Don't make eye contact!

Whoa.

Thanks again, Protein Wisdom via Michelle Malkin, for reminding me to check the transcript. Last night on Fox News - I think it was Brit Hume's part of the evening, as I was laboring mightily on my Total Gym Pro Plus 2000 Xtreme or whatever the thing's called with my toddler cracking up laughing as he climbed on my chest - I heard one tiny snippet of Senate-speak. The tagline was something like, "From some senators we heard sound..." [cut to soundbyte of Kerry holding forth in sonorous tones, looking nice and tan from Davos - cheap shot, but what the heck - about how Alito's nomination was the result of a revolt on the Right to which the White House responded by predictably caving and putting up an ideological conservative. Imagine!] "...and fury..." [cut to Kennedy looking ready to pop a vein in his forehead, actually pounding on the podium as he declared, "He failed to demonstrate before this Judiciary Committee that he was committed to the continued march for progress!!?!" - thanks again to Michelle Malkin, as I've reproduced her quote rather than relying on my memory].

In the moment, I thought, "My, that's not exactly a passion-inspiring soundbyte there; how'd he get so het up?" There was a serious disconnect between the words and the body language.

So - the link again is here - Michelle Malkin filled in the blanks for me. Go read the transcript on her blog. It includes such nuggets as:

[...][T]hey [the Supreme Court] are the ones who changed this country inevitably with what we call the march to progress. The march towards knocking down the walls of discrimination that permitted us to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and public accomodations so people who's skin was not white who could go into restaurants and hotels. Public accomodations[sic]. The '65 act for voting. Voting rights. The '68 act. The public accomodations[sic]. The 1973 act that said that women are going to treated equally. The Americans with Disabilities Act that said that the disabled are going to be part of the American family.

All of that is part of the march for progress.

And my friends, the one organization, the one institution that protects it is THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES!!!

She adds at the end of that paragraph, "(Screaming at the top of his lungs.)"

You know when you're, say, serving dinner at your house to a group of people you don't know all that well, you're thinking, "OK, this is fine, everyone's getting along well," and you ask, "So, Bev, what do you do for a living?" and it turns out that she sells mail-order herbal supplements to cleanse your body of all the toxins that accumulate in your fat cells from the hormones in meat and milk and the pesticide residues on vegetables? And she goes on at some length about how everyone who actually cares about their health should only eat organic foods, and especially eschew engineered foods because who knows what you're taking in when you eat, say, a genetically altered tomato? And, remember, you made this dinner, and if there was something organic in it, it was in the chemistry sense of "carbon-based" rather than the new-age sense of "grown through the gentle ministrations of Mother Gaia and nothing else, except maybe some manure from free-range cattle"?

Awkward pause... and someone makes a valiant but doomed effort to segue out of the danger zone, and eventually someone else drops all pretense and just flatly changes the subject.

That's the sense of it. Kennedy, a senior Senator, the (gulp) eminence grise of the Democratic Party, going completely wild in defense of a competing branch of government - more: giving them sole credit for every advancement he perceives in American life - right in the middle of a bunch of other Senators. Add to that the implicit - no, explicit assumption that the "march for progress" is the goal of American governance. And, of course, the implicit (this time it actually is implicit) acknowledgment that the courts are the last refuge of the Democratic Party, or at any rate his ideological companions.

I just can't figure out whether Jeff Goldstein is trying to create a segue out of thin air or baldly changing the subject. All I know is that my eyes are unwaveringly on my plate.

The dilettante blogger's haiku

Winter: Jeff Goldstein
cites my comment on his blog.
I fear reprisals.

Yet another reason (if you needed one)

...to avoid a "timeline for withdrawal" from Iraq, even a milestone-based one. The usual line, which is indubitably true, is that a timeline gives al Qaeda and its cohort a target to out-wait. But even points along a timeline are dangerous:

What is the engine of our involvement in Iraq? A combination of the will of the American people and the will of the American president. I have confidence in President Bush to stay this course until circumstances make it apparent that we, and the Iraqi people, have won. (As Orson Scott Card says in Ender's Game, since when does the victor need to be told he's won?) In the will of the American people, I have less confidence - not because the American people have poor judgment, but because they're an aggregate, not an individual. So it's possible to affect their - our - sense of the worthiness of the cause by several means, including - here's the rub - missing milestones.

So far, Iraq has done a brilliant job of meeting the milestones set for it internally and externally. But let's say we set a series of milestones tied to troop withdrawals. How many milestones would al Qaeda have to disrupt before the American people's aggregate sense of our effectiveness in Iraq would be damaged beyond salvage? Better by far to keep Coalition troop levels fluid, able to respond to events, and keep our eyes on the prize: a stable, democratic, allied-with-us Iraq, as I said in my previous post.

Democrats' Quilting Bee and Debating Society meets here

Many moons ago, I was a high school debater. My partner and I were the #2 team among Department of Defense Dependent Schools competitors in the U.K., which, with $4, will get you a pretty decent latte. I note here, for real debaters out there, that the DoDDS system, convinced (and correctly so, at the time) that we dependents overseas would not be able to research our questions at all adequately at base or post libraries, created packets of "fact cards" for us. All we had to do was to sort and organize them, and become sufficiently familiar with them that we could whip 'em out during a debate to good effect. So DoDDS debate teams started with exactly the same bodies of fact, and a team won by dint of its rhetorical fancy footwork.

But when the spokespeople of one of the United States's dominant political parties embrace high school debate as a tactic, well, forgive me if I tend to roll my eyes. For instance:

So, when the extremist nutcases in our country start comparing patriotic Democrats and Progressives with Osama bin Laden, welcome the opportunity to point out that the present incarnation of the GOP is controlled by the religious right, the Theocons, who bear disturbing parallels to the most wanted man in the world. And you don’t have to be able to whip out a bunch of quotes, all you need to remember is a simple soundbite and they will open the door for you.

The religious right is Osama bin Laden light.

That’s how easy it is to turn the tables.

H/T to Jeff Goldstein at ProteinWisdom, a terrific and often terrifically funny blog I've spent a lot of time on lately. (Not necessary work-safe, and definitely not kid-safe! Jeff's observations are clear and frequently hilarious, but couched in sometimes-inappropriate language for these audiences. However, civil discourse is the general rule. This is no Kos or DU.) The above is from a Kossack who goes by the moniker DarkSyde (whatever). His comments refer to what he perceives as similarities between Osama bin Laden's fundamentalist Islam and the beliefs of fundamentalist American Christians... without the barest acknowledgement of the completely different approaches each takes to the cultural norms of which they disapprove. Hint: one supports stoning and beheading of violators of religious law. The other, in its worst socially acceptable incarnation, supports aggressive, sometimes irritating, but ultimately non-physical conversion attempts. (If this DarkSyde's intent is to convince the great American center that all fundamentalist Christians are on the same page as the monsters who drag people to death behind pickup trucks or leave them wired to fences to die in the cold, good luck to him.)

Point being, DarkSyde, who is a "diarist" on DailyKos (which means he actually gets a "column" rather than just the opportunity to comment), appears to believe that the important thing here is winning the debate, rather than determining what is in the nation's best interest and going about creating a plan to achieve that goal.

Back in high school debate, it was a truism that the negative side was the easy side. If you won the coin toss, you chose to be the "con" side, because all you had to do was to poke enough little holes, or a sufficiently large single hole, in the "pro" side's arguments to weaken it; you didn't have to present an alternative. It was absolutely the opposite of the Perry Mason courtroom, in which Perry not only always got his client off but did so by revealing the real killer; instead, the debate was decided more like a real criminal trial, with a "reasonable doubt" standard. If the cons could elicit the equivalent of a reasonable doubt, they won. The pros, on the other hand, had to present their argument and then defend it vigorously, hoping that they could poke sufficient holes in the con-side's hole-poking attempts that their reasonable doubts would be revealed to be unreasonable.

But high school debate ain't what we're doing here. Does it matter whether the NSA program, summed up as "eavesdropping on the conversations of known al Qaeda members with others, some of whom may be US citizens," is legal or not? Of course it does - but if it's not legal, isn't the important question how to make it legal rather than how long the high-fiving should go on? What is the goal here? Is it important that the Shi'ites, many of whom are followers of a conservative brand of Islam, won a majority in Iraq's recent elections? Of course it is - but is it not at least as important that they didn't win enough seats to control to ["the" - sheesh!] Iraqi government and must form a coalition government? Should we consider whether military commanders in Iraq ought to have asked for more troops on the ground in the days immediately following Iraqi liberation? Naturally we should - but as an exercise to feed into the next conflict, rather than a "gotcha" moment with no follow-up.

I hope to get my hands on L. Paul Bremer's new book, My Year In Iraq, soon. I've heard parts of two interviews with him lately, and not only does he utterly destroy arguments from "the other side" about whether, for instance, the Iraqi Army "should have been" dissolved and more Coalition troops "should have been" used in the early occupation period, but he stays brilliantly focused on the goal of bringing about a stable, peaceful, allied-with-us Iraq as a means to greater American national security and, not incidentally, a better world. He ain't doing high school debate either.

