe just a few degrees, but still.

At a party, someone asks where in the city you would live if money were no object, and instead of a loft in SoHo, you find yourself saying you want a brownstone on President Street. When you leave town, and someone asks where you live, you don't say New York. You say Brooklyn. You might even throw in a "dem" or "dose," just for laughs and to underscore the point. Never mind that you moved in just a couple of years ago. It's Us vs. Them, and you belong squarely with the old women in the housecoats.

Yup. That's how it happens.

Crash!

2005-06-17T17:33:00.000-04:00

A helicopter just crashed into the East River right outside my window. Second time in a week too. Crazy NYPD choppers circling overhead, traffic totally at a standstill on the FDR, everyone here glued to the picture windows overlooking the river. And I'm trying to crank out a shitty newswire piece on desertification. Misplaced priorities? Hardly.

"Watch where you're going,"

2005-06-16T23:19:00.000-04:00

said the female voice over my left shoulder as I, late for an interview, slalomed between the foot traffic on 42nd Street. She said it not out of concern for my well-being, but with malice, with urgency. So I must have had a look of mild incredulity on my face as I turned to face her, apologizing for my sloppiness. She scowled at me: "Well, fuck you."

Right of Return

2005-06-15T13:49:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while.

Evelyn Gordon had an interesting idea recently in the Jerusalem Post: Israel should accept the full right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, but it should do so only under the definition of a refugee used by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which considers a refugee someone who himself has fled, rather than the UN Relief and Works Agency definition, which accords the Palestinian refugees a right no other refugee group in the world enjoys - the right to pass along refugee status to their offspring.

It is the latter definition which accounts for official UN estimates of Palestinian refugees of upwards of 4 million people, a population Israel would be suicidal to repatriate. Only 700,000 or so Palestinians fled (or were driven out) during the 1948 war, of those Gordon estimates about 200,000 are still around. It's only if you include their children and grandchildren that the number balloons. Her argument is that by accepting the right of return, but only according to the UNHCR definition, Israel would turn the tables on the Palestinians, forcing them to explain why they should enjoy a privileged status as refugees and, more importantly, making them seem like the recalcitrant party. She also argues, less plausibly, that Israel's negotiating position vis a vis the future of Jerusalem would be appreciably strengthened.

As I said, it's an interesting idea.

On principle, Gordon is right on. There is no legitimate reason for Palestinian refugees to be treated specially, except for use as a political weapon against Israel. Indeed, it is arguable that the ability to transfer refugee status to offspring is a cause of Palestinian suffering, encouraging them to continue to live off the largesse of the international community, rather than doing as other refugee groups have done and get on with their lives. (It doesn't help that surrounding countries are more than happy to let the refugees continue to wallow in their misery).

But there is at least one decent reason for Israel to stay the course. Accepting the right of return would also be an implicit acceptance of responsibility for the plight of the refugees, something Israel has rightfully refused to do. The Arab states launched a war of annihilation against the nascent Jewish state in 1948, in flagrant disregard for the will of the international community and the declarations of the United Nations. Whether by war or by design (I will not address this here, perhaps another time), 1.4 million people were displaced in the ensuing conflict, half of them Palestinian Arabs, the other half Jewish Arabs who had resided in surrounding Arab states for generations. It is more than ironic - it is downright cynical - for the Arabs to now paint themselves as the upholders of international law by insisting on implementation of the right of return.

Perhaps it is foolish to place principle above pragmatism in this instance. Gordon's suggestion could have very real and useful benefits. My objection is purely principled. Still, it would be wrong for Israel to accept responsibility for the plight of the refugees when it plainly belongs elsewhere.

Redeemed

2005-06-15T10:02:00.000-04:00

Bloc Party rocked Webster Hall last night. It was so steamy inside I was almost grateful they played for barely an hour. Almost.

Related: "Bloc Party Thanks Henry Hudson and Robert Moses" [Gawker]

Woman in Black

2005-06-10T10:35:00.000-04:00

Walking on Fifth Avenue before last night's Keren Ann show at Southpaw, we passed a tall, slender woman on the street, straight black hair falling around her shoulders, pale white skin, blank expression on her face. I thought, "Isn't it funny when you go to shows and people are dressed up like the performer?" Two hours later, the curtain draws, and there on the stage was that tall, slender woman with the straight black hair. She wasn't dressed like Keren Ann, she was Keren Ann. And she was absolutely mesmerizing.

The Case Against Coldplay

2005-06-07T12:53:00.000-04:00

No doubt all my regular readers are in line at the Virgin Megastore today elbowing their way towards a copy of Coldplay's newest CD, released today in the US and the UK. But I could barely contain myself when I saw Jon Pareles' attempt in the Times this weekend to knock the British rockers down a few pegs. (And still can't, seeing that as of this afternoon, the article was #12 on the most-emailed list).

See, despite the pop-perfect melodies, the gorgeous production, the positively majesterial soaring guitar leads, and Chris Martin's doubtless sincerity, something about this band has always rubbed me wrong (Mind you, not so wrong that I haven't bought both their first two albums. But I fully intend to undertake some digital thievery with this one).

Still, I've never been quite up to articulating my distaste. That's why I dove eagerly into the Times, hoping a seasoned music critic would put the words to my music. Unfortuantely, Pareles failed to make the case against Coldplay. He spends so much of the article acknowledging Coldplay's virtues that by the time he gets around to the criticism, there's practically nothing left to say. His most potent criticism - Coldplay is "faultless to a fault - isn't the kind of thing that's going to get the creative forces behind the band in a twist.

Sentencing Saddam

2005-06-05T23:09:00.000-04:00

The Iraqi Tribunal established to execute (er, administer justice to) Saddam Hussein announced that it will bring him to trial as early as two months from now in connection with the murder of nearly 160 people in 1982 . According to the Times report, this departs from the wishes of the Americans, who had wanted time to amass a substantial body of evidence detailing Saddam's crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. An Iraqi government spokesman assured that these charges alone were more than sufficient to warrant the death penalty.

As a punitive matter, this is a no-brainer. Saddam can only be executed once, so whether he's killed for the murder of 100 people or 100,000 is really immaterial. What the Americans wanted is the trial of the millenium, in which the disgraced former leader endures the greatest show trial of all time. It would drag on for years, revealing the extent and depravity of Saddam's crimes, distracting attention from the mess Iraq has become, and implicitly casting the American invasion in a far more benign light. The Iraqi government seems to want no part of that – just kill the bastard and be done with it.

Everybody's an Expert!

2005-06-02T23:22:00.000-04:00

All of a sudden, everybody's an expert on Europe. The papers have been filled this week with commentary purporting to explain the rejection by the French and the Dutch of the European Constitution. David Brooks, who I quite admire, has seized the moment to try and discredit American liberalism. The European welfare state has bred a lazy, reactionary populace, fearful of change and hanging on for dear life to a lifestyle that is slipping away. Brooks concludes with an ominous warning not to try such shenanigans over here.

But I wonder if he doesn't have the chain of causation backwards. Everyone concedes that the citizenry of the third world is willing to work harder and longer than Europeans. But is the hallowed European 'way of life' a product of the welfare state, or did Europe create the welfare state as the reflection of its values? I suspect it's the latter. For a long time Europe didn't have to work hard. Imperial conquest and exploitation fed an endless quantity of cheap goods and raw materials into the metropole while large oceans and impermeable borders kept the barbarians at the gate. Even with the decline of the empires, Europe was so far ahead in its productive capacities it could afford to ply its wares abroad and coddle its workers at home.

America has a very different history. The spirit of individuality and entrepeneurship run deep here. Cheezy as it sounds, it is the so-called American Dream that attracts the immigrants and inspires the workers to put their shoulders to the wheel, not the particular policies of the government. To think that borrowing some European-style reforms, like universal healthcare for one, would turn Americans into lazy Europeans is to harbor a seriously impoverished understanding of what America is.

