08.09.06
Moving toward the coup
Steve Gilliard has a very interesting post on the implications of Joe Lieberman’s refusal to accept the results of the election:
If you wonder how dictatorships start, look at Joe Lieberman.
It isn’t that he is running an independent campaign which is dangerous, but that he refuses to respect the results of an election.
I’ve been thinking all day about how to comment on Lieberman’s independent run, but it came to me, the thing which is so odious, so wrong, is that he’s running after losing, as if those votes didn’t mean anything.
He has placed Joe Lieberman over elections, over party loyalty, over democracy.
An independent run has always been an option for him, he didn’t have to run as a Democrat, but he did. But he refuses to accept the verdict. He, instead, claims he was cheated out of victory by dirty tactics and a campaign which ran on divisive tactics. Which is demonstrably untrue. Lieberman not only refused to accept the verdict of the voters, he seems to be contemptous of it. He seems to think that if he can’t convince one electorate, he can convince another.
It isn’t about Joe Lieberman should be Senator, but that no one but Lieberman is fit to be Senator. And that is dangerous to democracy. Because it goes to the core of what democracy is supposed to be, which is a contest of ideas. Instead, Lieberman sought to demonize his enemies and act as if some great offense had been committed by challenging him.
Coups and the dictatorships which follow start when one side not only questions the verdict of an election, but finds it illegitimate. Which Lieberman has done. He isn’t just saying he lost, but the way he lost was unfair.
Which is dangerous in the extreme. Lieberman thinks he’s above an election result he doesn’t like. He is refusing to play by the rules of our democracy. He ran as a democrat and lost, and refuses to accept that verdict.
Read the entire post at the link. Lieberman is dangerous and deluded. He thinks that he decides who should be Senator, not the electorate.
Introducing Riley, boy kitten
This is Riley, boy kitten and ambitious lad. (Has already figured out how to get into desk drawers from under the desk.) Riley lives in Victoria with The Niece. Very handsome kitten—what a terrific nose! the John Barrymore of kitties—but look at the size of his paws and ears. He’s going to be a big guy. (Click the thumbnail, then click the resulting larger photo.)
My first thought on hearing the name was the old radio program The Life of Riley, with William Bendix. I did a little Googling and was astonished to find that it was a television show in the 50’s. My memories are all of the radio program in the 40’s.
Here’s William Bendix, who died at age 58:
Aristotle confirmed
“All men by nature desire to know.” And, from a recent issue of New Scientist, a brief article confirming what Aristotle knew:
Why are you reading this article when you could be watching paint dry instead? It’s all because of our innate hunger for information. Humans, it turns out, are infovores.
The term was introduced into the scientific lexicon recently by neuroscientists trying to work out why we get a kick out of learning something new – why we have an appetite for knowledge. Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California in University Park and Edward Vessel of New York University, who coined the term, now think they have identified the brain mechanism responsible. They claim that the neural pathways through which we learn about the world tap into the same pleasure networks in the brain as are activated by drugs like heroin. They say that, for humans, only the basic urges of hunger, harm avoidance and the need to find a mate can distract us from this info-craving (American Scientist, vol 94, p 247). Read the rest of this entry »
Man, it’s hot
Now I’m glad I bought that Vornado fan on sale. I have both Vornado fans going, and in the living room it’s still 74.9 degrees. Thank heavens I’ll be leaving this heat for North Carolina and Baltimore…
FreeMind & ToDoList
Under the rubric of cool tools, let me show you these. The first comes via email from Alert Reader:
FreeMind is a free software package that allows you to create mind maps easily and quickly. It uses Java, so you need to have a Java runtime installed. The FreeMind link has links to install Java runtime for Windows or Mac.
ToDoList is also a free software package, Windows-only so far as I can tell, that consists of a powerful, flexible to-do list manager that can also be used relatively simply. The plugins are not necessary for the average user: they are to translate various file formats. If you’re using ToDoList from scratch and in itself, that’s all you’ll need. Lots more info at the link.
James Van Allen dies at 91
He was a favorite professor of The Eldest:
Physicist James A. Van Allen, a leader in space exploration who discovered the radiation belts surrounding the Earth that now bear his name, died Wednesday. He was 91.
The University of Iowa, where he taught for years, announced the death in a statement on its Web site.
In a career that stretched over more than a half-century, Van Allen designed scientific instruments for dozens of research flights, first with small rockets and balloons, and eventually with space probes that traveled to distant planets and beyond.
Van Allen gained global attention in the late 1950s when instruments he designed and placed aboard the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, discovered the bands of intense radiation that surround the earth, now known as the Van Allen Belts.
The bands spawned a whole new field of research known as magnetospheric physics, an area of study that now involves more than 1,000 investigators in more than 20 countries. Read the rest of this entry »
Wal-Mart accepts unionization—in China
Wal-Mart, long opposed to employees forming unions in order to do collective bargaining for better working conditions, fairer treatment, better health care, and the like, has surprisingly agreed to accept unionization in China:
After years of fighting unionization efforts at its stores, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, said today that it would work closely with Chinese officials to establish labor unions at all of its outlets here.
Wal-Mart said it would form an alliance with the government-backed All China Federation of Trade Unions because it wanted to create “an effective and harmonious way of facilitating the establishment of grassroots unions” at its stores.
The announcement came less than two weeks after Wal-Mart employees established their first union in China, the first time that a union had ever been formed at a Wal-Mart store. Since then, four other Wal-Mart stores in China have also formed unions, according to the government union officials.
