July 2003 Archives

Moorish Girl points to an article on the dearth of foreign literature translated into English.

Wired News: Whale of a Miscalculation

"A genetic study of whales suggests many more have been slaughtered in the whaling frenzy that began in the 18th century than previously believed, Harvard University researchers said. The study also shows whale populations have not recovered enough to allow hunting to resume."

I suppose that the admission that I have always been a "Save the Whales" kind of guy about sums up my politics.

Wired News: Hackers Lose a Patron Saint

"If there is a heaven, the angels are in for a hell of a time when Jude Milhon, the Internet's real and very earthy patron saint of hacking, shows up."

Milhon was known not only for coining the term "CypherPunk" but also for her Internet book Hacking the Wetware: The NerdGirl's Pillow Book.

Wired has an interview.

I have just spent an enjoyable half hour reading some of Unbillable Hours' back issues. I liked his observations about film music: as far as I can tell, the movies are all that is keeping classical music alive. Not that there isn't an audience for museum pieces, but the traditional sources of support for classical composers -- other than films -- mostly seem to have dried up by the beginning of the twentieth century. Most new orchestral music seems to be written for the movies.

A Savvy Queen Marketed Chastity

"The use of the royal image to assert, consolidate and maintain her grip on power is explored in "Elizabeth," a fascinating exhibition that runs through Sept. 14 at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, near London."

Four hundred years later, the Queen still has good P.R.

F.C.C. Media Rule Blocked in House in a 400-to-21 Vote

"The vote, which was 400 to 21, sets the stage for a rare confrontation between the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House, because there is strong support in the Senate for similar measures, which seek to roll back last month's decision by the Federal Communications Commission to raise the limit on the number of television stations a network can own."

Send in the Peace Corps

"The question of how to reorganize the armed forces should be turned on its head: instead of making the military better at humanitarian assignments (in Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps Liberia), humanitarian groups should strive to become more comfortable in military situations."

I agree with the author that we were too quick to pull our Peace Corps Volunteers out of longstanding programs in Jordan and Morocco. Refocusing the Peace Corps' mission from longterm development to military relief would be a mistake, however, and not just because it would increase the danger to volunteers. Frankly, the thought of turning the Peace Corps into an adjunct of the Bush administration's military adventurism revolts me.

Unbillable Hours' double-blog weekend should put anyone in a New York frame of mind. Not to be missed are the pictures of the Cloisters.

I am rapidly becoming a fan of the National Geographic channel. Rachel and I just finished watching a program about a pygmy hunting expedition in the heart of the Congo rain forest. The narrator first accompanied a primate researcher on a tour of the territory where she studies chimpanzees. He and a musicologist who has studied pygmy music for 17 years then joined the pygmies--men and women--on a hunting trip through the jungle. Amazingly enough, the pygmies eat only one kind of leaf in the jungle; the others are toxic as a natural defense against insects. The pygmies hunting technique is to set up a large net in a circle, and then drive the animals into the nets. For the first five days, the hunters were forced to subsist on manioc root, since they were not able to find game, and the narrator nearly ruined his relationship with them by sneaking a tin of sardines. They were rewarded on the fifth day with a catch of porcupine and a couple of other animals unique to the jungle, which they roasted over the fire and served with nut sauce. The program concluded with the traditional songs of the group after a successful hunt.

Despite the damp, the parasites, and the insects, I find myself asking -- when am I going to Africa?

I used to look at the body of literature as a vast plain spread out before me, where I was free to wander wherever I pleased. It feels now as though I am stocking a small room, and each new book leaves less room for the next.

I suppose that a growing sense of how time is in short supply is an inevitable consequence of growing older, and that one grows to appreciate more with each passing year the importance of making intelligent choices about how to spend it. In my case, however, this sense competes with a somewhat cavalier approach to life's organizational tasks.

The baby has begun to show marked tastes in music. First, she likes brass. Lots of it. This means that she also has a taste for jazz. In addition, she's a sucker for the folky Quebecois rythms of La Bottine Souriante.

Christopher Lydon :

'It's only the blog that makes his wife a little jealous. "You have to follow your passion on this," Ed Cone said. "You spend time on stuff you love, and good things happen." '

It is important to keep a sense of priorities about the things one loves, however.

Fool.com:

"My father used to tell me that I could trust someone who claimed they were not an expert but offered what knowledge they had, much more than I could trust someone that claimed to be an expert but never shared how they achieved their success."

I have an oral argument tomorrow in U.S. District Court, so I am out of the blogging loop for another day or two.

Ralph Nader Says Bush Impeachable on Iraq War

"He urged the nine Democratic presidential hopefuls to attack Bush on these points, adding Democrats are showing an 'unwillingness and inability to go after the principal vulnerability of Bush, which are the corporate crimes, fraud and abuse that has swept the country.'