Globalizing the Working Class

2005-06-02T00:02:00.000-04:00

David Bell has an interesting take on France's (and now the Netherlands') recent rejection of the European Constitution in The New Republic. He notes the supposedly under-reported exit poll indicating 80% opposition among the working class to adopting the charter, a figure he attributes to anxiety over the influx of cheap labor from Eastern Europe and resentment towards the pompous elites that run the country. In this view, the vote represents a growing antagonism between the upper classes, who largely benefit from European integration, and the poor, who basically lose out.

The discrepancy mirrors the election season concern over outsourcing in the United States. In a globalized economy, capital will ignore national borders and move where it can be most efficiently used. In manufacturing and other low-skilled jobs, it will move towards the third world, where labor costs are low and unions are flimsy. In terms of services, particularly highly skilled 'knowledge professions', it will move towards the great metropoli of the West, where the brains and know-how are most highly concentrated.

In economic terms, this isn't a bad thing. If widgets can be most cheaply produced in China, that is where they ought to be produced, even if it leaves a couple hundred people unemployed in rural Pennsylvania. Politically, however, that move is combustible and French workers are telling their leaders they aren't going to stand for it.

Now that national borders no longer represent the most important boundaries of economic activity, a realignment of classes along transnational lines is inevitable, and perhaps also to be welcomed. Certainly Marx would be happy. The working classes in countries like France are going to find themselves with much in common with the workers of the East, a prospect they are unlikely to welcome, accustomed as they are to their generous welfare benefits and state services. Meanwhile, amongst the elites, the opposite will occur. Those with the necessary skills are going to command salaries and benefits comparable to their counterparts in the West. Which is why the class polarization in France is but a microcosm of the rift that runs between the global elite and the masses. Except that third world workers, while remaining workers, can still effect a slight rise in their welfare by taking advantage of lower barriers between EU countries and flocking West. The big losers are the Western working class, who are none too happy about becoming global proletarians.

May the Farm Be With You

2005-05-26T15:39:00.000-04:00

Like the Bible before it, the latest Star Wars flick is open to numerous interpretations. Virtually any belief can be magically grafted onto the struggle between the rebels and the Dark Side and no one seems to have any compunctions about using the film to promote their particular issue.

This ad by MoveOn cause a bit of a stir a few days ago. And now the Organic Trade Association of all places has produced Store Wars, which pits a small group of organic rebels, led by O-Be-One Cannoli, Ham Solo and Princess Lettuce against the evil designs of Darth Tater, who seeks to dominate the whole grocery universe. Warning: It's a bit cheesy (heh!), but I laughed up a whole piece of organic tempeh.

Where's the feminist outrage?

2005-05-24T12:58:00.000-04:00

John Tierney must be incredibly bold or incredibly stupid. The former lover of Maureen Dowd writes that women may be lagging in pay and career advancement because they are simply less competitive than men, To make matters worse, he attributes the discrepancy not to socialization, but to "innate" differences, "a byproduct of evolution and testosterone".

Recall that it was that word - innate - that got Larry Summers in such trouble. But Tierney's claim seems far worse than Summers' alleged crime. Women are where they are not because they might be a little less adept at certain subjects (and by implication, more adept at others), but because overall they're innately less driven tto success.

Unlike Summers, Tierney is not suggesting this as one possibility among many, but claiming that this one factor accounts for the difference. Unlike Summers, he is not making a conjecture, but citing actual empirical research (something those firebrands in Cambridge seem unfamiliar with). Will Tierney inspire the wrath of outraged feminists?

Stay tuned ....

It's a twisted world out there

2005-05-23T01:36:00.000-04:00

This afternoon I was reminded that there are some issues that simply refuse to yield to calm, reasoned discussion. And this evening, I was reminded that our culture still cannot manage to cultivate the talents of our most promising youth without fucking them up.

Afternoon

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrived in New York today to seek the support of the American Jewish community for his planned unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, slated to take place late this summer. In a sense, the PM already has that support. Polls published last month point to 2/3 of American Jews supporting disengagement. But a public display is important to Sharon, both for its strengthening of US support for the move and as encouragement to the citizens back home who have been growing more reticent in recent days.

The leaders of American Jewry rolled out the red carpet in Midtown, while outside the usual roster of protesters were in heat. They called Sharon a traitor, said he had betrayed his people, that he wouldn't listen to reason. One poor confused teenager told me Sharon was as bad as Hitler. When I reminded him that Hitler had gassed 6 million people he was unfazed.

To be fair, the rhetoric wasn't as heated as it could have been. And to be doubly fair, I didn't hear the speeches on the sidewalk. But the anger was clear. And the fight will only intensify.

Evening

Conor Oberst has a singular talent: He's a wonderful lyricist. Someone should introduce him to Elton John.

In every other way his music is less than transcendent. But his personality can be so dearly loathsome that it nearly overshadows everything else. In a barely hour-long set at Webster Hall, Oberst performed a wild electronic melange, while telling fans that might have expected some of his softer hits to go home if they wanted to hear "that folk shit". He pranced around the stage like a spoiled teenager, threw his water at the crowd (as if we might feel honored to bathe in his exalted backwash), and demonstrated that he still thinks we're so enamored of his gifts that we want to hear every guitar noise and insipid thought that comes into his head. Oberst has a swollen ego, an overindulged libido, and a fist full of dollars – a toxic mix in the hands of a 24 year-old if ever there was one.

Evacuation Nation

2005-05-20T10:26:00.000-04:00

With American Jewry being kept up nights with cold sweats, fretting over potential Jew v. Jew violence when Israel dismantles the Gaza settlements this summer, it's refreshing to see this op-ed piece in today's Times. It's a sad tale that it even needs to be said:

To those soldiers who say they will refuse orders to evacuate the settlements, I say: think again. Remember that soldiers who believed the settlements were wrong reported for duty year after year to protect them and to enforce the occupation. We proved we were loyal Israelis and responsible soldiers. Now it's your turn.

And just so you don't think I'm being overly serious this Friday morning, here's a link to some politically incorrect humor. (Thanks LGF):

Tangled up in News(week)

2005-05-19T19:31:00.000-04:00

The many strands of the Newsweek story, whose 15 minutes are thankfully coming to an end, were the subject of a lot of opionon ink the past few days. Let's review:

David Brooks, as usual, had a thoughtful piece in the Times in which he excoriated (does anyone know how that word is actually pronounced?) Dennis Prager for saying Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths in Afghanistan. As you already know from my last post on the subject, that claim is beyond stupid. Brooks goes on to skewer the Administration for attacking Newsweek while treading ever so lightly on the freaks who went on a murderous rampage. Nice stuff.

In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum gave the lie to the Administration's scripted shock at the Newsweek story. This particular Koran story might be false, or at the very least unsubstantiated, but the list of nasty American behavior at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is lengthy and substantial, and includes the use of nudity, dogs, and fake meunstral blood. Still, I have issues with her piece. The problem with these tactics is not that they're illegal or immoral. Smearing fake meunstral blood on a man's face, or otherwise toying with a prisoner psychologically (while causing no physical pain) seems like an acceptable price to pay for information that may prevent acts of mass terrorism. The problem with these tactics is that they're entirely ineffective. As Michael Koubi, a veteran Israeli interrogator, had made abundantly clear to several journalists in the past few years, in interrogations, you catch more flies with honey. (I'm still searching for the links)

And then there's Martin Peretz writing in the normally unassailable New Republic. The shocking thing about Peretz's stupidity is how unusual it is. TNR is one of the finest journals in the country, and while they may occassionally get it wrong, they're always smart. This one, however, is just dumb. First, Peretz regurgitates the same stupid Prager logic: Newsweek's error caused a lot of suffering and wreaked a diplomatic disaster. Sorry, Marty, the idiot American troops did that. Then he goes off on a rant about the legitimacy of anonymous sources. Sure, sources often have their own agendas, which should serve as a caution to overeager journalists, smelling a scoop, not to get reeled in. But anonymity serves an important purpose in protecting whistleblowers, and Newsweek's government source, whatever else he or she was doing, was certainly blowing the whistle.