Wal-Mart’s decision surprised observers because while the company had signaled earlier that it would not do anything to stop unions from forming at its Chinese stores, it had never suggested that it would actively participate in backing unionization efforts. Read the rest of this entry »
The Moviegoer and Walker Percy
I’ve always loved The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s first novel—and a National Book Award winner (1962, and quite a controversy it was: certain New York critics and novelists took great exception to the award going to an unknown from the South).
Percy trained as a medical doctor, but contracted tuberculosis and never practiced. Although the Wikipedia entry says merely that his mother died in a car crash, it also happens that the crash was into a lake and Percy was in the car. He got his mother out of the car and onto shore, but she had died.
Percy’s primary interest was philosophy, and his novels all have a strong philosophical underpinning. The Moviegoer is the most accessible, and it’s a great read—but you can readily see the philosophy peeking through.
I read it just after I graduated from college in 1961, and I wrote to one of my teachers, Charles Bell, that this book had more to say about reality and fiction than any book since Don Quixote. (I was young, and given to strong and extravagant statements—but I did believe it, and I still see what I meant.)
Bell wrote back that he was a close friend of Percy’s, both sons of the South, and had passed along my comments. What a thrill!
Like J.F. Powers, who won the National Book Award the next year, Percy was a Catholic, and a Catholic writer. But, like Powers, his writing is universal. Well, that’s what “catholic” means, doesn’t it?
Here is more information about Walker Percy. Do read The Moviegoer. You’ll be glad you did.
GOP loves Lieberman (and vice versa)
This just in, not yet confirmed, via ThinkProgress:
According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President’s political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: “The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do.”
If this is confirmed, it pretty much shows to which party Lieberman actually belongs.
Organizational friction derails ideas
Specifically, the idea for a weapon that (unlike those the Pentagon favors) would be truly useful in asymmetric warfare. Via Kevin Drum, this post by the invaluable William Arkin at WaPo:
Israel has lost its current war against Hezbollah. Not because it hasn’t achieved many of its military goals and isn’t on the way to achieving more. Not because airpower and technology intrinsically are useless in fighting the “new” war.
Israel has lost in the court of public opinion, particularly in Europe. As I said yesterday, a certain ruthlessness in going after Hezbollah has challenged the aesthetic about conventional warfare and the level of damage deemed acceptable when a country is pursuing an unconventional foe.
An additional failure is shared by the Bush administration, Beltway defense, intelligence and technology “experts” who demonstrate again and again that they cannot anticipate anything: The United States and Israel once were developing a laser weapon to shoot down short-range Katyusha rockets.
It died, a casualty of the Iraq war and homeland security and national missile defense ideologies and bureaucratic politics. Read the rest of this entry »
Why is this man laughing?
Lieberman lost the primary, but will ignore the decision of the Democratic voters and bail out of the party, running as an independent. From all I’ve read, he ran a pretty dirty campaign, including having a lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies come up to yell at his oponent, Ned Lamont, during his appearances. In addition, he was very unforthcoming about his own financial ties to pharmaceutical companies and other big businesses. Lieberman is, in my view, a Republican in Democratic’s clothing—and the Republicanism has been quite evident for a while now, as he praises the GOP and its initiatives and lambasts his Democratic colleagues. Now he’s going after the Democratic Party as a whole by running against it in Connecticut.
And Lieberman’s wife… Take a look: Read the rest of this entry »
Bush Admin eager to avoid prosecution for war crimes
From today’s Washington Post:
The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments.
Officials say the amendments would alter a U.S. law passed in the mid-1990s that criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties governing military conduct in wartime. The conventions generally bar the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean.
The draft U.S. amendments to the War Crimes Act would narrow the scope of potential criminal prosecutions to 10 specific categories of illegal acts against detainees during a war, including torture, murder, rape and hostage-taking.
Left off the list would be what the Geneva Conventions refer to as “outrages upon [the] personal dignity” of a prisoner and deliberately humiliating acts — such as the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women’s underwear seen at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — that fall short of torture.
“People have gotten worried, thinking that it’s quite likely they might be under a microscope,” said a U.S. official. Foreigners are using accusations of unlawful U.S. behavior as a way to rein in American power, the official said, and the amendments are partly meant to fend this off.
I think it’s pretty obvious why Bush and his Administration are eager to change a law: they’ve broken that law. It’s not that they will be “under a microscope,” it’s that they would be found guilty of breaking the law.
They went into this knowing the law, and they (unilaterally) decided to break the law. Now they’re shouting “King’s-X, King’s-X” and trying to avoid accountability.
If you going to do the crime, be prepared to do the time.
Kitty nature vs. doggy nature
Dogs, by and large, are fairly easy to read and to understand: like us, they are pack animals. Like us, they are sensitive to social structure and social rules. Dogs and people can pretty well read each other’s body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. Once the dog accepts you as the alpha pack member, things fall into place pretty quickly. And they really know how to look guilty and ashamed when they do something wrong, which is somehow reassuring.
Cats, very much OTOH, are not a pack animal: they hunt alone, and their entire behavior is guided by the imperative to hunt. Thus territory is very important to them, since it defines the prey that belong specifically to them. Cats can indeed look guilty, though it seems more to express, “I’m caught!” than remorse.
But it is exactly the great differences between cats and us that make them so interesting to observe. And that interest is greatly enhanced if you know something about cat behavior. Roger Tabor was one of the first to systematically study the behavior of the domestic cat, and he has two quite fascinating books on the subject, which you can find at the link. (You’ll have to scroll down a good way to see the second book.)
Just as correct information can preclude a rant, knowing more about cats can make you happier with your kitty. I recommend the books quite highly.