Update: Well, color me surprised. Apparently Blogger doesn't support trackbacks, and besides linking to sites I read (and emailing the authors, which I usually don't do because of the pretension factor), I don't actually know how to indicate to their authors that I've been reading them. Yet who shows up in the comments but DarkSyde him/herself and... Jeff Goldstein! Wow. I'm honored, Mr. Goldstein. Mr./Ms. Syde, well, thanks for the appearance - can't say as how I'm honored.

Mr./Ms. Syde, you continue to confuse a general similarity (ask yourself what orthodox Jews believe about women clergy, for instance - I bet it's "eerily similar" to what Osama bin Laden believes) with equivalence, and believe that by doing so you "win." My point is that with methodology as flawed as yours, your conclusion is invalid.

But even if we elide your method, your conclusion is still specious. You say, in the Comments, "In toto, both ["the extreme religious right" - as opposed to ordinary American Christians or even most fundamentalist Christians, as Mr. Goldstein points out - and Osama bin Laden] wish to force feed their specific version of religion, with all the associated Fatwas acting as a veto on the behavior of others, regardless if others share that view, with the full power of the state and law behind them." You make this assumption, fail to back it up, and ignore the really indisputable fact that while Osama bin Laden has (or perhaps "had" is a better word, these days, thank you Mr. Bush) real power and influence over policy in the real world, the "extreme religious right" has precisely zero power and influence. By "extreme religious right," I must conclude you're talking about an apparently invisibly tiny group of fundamentalist Christians who would actually seek and support the setup of an American theocracy, rather than the larger group of fundamentalist Christians who are content to work through the electoral process; otherwise your equation of this group with Osama bin Laden makes no sense. Anticipating your counter that an American government that includes any number, however small, of fundamentalist Christians is in fact a "theocracy," let me point out the important difference between a theocracy, or government based on religious offices and run by religious leaders - such as, for instance, Rev. Jackson or the Archbishop of Boston - and a government in which some leaders are devout in their religions, and share their devotion (or maybe just their cultural aims) with enough voters that some of their policy goals are able to be voted into law. Since you come from the "nuanced" side of the aisle, I'm sure you have no trouble understanding that difference.

Federalism: not for the faint of heart

The Supreme Court has spoken - and it's with a heavy heart that I admit I agree with their ruling, and can't imagine why Scalia and Thomas dissented. I can imagine why they might have disagreed with the Oregon law, as I do, but not why they dissented from the majority opinion that the Federal government does not have jurisdiction over this area of American life. (Roberts, I don't know well enough yet.)

I hate that law. My father, I understand, loves it, for reasons he and I don't discuss. I consider it one of the depths of depravity to involve healers in suicide. I don't doubt that doctors faced with their patients' pain and desire for release may feel an impulse to help them achieve that release - good doctors, at any rate, ought to empathize with their patients this way, just as family members sometimes pray for the speedy (or "happy," in the old Catholic formula) death of a loved one in agony. But to take the next step by bringing about that death - that's a line I believe we ought not to invite doctors to cross. (I also fear that today's allowing doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs for terminal patients could too easily evolve into tomorrow's mandating that they do so, a la the Plan B pharmacist debates. And can anyone doubt that there will be pharmacists who, still committed to their own principles, will refuse to fill these prescriptions? But these concerns of mine are for later days.)

However. This ruling is closely analogous to Roe v. Wade, this time decided in a strict-constructionist fashion. The repeal of Roe no longer looks like such an impossibility. I reluctantly see this ruling as a victory for Life, because if Roe is overturned and the legality of abortion returns to State legislatures, there is a chance that some, perhaps many States will outlaw late-term abortions, that some will enact limits on second-trimester abortions, that one or two may ban abortion altogether (probably with the usual medical exception), and a certainty that each of the fifty States will have the freedom to explore a range of policy options. Jane Galt addresses this point this week.

Now, it becomes incumbent on me to try to prevent Pennsylvania from passing a law similar to Oregon's. That, friends and neighbors, is federalism, and it's not for the faint of heart.

Microbrews on a Bud budget

And I do mean micro. We're homebrewers. More accurately these days, I'm the homebrewer; my husband benefits from my largesse. (Of course, he also pays for the ingredients, but - well, let me tell the story in its proper order.)

One of the first Christmas gifts I ever gave him, and to date still my biggest coup, was a homebrewing kit. It was a significant expenditure for me at the time - $50, when I was living on my credit card and working at my geology degree. It consisted of a giant glass bottle of sorts, a bunch of arcane tubing and fittings and things, and a bag filled with other smaller bags, accompanied by a Xeroxed piece of paper telling us in roughest terms what to do with all the stuff. Somehow, in an apartment so primitive we had to light the wall heater (the only heater we had) with a barbecue lighter (which led to some exciting moments from time to time), we managed to brew our first batch of beer - almost entirely wrong, in terms of procedure, but ultimately it came out rather well. Some points on which we erred:

• The first step in beginning brewing tends to be glopping some very thick and preternaturally sticky stuff, malt extract, into a large pot of water - as close to five gallons of water as your pot will hold. You then bring the resulting thin sugar syrup to a boil and keep it there for about an hour, adding various kinds of hops at specific intervals to provide bitterness, flavor, and aroma. Ways to go wrong in this process abound: you can fail to dissolve the malt extract thoroughly and scorch it onto the bottom of your pot, which we did. You can forget to time when you started the boil, which we did. You can boil it over and make a mess the likes of which you've never seen unless you have one child with diarrhea and one with a stomach virus - see my previous post - which we did.
  
• There is a critter called an "airlock" or "vapor lock" or "fermentation lock" that can be summed up as an S-shaped tube, held vertically so that the S is on its side. One end of the tube fits into a rubber stopper or other type of cap for the carboy, or giant glass bottle (or large plastic bucket, but more on that later). You fill the tube halfway with clean water, and the effect is that bubbles of CO₂ that emerge from the wort as it ferments bubble up through it in a one-way fashion, keeping wild yeast and other contaminants out. Well. There's a first stage of fermentation that's very energetic, and requires either a bigger vapor lock than this little guy, more along the lines of a long piece of tubing with one end held down in a tub of bleach solution, or else some gol-danged headspace in the carboy. Otherwise you blow the cap right off, which is what we did. Being scientists, however, we determined that the process of blowing the cap off required - in fact was practically a definition of - positive pressure, so probably no wild yeast had been able to contaminate the pre-beer through the powerful blast of CO₂ coming from the carboy. So we popped the cap back on and continued. (I should note that open primary fermentation was the rule in medieval breweries. But they also ended up with a lot of skunky beer, I understand.)
  
• There is a little plastic cap at the bottom of the racking cane (the link is for a racking cane clamp, but the racking cane is pictured - you use it to "rack" the beer, or transfer it from one container to another by attaching flexible tubing to the hooked end and creating a siphon by means best left to the imagination). This plastic cap serves only one purpose: to keep the sucking-in end of the racking cane out of the trub, or gooey dead yeasties that coat the bottom of the carboy. Unfortunately, while we figured it had only one purpose, we figured that that purpose was to keep the end of the racking cane clean until we needed to use it, so we pulled it off and set it aside while bottling our beer. Consequently, that was one cloudy brew.
  
• Beer bottles must be sanitized before you put the beer in, or who knows what-all could be living in them. We sanitized our first batch of some 50 bottles about 3 at a time by boiling them in our brewpot. It took forever. More efficient means: toss all the bottles that will fit into a full sink of water containing regular chlorine bleach (no scent, please, and no need for funny gel-like consistency - the cheapest bleach in the store is fine), rinse them in the hottest water your water heater will put out until there's not the slightest whiff of bleach remaining, and drain upside-down. Or, same method but with one of the various sanitizing solutions sold at brew supply stores, which generally have the advantage of not requiring rinsing. The downside is that these solutions are expensive. Or, if you have a dishwasher, put the bottles into it on the "sanitize"cycle if there is one, or just through a hot wash without detergent. (Detergent will pretty much guarantee that your beer will have no head.) With any method, start with at least visibly clean bottles - nothing that once held cigarette butts!
  

All right. So our first batch, a pilsener, came out pretty tasty in spite of it all. But since then, well over a decade ago, we've learned some things:

• Beer brewed in two stages is better than single-fermentation beer. Besides, accomplishing the first, very bubbly phase in a six-gallon plastic bucket, then racking to a five-gallon carboy for secondary fermentation for the more leisurely phase, eliminates that blowing-the-cap-off problem and makes it a lot easier to clean out the trub, since it's at the bottom of an open-topped container rather than the bottom of a tall bottle with an opening the size of a fifty-cent piece.
  
• A pull-out faucet is a Godsend. Trying to rinse equipment without one is an exercise in how to splash water all over your kitchen, or wherever you brew.
  
• Moving from all-extract to partial-grain brewing, which involves the extra steps of steeping a few pounds of crushed grains in very hot water for a while and then sparging (or gently rinsing) the grains with more hot water, and collecting the sugar-water that results, not only makes better-tasting beer but also gives you much more of the sense of having done something - like making a cake from scratch. All-grain brewing, in which you start with nothing but crushed grains and have to come up with all the sugar-water from the steeping and sparging process rather than taking the shortcut of using malt extract - more like making a cake starting with wheat grains and sugar cane and some chickens - apparently requires about twice the time of partial-grain brewing, which many hard-core hobbyists counter by making double batches. I'm just not willing to devote that much of my house to brewing.
  

