planes, trains, and automobiles

And for an encore...

Go watch that, then watch a chase scene filmed in most movies of the 50s and 60s with the fast moving scenery next to it. It's funny to consider.

Less funny, but still cool, is the speed of those trains.

and by the way

Probably should have mentioned this when it hit, but the Huckabee clemency issue that came up is supposed to kill his political chances. Personally I thought what killed that was when he raised his hand to the "do you not believe in the theory of evolution?" question in the Republican primaries early on, and I apparently was wrong (or at least, significantly misjudged the viability of either disinterest or direct opposition to intellectualism in Republican politics). I don't think this will either, though it will create some unusual and misleading advertising in the future.

For the present case, my best guess will be that this is a hopeful wish that he will go away so that his base of support will go to Palin instead (based on the hopeful wish that she is somehow LESS offensive than Huckabee to normal, non-GOP base voters). I don't think there's actually that big of a cross-over between those two groups for base support (despite the fact that there's very little difference in actual politics/policies and populist messaging). Perhaps I am wrong there.

As far as the actual event, the pardoning/clemancy powers of executives and parole boards, I suspect the break point on how people reacted to this issue is more based on whether they already supported the pardoning powers of executives to begin with. After the Clinton administration and during my forays into political forums, I started seeing a lot of these discussions and polls over getting rid of pardons with favorable support from conservatives. Which I guess doesn't surprise me. I am not sure why it doesn't surprise me, given that both parties tend toward tough on crime positions or strong state actors over the justice system. But I haven't yet seen what the justification is for it. It sounds like the inverse of the "executing one innocent person" with anti-capital punishment arguments, with the "releasing one guilty person" instead. I'm not persuaded that this is a flaw with our system for a variety of reasons (recidivism rates of violent offenders, which this was not such a case, and more general problems with our ability to process parolees to measurably impact recidivism of crime further). The most persuasive argument is the political manner in which pardons and clemency are sometimes granted. In this particular case, there was a parole board which reviewed the case and approved it, it sounds like it was a ridiculous sentencing with possible racial overtones to it to start with, and the parole and release which may have required some medical assistance to maintain it was handled with our typical graceful incompetence by several state officials and actors after Huckabee's decisions ever took place. So those political calculations of abuse of these powers don't carry the weight that the emotional arguments do. We don't hear anything about the cases where state leniency worked, but where it fails this spectacularly, we hear all about it.

These are not circumstances that will be dissuading people who already were hostile to these executive powers (especially since it turned out to produce several deaths). But for people who see them as necessary, as it appears that our Constitutional drafters did (a curious omission of the populist opposition of conservatives on this and many other issues), I don't think we can fault the decision.

realistically speaking, realism says really?

Milling about political forums online and Afghanistan came up, as things like this often do, and I was asked to explain what the logical problem that Obama created by campaigning on the "good war" theory of Afghanistan and why this shouldn't be so surprising to his supporters.


---- If I agreed that this war was necessary for our national security and interests, yes it would mean that (...support more troops..). I don't. So I would be leaving Afghanistan yesterday if that were possible.

It remains in our interest to combat al Qaeda physically where possible. But I don't see how we couldn't deter the Taliban from allowing institutional support via an international terrorist group without occupying the country(s) that they hold political sway in. The argument that we need to play whack a mole with countries who harbor terrorists has never been persuasive to me (whacking actual terrorists themselves, rather than resistance to occupation forces, is a different issue than their influence over governments and public support within different regions). The argument that we could, in the process of that, introduce "democracy" and that this would improve our national security and international standing is even less impressive. I'm quite sure nobody has instituted democracy and its traditions of human rights protections at the point of a gun in the entire history of the world. The one possible exception is the American Civil War, and one can glance at textbooks written by Southerners glossing over Reconstruction's benefits as oppressive intrusions and the subsequent periods of violent resistance and Jim Crow law to see that even that failed in large measure.

Bottom line conclusion: cut the losses and get the hell out because we should never have stayed in the first place. There was no greater national security interest (or any other sort of state interests, with the possible exception of cornering the opium market, certainly not the fighting of a "drug war") once Bin Laden escaped for the military to stay in the country. Period. We have special operations units and the FBI/CIA/NSA and everybody knows it. I don't see how that isn't or wasn't enough and that wars of empire and outright aggression are needed instead. Fund the necessary intelligence and black operations needed to kill or detain people who actually need killing or detaining because they are threats to international and national security. Moreover, if deterring countries that harbor and fund terrorism was our real and governing issue, then Pakistan and Saudi Arabia would have been among our primary targets back in 2001-03. It looks to me like deterring a particular variety of terrorism is more important, which is hypocritical and hence a valuable recruiting tool for our enemies.

