A week from tonight, Lindsay and I will be drunk. And also married. The last month—which included the start of my MIT job—has therefore left hardly a breath to be had. So I think it prudent to run through some highlights:
We booked our hotel and a bunch of activities for the honeymoon in Juneau. Had John McCain chosen Sarah Palin before we chose Alaska, honestly we might not have gone. Which would have been a shame. But such is the election season: I could easily imagine this conversation having taken place if the timing was different . . . “What about Alaska for the honeymoon? Actually, nevermind. Not with all the hubbub about Palin.” That said, as relaxing as the honeymoon will be, I’ll still be the one asking people at the next table what they think about their governor.
MIT gave me a digital SLR, a Canon. Because I didn’t yet have a safe place to keep it in my office, I kept it at home for a while and got a chance to play with it. The quality of its photos are pretty stunning:
Lindsay and I have had to make about half a dozen trips to Paper Source, as we’re designing and printing our own wedding menus, donation announcements (we’re giving money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society rather than distribute favors to the guests), and the program:
But one of these trips to Paper Source led to the awesome impulse buy of adhesive, re-placeable 8.5″x11″ pieces of chalkboard. We stuck one on our freezer door:
I’m falling behind (again) on Identity Theory work. Typically I sit down for a couple hours on a weekend and read through all the fiction submissions and then distribute the better ones to assistant editors for their thoughts. But wedding planning has pretty much spoken for every recent weekend. That and home improvement—receiving wedding gifts has necessarily forced us to throw some old things out, pass along nice things to Lindsay’s sister, or generally reorganize
Lindsay had her bachelorette party last weekend. The various husbands and boyfriends got together to play Rock Band all night while the wives and girlfriends took Lindsay out. It was far and away the worst hangover I’ve ever seen in someone. I shouldn’t have laughed so much.
The Red Sox are in the playoffs again. And I’m sad to say I barely noticed. That fact is probably the best illustration of how I’ve lost track of time during the wedding planning and job change: I’ve always measured out the year with the rhythms of the baseball season—April through October is the meaty part of life, while November through March is just Christmas and cold—but this year it’s been about countdowns. The countdown to August 25th (my first day at MIT), the countdown to October 4th (the wedding), and of course the countdown to November 4th (the election).
Speaking of the latter, another reason I’ve missed the baseball season is Countdown. At either 8pm or 10pm each night, we take a break and watch MSNBC, and now that Rachel Maddow has her show at 9pm, that’s two hours Lindsay and I are spending on politics. We may very well stop watching after the election—we’re very aware that Countdown, for us at least, is there for cathartic reasons, to watch Keith Olbermann call people out on lies because we’re so tired of being lied to by people in government. Being lied to isn’t new, and Olbermann very much plays favorites and distorts the truth himself, but the stakes are so much bigger this time of year and the lies come so much more naturally, disturbingly so, and are in some cases so petty, that at the end of the day just before bed we need to watch someone fluent in the language of indignation.
My guess is I won’t post again until after the honeymoon. So if anybody has questions you want me to take to Alaska, let me know. And when I post again, my left hand will be a few ounces heavier.
From the NY Times, an article about a country club in Phoenix that still doesn’t allow women in its formal dining room:
Next came anonymous e-mail messages, sent to some female members of the club, deriding Mr. Brown and the Van Sitterts, and suggesting, among other things, “you and your type needs to go,” and a Web site was set up with some members’ names and phone numbers under the title “Femi Nazis here in Phoenix,” according to a complaint filed by Mr. Brown in the matter.
John Yoo’s testimony is like watching your football team, down by a field goal with a minute left, give up three straight four-yard running plays. It’s so frustrating for your side that you end up cheering for your linemen to punch the running back in the nuts, just cuz.
And for good measure, “Could the President order a suspect buried alive?”
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a sweeping ban on handguns in the nation’s capital violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
[. . .]
The National Rifle Association said the high court had given it the ammunition to challenge other cities’ gun-control measures.
…is its ability to convince citizens to vote beyond—and sometimes against—their own self-interest.
The New York Times published an editorial today enumerating the poor defenses by the executive branch of its own economic policies.