Our Beer Book, a ten-year-old beat-up blue spiral notebook in which we've recorded our brewing adventures since 1995, highlights our childlike wonder at actually creating, time after time, really good beer for the price of really bad beer. Even with our slapdash methodology, we've only actually destroyed three batches over a decade. Exclamation points pepper the pages, especially once we moved to Houston and discovered DeFalco's, Houston's one and only beer and wine supply shop, which inexplicably concentrates the nicest people, freshest ingredients, and best recipes in one rather unattractive storefront. Let me recommend the Sugar & Spice & Everything Nice Christmas Ale - like gingerbread in a bottle. Yum! And the Irish Red Ale, a proprietary recipe by one of the employees there (he gets a royalty payment for every batch of ingredients they sell, we were told), that is absolutely the best medium-bodied ale around.

Lost arts

Two out of three of my kids are sick, with the dreaded Intestinal Yuck. One is emitting fluids from one end, the other from the other. And we have houseguests arriving tomorrow. (As usual.)

So my thoughts have turned to the lost art of sickroom management, because in essence my entire house, all three stories, every bedroom and bathroom, the kitchen and the family room, have become sickrooms. In the time of the Spanish Flu, we'd all have been dead already. We're substituting Purell for quarantine and contamination of our favorite couch for sickbeds; when all is said and done, we'll (by which I mean "I'll") wash and quite possibly ruin the chenille throws that we've intemperately substituted for easily washable and bleachable bedlinens.

All because we don't have cable in every room, I guess, since television is the opiate of the undersized masses that inhabit this place. If, for instance, my daughter's room had had a cable hookup, which it only would have if we were inclined to put TVs in the kids' rooms, which we're not, then she would have spent all day today in bed rather than on the couch. So there's another lost art to ponder: the entertainment (or at any rate the maintenance of quiet and calm) of the non-reading patient. She doesn't do needlepoint or crochet; I might've been able to convince her to play with toys in bed, but for how long? So onto the couch she went, with a succession of DVDs to keep her mind off her stomach when she wasn't asleep.

I am not germ-phobic, by any stretch, no matter how long my blog entries on cleaning are. Ask my sister. Ask my husband. Ask my poor beleaguered mother-in-law, who would love for me to be a bit more methodical in my approach. My philosophy has always been - and I mean always - that if we clean too effectively, we deny ourselves the chance to be exposed to lots of microorganisms to which we can usefully develop immunities. Likewise, if we use antimicrobials on everything, we may be the last human witnesses to microevolution. (I doubt that the consequences would be that extreme - after all, even Stephen King didn't kill off the entire human race. But a couple of years ago, our youngest did have a run-in with antibiotic-resistant staph. aureus, which scared the dickens out of me.)

Where was I? Oh yes, sickrooms. My job in the past few days would have been incomparably easier if my sick kids had been confined to their bedrooms. But that hypothetical presupposes that they would also have been trained to expect confinement, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax.

On a related subject, I recently inadvertantly converted four friends to annual pillow-buying. Honestly, I mostly do it because, like ironed sheets, there's nothing like a new pillow to make an ordinary person feel like a queen (or king). But - well, it happened this way: I was out to dinner with some women friends the other night, and I mentioned in passing that I'd found the best pillow ever this year, having gone out as usual to buy new pillows for everybody during the January white sales - and one friend interrupted, "You buy new pillows every year? That must cost a fortune!"

Blushing, I pointed out that if you buy new pillows every year, you don't actually have to buy very expensive pillows. Several asked why I do it; I replied, relatively honestly, that it's because my husband is allergic (I didn't say to what; dust mites are probably a concern, but the Cat That Would Not Go To Kitty Heaven is a bigger deal, and he's not allowed near the pillows). I added, "I used to wash them spring and fall, but that was kind of a hassle -" and was cut off by a chorus that can be distilled to, "What are you, some kind of germophobe?" Which, I swear, I'm not. (I might add that until the husband started making enough money that pillows for the whole family were no longer a luxury that we'd indulge in only if we were flush at the end of January, we had the same pillows for oh, I don't want to think how long. I did wash them... occasionally. But I still pretty much never wash any hairbrush in the house, which is something my mom did frequently.)

The following morning, one of these friends emailed the rest of us that she'd just caught a piece on Today about the nastiness that dwells within pillows anywhere from two to 10 years old, and that the report further claimed that though allergen-proof pillow protectors will keep the mites and their, ah, bodily emanations out of your pillow, they don't stop the fungi and such that result from your being a living creature and sleeping and, um, drooling on that pillow. The whole crowd then engaged in a flurry of "Ewwww, gross!!" emails that resulted in everyone's going out to Target and buying this, which is the one I bought and look forward to all day, or similar. (And here I might add that I bet the Today piece was bought and paid for by the Association of Bedding Suppliers or something, to push up those January white sale figures. But truth is a valid defense, I always say.)

In conclusion, while I'd like to see a resurgence of certain lost arts and old-school rules (like "no shoes on beds," which never bothered me until Cheryl Mendelsohn raised the concern in Home Comforts, cited in my cleaning post earlier), considering pillows as family heirlooms (people used to! It takes a long time to collect enough goosedown for a pillow when you only have a dozen geese or so, I guess) is not one of them.

What should have been obvious

I want you to read this:

As you know, because the media parrot it incessantly, there were no links between al-Qa’eda and Saddam, because he’s a scrupulously secular Baathist and they’re fundamentalist Islamists. Good thing those pro-gay pro-feminist Eurolefties making common cause with honor-killing sodomite-beheaders don’t demand the same level of intellectual coherence from their own coalition as they do from the terrorists. Does George Galloway feel even a wee bit squeamish that his speeches are indistinguishable from David Duke?

Is there more to be said? Well...

An Iraqi of that name [Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, a member of the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam Hussein's elite security force], Carney knew, had been present at an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5-8, 2000. U.S. intelligence officials believe this was a chief planning meeting for the September 11 attacks. Shakir had been nominally employed as a "greeter" by Malaysian Airlines, a job he told associates he had gotten through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. More curious, Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact controlled his schedule, telling him when to show up for work and when to take a day off.

... [These ellipses, I note, elide a lot of vital stuff. Read the whole thing, as they say.]

Six days after September 11, Shakir was captured in Doha, Qatar. He had in his possession contact information for several senior al Qaeda terrorists: Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who helped mix the chemicals for the first World Trade Center attack and was given safe haven upon his return to Baghdad; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, otherwise known as Abu Hajer al Iraqi, described by one top al Qaeda detainee as Osama bin Laden's "best friend."

Among other things. I remember opining to my husband in mid-2003 that just on the face of it, al Qaeda must have been established within Iraq, or they wouldn't have been able to move so quickly and seamlessly into an "insurgent" role there. It takes time to establish relationships, especially those that depend on secrecy and an absolute intolerance for even minor betrayals. Safe houses, weapons caches, contact with high-level Ba'athists who might reasonably have expected to go into hiding upon the entry of American and coalition troops into Iraq - you don't achieve access to these things by showing up at the border and saying, "Hi, I'm on your side." Clearly, I said then, the relationships had been forged before. I've seen no reason, so far, to change my mind.

Law, order, and judgment

My husband and I argued for quite a long time last night over chicken tacos about what I like to call the "tempest in a teapot" that he likes to call the "tragedy of watching our nation become less free." I speak, of course, of the signals-intelligence/NSA/warrentlesswarrantless[grrrr...]-communications-intercept thing I blogged about here. The crux of our discussion is contained in our exchange that (my side) a President's powers in wartime are different from and appropriately stronger than his powers in peacetime, and that (his side) this is a war the end of which may not - probably will not - be obvious. He, I note, doesn't disagree with what the Bush administration has done, because this administration appears to have been careful in self-limiting its application of the NSA program in question. His beef is that Bush will not be in office forever; someday there'll be another Clinton (I hope not too soon) or Nixon, and the Bush precedent will give that person political and legal cover for less responsible use of the government's far-reaching surveillance capabilities.

I'll refer interested people to Tom Macguire for lots and lots of interesting information on the story. I found this entry to be particularly edifying. Don't neglect the comments. Tom is probably THE resource for the Plame-leak story as well, from all I've seen; frankly he's so deep into that story that I've completely lost track of who did what to whom. I suspect he'll be similarly thorough on this one.

Now that we have that out of the way... my husband and I are both correct, in my oh-so-humble opinion of course. Privacy, I've heard it said, is an illusion these days. The question is not what information is being gathered - assume that all of it is - or whether it's being stored - assume that all of it is. The question is what it's being used for. The government (I hate that over-broad formulation, but what are you gonna do?) ought to have little interest in me; I have no influence, no significant money, no contacts with unsavories, and I seldom talk about bombs or plots, though I do sometimes refer to my children as "pure evil," especially when they're still awake after 10:30. But the fact that I don't particularly care whether the government is monitoring my communications doesn't necessarily translate into a sense of "nothing to see here" from a civil liberties perspective. My husband's point is well taken: not every national leader is Bush.

