Sarah Palin

OK, everyone else has weighed in on this. Why do I think Sarah Palin resigned?

I know why I don't think she resigned. It wasn't because she can't take it. If I ever saw fame go to someone's head, it went to hers, when McCain drafted her out of nowhere to be the V.P. candidate. She loved it; she's hooked on the fame drug. I also don't believe that anyone whose school nickname was "Sarah Barracuda" is a sensitive, tender plant who can't take the heat in the kitchen.

I've seen one speculation, on Another Monkey's blog, that she resigned just ahead of a huge, breaking scandal that she couldn't have avoided if still in office. He said that on Tuesday, and it's Thursday, and the scandal still hasn't broken. It still could; but it could also be another conspiracy theory. None of the multifarious ethics investigations has nailed her for anything yet.

So I guess I'll come down in the camp that believes she's setting up for a Presidential run in 2012. Do I think she can win? No - in fact, hell no. But I think she thinks she can.

I noticed one bizarre thing as I listened to her explanation of why she was stepping down. It was all in buzzwords and catch phrases. I didn't hear one single original thought expressed in English. I could actually hear her pausing between phrases. There used to be an Internet game where you could make up sentences by picking buzzwords from columns one, two and three and stringing them together - Google isn't turning it up for me, but it sure sounded as though she'd used it to compose that speech.

Shrinking Coinage

No, this isn't what you think it's about. Now and then I drop in over at the Bad Astronomy blog, on the Discover site, just because it's cool. Today I dropped by and found a post called Coin Deflation, about a group of techies who "strap a scary big capacitor onto a U.S. quarter and zap it with 15,000 Joules." If you are into techno gadgetry, you should follow the links and look at the slow-mo videos they posted of this process, because they're fascinating - and for the bang-and-flash addicts, there's even a video section entitled "gratuitous explosions."

The point is what happens to the quarter when you do this: it shrinks in size. Quite a lot. It doesn't become lighter, I'm interested to read; so it must become denser.

These guys are evidently total lab rats, because of all the comments (9) on the original site, and on the Bad Astronomy post (20 when I looked), not one single person made the obvious (to me) joke about the value of the quarter decreasing! One guy asked if it was still worth 25 cents (nobody answered); and one guy admitted sheepishly to have "plunked down good money for bad" by buying a shrunken quarter because it was "awesome." No currency deflation references. No bad economy jokes at all. We're in the worst economic mess in living memory, and these folks shrink a quarter to half its normal size, and the connection doesn't even occur to them.

I love the human race. I just hope it can keep from killing itself with those gadgets.

Supporting a Friend

Here we go again. The Republican Party has no shame and no sense of how things look to the man on the street. Or woman, in my case.

I'm sure you've all heard the latest Repub sex scandal: Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., is now under investigation for allegedly having an affair with one of his campaign aides. A married campaign aide. Whose husband worked in Ensign's Senate office. I say, "allegedly," but I'm not sure I have to - Ensign copped to the affair last week, amidst many crocodile tears. There's an ethics committee investigation going into whether either the aide or her husband, or both, were fired because of the affair; but that isn't what fried my tomatoes today.

The Associated Press report, printed in today's San Francisco Chronicle, has a section at the end describing Ensign's return to the Senate floor:

On the Senate floor during a vote on a tourism bill, several lawmakers took time to speak with Ensign.

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., talked with Ensign for several minutes, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., gave him a quick embrace. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama patted Ensign's hand. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, shook Ensign's hand, and the two stood side-by-side for about a minute in silence as the vote continued.

Isn't that touching? His friends surround him with hugs of support and murmured words of sympathy - the randy hypocrite! He should have a scarlet A embroidered on the lapel of every suit he owns. All these yoyos claim to stand up for Family Values, and the sanctity of the hearth, and all that jazz. And they wonder why their approval ratings are heading for Antarctica.

Democracy in Iran

I keep reading articles suggesting that President Obama isn't being forceful enough about Iran's election mess. Frankly, I think he's doing about as much as is reasonable. When it comes right down to it:

• It's not our election. It's all Iranian, all the time.
• We don't have any skin in the game. We don't even have formal diplomatic relations with Iran.
• If he did want to act, what could he do? We can't send in the Marines - they're busy in Afghanistan.

