Bound in a Nutshell

Discontent.com suffered a major hard drive failure in early February. While it has been replaced and reinstalled, this blog is down temporarily pending a move to scoop, instead of b2evolution, as its backend.

Testing, testing.

GRAHAM: Number one, from a personal point of view, do you believe the attacks on 9/11 against our nation were a crime or an act of war?

ALITO: That's a hard question to answer.

GRAHAM: Good.

ALITO: That's a way of buying 30 seconds while I think about the answer.

I find it somewhat exceptional that Judge Alito hasn't already decided how he feels about this question; it's the kind of thing that I expect every politically aware citizen to have decided, one way or another.

ALITO: Senator, I think that what I think personally about this is really not -- it's not something that would be -- that would inform anything that I would have to do as a judge.

GRAHAM: Well, Judge, I guess I disagree. Because I think we're at war. And the law of armed conflict in a war time environment is different than dealing with domestic criminal enterprises. Do you agree with that?

ALITO: It certainly is.

GRAHAM: We have laws on the book that protects us, the Fourth Amendment included, from our own law enforcement agencies coming against our own citizens. But we also have laws on the books during a time of war to protect our country from being infiltrated by foreign powers and bodies who wish to do harm to us. That's a totally different legal concept. Is that correct?

ALITO: I'm reluctant to get into this because I think things like act of war can well have particular legal meanings in particular context, under the Constitution...

That's much more understandable. The first question was asking a personal political opinion; this is asking a more nuanced legal question on which a judge should not commit himself until he knows the details of the facts in a specific case.

[The rest of the interchange, available here, consists of Graham trying to get Alito to commit himself to the administration's position in Hamdi and Padilla, and Alito refusing to commit:]

GRAHAM: For those who are watching who are not lawyers, generally speaking, in all of the wars that we've been involved in we don't let the people trying to kill us sue us. Right? And we're not going to let them go at an arbitrary time period if we think they're still dangerous because we don't want to go have to shoot at them again or let them shoot at us again.

Is that a good summary of the law of armed conflict?

ALITO: I don't know whether I'd put it quite that broadly, Senator.

(LAUGHTER)

The precedent that you -- the Johnson v. Eisentrager, of course, has been substantially modified, if not overruled. Ex Parte Quirin, of course, is still a precedent.

There was a lower precedent involving someone who fought with the Italian army. And I can't remember the exact name of it. And that was the case that I thought you were referring to when you first framed the question.

But those are the precedents in the area. Then, if you go back to the Civil War, there's Ex Parte Milligan and a few others.

GRAHAM: We don't have to go back that far.
(LAUGHTER)

(Ex Parte Milligan was a civil-war era case which denied Lincoln the power to suspend habeas corpus in northern states in which the civil courts were still operating.)

ALITO: I did say that. The 14th Amendment protects liberty. The Fifth Amendment protects liberty. And I think it's well accepted that this has a substantive component and that that component includes aspects of privacy that have constitutional protection.

DEWINE: Congress has tried several times to protect our children from being exposed to pornography on the Internet. In 1996, we passed the Communications Decency Act, but the Supreme Court struck it down, citing the First Amendment. A few years later, we passed the Child Online Protection Act. Again, the court struck it down.

What bothers me about these cases is they fail to account for something that to me seems relatively simple: The core of the First Amendment is the protection of political speech, but it seems to me that pornography is altogether different. Unlike political speech, pornography has little value, if it has any value at all.

Ah, but the entire point of the first amendment is that Congress may not make that value judgement. The state may not decide that it values certain kinds of speech and doesn't value other kinds of speech, and then prohibit the latter kind on the basis that the state does not value it. This is bedrock, fundamental principle of our political system. It's a shame that certain politicians don't grasp that.

ALITO: The law, of course, as you know, constitutional law draws a distinction between obscenity, which has no First Amendment protection but is subject to a very strict definition, and pornography, which is not obscenity but is sexually related materials.

A distinction which has no basis in the constitution itself, but is drawn instead from the common-law; a better example of judicial activism would be hard to find.

ALITO: Now, in the pre-Internet world, the job of preventing minors from purchasing pornography was a lot simpler. If they wanted to get it, I guess they would have to go to a store or some place and buy it.

But on the Internet, of course, it's readily available from any computer terminal. And a lot of minors today are a lot more sophisticated in the use of computers than their parents. So the ability of parents to monitor what they're doing and supervise what they're doing is greatly impaired by this difference in computer aptitude.

And I can't say much more about the question than that. It is a difficult question. I think that there needs to be additional effort in this area, probably by all branches of government, so that the law fully takes into account the differences regarding communication over the Internet and access to materials over the Internet by minors.

That sounds ominous.

ALITO: I think that the principle of "one person, one vote" is a fundamental part of our constitutional law. I think it would be -- I do not see any reason why it should be reexamined.

Rick Hasen had expressed concern about this, given Alito's early writings.

ALITO: That was certainly true with respect to the equal protection clause. There was a long period between Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education when the true meaning of the equal protection clause was not recognized in the decisions of the Supreme Court.

And when Brown was finally decided, that was not an instance of the court changing the meaning of the equal protection clause; it was an instance of a court writing an incorrect interpretation that had prevailed for a long period of time.

It seems to me that Judge Alito is arguing here that there is an absolute truth of the meaning of the equal protection clause and that Brown did not constitute a change in the meaning, but rather a discerning of the true meaning which had heretofore lain unseen. No relativist, Judge Alito.

This may be problematic, depending on what Judge Alito believes the true meaning of things to be. What should happen when stare decisis requires one interpretation of [x], but a judge knows the true meaning of [x]to be something different?

ALITO:The Constitution sets age limits, for example, for people who want to hold various federal offices and there can't be much debate about what that means or how it applies.

But it also contains some broad principles: no unreasonable search and seizures, the guarantee that nobody will be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, equal protection of the laws. And in those instances, it is the job of the judiciary to try to understand the principle and apply it to the new situations that come before the judiciary.

I think the judiciary has to do that in a neutral fashion. I think judges have to be wary about substituting their own preferences, their own policy judgments for those that are in the Constitution.

They have to identify the principle that is to be applied under these broader provisions of the Constitution and apply it, but I don't see that as being the same thing as the judges injecting his or her policy views or preferences or ideas about the direction in which the society should be moving into the decision-making process.

It's a shame that Senator Kohl didn't then ask Judge Alito for examples of what he thinks does constitute judges injecting their own policy views. This is, I think, the key issue in the dispute between Democrats and Republicans about whether or not Alito should be confirmed: given that everyone more or less agrees that broad principles should be applied to new situations neutrally, how does one draw the line between that and injecting your own policy preferences?

The dispute over pornography is a grand example of this. Given the principle that the freedom of the press may not be abridged by the Congress (or, through incorporation, by the states), is it application of that principle to say that Congress may not ban consenting-adult pornography? Or is that an injection of liberal policy views or preferences into the decision making process?

It's relieving to note that Judge Alito believes that there are broad principles which must be interpreted and applied, as there are some conservative activists who do not; but his statement is utterly useless in helping a neutral observer tell where he draws the line, or even given a scatter diagram of what falls on which sides of the line.

But that seems to be the general pattern of these hearings: vague answers which don't actually say anything. It's almost as though this were a Potemkin hearing instead of a real one.

KYL: According to one survey that I had access to, 93 percent of the American people support the right to say "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

It seems to me that this is fundamentally missing the point of the dispute. Nobody is saying that it is illegal for someone to say "under God" when reciting the pledge of allegiance; the allegation is that it is illegal to *require* someone to say "under God" when reciting the pledge of allegiance. (I must say that I find the dispute to be somewhat peculiar given that the Supreme Court said more than sixty years ago that schoolchildren can't be forced to say the pledge if it would violate their religious beliefs; Newdow appears to be asking not just for the right to not say it, but for the right to say it the way he wants it to be said, in a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too sort of way).

Senator Kyl went on to make this grand argument involving the notion that sometimes rights conflict, and the role of the judiciary is to adjudicate the conflict, and that's valid, but his example is peculiar. Nobody's rights are trampled if a court rules that "under God" should not be a mandatory part of the pledge of allegiance.

LEAHY: Now, three years ago, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department -- and you're familiar with that; you worked there years ago -- they issued a legal opinion, which they kept very secret, in which it concluded that the president of the United States had the power to override domestic and international laws outlawing torture. So the president could override these laws outlawing torture. They tried to redefine torture, and they asserted, I quote, that the president enjoys complete authority over the conduct of war, close quote. And they went on further to say that if Congress passed criminal law prohibiting torture, quote, in a manner that interferes with the president's direction of such core matters as detention and interrogation of enemy combatants, that would be unconstitutional. They seem to say that the president could immunize people from any prosecution if they violated our laws on torture. And that stated as what was the legal basis in this administration until somebody, apparently at the Justice Department, leaked it to the press. It became public. Once it became public -- the obvious reaction of Republicans, Democrats, everybody saying this is outrageous; it's beyond the pale -- the administration withdrew that as its position. The attorney general even said in his confirmation that this no longer -- no longer -- represented Bush administration policy.

LEAHY: What is your view now? And I ask this because the memo has been withdrawn. It's not going to come before you. What is your view of the legal contention in that memo that the president can override the laws and immunize illegal conduct?

ALITO: Well, I think the first thing that has to be said is what I said yesterday, and that is that no person in this country is above the law. And that includes the president and it includes the Supreme Court. Everybody has to follow the law, and that means the Constitution of the United States and it means the laws that are enacted under the Constitution of the United States. Now, there can be -- there are questions that arise concerning executive powers. And those specific questions have to be resolved, I think, by looking to that framework that Justice Jackson set out, that I mentioned earlier.

LEAHY: Well, let's go into one of those specifics. Do you believe the president has the constitutional authority as commander in chief to override laws enacted by Congress and immunize people under his command from prosecutions that they violate, these laws passed by Congress?

ALITO: Well, if we were in -- if a question came up of that nature, then I think you'd be in -- where the president is exercising executive power in the face of a contrary expression of congressional will through a statute or even an implicit expression of congressional will, you'd be in what Justice Jackson called the twilight zone, where the president's power is at its lowest point.

That response was quite clever, although I don't know if it was intended the way it was received. Judge Alito has not conceded Senator Leahy's premise that the President has overridden laws enacted by Congress. He has merely said that if the President were to do so, it would be problematic under the rules of analysis in question.

But he's said it in a way that allows people who want to hear it that way to think that he's endorsed the notion that the government is currently overstepping its bounds.

That's not to say that he thinks it isn't; merely that this answer is a carefully, cleverly crafted dodge.

SPECTER: Do you agree with Justice O'Connor's statement quoted frequently yesterday from Hamdi that, quote, We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens, when she was citing the Youngstown case? Do you agree with that?

ALITO: Absolutely. That's a very important principle. Our Constitution applies in times of peace and in times of war, and it protects the rights of Americans under all circumstances.

SPECTER: You made a speech at Pepperdine where you said, in commenting about the decision of the Supreme Court in ex parte Milligan, that, quote, the Constitution applies even in an extreme emergency. The government made a, quote, broad and unwise argument that the Bill of Rights simply don't apply during wartime. Do you stand by that statement?

ALITO: I certainly do, Senator. The Bill of Rights applies at all times. And it's particularly important that we adhere to the Bill of Rights in times of war and in times of national crisis, because that's when there's the greatest temptation to depart from them.

Not that I had any serious belief that he would say anything different; but it's still a relief to hear it.

Apparently this web log is the #1 hit for invent automobile terrible idea on certain search engines.

I've been tagged with an internet tell-all-about-yourself meme!

Four jobs you've had in your life: Tow truck dispatcher, cable television cable operator, computer lab technician, computer programmer.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Blade Runner, The Name of the Rose, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Usual Suspects.

Four places you've lived: Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Antonio, East Windsor (New Jersey).

Four places you've been on vacation: Ontario, the Bahamas, Norway, Turkey.

Four TV shows you love to watch:Babylon 5, Queer as Folk, Sex and the City, Remington Steele

Four websites you visit daily: HuSi, Electrolite-Making Light, The Volokh Conspiracy, The New York Times.

Four of your favorite foods: Tzatziki, Borek, Macaroni+Cheese, Espresso.

Four places you'd rather be: Lisbon, Prague, Vancouver, Berlin.

Four albums you can't live without: In Tune and On Time, DJ Shadow. The Joshua Tree, U2. Live in Paris & Toronto, Loreena McKennit. Pretaluz, Waldemar Bastos.

New tagees: Chrononaut, Erik.

The details aren't out yet - or, to the extent that they are, they're vague - but Governor Schwarzenegger's infrastructure proposal, unveiled at today's State of the State address is breathtaking. In nominal dollars, it constitutes the single largest public investment project in the State, ever. In terms of its potential impact on the state, it is the biggest project proposal since the large-scale infrastructure projects overseen by Governor Edmund G "Pat" Brown (Jerry Brown's father) in the early 1960s - the last major statewide infrastructure project.

As we understand the terms today, it is not a conservative proposal. But, in a very real sense, it is; it draws on an older conservative tradition than the one which prevails in modern conservatism: the Whig conservatism which says that if we invest in internal infrastructure improvements, we invest in economic growth which will benefit everyone. Yet rhetoric like "Think of California as a mutual fund --in particular, a growth fund. Why do we invest in a growth fund? Because we believe in the economic future. So I ask each of you... do you believe in California's economic future?" is associated in modern times with political liberalism, and therein lies the political genius of the plan: by boldly seizing the center-left, Governor Schwarzenegger may remake the state's politics entirely.

But as a voter, rather than a student of politics, my concern is less Governor Schwarzenegger's future than this: is his plan good for California? According to the Legislative Analyst's office, the general fund bond debt was $55 billion as of July 1, 2004 (no bonds were on the special election ballot, but more than $3 billion was authorized in the November, 2004 election). So this proposal would more than double the state's bonded indebtedness. The governor's proposal does claim (see page 6) that the percentage of the general fund devoted to debt service will never go above 6% under the plan; but that claim is based upon speculation about the degree of economic growth, and assumes that no other bond measures are passed in the interim (a shaky assumption at best). This is risky business.

But, just as borrowing to buy a house or pay for an education is reasonable for individuals in a way that credit card debt is not, borrowing for infrastructure is good for a state in a way that borrowing for regular, ongoing expenditures is not. So, given that details aren't truly available yet, what do we get for all of the borrowing?

The numbers are a bit hard to decipher; the overall plan incorporates money from other sources (federal matching funds, redirection of existing money), with the result that it's tough to, in a meaningful fashion, see what the effects of the bonds, per se, are. But, in summary, the plan calls for:

• 550 new miles of HOV/HOT lanes
• 750 new regular highway miles
• 9000 miles of highway reconstruction
• 600 miles of new commuter rail line
• 8500 miles of bike and pedestrian paths
• an undefined quantity of truck-only lanes (for example, in and out of the port of Los Angeles)
• 9700 new classrooms
• 38,000 modernized classrooms
• a $6 billion program to upgrade the delta levee system
• two new prisons
• a new forensic crime lab
• 101 new courts

The biggest problem that I have with this list is that I don't believe that $70 billion can pay for all of it. Certainly everything on the list is something I think we need to pay for; the highway upgrades, the school construction, and the court construction - in particular - has been necessary for more than a decade. But $70 billion isn't enough to pay for this (how much has the reconstruction of the Bay Bridge, alone, cost?) And I'm not convinced that the "other revenue" on which the plan depends will be forthcoming. Accordingly, it may very well be that only a fraction of this immense proposal ever gets built - the rest could languish as a promise made, but not fulfilled.

But that is no reason not to try. These are all needed investments; they are all, with the possible exception of the forensic labs, the kind of things which can reasonably be paid for with bond money. The governor's proposal is fantastic, the kind of proposal that I hoped Gray Davis would issue, and Pete Wilson before him. A breathtaking vision of investment in the future, of borrowing to pay for rebuilding an infrastructure which is overstrained and has been crumbling for decades, is exactly what we need.

This is what we expelled Governor Davis for; the voters are well repaid.

Looking just at the politics of Governor Schwarzenegger's infrastructure proposal ($300 billion in infrastructure spending over ten years, including roughly $70 billion financed through bonds), the Governor has flattened the opposition and, most likely, ensured his re-election in the fall. His Democratic opponent - whoever he is - has no reasonable response. He can, like Sen. Perata did briefly during his speech tonight, take the this-is-fiscally-irresponsible tack; but that leaves him in the position of being a Democrat opposed to things like building new schools, cleaning up the air in the Central Valley, and extending hundreds of miles of mass transit lines. Alternately, he can take the this-isnt-enough approach, but then he has to convince the voters that a $70 billion bond issue is too small, a proposition which will be enormously difficult to sell.

The outrage I am expecting in the Conservative blogsphere may cause problems; a Conservative revolt to oust Governor Schwarzenegger, and name someone like McClintock as the Republican gubernatorial candidate, is not out of the question or even unlikely. For a Republican to make this kind of proposal - nominally the largest borrow-and-spend plan in the state's history - is astonishing, out of character, and certain to rile the party activists; and for him to follow it up with a call for a minimum wage increase is even worse. But, presuming that he can withstand a primary challenge, that is the political beauty of the plan: by taking this tack he undermines liberal charges that he's an ultra-conservative ideologue.

Governor Schwarzenegger has seized the political center and a good chunk of the space to the left of center. He has probably guaranteed himself re-election. As a tactical move it was brilliant.

SCOTUSBlog notes that a district court judge in DC has issued an order regarding the legislation which stripped the US courts over jurisdiction over enemy combatants held at Guantanamo.

Without getting into the merits of the legislation, or of the order, I would like to note the following opening portion of the order:

On December 30, 2005, President Bush signed into law H.R. 2863, the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act of 2006 (“the Act”). Section 1005(e) of the Act, entitled Judicial Review of Detention of Enemy Combatants

Read it again.

What does Judicial Review of Detention of Enemy Combatants have to do with Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes, or Pandemic Influenza?

The Congress should be ashamed of itself, shoving vitally important legislation that significantly alters the functioning of our legal system into an unrelated appropriations bill. I'm not a fan of the legislation in question, but surely it deserved to be debated, and to be approved or disapproved, on its own merits.

The Sacramento Bee reports that Ted Costa, a longtime conservative activist and promoter of ballot initiatives, is putting together a new proposal for redistricting reform. The proposal follows the defeat of Proposition 77, which he had sponsored, and seems to have learned something from that defeat.

If the report is to be believed, the new proposal replaces Proposition 77's panel of retired judges with a citizen committee essentially selected by lot, assisted by a consultant nominated by the chair of the California Judicial Council. In addition, the plan would not go into effect until after the 2010 census.

This fixes two of the most heavily criticizes provisions of Proposition 77, which may be enough to win it the support that Proposition 77 could not find. If the summary in the Bee is correct - something which I cannot easily determine as Costa's website does nto appear to have been updated in months - I will almost certainly vote for the measure: the current system is broken, and any system which is not obviously fatally flawed is worth trying instead.

Besides, there's something somehow charming about a system that attempts to select public citizens by lot.

But that's not my point here. The conversation began with a brief interview of Congressman Nathan Deal (R-GA), the author of the legislation in question. During the course of the interview, he attempted to argue that one of the reasons that we need this legislative change is that it's problematic that people who come to the country as terrorists, intending to destroy it, can give birth to citizen children.

That's just a tiny bit of overreach: suddenly the "war on terror" requires an enormous change to immigration policy, and the overturning of something which has been settled law for more than a century --- in order to prevent something for which there is no evidence has ever happened!

Look for this to become a major meme in right wing circles, however. The linkage of the two issues is too powerful for the proponents of this measure to refrain from, no matter the level of absurdity involved; it's far too easy to smear opponents of changing the rules as being pro-terrorist.

Proposition 78 and Proposition 79, two dueling ballot initiatives involving the state's role in obtaining discounts for purchasers of prescription drugs, are perfect examples of things that have no business on the ballot. They are both technically complex programs with unclear economic side-effects. Unlike Proposition 76, which is even more complex, they do not implicate or threaten the vested interest of the legislature or the broader political class. There is no reason except for political cowardice that decisions of this nature cannot be mae by the legislature, and their presence on the ballot this fall is close to an abuse of the initiative process.

There's been a lot of noise, most of it essentially name calling, generated by proponents of each; and the wording of proposition 78 makes it quite clear that there is only room for one of them in state code. Nevertheless, they are more similar than they are different, and the first question for the voter is whether or not he approves of those similarities; for if the answer is no, then he should vote against both.

AN OVERSIMPLIFIED OVERVIEW

Propositions 78 and 79 would both establish a program wherein certain residents of the state could obtain a discount prescription drug card. People with discount drug cards could go to a pharmacy, which would sell drugs to them at either (a) the usual rate, or (b) a rate negotiated between the state and the pharmacy, minus a rebate amount negotiated with the drug manufacturer. Participation would generally be restricted to the so-called "working poor", although the details differ between the two initiatives. There is no requirement that either pharmacies or manufacturers participate in the program, although there are some mechanisms in Proposition 79 which would require the state to use market pressure and/or public shaming to induce participation.

That's the core concept in both initiatives and, in general, it's a perfectly fine idea: there is much to be said for the market power available when you use the state as a clearing-house for purchases in this fashion, and there is much to be remedied in the health care options available to the "working poor". It is, of course, not clear that this solution doesn't in fact aggravate the problem; more on that later.

THE DIFFERENCES IN THE PROPOSITIONS: WHAT PATIONS ARE ELIGIBLE

Proposition 78 would restrict eligibility to those who

1. are a "resident" (the law does not specify "resident of California", it merely specifies "resident");
2. Have a family income of no more than 300% of the federal poverty line;
3. Do not have outpatient prescription drug coverage from another source, except Medicare;
4. Have not had outpatient prescription drug coverage for any of the preceding three months, with certain exceptions.

Proposition 79 would restrict eligibility to those who

1. Have total unreimbursed medical expenses equal to 5% or more of family income;
2. Are enrolled in medicare and have drugs not covered by Medicare;
3. Have a family income of no more than 400% of the federal poverty line;

There are two striking differences here. Proposition 79 would allow a broader category of participants (and would therefore be likely to have more economic effect on the industry overall); there are many people with large unreimbursed medical expenses who arguably need the support of this initiative who would be covered under Proposition 79 and not under Proposition 78. That speaks in Proposition 79's favor.

On the other hand, Proposition 78 excludes those who already have coverage. That means that under many circumstances, Proposition 79 would in effect be providing discounts not to individuals but to their insurance companies. To the extent that the state is not actually spending its own moey, that may not be a bad thing; but it may be a step towards shifting the burden of health care in aggregate from insurance companies to the state. It may, in short, be the thin wedge of an iceberg of unintended consequences; and those consequences deserve consideration.

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PROPOSITIONS: THE COST TO THE PATIENT

Both propositions stipulate that patients with prescription drug costs will be charged the lower of the standard rate for the drug or the rate negotiated between the state and the pharmacy, less the rebate negotiated with the manufacturer; they are identical in that regard. Both charge an annual application fee; Proposition 78's is more, at $15, than Proposition 79's, at $10.

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PROPOSITIONS: MEANS OF PERSUASION

Both propositions say that rebates will be negotiated with drug companies. However, Proposition 79 gives the state some weapons to use in the negotiation: it would prohibit Medi-Cal from purchasing drugs from drug companies which do not negotiate, and it would require that the names of manufacturers which do and do not enter into agreements for rebates shall be made public (essentially as a means of using public pressure to force companies to negotiate). Both of these fill an important niche: manufacturers have no incentive other than altruism to participate in the rebate program under the terms of Proposition 78, while Proposition 79 gives them an incentive.