[Side note: I confess that I love to make that kind of point; I think it probably drives reflexive Bush-haters nuts to hear it, just as referring to the non-Soviet West as "the democracies," as a contrasting term, e.g., "We in the democracies, unlike you Soviets...", reportedly infuriated the Soviet Union in its heydey, when it maintained that it was a democracy.]

John Adams famously said that "We are a nation of laws, not of men." I yield to no one in my respect for Adams, and only a little of that respect derives from my parvenu excitement that my children are his descendants, though I'm just a peasant Irishwoman. But he was a little off the mark: We are a nation of laws and of men. One often-cited advantage of our Constitution over behemoths like the unsuccessful EU version is its brevity and adaptability; it's written in sufficiently general terms that it remains brief even a couple of centuries and a universe of change after its drafting, because it didn't, and doesn't, micromanage. But it's obvious that a generally written law can be open to interpretation.

Equally obvious is that a too-specifically written law applies to too little in the real world to be useful for much, giving rise to more and more itty-bitty laws so that every circumstance is covered. I'm inclined to think that the balance we almost inadvertantly created - a framework that we've "fleshed out" with caselaw over more than two centuries - is The Way, not least because empirically it's proven to be so, so far. What it means, though, is that at times, particularly at critical times, we have to decide whether to try to circumscribe government action with law or to submit to the judgment of our elected leaders.

This principle is just as broad as the Constitution, and Adams can be forgiven for overlooking it, I think. Democracy was new and essentially untried (the Greeks' and Romans' experiences with democracy and republic being effectively lost to history at that point). The Founders were Hobbesian in their belief that men must be constrained by law because men were fundamentally - or Originally - sinful; but these same men, many of them, had already pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred Honor to an abstract other than God, a singularly un-Hobbesian thing to do. Is it so unrealistic that they may have viewed themselves, and their compatriots, as different in kind from George III? And so they might have assumed that an elected chief executive would hold the nation's good close to his heart, and indeed I think they were right, in the main. It's the judgment of that chief executive that we must rely on, more than his motives.

At this point, the anti-Bush crowd sees a no-win situation. Relying on Bush's judgment, they might say, is certainly no better than relying on his morals. And that's where I ask for evidence. Occam's Razor is useful here, too: what reason might Bush have had for authorizing the NSA program? Any reasonable answer to that question does not include "personal gain."

Which does not address my husband's objection. But this part does: at this reading, 43 individuals have sat in the Oval Office, literally or figuratively. They were men of ambition, men who craved power on some level, or else they would not have pursued a job that makes men old. Not one of them has succeeded in becoming a dictator. The chances of one's achieving such a Hobbesian feat now, when the power of the citizen to be heard and to hear is greater than it's ever been, seems to me to be vanishingly unlikely. We're in the midst of a flowering of civil liberties unprecedented in history - but, like my darn kids, we complain because we only got four new Gameboy games rather than a new DS.

[Another side note: actually, my son is saving up to buy a DS. He knows full well that complaining about our not buying him one is not an effective tactic with us.]

First

The desire to be first with good news is, I think, inherent in most people. Ordinary people now have tools in their pockets and purses that enable them to make a bid for "first" with greater speed and reach than ever in human history.

God rest the souls of the twelve who died in the Sago Mine in the last few days; God protect and restore to health the one man who survived; and please, God, be with the suffering families whose mistakenly raised hopes were so tragically dashed by the truth. And God, while you're at it, help us all to see this terrible event, illustrated by newspaper headlines declaring the twelve alive and by scenes of jubilation from inside the church where the families had gathered, as a morality play teaching us to be careful of the speed with which we can gather and disseminate information. Deliberation, where news of life and death are the subjects, should still be the rule.

I admit that I'm much more of a cryer now than I was before my kids were born. But is it possible not to be moved by the sight of those families hugging and laughing and praising God, joyous, grateful for an impossible miracle, juxtaposed with their bewilderment, anger, and heartbreak when they learned that the message "we found all twelve" had been commuted by optimistic inference to "we found all twelve alive"? I hope that when their first shock has passed, they'll be able to realize that no one at the mine could possibly have intended to lie to them; the mine officials, it's certain, wanted nothing so much as that impossible miracle. Who is guilty? The ones, whoever they were, who rushed to dial their cellphones. Who can blame them? Not I... though I hope I'll remember to take three deep breaths and ask myself some hard questions if I'm ever in a similar situation.

If the mine was, as I heard alleged on the news last night, a notably unsafe place to work, I hope the mine operators are prosecuted to the full extent of their culpability, and that safety will dramatically improve there as a result of these sad deaths. I do say "alleged" because the former head of Mine Health and Safety Academy, or Mine Safety and Health Academy, or whatever he was that wasn't MSHA, said that the mine had been cited some 200 times in the past year for safety violations - but did not say how many citations a mine considered to be "well-run" and "safe" would have had. (MSHA and OSHA reporting are notorious in my experience for their, ah, scrupulousness - for heaven's sake, don't pull on a hangnail at work, if you're an OSHA shop.) Mining is a dangerous business. Years ago, when my husband worked for a summer at a gold mine in Nevada, he had the dubious pleasure of an MSHA bulletin for reading material that, on a biweekly-or-so basis, featured the top three or four horrible deaths at mines, complete with line drawings. Less horrible injuries and deaths were reported but not illustrated. It was both gruesome and instructive.

Later, when we both worked in the environmental industry, we received annual training on confined space entry, most of which consisted of "Don't do it! For God's sake, stay AWAY from that hole in the ground! If your buddy goes down into the hole in the ground, DO NOT go after him - you may DIE!" An underground mine is the ultimate confined space entry: every time a person goes into that hole in the ground, he or she runs risks of bad air, cave-in, power failure, fire (in many types of mines) that, if it is not immediately deadly, consumes available oxygen... Yet coal still accounts for about half of America's electricity production, and underground mining is still a viable and in many cases preferable option in, especially, the eastern states. These men were working at good and beneficial jobs in an industry much more dangerous than sitting in an office. If the explosion that ultimately caused their deaths could have been prevented by reasonable and prudent means, I want that fact known and those responsible punished. But I think the accident's cause and preventability are far from clear at this point.

I can't end on that note. I'll end as I did some entries back: May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.

The nature of regret

Mark Steyn strikes again: in this opinion piece in the Telegraph, he reveals the primary result of a study from the University of Oslo about the emotional legacy of abortion versus miscarriage. The study, it seems, was small, comparing 40 women who had suffered miscarriages with 80 women who had had abortions, but the salient points ought to make anyone considering an abortion take notice: many women of both groups suffered emotional distress in the immediate aftermath of their pregnancy-ending event - 47.5% of women who had miscarried and 30% of women who had had abortions. But after six months, the percentage of women who had miscarried who continued to feel distress over their miscarriage had fallen to 22.5%, while the percentage of women who felt distress over their abortions had fallen much less, proportionately - to 25.7%. At five years after the event, less than 3% of women who had miscarried continued to be distressed.

Twenty percent of women who had had abortions were still distressed, five years afterward.

These figures are all from this article from BBC News; I have so far not turned up the original study. I wish I could. Was the women's distress self-reported, or inferred through questioning or a standardized test? Was it measured in degrees, or simply Booelian? But while the methodology is important, the apparent result says something to me about the nature of regret.

I have few, thankfully. Sometimes a choice between two courses has been decided for me by events, so that even if I might suspect that the road I didn't travel would have had more interesting scenery, I can't honestly regret that I took the other road - I perceived no choice. Sometimes I have indeed made a choice, and I have indeed spent time down the line wondering what might be different in my life if I had chosen the other course - but since I can see the life I have, and can't think of much in it that I would willingly give up, it's hard to regret any choice that led me to this place. Has my life been unusally blessed?

Well, I certainly think so, and as a superstitious Irishwoman I waste a good bit of mental energy wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. But really, if we're speaking of regret, I'd have to say that a regret presupposes that the difference in your life that you imagine if you had made a different choice would have been a positive difference. In other words, one in every five of the studied women who chose to end her pregnancy has concluded after five years of living with that decision that, no matter how difficult the prospect of having a child might have seemed back then, having that child now could have been better.

I'm reading a lot into a few isolated numbers. But think about it. Try to project yourself into your own future. It's nearly an impossible exercise, but the effort alone may at least ease your mind later.

The end of the world as we know it

Much is being made of the recent leak to the New York Times that the Bush administration authorized unwarranted (meaning "without-a-warrant" rather than "unnecessary") taps on international calls between certain individuals whose names or phone numbers had been learned through questioning of al Qaeda members or other al Qaeda-related intel. See here and here for two news reports on the story.

Out here in the blogosphere, there's a whole lot about the Fourth Amendment being thrown around. But let's review:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oaths or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I am not a lawyer, nor a Constitutional scholar. (These facts are patent.) But to the extent that it matters in a mere private citizen, I am a strict constructionist. Yet I have no beef with the phone taps, as far as the facts are currently known. Because:

[from Article II, Section 1:] Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Section 2 - Civilian Power over Military, Cabinet, Pardon Power, Appointments

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States...