The situation there is volatile enough without giving the theocrats any excuse to accuse Mir Hossein Mousavi of being backed by the CIA. There's plenty of history of CIA skullduggery in Iran - ask anybody in Teheran about Mohammed Mossadegh, who really was overthrown in a CIA coup in the early 1950s (after trying to nationalize the oil industry; some things never change).

We've all suffered in the last few years from the Bush administration's insistence on "exporting democracy." Democracy isn't something you can "export," like a crate of ball bearings. It's a delicately balanced series of agreements among the citizens of a country, and the version that exists in the U.S. and Britain now took centuries to develop. But while the English were fighting the Civil War, in the 17th century, asserting the right of the people over the monarchy, the Persians were ruled by the Safavid dynasty of Shiite shahs (some things really never change - details of Persian history taken from the timeline at From Ancient Persia to Contemporary Iran).

If democracy isn't exportable, though, it seems to be contagious; and I think the Iranians may have caught it. Not only have they just had an election, they're now furious because the election was obviously rigged. And that anger really is a democratic urge.

I wonder if the people in charge of those election results really thought anyone would accept them, when they're statistically so extremely unlikely. And I really wonder what the results of a fair count would have been. You never know - Ahmedinajad might have won. He might even have won by a wide margin. But we'll never know, because they decided to fake a result.

I wish the Iranians all the best; my heart aches for them, because the democracy in Iran right now is a paper label over a theocratic tyranny, and if they really want a democracy, they'll have to fight for it. But if they're willing to fight, they may just end up with a truly democratic Iran. Reuel Marc Gerecht, in a N.Y. Times op-ed piece (The Koran and the Ballot Box), thinks we may be seeing the start of "the final countdown on the Islamic Republic." I hope he's right.

Working for the Man

Pardon me while I indulge my inner curmudgeon. San Francisco Chronicle writer C. W. Nevius wrote a column the other day on the inability of a local clothing shop owner to get anyone to work for him on his terms - except illegal immigrants. The (presumably) solid American citizens only want to work for him on their terms: wanted to be paid under the table; unwilling to fold things, or dust things, as needed; unwilling to work on Saturday morning, or Friday night ("I go out on Friday nights"). The only people willing to come when he needed them, work until the end of the shift, and do whatever jobs came along, were the illegal immigrants.

I wouldn't take the column so seriously if this were the first time I'd heard this refrain; but it isn't. I heard a virtually identical lament a few years ago, when I was recovering from my second knee surgery. Home all day doing rehab exercises, I took a break to go outside and gab with the contractor who was remodeling my neighbor's house. (Did a nice job, too.) He said the same thing: he's tried to hire Americans and they won't work. They don't show up, or they don't stay, or they don't do the job the way he wants it. The workers who show up, work all day, and do what they're told to do as it's explained to them - are the people whose papers are, um, not in order.

The anti-illegal folks rant loudly about the way illegal immigrants are going to ruin this country. If Americans lose the will to do a day's work for a day's pay, we'll ruin the country all by ourselves. The illegal immigrants won't have to do a thing.

The whirring sound you hear is my dad, spinning in his grave. Dad worked from the time he was I think about fourteen; he didn't graduate from high school until he was 21 because he was working. He took any job he could get; on every job, he worked his hours, and did whatever they told him to do: sell shoes, make ice cream, chip paint, drive a forklift, supervise a crew, move furniture. After he retired from Federal civil service (he had a civilian support job for the Navy), he got another job doing cleanup at an auto body shop, just to get his Social Security quarters in; and by the time he was ready to retire again, they begged him to stay, because he did more work in a day than anyone else.

That work ethic is what built America; it's what won 2 wars and pulled the country through the Great Depression. It's what makes the international commentators say that Americans are the workingest fools on the planet, taking less vacation than anyone and working crazy overtime. I wonder. I realize I sound like a bunch of people I actually have very little in common with; but I was raised to believe that a regular paycheck was a contract, and my side of the contract was a solid 40 hours of work a week, in exchange. It sounds to me as if we may be losing that attitude. If we do, we'll regret it. And we may try to blame the resulting trouble on the Mexican immigrants; but it won't be their fault.

Touring the East

Having ranted (see last post), I want to share some of the oddities I noticed while traveling. We did an urban vacation this year - New York City and Philadelphia, separated by a few days in Cape May, NJ.