Is it just me?

2005-05-17T01:32:00.000-04:00

Cause it often is. But in this case, I think I might be on to something.

The case in question is this whole to do over the Newsweek story that carried a nugget about American descration of the Koran at Guantanamo. The story is said to be responsible for setting off riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan in which 17 people were killed. Under mounting pressure Newsweek retracted the story, claiming that they only had a single source for the story and that source was backing away from his claims.

My gripes are twofold:

1) While the source might be flaky, it doesn't follow that the story is wrong. In fact, the account in the Times cites evidence of Koran abuse from several other places. The magazine's retraction is on a technicality - they can't stand by their story because it can't be verified, which isn't surprising given that the source was leaking a government secret which subsequently became a political hot potato, so no one is likely to come forward now and corroborate it. Still, it's not because the story was wrong.

2) It has become commonplace to emphasize the severity of Newsweek's supposed error by saying that people died because of this story. That's bullshit. People died because their buddies got a little too excited railing against the Great Satan. If American forces actually desecreated the Koran, and there's ample reason to think they did, then they are more responsible than the magazine that reported it, but still less responsible than the morons who can't seem to rally against America without killing passerby. Newsweek is at least three orders removed from culpability.

Dithering during genocide

2005-05-16T23:52:00.000-04:00

EINY had this to say about the genocide in Darfur: Why does no one care about Darfur?

The real question, methinks, is not why don't we care, but why doesn't the news media care? It's by now a truism that we care about what we're told to care about. If Darfur were daily on the front page of the Times, it would so disrupt our morning coffee and quick jaunt over to the sports page we would be up in arms. But it's not, and the consequence is public apathy. Even if we weren't so indifferent, I wonder, what would we do about it? I too was quite moved by Hotel Rwanda, but I was bothered by the film's implication that the world just stood idle and let it happen. What was the world supposed to do? During the Holocaust, Roosevelt could have bombed the tracks to Aushwitz and that would be that. But Darfur, like Rwanda and Bosnia, doesn't lend itself to such neat solutions. We're talking here about a messy third-world tribal conflict which, as we are learning daily in Iraq, is not something we're particularly well suited to pacify. As someone similarly reared on the vow of Never Again, I can't help wondering if that promise is really one we're capable of keeping.

Swimming with Sturgeon

2005-05-12T23:03:00.000-04:00

I had an unsually full day today, with three roundtrips between Manhattan and Brooklyn. I started off with a morning lecture at J's alma mater Ramaz for Israeli's Indepdendence Day and concluded with Ezra Goldstein's fantastic play Swimming with Sturgeon, which still has a few more performances at the Abingdon Theatre. I realize I probably have no sway over any of you, but if you're even slightly inclined to shell out 20 bucks for an off-Broadway production in the next four days, go see this play. Trust me.

There's a new blog in town

2005-05-10T13:34:00.000-04:00

Check out La Differance, a new blog by Janis. with help from Zack and Rav.

If the past is any guide, this should be a rather soft-spoken affair, with gently expressed opinions, scrupulous respect for other viewpoints, and an almost religious commitment to finding common ground. Enjoy.

Annals of Marketing

2005-05-10T13:16:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to see the science fiction film, The Girl From Monday, at the Pioneer Theater on Avenue A. The basics are these: a revolution in the near future has brought a multi-media monopoly to power; human beings are bar-coded on their wrists and are prized only for their value as consumers; people have sex with each other only to increase their credit rating and their buying power; students are fed a daily dose of narcotics to keep them docile and stupid. You get the idea.

It was a pretty terrible film – interesting premise, poor execution. In one scene, the advertising strategists that were the film's villains, convincing people of material needs they didn't even know they had, were trying to figure out how to get people to purchase more heart surgeries. The problem, they concluded, was that heart surgery is associated with old age, with infirmity, and lowers a consumer's value. Instead, they needed to portray heart surgery as young and hip. Thirty-somethings needed to have heart surgery because they wanted it, not because they needed it. Heart surgery had to become cool.

So you can imagine my dystopian shock to awake to this story in the Times about the drug company Avanir's attempts to market a new disease, complete with a sufficiently scientific-sounding name (the pseudobulbar affect) and an "ill-defined group of symptoms". The pseudobulbar affect is a condition that afflicts people with severe neurological diseases, causing them to laugh or cry uncontrollably, often 40-50 times a day. Avanir has been sponsoring speeches and symposia, a quarterly newsletter, a website (www. pseudobulbaraffect.com), and, of course, taking ads in medical journals to promote, not the drug (which has yet to get FDA approval), but the disease.

Critics allege the company has produced a drug in search of a syndrome, while others claim the pseudobulbar affect is very real and more than a little socially disquieting. Typical of such he-said-she-said reporting, there's no real way to judge who is right. But given last night's entertainment, I'm thinking Avanir is out to make the pseudobulbar affect the new black.

Bug Me Much

2005-05-06T12:06:00.000-04:00

I was just as excited as anyone to discover recently the site bugmenot.com, which promised to end to frustrations of trying to read an article somehwere only to learn i first had to endure a cumbersome registration process. It worked well for a time, but as with all good things, some clever shmuck brought it to an end. After trying to read this article on the Financial Times site. It's about Iran's upcoming elections, and had I gotten access, I would be writing something really illuminating right now instead of ranting. FT wanted me to login, and so I headed to bugmenot and got a username and password. That failed. Then another. Failed again. Six times. Six failures.

Let me tell you, it bugged me.

A lot.

Syndication

2005-05-06T11:50:00.000-04:00

Star Trek was never a hit until it entered syndication. Same with blogs, or so I'm told. So let this be the first step towards annual conventions in Vegas of died-in-the-wool Anguswitonians. The RSS feed is available here, and if you lose it, it's on the right side of the page, below the Blogger logo.

For those of you not familiar with syndication you can read a very brief intro here.

And I use Netnewswire for Mac as a reader, available as a free download. I'm not totally sold on it though, so if anyone knows some good alternatives, do share.

Bring it on

2005-05-05T14:22:00.000-04:00

Just when you thought Texas had exhausted its capacity to surprise the nation, here comes a new bill to regulate cheerleading of all things. According to the Times, the bill, just approved by the House of Representatives, "would allow state education officials to prohibit 'overtly sexually suggestive' cheering and drill team routines."

I'm confused. Did education officials not have this capacity before the state granted it to them? I'm hard-pressed to believe that had a Texas high school principal felt that cheerleading routines were too sexual, s/he couldn't marshall the moral outrage necessary to have drill leaders tone things down.

Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum (an eagle forum? what in the hell?), explains it this way: "We feel this is a bill that empowers parents, that provides moms and dads with some additional support."

Again, confusion reigns: Do parents need empowering here? Are they not fully within their purview to control their daughters' participation in cheerleading? Could they not summon the offended masses to de-sexualize cheerleading without state interference?

It strikes me as quite un-Republican to have the state step in to govern something which is, lawfully and morally, the right of schools and parents to determine. Which is why suspect that this is isn't about granting state officials power they previously lacked, but about giving them permission to do something that conservative groups, in the face of popular fascination with racy cheerleaders (this is the home of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, after all), want controlled. Moral crusaders will now see themselves as enjoying a popular mandate to eliminate something that, let's face it, if most Texans genuinely disapproved of, the public would have long ago taken action on its own to curb. And perhaps more importantly, those that couldn't care less will feel compelled to put the brakes on, lest they be branded out-of-synch with Texas's moral values.