...and we are at war, a condition that has in the past required the chief executive to suspend the writ of habeus corpus (Lincoln), to undertake massive secret projects with budgets disguised under other line items (Roosevelt), to intern US citizens (also Roosevelt), among other temporary infringements of the widest exercise of civil liberties. Key here is the temporary nature of such infringements, and it's inherent in our system: until a president disbands Congress and calls off general elections (yes, I do recall that some were claiming before the 2004 elections that Bush would pull a real October surprise and do exactly that - my goodness, you people, get a hold of yourselves), there is no statute or order that cannot be considered "temporary." And bear in mind the word "unreasonable" in the Fourth: is it "unreasonable" to assume that a person who has been receiving calls from known members of al Qaeda, a hostile foreign group bent on the destruction of the United States among others, may be connected to them somehow? If it's reasonable, strict interpretation of the Amendment would seem to allow that person's virtual "papers" to be searched. So everyone take a deep breath.

The difficult part is remembering that we are actually at war. I suspect it's always been harder for us to remember this fact than for, say, Europe - at least since the War of 1812, the last time we saw a hostile foreign army on our mainland. So many of us have no personal experience of a real, bloody war - the kind of war the Soviet Union waged against Afghans, the kind of war Saddam Hussein waged against Kuwait, the kind of war that tore Vietnam in two until we graciously allowed the bad guys to stitch it back together without benefit of anesthesia. So many of us forget that it's not just the forces of nature that can cost hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives. Thank God, we in the United States have not seen so bloody a war on our own soil since the 1860s, but lest we doubt that it's possible, take note of the horror of Darfur, where credible sources put the number dead at 300,000 or more. Because at this moment in history, the really deadly conflicts all seem to be taking place in the Third World or thereabouts, we may foolishly conclude that we're somehow more "civilized"; but bear in mind that it was not long ago that the Soviet Union was in the business of killing in the millions, and while Stalin may not have been "our kind of people," he was most assuredly not one of the dressed-up savages some of us in the enlightened West may wishfully see in Africa and the Middle East.

No, he was a real monster. Something that George W. Bush demonstrably is not.

Christmas card blogging

About nine years ago, I started making my own Christmas cards. I blame my sister, who at that time was an ardent rubber-stamper; she started turning out cards of professional quality but personal soul, and I obviously couldn't let her do that without putting forth my own effort.

The above are the last three years' worth - this year's is the rightmost, last year's (my favorite, though the least work for me) in the middle, and the previous year's, which doesn't photograph as well - it's probably one of my prettiest stamp-only cards ever - on the left. Behind the cards is my fake gingerbread house, modeled on our actual house, with, yes, Golden Grahams for shingles. (The "fake" part is that I didn't make gingerbread; I glued innumerable pieces of graham cracker together with royal icing, mistakenly believing it'd be faster and easier than the all-gingerbread method. The house is indeed entirely edible, though by the time I let the kids eat it, it'll probably be so dusty that only a child would stoop to breaking off a hunk.)

A friend of ours, an architect by training whose creativity is beyond the ken of normal (wo)men, makes the most original dang Christmas cards imaginable. One year, the card cover was paper dolls of her entire family: color photos of them on glossy cardstock, all wearing red long underwear. Inside the card, she'd included a piece of regular-weight paper with elf constumes, with paper-doll-costume tabs, to fit the people and poses. Another year, the card was a snowglobe: her family posing in front of the Space Needle (this was in their, and our, Seattle days), with a small plastic zipper bag containing glitter "snow" somehow attached to it; the recipient put a little water in the bag and presto! A favorite of mine was the year she was pregnant with their first child; she wrapped a strand of white Christmas lights around her very pregnant belly and had her husband take a black and white picture of just that, then "colorized" (by hand - this was pre-Photo Shop-in-the-home) just the area of the glow. Beautiful! I aspire to her standards but have no hope of reaching them. Her cards are one of many things I look forward to at Christmas. Heaven help me if she ever decides it's too much work and hits Hallmark instead...

Life and death in San Quentin

This morning "Tookie" Williams was executed by the State of California for the crime of multiple murder. Some insisted that he was innocent, though

[w]itnesses at [his] trial said he boasted about the killings, stating "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him." Williams then made a growling noise and laughed for five to six minutes, according to the transcript that the governor referenced in his denial of clemency.

Evidence against him included "testimony from two of Williams' accomplices, ballistics evidence linking Williams' shotgun to the murders and testimony from four people that Williams had at different times confessed to one or both murders."

I am, as anyone reading this blog at the time of Terry Schindler Schiavo's death can see, a proponent of life even if the life in question has little or no apparent objective value. Life is precious and irreplaceable. That said, it does not follow that all life must be preserved at all costs. There are reasons to give up one's own life; there are reasons to take a life. My belief in the value of human life wouldn't make me hesitate for one second to kill (or, more likely, to try to kill - it's not something I have practice in) someone threatening my kids, for instance. It's also why I remain reluctantly on the side of maintaining a limited legal status for abortion, though I would like to see its limitations include (a) state-by-state decisions (that is, a rollback of Roe v. Wade) and (b) first-trimester legality only, except in cases where multiple, independent, "blind" reviews indicate that the mother's life, not simply her "health," are in danger if the pregnancy is allowed to continue. This is my personal wish list. I'm not at all satisfied with it, but there it stands for the moment.

Similarly, I recognize that the death penalty opens the door for innocent people to die. More broadly, any reasonable system of jurisprudence - that is, any system that allows evidence other than multiple unambivalent eye-witness accounts coupled with incontrovertible forensic evidence, for instance - opens the door for innocent people to be punished for crimes they didn't commit. The death penalty is more a symptom of that fact than a cause in itself. Such Has It Always Been. I believe there should be a very high standard of evidence for capital cases - of evidence rather than of legal argument; I don't like the thought of clearly guilty murderers "getting off on a technicality" (who does?). Mr. Williams, having been convicted on strong evidence of four cold-blooded murders, died today because his life is forfeit for those innocent lives, regardless of his later redemption (which did not include remorse, since he maintained all along that he was innocent himself).

All right. I have heard the argument that since Williams was a cofounder of the Crips, even if he was innocent of these four murders, he was certainly guilty of conspiracy to murder, that being one of the Crips' hobbies, and therefore deserved to die anyway. I can't buy that. What I do buy is that his original trial, with fresh and clear evidence including his own boasts, came to a just conclusion, and he deserved to die because he was guilty of what he was accused of.

A life has been ended at the hands of society. That life had intrinsic worth from beginning to end, but its owner freely chose to set his life in trade for some momentary pleasure or gratification or perceived need that resulted in four violent deaths at his hands. We have soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are setting their lives in trade for a chance at freedom and prosperity for millions of strangers abroad, and for the long-term safety of millions of strangers and a smaller number of loved ones at home. Their trade is a generous act; his was a selfish one. Their trade preserves and defends other lives; his ended at least four. Just as these soldiers choose their course with their eyes wide open, he apparently made that choice years ago, and just as some of these soldiers will have to give their lives in the trade they endorsed, he has given his. Life is precious, but it is not always paramount.

Cult of the child

Cindy Sheehan, Mother Superior, has written a book entitled Not One More Mother's Son. I will not dishonor her son's memory by reading it, and I will contribute Not One More Conservative's Penny to her charade.

Look. I'm a mother. I have two sons and a daughter who will one day have to decide whether to serve in this country's armed forces. I don't want any of them to die - in action or any other way; if I had it in my power, they would live happily ever after. But I don't have it in my power. What's more, I know that at some point, the direction of their lives becomes their direction, not mine.

Years ago, I read somewhere about the "cult of the child," a piece of Victoriana wherein childhood, formerly the pre-adult stage of life to which no one paid much attention, suddenly became a kind of ideal state which parents were encouraged to prolong and celebrate. The cult of the child has reached fruition in our time - insofar as anything childish can bear fruit, which is sort of my point. Adults build; adults create; adults contemplate; adults forge bonds. Children imitate adults in doing these things, so that they can learn to be adults. This process is called socialization, or "growing up." But for some of us, apparently, watching our children grow up is too painful to bear. Is it the signal of our own mortality that shakes us? The sense that they may pass us by - or not achieve even what we have achieved? Is it that we're afraid of what they may say or think about us as parents?

I'm not immune to these fears. My husband, a more level-headed and cool-tempered soul than I, reminds me sometimes that we've had our own criticisms of our parents, yet (a) we turned out pretty darn well and (b) we still love our parents in spite of their failings. He intends that these things should comfort me; of course, they just make me more nervous. But that's my problem.

Cindy Sheehan's is apparently that her honored son never grew up to her. How can anyone "support the troops" without acknowledging their agency? How can anyone miss or ignore the fact that they're not just "mothers' sons" but men, entitled in our society to vote, drive, enter into marriage and other contracts, commit crimes and be tried and punished as adults, and - not incidentally - volunteer to serve in the armed forces? They may have any motive they please for their service. Some, probably many, do it for the money or the benefits; these are not trivial, particularly when the starting point is less than zero. Some do it for the adventure. Some do it for the guns; others to get away from home. Some do it for love and respect.