Given that it's almost impossible these days to get rare meat from a restaurant (they're all terrified of being sued for salmonella), why do the restaurants in the Atlantic coast states turn their air conditioning down so far you could hang meat in the dining room? They can't be afraid of it going bad, they've cooked it through. The weather was very muggy while we were there, mostly too warm to carry a jacket; and I'm still surprised I didn't catch a chill from the air in those restaurants.

This being the first time I've ever driven through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I had my first experience with Wawa. If you've been there, you know. It seems like a perfectly competent convenience store chain; but the name floored me. If you go to their web site and look at the Milestones section, you'll see the history and it actually makes sense: wawa is a Native American word for a Canada goose in flight. I foolishly assumed that Wawa, Pennsylvania was named after the firm, but I was wrong.

I was also startled to find that a dominant provider of gasoline in New Jersey is: Lukoil. When we drove down the Garden State Turnpike from New York to Cape May, Lukoil had the concession at practically every turnpike rest stop. With all the noise we hear about the U.S. energy companies, how did a Russian firm get to be so wide-spread in New Jersey? Wikipedia tells me that Lukoil bought Getty Oil in 2000 and rebranded some of the stations. I kept looking for Pikov Andropov.

WHAT is Going On?

I can't take a vacation these days without everything going to hell. I go out of town for a couple of weeks, and:

• A whack job with a gun takes out the only 3rd trimester abortion provider in Kansas.
• Another whack job with a gun goes to the Holocaust Museum and starts shooting, killing a guard who did him no more harm than to open the door for him.
• Kim Jong Il tests another [deleted expletive] nuclear weapon, and fires off a couple of medium range missiles for good measure.

Listen, people, I want peace and quiet on my vacations! Can't I leave you alone for a minute?

On the murder of Dr. Tiller, I don't really have much to add to what others have said. The revolting hypocrisy of the Operation Rescue position is self-evident. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that they are paying for the defense; just a suggestion for investigating journalists, if there are any left. I'm disturbed but not surprised by Cristina Page's analysis (on HuffPo) suggesting that violence against abortion clinics and providers increases in inverse relationship to the president's position on the subject. No abortion providers were killed during the Bush administration.

On the guy at the Holocaust Museum (I really think it's dignifying these people too much to refer to them by name) - if we're going to allow every idiot to buy a gun, then we have to expect that once in a while, one of the idiots will shoot somebody. Frankly, it's the price of the Second Amendment. All you NRA types, are you happy now? This one was from left field - the perp had no criminal record. He falls in the same class as the jihadi suicide bombers; unstoppable.

And there isn't much you can say about Kim Jong Il.

OK, I'm back home now; you can all stop this. (I wish...)

So What About Torture?

We're all talking about torture these days, what with Dick Cheney ranting that torture (and illegal wiretaps, and and and) has "kept us safe." This has got me thinking about it; I think I've said this before, but it's worth saying again. As a hypothetical question, why shouldn't we use torture? If it'll find us that "ticking bomb" they always talk about, why not?

The practical approach, which you will hear from almost every experienced intelligence officer you find, is that it doesn't work. As the very old saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. What you get from a man you are torturing is not the truth; it's what he thinks will make you stop hurting him. You get the truth by persuading him, gently, that his interest and yours run together, and that he can help himself by helping you. This is how the pros do it.

But the real issue isn't whether torture "works" or not. What effect does torture have, and on whom? The issue with torture is the corrupting effect on the torturer. I can't remember the names offhand, but there was a famous psychological experiment at Stanford, about 30 years ago - the professor divided his students randomly into "guards" and "prisoners." In almost no time, the experience of having power over the "prisoners" caused the "guards" to behave abusively to them - it got so bad the professor stopped the experiment. Power corrupts. Torture corrupts the torturer. And if we, the people, allow torture to be used in our name, it corrupts us; we are complicit. This is why Obama is right to say that we can, we must, protect ourselves without compromising our values - the values which say that we don't do those things.

The argument about "keeping us safe" is absurd. I simply don't believe the argument that the lack of further attacks since 2001 means we are "safe," and that we're "safe" because our agents tortured the people in Gitmo. Safety is very iffy - any of us at any time could be killed in an automobile accident, whether the government is torturing people in Guantanamo or not. How then are we "safe"? If we die, what difference is it how we die? If a man wants to kill you badly enough that he's willing to die in the process, you can't stop him except by sheer luck.