"In many ways, this was light criticism of Bush by Nader. He has said the war in Iraq developed from 'messianic militaristic determination turned by a closed mind, facilitated by a cowering Congress and opposition Democrat Party and undeterred by a probing press.'"

The New York Times reported the same story, but toned it down considerably.

1947 Diary Found in Truman Library (washingtonpost.com)

"In a loose-leaf entry dated July 21, Truman wrote:

"The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."

It is a shame to read Harry S Truman spouting off like just another cheap, small-town Southern bigot.

Gayle and I went to see the Shakespeare Theatre's production of Ghosts last night, and found it to be one of the company's rare disappointments. In a nod to lead actress Jane Alexander's former NEA chairmanship, Osvald becomes a painter of shocking nudes. Rather than contracting congenital syphilis from his dissolute father, Osvald succumbs to AIDs contracted in his wild life as a New York painter. This heavy-handed attempt to "update" the play and make it "relevant" reduces Mrs. Alving's moral dilemma to incoherence: there no longer appears to be any connection between her acquiescing in the immoral and abusive life her husband led and the heavy price her son pays. One thing this production did accomplish, however, was to awaken in me a desire to pick up the play and read it again after 15 years.

I saw a chilling PBS documentary two nights ago on the descent of Liberia into chaos. The most disturbing part of the story was perhaps the rise and fall of Samuel Taylor Doe, the master sergeant with an eighth grade education who seized power in a military coup and then was brutally deposed some years later by Charles Taylor's rebels. Memorable scenes included Doe's utter incapacity to answer foreign journalists' questions about his plans after he seized power, his appearances with Ronald Reagan at a time when the U.S. found him a useful pawn in the war on Communism, and his grisly end after he was betrayed, his ears and genitals were chopped off, and he was put on public display to die a slow and painful death. Doe apparently did not suffer more than thousands of Liberians under his despotic rule and the ensuing civil war, but his suffering was particularly vivid both because of its contrast with his previous state and because it was captured so starkly on television.

The broader theme of the piece seemed to be that even when Liberia was a showpiece of African independence, the U.S. descended founders and leaders of the country never managed to reconcile with the indigenous Liberians, leading ultimately to the countries' descent into despotism and anarachy.

I managed to catch the question and answer period of a lecture on North African zawiya -- or religious brotherhoods -- at the Middle East Institute. One of the more interesting points was that many of the Moroccan dynasties began as zawiya. Coincidentally, I began to read about their modern role in Morocco in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea's A Street in Marrakech. Although I saw many maributs -- or saint's tombs -- while I was in Morocco, I lived there in complete ignorance of the complex societies that exist around them, about which I am only now beginning to learn.

Losing

"It is frequently said that the only lawyers who do not lose cases are lawyers who do not try cases."

Muslims in U.S. Feel Targeted By Anti-Terror Business Policies (washingtonpost.com)

"The controversy reflects a new concern rippling through Muslim and Arab American communities, already on edge because of hate crimes and a law enforcement crackdown since the 2001 terror attacks. Now some Muslims say they fear that businesses are singling them out unfairly in an effort to comply with U.S. anti-terrorism measures."

reviewjournal.com -- News: CIVIL LIBERTIES: Disadvantaged

"Many Las Vegas lawyers, however, say there is an emerging pattern of intimidation and excessive force, with casino security, state gaming officers and the Metropolitan Police Department often working in concert to trample constitutional rights, civil liberties and gaming regulations to deter advantage gamblers from playing at local properties."

[via Unbillable Hours]

I attended a fascinating lecture at the Middle East Institute today by Jean Abinader of the Arab American Institute. In the course of an hour, Mr. Abinader discussed many of the stereotypes and preconceptions that color both popular discourse and national policymaking in the United States. For example, contrary to popular perceptions, most Arab Americans are Christian not Muslim (a reflection in part of declining Christian communities in Arab countries). Moreover, only 20 percent of Muslims in America are Arabs; Arabs are far outnumbered by South Asians and African Americans. Arab Americans have made a point of distancing themselves from the despotic regimes of the Middle East, and have not traditionally thought of themselves as a minority. In fact, most Arabs in America do not think of themselves as Arabs at all, but as Egyptians, Lebanese, Moroccans, Syrians, etc. (Many associate the label "Arab" with Nasser's discredited pan-Arabism.) Increasingly since 9/11, however, Arabs have found themselves consigned to minority status and facing many of the same problems that other minorities have faced in this country. At the same time, the community is coming to grips with the fact that if they want to have a political impact in the United States, they need to come together, and that the label Arab-American is one under which they can unite to pursue their common interests and influence U.S. policy. On a local level, AAI is pursuing legislation to preserve civil liberties in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

Canadian singer and teacher Peter Shaw, whom I am honored to call a good friend, was recently interviewed by Australian radio about his life as an Australian expatriate in Canada for the past 34 years. Peter has a one-man mission to educate Canadians (and some Americans) about Australia. He says that the question he is most often asked is whether Australians fear the poisonous snakes, but he is forced to answer that the only snakes he has seen are in zoos.