If you assume, as I do, that much of the underlying problem is a sectarian/religious conflict within the Islamic world, then picking sides within that is probably not in our interest. Nudging the winning side toward something like liberal human rights, sure. Making sure it doesn't spillover into wider regional conflicts, sure. Bombing and occupying Muslim countries on the "wrong" side, no. That just paints a target on us.

There's also the matter of the percentage of private contractors being used as "troops". It's higher in Afghanistan than it was in Iraq. I'd rather just pay the actual troops more if we needed more of them. Apparently the evasion of rules of engagement and rule of law are more important still than troop levels. To me that suggests we have bigger problems with our strategy than we could resolve by putting more actual troops in.

The real problem for most people (particularly Obama supporters) is not that we're over there still, or even committing to be over there for longer. It's that this wasn't exactly a surprise but has become so. He addressed the Afghanistan/Pakistan status versus Iraq deliberately and at multiple occasions during his endless campaign stretch. Apparently people were not listening? I am not sure what his logic was of equating "not Iraq then or now" with "more Afghanistan today". I think I can buy the argument that "not Iraq" would have helped "more Afghanistan" 7 or 8 years ago. I didn't understand how that situation, where we were using special operations and air power to annihilate or capture targets of interest and/or support Afghani rebels and ground troops against a militant regime with minimal ability to rally the public to resist, equates to the situation now, where we are using ground forces to occupy a nation and drone strikes to attack positions of interest in a low intensity war setting fought against people who are now capable of being rallied by militant regimes because of years of occupation and the local corruption we replaced the militancy with. Really, the only way this was a winnable and "just cause" is if there was a legitimate regime installed and supported by public considerations freely that is being repressed by militant forces of terrorism (from either within or without the country, Pakistan is a better analogy for this than Afghanistan). Since it is an illegitimate regime supported by us or narco-terrorist dollars, it's not a winnable scenario.

The next domino is that we're now again subscribers to the domino theory. That somehow abandoning Afghanistan, even the limited half-assed solution Obama is using of timetables, abandons Pakistan (or more importantly Pakistan's nuclear arsenal) to the fate of being overthrown by militant Islamists. I don't follow how that argument made any sense in the 1950s and 60s when it was used to get us in and then keep us in Vietnam for a decade. It really makes no sense with a government that has a modernized army and a modestly powerful central government that it wouldn't fight back or accept assistance to fight back against attempts to overthrow it. If Canada were suddenly overthrown by French-Canadian separatists and lets say the population of parts of Louisiana started making noises and throwing molotov cocktails at the rest of us, we wouldn't fight back? Seems to me like the realistic scenario is to tell Pakistan to deal with its own problems and get its own house in order and then ask what, if any, support it needs from us to do that. It doesn't seem insensible that they would want us to stay in Afghanistan (except that their military doesn't really want us to put more troops in any more than the American public did), but this is because it serves THEIR national interests by shifting the responsibility for fighting to OUR military.

Therefore, the best case scenario is to leave Afghanistan, let the Pakistanis deal with their own internal security problems, lean on them and India to inch closer to some settlements over Kashmir and their other regional differences to give them some breathing room in which to do so, and return militarily to the region only if the Taliban again becomes an internationalist problem by supporting terrorist organisations (which we could then target over the Taliban itself). We can certainly make strong statements about human rights abuses and offer whatever means we find appropriate to nudge the extremist philosophy they use to govern toward the modern world (be that threats or money/aid with very big strings attached to it, like for example information on militant terrorist groups operating in or near Afghanistan). The problem is not Afghanistan. It's international terrorism. Until, or unless, this understanding becomes a central feature in our national strategies, we'll keep having these endless commitments of troops in places that they can do no good for safekeeping our national security and sovereignty.

The full problem for Americans, especially those that supported Obama last year more fully than I, is that they didn't ever hear him explain what the justification for military operations in Afghanistan was and nobody could be bothered to ask. "Not Iraq" is no longer good enough.

(I include myself in those who didn't bother to ask, Afghanistan was not nearly as important an issue for 1 as the general global economy/trade or the terrorism issue more generally simply because whether we are there or not people will be there killing each other in various forms and ill-conceived purposes for violence and 2, I personally didn't expect that whatever the real reason given was, we would be leaving anytime soon either. "Tough on crime" laws are more likely to be overturned than the US leaving a war like this mid-battle)

just passing through, nothing to see here

Play that funky music

I can't argue with the top ten or so. Purple Haze should definitely be up there also though (since Zeppelin/Page has two, I assume there wasn't a rule requiring the best from a single artist).