Mr. Bush boasted about 52 consecutive months of job growth during his presidency. What matters is the magnitude of growth, not ticks on a calendar. The economic expansion under Mr. Bush — which it is safe to assume is now over — produced job growth of 4.2 percent. That is the worst performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945.
Mr. Bush also talked approvingly of the recent unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. A low rate is good news when it indicates a robust job market. The unemployment rate ticked down last month because hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the work force altogether. Worse, long-term unemployment, of six months or more, hit 17.5 percent. We’d expect that in the depths of a recession. It is unprecedented at the onset of one.
What struck me while reading the editorial was that access to accurate statistics has consistently convinced me to vote beyond my own self-interest. This November will be my tenth trip to the polls, and in every one, my decision has been based on issues that have little to nothing to do with my everyday life. I’m financially stable, know only two people deployed to Iraq—and in support positions at that—have excellent private health insurance, and take the bus to work. But on those issues (the economy, the war, health care, and dependence on foreign oil), I have strong opinions on what the next President should do. It must sound pedantic, but there’s no possible way for me to have those opinions, and have them based somewhat on reality, without access to good information. It’s the one thing that achieves the major (stated) goals of both contemporary liberals and contemporary conservatives: to hold those in power accountable for their promises and actions, and to let people make decisions for themselves.
That’s why I’ve considered President Johnson’s signing of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 to be as important as his signing of the Civil Rights Act two years earlier, and why suppression of documents—whether by someone fearful of being charged with spying on their fellow citizens or by a candidate afraid of what their previously undisclosed financial ties will reveal—is inevitably harmful in a society whose power, ultimately, even if only every four or eight years, rests with voters.
I’ve always been the slightest bit wobbly on the death penalty. I’d call myself 95% against, 5% for. I’m against it as a Christian. I’m sympathetic to it on the grounds that, in the search for truth, the death penalty offers prosecutors leverage in those few cases where life in prison isn’t enough of a threat. But I’m primarily against it because no justice system is perfect. To quote the Economist again: “[V]ictims pay an irreversible price for miscarriages of justice.”
In the United States, I’d venture to say the death penalty won’t last another 50 years. Every argument in favor of it is undermined by its—pardon the term—execution. It hasn’t been shown to reduce crime, undermining its supposed deterrent value. It doesn’t offer the expected catharsis, undermining its attractiveness to families of victims—not to mention the reprehensible idea of state-sponsored vengeance. The appeals process is more expensive than lifetime incarceration, undermining the argument that life imprisonment is akin to a death sentence so why not get it over with to save money. And with newly published research positing that lethal injection may cause excruciating pain—albeit in silence—there no longer exists a method of execution that is fully agreed upon to avoid the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
But as that same Economist article discusses, the Japanese death penalty is abhorent for those same reasons, yet to another degree altogether. The Japanese conviction rate (for all cases, not just death penalty ones) is an unjustifiable 99%. Defendants in those cases—until a small change to the system takes place next year—are judged by three judges, not by a jury of peers. And even when that small change takes place, those jurors can convict with a simple majority: unanimity is not necessary to send a defendant to death as it is in the United States even for, say, a class E felony. Finally, executions are carried out by hanging in Japan and in complete secret. The public does not know the date of the execution and, far more perversely, neither does the convict, until about an hour before it is to be carried out, sometimes after years in jail following sentencing.
The impetus for the Economist’s short article on the subject is that Japan is starting to rethink its execution laws, as well it should. It has come so far since World War II in undoing a reputation as a country remarkably cruel in its treatment of enemies, foreign and domestic. 95% of me hopes that the U.S., as a close friend since those days in the 1940′s, will clear a path for Japan to follow.