The real argument in favor of torture, which is never openly stated, is that our lives, our country, our safety, are so important that we can, we should, use every possible means to protect ourselves. The end justifies the means. This is just wrong. The end doesn't justify the means; the means are important. The wrong means will corrupt the end. If we use the enemy's means, we become the enemy. Where did the "enhanced interrogation" methods come from? They come from the army's SERE school, which teaches U.S. soldiers how to resist torture. Whose torture were they meant to resist? The torture used by the Communist Chinese, during the Korean war; that's when SERE was established. Does this mean we've become the Communist Chinese? Prove that it doesn't. We're doing what they did.

And that's why we have to stop this. The Bible says, By their fruits ye shall know them. We have to stop producting these bitter fruits. We should never have started.

Not in Our Back Yard

Our wonderful Congress has just voted, almost to a man (the Senate vote was 90-6) to deny the administration funds for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Their primary argument seems to be, We don't want those people in our constituency.

This is a disgrace. Guantanamo is a mess; the United States made the mess; it is our responsibility to clean the mess up. Isn't that one of the things we're supposed to have learned in kindergarten? But the mere possibility that some of the people we've kept in jail in Gitmo for what, over seven years now? That these people might possibly be kept in jail in the U.S. seems to have Congress spooked. I think what really alarms them is the possibility that these people might be released in the U.S. - maybe even in their constituency.

So, under what circumstances would they be released? Well, say there was no evidence that proved that they were "enemy combatants." (Whatever that is.) Like, maybe we've kept innocent people in jail for over 8 years?? If we have, shouldn't we admit it, apologize, and let them go home?

Nobody is suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to be released for lack of evidence, but he isn't the only person being held there. I remember reading that some representative from Kansas actually argued that they didn't want Gitmo detainees transferred to Leavenworth. Come on - you're afraid they'll break out of Leavenworth??

We're supposed to be a nation of laws, or at least so I remember from my civics class. The Bush administration's greatest sin was to declare itself above the law; and for our own sake, we should apply our own laws to the detainees in Gitmo, allow them to defend themselves in open court, and release them, if there's no evidence that they wronged us. Or jail them in the U.S. if there is. And in the case where they can't go home - I'm thinking of the Uighurs, who will be in dire danger from the Chinese government if they return home - we owe it to them to let them settle here. We owe it to ourselves, to prove to ourselves and the world that we are ruled by laws, and we truly regret what we did at Guantanamo Bay.

Lift That Bale

After writing that last post, I realize I want to talk some more about the various versions of Show Boat. Full disclosure: I've never read the book and never seen either movie all the way through. I've recently attended two public discussions of the Broadway show; and last night I sang in the chorus of a concert version of Jerome Kern's Broadway version of Show Boat.

In the second public discussion, the Oakland East Bay Symphony's forum on Race Relations in Art, the presenters showed several film clips: the introduction to the 1951 movie, Paul Robeson singing Old Man River from the 1936 movie, a 1940-something clip from a Hollywood medley with Lena Horne singing Can't Help Loving That Man, a clip from the 1951 movie with Ava Gardner singing Can't Help Loving That Man.

Let's start with the 1951 movie. This is a Disney plantation (although MGM made the movie), in technicolor of course. The slaves all have clean clothes with no visible rips or patches, they have nice straw hats, and they all smile, all the time. It kinda made me shudder. It might as well have been a cartoon; anybody else remember Song of the South? The introduction here is Song of the South with real actors.

Then, they showed the clip from the 1936 movie, which you can not rent from Netflix, with Paul Robeson. First, what a voice that man had. If you've never heard a recording of his, get one. Second, this movie is (of course) in black and white; and frankly, this looks like a real plantation. The slaves' clothes are not nice and clean and mended, and they don't smile. The line of men carrying bales of cotton up the ramp can barely carry them - the camera stays on one man who staggers so that I was sure he would fall. The dock workers gather behind Robeson (as Joe) to back him in the chorus, and they look grim. I don't know how much Robeson had to do with the staging; he was a well-known agitator. If the 1951 version is a too-sweet mint julep, this movie is a splash of cold water in the face. I'd love to see all of it.