Department of Idiocy

2005-05-04T14:38:00.000-04:00

An article by Diana West on the website Townhall.com drew my attention to Conflicts Forum, a group dedicated, harmlessly enough, to bridging the gaps between Islam and the West. It is the brainchild of former British and EU diplomat Alastair Crooke and, as self-styled independent non-profits are wont to do, aspires to challenge prevailing orthodoxies that percieve Islam as hostile to the West.

Now, being a resident of this so-called 'West', I'm not familiar with such an orthodoxy. If anything, the liberal elite would have us believe that Islamists are just misunderstood, or inflamed by arrogant American imperialism, and that if we would just be more gentle and solicitous in the excercise of power we could all get along. But no, we insist on toppling legitimate Muslim governments, parading our bare-chested women to frustrated young men who prefer the purity of 72 black-eyed virgins to the depravity of silicone-inflated pornstars. But perhaps things are different in Britain.

Regardless, their website includes these gems meant to turn our myopic view of the Other on its head:

Conflicts Forum seeks also to stimulate a new and rigorous understanding of armed political action, its causes and its varied nature, and to distinguish between this and what has been labelled as “terrorism”.

A "rigorous" understanding of "armed political action" that leads to the conclusion that it is something other than terrorism? And what would a rigorous understanding of terrorism entail?

I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised at what these sophisticated Eurocrats are coming up with considering the Reuters report from two weeks back describing how EU ministers, meeting in Luxembourg, were considering the "previously taboo idea ofdialogue with Islamic opposition groups in the Middle East." Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, asked this prescient question in a paper he co-authored:
"Has the time come for the EU to become more engaged withIslamic "faith-based" civil society in these countries?"

These are true masters of the euphemism. Terrorism is something other than the sanitized "armed political action", while Islamist murderers of women are children are "faith-based civil society", except there's nothing civil about them.

These people will never learn.

Hey good lookin', Part 2

2005-05-03T08:50:00.000-04:00

Well, it's official: The editors of the Times are not regular readers of yours truly. If they were, they would have known that this story about how unattractive children get short shrift from their parents was reported here weeks ago.

As it is, they reported Dr. Andrew Harell's findings despite the glaring hole in his reasoning. Fortunately, they bothered to include a quote from a Yale professor who noticed the gap as well.

Dr. Robert Sternberg, professor of psychology and education at Yale, said he saw problems in Dr. Harrell's method and conclusions, for example, not considering socioeconomic status.

"Wealthier parents can feed, clothe and take care of their children better due to greater resources," Dr. Sternberg said, possibly making them more attractive. "The link to evolutionary theory is speculative."

Duh! And remember. You heard it here first.

The Pentagon Pathos

2005-04-29T10:32:00.000-04:00

It genuinely evokes my pity to observe the tortured twists and leaps of logic necessary for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, to portray our adventure in Iraq as a rousing success. CNN reports on the General's recent news conference:

First he said:

"In terms of the number of incidents, it's right about where it was a year ago ... And weeks will differ, and months will differ a little bit. But if you look at the scope of this, over time since May of 2003, that's the conclusion you draw."

Then he said:

"Almost any indicator you look at, the trends are up. So we're definitely winning ... However, there will be a lot of challenges ahead. Like any insurgency, we become impatient. And in the end, the Iraqis must do this for themselves."

How exactly does one declare the allies to be 'winning' when the insurgency is precisely where it was a year ago? A gold star for anyone who can explain that one.

Matisyahu Speaks

2005-04-27T18:47:00.000-04:00

Chasidic reggae superstar Matisyahu (are there chasidic reggae B-listers?) was among the celebrity guests at our Arizona Passover. Ok, so he was the only one. But after his Tuesday night show, he invited Anguswit back to his room for an exclusive tete-a-tete. Among the topics discussed were the relative merits of chicken v. brisket, Matisyahu's ideas concerning what I'm going to call 'dichotomism', and the truth of reggae.

Below is a representative snippet of the conversation:

Anguswit: How did you like the food?
Matisyahu: Chabad minhag [custom] is we don't eat vegetables with peels and we don't eat spices. Whatever we ate was delicious.
A: Brisket or chicken?
M: The brisket was delicious.
A: Any other favorites?
M: The blintzes and the baked potato with sour cream and scallions.
A: But that's so conventional.
M: That's what we like. We're conventional people. We loved the cook.
A: You mean, as a person?
M: Yeah.
A: So are you going to come back next year?
M: Next year we'll be in Yerushalayim [Jerusalem] with Mashiach [the Messiah].
A: Really?
M: For sure.

Road Trip

2005-04-26T20:34:00.000-04:00

In the summer of 1962, my newly married parents set out on an epic cross-country road trip, from New Hampshire to Arizona, where my father was to report for a two-year stint at Fort Huachuca, Arizona (pronounced wa-CHOO-kuh).

Today, with two youngest boys in tow, we re-enacted the final 75 miles of that journey from Tucson.

Check out my dad preparing the defend the nation.

Stuffed

2005-04-26T02:29:00.000-04:00

My Passover experience thus far can be summed up in one word: food. The amount of food I've ingested in the last three days has been truly monumental, culminating in tonight's BBQ, where I imbibed two enormous steaks. Right now my body is struggling to cope with a quantity of red meat it has never before been subjected to. It's all making be borderline delirious and only vaguely coherent. Tonight I rest, tomorrow I blog.

Flight Club

2005-04-22T10:05:00.000-04:00

You wake up at O'Hare. You wake up at SeaTac. Pacific, Mountain, Central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

You wake up at Air Harbor International.

If you wake up at a different time and in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?

Uh, not likely. But it does make for some cool blogging. Ok, cool for me anyway. This picture is of me in flight suit at O'hare, en route to Tucson. More to come.

Oh, and FYI, if you're ever faced with a t-mbile wireless network that wants your username and password, use tmbile1 for both. Thank god for stupid people.

David Brooks

2005-04-21T11:52:00.000-04:00

David Brooks has just become the most important columnist at the Times, and perhaps in the country. His column today made me profoundly uncomfortable, which I suppose is what a good column should. It launches him far beyond the shallowness of Friedman, and the pop-culture pithiness of Dowd, and the boredom of Herbert. I remain a Krugman fan. His writing is important, but conventional.

Brooks is anything but. Challenging a sacred liberal cow like Roe v. Wade takes incredible courage, particularly on the op-ed page of the Times. And his reasoning is cogent, hence my discomfort. He is right that Congress, as a proxy for the public, is the appropriate venue to address the sensitive social issues that have should not fall to unelected judges – abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia. But how to reconcile that with the fact that it is the courts – not Congress – that have become the principal engine for positive social progress since at least the Civil Rights Act in 64? I would like to believe that if politicians weren't so singularly focused in getting re-elected, they would be able to formulate good legislation that converges on the great American center. The fact is, they haven't, which is why we had Roe in the first place.

I now proclaim the floor open.

No wonder friggin' Elijah won't sit down at the table

2005-04-20T12:34:00.000-04:00

It's going to be a very metal Passover. According to the NY Post, on the second night of the holiday of freedom, VH1 will air a Passover seder featuring hard rockers Dee Snider and JJ French of Twisted Sister, along with their fellow tribesmen Leslie West of Mountain (who?) and Scott Ian of Anthrax. If you can pull yourself away from the matzah and herbs, this one's not to be missed.

Paying for Peace

2005-04-20T12:14:00.000-04:00

An article in the Baltimore Sun this week documents the latest efforts of Mahmoud Abbas to co-opt Palestinian terrorists. The story concerns Munir Aqra, a Palestinian terrorist who was given a job in the security services in exchange for signing "a one-page pledge to put down his weapons and not engage in attacks against Israel."