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PROPOSITIONS: ADDITIONAL PROVISIONS OF PROPOSITION 79

While a prescription drug program is the core of both propositions 78 and 79, proposition 79 has some additional related provisions:

• It establishes a program to assist small businesses. Those which pay more than 50% of the cost of health coverage for its employees will be able to obtain "a net price comparable to the Cal RxPlus program," using the same procedural mechanism for establishing prices;
• It prohibits "profiteering in prescription drugs", defined as what happens when someone "exacts or demands an unreasonable price; exacts or demands prices or terms that lead to any unjust or unreasonable profit; discriminates unreasonably against any person in the sale, exchange, distribution, or handling of prescription drugs dispensed or delivered in the state; or Intentionally prevents, limits, lessens, or restricts the sale or distribution of prescription drugs in this state in retaliation for the provisions of this chapter." In addition, it specifies a penalty of $100,000 as the minimum penalty for profiteering;
• It creates a nine-member "Prescription Drug Advisory Board" to review access to and pricing of prescription drugs and report on their review.

The first of these is a stunningly good idea; small businesses are often badly pinched by the cost of providing health care to their employees. While I would prefer to remove the burden of health care from businesses altogether, the limited burden-shifting envisioned here - in which small businesses which are clearly working to support their employees are provided access to discounts negotiated with the drug manufacturers and with pharmacies - is a fantastic thing and, if this measure goes down in flames, should be adopted by the legislature forthwith.

Aside from whatever the administrative costs are, the third of these ideas is harmless: a board of advisors selected to meet convoluted criteria runs around investigating and issues a report. It's unlikely to achieve anything dramatic, but also unlikely to cause any problems. I can find no compelling reason to be for or against it.

It's the middle provision which gives me fits. Libertarian economists might say there's nothing wrong with profiteering, but I don't share that objection; and yet the provision still troubles me - not only is it it sufficiently vague as to invite years of litigation, but it also is worded in such a way as to presume that the initiative is going to result in retaliatory actions by drug manufacturers. It presumes an adversarial role between people who should be cooperating, and that is troubling, particularly if that presumption is shared by those who are placed on the harmless board of advisors.

Worse yet, the initiative includes an unusually restrictive clause on legislative amendment.

AMENDMENT OF INITIATIVE STATUTES

A normal initiative statute includes a clause that reads something like this:

The Legislature may amend this act only to achieve its purpose and intent, by legislation receiving at least a two-thirds vote of each house and signature by the Governor.

The intent is that an initiative statute, passed by the people, cannot be summarily overturned by the legislature; the legislature can only act in a way which is consistent with the intent of the initiative, and only by supermajority. That is standard boilerplate language in initiative statutes.

Proposition 79 goes beyond that (emphasis added):

No provision of this act may be amended by the Legislature except to further the purposes of that provision by a statute passed in each house by roll call vote entered in the journal, two thirds of the membership concurring, or by a statute that becomes effective only when approved by the electorate. No amendment by the Legislature shall be deemed to further the purposes of this act unless it furthers the purpose of the specific provision of this act that is being amended. In any judicial action with respect to any legislative amendment, the court shall exercise its independent judgement as to whether or not the amendment satisfies the requirements of this subdivision.

OK, so the Legislature can only amend a provision if it is consistent with the purpose of the specific provision. It can't, for example, determine that a specific provision undermines the purpose of the law as a whole, and amend that provision out of existence. And every level of court gets to make an independent judgement as to whether or not the amendment is consistent.

That fairly effectively ties the Legislature's hand. I'm not convinced that's a good idea.

CONCLUSIONS

Proposition 78 is an incredibly poorly worded law; its drafting is sloppy, and reading it brought me quickly to the suspicion that it is deliberately so. I am skeptical about the wisdom of placing such a law on the statute books.

In addition, while it is less likely to result in a burden-shifting from insurance companies to the state, it excludes a large class of people - those who are not desperately poor but who are effected by large-scale medical bills. There is no principled reason to exclude them. There may be a pragmatic reason - that a program of this sort inevitably distorts the market and that, as a result, it is better to restrict inclusion to the smallest possible population so as to reduce the market distortion - but proponents of Proposition 78 have not made that argument, and there does not seem to be much available analytical data to demonstrate the difference in economic effect of the two measures. Assuming you think such a program is a good thing in the first place, there does not seem to be a pragmatic reason to support the eligibility requirements of Proposition 78 over those of Proposition 79.

Indeed, assuming you think such a prescription drug program is a good thing, there are three reasons I can come up with why one might support Proposition 78 over Proposition 79:

1. Opposition to the state using market force and public shaming to force negotiations;
2. Dislike of the profiteering provisions in Proposition 79;
3. Horror at the restrictive amendment rules in Proposition 79.

I'm in favor of using market force and public shaming to force negotiations; indeed, using the state's market power is the primary purpose of this kind of discount program. I am, however, troubled by the tone of the profiteering provisions; and that distemper is made worse by the restrictive amendment rules, which make it difficult if not impossible to fix any problems with the initiative after the fact. Yet, at the same time, it is clear that Proposition 78 is the lesser of the two initiatives; it is poorly constructed and, by setting its sights lower, guarantees that it would be less successful at achieving the goal.

It's a conundrum for me. Were I a legislator, I would vote against both and insist that someone draft a better one. As a voter, I don't really have that luxury; I can vote against both, but then the goal will likely not be achieved; the legislature has already shown that it is unwilling to touch this, and the defeat of both initiatives will resound as the defeat of the idea, not the defeat of the implementation. But I have problems with both implementations.

In the end, forced to jump off the fence by the impending deadline, my support for the goal outweighs my dislike of the implementations. Either one would be better than the current system; and, of the two, Proposition 79 would be better than proposition 78. Given that the enemy of the ok is the perfect, as the saying doesn't go, I find myself compelled to vote for Proposition 79, despite my misgivings.

Making a decision about Proposition 78 is more difficult. If Proposition 79 passes, I want Proposition 78 to fail (so that it doesn't conflict); if Proposition 79 fails, I want proposition 78 to pass. Clearly, then, my decision about Proposition 78 depends on how I think the voters are going to vote on Proposition 79; and for that, unusually, I must consult the polls. The latest Field Poll shows Proposition 79 failing 37-45-20; they also show Proposition 78 failing 36-45-19. Assuming the poll is correct, then I should vote 'yes' on Proposition 78; but with that number of undecideds, even following the normal rule that undecideds usually break against initiatives, it's hard to be sure.

I haven't yet decided where I stand in the battle between proponents of Proposition 78 and proponents of proposition 79, but Proposition 78 is one of the worst drafted initiatives I've ever read.

Some examples:

[Health and Safety Code Division 112, Section 130601, paragraph f, subparagraph 4, clause i, as added]

"Prescription drug" means any drug that bears the legend "federal law prohibits dispensing without prescription," "Rx only", or words of similar import.

What, there isn't a legal definition of prescription drugs by status, it all depends on what the label says? Seems trivially easy to get around. (To be fair, Proposition 79 has similar wording, but it still seems terribly bizarre to me).

[Health and Safety Code Division 112, Section 130605, as added]

To be eligible for Cal Rx, an individual shall meet all of the following requirements at the time of application and reapplication for the program:
(1) Be a resident.
(2) ...

Be a resident of where? I mean, yeah, it's implied that you have to be a resident of California. But shouldn't a well-drafted law say so rather than requiring a judge to assume it?

[Health and Safety Code Division 112, Section 13606, Paragraph b, Subparagraph 4, clause c; Section 13707, paragraph b, as added]

(c) In assessing the income requirement for Cal Rx eligibility, the department shall use the income information reported on the application and not require any additional information.
...
(b)(1) Private discount drug programs may require an applicant to provide additional information, beyond that required by Cal Rx, to determine the applicatnt's eligibility for discount drug programs.
(2) An applicant shall not be, under any cirrcumstances, required to participate in, or to disclose information that would determine the applicant's eligibility to participate in, private discount drug programs, in order to participate in Cal Rx.

OK, I kind of get this one: eligibility for private discount drug programs and for CalRx are not related to one another, the private programs can have higher requirements, and you don't have to participate in one of them to participate in CalRx. But since CalRx is nothing other than a clearing house for private discount drug programs, this is a meaningless semantic distinction: in effect to participate in the program you have to seperately establish eligibility, using different critiera, with both the state office and the local pharmacy filling the order.

This is unclear at best and tendentious at worst. When combined with the sloppy drafting above, it makes for a poor portrait of craftsmanship and writing. Lawyers can express themselves more clearly than this when they want to. This reeks more of a deliberate intent to be unclear and confusing than honest error.

Proposition 77 is the most revolutionary of the measures on the ballot this fall. It proposes a change to the innermost workings of the political system, something akin to the adoption of the blanket primary in the late 1990s; and its effects, if adopted, may work as profound a change on the state's politics as the abolition of cross-filing in the 1950s or the adoption of the initiative system itself. Then again, it might not; the single biggest problem with the initiative is that nobody can say with any certainty what its effects will be. There is some precedent, and there are some examples of similar systems elsewhere; but evidence which is collectible from such precedents may not apply to California, and many of the conclusions which both proponents and opponents of the measure are reaching are, in fact, the sentinels of wishful or fearful thinking.

THE BASIC PROPOSAL

Proposition 77 would change the rules under which California draws the borders of legislative districts after each census. Currently, those borders are drawn up by the state Legislature. Proposition 77 would change the rules so that tentative borders are drawn up by a party-balanced panel of retired judges, and then must be approved or rejected by the voters in a referendum. Proponents of the measure claim that this will lead to fairer districts, pointing to the current districting scheme as a rank example of political corruption. Democratic opponents of the measure claim that it is nothing more than an attempt at a partisan power grab by the Democratic party, while Republican opponents of the measure claim that it is nothing more than an attempt at a partisan power grab by the Democratic party. The proponents are closer to the truth, but there are some subtle concerns that both they and the measure's opponents are missing.

THE CURRENT SYSTEM

Article 21 of the California State Constitution provides, in its entirety:

SECTION 1. In the year following the year in which the national
census is taken under the direction of Congress at the beginning of
each decade, the Legislature shall adjust the boundary lines of the
Senatorial, Assembly, Congressional, and Board of Equalization
districts in conformance with the following standards:

(a) Each member of the Senate, Assembly, Congress, and the Board
of Equalization shall be elected from a single-member district.

(b) The population of all districts of a particular type shall be
reasonably equal.

(c) Every district shall be contiguous.

(d) Districts of each type shall be numbered consecutively
commencing at the northern boundary of the State and ending at the
southern boundary.

(e) The geographical integrity of any city, county, or city and
county, or of any geographical region shall be respected to the
extent possible without violating the requirements of any other
subdivision of this section.

The California state Legislature is responsible for redrawing the borders of legislative districts after each census. Its border-drawing is subject to federal review under the Voting Rights Act (because certain parts of the state, including Monterey County, are deemed to have been historically discriminatory against the Latino population of the state). In practice, rule (e) above is regularly ignored; a casual glance at any of the current state district maps shows little if any respect for the geographical integrity of anything.

In 1991, after a protracted fight between the legislature and then-Governor Wilson, the State Supreme Court appointed a panel of special masters to hold public hearings and return a recommendation as to what plan should be adopted. That panel rejected both the legislature's preferred plan and the Governor's preferred plan, instead proposing a third plan which was ultimately adopted. One of the signal features of that plan was that all state Senate districts were comprised of two adjoining Assembly districts. These districts were generally considered by partisans on both sides of the aisle as having been fair districts, and there were a substantial number of districts in which the district representative's party switched over the course of the decade.

In 2001, the leaders of both major parties in the state Legislature organized a plan in which every sitting legislator would be ensured a safe district. It was not, as some have alleged, a partisan districting in which the Democrats in the Legislature conspired with Governor Davis to ensure that Democrats would have as many seats as possible; it was a bipartisan incumbent protection plan in which both parties assured that every legislature would be placed in a district in which he was relatively invulnerable to competition. There have been virtually zero districts in which the representative's party has switched in the last two elections.

THE PRAGMATIC PROBLEM WITH THE STATUS QUO

One of the side-effects of an incumbent protection plan is that, as a general rule, it is now true that state Assemblypeople, Senators, and Congresspeople are more likely to be defeated as a result of opposition in the primary than they are in a general election; their districts were designed in such a fashion as to make inter-party competition difficult. This has encouraged politicians of both parties to take positions which appeal primarily to party activists (who are more likely to vote in primaries) and less likely to appeal to the state's centrists (including the approximately thirty percent of voters who are not affiliated with any political party). This has exacerbated the frustration with politics felt by the so-called "independant" voter.

In addition, the need to placate party activists has led directly to the state's intractable budget problems. Compromise between the parties at the legislative level has become all but impossible, as any such compromise risks a backlash from party activists. It is easier for Republicans to hold fast to their determination to not raise taxes than it is for them to seek a budget compromise; it is likewise easier for Democrats to hold fast to their determination to not cut programs than it is for them to seek a compromise. The incumbent-protection districting has created a situation in which everybody has a structural incentive to avoid compromise as much as possible, and has combined with the side-effects of term limits to create a politics of combative paralysis at the state level.

It is, to be sure, not fair to blame this situation entirely on the 2001 redistricting; there are other elements at play. But legislative districts in which interparty competition is less meaningful than intraparty competition encourages extremism in the legislature and discourages compromise, and the results have been unfortunate for the state as a whole.

THE IDEALISTIC PROBLEM WITH THE STATUS QUO

The 2001 redistricting has been widely recognized as an incumbent protection plan: a system in which the legislators drafted districts in order to guarantee their own re-election. A system, in effect, in which the legislators currently in office deliberately chose those voters most likely to support them. To put it bluntly, this is a perversion of democracy. If the legislature can select its voters, if it can aggregate people into districts in such a fashion as to make competitive elections nonexistent, then the people are no longer choosing their legislators in any meaningful fashion. Elections conducted under such a system are a farce, a rubber-stamp in which the people simply verify that the legislators have chosen their voters wisely.

This has always been a danger with reapportionment conducted by the legislature. It is a sin of government that has been around since at least the time of the Long Parliament. But it is also a fundamental violation of the rights of the people. It is no more acceptable than was the decision of Tennessee to forgo reapportionment for decades. And there is some reason to believe that modern technology is making the problem worse by making it harder for the Legislature to accidentally create a few competitive districts in addition to the mass count of districts designed specifically to deny the voters a meaningful choice.

This concern is felt particularly keenly by conservative activists, who believe themselves to be disadvantaged and discriminated against under the current system, and who think that a different system will grant them more power. There is substantial reaosn to think that they are wrong about this proposition granting them more political power; but setting that aside and looking only at their idealistic argument, they have a point. For the legislature to create districts that deny political competition and bear no reasonable relation to geographic communities, in order to ensure their own re-election, denies the voters a meaningful participation in representative democracy. It is intolerable.

THE PROPOSED SOLUTION: PROPOSITION 77

Proposition 77 would take the power to redraw legislative districts away from the legislature entirely and, in effect, split it in half. The power to create new district maps would be handed to a panel of retired judges selected through a complicated procedure designed to ensure partisan balance among the judges; those judges would then be constrained by a set of rules regarding what they could consider in drawing new boundaries. The power to approve new district maps would be vested in the voters themselves, through the power of referendum.

There is some precedent for involving the judiciary in the process. The 1990 redistricting was in effect done by the judiciary, and other states have from time to time had individual redistricting plans issued by the courts. In addition, since the 1960s redistricting plans in areas which are deemed to have had a history of racial and ethnic discrimination in the political process have been subject to judicial review.

More common is the principle behind involving the judiciary: the idea that redistricting should not be done by politicians but by people who are non-partisan and unlikely or ineligible to stand for political office is a common one. Iowa, for example, has for several decades vested redistricting in the hands of an independent commission appointed for that purpose, and district boundaries in most parliamentary systems are redrawn by civil servants whose only responsibility is to ensure fair districting. It is generally agreed by US experts that Iowa's districts are the fairest and most competitive in the United States; and there is very little discontent with the drawing of district boundaries in countries with civil service-drawn district borders (although this may be a result of a generally less polarized electorate in those countries, or of other cultural factors which do not arise from the district boundaries themselves).

Much of the opposition to proposition 77 seems to focus on a perception that the procedure for selecting who will draw new boundaries does not actually guarantee political independance, and may simply result in a politically biased cartel which is not, in the end, responsible to anyone. Proponents are aghast at the idea: if retired judges cannot be trusted to be unbiased and neutral, to apply the rules regarding district boundaries fairly and without a nod to political concerns, then who can be?

The proponents of the measure have a point: we expect judges to be unbiased, as a daily routine, part of their jobs. Judges hearing cases that arise out of election disputes are expected to put their partisanship aside and apply the law fairly and - Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, generally do so. It is not unreasonable to expect them to suppress their political bias in this task, and in any event the fact that their plans will be submitted as an initiative acts as a check on any political adventurism.

There is a problem, however, which opponents and proponents both seem to ignore: unbiased judicial involvement in the drafting of new districts may well lead to a perception of bias. As we've seen with the juggling of judges in the Tom DeLay case (where two judges have now been pushed off the case as a result of charges of political partisanship), it is easy for people to learn to percieve judges as being biased partisan hacks. To the extent that happens, respect for the judiciary, and willingness to comply with the decisions of courts, declines. It is possible, though by no means certain, that redistricting by judges will result in better redistricting and also cause a decline in public respect for the nonpartisanship of judges; that is one of the great risks of the proposal.

VETTING REDISTRICTING BY INITIATIVES

The other great risk in proposition 77 involves using initiatives to approve new district maps. Under the proposal at hand, the panel of retired judges is supposed to send its plan to the Secretary of State. It will go into effect immediately for the upcoming primary and general election, but it will also appear on the general election ballot as an initiative. If the initiative passes, the resulting plan is in effect until the following census; if the initiative fails, then a new panel of special masters is appointed and the cycle repeats itself.

The complaints i've heard about this focus entirely on the fact that the plan goes into effect before it is approved by the voters. If this measure passes, for example, the election of 2012 will be conducted using the districts drawn by retired judges using the 2010 census data, and simultaneously the voters will be deciding whether to accept or reject the boundaries. Doesn't that, as the opponents of the measure say in their rebugttal to the argument in favor, "take away the right of voters to reject redistricting plans before they go into effect?"

To an extent, yes. Under current rules, if the legislature adopts a redistricting plan, angry voters could circulate petitions to force a referendum at the next election, and the new boundaries would be suspended until after the election. This has never happened. The signature gathering does pose a significant barrier; and arguably a system in which the voters automatically get to vote on the plan is one which gives more power to the voters than one in which they only get to vote on the plan if they collect six hundred thousand signatures asking for the right to do so. This particular argument, as presented in the ballot pamphlet, is disingenuous at best.

There is a different concern, though: what will the campaigns over district boundaries be like? There will be expensive, high-profile campaigns; there always are, with ballot initiatives. Will they focus on contiguity (the only real concern that the judges are allowed to take into account when drawing the district boundaries)? Or will they focus on partisan outcomes? How likely is it that we will see political commercials denouncing new district boundaries for creating a democratic, or republican, partisan majority that is inconsistent with voter registration? What is the risk that plans which conform to the letter of the law will be rejected for reasons that the drafters of the districting plans are not lalowed to consider. Worse, what is the risk that plans will be consistently rejected and that, in effect, we will endure biennial redistricting?

Nobody knows the answers to this question; it is the great unknown in proposition 77.

The question that we as voters must consider is this: is that risk, and the risk of damaging the reputation of the judiciary, worth it? Or are we better off sticking with a means of selecting district boundaries which is actively undermining democracy?

In my mind, there's no contest. There are risks associated with Proposition 77; there are uncertainties. But i'd rather take those risks than continue with a system in which legislators select their voters and elections are, in effect, rendered meaningless. The risks of adopting proposition 77 can be ameliorated by further ballot initiatives if they turn out to be too great. While the risks of sticking with the current situation can also be ameliorated by ballot initiative, the failure of this initiative would discourage further attempts, and it is more likely that we would stick with the status quo than try something new. That course would do too much damage to our political culture.

Proposition 77 is a questionable idea whose time has come. It has risks, and it is not guaranteed to fix every problem for which it is offered as a palliative; but it has the potential for great improvement, and the current situation is intolerable. It is an experiment which, like the blanket primary in 1998, deserves the wholehearted support of the voters of the state.

About the best thing I can say for The Legend of Zorro is that it is only the second movie i've ever seen to demonstrate the importance of election inspectors. Otherwise, the movie was ridiculous ahistorical drivel, often unintentionally absurd, with mediocre acting and poor editing.

It's bad when the editing is so poor that the audience notices. Now, granted, because i've done video editing, i'm more likely to notice than most; but still, repeatedly showing the same [redacted] exploding shows a lack of interest in quality which would make any software production team blush deep red in embarassment. But that wasn't the worst part of the film, by any means.

The worst part of the film was the idiotic plot. Here's a summary: in 1850, as California is voting to approve a constitution and join the union, the state becomes embroiled in a plot involving the confederate army's desire for a new weapon to allow it to launch a pre-emptive strike on Washington DC. The weapon is being developed in California and will be sent to the confederacy on the transcontinental railroad.

In 1850. An army which didn't exist until 1861 is using the transcontinental railroad that didn't exist until 1869.

Not to mention the absurdity of transporting wine bottles full of nitroglycerin on a train.

"What were they thinking?" doesn't even begin to describe it.

(Jared, Ian, and I give the movie six thumbs and twenty-four fingers down. Your mileage is unlikely to vary).

There's a somewhat strange report in the news this week (Hat tip: Election Law Blog) that the Attorney General has sued the Santa Cruz County Elections department for failing to comply wiht the Americans with Disabilities Act. Attorney General Lockyer's suit claims that 72% of the county's polling places had barriers to access for the disabled.

I find this statistic to be incredible. Over the years that i lived in Santa Cruz, I worked as a poll worker in the following polling places:

• the College 8 community room at UCSC;
• the Porter College community room at UCSC;
• the Baobab Lounge at UCSC;
• a Lutheran Church in central Santa Cruz County;
• a natural history museum in the Seabright area of Santa Cruz;
• an episcopal church in downtown Santa Cruz;
• a church on the eastside of Santa Cruz.

Of these sites, all three churches and the museum had easy handicapped access and closeby parking. The polling places at UCSC were all accessible, but they had no parking nearby, and could require some effort to get to the building; but that would have been the case for any polling places at UCSC, where parking is a contentious issue and buildings are often a fair ways from parking lots.

This is anecdotal evidence, of course. But 100% of the polling places I worked in were fully handicapped accessible, and every mandatory poll worker training I went to informed me of the procedure for having poll workers take ballots to people's cars if they were for some reason unable to make it into the polling place. While I can imagine that in the more rural areas of the county, handicapped accessibility may be a problem, I simply don't believe the allegations in Lockyer's lawsuit: my experience of over ten years volunteering in Santa Cruz County polling places conflicts with the statistics he is using.

Proposition 76 is a complex initiative that attempts to make a series of highly technical changes to the budget process in the hopes that doing so will help solve the state's persistent budget problems. It is also the centerpiece of Governor Schwarzenegger's agenda for the special election. Unfortunately for the voters, it contains some good ideas, some ideas which appear to be about fixing the problem but are in fact about something else entirely, and some ideas which are questionable. The mixture of ideas makes it difficult to determine how to vote; the complexity of the initiative makes the political rhetoric surrounding it useless in helping make that determination.