A few, I'm guessing, do it for patriotism and duty, but nearly all will eventually feel these rather abstract impulses, once they've been exposed to them and shown what they mean. Yet military recruiters regularly take verbal fire for emphasizing the reasons that young men (especially young men) do apply, like the education, training, and steady pay, not to mention the chance to do something exciting and dangerous, rather than the small-but-present risk of death or injury in tandem with the only "acceptable" motive: patriotism. Only those who feel, out of the box, an urge to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States need apply...

The weak-minded pacifism of some of this age's women, and the womanish men who admire them - bah! Do they honestly believe that war is never the answer, no matter what the question? What would their answer have been to Pol Pot? Khan? Vlad the Impaler? A stern talking-to? Shunning? They have avoided stating an answer because the extent of their "vision," such as it is, is to stand in the way of war, to protect all those mothers' sons out there without regard to the cost to other mothers' sons and daughters, including their own children's. They feel good about their efforts - they are serious, they are doing something that matters - but when they unbelievably succeed in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, they drop the issue like a toy they're bored with and move on to the next war.

There's always a next war.

And what was their answer to Saddam Hussein, benevolent ruler of the Kite-Flying Paradise^TM? Oh yes: authorizing the President to use force to bring him to task, then scolding the President for using force to bring him to task and claiming that the President had pulled the wool over their eyes. This same President whom they've derided for years as too stupid to pound sand: now he was canny enough to fool them in all their august sobriety. This is a reelection strategy?

Apologies to whoever said this first - I can't recall where I read it recently but I had the same thought: "We're stupider than Bush" doesn't have much bumper-sticker value.

In fervent thanksgiving

We learned last night that my husband's brother had been hit by a car while skateboarding. He was thrown into the air and fell on his head and neck, underwent five hours of brain surgery, and my first fervent thanksgiving is that he lived through the accident. When we first heard, though, he hadn't yet regained consciousness, so we didn't have much more to be thankful for then.

My husband immediately made plans to fly to California to be with him and their mother, and my second fervent thanksgiving is for frequent flyer miles; he was able to get on a flight early this morning for the mere cost of 37,500 miles and fifty bucks, even though it's the weekend before Thanksgiving.

When I called my sister for prayer support, she pointed out that she and her husband live perhaps five minutes from the hospital where my brother-in-law was - a fact I'd entirely forgotten as I concentrated on getting the husband across country and communicating with the mother-in-law in transit from SoCal northward. So my third fervent thanksgiving is for my sister and brother-in-law, who are picking my husband up at the airport, giving him a place to sleep very close to where he'll be needed, and performing whatever fetch-and-carry services anyone in my in-laws' family needs, in addition to continually lifting up my dear brother-in-law in prayer - something at which they're better than I am, though I'm doing my best today.

We got through to the ICU eventually and discovered that he was showing good improvement - had been conscious, responsive, able to follow directions and to move his extremities. So, my fervent thanksgiving for the first good news we'd had, and for the ability to put my mother-in-law's mind a little at rest, since she'd been driving through the mountains and unable to receive an update for a couple of hours. And then, a few hours later, just before hitting the sack, we called again and were told he'd shown "massive" improvement - was, in fact, very impatient to have his ventilator removed, though that won't be done for a couple of days since his frequent periods of deep sleep are still too deep for his breathing reflex to function reliably. I fervently thank God for this improvement.

Penultimately, my fervent thanksgiving for the people who stayed with him in the hospital, his estranged girlfriend's parents. They've acted as parents to him during a terrible time and, in spite of their not being permitted to have much information about him since they're not relatives, have apparently been his advocates and companions for many hours since the accident happened.

And finally, I most fervently thank God for the staff of Sutter Memorial Roseville, who saved his life and continue to care for him with kindness and dedication.

One non-thankful note. I second my mother-in-law's exasperated statement, once she'd learned that he was doing much better: "This is the third time I've had to rush to the hospital in a mad panic over skateboarding - I'm going to burn that thing!" I have nothing against skating or skaters, but this is the worst one yet for my brother-in-law. On the other hand, maybe it is a thankful note: my kids are now "scared straight" about wearing helmets, at least for the moment. Whether a helmet would have helped him, I don't know yet, but I've never yet heard of a case in which someone was harmed by wearing one.

Ain't gonna study torture no more

Wretchard over at Belmont Club speaks today about the McCain Amendment and its probable effects. As usual, he's insightful and intelligent and I commend his blog to all, but two things I'd like to add:

1. I don't think terrorists are necessarily writing anonymous letters to American senators encouraging them to support the Amendment, and
2. I'm about as sick of NIMBY attitudes as I can be.

As to the first. There's much talk, from the "con" side of the Amendment debate, about how if it passes terrorists will have a big party to celebrate that fact that they'll never be tortured if captured by Americans, and will immediately revamp their training regime to take into account the very limited interrogation options available to the American military. But there's extraordinary rendition, the practice of sending prisoners to other nations to be interrogated there. Rendition was a Clinton-era invention (at least officially - I have to wonder how often it happened sub rosa before then), and would not be affected by the McCain Amendment. So terrorists would not face American interrogators with bright lights, loud music, coercive suggestions... instead they might face a well-equipped Saudi, an angry Kurd with access to electricity - who knows? If I were a terrorist, I don't think I'd be happy that the Americans would no longer be my interrogators if I were captured.

(Please note: I do not mean to suggest that either Saudis or Kurds necessarily use torture - just that their rules would be different from ours, as indeed they are now, and there's no Saudi or Kurd or Russian or Somali McCain, for instance.)

Some of Wretchard's commenters opined that we'd start taking fewer prisoners on the battlefield. I doubt it. Our need for intelligence would be as great as it is now. Here I step off into a world of my own devise: if I were in charge of battlefield prisoners, I would try to sort out the intelligence wheat from the chaff as quickly and efficiently as possible - exactly how is an exercise I must leave to the student, since I think it must rely on local informants, overheard chatter among prisoners, intelligence already in hand, etc., but I can't know for sure how it's currently being done. Having discerned which prisoners would be most likely to give important information, I would concentrate my interrogation resources on that fraction. The other prisoners' primary hazard might be death by boredom.

In a post-McCain world, if I just killed every fighter on the field, I would lose whatever intelligence I stood to gain before, so that choice is not open to me - having prisoners is highly inconvenient and expensive, but the tradeoff in intelligence makes it necessary. So I'd still have to take prisoners. Having taken them, I'd still have to sort out who might have useful intelligence, presumably by the same methods I was using before. Then I'd render the useful ones to allies for interrogation, and wait for the results. Finis.

This is a NIMBY argument - "not in my backyard," for anyone who didn't live through the '80s. The scruples of Californians about being able to see offshore drilling rigs does not obviate their existence elsewhere, and if it's an environmental tragedy to have them at all (which it's not - tankers spill far more (and often refined, a.k.a. more toxic) petroleum), it's a tragedy whether they're off the coast of Santa Barbara or Galveston. The immorality of NIMBY is why I am against the McCain amendment: I would rather have combatant prisoners in the hands of American interrogators, who are guided by social and cultural norms that preclude the most heinous forms of torture and seriously circumscribe interrogation techniques, than have squeaky-clean collective hands but know that others were up to their elbows in filth on our behalf.

An analogy to the Catholic Church might be appropriate here. The Catholic Church's guilt in the recent spate of pederast-priest claims, investigations, and convictions is not that the church as a whole was participating in the appalling behavior, but that the Church knew about and enabled the behavior. In what way would the American government - the American psyche - be innocent of torture if we knowingly sent our prisoners to places where human life and dignity are cheaper than we hold them?

Make no mistake, we're using rendition now. I'm deeply conflicted about it. Only long after the fact will we, the public, know whether the intelligence gained by other nations using techniques we refuse to apply was worth the moral cost to us (the moral cost to other nations is, I believe, appropriately their own concern, and that's not just an expedient view of mine). I hope that our government has already performed that calculation, using information not yet declassified, and that it's the demostrated benefit of rendition that is causing us to maintain the policy on a lesser-evil basis.

The bottom line, for me, is that we could outlaw torture in the same way that the Right-Thinking Nations of the World once outlawed war. And it'll be just as effective. Oddly, the traditionally conservative view of humanity as fundamentally flawed, and the traditionally liberal view of humanity as fundamentally good, flip-flop here: I, a conservative, believe that keeping prisoners in American hands, without the stringent limits on interrogataion the McCain Amendment would impose, is far less likely to result in egregious torture than the uptick in extraordinary rendition we'd see if the Amendment passed, because America is fundamentally good. My opponents take the view that the American military must be restrained by force of law from doing what their fundamentally bad natures would lead them to.

Funny.

Happy Veterans' Day!

Veterans past and present, thank you for placing yourselves between your loved home and the war's desolation.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Be still my heart!

den Beste is blogging again! I'd barely heard of him when I started reading blogs, and didn't actually come across his blog until he'd already stopped writing it, so I'm excited out of all proportion to the actual event, no doubt.

If you don't know him, for heaven's sake, google him; he's... he's... He defies explanation, that's what. He took a hiatus of - oh, over a year, certainly, for reasons having to do with his health in conjunction with the stresses of blogging. Apparently picked nits wearied him to the point that he lost the energy of spirit needed to stay on the daily treadmill, which I suppose one could view as oversensitivity or prima donnism (to coin a phrase), but I'll take the man's word that his unspecified condition, and the medication necessary for him to blog at a high level, created (and no doubt still create) pressures on him that most of us don't have to face.