Putting aside the question of whether Abbas should be aggressively dismantling terrorist organizations – placing their leaders in prison, confiscating their weapons, and rooting them out of their offices and lairs – does anyone genuinely trust a terrorist who simply signs a piece of paper? We well know the value of paper agreements in the Middle East. This is sorta like giving rapists a job with the NYPD in exchange for promising never to lay hands on a woman again. Except it's actually a lot worse. Terrorists are motivated by ideology, not financial gain or whatever sordid fantasies animate rapists. If terrorists rationalize that murdering innocent civilians is legitimate means of fighting Israeli occupation, wouldn't it stand to reason that violating a promise to the PA would be an acceptable price to pay in exchange for the weapons and implicit trust bestowed on security personnel?

Hey good lookin'

2005-04-19T09:37:00.000-04:00

I probably should have learned my lesson from my last experience weighing in on a science issue, which prompted more comments than my site has readers. But I couldn't resist this one. The link has been sitting on my desktop for a few days, staring me down, almost daring me to make some comment that will be construed as vaguely racist, classist, or sexist. So here goes.

A Canadian researcher recently reported the results of a study that purports to show that parents are more likely to give better care and pay closer attention to good-looking children compared to unattractive ones. In observing parental behavior in a supermarket, it was found that more attractive children were more likely to be buckled in and less likely to be allowed to wander off more than a few feet. Researchers attribute this to a Darwinian impulse to be more protective of their best genetic material.

Nowhere in the press release, however, does it stipulate whether the observed behaviors occurred by a single parent discriminating among multiple children, or between parents treating their children better or worse depending on their looks. If it is the latter (as I think we can assume given that the former wasn't stated), a different explanation emerges. Parents of better looking children are probably better looking themselves, which all too often translates into better education, better pay, and better standards of living. Isn't it more likely that it is those distinctions that account for the observed behavior? After all, people who have more tend to be more convervative (as in, to 'conserve') and protective than those who have less. Isn't that why good youthful liberals grow up to be stodgy Republicans?

I have emailed the researcher asking for clarification.

UPDATE (4/20/2005): Dr. Andrew Harrell confirmed my hunch. He responded to my email thus: "This particular study involved one adult with one child. We don't know about the actual composition of the families, whether the children had siblings, etc." Had the study shown that a given parent lavished more attention on their attractive offspring, his observations would have more validity. As it is, I think my critique stands.

Withdrawal Symptoms

2005-04-18T09:48:00.000-04:00

My recent exchange with Ben'sbigbro over the prospect of Bashar Assad's regime collapsing prompted a bit of rethinking. There is no question that Syrian troops are on the move, as made clear from this piece in the Daily Star, and that this is essentially a good thing. Equally, Syria has major stakes in Lebanon, both economically and strategically, as Olivier Guitta points out in the Weekly Standard. This would explain the lingering Syrian intelligence presence, as reported here and elsewhere.

So what's an Assad to do? Exactly what every country does when unambiguous directives from Washington (and the unusually vocal and united Europeans) clash with clear domestic imperatives (read: regime survival) – be ambiguous.

The example to follow here is Iran. Iran is faced with an administration that has branded it an evil supporter of terrorism, has demanded it abandon its nuclear weapons program (which Iran denies it has anyway), and has gradually ratcheted up the pressure. For Iran, outright defiance would be madness. But so would compliance. Iran's defense posture (essentially the development of long-range missiles combined with non-conventional warheads) is the product of deep currents in Iranian history (the lingering psychic effects of Iraq's missile attacks on Iranian cities in the 1980's, the lessons of Gulf Wars I & II, the insurmountable obsolescence of Iran's conventional military power) and as such enjoys widespread support among both reformists and conservatives. Iran's solution is ambiguity – pay lip service to Washington's demands, take some modest actions to mimic being cooperative, and maintain weapons programs in secret until the country has got the bomb. Once Iran has managed to go nuclear, it enters the safe zone currently occupied by North Korea.

Assad seems to be playing a similar game. Give the Americans enough to keep their rhetoric at a manageable simmer, while quietly laying the groundwork for continued Syrian influence in Lebanon. That's why astute observers are saying this is not the time to give Syria some breathing room to make changes, but to push hard now.

You heard it here second

2005-04-15T11:11:00.000-04:00

Thanks to EINY who scooped this bit that is sure to have blanketed the web by this afternoon. Get it while it's hot.

Seda Club

Those Understated Brits

2005-04-15T09:20:00.000-04:00

A story in the London Times today about an Algerian Islamist who could have been deported from Britain months ago, before he had a chance to murder a London police officer, contains this remarkable gem:

He was sentenced to 17 years’ jail yesterday for conspiracy to commit a public nuisance “by the use of poisons or explosives to cause disruption, fear or injury”.

Oh, to live in a country where terrorist attempts to poison the populace are merely a 'nuisance'. Sounds like something that might momentarily interfere with the Queen's afternoon tea.

Assad declared 'irrelevant'

2005-04-14T09:12:00.000-04:00

The Israeli paper Ma'ariv is reporting that, according to Ariel Sharon's conversations with U.S. officials this week, Bush and Co. do not expect Syrian leader Bashar Assad to survive the looming withdrawal from Lebanon and that provisions need to be made for 'the day after'. The link is in Hebrew, but includes these nuggets – that the source of this thinking is our intrepid CIA, that Bush has 'erased' Assad from his calculations, that in his view he 'doesn't exist'. The background for this is, not surprisingly, the succesful marginalization, and ultimate elimination, of Arafat. Never mind that Arafat succumbed to biology, not America's symbolic erasure.

I suppose we should be relieved that the U.S. has learned from its Iraq experience that thinking about the morning after is kinda important. But another Iraq lesson - that regimes like Syria's do not go quietly into that good night - has yet to percolate through Bush's muddled thinking (nor those of his still confused CIA underlings). Assad is being squeezed more than he or his father ever were. The Lebanese debacle has weakened their grip, and as Krauthammer recently argued, we should probably pushing them hard right now. But it's prety hard to imagine that one day we're going to awaken to images of Assad on a slow train to exile in Sudan, leaving behind a tidy little country ripe for democracy. If Assad goes down, he's going to go down swinging, and it won't be pretty. Then again, I'm not privy to those reams of intelligence info that have served us so well in the past, so what do I know?

SCORE!

2005-04-13T08:01:00.000-04:00

It sure as hell took long enough. Check out my much-anticipated piece in today's Newsday.

Uncovering a Hidden Heritage

Click on This

2005-04-12T19:38:00.000-04:00

This post is to let all 12 of you know about a new blog you should check out. The Prospector Gadget (I had a hand in the name, thank you) promises an insider's look at new gadgetry. The blog is surprisingly funny considering its subject, and once the blogger resolves his identity crisis (is he prospector gadget or shitgoalie?) he should get on just fine.

By the way, shitgoalie, anguswit is one word.

Snap, Crackle, Pop

2005-04-12T14:16:00.000-04:00

Here's a site that lets you vent your frustrations and relive happy childhood afternoons after the UPS man had paid a visit.

Virtual Bubblewrap

I found manic mode to be particularly enjoyable.

Spotted in Brooklyn

2005-04-08T15:52:00.000-04:00

This was inked on the wall of the 7th Avenue F stop in Park Slope.

I feel like I should be outraged or something, but I just don't understand it. Does anyone?