AN OVERSIMPLIFIED SUMMARY OF THE INITIATIVE

Proposition 76 would make the following changes to state law:

• It would prohibit the state's General fund from borrowing money either from the Transportation Investment Fund or other special funds;
• It would change the rules for what happens when there is no budget on the start of the fiscal year, preventing shutdowns of state government;
• It would provide that shortfalls in the constitutionally mandated spending on schools would not need to be repaid in subsequent years, and make some highly technical changes in the rules for how the mandated spending floor is determined;
• It would change the rules that determine the maximum spending ceiling for the state government;
• It would grant the governor the power to unilaterally cut spending where he sees fit, under certain circumstances.

THE GOOD: INTERACTION WITH SPECIAL FUNDS

One of the things that makes California's budget process is the proliferation of special funds in which revenue from a specific source is theoretically dedicated to a specific expenditure. According to the Legislative Analyst, there are hundreds of these whose expenditures are responsible for roughly 20% of the state's annual expenditure. Usually these special funds are created by ballot initiative, with voter expectation that the money will be spent as directed in the initiative.The highest profile example of this is the state's transportation fund, in which revenue from gasoline taxes are theoretically set aside for expenditure on transportation infrastructure projects.

In recent years, when the state's general fund has experienced a budget deficit, the state has papered over the deficit in part by borrowing money from the special funds. In theory the money borrowed from the general fund is supposed to be repaid, but such repayment is often either delayed, fractional, or both. Moreover, the ability of the general fund to borrow this money means that the targeted expenditures may not happen in any given year, if the state decides the general fund needs the money more.

Proposition 76 would explicitly prohibit such borrowing, creating a firewall between the general fund and these special funds. This is a good thing: if the voters are going to create special funds, they have a reasonable expectation that the money in those special funds will be spent as they have directed, not used as a slush fund to provide backup financing for the general fund. Without the firewall that Proposition 76 would erect, the entire notion of a special fund is in fact meaningless, and most people voting for initiatives that create such special funds have always assumed that firewall to exist. This provision of the proposition inserts a common-sense barrier between different accounts which should have been placed there decades ago.

POSSIBLY A GOOD IDEA: IMPROVEMENTS TO PROPOSITION 98

In 1988, the voters of the state of California passed a ballot initiative which ensured that the public schools would receive a minimum amount of funding from the state general fund. (The schools also receive money from local property taxes; the precise nature of school financing in California is incomprehensible even to trained accountants). The guarantee provided that the public schools would receive 39% of general fund revenues in 1988-89, and then a minimum amount based upon that quantity, indexed for growth in school attendance and per capita income. However, in years in which the percentage growth of per capita income is less than one percent more than the growth in general fund revenues, a different guarantee is used; the 1988-89 baseline is indexed based upon growth in attendance and per capita general fund revenues. When the latter guarantee is used, or when the legislature declares an emergency and suspends the initiative, the difference between the amount actually funded and the amount which should have been funded (under the first guarantee) is recorded as a loan to the state, which is supposed to be repaid in subsequent years.

Proposition 98 has been derided since 1988 as depriving the state of flexibility in spending, and thereby making the entire budget process more difficult; but that was the goal of the intiative - to take public school funding off of the table for discussion when expenditure needed to be cut. The intent was to ensure that school funding remained stable, and it has largely succeeded in that. I say largely and not entirely because the legislature remains able to suspend the guarantee, because school funding can vary depending on which guarantee is used in any given year, and because the creation of large implicit loans results in an enormous state debt to schools, the repayment schedule for which becomes a heated political issue in nearly every budget cycle.

Proposition 76 attempts to remedy two of these. It remedies the uncertainty by eliminating entirely the second test; if Proposition 76 passes, the public school funding guarantee will always be based on per capita income and not per capita revenue growth. (Note that, while this is very good for the schools, it is not entirely clear that this is a good idea: if revenue growth remains significantly below per capita income growth, the total percentage of the state budget allocated to the public schools will slowly increase). The proposition remedies the problem of creating large implicit loans by ending the practice; in the future, if this measure passes, when Proposition 98 is suspended, the state does not incur a debt to make up the shortfall in the future.

There's much to be liked in these provisions; the current system is excessively complicated and the new system would simplify it, and appears to be simplifying it in a way which is in line with the intent of Proposition 98 (by permanently adopting the higher of the two possible baselines). The measure would also prevent the accumulation of an enormous implicit debt owed to the schools by the general fund. But, at the same time, that opens the door for abuse; if the legislature ever finds itself regularly suspending the guarantee of Proposition 98, there is no longer a penalty. And the permanent adoption of the higher level guarantee, particularly when combined with other provisions of the intiative, creates a serious risk that over time the percentage of the budget available for things other than education will shrink precipitously.

THE UNFORTUNATELY NECESSARY: CHANGING THE RULES FOR LATE BUDGETS

Under current California law, the legislature is required to adopt a budget by July 1 of any given year. It rarely does. When it doesn't, the state is not authorized to pay for anything (not having a budget) except for those things which courts have ruled that it is required to pay for; the result is a partial state government shut down. The intent behind this is, in essence, to hold a gun to the legislature's head: if it doesn't comply with the constitutional provision requiring a budget by the start of the fiscal year, its members must pay the political price of defending responsibility for a partial government shutdown.

The trouble is, the threat hasn't been getting results; the legislature regularly misses the deadline, and state government is as a result regularly thrown into chaos. Proposition 76 would change that by replacing the current rule with a different one: until a budget is passed, the state would be presumed to be operating under a budget identical to the one of the previous year, and spending would be authorized at the previous year's level.

The obvious drawback to this is that there is no longer a real threat to hold over the head of the legislature; there is no substantial penalty for failure to produce a budget on time. But given that the current penalty isn't producing its desired result and is regularly getting invoked, the current system is worse than the one this initiative would replace it with. It's an unfortunate admission that budgets are going to be late, and that as a result we have to have a better default than shutting down the state government every time it happens.

THE DUBIOUS: HANDING MORE POWER TO THE GOVERNOR

California's General Fund is required to be in balance when the budget is passed. If the budget subsequently falls out of balance (because revenue is lower than expected or expenditure is higher than expected), the Governor is allowed to declare a fiscal emergency and summon a special session of the legislature to modify the budget. If the legislature has failed to do so after 45 days, it is prohibited from either (a) considering other business, or (b) adjourning, until it has come to an agreement. This has been politically impractical in recent years, as a substantial minority have banded together to block any tax increases (which must be approved by a 2/3 majority), while a slim majority has rejected most spending cuts. Emergency budget rebalancing has turned into a protracted game of chicken in which the minority attempts to force unpalatable cuts on the majority, which meanwhile tries to bribe the minority into accepting tax increases.

Proposition 76 would take the issue away from the legislature: if it had failed to produce a rebalanced budget after 45 days, the Governor would be empowered to make whatever cuts he wanted (with some limitations) to the General Fund, in order to bring the budget back into balance.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not cutting the budget is properly an executive rather than a legislative task, this measure has two almost certainly intended political effects: it increases the power of minorities in the budget rebalancing negotiations (because a stubborn minority can always refuse to deal, threatening to kick the issue to the governor instead); and it enshrines a built-in bias in favor of cutting spending rather than increasing taxes. The governor cannot unilaterally raise taxes; he may only unilaterally cut spending. When combined with the existence of a sizeable minority opposed to any tax increase, anywhere, for any purpose, this provision serves to bolster that minority's strength in the negotiations for budget rebalancing; all they have to do is hold firm to their refusal to entertain the notion of tax increases, and the governor will be required enact budget cuts over the will of the legislative majority.

Proponents of this provision will defend it by pointing out that we need to live within our means, and that this is a value-neutral provision for ensuring that: when the budget falls out of balance mid-year, if the legislature is unable to fix it, the governor will restore the balance. They're right to an extent; we do need to live within our means. But this is hardly value neutral; when combined with the 2/3 majority requirement for tax increases and the presence of a committed minority opposed to all such, it enhances that minority's strength, frustrates the will of the legislative majoriuty, and reduces the incentive to forge a political compromise. Those who know that, if they stand their ground and refuse to negotiate, the governor will be forced by law to give them the budget cuts that they can't obtain through legislative agreement have no incentive to negotiate and a great incentive to hold out.

This provision is something of a trojan horse; embedded in an ostensibly neutral reform of the budget process, it instead changes the structure of that process in order to make things easier for those who want a particular policy outcome and harder for those who don't.

THE MISLEADING AND BAD: Reducing the state spending limit

If that were the only part of the initiative which took sides in the political debate instead of neutrally reforming the process, the initiative might still be a good thing. There are many good ideas in it, and those good ideas may well outweigh this particular biased structural change. But, crucially, it isn't the only part of the initiative in which partisanship hides in the cloak of neutrality.

California law provides, through a complicated formula, a maximum cap on the amount the state can spend in any given year. The quantity is determined by indexing forward from a base year, using as an index a calculation based on (a) population growth and (b) state GNP growth. According to the Legislative Analyst, the limit is somewhat substantially above current spending - the cap is not providing a constraint.

Proposition 76 would change the method by which the cap is calculated. In addition to the existing cap, it would add a new cap, in which spending would be constrained to the previous year's spending adjusted by the average of the increase in revenue over the preceding three years.

The intent is to ensure that the state never overspends; increases in revenue could not be spent immediately and must be, instead, saved as a hedge fund against a rainy day. That's a reasonable intent, in itself; it's a clever trick designed to force the state government to save money during boom times, and it would probably be quite effective.

This mechanism would, of course, delay the impact of tax increases: the full amount of new taxes could only be spent several years after they go into effect. That might reduce public or legislative support for new taxes - neither the legislature nor the electorate tend to like schemes which impose pain upfront in exchange for benefits later. But that isn't the real problem.

The problem with this proposal is this: if current spending is significantly below the spending cap, and this rule would allow increases in spending at a rate lower than that allowed by the current cap (which it would), this rule permanently lowers the spending cap. As years pass, it would constrain the state's options more and more; each year, the gap between the spending cap under the old rule and the spending cap under the new rule would increase. Government would be permanently limited.

Perhaps government should be limited; that's a conversation for another time. My objection is this: that's a policy decision, a political agenda, which has nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of this measure. It is not necessary to reforming the budget process; it uses reforming the budget process as an excuse to pursue a partisan ideological agenda. It is a trojan horse.

Logrolling - the combination of unrelated proposals into an amalgamation which pleases nobody - is sometimes necessary in the Legislature. It is not necessary in a ballot initiative, and in fact borders on the deceitful. A measure presented as a policy-neutral change to the budget process should not contain, embedded within it, a measure to permanently reduce the amount the state can spend. That is a seperate issue.

I can see this being a tough call for many: even if you object to the procedural logrolling, the good things in the initiative may outweigh the bad. But for me, it is clear: ballot initiatives should not encompass multiple subjects, and this one is a clear attempt to pursue a conservative political agenda behind a smokescreen of neutral budget reform. It deserves to be rejected at the polls.

No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.

Nine Senators voted against this. The Bush administration has threatened to veto it.

No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment .... ``cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment'' means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States"

Just what is wrong with Senators Allard (Colorado), Bond (Missouri), Coburn (Oklahoma), Cochran (Missouri), Cornyn (Texas), Inhofe (Oklahoma), Roberts (Kansas), Sessions (Alabama), and Stevens (Alaska)? These men are on the record, on the floor of the Senate, as opposing a ban on the use of cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. They should be ashamed of themselves. And the voters of those states, the men and women who sent these men to office, should be ashamed of themselves as well.

UPDATE: These Senators are objectively pro-torture.

It's been entertaining over the last day or so reading the unbelievably bad arguments people are making in favor of, and in opposition to, Miss Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court. It's enough to make me doubt the sanity and wisdom of the blogsphere, if truth be told.

Conservatives seem to have fallen into three different camps, liberals into two. One of the conservative camps and one of the liberal camps ought to be able to make common cause, although they will each have to consider whether or not it is in their overall interests to do so on this issue. The rest are going to find that it's basically impossible to talk to each other.

The first strand of thinking among outraged conservatives appears to be "Where is our Scalia? Where is our Thomas? How do we know that Miss Miers is really a conservative?" What most of those taking this position are really arguing is "we can't bring ourselves to support her unless we know she'll decide things the way we want her to decide them", exactly the sin they were accusing Democrats of during the Roberts hearing. These hypocrites are engaged in a massive betrayal of conservative legal principles; they are more interested in outcomes than in process, more interested that the president's nominees be politically correct as they define it than they are in the quality of the legal reasoning or the intellectual integrity of the jurists. They are particularly amusing to watch right now because the nomination of Miss Miers betrays the hypocrisy at the core of their argument. The gig is up.

The second, vastly more responsible, strand of thinking among outraged conservatives appears to be "This woman is utterly unqualified by just about every measure of qualification we normally use to assess Supreme Court justices. I don't care if she's a conservative, her nomination is a disgrace either way." The people making this argument are the people who really believe what they were saying during the Roberts confirmation process about the importance of a stellar record and a judicial temperament. It's almost heartbreaking to watch these people come face to face with what opponents of the Bush administration have known for years: that Bush is very good at making promises and very bad at delivering.

The third, somewhat consistent although very very scary, strand of thinking among conservatives appears to be "Bush knows what he's doing, trust him." To a liberal like myself this argument appears nonsensical, and even to many conservatives its questionable: what possible reason has Bush given to trust his decision making when it comes to appointees? "Trust, but verify" might be appropriate, but trusting without verifying is, in this case, utterly insane.

The first strand of thinking among liberals appears to be "This is an obvious crony appointment! Let's use it to show everyone what we have known all along about Bush." What this group is saying is very similar to what the second group of conservatives is saying, and I submit that liberals who are of this opinion will be more effective in blocking Miss Miers' nomination if they find a way to make common cause with those conservaitves. If, on the other hand, they are more interested in giving Bush a black eye than they are in blocking this nomination, they should be ashamed of themselves: as much as Bush may deserve that black eye, and as much fun as it may be to give it to him, to say that you believe that Miss Miers is an unqualified crony and yet blocking her nomination is less important than making Bush look bad is, in essence, to say that the quality of the Justices on the Supreme Court is less important than making Bush look bad. Is that really an idea that the people promoting it want to be promoting?

Which brings us to the second strand I've seen in liberal thinking: that Miss Miers may be an unqualified crony, but that she's less likely to successfully advance conservative interests and/or damage liberal interests than just about any other nominee Bush might put forward, so we might as well support her. Aside from the underestimation of Bush involved, this is a very disturbing proposition: at its core is the premise that protecting liberal political interests is more important than ensuring that good judges sit on the Supreme Court. That idea illuminates a lack of seriousness about key elements of our government. Not only is it the identical lack of seriousness as is exhibited by those who don't care if she's qualified as long as she's conservative, it is every bit as contemptible. Liberals, as the people who believe that government can serve the interests of the people, as the people who do not believe that a smaller government is the answer to every problem, have a particular responsibility to work towards good government; making a deal in which we support mediocre or even terrible officeholders as long as we think they will be our political allies, especially in a job which is supposed to be relatively apolitical, cheapens and weakens us.

I supported a similar argument when it came to Judge Roberts: that we should get behind him because he was the least bad thing we could expect from this President. The difference was that he was almost over-qualified for the job; I feel completely assured that Roberts is a smart man, capable of the task in front of him. With Miss Miers, I am not so certain; and I am shocked and aghast at those liberals who argue that, even if Miss Miers turns out to be an unqualified crony, we should support her because the next candidate might be less likely to be a political ally.

*If* Miss Miers turns out to be an unqualified crony, we should do no such thing. We should stand up as the party of good government, the party which believes in government, and denounce the nomination as the premiere example of why government should not be run by those who do not believe in it, and we should make common cause with all those we can in order to block the nomination. To do otherwise would be to betray both liberalism and the public interest.

I can remember, as a cadet at West Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.

...

Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda's, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

...

Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is "America."

Whatever is said about him in the next several months, it is clear from this letter that Captain Fishback is a man who loves his country, and we have been well served by him.

Let me take this moment to remind everyone of to keep an open mind about Harriet Miers, the new nominee for Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court. The lack of previous judicial experience does not necessarily make for a bad justice; nor does a close association with the executive branch (although the latter is troubling in an era when the most important cases before the court may well be issues of the executive overstepping its authority to imprison and interrogate people). The President does deserve a chance to make the case for his nominee, and we should listen to it.

That said, it had better be a good case; it really does look as though he picked someone from the vast pool of undistinguished late-middle-aged lawyers simply because she was his lawyer. With Judge Roberts, it was plausible to make the case that he was among the best possible candidates for the job. It's hard to imagine that with Miss Miers. Why her and not, say, Judge Posner? It's a tough case to make, and it will require a serious discussion of what exactly we mean by "best candidate for the job" when it comes to Supreme Court Justices. I look forward to the conversation.

(In the meantime, I'm experiencing a great deal of amusement-cum-schadenfreude watching Conservative activists tear the nomination apart and whining "where is our Scalia/Thomas?" The nomination of Judge Roberts aside, the administration's performance over the last six weeks appears to have been a series of spectacular own-goals, and Miss Miers may well turn out to be the icing on that cake).

Hurricane Rita is headed for the Texas Gulf Coast. As of current writing, *three days out*, she's a Category-5 Hurricane with a pressure almost as low as Katrina's was at her worst, and falling fast.

Houston isn't below sea level, so it's unlikely to go the way of New Orleans; but Galveston has been destroyed before.

Amazingly enough, they're predicting that Rita will still be Category-1 hurricane when it hits *AUSTIN*.

I hope everyone gets the message and evacuates this time.

I've been avoiding talking about Hurricane Katrina, mostly because every time i've tried i've been overcome by incoherent rage, but as time passes i'm slowly getting a handle on it.

Which made this report in the New York Times both heartening and disappointing. The officials of Houston, Texas, are evacuating the Katrina evacuees a full three days before Hurricane Rita is expected to hit land. It's fantastic that they're that on the ball ... and this makes the behavior of the NOLA city officials in the days before Katrina's landfall seem even more outrageous.

The disappointing thing is this:

"They've been trying to get us out early," Mr. Freeman said. "We're the working people. They don't want us here."

You'd think that someone who'd just been through one category four hurricane which left his home city under water might be a bit less suspicious of the motives of people who are saying "hey, we need to get you somewhere safe before this other hurricane that's headed right for us hits land." I mean, sure, Houston isn't New Orleans, and Rita isn't Katrina, but getting people out of harm's way is exactly what should be happening, and someone who was just in the eye of the storm ought to be better placed to understand that than anyone else is.

Apparently some activists at Baylor University are upset that Starbucks has coffee cups that have the following quote:

"My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short."

I stop at a Starbucks most mornings on the way to work, and I buy a latte, which comes wrapped in a piece of cardboard that keeps most of the cup covered and prevents me from burning my hands.

I have never noticed quotes on the cup before this news story.

Perhaps i'm particularly unobservant. Or perhaps Baylor's activist community is just looking for something to complain about. My bet is on both.

When the comic strip bizarro is on target, it's *really* on target:

On Friday of last week, a [redacted. based on PC hardware] was dropped off in my cube. I finally got around to trying to use it today.

It would not boot; it complained that there was no operating system installed. So I got a [redacted] OS image CD, plopped it in the CD drive, and attempted to install it.

The machine would not boot from the CD.

So I went into the bios. The bios said that it was set to boot from CD before trying to boot from the hard drive. It also seemed to show that there were no IDE drives present. (?!) I turned off 'quickboot mode' in the hopes that that way I would see more.

That got me a complaint about disk drive A not being found; the BIOS was configured to support a legacy disk drive that isn't installed. I turned off support for the legacy floppy drive and restarted.

No dice. At startup, the machine gives me a couple of reassuring messages (mouse found, etc), then displays a 'press any key to continue' screen showing that I have no installed hard drives, and then complains that it can't find an operating system, without attempting to boot off of the OS image install CD.

I opened the case; there are two hard drives there, both of them plugged in to the power supply. The CD is plugged into the motherboard via an IDE cable, but the hard drives do not appear to be.

I am unable to use the machine in the state in which it was dropped off in my cube; it will not boot from an OS image CD and appears to not have its hard drives connected to the IDE controller.

Can someone please take a look at this for me?

Utterly unbelievable.

Frankfurter Allgemeine has a wonderful series of images up showing district-by-district results for the recent inconclusive German election. They make clear some things which the English-language media either hasn't been reporting or hasn't understood. While it is true that the overall election results were basically a tie, it is also true that Germany appears to be breaking down into several different regions in which different parties are competitive - except for the CDU, the only party which appears to be broadly competitive in the entire country.

Some data points:

The greens appear to have little to no constituency in the east outside the immediate environs of Berlin, and are strongest in the area of the Black Forest and the environs of Stuttgart.

The SPD appears to have little constituency in Saxony and Bavaria, is weak in Baden-Wurttemburg, and is only really strong in Westphalia.

The FDP has no constituency whatsoever in the east outside of Berlin and Saxony, and is strongest in Baden-Wurttemburg and the areas west of the Rhine.

But the most dramatic of them all:

The Left party is extremely weak in the former west Germany, except for the Saarland, but it is the dominant political party in the former East Germany.

The CDU/CSU, however, seems strong everywhere in the west, in Pomerania, and in Saxony; while it remains dominant in Bavaria, its strength there is decreasing somewhat, and it continues to have a powerful base throughout the former west Germany. It is the only party in Germany which can reasonably claim to have a truly strong following nationwide (as opposed to a strong following in particular regions).

COBURN: My question relates to the Constitution and what is said in Article 3 that judges, both of the Supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior.

My question to you: Is relying on foreign precedent and selecting and choosing a foreign precedent to create a bias outside of the laws of this country, is that good behavior?

This sounds to me like an implicit suggestion that judges can be impeached for relying on foreign precedent. Judge Roberts seemed to take it the same way:

ROBERTS: Well, for the reasons I stated yesterday, I don't think it's a good approach. I wouldn't accuse judges or justices who disagree with that, though, of violating their oath. I'd accuse them of getting it wrong on that point and I'd hope to sit down with them and debate it and reason about it.

But I think the justices who reach a contrary result on those questions are operating in good faith and trying, as I do on the court I am on now, to live up to that oath that you read.

I wouldn't want to suggest that they're not doing not doing that.

LEAHY:Can I assume that you will hold the internment of all residents of this country who are interned just because they have a particular nationality or ethnic or religious group -- you would hold that to be unconstitutional?

ROBERTS: The internment of a group solely on the basis of their...

LEAHY: Nationality or ethnic or religious group?

ROBERTS: I suppose a case like that could come before the court. I would be surprised to see it. And I would be surprised if there were any arguments that could support it.

Oddly, I wouldn't be surprised to see such a case come before the court, in the event of a large-scale terrorist attack, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the position Judge Roberts put forth here be extraordinarily unpopular in such a case.

So i'm relieved to hear him say what he did yesterday.

SPECTER:And the question, by analogy [ed: analogy to the Dickerson decision in which the court upheld Miranda]: Whether a woman's right to choose is so embedded that it's become a part of our national culture; what do you think?

ROBERTS: Well, I think that gets to the application of the principles in a particular case. And based on my review of the prior transcripts of every nominee sitting on the court today, that's where they've generally declined to answer: when it gets to the application of legal principles to particular cases.

I would repeat that the court has already applied the principles of stare decisis to Roe in the Casey decision. And that stands as a precedent of the court, as well.

SPECTER: Do you believe today that the right to privacy does exist in the Constitution?