But he's back, on his own schedule, at RedState, and I feel like a kid who didn't reach her teens until after the Beatles broke up - only to learn that they'd reunited and were coming to her town!

Revolutions and insurrections

Belmont Club is, as usual, on point and insightful concerning the riots in France, which enter their thirteenth night tonight. I commend to your attention this post particularly, especially Wretchard's "Commentary" section where he discusses the difficulty in quelling riots and the dangers of trying to do so via blind and memoryless profiling. Also note the comments from readers, where my musings began.

All right, that's not entirely accurate; I've been thinking for a few days, since about Day 7 or 8 of rioting, about the tendency among some Americans to call karma on the French and to puff out our collective chest about how such things could never happen here. Seems to me that if a group ethnically representative of twenty percent of your population decides to rise up, take up arms, and attack the infrastructure (thankfully, not the innocent citizenry so far), even a country like the United States would be hard-pressed to retake control. Of course, the French government hasn't done itself any favors by not doing anything substantive for twelve days.

Josh Trevino's blog entry "Twelfth Night," which I just found, has a terrific roundup of recent events. (Apologies to Josh for not taking the time at this moment to find the tilde sign that ought to appear over his "n.") One point on which I think I differ with Josh is that the "French assimilation model" may have failed. He points out, correctly I think, that if this soundbyte of a statement takes hold, the ideal of French assimilation may be discarded, in France and elsewhere. The ideal of which he speaks is twofold: "equality of citizens as citizens, and the primacy of French culture and Western values." The problem I have with the idea is that the French assimilation model, like Communism according to the Left, hasn't really been tried. I'm not as well informed as I'd like to be on this subject, but I understand that the French have not exactly encouraged full assimilation (any more than this generation's Muslim immigrants have sought it), instead making it clear that new immigrants are not quite up to par and can't become so. I haven't heard that there's a by-your-bootstraps mythos in France as there is in the U.S.; this lack of a story to inspire the children of immigrants would certainly add to the alienation of Muslims living in not only sanctioned but informally required ghettoes (in the term's original sense).

In any event, my thoughts turn to various possible parallels suggested by Wretchard's erudite readers: that the American revolution began as a tax protest, the Civil War as a states'-rights debate, and so on. Many commenters wondered whether this French disaster might finally awaken Europe, one calling it "France's Pearl Harbor." And then, one commenter stated as certainty that success in Iraq would cause all the Muslim dominoes to fall, bringing hope and prosperity to people whose only prior alternatives were surrender or religious fanaticism. Here's where I jump off the bandwagon.

We may - I think we will - succeed in Iraq. Iraq will stand proudly as the Islamic world's flagship representative government, and will prosper. But it does not follow that the Bush Doctrine is a sure bet. The American revolution succeeded, against dreadful odds, and the American experiment in liberty and equality has succeeded as well, brilliantly. But its French counterpart, only a few years behind, with the American example to guide it and inspired by the same ideas, thinkers, and emotions, has been limping along for two hundred-plus years with only occasional intimations of success, by comparison. The U.S. shed blood and bitter tears in our Civil War, but recovered and surpassed its previous strength, conviction, and achievements. France's history since its Revolution sounds terrifying to me: the Terror, Robespierre, the weirdness that was Napoleon's empire, the Dreyfus affair and its overtones of anti-Semitism, the trenches of WWI, the Vichy and the Resistance, some members of which were Marxists hoping to win France for their own. The U.S. had the advantage of physical isolation and a second, tremendous advantage in natural resources (there's a reason we've never been a big colonial power) - but that's my whole point: because a radical idea works in one place does not mean it will work in another.

It's a time for nail-biting, not hubristic chortles or triumphalism. We could experience our own spreading urban riots, and if we do we'll discover whether we've actually paid attention these last two weeks. The Middle East may not view Iraq as a beacon of hope, but a Q'ran on fire, and we'll see whether the Iraqis have the stomach to face their coreligionists without conceding. We're experiencing the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." I thank my lucky stars that, up to now anyway, I'm not living in the literal midst of them.

Bayou of tears

Houston was my home for just three years, and the great State of Texas about six - one of which was when I was four years old. Houston did not change my life, and I don't now think of it as "home" or yearn to go back, though of course I miss our friends there.

But did you see those Astros? They were swept, but in stark contrast to what one of my son's classmates said about them ("They're sheer losers, dude!"), they made the Sox dig for every out and every run and every inning and every one of the four games that constituted this incredible Series. Game 2 tied up at the middle of the ninth, the Sox forced to fall back on their homefield advantage? A fourteen-inning Game 3? Seven shut-out innings in Game 4? I don't even follow baseball with any degree of devotion, but it was a great run for the Astros, as hard as it was for me to watch. (I'm an inveterate fan of the underdog, plus my family firmly believed in the "McArdle curse," which required us to leave any Cardinals game we were attending back when we lived across the river from St. Louis or risk costing the Redbirds a victory.)

Backe's pitching last night seemed to improve (from darn good to great, I should point out - what a slider he's got!) as he closed in on 100 pitches; why they took him out when they did, I don't know - he still hadn't walked anyone, though it was late at night and I didn't take note of how many pitches he was throwing per inning or how many hits or would-be hits the White Sox were hitting off him in the 7th versus the 2nd. Ensberg's stance is the weirdest thing I've ever seen on a baseball diamond, and clearly it ain't working for him, so I hope he closes it the heck up. I never did figure out the beard thing, but it made it quite a trick for me to tell the boys apart; never mind, they all looked pretty good with it. And finally, I sincerely hope that going almost all the way this year, when they had no right nor reason to expect it, will give them the gumption to take it that last step next fall.

Baseball is, to me, the best spectator sport there is. The action is easy to follow and frequently concentrated in one relatively small area; unlike football and basketball, where your seats - no matter how "good" - will yield bad views for a major portion of the game, in baseball, for the most part you know what you're getting when you buy your ticket. The strategy is accessible on levels from beginner to super-genius. Its pace is neither frenetic nor the hesitation waltz you get in football. It relies not on size or strength (recent emphasis on beefy sluggers notwithstanding) but on a magical arm or winged feet or stunning reflexes or glue in the glove, or two or more of these, and, as with a decathlete, a baseball star can be less than the best in any area and still be The Best thanks to his concatenation of traits. There's almost never blood, almost never a broken bone, yet there are opportunities to "take it for the team" by slamming into a wall in pursuit of the potential home run or by diving face-first for the plate, or, as Backe demonstrated last night, by blocking a line drive with your tender, unpadded flesh and then, without pause, picking up the ball and throwing the batter out at first - you can be a hero without risking a coma or a snapped neck.

And it makes great movies. We picked a good game as our national pastime. And that's all I have to say about that.

Oh, Jane...

So one of my favorite blogs is this one, but this entry has me shaking my head in dismay. (There was an earlier entry that had me shaking my head more vigorously, but it's fallen off the page now, so I'll stick with the one I can see.) Jane Galt, the primary author of the blog (Megan McArdle is her real name), is a Manhattan semi-libertarian who supported Bush's reelection after a lengthy opening of the floor to her commenters on both sides (actually more than both sides) on a number of questions concerning the candidates' fitness, and who supported the Iraq war on the basis of finding and removing WMDs, mostly. It appears that now, perhaps in the spirit of keeping her left-side commenters coming back, she is advancing late criticism of the Bush administration for its foreign policy decision process, in particular with regard to the war.

Me, I'm not about to. If there were a law about how presidents had to make decisions, we wouldn't need presidents, and we'd have rule by committee. If Bush makes mistakes, they're on his own head - and in contrast to some of his forebears, he at least tends not to try to save face by repudiating those who advised him. As I said during the election season, there was absolutely no reason for Bush to yield to Democrats' calls to "admit his mistakes"; it would only have damaged his reelection prospects, provided aid and comfort to the enemy both foreign and domestic, and weakened the confidence of his supporters. The only important factor is whether he corrects those mistakes that actually turn out to have been mistakes. (That is, one side of the political spectrum's claiming that an action has been a mistake ought to be insufficient cause for a president - any president - to take action beyond assessing whether the claimed mistake really is one.) Public confession is a non sequitur.

We elect our executives to bear the crushing weight of a responsibility the likes of which was undreamt of even by Caesar; we age them, kill some of them in office, and I'm certain cost them sleep for the rest of their lives if they do survive their terms. Second-guessing them is our right, but history is long and memory is short; we'd be wise to be sure that our critiques are valid before we go assigning them staggering importance. Like this: was it stupid to have inappropriate relations with a very young intern in the Oval Office? Yes, but not a matter of national security. Was it stupid to nominate Harriet Meirs to take O'Connors's seat on the Supreme Court? We don't know yet, though many legal and/or conservative scholars and commenters appear to think it was an unnecessary risk; it's a question I'd rather learn more about before declaring it so.