Britain's Thought Police

2005-04-07T10:33:00.000-04:00

Lest you think all the academic controversy over Israel is centered in upper Manhattan, the British Association of University Teachers is preparing to jump back into the fray in a move that is likely to cause, as the Brits would say, a 'row'. At their annual conference later this month, the Union will debate a resolution to boycott three Israeli universities, according to a Guardian report. But unlike previous failed attempts to exclude Israel from academia, this one has a twist, a clause that excludes "conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies". In other words, this isn't really a boycott of Israel per se, but of those Israelis who fail to pass an intellectual litmus test, or as the Soviet thought police might have said, those who don't have the 'correct opinions'.

Who let the Jews out?

2005-04-06T08:45:00.000-04:00

You know Passover is on the horizon when the boxes of matza start appearing in the supermarket and funny flash videos start filling your inbox. Our Funny Web Clip of the Week (shall we start a new feature?) comes courtesy of GlassShallot and includes some promotion for a soon-to-be-released book. But if you can overlook that, you might actually laugh.

http://www.passovergreeting.com/

Back to life ...

2005-04-05T09:23:00.000-04:00

.... or something like it. It's taken longer than expected to get back to routine after a week soaking up the rays in sunny California. And my timing couldn't have been more inopportune, considering the major linkage I got last week and the commensurate spike in traffic.

Oh well.

Google, in its continuing quest to be the online repository of all human knowledge, has unveiled a new satellite image feature on its maps page. The service, which lets you download and zoom in on any address (including the White House), was formerly available from Keyhole by subscription only. Way to go Google. When is the Oxford library going to be up and running?

I was also impressed by Thomas Cahill's op-ed in today's Times. With the world media fawning all over the death of the Pope, and the dead pontiff's body still warm, it may be too early for a cold shower to be appreciated. But it had to be said. The man who helped bring down communism in eastern europe, and achieved historic reconciliation between Christians and Jews, and even acknowledged many of the Church's historic crimes, has also presided over a near-catastrophic decline in Church attendance and the dwindling ranks of the priesthood, at least in the developed world. Some might consider that a good thing, but for Catholics it's a mixed legacy at best.

Though I walk through the valley

2005-03-29T01:37:00.000-05:00

Five more hours in the car and we arrived back in the Valley late this afternoon, in time to crawl through our last ten miles on a six-lane, SUV-clogged LA 'street'. I ended up breaking even at the blackjack tables, which I suppose I should be happy about, though I was utterly robbed on my last hand. Late this morning, feeling lucky, or bold, or stupid, I plunked down all my remaining chips for one last shot at blackjack glory. I was holding a 17, the dealer was showing a 6. I was sure I was in the clear until the bastard pulled out a fiver and I was left outside in the blazing Vegas sunshine feeling, like so many others, a little lighter.

I've been a bit removed from my daily dosage of compulsive newspaper and blogosphere reading, so I don't have anything witty and/or insightful to offer. LA does peculiar things to my capacity for higher thought. In a few days, after o.d.ing on the sunshine, and the surgery-perfect bodices, and cranberry crazes at jamba juice, i will be back in my new york closet, connected to the world outside through a high-speed data cable, offering my thoughts on the state of the world. In the meantime, I have the synthetic Vegas version to warm my cockles.

Viva Las Vegas

2005-03-27T22:05:00.000-05:00

I had been in LA less than 48 hours before Dan and Hank and I decamped for fabulous Las Vegas. We're staying at the Paris Hotel and the current gambling tally has me down $30. Not bad for a poor guy.

What a Day

2005-03-24T11:44:00.000-05:00

It seems I just may be on my way to blogger stardom. First Harry linked to me from his popular site (by the way Harry, anguswit is one word), and now EINY has given me a shout out as a blogger deserving "more attention". I don't know if he means medical attention, but I'll take what I can get.

Like EINY, I will be leaving town tomorrow for a week in sunny LA. Unlike EINY, I expect to be blogging regularly. Those of you enjoyed my tales from the roadtrip down to New Orleans, don't get too excited -- there will be far less debauchery in Tarzana.

Lest I leave you unoccupied during flight time, have a look at this recent op-ed from the Times' dowdiest columnist, which seems to vindicate my various posts regarding the Larry Summers debacle. Though Dr Katz informs me that the study may be flawed, I'm gonna go out on an intellectual limb here and say: fooey!

Also from the grey lady, news that excommunication, book burning, and all that stuff you thought had gone out of fashion after the Inquisition is alive and well in the ultra-orthodox enclave of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. The Times reports that a rabbi seeking to reconcile (yes, reconcile!) Torah and science has had his books banned. Clearly the rabbis aren't media savvy enough to understand the relationship between book banning and skyrocketing Amazon sales rankings, but these guys who wear black fur coats throughout Midde Eastern summers are known for updating their ideas pretty quickly in response to changed circumstances, so I don't expect this to repeat itself.

This is Crazy

2005-03-22T10:21:00.000-05:00

Thanks to LGF (via MEMRI) for bringing this amazing video of female Iranian police cadets.

I actually thought this was a Daily Show spoof when I first watched it, cause it's pretty darn funny.

Here's the link to the MEMRI TV page. The Iran video should be the first one in the list. This is must see TV people.

By the way, I'm feeling much better this morning.

sick and tired

2005-03-22T01:48:00.000-05:00

it's almost 2 in the morning. I've been holed up sick all day. i'm banking on this being a 24 hour cold and being back to my normal wit tomorrow. earlier i trekked out to crown heights in search of some shmaltzy kosher chicken soup to soothe my body. I ended up at Esther's Party steak house. Don't let the name fool you. Though everything else in crown heights was closed by 9:30, there was no party at esther's. the hot dogs were finished. there was no dr. brown's black cherry (shandeh!), and their chicken soup had recently seen the inside of a can. my hamburger was twice the diameter of the bun it was served on. but i'm home, back in bed, belly purring gently, looking forward to a less painful morning.

Blame it on the Satellite

2005-03-18T10:40:00.000-05:00

Israeli columnist Danny Rubinstein has an article today that repeats the tired old argument that more satellite dishes means more democracy in the Arab world. Reform is inevitable since authoritarian regimes can no longer can control the flow of information.

But perhaps democratic ones can. In an ironic twist, European regulators are banning Hizballah's TV station, Al Manar, from European satellites. The Europeans are taking their cue from none other than France, which has already banned Manar.

Let's be clear: Hizballah, for all its political activism and social welfare activites, remains a terrorist group that, with Iranian money and Syrian aquiescence, encourages Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism from its Beirut headquarters. One of Manar's technicians admitted as much in this Jeffrey Goldberg article from the New Yorker. (If you haven't read this piece, do yourself a favor. It's long, but hands down one of the best pieces of reporting I've seen in years).

I couldn't care less that the anti-Western and anti-Semitic invective on Manar will be denied to the Muslims of Europe, where rising fundamentalism poses the greatest threat to European security since the Cold War. But it's hard to escape the irony of Europe, which self-righteously cloaks itself in liberal progressive values, pursuing such an atavistic policy of media censorship. Soon Hosni Mubarak is gonna turn to Jacques Chirac and say, mon frere, who's the liberal now?

Bits and Pieces

2005-03-16T12:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a couple of items of interest today:

CNN reports that Harvard faculty have adopted a motion adopted expressing their "lack of confidence" in Summers' leaderhip. Despite the headline, it appears that the motion somehow differs from a 'no-confidence" measure, but I suppose you have to be a Harvard professor to understand the distinction. This is just further proof of the parallel universe that is Cambridge.

Also, an article in Wired reports that British engineers have developed a 'building in a bag'. Apparently you just add water and air and, voila, instant building! Maybe Mayor Bloomberg should consider this to rectify the NYC housing shortage.

And finally, the Department of Homeland Security, that intrepid federal agency that makes us all breathe a little easier, has released a report on 15 potential terrorist attacks, complete with anticipated casualty figures. The Report's authors implausibly claim they are not out to scare the public, but to target funds towards appropriate preventive measures and response plans. But that could have been achieved without making the report public, which it only became after it was "inadvertantly" posted on the Web. Now that should make us all sleep easier.