ROBERTS: Senator, I do. The right to privacy is protected under the Constitution in various ways. It's protected by the Fourth Amendment which provides that the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, effects and papers is protected. It's protected under the First Amendment dealing with prohibition on establishment of a religion and guarantee of free exercise. It protects privacy in matters of conscience. It was protected by the framers in areas that were of particular concern to them. It may not seem so significant today: the Third Amendment, protecting their homes against the quartering of troops. And in addition, the court has -- it was a series of decisions going back 80 years -- has recognized that personal privacy is a component of the liberty protected by the due process clause. The court has explained that the liberty protected is not limited to freedom from physical restraint and that it's protected not simply procedurally, but as a substantive matter as well. And those decisions have sketched out, over a period of 80 years, certain aspects of privacy that are protected as part of the liberty in the due process clause under the Constitution.

"Certain aspects of privacy that are protected as part of the liberty in the due process clause under the Constitution." "It's protected not simply procedurally but as a substantive matter as well."

To be fair, Judge Roberts could be merely reporting what the Court has said in the past, repeating what the court has held the law to be without saying whether or not he's agreed with it. But given his comments elsewhere about stare decisis, my reading of this is that he accepts such things as settled law.

SPECTER: The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. Do you agree with that statement, Judge Roberts?

ROBERTS: Well, yes, Senator, as a general proposition, but I do feel compelled to point out that I should not, based on the precedent of prior nominees, agree or disagree with particular decisions.

Somehow I don't see the social conservatives being thrilled with that answer.

I'm still struggling to find words to describe my reaction to the last week's news, to the shocking pictures and even more shocking words, to the destruction of one of my country's best known and most interesting cities.

But while i'm doing that, i'd like to echo this:

Does anyone have confidence that, tomorrow say, if Tulsa or Peoria or Dallas or Chicago where attacked by a chemical or biological weapon--that our government would be able to mount an effective response? I certainly don't. After all, the government knew a Category 4 or 5 was about to slam into New Orleans.

That doesn't say it all, not by a long shot. But it's a start.

My aunt's mom managed to get a call out yesterday afternoon saying she was fine. No word from my friend's friend (the tourist) nor from any of Jared's family in the area. Jared's parents are calling, but (surprise!) nobody's answering.

Even my aunt's mom's situation is unclear: she survived the hurricane alright, but 80% of the city is under water, and the governor has ordered everyone, including the refugees in the Superdome, out.

The government-in-exile says that people *might* be able to return in a week to get essentials and that then they'd be ordered away for a further month.

Nothing like this has happened in the United States in my lifetime; i'm a bit dazed and shocked by it all.

A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.
PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD
FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE
BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A
FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH
AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY
VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE
ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE
WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN
AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING
INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY
THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW
CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE
KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR
HURRICANE FORCE...OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE...ARE
CERTAIN WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS.

The NOAA is panicking. Jared's grandmother and my aunt Libby's mother have not left the city. When I talked to Jared's dad this morning, he could not reach his brother or sister on the phone (probably a good sign: it likely means they've left town).

It's ... surreal, disturbing, unbelievable ... to think that by the time I wake up tomorrow morning New Orleans may quite simply be gone.

Proposition 75 is another easy-to-understand initiative; the voters are blessed this year. It would change the rules regarding the way in which public employees' unions are allowed to operate, by prohibiting them from using any dues or membership fees for political purposes without explicit authorization from the employee who provided the dues; such authorization would have to be renewed on an annual basis or woudl become invalid.The official purpose for this proposal is that it is unfair for union dues to be used for political purposes without the consent of the member whose money is being so spent.

In a churlish mood I might be tempted to lodge the snarky enquiry: "would the proponents of this measure support the same proposal if it were framed so as to prevent a church organization from spending tithe money for political purposes without the explicit written consent of the contributor, or if it were framed so as to prevent a business from spending money for political purposes without the explicit written consent of a shareholder?" The answer to those questions would go a long way in assisting the voters to determine if the proposal is offered out of an earnest interest in the political liberty of union members or not.

But there are two other questions which spring immediately to mind whose consideration might be more productive:

(a) if it is important to protect union members from the malicious use of their hard-earned dollar by corrupt union bosses pursuing unsavory politics, why extend that protection only to public employees' unions?

(b) if opt-in schemes, in which the organization is prevented from doing something unless it is annually approved by individuals, are such a good thing, why should it only be unions which are constrained by them? If an annual member opt-in for union political expenses is a good solution to the problem of union political corruption, doesn't consistency also say that banks should be required to get annual depositor opt-in before sharing their depositors' financial information with strangers?

The second is perhaps a bit of a non sequiter, included here only because I have an axe to grind: it is pathetically symptomatic of contemporary political debate that the people supporting this initiative can, without a hint of embarassment, both proclaim the benefits of an opt-in scheme that constrains the freedom of operation of public employee unions (by shifting control of finances to their members) and denounce the perfidies of an opt-in scheme that constrains the freedom of financial institutions (by shifting control of information to their customers). It calls into question the legitimacy of the proponents' claim to be fighting for the freedom of the little guy, and it also throws into sharp relief the depressing reality that blatant hypocrisy is no longer considered to be politically damaging.

It also places liberals who value consistency in a bit of a bind. From a rhetorical point of view, it's hard to argue that people shouldn't be free to reject politics they oppose; from a consistency point of view, it's hard to argue against opt-in programs that hand more power to the individual and take away power from institutions. Isn't empowering the individual the liberal dream? If I stand for empowering the customers of large businesses to control what those businesses do with their personal information, how can I reasonably oppose empowering public employees to control what their unions do with their money?

The principle can be taken to absurd extremes: imagine a world in which everyone had to explicitly approve using their tax money on each individual program the taxing agency spends money on; it would be a bureaucratic nightmare (and the verification of all of the approval forms would almost certainly be underfunded, compounding the confusion). Yet, absent the absurd extreme case, it's a good principle: allowing people direct control over their money, their property, their data, their destiny, enriches their freedom and empowers them. I can denounce the hypocrisy of those who only support this principle when it suits their particular interest and ignore it when it does not; yet I would prefer not to be guilty of the same sin.

Still, one thing bothers me about this initiative. Sometimes selective implementation is a bad thing; the world would be better off if everyone disarmed, but unilateral disarmament is the first step down the road to disarmament (unless you can find someone else to bear arms for you). That might very well be the case here.

I asked above, why is this initiative directed at public employees' unions alone, and not at the broader union movement? Why is this done via a modification to the Government Code rather than the Labor Code? There's a simple answer to that: the public employees' unions are the last unions, aside from the Longshoremen, who have any substantial political power. The rhetorical goal here may be to improve the lot of the downtrodden public employee; the real goal is to castrate the employee unions, to deprive them of political power..

There are many reasons for this; perhaps as many as there are supporters of the initiative. Some want to destroy the political power of public employee unions because they believe the political power of employee unions is uniquely harmful to the state, creating a large political interest blocking political change and innovation, and making the state less responsive to the voters than it is to its employees. Some want to destroy the political power of public employee unions because they believe employee unions are reliably liberal and that doing so will cause a restoration of conservative power. Some want to destroy the political power of employee unions because they belive that if the public employee unions are deprived of political power, they will wither away, the last remnant of the labor movement, and labor activism in the United States will cease altogether.

If the first group, or the latter, are correct, then it suddenly becomes unclear that supporting this measure is in fact serves to enrich the freedom of, and empower, public employees. By destroying the political power of their unions, we would weaken significantly the ability of those unions to negotiate with the state (because the application of political power is a great negotiating tactic against a politician); that would *reduce* the freedom and power of public employees.

Proposition 75 is a poison pill disguised as helpful medicine. Its goal is to break the power of the public employee unions; it is being promoted in an underhanded fashion. It deserves to be rejected at the polls.

It's August; I have to get on this or the election will come by before I know it.

Proposition 74 is an amazingly straightforward ballot initiative which makes two substantive changes to state law:

1. It adds a paragraph to the part of the Education Code which specifies the rules by which teachers become permanent employees, indicating that for any teacher originally hired in 2003-2004 or later, it will take five years for them to become a permanent employee rather than two;
2. It adds a paragraph to the part of the Education Code which specifies grounds for dismissal of permanent employees by public school districts, indicating that the receipt of two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations shall be considered "unsatisfactory performance" for which a permanent employee can be dismissed, and allows districts to fire such teachers without providing a 90-day period for the teacher to improve his performance prior to initiating dismissal proceedings.

With something this straightforward, it's unfortunate that the polemicists have decided to do their best to cloud the issue. The argument in favor of the initiative, printed in the ballot handbook, implies that it will get more money into the classroom, and suggests that the only reason one might have to be opposed to it is that ot one has been confused by union bosses. The rebuttal says that the initiative will discourage recruitment of quality teachers and that it is nothing more than an attempt to scapegoat teachers. The argument against goes even further, claiming that teachers don't have tenure (using a weaselly redefinition of the word) and outright lying with the claim that the initiative takes away the right of a teacher to an administrative hearing before they are fired.

Both are, I think, missing the point, and missing an opportunity; for it is difficult to make an informed decision on this proposition without understanding how it fits into the scheme of "tenure", and why we have such a thing in the first place.

----------------------

The first thing to ask, I suppose, is "is there such a thing as teacher tenure?" The California Teachers' Association, in their argument against Proposition 74, says there isn't: that "California teachers are not guaranteed a job for life, which means they don't have tenure." But Dictionary.com defines tenure as "The status of holding one's position on a permanent basis without periodic contract renewals", which status teachers clearly have. Moreover, teachers who have been granted 'permanent employee' status can only be fired for a select list of things, including (but not limited to) conviction of a felony, membership in the Communist party, alcoholism, and advocating criminal syndicalism; and even then, such employees are entitled to an administrative hearing, with appeals, to ensure that they are being fired for cause. Since most private sector employees live in a world where, unless they can prove they are being discriminated against in violation of the various civil rights acts, they can be fired at the whim of their employer, the status teachers have is quite different from that of ordinary employees. In common usage, "tenure" is the word used to describe that status. The CTA appears to be attempting to redefine the word away from its ordinary meaning.¹.

But why does such a system exist? Part of it is a standard, bureaucratic protection offered to all civil servants: a protection against arbitrary dismissal for political reasons, the result of decades of effort to end the patronage games of nineteenth century politics. But that's not all of it; the historical record in California shows a pernicious system whereby school boards and administrators would lay off high-salary teachers in order to reduce expenditures (much as many companies will lay-off their most senior, expensive employees during budget contractions). And the pro-tenure rhetoric claims that the issue is "academic freedom" - eg, protecting teachers from being fired for teaching things that the research community believes to be true but which the Board of Education, Superintendent, or Principal do not. All of this boils down to two general cases: tenure exists in order to (a) protect teachers from being fired for political reasons, and (b) protect teachers from being fired for failing to meet arbitrary criteria not related to their job performance.

I would submit that both of these are good things; moreover, I would argue that in concept this style of protection ought to apply to any job, anywhere. Employers in industries with highly competitive job markets understand this; few software companies would fire an employee for being a political activist in their spare time, and even fewer would require adherence to Disney-style dress codes. Yet employers in markets which aren't highly competitive are often not so enlightened; and employers who are effectively in monopoly positions vis-a-vis their workforce are rarely so enlightened. Rules like this, by infringing on the liberty of employers to not employ people who do things they dislike, extend and protect the liberty of employees to live their own lives free of interference by their employers. They are predicated on the presumption that, in contract negotiations, employers have the upper hand, and that the power to withhold a job is in effect a form of coercion - and that presumption is well borne out by the history of corporate activity, both within America and abroad. Their particular application in the world of public education is also borne out by history - given that, in a world with tenure, teachers can be fired for failing students who have committed the sin of plaigirism (if their parents are politically well connected), and given that in the pre-tenure world it was common for teachers to be fired for political activism, it is hard to imagine tenure, as such, as being anything other than a great boon to the freedom of teachers to live their own lives, free of slavish devotion to the whims of the body politic.

Yet the gap between intent and effect is often larger than the Colorado River's chasm; and - however much the rhetoric of those supporting the initiative suggests they would be perfectly happy to do away with tenure entirely - the question under consideration is not the abolition of tenure: it is, instead, the assertion that tenure has created a system in which it is impossible to fire teachers for cause, and the proposal of a specific fix for doing so. So, given that tenure is a good thing in concept, the next logical question is this: is there such a gap between the goal of tenure and its implementation, that firing teachers for cause is impractical?

The proponents of both answers to that question have armed themselves with naught aside from anecdotes. But anecdotes do not a good case make. Those who say 'aye' can cite any number of cases in which firing a particularly bad teacher was painful, expensive, and protracted; those who say 'nay' can cite any number of cases in which teachers have been fired for bizarre and quixotic reasons. There does not appear to be any reasonable statistical data on the subject. Yet I suspect the proponents have the advantage here; for who among us cannot remember, from our own educational experiences, a teacher who was simply so incompetent that he/she should never have been allowed to teach? My memories involve a teacher - let us call her Mrs. C - whose lectures were incoherent because she was drinking between classes, whose grading seemed to be based entirely on whether or not she liked the students, who was utterly unable to impart any information or passion in her classes whatsoever. She should have been put out to pasture, as the saying goes, long before she was; the fact that she wasn't indicates either incompetence on the district administrative level (in that they hadn't noticed the problem), or a sufficiently high cost of doing so that the district decided it wasn't worth it to pay that cost.

My anecdote, to be sure, does not a case make; but i'm convinced that almost every child of the public schools in California has a similar story. Most teachers are hardworking, devoted employees; but there are some bad apples, and getting rid of them seems to be impractical for some reason or another.

And yet ... how do you change the system to reduce the cost of getting rid of Mrs. C and her analogs, while also ensuring that it remains difficult for a school district to fire a teacher for attending an unpopular political rally or for getting pregnant while unmarried? In particular, does this initiative solve the former problem without recreating the latter?

The initiative is an attempt to solve the problem of Mrs. C and her cohorts, to be sure. It seeks to do so by extending the time it takes before a teacher is provided with the full protection of permanent employee status, a provision which has generated very little controversy; the idea seems to be that a longer time period will allow for more substantial analysis of the teacher's work. It also seeks to do so by changing the rules that govern when a permanent employee can be fired; and that is the point where it could become problematic.

California law already allows tenured teachers to be fired for "unsatisfactory performance", a term so vague as to be meaningless. Yet clearly it is difficult to establish "unsatisfactory performance" under the current rules - but the difficulty lies not in anything written in code or procedure, but in the mentality and mindset of teachers, administrators, and judges, and the body of precedent set in administrative hearings and their appeals. This initiative seeks to define a certain thing - "two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations" as automatically constituting "unsatisfactory performance" and, to the extent that that same thing would not currently be construed as unsatisfactory performance, to bypass the established cultural mentality and body of precedent. Fair enough; since those are the actual locus of the problem, that is the only way change is going to occur.

But what are the grounds for an "unsatisfactory evaluation"? The California Education Code requires that each district have a uniform system of evaluation (within the district), and requires that the standards used for such evaluation shall be assessed as it reasonably relates to certain educational objectives, except that "Nothing in this section shall be construed as in any way limiting the authority of school district governing boards to develop and adopt additional evaluation and assessment guidelines or criteria." In fact, while the education code contains some provisions indicating that the evaluation criteria MUST include certain things, it contains no exclusionary limits whatsoever on what cannot be used as grounds for evaluation.

So, if Proposition 74 passes, two unsatisfactory evaluations, which can be based upon any criteria the school district chooses, shall be sufficient grounds to terminate a "permanent employee". Said employee shall, of course, be entitled to an administrative hearing and an appeal of the decision to fire them; but the law implies a presumption that the two unsatisfactory evaluations are sufficient, and it would therefore be difficult to win such a hearing or appeal. This initiative effectively allows teachers to be fired for any reason at all, providing only that the school board indicate in advance that something will be grounds for an unsatisfactory evaluation. It eviscerates, in short, the protections of tenure.

I agree with the proponents of the measure that tenure has introduced problematic side-effects that need to be remedied. I do not agree that this initiative is the way to do it. It eviscerates the meaning of teacher tenure, effectively using the existence of side-effects as an excuse for abolishing the system entirely. It attempts to fix a problem with tenure without taking into account the problems tenure was intended to fix.

¹There is an interesting and bizarre political subtext to this initiative which I'll leave for a later post. I want to look at the merits of the idea before delving into the politics surrounding it, no matter how easy it is to get distracted by the latter.

RPI's argument that "copy" does not necessary mean "exact copy" is one example of mincing and then stretching the meaning of words beyond reason."

Nobody does farce like California does farce.

Under US law (propounded by the Supreme Court in a series of cases beginning with Baker v. Carr), states are required to redraw the boundaries for electoral districts after each census. (Prior to that, it was not uncommon for states to not redraw their district boundaries for decades; Tennessee had failed to do so for sixty years, resulting in a legislature which resembled nothing so much as the 17th-century Parliament). After the 2000 census, California's legislature redrew the state's congressional districts along bipartisan lines: the leaders of both parties agreed that the Democrats, then the dominant political force in the state, could pick up the new Congressional seat, while each house of the state legislature would draw its own districts in such a way as to guarantee that every incumbent would be re-elected by almost Soviet margins.

It was a stunning concession of power by state Democrats, who eschewed the chance to pack the legislature and virtually eliminate the carping Conservative minority; and it was a stunning concession of principle by state Republicans, who thereby endorsed a scheme by which the legislators chose their voters and legislative elections became a farce.

Some Republicans, backed by both angry conservative activists who have deluded themselves into believing that "fair" districts would have returned a Texas-style legislature and angry citizen activists who are disgruntled at the effective rendering inoperable of democratic choice, have since had second thoughts, and the state's politics have in recent years been the scene of much grumbling. Grumbling which started in the Rotary Club, drifted down the street into the churches, and echoed through the halls of the legislature. Grumbling which our publicity-hungry Governor, always in search of a stick with which to beat the Legislature (and with which to demonstrate himself to be a Hero of the People) seized on and made a cause of his own.

While the Governor was hedging, trying to decide whether it would be better to seek a deal with the legislature or to go straight to the voters, the activists acted. Ted Costa, a long-time purveyor of citizen initiatives marketed to voters with a conservative bent, sent a petition in to the Attorney General for preparation of a title and summary - a petition regarding the reform of the redistricting system, which would vest the power to redistrict in the hands of retired judges, subject to a popular vote on the results. Once they got back the title and summary, his office hired an army of mercenaries to stand in front of every WalMart and McDonalds in the state, flogging the proposal at random passers-by, gathering the needed signatures for qualification.

The signatures were gathered and sent to the Secretary of State's office, Arnold enthusiastically backed the measure and made it the centerpiece of his political strategy for the year, and a special election was called. An election to deal with the urgent redistricting crisis. An election in which this ballot initiative was the paramount issue, although other issues tagged along.

There was, it seems, one small problem.

The initiative that Costa's people turned over to the mercenary signature gathering army was not, in fact, the same initiative that they'd submitted to the Attorney General. Depending on your political leanings, the differences were either minor technical trivialities, a perfidious attempt to mislead the voters, or both; and most people have only their political leanings and abject rumor to go on in determining the matter, as none of the people involved - nor the media covering them - have seen fit to provide a side-by-side comparison of the two texts.

The Attorney General responded to this by suing the Secretary of State to prevent him from placing the initiative on the ballot. Or, since this political crime was discovered after the ballot initiatives had been numbered and during the preparation of the ballot pamphlet, to remove the initiative from the ballot that was already being prepared. Various left-wing activist groups who have deluded themselves into thinking a fair redistricting would result in a Texas-style legislature attempted to join in the lawsuit but were rebuffed by the court. Ted Costa launched a small publicity campaign in which he observed that every ballot initiative faces lawsuits; what he didn't admit is that most of those lawsuits are of the rhetorical caliber of "having a recall election discriminates against Mexican-Americans!" rather than the somewhat more compelling "the law says X and Y must be identical and they aren't!".

How is it possible that Ted Costa, the most successful initiative vendor of our time, could make this mistake? Kevin Drum reports that Costa's answer, when he was asked that at a recent conference of conservative bloggers, was incoherent. As well it should be; for such an experienced outfit to have failed it so vividly on such an important and high-profile issue almost suggests the game was deliberately thrown.

The case went to court, and the pundits and activists complained. They complained in ironic ways: the same people who said that it was unreasonable for the Florida courts to not comply with the letter of an inherently contradictory law (in 2000) demanded that the California courts ignore the letter of an inherently straightforward law (in 2005). Meanwhile, those who demanded that the courts allow the county election boards to determine the will of the people in 2000 demanded that the courts direct the Secretary of State to ignore the will of the people, expressed by more than 900,000 signatures, in 2005. Virtually nobody seemed concerned that the true extent of the problem was unclear.

The court proceedings were, to judge by the decision, hysterical. The proponents of the measure were reduced to arguing that the Findings and Purposes section of the initiative was irrelevant. Granted, this is something that California voters have long suspected - but do we relaly want to introduce as a general rule of statutory construction the meaninglessness of the preamble, and its inapplicability when interpreting the attached statute? Does this actually strike anyone as a good idea?

Even the judge was in on the game, as witnessed by the opening quote. While poking fun at the absurdity of the claims before her, she could not find it in herself to identify the appropriate adverb (necessarily, instead of necessary); a fitting capstone indeed to a silly argument.

This is a serious matter, and perhaps I should not be laughing at it; but I cannot help myself. A bizarre clerical error by people who should know better has led to an inversion of normal activist principles and the collapse of the governor's high-profile political strategy. How can you not laugh?

On a more serious note, both sides have good points. If the differences really are trivial, then a court removing a ballot measure that 900,000 people have endorsed is troubling - and it remains so even when we know full well that a different measure expressing fundamentally the same concept will be back next year. On the other hand, the Attorney General's point, and that of the Judge who decided the case, are well taken: if differences not authorized by law are OK in this instance, where do we draw the line, and do we really want courts doing that on a regular basis?

WARNING: Spolers for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Friday night, as a result of a bit of advance planning (mostly in the form of extracting commitments from I_ and S_, the neighbors whose cats entertained us on Saturday morning), the four of us went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, accompannied by R_, a friend of mine from Oregon who was in town for the night passing through on his way to somewhere else. R_ and I went to dinner at a Turkish restaurant and caught up (it's been more than a year since we've seen each other), and we met Jared, I_, and S_ just seconds before the movie began. S_ had been preserving five seats for us against a small army of greedy teenagers, and did a stand-up job of protecting them without inducing bleeding, vomiting, or other discharges of bodily fluid; I_ and Jared had been waiting at the hot dog place next door, where I_ had been hoping to avoid the trailers.

There were trailers. I don't remember them all. Corpse Bride, which looks cute and comical and altogether reminiscent of Nightmare Before Christmas. King Kong, which looks like it will be an inredibly stupid story told with outstanding production values. (Thank you, Peter Jackson! How about you pick a better story for your next film?) Narnia, of course, which has been growing on me the more I see trailers for it; as much as I am leery of Disney, it looks like there is a chance that the director will be able to carry the wonder and awe of the story.

I can hope, can't I?

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was fantastic. The best movie I've seen in the theatre all year (although that's not saying much, alas). It wasn't precisely how I imagined the book - Johnny Depp was downright creepy, portraying a Willy Wonka who had become downright unhinged, and there was something somehow ... different, in a way I can't quite define ... in the Oompa-Loompas. But it pulled off the atmosphere, and I got a sense of the amazed wonder that Charlie felt while walking through Willy Wonka's world. As an added bonus, Johnny Depp was periodically funny (and his unhinged Willy Wonka was flawlessly portrayed). But best of all were the Oompa Loompas, whose songs - lyrics by Roald Dahl - turned the movie into a parody of musicals and a parody of modern music. It was hysterically funny.