…a line from this week’s Economist about why value needs to be placed on endangered species—they call it “sustainable exploitation” (a turn of phrase that I love for both its directness and its irony). Their argument is that trade bans do nothing to protect endangered species—in fact, bans often worsen the problem by increasing the trade value of those species for people who are willing to circumvent the ban. Think of the War on Drugs if you need a parallel. It’s better, the Economist argues, to allow that trade to happen. It’s better to breed an endangered animal in captivity, even to use it for profit, than it is to allow that species to be wiped out. The biggest obstacles to lifting bans on these grounds are animal rights groups themselves:
Animal-welfare groups are more concerned with harm to individual animals than with the survival of entire species, so they do not want any animals killed at all. Conservation groups worry that sustainable killing is hard to sell to their members. A disappearing species is good for fund-raising; blood on your hands is not.
However, I also learned the ultimate truth about every war since civilization began: wars are fought by the poor and won by the rich.
A soldier from Somerville wrote an overwhelming piece, published today. His point is that, despite the political support soldiers receive in contrast to Vietnam vets, their needs upon return to civilian life are still as neglected as those from previous generations. He writes of friends who died, and it’s only halfway through the article that you realize they died after returning from Iraq. And he writes eloquently of the social contract with its soldiers that America is still unable or unwilling to honor:
I am proud of my time in the Army, but I also can’t help but be saddened and frustrated that, like tens of thousands of others, I felt the need to throw myself into imminent danger just to have the opportunities that others in America take for granted. I get enraged thinking about my friends and family who are backed into a corner by society and then face the choice of destruction by their surroundings, their own hand, or by higher powers who hold a carrot in front of them and get some to commit to indentured servitude; a life that will greatly help them in the future, provided they live.
BOSTON, Feb. 1 — Two men charged in connection with placing electronic advertisements for a cartoon around Boston, sending the city into a panic when people feared they were bombs, pleaded not guilty today, responding to the charges with grins and buffoon-like comments.
The Times called Berdovsky and Stevens buffoons because they responded to reporters’ questions with non-answers. Give the two some credit: they called out reporters’ bullshit. Journalists repeatedly asked for Berdovsky’s and Stevens’ comments on the case after the two (and their lawyer) had repeatedly said they would not comment on the case.
Press: What do you think about the case?
Defendants: On the advice of our lawyer, we won’t comment on the case.
Press: What do you think about the case?
Defendants: We won’t comment on the case. Pretty much the furthest thing from the case would be 1970′s haircuts. We can comment on those.
Press: But what do you think about the case?
And they get called the buffoons?
It’s a damn good thing nobody died yesterday. With the way the media and city officials are calling for prison terms—for nothing done wrong—we’re a fatality away from reliving parts of Boston’s Sacco-Vanzetti trials.
Again, totally embarrassed of my town and especially of my mayor. From Daily Kos in a post called “Morons in Boston”:
Let’s get a few facts straight on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force sign fiasco:
Attorney General Martha Coakley needs to shut up and stop using the word “hoax.” There was no hoax. Hoax implies Turner Networks and the ATHF people were trying to defraud or confuse people as to what they were doing. Hoax implies they were trying to make their signs look like bombs. They weren’t. They made Lite-Brite signs of a cartoon character giving the finger.
It bears repeating again that Turner, and especially Berdovsky, did absolutely nothing illegal. The devices were not bombs. They did not look like bombs. They were all placed in public spaces and caused no obstruction to traffic or commerce. At most, Berdovsky is guilty of littering or illegal flyering.
The “devices” were placed in ten cities, and have been there for over two weeks. No other city managed to freak out and commit an entire platoon of police officers to scaring their own city claiming they might be bombs. No other mayor agreed to talk to Fox News with any statement beyond “no comment” when spending the day asking if this was a “terrorist dry run.”
There is nothing, not a single thing, remotely suggesting that Turner or the guerilla marketing firm they hired intended to cause a public disturbance. Many have claimed the signs were “like saying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Wrong. This was like taping a picture of a fire to the wall of a theater and someone freaked out and called the fire department.
The FCC can’t pull a private cable network’s license, Mayor Hyperbole McFuckwit.
Vietnam vet receives Medal of Honor for valor inâ¦Cambodia http://t.co/9EMHJUQi2012/05/16
Oof yeah, just read any Aust.-Hung. stories MT @pedropizano: 15) Reporting on the Balkans in peacetime can be just as challenging as wartime 2012/05/16
And when I post again, my left hand will be a few ounces heavier.