Was it wrong to attempt regime change and democratization of Iraq? Seems to me that those who claim it was are not looking very hard at even the proximate effects. If they base their claim on their memory of how the White House "sold" the war (there's always a lot of outraged finger-in-the-face about "This war was sold!" as if any war at any time has been thoughtfully debated in the public square and a plebiscite taken before war was declared), it's a selective memory. I definitely lean toward the "emphatically not a mistake" side, though I recognize that failure and/or unintended consequences are always possible. In those events, as always, we'll have to respond as they come up.

Here's a great tidbit about disagreement within presidential cabinets:

According to John Quincy Adams, at one cabinet meeting late in the Monroe administration Treasury Secretary William Crawford called the president a "damned infernal old scoundrel" and "raised his cane, as if in the attitude to strike." For his part, Monroe "seized the tongs of the fireplace in self defense, applied a retaliatory epithet to Crawford, and told him he would immediately ring for servants and turn him out of the house."

It has little if anything to do with the subject at hand, but it's funny.

"It's fun to share!"

Bear with me here... The above title will seem off-topic for only a minute.

I am tired, so very tired, of children's television programming that attempts to convince children (who are not stupid, just uneducated) that doing the right thing is more fun than doing the thing they want to do.

I've found one short program on Disney that violates this apparently otherwise-inviolable rule: Captain Carlos. In CC, a young boy is hungry. He has some healthful (mistakenly termed "healthy," but that's a post for another day) snack or meal in front of him, but his little sister, who's in league with the Devil, tempts him with junk food. Carlos, however, makes the right choice... and the narrator actually points out that (for example) "Cookies may taste good, but they aren't so good for you" as Carlos scarfs his vegetable soup. It's not very compelling as television, but it has the virtue of being truthful...

...which "It's fun to share!" does not. It's not fun to share when you're three. And it's not fun to take off your shoes in airports when you're thirty-three, or forty-three, or however old the commenter gmat at 6:44 on this post at Belmont Club may be. gmat said, among other things, "The fact is, four years after 9/11, it is still more dangerous, even in Iraq, let alone the rest of the arab world, to be pro-American than to be anti-american. And I'm still taking my shoes off in airports," which might lead us to believe that our goal in Iraq was to feel better rather than to do what we believe is right. As it happens, the United States shares with every other sovereign nation the right (in its first sense) to do what it perceives is right (in its second sense - or I may have these definitions switched) for itself; and as it happens, what we are doing there is also what is right in a sense beyond our own national considerations. We are not acting to oppress; we are acting to create a pied-a-terre for freedom of the individual in a place where that freedom has controlled very little real estate.

The other night I was (again) asking my husband the eternal question, "Do these people actually believe what they say, or are they just saying it because it furthers their agenda in some way?" To wit, does Rangel really believe that Bush is this decade's Bull Connor? I understand he later "clarified" his statement by saying that he meant that "Mr. Bush, like Connor, had become a rallying point for America's blacks." Is that a clarification or a backpedaling? Or merely an acknowledgment that the most vocal sectors of the American black community have lost all sense of history? (I leave aside Major Owens's "'even more diabolical' than Connor" response to Republican requests that Democrats reject the statement).

Does Michael Moore really believe, as he said in spring 2004, that suicide- and car-bombers in Iraq are that nation's "Minutemen"? Or does he believe, as he says in his latest "Mike's Letter," that they're the terrorists we've known them for all along- "Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters" - when his purpose is to lambast Bush for appointing Brown to head FEMA?

And how about Hillary Clinton? Can we make sense of her recent statement at a Washington protest rally, that "we need to break our addiction to foreign oil" by remaining "absolutely firm in our opposition" to drilling in the ANWR? Her solution to the obvious conundrum contained therein: "The answer to our energy challenge does not lie under the plains of the arctic refuge, but in the minds that are ingenious in America." Relying on the appearance of sudden inspiration hardly seems reality-based, much less a point of national policy. In the interim, in these times before hydrogen can be produced economically, before the tremendous and so far insuperable problem of energy storage at least as efficient as that represented by a gas tank has been solved, how else can we wean ourselves from foreign oil besides by producing more oil domestically?

Again, probably a post for another day. For now, let me stand up and say, "Vegetables do not taste as good as chocolate. Doing homework before playing with friends is a complete bore. And it is not 'fun' to share. But some things we do because they're right." One such thing: not scrambling out of Iraq ahead of an election cycle, nor gauging either the importance or the success of our actions there by how popular those actions are.

"Affirm the knight"

My parents are teachers. Now, at any rate. My mother trained as a teacher in college; my dad has become a teacher since his retirement from the Air Force some years back. They're about as dedicated as any parent could hope a teacher would be, and their dedication overflows into their grandparenthood, as well as their continuing parenting of their (very-)grown daughter here.

Recently they gave me a book called Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax. As I have with so many parenting books I've received over my parenting years so far, I thanked them and put it on the shelf - until last night, when I was fresh out of new reading material and needed something, anything, to put me to sleep.

That book was not the right choice. It scared the bejeebers out of me: I railed against the mismatch between kindergarten teachers and their boy students (virtually all K teachers are women and have been trained to do things like speak gently and encourage kids to use lots of color and to draw human figures; boys physically do not hear as well as girls, and their retinas have more "motion-detecting" cells and fewer "identification" cells, such that they tend to draw relatively monochrome pictures of things in motion rather than nice families in their pretty gardens). I boggled at the difficulties of keeping boys interested in art and music, the girls in athletics, math, and science, when a "gender-neutral" approach is the norm. The chapter on teenage sexuality was so horrifying that when I finally fell asleep, it was with my "self-esteem script" for my daughter running through my head. I'm shuddering right now. As Dr. Sax terms it, the teen sex paradigm has changed from the female to the male: even as recently as ten years ago, the female paradigm was more common, in which the girl demanded, and got, at least a verbal and time commitment from the boy before she'd have sex with him (and of course this was back in the day when "having sex" included oral sex, which this book scarily informs me is now "second base" or "equivalent to kissing" to today's teens). The new male paradigm is, as my husband said this morning, a teenage boy's dream: sex with not only no explicit or implied commitment but actually designed and planned to mean a lack of commitment. "Hooking up." Fear it, if you're a parent.

Fear it for your daughters because any fool knows that it isn't all that fun for a girl or woman to perform sexual acts on a boy or man who doesn't give a tinker's damn about her. Fear it for your sons because this is all the warm-up they get in the desperately important "finding a surrogate mother" sweepstakes - let's face it, wives, that's what we are in one vital respect: we are typically our husbands' only truly intimate emotional connection and support besides their moms. And as Dr. Sax points out, single heterosexual men are sicker, unhappier, and shorter-lived than their counterparts with wives or partners.

I'm perhaps halfway through the book so far, and am growing increasingly nervous about the next ten or fifteen years with these kids of ours. How do we teach our daughter that she's "above rubies" and need not "drop to the broadloom" in Mark Steyn's humorous formulation for anyone unless she gets what she wants - love - beforehand? How do we socialize our sons, foster young men who respect women and have an appropriate outlet for their natural aggression?

As one guidance counselor says in the book, you may not be able to turn a bully into a flower child, but you can turn a bully into a knight. Affirm the knight, she says. I'd add that you may not be able to turn a flower child into a truck driver, but you can turn a flower child into an emotional Rock of Gibraltar for all around her.

I want my sons to be manly, my daughter to be womanly. I want them to have courage, to know when it's time to stand up and be counted, to feel deeply but to know when their feelings are not the most important factor. How can I affirm the knight in my sons? I sure hope there are some answers later in the book, because my confidence is at an all-time low right now.

On the other hand, there's this story, courtesy of Instapundit:

When their homes began to sink in Katrina's floodwaters, elders in the quarter here known as Uptown gathered their neighbors to seek refuge at the Samuel J. Green Charter School, the local toughs included.

But when the thugs started vandalizing the place - wielding guns and breaking into vending machines - Vance Anthion put them out, literally tossing them into the fetid waters. Anthion stayed awake at night after that, protecting the inhabitants of the school from looters or worse.

...

In the days after the storm, the Samuel J. Green school also served as their base for helping others in the neighborhood.

They waded through filthy water to bring elderly homebound neighbors bowls of soup, bread and drinks. They helped the old and the sick to the school rooftop, so the Coast Guard could pluck them to safety by helicopter - 18 people in all.

The knight was in the ascendant at that school. There's hope.

For the love of God

I started to title this entry "The wrath of God" but thought better of it; it's too easy to write off a disaster like that witch Katrina as "God's wrath" and stop thinking about it, except, depending on your temperament, to wonder (again) why God allows terrible things to happen, or to wonder why we theists insist that God is Love manifest when terrible things happen.

So instead I'm sending an appeal: for the love of God, for the love of humanity, please don't use this. Don't use this awful tragedy as a smackdown of your favorite Bozo-the-Clown doll. There's plenty of blame, too much blame, to go around: the city and state governments failed their citizenry, some of the citizenry did incredibly foolish things and may cost others their lives, and still other portions of the citizenry are now behaving like rabid dogs and armed two-year-olds, making the horror more horrible. There is no need to begin the accusations so soon. Let's bury the dead first, and pump out the bitter water, and tend to people's hurts. And let's learn: let's learn how to prepare for a foreseeable catastrophe, and how to help others caught up in it. Please. For the love of God.