Saturday, after recovering from the invasion, I went up to the city to play D&amp with H_, V_, T_, and someone I hadn't met before. My regular group had scheduled a game for that day, but a number of players had dropped out at the last minute for various uninventive reasons (nobody was kidnapped. nobody had their house fall in on them. nobody was in thrall to a dark master demanding that they devote their every breathing hour to his notorious schemes. why aren't excuses more creative and inventive?). So I rolled up a character for a temporary adventure - a gnome bard whom everyone, not having seen gnomes before, thought was a miniature dwarf; he proceeded to get squished by a raging barbarian ogre who didn't like alchemist's fire. (The party should have protected me, as the bard in the next encounter wouldn't have been able to enthrall them if they had). Amused and entertained, I went home shortly after dinner, and broke open my package from Amazon.

Amazon has to have taken a bath on this. Not only did they guarantee Saturday delivery of the new Harry Potter book to 900,000 people; they retroactively reduced the price, crediting everyone's account with $1. The economics would seem to be insane.

I was done with it by 2 in the morning. It was an entertaining read, about all I expected. I'm one of the small handful of people in the world who neither love nor hate the series. I thought much of the book was tedious and dull; it was hard to get emotionally or even intellectually interested in the various romantic schisms, or in everyone's unwillingness to believe Harry's theories, or the question of whether or not the things Harry was getting from his chemistry book were threatening or not. Maybe these things gelled better with the target audience, but for me they seemed silly and disinteresting.

That section of the book was surreal, too; the children at Hogwarts going about their banal existence while the world is literally falling apart around them. I was disappointed that JKRowling didn't do more with that theme, draw out more both the good and bad aspects of that kind of protection, show the characters realizing the banality; although it's possible that Harry did, and that realization is one of the major pieces of character growth in the story. I was also disappointed that she didn't do more with the suspense tension of having the audience know something critical about a major character which none of the other characters did - there were some stabs at it, but I think it's fair to say that JK Rowling does not have a future as a writer of thrillers.

That said, the increased dramatic tension at the end, particularly the way Harry was forced to grow and make difficult choices, made the rest of the book worthwhile. Yeah, yeah, Dumbledore was acting very strangely - something that i'm sure will be explained in book seven. But, really, his death was necessary; it's very hard for the hero to come into his own while still under the protective shield of an elderly mentor.

I spent Sunday in the protective cocoon of the Stanford Library, researching my next K5 article. I have an effective deadline of one week from today, so I needed to get working ... and it was nice to be ensconced in a library, hidden from the world, soaking up the contradictory stories told by the historians of the past. Even if the subject is more complex, and tedious, than I had expected it to be.

After, we went out for dinner. This involved complications, as my cell phone had spent the hours I was in the library frittering away its power in a desperate attempt to contact a server, shouting "here I am" into the concrete pillars of the dungeon. We did not have to resort to smoke signals and semaphores, thankfully, and Jared, I_, S_ and I settled on dinner at Palo Alto's Cheesecake Factory. (I didn't decide; my tastes run to more ethnic food than that - but Jared and I_ tend to be skeptical).

Monday night, Jared and I went over to E_'s house to hang out, have dinner, and watch a movie. My mood was somewhat spoiled (as I expect was Jared's) by a fight we'd had on the way there, which originated in my ignoring a question he'd asked - repeatedly - in IRC; but my mood lifted as we conversed, as did his.

The movie of the evening was a documentary, The Corporation. It was terrible. We ended up interrupting it almost every minute to complain or argue about it. The film purported to be a critique of corporations, but it turned into a critique of capitalism, and most of the things which it was complaining about were not a result of either the corporate form of organization or of limited liability per se; they were the result of the cultural focus on growth and profit. It's ironic, because I'm skeptical of capitalism and instinctively dislike large corporations ... but the movie completely failed to make its case, uanble to draw a connection between the evils it objected to and the cause it alleged. It was an enormous oversimplified non sequiter, and it was funny.

My dreams slowly melted away into the sound of jared grumbling. "Grumble grumble grumble", he whined. "Grumble grumble."

"What's wrong?", I asked in a groggy voice, hoping that I could soothe Jared and fall back asleep before I came fully awake.

"It's before six in the morning", Jared began, and I winced, knowing that he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep even if I did. "Something was going jingle jingle jingle and I looked, and saw Riesling, Rivka, and Princess." Three neighborhood cats had invaded our house during the night, and Jared was allergic to them all.

I tried to go back to sleep. What does it matter if there are cats in the house? They'll wander around and play for a bit, and then they'll get bored and go back out the way they came in. Jared tried to chase them out of the house. Riesling - or the one he thought was Riesling - went happily on his way, The short-haired gray cat he thought was Rivka went downstairs, and he chased her out the front door. I started to drift back to sleep, and there Jared was, complaining again: the third cat would not go outside. It had fled under the bed and was cowering there.

The cat began to cry. A pitiful, terrified cry. Yowling for its parents. Yowling for freedom from terror. A constant high-pitched high-pitched terrified wail.

I pulled the light purple sheets over my head to shut out the noise and the light. I failed. Jared continued trying to extract the cat. As I lay there, trying to pretend it would all go away (because ultimately who cares if a cat spends the rest of the night with us), I realized the problem: if this cat really was Princess, we shouldn't be shooing her outside.

Princess is one of four cats who belong to our neighbors I_ and S_. She was fostered there as a kitten and has never moved on; she's also never been out of our neighbors condo. If she had arrived here, in our bedroom, terrified, utterly unwilling to go outside (as scared as she was of Jared, and of me once I got up, outside terrified her more), we should probably try to catch her and take her home. Our neighbors were probably worried sick, and the poor cat was probably traumatized already. Kicking her outside would just result in her hiding under the building or something similar.

I got up and tried to entice the cat out. No go. Jared went downstairs to call I_ or S_; they didn't hear the phone, which he let ring for three ages. I got dressed, went next door and into the neighbors' house, up into their bedroom. S_'s eyes opened as soon as I walked in. "We have what appears to be an utterly terrified Princess in our bedroom."

I_ was shocked. "How is that possible?", he wondered. S_ came over, saw the cat under the bed, decided it wasn't Princess but rather one of the other black cats in the neighborhood. She went back next door to get some cat treats to extract the cat with; Jared proceeded to slowly force the cat out from under the bed (by moving it) and then drive it out the patio door. He succeeded, with no small difficulty; but the cat was then bewildered, unable to jump up on the roof to proceed home. S_ returned, saw the full glory of the kitten, and realized her error: it was Princess, in fact. She took Princess home, and the cat, quite happy to be back in its lair, began to play.

I was now fully awake; sleep was not going to come. I gathered up stuff and went outside to ask I_ and S_ if they wanted me to get them coffee. I saw a flash of cat movement, and realized that their other kitten was outside, too. I wandered over to their patio, and the kitten was hiding under a table. I looked around; neither S_ nor I_ were in sight, so I opened the door to get them. The kitten took a cautious step forward. I held the door open (Princess wasn't going to go back outside, and the adult cats are allowed out, so I didn't have to worry about not letting the cats out); the kitten ran inside.

S_ and I went to go get coffee. (I_ wanted to go back to sleep). We sat outside the cafe sipping our yuppie coffee drinks while people wandered by with their dogs. Among other things, we saw a giant german shepherd puppy which was almost as large as its owner, and a tiny brown dachshund which resembled a furry sausage on stubby centipede legs. (The dachshund, upon seeing the german shepherd, became aggressive and domineering, barking and growling, trying to chase it away; the German Shepherd thought this was great fun and wanted to play).

Maybe tomorrow morning I can sleep?

It's a bit early, perhaps, but I want to get a handle on the ballot propositions before the advertisors fill my mailbox with drivel and the united pundits of California fill the ethernet with bytes.

Proposition 73 is a fairly standard-issue constitutional amendment which would require, subject to some caveats, that teenage girls notify a parent forty-eight hours prior to obtaining an abortion. Despite some rumor-mongering on certain liberal websites about how this qualified for the ballot as part of a covert strategy to rile up the social conservative voters in California and get them to come to the polls (where they would presumably support Governor Schwarzenegger's agenda as expressed in other ballot initiatives), there is no evidence for that proposition - the measure was submitted for signature gathering in September of 2004, while the initiatives which form the core of the governor's agenda were not submitted until the following January. Accordingly, Proposition 73 measure deserves to succeed or fail on its own merits, rather than as a result of a mythical association with certain other initiatives.

The measure is straightforward and simple, unusually so for a ballot initiative. It specifies that a doctor may not perform an abortion on an unmarried women, under the age of 18, who is not serving in the US Armed Forces and who has not been declared an emancipated minor under California law, unless he has notified a parent who has legal custody of that woman and waits forty-eight hours for the notified parent to reflect upon the matter. There's an exemption for medical emergencies, and the doctor may also perform the abortion if he receives a waiver of notice from either the custodial parent or from a judge, and it provides a simple, timely, and free procedure whereby a woman may seek a judicial waiver.

As parental notification laws go, this is relatively unobtrusive. It does not require parental consent; it does not require the notification of both parents; it seems designed to make the judicial waiver process as easy as is practicable (and, indeed, poses no small risk of tying up the courts with parental notification waiver cases). It provides little in the way of technical excuses for opponents to the law to hang their opposition on, and an honest debate about this law will be about one thing only: should the state require doctors to obtain parental notification prior to performing an abortion on a minor? The drafters of the initiative, by meeting most of the common technical objections to such laws, have done an outstanding job of forcing the debate to center around that issue.

It's a tough call. On the one hand, there is simply no other medical procedure - including, say, tattooing - which doesn't require parental consent, and while abortion falls into the realm of sex-related subjects that most of us wish to keep somewhat private, it's also one of the most serious choices a woman ever has to make, and is arguably the kind of medical decision that is least compatible with solitary decision-making, and the most deserving of protections designed to ensure that the decision is entered into only upon serious contemplation.

And yet.

While it's probably true that many teenagers who are afraid to talk to their parents about sexuality, or pregnancy, or anything at all really, have no real need for that fear, it is also manifestly true that some do. Abusive families exist. And it's not just sexual abuse that's the problem, although - as John Kerry showed he understood in last year's presidential debate - it is the simplest explanation for liberal unease with parental notification and consent laws. Physical and emotional abuse can be just as traumatic, just as terrifying.

The authors of the initiative declare that "the People of California have a special and compelling interest in and responsibility for ... promoting parent-child communication and parental responsibility". That's all well and good for normal families in which the children don't live in fear of being beaten, for families in which the bond betwee parents and children is healthy, for families in which the destructive power of righteous anger is held in check. But those aren't the only families.

The authors of this initiative have made some effort to take that into account by providing an easy, cheap, and timely means for obtaining judicial wavers. They should be commended for that. But they have missed something important, something which makes their effort seem almost laughable. It' s understandable that they've missed it, because it's something that's difficult to truly grasp unless you have lived in the shadow of fear: for people growing up in such households, obtaining a judicial waver is going to be extremely difficult, because it means they have to trust the judicial system to be on their side. In a world where the adults you are supposed to trust the most have turned on you, in a world where nothing is safe, why should you trust the legal system to not abuse you too?

In the bright world of normal life, this question seems insane. In the dark, tortured world of someone whose life is a nightmare and whose family members have become the demons in whose torturing hands their lives have been sentenced, it is a perfectly reasonable and rational concern. And it's a concern that no judicial notification procedure, however simple, however cheap, can overcome: the emotional barrier to trusting a strange, powerful adult, is simply too high.

As a matter of oversimplification, teenage girls obtaining abortions can be broken down into three categories:

1. Girls with normal, stable home lives who talk it over with their parents first;
2. Girls with normal, stable home lives who don't talk it over with their parents first but who would not suffer unduly if they did;
3. Girls with abnormal, freakish, abusive home lives who don't talk it over with their parents because they're rightly terrified of what would happen if they did

As far as I can tell, proposition 73 is designed to force girls in the second group to talk with their parents before getting an abortion; and that's a reasonable, almost noble goal. But it will achieve that goal by significantly increasing the emotional - and, quite possibly, physical - cost to girls in the third group - to girls who are already living a life of despair, to the girls who have the least ability to bear an additional cost. In general, social policy goals should not be achieved by imposing costs on those least able to bear them; and so it is with this social policy goal. The aim may be good, but the cost is too high.

I will be voting "no" on Proposition 73 for that reason.

Never forget, and never let it happen again.

The Associated Press is reporting - and the report was presaged for me by a stunning picture on the front page of the sports section of yesterday's New York Times - that an American skateboarder spent the weekend jumping over the Great Wall of China at a speed of about fifty miles per hour. My weekend was significantly less adventurous.

Friday night, Jared and I went down the peninsula to the Shoreline movie theatres, a massive cineplex complex with a parking lot only slightly smaller than San Marino, to see Crash, which we'd heard good things about (from, among other people, Jared's mother). It was a remarkably well-made movie; the atmosphere was perfectly constructed, the music was well selected to reinforce the mood. Jared thought that, if the movie was intended to be a slice-of-life story about characters whose lives were intertwined in surprising ways, it failed; and it's certainly true that some of the intersections in characters' lives were ... implausible. I saw it as a more overtly political movie, a grand meditation on the nasty reality of race relations in modern America - and there it excelled, painting a dark and bleak picture without taking sides, and including surprisingly lyrical moments as a testament to the beauty of man and his strength and power to do great things while the world around him is turning to shit. (That terrible moment of intersection between the loving myth a father told to banish fear from his daughter's heart and the lie a different daughter told to keep her father safe from his own worst instincts was easily one of the most compelling cinematic moments ever.) The movie's great flaw was, ironically, a problem with characterization: two of the characters undergo inexplicable changes of personality without either adequate background to explain them or story elements which allowed us to see how the character grew from point A to point B. That, and Ryan Philippe is nowhere near as cute as he was when he was younger ... but it's still the single best meditation on race relations I've ever seen on the silver screen.

Saturday was mostly a slow day, but a good one. I woke up early, still on Ontario time, and made breakfast: shallots fried together into scrambled eggs with cheese, with bacon on the side. We hung out for a bit, me drinking coffee and reading and chatting with people online, Jared playing World of Warcraft, and then headed out - late - to see our friends in the city for an afternoon and evening of board gaming.

Our game day started with 1853, one of the earlier games in the 18xx series. Set in India, it has an almost nonexistent stock market, and features both metric and double-gage track. I nearly got horribly hosed due to an error in understanding how the opening bidding round worked, but pulled it out and instead transferred the hosage to Jared. Still, it wasn't good enough to come back, and I ended up a distant third. The truly odd thing about this game, though, was the rule that says that the existence of actual tiles does not limit track - eg, if you run out of a given tile, you are allowed to assume an infinite number, as long as the tile existed in the first place. Far too many companies were running metric track, so more than half the metric track on the board at the end of the game was imaginary. Made for an interesting board, at least.

M. had been feeding us salsa and cheesy poofs all afternoon, so I wasn't terribly hungry when A. made cauliflower-mustard pasta (a good thing, all said, as mustard is something of the anti-corn). While he was cooking and we ate (or, rather, Jared ate, as nobody else was terribly hungry), we played Citadels, a surprisingly fun quick card game involving using character roles to enable you to build buildings for yourself while interfering with other peoples' ability to do so. I won won game, and M__ won the other.

We finished up with Goa, a complex resource management game whose premise is that everyone is a dutch trader in the Indies in the early modern period. Again, I got fairly badly hosed at the start (I was frozen out of the bidding in the first round), but I managed to come back, and for a while looked like I had an angle on winning. In the end, I had to settle for third - but it was a close third, instead of the embarassingly distant third of the first game.

Jared was getting very sleepy, and I wasn't far behind, so we wandered off to go home. Along the way, his stomach and intestines began to grumble.

I wasn't too concerned. He has a touchy intestinal system, something he inherited from his father, and so this sort of thing happens fairly regularly. Still, it's never pleasant, and it always makes him look like exhausted, dehydrated, and miserable; so I rushed him home as quickly as possible and put him to bed, only to discover that now my intestines were grumbly. That's unusual; in most cases I have intestines of iron. My guess is it was some form of food poisoning; in the middle of the night, I was unable to drink water from concern that it would simply come back up, something that's only ever happened to me when I've been suffering from food poisoning. That, and Jared was feverish when I climbed into bed - also an unusual symptom for run-of-the-mill unhappy intestines.

Sunday was a good, lazy, low-energy day. The kind of day when all you want to do is lay out in the sun and absorb the Sun's energy and take a nap on the grass. The kind of day when you want a dog to run around and do all of your playing for you.

My friend I. had come over the day before, trying to drag us off to breakfast with him and his wife; I'd been unable to comply, having already made breakfast. So we'd agreed to go on Sunday (a date which Jared backed out of, still feeling somewhat ill), and so Sunday started with breakfast with friends. While there, I. told me about this story, a curious tale involving unsympathetic policemen, and we made fun of the plaintiff a bit. Then he taught me the rules to Landlord, a Chinese card game, which a co-worker of his is working on adapting into a computer game. We played for a couple of hours, wandering in the middle back to his condo and sitting outside in someone else's (shaded) patio, until it was time for them to leave for a Giants game.

I wandered inside and babbled online for a bit; and then Jared and I sat down to watch the first eight episodes of season 3 of Alias.

Alias is not great TV. I think it's dubious whether it's even good TV. But it's *fun*, surprisingly so even when it's being cheesy and predictable; it's sort of a low-grade cross between James Bond and the X-Files; and, of course, the best way to watch TV series is in a continuous run, on DVD. The third season is somewhat less ... entertaining ... than the first two were; there was a serious lack of suspense, which turned into a serious lack of anything to make you interested in the series (unless you're attracted to Jennifer Garner, which works for some people). It picked up significantly around episode 6, but I'm unconvinced that if I'd been watching it an episode a week, I would have stuck with it.

Something Cheeseburger Brown wrote set me to thinking, on the way to work this morning, about my relationship with airplanes. I love the fact that I can use an airplane to travel pretty much anywhere in the world at a speed which would have been unbelievable half a century ago; and yet at the same time, like most people, I loathe the experience of flying. I understand what Cheeseburger was trying to say, I think, about perepsective, and how amazing the modern world is; and yet everytime I'm on an airplane I'm reduced to remembering one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, the time I tried meditating on an airplane.

The way I meditate, most of the time, after centering and clearing my mind, I can sense the presence of living things around me; on some occasions, the most soaring spiritual experiences of my life, I've almost felt that I could *merge* with the trees and the grass and such around me, that the connection between all living things was palpable and I could *touch* it. Attempting to do this on an airplane is not simply unsettling; it is starkly terrifying. I quickly became aware that there was *nothing* - the people on the plane, sure, but outside the dead metal hulk encasing us, nothing that could be connected with. We were alone, inside a bullet, hurtling through a void, cut off and seperated, alienated from the rest of the world. The enervating feeling of loneliness that comes from long times spent isolated from people has nothing on this sense; it was a sudden, powerful realization of utter disconnectedness.

I am convinced that people living long-term on space stations or long-distance space missions will suffer various neuroses and psychoses due to this exact same feeling, due to the distance between them and other living things. Something of a spiritual malaise, which science will have a difficult time recognizing or treating. Perhaps the entire asteroid belt will be populated by psycopaths and decent normal people will be afraid to travel there?

The purple flowers poking up from the grass outside are being flattened by a strong wind from the north, but the trees don't seem fazed at all, and i'm inside looking down at them, fighting with a makefile that doesn't seem to be doing what's intended (so that I can test something for people working on a different project than my primary responsibility). I'd rather be outside, in the wind, in the sun, curled up with a book, or with a notepad. There's nothing quite like a vacation to remind me of how much I despise the computer industry (while loving computers at the same time). Anyone got any good advice on how to make changing industries financially feasible?

There's a particularly frustrating not-reproduceable-in-house problem that I'm trying to debug; it looks like something is failing because someone's come along and removed a file, or perhaps because a directory handle has gone stale, but it's hard to tell who and why. It's not my code, but i'm the integrator for the project, so until I can point at some code and say "hey! it's this code's fault. You, over there, fix it!" in my best Napoleon imitation, I'm stuck with debugging it. Also, apparently, while the patch I provided to version 1.3 of the product product, right before I left, worked, the *identical code change* in version 1.2 did not, and nobody answered my mail asking for a summary of what the differences between the two versions were.

I swear, every technology company needs to hire a professional historian to keep track of what's gone on so that information isn't fucking lost like this.

I got home late Wednesday night (11pm, in part because the flight sat on the tarmac for forty minutes while the airport tried to find us a gate), tired; I'd spent half of Tuesday and the entire plane flight writing my trip report. It's the first time i've ever successfully written anything while on a plane, trapped in an aluminum tube hurtling through the sky, with barely breathable air and slightly more room to wriggle around than is afforded canned sardines. My neck hurt and my wrist screamed for relief, my legs wanted nothing so much as a good run, and I was exhausted and hungry. Jared was kind enough to take me to In-n-Out for dinner, and then we went home, where I collapsed.

Much of my exhaustion was left-over from the weekend, but some of it was due to the hostel: it had no air conditioning, and the other guys in the room had gone to bed (a) without setting up the fan, and (b) with the fan unreachable without climbing over them and waking them up. Being a polite sort, I didn't want to do that, so I lay in bed much of the night, sweat pouring out of me over the sheets, unable to sleep for the heat. (The same thing happened when I stayed in a hostel in San Diego. Oddly, I never remember such an experience in a European hostel; maybe they just choose better-designed buildings?)

Work has been slow the last two days; getting back into the rhythym is a bit tough, and I feel a yearning to be elsewhere. The strangest thing is ... I feel a yearning to write. Not, as is often the case, a yearning to have written - I often have stories I wish to have written but little desire to sit down and write them. This week has been the opposite. I can hardly keep the words contained, focus on something else for long enough to let them go. I can't remember ever feeling like this before.

Last night, Jared and I went over to E's house for dinner board games (there's a san francisco area weekly gaming group whose abode wanders from place to place on given weeks; Jared and I go sometimes). We played St. Petersberg, a decent enough game; not a great one, but entertaining, and complex enough to hold my attention even though I was fighting off the urge to fall asleep. It's essentially a resource management game, in which you bid for cards that give you either more money or victory points, and the goal is to expand your revenue stream and then convert revenue into points. E was somewhat grumpy, having just gotten in from Ireland, and was quite snippy with R, who suffered from his usual analysis paralysis.

I was particularly happy about dinner; I got home from Canada to discover that I am essentially broke until the next payday (ooh, the joys of taking unpaid vacation). This isn't a large-scale problem, but it's interesting in the short term; it's been years since i had to cobble together coins from various coin stashes in order to pay for lunch. I didn't even end up being forced to do that when I was unemployed.

Tonight Jared is going to take me to see Crash; that should be fun. I hope I can make it through to the movie; I really need a day of just *sleep* to catch up with all the sleep I lost while I was travelling. Either that, or maybe more beer; beer gives you energy, right?

Thanks to someone - 606? Greener? Driusan? it's not clear - I also can't get Cows with Guns out of my head. Someone played it on a laptop Monday after I'd stopped tripping, and it's stuck there; I must have listened to it 50 times today in the hopes of driving it from my head, but each playing just made me want more. It's sooo fucking funny, and sooo fucking addictive.

"We will fight for Bovine freedom, and hold our large heads high / We will run free with the buffalo, or die."