The sad part is more that I can't argue with it. Either because there isn't much out there now to compete with it or because I don't know enough to challenge collective wisdom of crowds on musical judgments like these. My suspicion is that things written 30-40 years ago with some staying power and popularity with a broad range of people, who didn't grow up hearing them to develop some sort of strong irrational emotional attachment to a particular song, are just good works. There's a few that snuck in from say 20 years ago (Nirvana, Metallica, GNR), but it doesn't seem like the musical talents stayed in guitars for this generation. At least not in the same way. Could be the drummers, or it could be that too many people in music went the beats route and don't actually play anything at all. Dunno.

The other possibility for argument purposes is that these sorts of lists have a feedback effect. They've been doing them for several years at least through internet discussions, forums, and magazine articles. The arguments for or against certain performers and performances are well entrenched. New people to the arguments, rather than investigating their own fancy sophisticated sensibilities on the matter, may simply adopt the tried and true consensus opinions.

since nobody asked

Tiger won't get out of the news. Which annoys me.

My "double standard" approach is that marital problems and infidelity are things best handled by the people involved and best aired and settled in private. The problem with that approach is that powerful or famous women aren't as known to be establishing harems of sexual consorts alongside their more traditional relationships (with a few possible exceptions in the "sex symbol" category). If they were, the sort of blind eye I have for it would make for a pretty fair approach, somewhere close to how Europe deals with the issue with a level of sex positivity and some respect for individual decision making. That, of course, isn't America.

Here would be my argument. If one spouse is displeased with their mutual and non-mutual sexual arrangements, they can file for grievances in their divorce (assuming they didn't agree to a marriage contract which had specifically listed the possibilities of "non-traditional" sexual arrangements and/or limited their damages in that case). I don't think that problem in particular has much of anything to do with the public interest. The actual public interest I can conceive of is to create environments where human beings regardless of gender are not treated as mere sexual consorts as much as possible, or at least, as much as is desirable for people involved (it is always possible that some people like being desired sexually more than they desire other intimate attachments, though this seems more true for men than women). Still I don't yet see how castigating famous people for sleeping around is helpful and necessary to creating that sort of positive environment. It seems more or less to simply provide normal people with analogous situations to their own marital problems, verifying pre-existing realities, rather than upsetting this established order. There are probably ways we can cover things like this that would actually challenge the status quo of a male dominated sexual environment, for instance asking questions of consent, moderation, and toleration.

Of course the other issue is that Tiger is basically a public figure for hitting a golf ball. If he were communicating a vibrant public message, from that public forum we've given him for no apparent reason, that men should be faithful husbands and then were discovered "hiking the Appalachian trail" in Argentina, then I'd be a lot more concerned. Hypocrisy, or double standards generally, to me is a bigger character flaw than infidelity in others. If the infidelity is predictable or consistent behavior, it can be avoided as a topic of interest or a problem generally. When fidelity is promised it should be from a consistent arrangement so as to be a predictable expectation. When it is promised and not delivered, it is a problem, but only because it creates unpredictability in a potentially dangerous and uninteresting way. I would be of the opinion that some forms of unpredictability seems essential to a long-term relationship. This sort, which is predicated on breaking very strong contractual obligations, is not so helpful.

But it also doesn't yet seem to be any of our business to help resolve the situation either so our attention is wasteful.

this is not a race issue

uh, why is this a black thing?

Because last I checked, the demographics relating to civil rights for homosexuals had a generational gap for everybody. It pretty much is old people versus their grandchildren, or in some cases, children, regardless of racial or ethnic factors. There are religious factors which impact tolerance here, but since younger people are more apt to leave religious institutions they have strong disagreements with (most commonly over views on abortion and homosexuals; Catholics/fundamentalists with birth control) than people who've been in those institutions their entire lives, there again, these are generational gaps.

So to summarize: blacks are no more likely than any other ethnic group to oppose gay marriage rights. When controlled for factors like religious affiliations and attendance rates, socio-economic status, and so on, and what comes out at the end is a group of people who look just like everybody else on their stance toward gays: old people retain their bias and younger people don't share in it. This was studied to death in the wake of the California ballot last year with the supposed problem that all of Obama's minority voters had voted against gay marriage. It was in fact, older largely religious white people who had (goaded by well-funded scare tactics from the Mormon church and others). The "angle" being used here is pointless nonsense to justify a headline that doesn't alienate the core readers of newspapers: older white people. Who are in fact, on this issue among a few others of late importance to the nation, :cough, health care and social security reform :cough, the problem.