David Brooks

2005-03-12T10:06:00.000-05:00

Could someone please explain David Brooks' column in today's Times?

We all know we live in an era where people are obsessive about health and safety, if for no other reason than fear of lawsuits. But has the Times' token conservative actually made an argument in favor of excess? Is he trumpeting the virtues of 18,000 calorie feasts? Does he truly hope to bring back the "grand and pointless gesture" ?

Apparently so. He sings the praises of that "alternative and much stranger moral universe" the rest of us know as New Orleans. He blames everyone from the President to the mysterious "arbiters of virtue" who have determined, in Brooks' most astute observation, that smoking is more sinful than 6 of the 10 commandments.

All true enough. Brooks' diagnosis of the cultural condition is wholly unoriginal, even if he is entertaining in making it. But god help us if the cure is to live like they do in New Orleans.

Holy Exploding Landmines, Batman!

2005-03-10T12:32:00.000-05:00

Thank to Tim for bringing this anti-landmine video to my attention. Word around the blogosphere has it that the evil American networks won't air this cheap and disturbing bit of shock tactics, though I can't find any data suggesting it's in heavy rotation in France or, as stoplandmines.org wants to remind us, in any of the 170 or so countries that have accepted the anti-landmine treaty. Can anyone?

Warning to those with young children and the faint at heart: this is pretty disturbing shit.

If you're ready, watch it here.

Academic Freedom

2005-03-08T11:20:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, a who's who of major Jewish advocates and intellectuals gathered at Columbia University for a symposium on academic integrity. Amidst the platitudes and crowd-pleasing chants of the speakers, I witnessed the most shameful displays from the pro-Israel audience. A group of protesters, mouths taped shut in mock protest, were greeted with curses and other insults from several audience members. Outside, a New York Times photographer who attempted to photograph a scuffle between pro-Israeli attendees and protesters was verbally abused and fled the venue in fear. Several individuals screamed that this was so typical of the Times to focus on the protests and not on the message of the event itself.

Don't these morons understand that if you convene a conference on academic freedom, and then viciously try to silence and intimidate critics and protesters, that that then becomes the story?

Dude, Where's my Dutch?

2005-03-05T13:01:00.000-05:00

While many of us still think of the Netherlands as a model of European progressivity, the country of generous public welfare programs and limitless opportunities for pharmocological experimentation, that image may soon be a pleasant memory. Two recent stories in the Times, both concerned with the rise of radical Islam in Europe, should worry not only the Dutch but also those who want to see their societies draw closer to the Dutch model.

The first documents the Dutch version of white flight as natives flee rising crime rates and threats of public violence for more secure locales.

And the second reports on Dutch politicans forced into hiding out of fear of reprisals from violent Muslims.

The Dutch, it would seem, are in danger of losing their own country. It's a cruel postmodern joke that the country's very tolerance contains the seeds of its own unraveling.

Conspiracy?

2005-03-04T11:31:00.000-05:00

I post this link solely as a lesson to you all you kiddies about how baseless rumors get started.

Here's the blog link:

http://www.popdoh.com/2005/03/hunter-s-thompson-murdered.html

And the original story (requires registration):

"Alexander Pope in a prose convertible"

Springtime in the Middle East

2005-03-04T10:55:00.000-05:00

I'm an alarmist by nature, but still I can't help but be encouraged by the recent spate of positive developments in the Middle East. Little excited me about the recent Iraqi elections, save for the individual courage of voters who braved terrorist threats to get their fingers inked in purple. Iraqi elections are but the first step on a long and torturous road, but they are a step. Nor was I terribly impressed by Palestinian elections, where there was no real choice and the outcome was essentially predetermined. Elections and democracy are not synonymous, a point lost on most Americans whose most potent expression of political participation is the casting of a ballot.

But when taken together with the genuinely remarkable turn in Lebanon, these quasi-elections have an altogether different hue. Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator who ruled mercilessly before leaving the country in the hands of his son Bashar, was a sophisticated and ruthless politician who maintained power for decades while keeping his people in a state of perpetual misery. (Syria is one of only a handful of countries where you can't buy a Big Mac, political litmus test if ever there was one.) His son, however, shows no such talent. Bashar has, perhaps fatally, misread the shifting political winds augured by Afghanistan, Iraq, and pro-democracy sweep of U.S. politics. When his father encountered resistance to his hegemony in the early 1980's, he bulldozed it. Literally. The city of Hama, where the resistance was centered, was leveled. Today it is a parking lot.

No such options present themselves for young Bashar. He has grossly miscalculated in thinking he could conduct business as usual in a region where the number of outlaw states has been shrinking at a rate of about one every other year. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, who seems to have his ear far closer to the ground, announced this week that he would allow the first contested presidential election in the country's history. It may all be bluster, but at least he sees the writing on the wall. Bashar seems as feckless as ever, and it will be his downfall.

I am certainly no fan of our current idiot-in-chief, under whose watch we have seen a steady erosion of civil liberties, environmental protections, equitable sharing of the tax burden, public faith in government, and the goodwill of our allies. His foreign policy has been brash, aggressive, clumsy, and justified by naked untruths. But - and I would normally be the last to admit this - it aint all bad.

Riding that train, part 2

2005-03-02T00:18:00.000-05:00

I was on the A train heading to Brooklyn tonight when a group of about 10 Hasidic Jews crowded into the car. I glanced up briefly from the NY Times crossword which was engaging me and noticed that actually the car was brimming with religious Jews. This isn't normally a strange site in New York, but it was after 11 o'clock at night, an hour when most of the city's black-clad Orthodox Jews have long since returned to the safety of their Brooklyn enclaves. Transfering to the F at West 4th, there were even more of them. Something must be up, I figured.

That something was the 11th Siyum Hashas. For the uninitiated, Shas refers to the Babylonian Talmud, and a Siyum (literally 'completion' in Hebrew) is a celebration of sorts upon finishing a substantial chunk of Torah study. Since 1927, Jews around the world have studied the same page of Talmud each day in a 7-year cycle known as Daf Yomi (click here for a fuller explanation).

Anyhoo, every 7 years, the cycle is completed and everyone gets together for a big hoe-down at Madison Square Garden. The program is apparently simulcast around the world and hundreds of thousands participate. Which accounts for the large contingent swarming the subways at the normally ungodly hour of 11. Except tonight it was a very godly hour.

Its been a long time since I was a regular Talmud student. But the thought of that many Jews doing the same thing for such a long period of time is more than a little bit cool. If only such unity wasn't limited to the study of some ancient text, we might all be a little better off.

Update: March 2, 11:03 am

The Times had this story about the Siyyum today.

Update: March 2, 11:17 am

Thanks to Jewschool for drawing this little Talmudic marvel to my attention.

Oscar the Grouch

2005-03-01T12:14:00.000-05:00

I watched more of this year's Oscar festivities than in any year in recent memory. I chuckled uncomfortably through Chris Rock's monologue, with its tepid, curse-free attempts at irreverence (His best line of the night was introducing "comedy superstar Jeremy Irons"). The best song performances were all lackluster (where does Beyonce get off singing in French?!?!) and my general disgust with mainstream American culture was only exacerbated by the predictablity of it all. How could anyone possibly think Million Dollar Baby was superior to Sideways, the most original, sophisticated, unpredictable American film of the year?

If anyone knows who that luscious woman in Sydney Lumet's box was, please click on comments.

Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

2005-02-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

Sasha Frere-Jones, writing in the New Yorker a few weeks back, made an interesting remark concerning the oft-repeated platitude that songwriter Conor Oberst is the new Bob Dylan. If there is a new Dylan, wrote Frere-Jones, he won't be a songwriter.