[Niagara Falls, Tuesday, 5. July, 2005]

It's 8.30 in the morning, and I'm sitting in a comfy chair in the lobby of the bright, psychedelically colored hostel in Niagara Falls (Ontario). There's a family milling about and taking longer than I would have imagined possible to do anything. The father is obsessed, it seems, with convincing one of his children that they want to either drink the milk he is proferring or, failing that, the coffee; neither of the kids want to imbibe either substance. His preternaturally talkative daughter has cornered the receptionist, filling her ears with tales of coconut milk and how scary the hallway to their room is. A repairman with six metal studs extruding from the back of his neck is banging on something in the hopes of fixing whatever it is has that has gone wrong with the power in the computer room. All I want to do is find out where the coffee grounds are, so I can make more coffee, but interripting someone I don't know when they've obviously got their hands full is simply more than I can handle before I've had the first coffee of the morning. So I sit by the door, restless and bored, waiting for an opening that doesn't come, a breaking of the rhythym of the din which I start to fear may never happen.

Fuck it. I'll just walk down the road to the nearest Tim Horton's. Their coffee is good, and it can't possibly take too long to find one. This is urban Canada, after all.

Twenty minutes later, after walking along a curious avenue with expensive-looking brick residences on one side and decrepit businesses struggling to survive on the other, I haven't found one. I have, however, found a Czech Karaoke Bar which, sadly, is closed (it portends hours of amusement if open) - and, thank heavens, a cafe filled with ethnic Italians shooting the shit over their morning espresso, against a backdrop of syrupy Italian pop. ("Lachryma" does not belong in an upbeat bouncy song, sorry, no more than Zombie is an appropriate song for a techno remix).

How did I get here?

-----

When Cheeseburger Brown first posted about HuSiStock, I was torn. Meeting the HuSi crowd - many of whom I knew from back in the day, when they were Kuro5hin diarists, before the great crapflood began - sounded fun, and meeting Rusty is something I've wanted to do for years. Even building a deck sounded good; with the right number of people involved, we could get that done in a day, and then we could all enjoy its use for the rest of the weekend. Yet large groups of strangers - and make no mistake, for all that we know each other to some extent, we're also all strangers to some extent; online friendships reside in a wierd in-between-land that makes it hard to predict how things will go - large groups of strangers often scare me, drawing out the shyness that I long ago put aside in my day-to-day life. And flying east is expensive, almost frivolously so when I'm still trying to pay down the debt I incurred while I was unemployed. So I wavered for months in my trademark indecision, until it became clear to me that I really had already decided, and I was merely looking for justifications that I could offer to myself and my friends, lies i could tell myself to convince me that a decision I'd already made was in fact the right one.

Once I'd decided I was going to come, the decision to package other things together with HuSiStock into the trip was a natural one. Three or four days isn't enough time for me to break out of the insidious patterns of day-to-day life, to fully relax and feel free. Moreover, having spent the money to fly out east (and rent a car, the first time I've ever been able to do so while backpacking), spending more days makes the cost easier to bear. Plus, travelling without jared makes a perfect opportunity to do things, like camping, which he would detest.

As is usually the case with travelling excursions, the rapidly approaching day of departure turned the trip into something of an obsession. Visits to foreign countries - although I admit that it's questionable at best how foreign Soviet Canuckistan really is - always loom as major events. They are a chance to step outside, to let gel the subtle shifts in personality and relationship with life and the universe which are difficult to realize in the normal world. And they are an opportunity to see a land and a world which are alien, and to learn thereby to love the world more deeply, to see facets of the beauty of the world which have heretofore been hidden. What could possibly be better than that? What could be more appealing, more intoxicating to imagine, as the days approach?

::Sunday, 26 June, 2005

I arrived in Buffalo, New York, late in the afternoon. I was hungry; United's food service in coach has gone from free and bad to expensive and worse, a stunning example of how the pressure of competition often fails to make things better, except of course in the minds of religious fanatics. United had, in addition, misplaced my luggage somewhere along the way.

I wasn't terribly surprised by that. I'd shown up at SFO fifty minutes before departure, only to find that 5.30 AM is, in fact, the busy time, and been forced to desperately scout around for options that would let me bypass the impossibly long checkin line which, had it clutched me, would have caused me to clear security after my plane had left. Yet that wasn't when the luggage got misdirected; it made that flight, despite being checked in after the official luggage cut-off time (a bureaucratic device that I don't remember ever seeing before). No, it was the second flight which gave me trouble. Though its departure was delayed by over an hour, first for someone to fix the unspecified mechanical trouble the plane had encountered on its previous run, then again for the arrival of a mechanic crew capable of replacing the ceiling panel which had fallen down when the adjoining luggage bin was closed, the ground crew still managed to miss an entire section of lugggage. There were about twenty of us leaving our name, address, phone number, luggage description, and pithy comments at the luggage office.

At least they delivered.

The rental car office was also having a bad day. Although the flight attendant made it sound like it was always like this, a result of consistent corporate greed an dmismmanagement rather than minor human error. The man in line before me, who spent most of the time complaining on his cellphone while I eavesdropped in detached amusement, had been waiting for forty-five minutes to return a car. Meanwhile, people in line to pick up reservations were processed and then told to sit down and wait for a car to arrive which they could take out. The receptionist complained, when processing me, that she'd been there for a week, and worked four hours or more of overtime each and every day.

I was glad for the solace of a book, as my wait took about an hour. Have I mentioned that I was hungry?

Downtown Buffalo, where I'd rented a room at a more-expensive-than-warranted mediocre hotel (the CAD$22/night hostel I'm staying in tonight is cleaner, and has more and better services than this pathetic excuse for a business hotel did), is dead at night. There's nobody on the street, and no cars driving by; there are merely stately brick buildings basking in the heat, dreaming of the days when the city was alive. It has a run-down, decaying feel, the feel of a place which had money once, which was vibrant once, but whose vitality and happiness have been sucked away by a quarter century of economic stagnation.

I was surprised by two things which were revealed as I walked around the area, seeking food. Though the precinct was redolent with the aura of decline and of wistful yearning for better days, it had escaped the oppressive misery of inner-city precincts in urban California. The streets did not feel threatening, the buildings and landscape, though clearly deteriorating, had not been trashed and abandoned. The city was experiencing a genteel decay, and some sort of life, some sort of hope, remained, holding on in spite of things, refraining from the temptation to despair.

The other surprise, tucked away in the corner of a circle dominated by a memorial to the swearing-in of Theodore Roosevelt, where a languid work crew removed the detritus left behind by a one-day music festival involving unknown bands, was a statue and memorial to Millard Fillmore.

Millard Fillmore!

An inconsequential president whose only claim to fame is that he presided over, and in no small measure accelerated, the disintegration of the Whig Party. Why should we commemorate him? Is this some sort of sick joke perpetrated by the Buffalo City fathers? Or, worse, is there some atavistic affection for the disaster of a politician persisting in the local psyche?

[Later, across the river from The Falls]

Somehow, the Falls are more impressive at night, when the rainbow colored lights reflect off the water and cast a romantic glow on the mist. Not that they're entirely unimpressive during the day - while not as amazing as the pictures I've seen of Iguacu Falls, the rushing water, and the mist kicked up by the rocks belowed, are picturesque enough, and the guitarist singing folk songs with a country-western accent is better than I expect to find in such places. Still, it's somewhat difficult to imagine as one of the premiere tourist destinations in North America. The serene beauty of the swamp-lakes of Algonquin was somehow more impressive.

At night, there's a somewhat spooky orange pumpkin-shaped glowy hot-air-balloon thiny hovering somewhere over the American sdide of the river like a demonic god glowering over his demesne. During the day, it's a somewhat pathetic dingy-gray jack-in-the-box offering a mediocre viewing platform for tourists with money but no desire to cross the border for a better view.

Not for the first time on the ttrip, I wish my camera had working batteries. The mist born at the foot of Horseshoe Falls is rising above the gorge in the shape of a mushroom cloud, the only mushroom cloud I've ever seen in real life, and I wish I could capture it on film before its colors fade into the nondescript haze that permeates the sky.

It's somewhat amazing to no longer mind the humidity. After a week outside in it, it feels less oppressive and stultifying, more a vivid reminder of the feeling of being alive, almost refreshing in a way. Somewone (Druisan?) I was talking with over the weekend was praising humidity, alleging that dry heats are cruel and oppressive, and for the first time in my life I can sorta see it, can feel the beauty of feeling the air, can sense the pleasantness in sweat pooling on my arms.

I'm somewhat shocked.

A bit away from the Falls, on the path I took to get here, is an imposing nineteenth-century gray-brick building, the county armory. In front of the building there is an understated memorial to the Ukrainian-Canadians who were interned there during the Great War.

The government of Upper Canada interned ethnic Ukrainians during the Great War? That's at least as great a blot on the history of this country as the internment of ethnic Japanese is on my country's history; and yet I've read and heard nothing about it. It's an unspoken, forgotten tragedy woven into the fabric of one of the greatest man-made disasters in history. It's something that my American liberal prejudices in favor of Canada cause me to have difficulty grasping; a striking reminder that nationality offers no barrier atall to the human capacity for vindictive evil.

::Monday, 27 June 2005

Buffalo on a Monday morning was almost entirely unlike Buffalo on a Sunday night; the roads were infested with verminous cars which swarmed hither and yon with no appearance of order and little sense of patience. It was unclear where they had come from and it was unclear where they were going. They were an alien irruption on a decaying city, and my eight-block walk for morning coffee left me with a sudden desire to flee.

The desire was exacerbated by the hostel's "Continental Breakfast", which was available in a room, slightly smaller than my living room, which was overflowing with teenage girls from Wisconsin making waffles. I was so greatly disturbed by their conclave that I ate "breakfast" at a McDonalds in Lindsay, midafternoon.

It's a long, somewhat tedious drive from Buffalo to the Algonquin Visitors' Center, but it was nice to be driving, to be out in the country, alone. I had been yearning for solitude. Jared and I have just finished our first year of living together and - while I love it, and am happy as we settle in as a couple and would not exchange it for the world - I was a loner for many a year. As a teenager, I was shyer than anyone I've ever met except Popsicle's nanny, and the combination of living with my boyfriend, and a job that's as much about people as it is about code, and the most active social life I've ever had, have been causing a mounting pressure. A desperate grasping for solitude and silence. So I was content as I drove, windows down and air conditioning blasting and radio blaring, happy to be in Canada, happy to be venturing into the quiet of the Ontario forest-swamp. Mounting hunger and a need to pee did force me off of the QEW into a Tim Horton's, where I had a snack and a nother coffee, but then it was back on the road for me, until ----

Slozo told me over the weekend that the 401 is the busiest freeway in North America. I believe him. It's a gargantuan seven-plus lanes in each direction, filled to the brim with cars which coagulate around the corners. Five times I found myself in "the parking lot that is the 401", and three times I was forced off of the freeway by an impatience with traffic that moved perhaps a mile every fifteen minutes; one of the other times I was only going one exit anyway. It's really only the sprawl which distinguishes Los Angeles from Toronto, as far as I can see from my limited exposure; the smog and the traffic are both worse in Los-Angeles-On-The-Lake.

p>---- I got off the freeway and took back roads through the suburbs, searching as I went for a way to relieve my increasingly painful bladder. Eventually the suburbs thinned out and faded into countryside, and I veered to the north, not expecting that I was driving into the great mainstay of the provincial economy: the summer road construction boom.

Somebody - Greener? - was joking over the weekend that Canada has two seasons: winter, and road construction season. I've not seen the former, but I can attest to the latter. Before arriving at MostlyHarmless and Janra's hotel on Thursday, every Canuckistani road I drove on was undergoing construction of some sort. It's an amazing conspiracy by the Ontarian politicians to keep the construction workers employed, content, and voting for the Liberal party; and as an added bonus, the youth of the villages can get summer jobs holding up signs controlling the traffic flow on roads that have been rendered temporarily one-way.

Maybe, just maybe, I should have followed the directions that Google maps gave me, ne? Or maybe not; Google appears unfamiliar with much of Ontario, as Greener can attest.

I finally rolled into the park around 7pm, checked into my campsite, and then sought dinner, and water - and lots of water - and lots and lots of water - at the Visitors' Center. My campsite was nice enough, a wide open area in a forest by a lake, and I was quickly able to set up my hammock, which hung nicely between two strong trees.

Then I made my big mistake, my one true regret about the trip, which - when combined with one of the two things I fucked up in preparing for the trip - made me utterly miserable for the rest of the night, grumpy for most of the day after, and changed completely the nature of my experience in Algonquin. I didn't put the mosquito net up immediately. I relied, for a while, on the power of my pathetic imitation environmentally-friendly DEET-free mosquito repellant. Worse yet, when I finally realized that I needed to put up the mosquito netting NOW, it failed to protect me from those insects who already surrounded the hammock, many of whom were subsequently trapped on the inside of the mosquito net. I was eaten alive.

Spacejack says I am crazy. He is right.

I lay there, awake in a hammock in still, thirty-plus air, under a mosquito net which strangled every nascent breeze, trying to kill the bugs, scratching at inflamed bites, cursing the fates, for most of the night. At first it was understandable that I couldn't sleep, I was still on west coast time. But by 2am I was bored out of my mind, distressed, angry, itchy, my cool, happy-traveller persona shattered by the torment of dozens of hungry monsters. I had become PISSED-OFF-CAMPER, a demon seething with hatred for the forest, for the insects, for life itself.

Eventually the moon rose, and so I broke provincial law. I grabbed my flashlight, drove to a trailhead, and went on a hike. It was a fantastic hike, a surreal trek down a pleasant moonlit walkway through a swamp, with burbling water and mist rising from below the grasses. It was the perfect opportunity to experiment with black and white photography. Sadly, it was then that I discovered that, when I decided that it really wasn't necessary to replace my camera's batteries before travelling, I had erred; there would be no pictures for me on this trip, alas.

My second hike, commensurate with the rising sun, was to a vista overlooking a valley, high above the canopy. It was a soothing, peaceful, beautiful moment as I sat on the rocks and looked out over the trees and the hills and saw the steam rising through them. The forest-swamp is beautiful indeed when viewed from an elevated height; but my joy was dashed by the return of the flying vermin, and I fled down the trail to my car. I crashed out, exhausted and itchy, but feeling much better about the world, at about 7.30am.

::Tuesday, 28 June 2005

A modification in dress - replacing shorts with long pants, wearing socks inside my sandals, wrapping a bandanna around my neck (said bandanna purchased in Algonquin, then lost by the time I wanted to loan it to ni on Sunday when he'd forgotten to bring his to the race) made the insects more tolerable when I went hiking after arising around lunchtime. Still, after forty-five minutes or so, a thick cloud had condensed around my face, and all of my bites were screaming out for relief, demanding "scratch me" with the incessant pulse of a breakbeat rhythym. Every part of my skin, save those tender areas not usually exposed in public, featured one - or perhaps half a dozen - aching wounds.

I can't comprehend how premodern humans, without the benefit of insect repellant and mosquito nets and screen doors and neo-fucking-sporin, withstood it. That the great swamp-forest of Ontario was ever settled atall, let alone the truly infested tropical regions, is a towering testament to the determination of men.

When I got back to my car, fleeing from the hordes, and went off in luxurious air-conditioned high speed, I noticed that the car was getting hungry. So I wandered down the highway, out of the park, to Whitney, a medium-sized village on the east end of the park which doesn't even rate it's own Wikipedia entry, and bought gas.

Gas is expensive in Soviet Canuckistan. Less so than it used to be, said Greener in a conversation on Sunday afternoon, but still enough to make my eyes bulge a little when buying gas. (Druisan asked me how I handle the conversion of gas prices from CAD/litre to USD/gallon; I don't. It's not worth the trouble when I can do the much simpler CAD/tank to USD/tank conversion).

There was a reputable-looking motel across the street, so I stopped in to enquire about pricing. I'd been debating with myself ever since I gathered myself up to go hiking in the middle of the night. On the one hand, I came here to camp; I particularly wanted to sleep in my hammock. I wanted a wilderness experience. On the other hand, the idea of another miserable, boring night - a sleepless night of impotent rage - terrified me. Yet somehow I felt that if I gave in, if I allowed the mosquitoes and the blackflies and the venemous evils of the forest to drive me from the night, I would have failed in smoething important; I would have become a lesser man.

It was the impending rain which pushed me over the edge and made me decide to enquire, and it was the cheapness of the room which decided it; and as I paid the man, the skies opened up, and it rained, a harder, starker rain than I'd ever seen in my life. With thunder. And lightning. Hitting the mountain up the road.

Where I live now, and where I have lived for the past decade and a half, we do not get such storms. Sure we get rain; heavy rain is a mainstay of the Santa Cruz winters. But I can only remember one thunderstorm in the entire time I lived there - a loud, dry lightning storm off the coast. It was an impressive spectacle to be sure, but it was quite unlike what opened up upon me in Whitney, and so I wandered outside and stood, transfixed, watching, listening in the rain, until the storm passed and the sky cleared.

::Wednesday, 29 June 2005

They fed me in the morning. Sausage and eggs and, thank the Gods!, coffee. (Real coffee, stronger than I expected in a breakfast joint attached to a motel in the middle of nowhere). A bunch of hardy-looking germans rented a canoe and went off into the swamp. I wandered off to go hiking, stopping first at a store to buy more bottled water and --

and REAL insect repellant. DEET, the bane of insects and the friend of campers everywhere. The most wonderful and beneficial poison known to man. I was never really bothered by insects again.

-- That morning's hikes were delightful; I was able to enjoy the pretty scenery of the forest without a cloud of insects harassing me. Only one really annoyed me: an adventerous bugger who discovered that I hadn't sprayed my socks and bit me through them. I was amazed at the invasion, I would not have thought it possible through such a thick fabric, but I quickly remedied the situation.

I hiked for a while that morning around a lake, a bastion of serene reflective beauty, and knew peace for the first time since shortly after arriving in the park; and with the comfortable tiredness that comes from walking for hours, my spirits began to soar, and I basked in the love of the forest for a while.

I went back out around lunchtime, to a store-cum-restaurant in the park, for lunch: a Greek salad. Wonderful, awesome food, exactly what I want on a hot, sunny, sweaty day. The restaurant was on a deck overlooking a canoe rental and launch, and as I sat there, eating my salad and watching people paddle away, I debated with myself. I'd never been in a canoe, and a number of people who are close to people who are close to me have died in freak accidents in waterborne vessels - but fuck, it didn't look that hard. I began to imagine that i could do that.

And so I did. After lunch, I rented a canoe and went out on the lake. It took me a while to get it down; at first, I was swept down to the near end of the water, before I figured out how to keep the current from turning me against my will. Even so, I struggled a bit, learning how to paddle against the wind, and there remained times when the wind would pick up and I would just have to stop fighting the current and drift until the wind died down. Later still, I began to figure out how to use the current to help me, and my speed and efficiency went up. For slightly more than three hours I wandered around the lake, paddling or not as the moment dictated, slowly gliding from shore to shore, and it was beautiful. There's a power and a freedom in a canoe that is not available to a hiker, and propelling yourself to glide across the water against the wind is exhilerating. Not to mention exhausting; I crashed out at about 7.30pm, completely drained and worn out.

::Thursday, 30 June 2005

With the help of an alarm, I woke up early, and was out and on a trail by sunrise. Morning hikes - with the sunlight breaking through the leaves and casting eerie shadows upon the trail, and sections of the trail still to dark to navigate sans artificial illumination (is artificial illumination the name of a band?), and the birds loudly chirping hello in their energetic morning voices, and the forest air still cool and damp, waiting for the sun to convert it to syrup - morning hikes are fantastic. And so is watching the sun rise from a cliff overlooking the forest canopy: stunning and beautiful. I wished I'd had a working camera.

Around mid-morning, I wandered back out for breakfast. I wanted to eat and then go canoeing - canoeing had been the highlight of the trip so far, a fantastic experience of spiritual joy and physical exhaustion, and like a greedy bastard, I wanted more. But I had a decently long drive ahead, from Algonquin to Picton, and I remembered how exhausted I'd been the night before, and quailed before the thought of a six or seven hour drive while that exhausted, and so I packed up my stuff and headed out after breakfast. I did stop first, to join a flock of other people on the side of the road watching a young moose grazing by the roadside, at least until it wandered off by crossing the highway at a curve (to the astonished horror of half of the crowd) and vanishing into the trees on the other side.

For this city boy, driving on country roads is fun. Soeeding along wide sweeping curves, threading passageways through the hills, slowing down to pass cautiously through cute little villages, stopping by the roadside to piss - but mostly the absence of other traffic, the freedom from the constant low-level stress of watching dozens, or sometimes even hundreds, of other drivers, and wondering what they're going to do and how to adjust your plans for them. It's a freedom and a joy unavailable on crowded urban byways (except maybe in the middle of the night), and it tempted me to take the most circuitous route possible, to keep going until there was nowhere left to go, no town unpassed, no road not taken. The inevitable converse of this is that, after four days of mostly country driving, arriving in a real city comes as a shock, with a whirlwind of activity and countless cars and people meandering about without any order atall; cities are vibrant and chaotic and alive and a little bit scary when you're used to less stuff moving about. So I was stressed, and disturbed, and unhappy when I arrived in Belleville on Thursday afternoon. It seemed the entire town was out on the road, commuting or doing their pre-holiday shopping, and it was overwhelming; and I proceeded to get lost, not once but twice. (It didn't help that the highway widened out to multiple packed lanes, and that staying on the highway required the ability to make sudden turns at intersections, none of which were signed far enough in advance that a reasonable driver could cut over in heavy traffic.) I ate, which made me less likely to ram the car in front of me in exasperation, but I was nonetheless thrilled to get out of the maze of Belleville and into the bucolic fields of Quinte's Isle, where I took a wrong turn down a confusingly named dirt road, on which I was passed by a gang of local kids racing their ATVs. I had to call a friend, back in California, and ask them through the almost unusable cell phone reception to find better directions on the intarweb than the ones I had with me.

The B&B was a gorgeous, expensively restored former schoolhouse. (Did Ontario sell all of its rural schoolhouses?) Apparently I was the only guest for the night, something which I found somewhat shocking for the night before a major holiday, so the proprietor kindly volunteered to upgrade me to their nest room, a two-bed suite with a jacuzzi. What unexpected luxury! A highly welcome one, moreover, even if there was almost a disaster involving massively expanding soap bubbles threatening to flow out all over the room. Even better, the woman who took my money the next morning charged me CAD$20 less than I'd expected her to; an upgrade and a discount! What fantastic luck!

After checking in, I wandered back up to the the nearest small town to go shopping. I wanted (a) sunscreen (because I'd been somewhat significantly sunburned while canoeing, and I wanted a precaution against the pain that would ensue if I didn't have protection against further burning over the weekend; a wise precaution, it turned out, especially once Janra discovered that her sunscreen wasn't what she believed it ot have been); (b) camera batteries (so that I could have my own pictures of HuSites - a doomed cause, as the drug store didn't sell the right kind, and the more specialized stores had already closed up for the night); and (c) alcohol (because what kind of party guest shows up without something to share? This also failed, alas, as I couldn't find the town's liquor store). Then, because hiking for days on end had triggered an irrepressible and somewhat psychotic desire to see a movie, any movie, I went to the town's nearly empty one-screen movie theatre and watched the second-worst movie I've seen in recent years, The Longest Yard¹. After that, as the sun ducked below the horizon but the humid heat persisted, I wandered up to a bar with outdoor seating and munched on greek salad while eavesdropping on the Quebecois family next to me and surreptitiously ogling the cute guys. Meanwhile, half the town's teenagers assembled at the Tim Horton's across the street to hang out and party, with a boombox playing reggae. The music echoed throughout the town. Isn't small town life picturesque and romantic?

[The rapids a kilometer or more downstream are more impressive by far than the falls themselves, a veritible cacophanous wooshing of water.]

The sun came out, and I headed back down the road and up the trail for another hike. There was no water on the trails, surprisingly, nor were they damp (although the road was, and the storm had come from the direction of the park). The protective screen of the foilage above remained indomitable.