Now let's talk about Can't Help Loving That Man, sung by the character Julie LaVerne, who turns out (in a major plot twist) to be "passing as white." Having heard Lena Horne sing that, any time anyone else sings it (and last night it was Debbie de Coudreaux, a brilliant mezzo, who sings at the Moulin Rouge in Paris), the voice I hear belongs to Lena, the interpretation is Lena's. Wow. I must get more of her recordings. So with her available, why did Ava Gardner sing the part in 1951? (She couldn't sing, by the way - they dubbed the voice. Lena Horne's interpretation of the song was better, too.) Because Lena Horne was mixed race - and the astounding reasoning of the mid-century world said that a mixed-race actress could not be allowed to play the part of a mixed-race character. Don't ask me. I don't understand any of it. I understand that it was a problem; hell, I grew up in the 1950s and didn't meet a black person until I was around 10. I've just known too many brilliant, capable black people since, musicians and non-musicians, for any of this to make any sense to me any more.

And it was clear from the discussion at the forum that we still have a problem. In 1999 at Indiana University, a very fine black tenor named Lawrence Brownlee sang Tamino in the Magic Flute, and some local Neanderthal wrote a letter to the editor complaining that it was "an abomination" for him to be kissing a white Pamina on stage. For a broader discussion of race in classical music, I recommend the San Francisco Classical Voice's review of the OEBS Forum.

We've come a long way - just think about those happy darkies in the 1951 movie - but we haven't come far enough yet.

Wotta Week

I just realized I haven't posted in 2 weeks. I have to get more control of things - I have this feeling that I'm overcommitted. In the last 3 weeks I've:

• Finished up the National Hunger Study (my microscopic part in it).
• Gone to a retirement lunch for an old friend from work (now he has even more time to send me weird YouTube links).
• Helped the Oakland East Bay Symphony volunteers set up their forum on Race Relations in Art (and attended same - very interesting, showed clips from the 1936 Show Boat, with Paul Robeson singing Old Man River. If you've seen the happy Disney-style 1951 Show Boat, the 1936 movie would knock you straight off your chair. "Lift that bale" has a whole new meaning after seeing some of those shots.).
• Spent 2 mornings stacking groceries at the local food bank warehouse.
• Attended a board meeting for one of my nonprofits.
• Attended a book signing party for an old friend.
• Attended the annual convention for another nonprofit, and took photos of the events.
• Sang at the dinner after the convention.
• Identified, bought, configured and re-configured a new laptop for a nonprofit.
• Spent hours on the phone negotiating nonprofit discounts for Microsoft Office licenses.
• Attended one chorus rehearsal and 2 rehearsals with orchestra and soloists.
• Sang in a concert performance of Show Boat, plus selected Jerome Kern pieces. Lovely concert, great soloists, great music.

Is that enough? I'm tired all over again just reading it.

This week was enlivened by computer failures. I had to give the photos I took at the convention to someone else, so I tried to burn them to a CD. Got a blue screen of death. Three times. Fortunately, two of those times also produced usable CDs. The system seems fine as long as I'm not burning copies of photos.

Then there's the new laptop. By the way, there are some great deals on Vista laptops out there if you're interested. Bought it, built it out, patched it, everything copacetic. Then we tried to install an ancient version of FileMaker Pro that we've been using (because it was paid for - this is a nonprofit). Couldn't install it; it's supposed to have an auto-play feature, but it wouldn't even run under 64-bit Vista. So I decided to switch to the computer admin user with the install CD still in the drive. The CD drive whirred loudly for a minute and the whole box died. No keyboard, no mouse, no touchpad. Dead. I turned it off, and tried to turn it on again, and it wouldn't come up. To make a long story short, I had to rebuild it from the recovery disk, which took another entire day. I'm really tired of rebuilding computers.

And somehow I still have to make up my mind how I'll vote, Tuesday, on those unspeakable California budget propositions. I don't like any of them very much; I'm in favor of a spending cap (since the Lege has all the spending discipline of a drunken rock star), but I object to using the State Constitution for budget management. I don't like the budget cuts and spending changes the propositions will make, but it's pretty clear that defeating them will cause even more budget cuts. I may never vote for another incumbent again given that the incumbents got us here.