The "rift" story is one of grandfather and maybe father versus progeny. Please stop patronizing us with this illusion that it is somehow only black people who suffer from having older bigots in their voting ranks.

updating Swiss laws

The Swiss

Looks like one argument being accused of the "for" banning minarets is feminist organisations in Switzerland. I'm not sure how vehement they were in France behind the burqa ban there, but indeed many anti-Islamic factions do adhere to some sort of feminist philosophy (similarly there are many such factions with significant opposition to Christianity, for much the same reasons of course. Some of which are quite legitimate concerns regarding patriarchal demands upon women without consensual, either implied or affirmed, arrangements). I don't think that this argument, that the legal use of minarets is a creeping version of shariah law that will terminate in burqas being imposed on Swiss women, is so convincing that it could and did sway millions of voters. Something did, and it might indeed have swayed some women in Switzerland by the appearance of polling data (or this could have merely been a pre-arranged bias by Swiss women as a whole against Islamic traditions). This wasn't a smoking gun explanation for me.

I don't follow the ability of a ban on architectural design or even a noise ordinance constraint (which they did not need or attempt) would matter and cast the Swiss people down some slippery slope to Arabian fundamentalist laws that most Muslim communities do not seek to subscribe to anyway (see: most of SE Asian Muslims, Thailand separatists being a critical exception, and most American or Canadian Muslims even living classically within ethnic and religious enclaves like in Hamtramck). This still seems mostly like intolerance and fear mongering, which are not justifications for restrictions on liberties. Even the liberties I disagree with or find otherwise flawed and wacky, like the freedoms of religious worship, I find myself compelled to defend against such defamation and stupefying intolerance from majority rules which do not comprehend them. Where those religious practices infringe upon other individual liberties, such as by repressing women or freedom of speech or commanding the political will of other religious and secular associations, I find sufficient reasons to oppose them. Constructing a mosque is no more offensive to me than the construction of a church or a synagogue or even the erection of Christmas trees by city officials. Big fucking deal.

In other words, I still don't understand what the basis for the law was. It was further argued that there was a grievance over the Swiss government's dealings with international state and non-state actors involved in terrorism, which is fine as far as that goes as a grievance. But I still don't see how that should lead the Swiss populace to conclude that they should penalize Muslims living within Switzerland. Seems like their elected officials would be the problem. Quite frankly, even if that argument is plausible as a justifiable reason, the case and manner in which it was made there, not so much (that is: by complaining about Iranian political figures and imams being slimy amoralists with links to terrorism and somehow linking this as an action some years old to modern Swiss thinking that was hidden by polling data prior to the referendum and suggesting that the Swiss are responding and reacting to some sort of internal fears over Islamic radicals within their borders rather than from without doesn't seem like a productive chain of reason to make the case.)

We did the same sort of thing through the 60s, 70s, and 80s with a variety of terrorist organs in the Middle East, including the state actors of Saddam Hussein and the precursors of the Afghani troubles (including Bin Laden). It's not exactly a new form of dissatisfaction with secret government acts that protect their internal state and external corporate business at the expense of others. Really, this practice of extortion and terrorism goes back to Attila or the Barbary Pirates. So while we might certainly find it abhorrent for nation-states to do shady backroom deals with unpleasant characters, it's not exactly a 'hold the presses' news story.

And it's certainly not worth the public attempting to take out that frustration on a disinterested and politically disenfranchised third party (in this case, immigrant Muslims in Switzerland). It looks like it'll probably be overturned by appeals to Swiss or European courts and previous laws and restrictions on religious freedom anyway as there is no danger to public safety or health that the architectural design of a mosque poses (just as there isn't for a cathedral or church bell tower), nor is it somehow a dangerous symbol of "religious superiority", another argument of "creeping shariah". Nor is a church design somehow a religiously significant structure either under the argument that a minaret is somehow a pernicious use of Islamic creed (note that churches do not all thus subscribe to the same design and nor do all mosques or other Islamic community symbols), and as such, cathedrals and churches could be argued against as the same sort of political message of supremacy when they are removed from otherwise historical value or a bland office building design (there I go again, demanding that people seek religious equality if only to protect their own religious institutions against creeping governmental agency). It is plausible that a burqa might be such a symbol, if it were imposed as a requirement against the consent and willingness of women who must wear them, and that a campaign against clothing regulation on the part of religious authorities might be appropriate. Though not, in my opinion, by instituting a comparable government ban in the opposite direction and sentiment. Far be it for me to disagree with a French idea....