So the afternoon went, with me hiking in the woods, smiling at the trees, working up a sweat and swearing at the insects and the heat. The wind picked up a bit, the sun went down, and I went back to my hotel room to sleep, ecstatically insect free. The power was out (and the room was hot), but I did not care; power is an extravagance anyhow.

::Friday, 1 July 2005/Canada Day/HuSiStock Day 1

Belleville, early in the morning on a holiday, was much more pleasant than it had been the night before. The streets were nigh empty, the people snug in their homes. Picton, on the other hand, was busy; everyone in the town who was awake was wandering around, milling about, holding a giant social hour on the streets. I stopped for coffee (while the B&B provided a fantastic breakfast, it came with a lousy, bitter instant coffee which tasted more like a lab experiment gone bad than like the nectar of the Gods) at a store which bragged of selling "Seattle's Best Coffee." The proprietor invited me back for balloons, a clown, and a speech by the mayor, all to celebrate both Canada Day and the store's Grand Opening. I demurred, then went down the street to buy a flag for my radio antenna; the velcro held fine on the country roads with a low speed limit, but the flag flew away, littering itself upon the highway, once I hit 110 on the 401.

So much for Canada Day, eh?

I was excited. Today was the day, the day the party would begin, the day I had come here for. Anticipation wasn't making me late; it was mingling with the remaining glow of joy from canoeing, helping a relaxed, happy aura to suffuse across my being.

I stopped in roughly the area which had forced me off of the freeway before, to call Mostly Harmless and let him know when I'd be at his hotel. Then I took a wrong turn onto the wrong freeway; navigation was making me late. (Carly Simon got it wrong, although I suppose her lyrics make for a catchier tune).

I got to the hotel where Mostly Harmless and Janra were staying and saw two couples waiting for a ride, a problem I resolved the way any socially shy geek would: I called Mostly Harmless and waited to see who answered the phone. Neither of them looked atall as I had expected - a common theme this weekend - and I was amazed at how little stuff Janra was taking with her for her trip to the Great Whit North. Neither of them had much stuff, to be honest, a fact which made it even more astounding on Monday when Mostly Harmless took near half a day to disassemble their campground. How could so little stuff take so much time? (Is there a koan about that, somewhere?)

We talked as I drove, about my trip about theirs, about the Great White North, about their expectations for the weekend, about Rusty and how we would almost have a quorom of K5 administrators in attendance. To be honest, I can't remember what all was said, and when; all of the weekend's conversations have converged into a formless blur, a melange of words from which sentences emerge without their temporal context. Who said what, and when, and do whom, can be hard to pick out; such is the way of the party.

Eventually we decided that traffic sucked, and Janra - a fantastic navigator, it turns out - ploutted a route over to County Highway 4, which we took into Bradford. Shortly thereafter, as we hadn't actually read the directions telling us we needed to turn right in town in order to stay on the Highway, the road we were on threatened to cross Highway 400, so we hopped back on it.

We arrived in Gilford in mid-afternoon. I almost missed the schoolhouse, but Mostly Harmless saw it, and his sighting was confirmed by the telltale "StoryZoo Studious" sign, so we parked across the road and went in. Cheeseburger Brown was there, shirtless with a tan and a small pot belly, wearing a hat, with his underwear and a wide grin showing. He seemed ecstatic, brimming with energy and enthusiasm and spirit, and I instantly felt at home. He introduced us to the others who were there - ni, a cute skinhead on whom I immediately found myself struggling to resist a crush; 256, who looked like he should be leading an anarchist revolution in inner-city Manchester; Miss Lake, 256's companion, who appeared far to sedate and normal for this crowd; Driusan, who looked like a refugee from Santa Cruz; 606, who seemed every bit the stereotypical hacker; and Spacejack, the one person at the entire event who looked as though he might, in some alternate universe, be serious and respectable. Cheeseburger Brown then took us on a tour of the schoolhouse, in which two things stood out: a beautifully framed kitchen, cordoned off from the rest of the schoolroom, both within and without; and the .... courtroom. It's a shame nobody got a picture of that.

The piles of shoes near the doors suggested that they have a no-shoes-in-the-house policy, not uncommon among people who would prefer to not spend quite so much time cleaning, so I took mine off and added them to the pile; they stayed there for more than a day and were never on my feet when I was at the stockyard the rest of the weekend. It was quickly clear that, whatever else was going on, HuSiStock was going to be taking on some of the aspects of a Hippie commune.

We moved outside and talked, and other people trickled in. I only remember the arrival of Greener, who seemed a happy-go-lucky sort and exuded the air of the unflappably tranquil backpacker. I showed him the pizza place where people were supposed to park - a deed for which Cheeseburger Brown later paid both of us; all weekend, however, we remained the only people parked in the remote lot, as everyone else left their cars in the front of the yard, where they had dropped them off while setting up their tents. Eventually, Cheeseburger Brown rousted Old Oak to set up a hammocking spot, as the originally planned one had been turned into a makeshift kennel; Old Oak bolted a couple of boards to the balcony, and then he and slozo insisted on setting up a tarp to protect me from the rain that I wasn't the slightest bit concerned about. (I grew quite fond of that tarp; it kept me from the early morning sun, allowing me to sleep later in the morning than those condemned to broil in their portable plastic ovens).

Cheeseburger Brown and I went down to pick up pizza and chatted away. Meanwhile, a band set up and proceeded, surrounded by citronella candles and tiki torches, to play music for us. A chill set in, and we all fled to the other side of the yard, where a raging fire had been born. Someone set off fireworks. Cheeseburger Brown handed out sparklers and some of us took great joy in them. Mostly Harmless made gang signs by the fireside, which I photographed so we could send them to manobes. A bottle of peppermint schnapps went around the fire; the band finished, and Littlestar led a cheer.

The rest of the night is a haze of drunk conversation by the fireside. Eventually Molasses and Rizzo showed up, carrying the entire state of New Jersey in their trunk. ("It's a small state. It's not like we could carry California or anything.") People gradually wandered off to sleep until, at the end, there was only me, the two band boys, and two other locals hanging out by the fire; we huddled there for warmth (someone who had been going to bed had decided that everyone was, so he'd been working on putting the fire out, and none of us disabused him of the notion), and I smoked some weed with them.

I love smoking weed, for all that I haven't done it in years; as a drug, it makes me incredibly happy, especially when mixed with alcohol. But it also makes me asocial: quiet, withdrawn, I become an observer of the beauty of the world rather than a participant. It was no different Friday night, and that tendency was exaggerated by being the only stranger in a group of people who all knew each other; their conversation turned naturally to its usual patterns, and I was outside. Cute band boy (band boy #1) tried to draw me in, but we were both way too high for it to work, and I wandered off and climbed in my hammock. As I lay there, a shit-eating grin on my face, happy as a clam (as the incomprehensible expression runs), the first rays of sunrise broke over the horizon.

::Saturday, 2 July 2005/HuSiStock Day 2

I woke up to the sounds of a murmuring of voices near my head, but I couldn't see where they were coming from. I ignored the sounds, figuring they were transient and people would realize they were right next to my head and move. The noise didn't go away, my prayers were unanswered, but I kept hoping it would, and kept ignoring it in vain, grasping out for just a few more moinutes of sleep, resisting the temptations of the day. One of the voices told Spacejack that there was coffee downstairs, and that added temptation lured me from my lair, so I stumbled downstairs to chat with Mr. and Mrs. Oak, and spacejack, and J, sipping coffee and slowly remembering where I was.

As the conversation wound down, and not wanting to impose too long on Old Oak's hospitality, I left the downstairs and wandered back up to the gazebos, where I saw the source of the murmuring - a circle of chaires right next to the head of the hammock. I was amazed that my snoring hadn't drowned out the conversation. I sat down to join the conversaiton, not hungover but somewhat sluggish from the morning and lack of sleep.

There was a flurry of activity as people made breakfast - sausage and eggs, plus yogurt - and slozo brought out more coffee. A lethargic quiet settled over the camp as people broke their fast and the air thickened into soup. I remained somewhat zombie-like while people organized a boat trip. Later, Cheeseburger Brown organized two cars into a store run; I got cuban rum, which I'd never before managed to have (which was surprisingly smooth, the smoothest alcohol perhaps i've ever had, but still not so much better than non-cuban rum as to make it something special. certainly not good enough to import it back into the country illegally), sambuca (because anisette liquor simply MUST be passed around the campfire), and half a bottle of Bailey's (more on that later).

We played some frisbee that afternoon, and the dogs obliged me by leaving the disc alone. I introduced spacejack to the difference between 175gm ultimate discs and the other plastic frisbees one can buy. Slozo tried to interest people in volleyball and, failing that, "frisbee volleyball." The band boys eventually got up; cute band boy looked happy and relaxed, nerdy band boy looked as though he had been dragged through hell and his bedraggled soul was badly in need of solace and comfort. Rizzo, who almost always looked like he could barely comprehend the world, took mushrooms, and went off to WalMart, a strange place to trip: who wants to hallucinate in a place which is, on its own merits, bizarre and frightening? People brought out their laptops, and we harassed rusty. Other people discussed goatse and tubgirl for the dubious benefit of someone who had never been properly exposed. A few people asked me when Jared would come to one of these events (answer: probably never. you might get him to go to dinner with HuSites, but a weekend camping around a bunch of people he doesn't know who are drinking holds little appeal for him). Popsicle wandered around periodically - at first showing disinterest in people who weren't family, then later showing active scorn for the strangers in her midst. (At one point, I don't remember which day, she wandered around the circle and looked at everyone, one at a time, and then said "no, no", shaking her head and moving on to the next person; we were clearly not the droids ... erm, geeks ... she was looking for.)

The afternoon passed in a bubble of warmth and good cheer, a merry atmosphere pervaded the premises. Some people played horseshoes, another attempt at volleyball was made. Evening came, bringing with it chili, and Isosceles Cat (sorry, couldn't find a link; if an editor could oblige that would be cool set up to spin for us. Some of us had a brief argument about the difference between a 'DJ' and an 'electronic music artist'; I think we agreed to disagree about the contentious subject, and neither of us asked Isosceles Cat what he preferred.

The fireward migration was slower tonight, as laziness kept people up by the gazebos longer. Druisan and I, talking to Mostly Harmless, Janra, and some other people, nearly split a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Nicely buzzed, I wandereddown to the fire, handing out what was left of the previous night's sparklers. I sat next to the fire, inside the ring of people, so I could see the people I was talking with; my sweatshirt, a necessary protection against the nighttime chill up near the house, saved my sunburned skin from the torture of the fire. I passed around the sambuca, which vanished quickly (a large chunk of it into ti dave and atreides. Druisan set to work roasting marshmallows to use the Bailey's with; Janra had told us of a neat trick she knew involving turning marshmallows into cups to hold liquor (something which turned out to be more difficult than expected: while it was easy to get the outer layer to seperate from the inner, keeping it from collapsing on itself was hard.) Atreides' voice echoed, booming loudly around the fire. People slowly drifted away, vanishing with the flames into the night.

p>::Sunday, 3 July 2005/HuSiStock Day 3

I was way more successful at ignoring the general murmuring of the crowd on Sunday. What I could not ignore was Cheeseburger Brown, directly above me, yelling. Yelling at his dog. And being ignored, from the sound of it.

That sound could wake the dead, and very nearly did.

The stockyard was far more subdued on Sunday morning, as two days of heavy partying and little sleep had taken their toll and sapped the energy; an air of contented exhaustion had rolled in overnight. I snarfed down a bunch of sausages (after waiting a while to see if other people would eat them) while sipping coffee, peacefully absorbing the sun's warmth and the social comity, making small talk while required.

I wandered inside for a bit, giving in to the temptation to use the internet; Atreides handed me Littlestar's laptop and asked me to push 'post' when the wireless network came back and then log out as him (he had an errand of some sort to run, I remember not what it was). I did this, and nothing more, as the microwave was making the wireless network flaky; he came back later to check on me, worried that I might be abusing his powers to muck with the site. After a bit the wireless network failed entirely, disrupted by the microwave's angry disdain for competing technologies; the microwave, like the television, will stand no competition in the battle to capture the souls of men. Cheeseburger Brown wandered by and asked if I would drive to the go-kart tournee.

Assembling the racers took more time than I'd expected, but eventually we were on our way. Two of the three cars arrived as expected, but the other one vanished for a while (apparently it went off in search of gas). The race itself was a blast. Atreides was aggressive, passing on the inside around corners more often than not, but it did him little good. 606 was impossible to pass for some reason. I wasn't lapped nearly as many times as I expected - the last time I went go-karting was at a bachelor party for a friend who is very into racing, flies each year to Indianapolis for the Formula One race, plays racing games often, etc, and I sucked by comparison with the more racing-oriented people in the crowd - and I was thrilled to find out that I hadn't come in last.

After, Druisan, 606, and I went off to get more ice. Druisan expressed amazement, not necessarily in a good way, at my music selection, while we drove around. Littlestar had recommended a gas station nearby, but they were out; the clerk recommended that we try a grocery store. When I asked where one was, she directed me to a No-Frills at the next stoplight. I thought she meant the next stoplight south, towards Bradford; Druisan thought she meant west, towards the 400. I took Druisan's suggestion, and we shortly found ourselves on 400 north (due to a driving error on my part), a 20-minute or so detour which allowed us to talk and brought us by a field of cows, the only known cow sighting at HuSiStock. We turned around at the next exit, then went down to the No-Frills (on the edge of Bradford), grabbed some ice, and headed back to the stockyard.

A bit later, someone organized a new trip to the lake, and we headed out - Janra, Mostly Harmless, NStenz, LilFlightTest, Janra's sister and her boyfriend, me, and someone else whose name I don't remember (perhaps a friend of Janra's sister?) Janra's sister had come up from her home to see Janra and go out on the lake, so that's what we did. NStenz had some trouble getting the boat moving, but eventually he and Janra's sister's boy got it straightened out, and we headed out into the water. It was a fun ride, although we periodically took on a bit of water. At one point we were swallowed up by a cloud of mating dragonflies, at least one of which curled romantically into the shape of a heart after alighting on the boat. At another point, we hit seriously choppy water, causing mild concern about the danger of capsizing. After that, we headed back, and swam - or, well, waded - off of the public boat launch. Janra's sister and her cohorts mostly stayed on land, but the rest of us went out, soaking ourselves completely in the water, trying to keep our feet out of the slimy mulch. A seaplane landed and looked for quite some time as if it were coming directly towards us - and, amazingly, it left no wake behind as it passed.

Sangria had just been brought out when we left, and it was gone when we got back. I was sorta bummed; Sangria on a hot day is the perfect refreshment, followed closely by frozen white wine slushies. Meow and her boy had arrived in the meantime, putting to rest the talk of kidnapping her. 256, MissLake, and Isosceles Cat were gone, alas, and the sense was beginning to dawn that soon the party would be over. Molasses organized a game of texas hold-em in her incredible enclosed portable patio; the game stretched from before sunset until late in the night. I did poorly; I was the third person ejected. (Druisan, who was ejected by a risky move early in the game, stayed to play dealer). Someone brought out barbecued corn, and I nearly fainted from delight - barbecued corn is the food of the gods, the sole reason the gods created life in the first place. It was followed by steak, tender and soft enough to be cut with a plastic knife, and then people broke into the cigars Gedvondur had brought. A tranquil happiness settled over the camp.

I circulated a bit after getting ejected from the game, avoiding the drunkenness of the preceding evenings. Janra, Mostly Harmless, and I all stayed up later than we should have, not wanting it to end; but exhaustion was creeping up on us and joining the importent voice of duty demanding sleep, and so I crawled off to crash about the same time the poker game broke up and the players retreated from the cold to the embrace of the fire.

p>::Monday, 4 July 2005/American Independance Day/HuSiStock Day 4

The rising sun woke me up; I contemplated obeying his exhortations, but decided against and went back to sleep. Some time later, very gently, Janra awakened me; it was 6.15, time to get up. I sprang from my hammock into the toilet, then stumbled down to the remnants of the fire, where MillMan had thoughtfully left me one smouldering log. I sat next to it, huddled as close as I could get, to absorb enough heat to ward me from the morning chill as I waited for Janra and Mostly Harmless to be ready. That didn't take long, and so we set off into town, where we had an OK breakfast at a hotel restaurant (they paid, which was nice). My meal consisted of potato pancakes - a traditional Yiddish dish - and sausage; the irony was apparently lost on the restaurant. Janra, who had cut short her dinner out of an urgent need for DEET to protect her from the blood-sucking vermin of Ontario, was ravenous.

When we got to the executive flight center - a much more congenial way to fly than the stressful commercial airlines - Mostly Harmless and I kept Janra company until the Bluebird was ready to go, so it was late morning by the time we arrived back at the stockyard. The tents had mostly been dismantled, the stockyard was mostly empty, and I felt a stirring sense of loss. The party was winding down, and there's always a bittersweet feeling when everyone leaves - and one by one they did, until of the foreigners (eg, the people who weren't regularly there), only Mostly Harmless, 606, Druisan, Greener, and I remained. Mostly Harmless wandered off to begin his interminable packing, and Druisan and I debated whether or not to take the mushrooms we'd bought the night before.

I'd been thinking about taking mushrooms all weekend. It had been years since I'd done any hallucinogen at all, and I no longer had a reliable source; and I'd never, even in the days when I was a stoner, felt comfortable shrooming in a crowd. But this seemed like a crowd I could be comfortable in.² Druisan had been contemplating as well, and so when he asked if I'd do it with him, I jumped at the chance - save only the proviso that it had to be during the day. Shrooms are more fun when you can see things; what's the point in messing with your senses if there's nothing to see?

And yet, as we watched people pack up and clear away, we were both unsure again; people were drifting out and the empty yard felt sad and lonely, not - perhaps - the ideal mood. The party was over, and we were lingering; I'd expected a late afternoon takedown instead of a morning one, preceded by a tired jovial few hours. So we talked about it, and agreed to abide by the results of a coin flip.

Druisan's explanation of why shrooms disagree with him sounds like they make for one of the most unpleasant ways imagineable to spend an afternoon, but he gave no overt sign of it while he was under their influence. We both sat under the gazebos, watching, conversing as we were able. I only moved twice - once to get water, once to rescue slozo's jerry-rigged sun umbrella from the grill it was in the process of landing on. It was a mild trip (I was way more out of it Friday night when smoking with the band), highlighted by a cute fractral in the trees, and it was fun to hang out with people for one last afternoon. Old Oak's face, as he talked with me, is particularly vivid in my mind.

The afternoon settled into a light rain, which I sat outside in and enjoyed it falling on me. The rain intensified. Slozo said something about the wireless router, which I immediately moved. The rain turned to a downpour, and we struggled to get the musical equipment, and greener's stuff, deeper under the gazebo and out of the torrent. (Greener, alas, was stranded by a failure in the break line of his car; the garage would look at it, they said, later today or tomorrow). As the storm cleared, it began to feel like time to go - both Druisan and 606 enquired "when" several times - so shortly after Cheeseburger Brown returned from shuttling Mostly Harmless to the airport, we took down the hammock (I got 606 to lay down in it first; he loved it), waved goodbye, and drove off, last - except for poor, stranded, Greener - of the guests to leave.

We drove off into the thunderstorm from hell. The heaviest rain I'd ever seen poured out of the sky, making the roadside invisible, and I focused on the dim lights of the cars ahead while 606 and Druisan played with 606's iTrip. (they kept playing good Canuckistani music by bands i'd never heard of, and while 606 told me who they were, I don't remember; I was focused on the dim headlights, not on the conversation). The airport was slightly confusing, a twisted maze of poorly signed roadways³ with absurd speed limits. (20? 20? Please.) I was ravenous, having declined food earlier on the grounds that I was still tripping and could not deal with the concept of food; so Druisan and I stopped at a Tim Horton's near his place and ate. Dinner was quiet (the conversation had finally run dry), and I was confused by his pronunciation of "honey cruller", which my mind kept trying - and failing - to interpret as a german word. Then, after a sandwich and some coffee, I dropped Druisan off and was on my way. On my way here, to this hostel.

I was greeted by an extraordinarily gregarious chap who resembled nothing so much as a very happy bottle of bubbly water exploding under high compression. He babbled at me for a while, assuring me that I could still reach the Falls, on foot, in time for the fireworks. He was wrong; they started as I was walking and, though I caught a few glimpses through the trees, they were done well before I had a chance at a decent view. That was fine; the fifteen minutes or so by which I missed them were minutes spent at HuSiStock, and how could I complain about that? It was, after all, a fantastic weekend; a great deal of fun was had by all at Littlestar's fabulous party. At the risk of sounding too much like a doped-up Santa Cruz hippie, I loved them all ... and I miss you already, especially the ones who, as Cheeseburger Brown put it, transmogrified into friends.

It was a fantastic HuSiStock; I can't wait to do it again.

¹The worst was Murder in Portland, a pathetic gay art film-cum-porno that caused everyone watching it to writhe in pain. Truly the Vogon Poetry of movies.

²My friend L____, back before her life fell apart, used to periodically go to parties, held in a state park, with friends she'd met through her homebrewing co-op. She invited me once, and it was a good enough time, with lots of drinking and smoking and game playing; but I always felt completely the outsider. This was different; it was like the same event, only with my people; and it was fantastic. I knew that I could do almost anything and nobody would judge me - except, as Druisan noted, Popsicle, was going to judge me no matter what I did.

³To be fair, the signs were fine as reminders to people who already sort of knew where they were going. We didn't, and so they were horribly unclear.

This blog will be inactive, as I will be out of town and without computer access (the longest time I've gone without internet access in three years) from June 26 through July 6.

I'll be spending one night in beautiful downtown Buffalo, hopefully catching a showing of Howl's Moving Castle, then three nights camping in Algonquin Provincial Park, followed by a night on Quinte's Island (near the end of the St. Lawrence). Then it's up to Gilford for HuSiStock, followed by two days experiencing the beauty of Niagara Falls (including, of course, 4th of July Fireworks over the falls! .

Pictures about a week or so after I get back.

Buried in the midst of the controversial "yes-government-can-take-property-for-economic-redevelopment" supreme court decision is this interesting historical datum: in 1984, the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional a land redistribution scheme in which the state of Hawai'i, using eminent domain, purchased property from landowners and then turned around and sold it to the existing renters.

The reason for this? 49% of the state's land was owned by the state and federal government, but 47% was owned by a clique of seventy-two landowners; on Oahu, 72.5% of all privately owned land was owned by twenty-two people.

According to the Sacramento Bee, the governor has finally issued the declaration calling for a special election in November. According to the Secretary of State, there are five ballot measures qualified for the next statewide election:

1. A measure to amend the constitution to require parental notification, and a 48-hour waiting period after parental notification, for abortions on unemancipated minors, except when a judge has granted an exemption;
2. A measure to increase the length of time required for a public school teacher to get tenure, and provide a mechanism for firing teachers who have tenure;
3. A measure to prohibit public employee unions from using dues or fees for political activism
4. A measure to change the proposition 98 school funding guarantee and impose an overall state spending limit;
5. A measure to take the reapportionment power away from the legislature, vest it in retired judges (subject to a mandatory referendum!), and redistrict immediately.

In addition, there are currently three measures pending signature validation which might conceivably qualify.

I've been holding off on reading these until the special election was called. I guess now I have to break into them.

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson --

Dave Neiwert would say that this is a sign of impending fascism. I don't know that i'd go that far, but it is disturbing,a nd says a lot about the deterioration of our political culture: an auditor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, responding to a call from someone who said they had information about employee fraud, was severely beaten by a group of thugs.

You'd think that high-level scientists would be beyond this sort of thing.