Ernie the Attorney points to tips on managing your email.

I know that I am tired when I do not want to watch more than the first half of the Graduate (showing tonight on A&E). I got as far as Dustin Hoffman lazing in the swimming pool after his first (hilariously embarrassing) tryst with the sultry Ann Bancroft. Much of the rest of the evening has been spent lulling the baby to sleep, and now it's almost time for me to sleep also. My wife is not so lucky; she's likely to be up half the night with the baby.

Our Man in Jazz

"In 1962, approached by city fathers about a jazz festival in the pre-Civil Rights Act South, Wein observed dryly, "You know, Duke Ellington is accustomed to being treated as royalty wherever he goes. He stays in the finest hotels. But I understand that your hotels are segregated and will not accept blacks as guests." He noted that many jazz bands were integrated. The city fathers agreed the time was not yet ripe for a New Orleans jazz festival. In 1968 they came back to him, discovered his wife was black, and instead hired Wein's former colleague Willis Conover."

Gene Santoro with a taut review of the autobiography of legendary jazz promoter George Wein.

Ashcroft Aide Under New Scrutiny "The report criticized the prolonged detentions and occasional physical abuse of illegal immigrants with no clear ties to terrorism, and it generated headlines from Australia to Ireland that spoke of the "unduly harsh" conditions." [via New York Times: National]

According to the New York Times, Inspector General Glenn Fines has attempted to shed some light on the Justice Department's detention of illegal immigrants following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  While Mr. Fines' report has riled conservatives, it has drawn worldwide and Congressional attention to the harsh conditions under which the detainees are held.  The report did not go so far as to criticize Attorney General John Ashcroft or other top officials by name.

After the fireworks, we came back inside and watched Boston's celebration on television. Boston had the Boston Pops, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Lee Ann Rimes, with a much more traditional Independence Day program than Washington, including a stirring rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. One thing that was quite remarkable was how much Rachel obviously enjoyed the Sousa marches and other band pieces. The fireworks, which were launched from barges in the Charles River, were decidedly more spectacular, and the musical accompaniment better choreographed.

I have just passed a lovely 38th birthday, the first in the company of both my wife and my daughter, now eight weeks old. I received telephone calls from my in-laws, my sister, my parents, my best friend in Alabama, and my brother. Gayle and Rachel gave me a burr coffee grinder -- which grinds to eighteen different grades -- and a new coffee maker with a thermos rather than a hot plate, so that the coffee stays hot but does not burn. Gayle cooked a shrimp and sausage pasta salad for dinner, and we had marble cake and chocolate chip ice cream. The three of us watched the Chieftains, complete with step dancers, a musical salute to composer John Williams, and Dolly Parton on television, and then we stepped into the street in front of our house to see the Wheaton fireworks.

Six Detainees Soon May Face Military Trials
New York Times: Politics: "President Bush set in motion the process that officials say will soon lead to the first use of military tribunals by the U.S. in more than 50 years."

The credibility of the Administration's claim that military tribunals are appropriate in these cases is perhaps best judged by the credibility of its claim that the war in Iraq was fought because Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- which have yet to be found. Any such subversion of the judiciary as use of military tribunals should be subjected to vigorous skepticism.

Dell to Stop Using Prison Workers

"Responding to concerns from both customers and environmental advocates, Dell Computer announced yesterday that it would no longer rely on prisons to supply workers for its computer recycling program."

A story like this always causes me to do a double take: "Wait a minute; I didn't know that Dell was using prison labor in the first place!" A few years ago it was fashionable to criticize the Chinese for their reliance on prison labor, but the dirty secret was that we have our own prison-industrial complex, in the words of Jesse Jackson. Reliance on prison labor can only depress wages and working conditions in the private sector, and it at least raises questions about exploitation of the prisoners themselves.

The New Republic Online: Sex Appeal

"By resurrecting an unprincipled and unconvincing constitutional methodology, the Court will energize the conservatives who have lost the culture wars, and will allow them to cast themselves as judicial martyrs rather than political losers."

Jeffrey Rosen advances the argument that it would have been more appropriate to strike down the Texas sodomy law on the narrow grounds that it violated Equal Protection of the Laws than on privacy grounds. The broad privacy language in the majority opinion will lead, he fears, to increasingly embittered confirmation battles as conservatives assail the court for judicial activism in creating broad-based sexual freedom based on a right of privacy.

NY Times: Intel Loses Decision in E-mail Case. The California Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a former employee of Intel was free to send e-mail messages to current company employees, overturning a lower court's injunction. The court rejected Intel's argument that the messages represented illegal trespassing to its computer systems.

The Washington Post reports on the mutual distrust and misunderstanding between American MP's, who just want to go home, and Iraqi police, who would like some respect and a freer hand to do their jobs.