I mulled that over for a while, wondering what he meant, and what the new Dylan might be. And I pondered a similar question reading this week's coverage of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's suicide, in particular this piece by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune, which asks in its first line: "Who's the Hunter Thompson for this college generation?"

I wonder if the new HST, if there is one, wouldn't be a journalist.

I first encountered Hunter Thompson as a college freshman when some upper classmen in my fraternity would joke about, and quote from, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I confess, after reading it I didn't really get why it was a classic and why its author was such an icon. It was shocking to read such frank confessions of drug use. And the style was certainly original. But I couldn't fathom what significance HST had beyond being the producer of some marginal drug culture literature.

Fortunately, my education didn't end there. I've since recognized gonzo journalism - the style of first-person reporting HST is widely credited with originating - is far deeper than it might appear. Beyond its veneer of careless abandon, lies a profound postmodern insight - that the act of observing something changes the thing itself.

HST diagnosed this paradox of contemporary journalism in the introduction to his groundbreaking book on the 1972 presidential campaign (thanks to HairofBlog, whose copy I still have):

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists ... When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in ... especially not for 'minor infractions' of rules that neither side takes seriously.

Hunter, as he often did, nailed it.

Before and after HST's heyday, journalists had the audacity to think politicians were being their normal lying selves in their presence. But HST pulled the tarp right off that one. Rather than hide behind the fiction that journalism is some cold, dispassionate craft, he embraced it as an antidote, hurling himself to the center of the action. I'd like to say nothing has been the same since, but we humans have short memories. Like September 11th - another event after which supposedly nothing was the same but which just a few years after we awake to find precious little that isn't - reading political coverage today seems like we're right back where we were, only now the politicians are in on the scam. Perhaps they've learned something from Hunter too. Their current skill in spinning journalists and controlling the news cycle is testament to how quickly they adapted.

All this runs headlong into another inescapable feature of the modern age - nothing happens until it's written about. This rule has a rather unfortunate corollary: whatever is written about, happened. And so the administration can pretend like all is rosy in Iraq, that social security is headed for an imminent crisis, that No Child Left Behind has been a rousing success - so long as the newspapers and pundits and talking heads say it is. And if you need to pay them off to say it, so be it.

Schmich quotes a journalism student who nominates Lewis Black, from the Daily Show, as the HST of his generation. Black is a weak candidate, but the student might be on the right track. Jon Stewart might be a better one. He speaks fearlessly, is irreverent as a rule, and wildly funny. And, as he loves to remind us, he's no journalist.

That's the sad fact of it - journalism, like music, is no longer a platform for exposing the untruths of government, of rallying the masses, or of inspiring much of anything. That job, it seems, has fallen to comedians.

Get your Jew on

2005-02-23T11:15:00.000-05:00

This is beyond funny. (With compliments to EINY)

Yiddish with Dick and Jane

Running on Empty

2005-02-22T09:21:00.000-05:00

An old friend of my family recently finished work modifying the diesel engine in his van so that it runs on pure canola oil. Check out the pictures. The advantages are fairly obvious - veggie oil is cheap, basically clean, plentiful and renewable. This friend, mind you, is no gearhead or techie and modified his car by himself from his own research. Imagine what the big car companies could do. With a solution to a growing global energy crisis this obvious, only an idiot could be blind to it.

The Green Light

2005-02-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

In a press conference yesterday, George W. essentially gave the Israelis permission to bomb the hell out Iran, advancing us further down the inexorable road to a showdown over Iran's nucular program . In response to a question, Bush had this to say:

Well, of course the -- well, first of all, Iran has made it clear they -- that they don't like Israel, to put it bluntly. And the Israelis are concerned about whether or not Iran develops a nuclear weapon, as are we, as should everybody.
But clearly, if I was the leader of Israel, and I listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs about -- that regarded my security of my country, I'd be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon, as well. And in that Israel is our ally, and in that we've made a very strong commitment to support Israel, we will support Israel if -- if there's a -- if their security is threatened.

The U.S. would like nothing more than for someone else to take care of a problem it has neither the military resources or political capital to address. Of course, the regional fallout (Tehran has vowed to respond harshly, and has the long-range missiles to do it) will be America's to clean up. And American forces will likely be at greater risk than Israel, the only country in the world with a viable missile shield.

A lynching in Cambridge

2005-02-18T09:55:00.000-05:00

The quantity of bullshit being shoveled in Cambridge right now is staggering. Harvard Prez Larry Summers caved to faculty pressure and released a transcript of his comments regarding women in the sciences and all it did was feed the lynch mob out for his head. According to the Times account, Summers theorized about a number of reasons women may be underrepresented in the sciences, among them perhaps innate aptitude, a controversial proposition to be sure, and one that Summers reportedly qualified repeatedly by saying he might be wrong.

The eminences that are the Harvard faculty are now out for blood. One of them was quoted as saying: "It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference." Why, I wonder, is that view any less "crazy" than Summers' thinking there might be? Why is that view acceptable and Summers' view renders him unfit for the Harvard presidency? And most of all, what the fuck is up these professors' asses that a challenge to the conventional wisdom gets them all in such a twist? If Summers is so horribly wrong, then prove him so and I'm sure the man will humbly apologize.

I wish Summers would fight these mobsters. Instead, he has bowed to political correctness by "apologizing", using the standard political playbook of apology, public displays of contrition, and assertions that his comments were taken out of context. He's better than that and he should have told these fuckers to go to hell.

Meet you halfway

2005-02-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon isn't particularly sincere about seeking a lasting accomodation with the Palestinians, but you'd think he would have made a bit more effort for the camera's sake. Mubarak and Abbas are practically falling over to shake the little troll's hand. Though who knows what monumental effort it takes to bend over a belly of such monstrous proportions.

Who to Believe?

2005-02-09T09:53:00.000-05:00

Mark your calendars everyone because it will be a LONG time before I weigh in on celebrity gossip again, but browsing a newstand at the Port Authority bus station yesterday, I came face to face with these two mag covers, and the cognitive dissonance was totally unbearable.

If all this talk of bringing democracy to Iraq gets you hot ....

2005-02-08T11:18:00.000-05:00

.... then check oout this site, from the people who brought you retartedsingles.com (for the mentally challenged and those who love them) and nazidate.com (for the fascist fetishists among us).

If you can't beat em', retire em'

2005-02-04T17:44:00.000-05:00

In one of her first moves as the new American Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice has proposed giving a $100 monthly allowance to terrorists who would agree to lay down their arms and 'retire' or find another profession.

Right. Cause that's all that's motivating these guys after all -- it's a living. I'm sure the leaders of Hamas would like nothing more than to retreat to a quiet life in the country, or maybe take some job retraining courses to become mechanics, courtesy of the American-supplied monthly stipend. I seriously hope this woman is kidding, cause this does not bode well for her tenure at State.

Let them eat paper

2005-02-03T10:11:00.000-05:00

I know this was in the Times, and so you've all seen it. But seriously -- is he fucking kidding? And why the Circuits section?

Everything you need to know about France

2005-02-03T10:07:00.000-05:00

Poking fun at the French has become something of a national pastime and shouldn't even merit a mention anymore.

But ridiculing their pomposity while also giving step-by-step instructions for knocking them off their Gallic perch - well, that's something else entirely. See how it's done in this great piece from the London Guardian.

One man's pleasure is another man's sport

2005-02-03T10:01:00.000-05:00

Those crazy Brits can't help but measure everything. Check out the new must-have for the geeky techno set (note: it's only available in the UK. Don't think the Bush administration would be too happy about these imports).

http://www.bigpockets.co.uk/product.php?product_id=2175

(Thanks JJ)

Cheney gets dolled up for the Auchwitz commemoration

2005-01-29T09:41:00.000-05:00