The Court:

OK, guys, pay attention. In 1941, we said that Congress had the power to pass a law restricting production of a good in order to prop up its price on the interstate market, and that it could even regulate the production of goods *for private consumption* because the mere existence of those goods would influence the price and therefore effect interstate commerce. Given that we said that, and we still believe it, of course Congress has the power to prohibit the production of marijuana for home (medical) consumption while attempting to completely eliminate the market in marijuana. They're the exact same logical problem, and everyone who disagrees either completely misunderstands our precedents or disagrees with them.

Scalia:

The Necessary and Proper Clause clearly states that Congress has the power to do things it wouldn't otherwise have the power to do, if doing them is necessary to accomplish things that it does have the power to do. This law, which effects intrastate activity and is therefore not authorized by the commerce clause, is necessary in order to extinguish the market in marijuana (which *is* authorized by the commerce clause), and therefore the necessary and proper clause allows the Congress to do what it has done.

O'Connor:

the court's decision declares any activity involving production, distribution, or consumption to be "economic activity" that is therefore eligible to be regulated under the commerce clause. This eviscerates the Commerce Clause's limitation on federal power and makes it meaningless. It thereby stifles the freedom of the states to protect the liberty of their people.

Thomas:

production and consumption are not "Commerce". Only trade or exchange is "Commerce". The Congress has no power to do this - or to pass laws regulating production and consumption in general. It does have the power to prohibit trafficking marijuana across state lines, but prohibiting medical consumption within one state is not necessary and proper to doing that, because medical users are a distinguishably seperate class.

Thomas' interpretation is, as often, frightening: he's basically saying that almost all federal regulations governing the production of goods are invalid, because production is not commerce. There *might* be a loophole for rules governing the production of goods intended for transit across state lines, but even that loophole is not available for rules governing the production of goods which don't cross state lines - eg, federal OSHA regulations governing safety in auto repair shops and restaurants are not constitutional.

But the subtext to this case - something that O'Connor deftly avoids addressing with her moderately worded opinion expressing concern that perhaps the court is allowing the federal government too much power and just a small swing back in the other direction would be enough to ameliorate it - is that this decision saw the Supreme Court faced with an extraordinarily contentious choice. In practice, it could have done one of three things:

• Issued the ruling that it issued, holding that the Controlled Substances Act was entirely within the Congress' power, as expressed in a New-Deal-era precedent (Wickard);
• Ruled that the Controlled Substances Act was unconstitutional and that Wickard had been wrongly decided;
• Found some contorted and unconvincing grounds for distinguishing Wickard from this case.

Federalists are concerned, and rightly so, that this decision basically removes any meaningful limits on Congressional power under the Commerce Clause. That's been the principle conservative critique of Commerce Clause jurisprudence for decades now.

But the flip side of that is that overruling Wickard would essentially bring the modern system of government regulation to a grinding halt, invalidating huge chunks of federal law and (perhaps worse) leaving a great amount of uncertainty as to what had been invalidated. There would be full employment for constitutional lawyers for many years as the confusion brought about a stampede to the courtroom; and after the dust settled, the nation's economic system - and its politics - would be changed beyond recognition.

That's a bit much for the Supreme Court to bite off.

The third option was, of course, a possibility; but the Supreme Court already issues far too many strange and incomprehensible distinctions between things which appear identical to outside observers. It's a good thing that they didn't do it this time, because as the number of such cases increases, the public's faith in the judiciary as something other than a high priesthood of delphic oracles decreases.

As a practical matter, then, this was the best possible outcome for this case. The choice was between either allowing more or less unfettered power under the commerce clause or imposing shackles that had been discarded sixty years ago, and thereby allowing too little power under the commerce clause. There really was no middle ground.

Up in Washington state, the dispute over the election of Christine Gregoire - who won by 129 votes after two recounts (the first of which showed her opponent winning) has been put to rest. Superior Court Judge John Bridges declined to overturn the election results, saying that the proponetns of that action had not demonstrated deliberate fraud.

This is a good thing, the expected whining from Dino Rossi's cohorts notwithstanding. An election that close is well within the margin of error for the voting systems involved. Yes, around two thousand votes (out of two million - eg, about one tenth of one percent) were illegally cast. Perhaps those favored one candidate over another; it's hard to tell without testimony from those who voted. But it fundamentally doesn't matter: an election that is that close might as well be decided by a coin toss.

So why do I think it's a good thing? After all, if the election might as well be decided by a coin toss, a court decision overturning the election would be no great tragedy, right? That's true to an extent ... except that judges determining who should win an election is a dangerous blurring of the seperation of powers. IT's far better for the legislature to lay out a procedure for dealing with results that are within the margin of error, and that the courts have nothing to do with it other than to ensure that those procedures are carried out.

That seems to have happened here. Asked to overturn an election result produced by following the procedures set out by the laws of the State and call a new election based on nothing more than circumstancial evidence and the closeness of the result, Judge Bridges declined. Good for him, and shame on Rossi and his compatriots for asking him to do anything else.

It appears that hell has indeed frozen over.

It appears that the irresistable force of the drug war has shattered neo-federalism. Not being a fan of neo-federalism, this should make me happy; but as someone who also loathes the drug war, i'm quite disappointed. I'd hoped that a doctrine I dislike might at least get used in support of a cause I favor.

The Economist, while an unusually good newspaper with the most detailed coverage of parts of the world the American press prefers to ignore, is more than occasionally guilty of infecting its news reportingwith its political biases. This isn't usually a problem, because everyone who reads them knows what their biasses are and so can use that knowledge to flavor their interpretation of its reportage, but it's rarely as amusing as it is in this week's leader. First they castigate "Euro-enthusiasts" for using their own political preferences as a frame to misinterpret the meaning of the results of the Dutch and French referenda on the EU Constitution, and then they proceed to do the same:

Europe's leaders should draw two broader lessons from the French and Dutch noes. The first is that rejection of the constitution signals that the dream of deeper political integration and, in the 1957 Treaty of Rome's famous phrase, "ever closer union", is over. Instead the EU should move in the direction of being a looser, less federalist and more decentralized club."

This is sort of like saying that the repudiation of Toryism in the last British election constitutes a mandate for the renationalization of key industries. It's nothing more than the Economist projecting its preferences onto the votes of the French and Dutch electorates.

The Economist really ought to be ashamed of itself; usually it is more subtle than this.

Having been inspired by a long biography of John Kenneth Galbraith, i've been slowly working my way through famous economic texts - "American Capitalism", for example - and, in line with that, was hoping to borrow a copy of "The Road to Serfdom" from the Stanford Library.

I can't right now, at least not in English. All copies of it are currently non-circulating (presumably because they're required reading for a class this quarter), except for the German-language edition.

It's not clear why that is allowed to circulate.

I'm sure that there will be much interesting to be said about this when the histories are written; and at least some of those things will be about the danger, inherent in our bureaucracy, of pissing off the mid-level bureaucrats.

But today, the only thing to be said is really this: the mystery was much more interesting. The act of revealing the secret often destroys the wonder and renders things mundane, and that has happened here. "W. Mark Felt" is just less interesting than "Deep Throat", and no amount of historical analysis will change that.

I'm not sure what the alleged legal basis for this is, but I don't see how it can possibly not be an establishment clause violation for a judge to insert into a divorce decree an order prohibiting the people getting the divorce from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs".

I rarely support this sort of thing, but the judge in question should be impeached.

In what way is this not a modern inarnation of His Majesty's Court of Star Chamber?

One of the side-effects of having read (and enormously enjoyed) Richard Parker's lengthy biography of John Kenneth Galbraith is that it instigated a desire to read Galbraith's writing. (See also this complaint and its responses for further inspiration).

A Journey Through Economic Time was fairly significantly disappointing. It's the rambling memoir of an old man who can't really be bothered to focus on telling his story without detrimental diversions, and it's much less effective as a history of modern economic thought than the aforementioned biopic. But it did contain an interesting idea - the answer to a question that pops up over and over again in modern political debate: Why do liberals care about the distribution of income?

I'd always thought that the idea was that the distribution of income is important for ethical reasons, that a wide disparity between the rewards available to those favored by the system and those available to those disfavored by the system was somehow wrong. Galbraith adds a different view: a wide disparity in the distribution of income makes it more likely that the economy will enter a liquidity trap, because only an unequal distribution of income allows the accumulation of sufficient capital that failing to invest or spend it can influence the economy on a large scale. (Another way of saying this is to note that unequal distribution of income allows Say's Law to be violated, by creating the conditions in which capital can be withdrawn from the effective economy, thereby reducing aggregate demand).

I'll have to remember this point the next time i'm arguing with a libertarian online.

I've since moved on to American Capitalism, which proposes the following interesting notion in its first quarter: the excess of advertising in the modern world is the result of a lack of price competition in semi-competitive oligarchies. The empirical fact that modern (as of the time he was writing) industries developed into semi-stable oligarchies in which price competition was socially disavowed (as being destructive) forced competition to take other forms, the most dramatic of which was the use of large-scale advertising to recruit customers.

I'm not sure i'm convinced - i'm particularly not sure that advertising in the early industrial era was less prevalant than it was in the 1950s - but it's an interesting conceit.

The Supreme Court of the United States, in California Democratic Party v. Jones: blanket primaries violate the free association rights of parties who want closed primaries.

The Supreme Court of the United States, in Clingman v. Beaver: semiclosed primaries do not violate the free association rights of parties who want open primaries.

Talk about judicial activism and writing your political preferences into law ....

This is by way of an expansion, and further elucidation, of my recent remarks.

The immediate cause of my anger is the implications in post, and some of the comments to it, regarding recent events in Uzbekistan. The claim seems to be that the violence was incited and organized by a shadowy Islamic terrorist organization - and, while the post itself goes on to weakly condemn the government of Islam Karimov, the comments in that thread (and others) by the proprietor of exit zero seem to suggest that those opposed to his government are worse than the government itself.

Uzbekistan's government, led by former Soviet apparatchik Islam Karimov, has a reputation as one of the most brutal governments in the world. It's not quite as bad as things are in Turkmenistan - a state run by a certifiable madman whose cult of personality outdoes that of the North Korean president - but the Uzbek government has shown time and time again that it has no respect for the most basic of civil rights, little understanding of or respect for the notion of freedom, and a penchant for disappearing and/or killing its critics. It is one of the last true Stalinist states.

In addition to the political repression, of course, the economy is stagnant or worse, and dust storms of toxic salt periodically drift through the country, blown up from the residue of what once was the fifth-largest body of fresh water in the world.

And yet some people feel the need to seek for the hidden hand of Islamic extremism to explain why people might object to the continuance of the government sufficiently strongly as to raise weapons against it.

I don't know if some of those opposed to the government have been influenced by the ideology of the Taliban - which was, after all, actively seeking to bring about revolution in the region. But I very much doubt that everyone is, and I don't particularly care if some are. This is the kind of situation in which those citizens of Uzbekistan who are willing to act to bring about change must accept every ally available to them; the state is strong, its army is very, very long ... and anyone who will help you bring about the revolution is a friend. Even if they do have dreams of imposing a very different form of dictatorship later on, that problem can be addressed when it arises ... and they'll help you bring about an end to the much more tangible, much more real despotism in front of you now.

I am not saying that it is understandable for those who object to the Uzbek government to randomly kill civilians; it would not be. But there is no evidence that they are. There is, however, evidence that suggests that an angry population, subject to one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, are fighting back.

Such fighting is entirely understandable, entirely predictable, and should be welcomed by the free world. Even the US government is hedging on the subject:

"We urge both the government and the demonstrators to exercise restraint at this time," he [White House spokesman Scott McClellan] said. "The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government, but that should come through peaceful means, not through violence."

What possible reason could he have for thinking that this could be done? Karimov's government - like that in Turkmenistan - has shown that it has no more interest in a peaceful change of government than does Fidel Castro. The government appears to have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters over the last several days.

The best way, perhaps the only way, for the people of Uzbekistan to achieve freedom in their lifetimes would be for them to rise up en masse and slaughter the leaders of the state which has no qualms about slaughtering them. That wouldn't be terrorism; that would be a just and righteous revolution.

I hope it happens soon.

Why is it that so many American conversatives, who are unwilling to say anything good about even mild socialism, have such a soft-spot for the communist apparatchiks-turned-dictators that currently keep the people of central asia under the grip of government terror?

Islam Karimov is bad enough, but Saparmurat Niyazov is literally insane, and his people prisoners of his insanity. Why are those who are so concerned with spreading freedom in Iraq so utterly unconcerned about these countries?

I haven't read the decision yet. I'm at work, and can't spare the time until lunch.

But I read the NYT headline in somewhat stunned disbelief.

The Supreme Court has apparently ruled that the laws in Michigan and New York, which allow in-state but not out-of-state wineries to make direct sales to consumers, is an unconstitutional infringement of the Commerce Clause.

"The Congress shall have the power ... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States".

But the 21st amendment, adopted in the 1930s, close to a century and a half after that was written, says:

"The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited."

How much more clear does it need to be?

I begin to understand what had once struck me as paranoid rantings.

I see that, over at CalBlog, the debate over the meaning of the crusades, and whether or not Kingdom of Heaven is an accurate representation, has begun. The first shot has been fired by someone who hasn't even seen the movie yet.

How utterly predictable. The debate isn't really about the movie; it's about the representation in modern culture of the crusades themselves. More than anything else, really, it is about the self-image of the Christian world. Mr Levine's post is intended to debunk the idea that

the Crusades were a product of Western/Christian prejudices wherein Christian fanatics spread out around the world to kill or convert anyone who wasn't Christian because all non-Christians were worthy of being killed simply because they didn't share Christian beliefs. The implicit argument in this line of thinking is that the Crusades were an aggressive war launched by Western civilization against non-aggressive cultures that lived outside of Western modes of thinking.

Unfortunately, while he is correct in complaining that the popular impression described above is an oversimplification that misses important parts of the story, he attempts to replace it with this odious claim:

Or was it a case of religious armies counter-attacking other religious armies after being pushed out of territories that they previously had hegemony over?

The answer to that question is, quite clearly, no.

Mr. Levine is, of course, correct in his claim that the Arabs had conquered lands that were, at the time, Christian; and he is correct that those conquests were often resisted (Although, note: in the great cities of Egypt, the Arabs were, indeed, welcomed as liberators - because the dominant form of Christianity in the Coptic world was considered a heresy by the Empire, while the Arabs literally did not care about the difference between Greek and Coptic Christianity). But those conquests had ended centuries ago: the border between the Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire had remained more-or-less static since the end of the seventh century, and the furthest incursion into western Europe via Iberia had been pushed back two hundred and seventy years before the Crusades.

If France were, today, to declare war on Canada in the hopes of retaking Acadia and Quebec, we would think they the French were insane; and we would hold them to be the clear aggressors. The Crusades were every bit as aggressive, and wrapping them in the claim that the Christians were just retaking land which had been theirs is every bit as insane.

This is particularly true when you consider that the people involved in the crusade were not, with one possible exception, in any meaningful way the same people who had been pushed out of those lands. The crusades primarily drew warriors from France, England, and Germany; the Holy Land had, prior to the Arab conquest, been ruled by something that was still culturally and politically identifiable as the classical Roman Empire. While the western states could with some justification claim to be the cultural descendant of that Empire, the fact remains that there was zero political continuity, and that culturally and economically the societies which participated in the crusades were highly dissimilar to the society of classical Rome. Moreover, the political entity which was a direct descendant of classical Rome was also, in fact if not in theory, a highly dissimilar culture - and it did not, in any meaningful way, contribute manpower to the crusades.

The only theory under which it makes sense to say that the Crusades were conducted by the same people from whom the Holy Land had been taken was a theory which held that all of Christendom was united in one socio-political entity. While this theory held a great deal of currency in the popular imagination at the time, it had not been true as a political matter for well over a century at the time of the First Crusade - and, during the period of the crusades, the entire idea fell into disrepute.

To a certain extent the experience of the crusades themselves helped undermine the notion of a united Christendom. The crusades certainly did more to exacerbate conflict between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity than any other single cause.

The idea that the crusades were a response to Arab aggression, and simply a retaking of lands lost in the Arab conquest, is a myth. The lands being reconquered had been conquered four centuries previously; they had been taken away from people who were in virtually no respect politically, culturally, or socially linked with the people who were taking them back; and the people who had the best claim to be the descendants of those who had lost the land in the first place weren't involved in the crusades.

That said, there had been a significant change in the international political situation in the eleventh century which created a legitimate fear in Europe that a new era of Islamic expansion was about to begin. The problem wasn't the Arabs or the Moors - who had seemed content with static borders for centuries. The problem was the Turks.

The Turks had, in the century or so before the Crusades, crossed into Transoxania and conquered it; they had converted to Islam and conquered Persia; they had imprisoned the Caliph and turned him into nothing more than a figurehead; and they had repeatedly made war on what we call the Byzantine Empire. They took to these wars with the missionary zeal of converts - yet, their actions in the decades before they converted suggest that they would have entered into the wars regardless of their religion. They were outsiders bent on conquest who adopted the religion of the people they conquered, and who - as is often the case with conversions - became more ardent, more religious, more fanatical than those who had held that religion all of their lives.

But they posed no threat to western Europe; they had no navies, and - by descending through transoxania rather than crossing the Russian steppe - they were cut off from the main overland routes by which Europe had been invaded in the past.

Until Manzikert. Just under twenty years before the start of the first crusade, the Byzantine Empire was defeated in a decisive battle from which it never recovered. The Emperor was captured; his leading general fled back to the capital and instigated a coup; and gradually over the course of the next two decades, it lost control of most of Anatolia. By the time of the First Crusade, the Turks were on the shore of the Bosporus, and the Byzantine Empire's ability to block entry into Europe was gone.

That was the international context for the Crusades: a stable border between the Christian and the Islamic world, which had held (minus occasional skirmishes) for centuries, had been shattered by an aggressively expansionist Turkish population.

******

It is not clear what Pope Urban II's motivation was in calling the Crusade. No copies of his speech have survived, and the reports of those who heard it disagree on significant details. I do not recall the issues of disagreement, nor do I have my copy of those sources with me (they're in a box somewhere, still unpacked from when I last moved). I do know, however, that this is an area of significant disagreement among historians, even now.

But the Pope's motivation is ultimately of less interest than the motivation of the people who answered his call for a Crusade. These can broadly be classified in the following groups:

• People who were honestly motivated by Christian zeal to retake the Holy Land;
• People who were motivated by the Church's promise of forgiveness of sins;
• People who saw the Crusades as a way to obtain glory, power, or treasure.

The writings of the crusaders themselves, as well as the descriptions of the crusaders left by the Byzantines after the crusaders passed through Byzantine territory, strongly suggest that the vast majority of the nobility (by nobility I mean merely people from families which owned land and whose primary means of support were as warriors) fell into the second or third category.

There were certainly some whose motivations were, as the traditional story behind the crusades would have it, the greater Glory of God - who went into the Crusades as pious idealists. They were a minority. Probably the single largest group of such people were the immense congregation of peasants who followed Peter the Hermit overland to be slaughtered in an ill-advised attempt to attack a trained and battle-experienced Turkish army with pitchforks and farm implements; but few historians would deny the existence of genuine religious motivation among some of the more professional fighters.

A lot more were motivated by the promise of forgiveness of their sins. This raises the question of what, precisely, the Church's motivation was in offering such forgiveness - a question whose answer has not been established to any degree of certainty, and which requires access to documents not allowed out of the Vatican archives.

But many, surprisingly many in an activity long portrayed in popular culture as the outcome of the height of religious zeal, were simply interested in the typical things that warriors have wanted throughout history: treasure and land. The overwhelming majority of the warriors who fought in the crusades were the younger sons of nobility - people who were simply not going to inherit the land, title, and wealth of their parents. People who, in an earlier age - particularly in France - would have engaged in petty fights with each other, or rallied around younger scions of the royal family in an attempt to overthrow the established order. People for whom conquest of the Holy Land offered a future.

The venal nature of many of the Crusaders was demonstrated by the refusal of the Crusaders to turn the territory they conquered over to the Byzantine Empire, the political entity which had the theoretical legal claim to them, despite having agreed to do so when they passed through Constantinople. The Byzantine claim to the Holy Land itself was dubious, but the Crusaders also didn't return places like Antioch - which had been Byzantine territory within two generations prior to the Crusade - and there was significant doubt in the minds of the Byzantines as to whether or not the Crusaders were going to turn over Nicaea, long the heart of Byzantine Anatolia, a city which clearly was rightfully part of their territory.

Not to mention the travesty of the Fourth Crusade, in which those who set off to fight the Turks instead overthrew the government of a Christian country and looted its capital, then the wealthiest city in the Christian world.

So yes, Mr. Levine is right in his detestation of the myth that the Crusades were a clear example of intolerant Christianity seeking to impose its religious beliefs on the rest of the world. But his myth of a Christian world simply defending itself against aggression and retaking land that rightfully belonged to it is just as wrong.

The crusades were a complex phenomenon, not easily distilled to any single simple explanation. But the simple explanation which fits best is that, by and large, the crusaders were the greedy younger children of mid-level nobility who used religious zeal as an excuse to carve out territory and wealth for themselves, abetted by a church whose reasons for doing so remain unclear.

Only, please, not in Baltimore.

Readers of this blog may remember a string of stories, last fall, about the contentious mayor's election in San Diego, when a two-candidate runoff was bedeviled by a write-in candidate who may (or may not) have gotten more votes than the incumbent. The resultant court cases included a challenge to the legitimacy of a write-in campaign (mounted by Donna Frye),challenges to the legitimacy of certain votes, and the recusal of the entire county judiciary. In the end, the incumbent mayor was judged to have won - by a very slim margin, and only after several thousand write-in ballots were disqualified.

Last week he was named one of the three worst big-city mayors in the country by no less a publication than Time, and now he's resigning. Meanwhile, the deputy mayor - who will serve as acting mayor until the special election to replace the resigning mayor - is under federal corruption indictment and goes on trial in May.

I think that Donna Frye's point has been amply made. And I pity the poor voters of San Diego whose attempt to throw out the bums were prevented from going into effect by zealous attention to technicalities.

The historian in me is excited, even though I find this time period almost dreadfully boring:

Classicists at Oxford, using multi-spectral-imaging technology similar to that used on the Dead Sea Scrolls, have begun deciphering some of the 400,000 scraps of papyrus retrieved more than a century ago from what had been the dump outside one of ancient Egypt's largest cities.

Included in the finds are parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles and a lost novel by Lucian.

The technique could see the number of accounted-for ancient manuscripts increase by one fifth, and may even lead to the unveiling of some lost Christian gospels.

The administration's goal is to make it easier for U.S. citizens and legitimate foreign visitors to enter the United States, said Randy Beardsworth, a top Homeland Security official.

They're going to do this by requiring that US citizens have passports in order to re-enter the country. Even if they've gone to countries that don't require a passport for a US citizen to enter them.

This is in order to protect the country from terrorists, you understand.

If implemented, this will impose an enormous expense on the passport agency, which will get flooded with applicants (only 20% of US citizens currently have passports), thereby (in all likelihood) significantly increasing the time it takes to get a passport. It will also have serious economic repurcussions by preventing most people from travelling to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada on short notice (since they'd have to get a passport first).

But ultimately, it's wrong on a more visceral level. The governments of our neighbors, who will allow us to enter their countries without a passport, trust us more than our own government does. We can now leave without papers, but we can't get back in without papers: pity the poor person who loses his passport, or has it stolen, in a country without a US embassy to replace it.

This is a pathetic announcement of the fear in the heart of our government, and the most visible degradation of the meaning of American citizenship in our time.

The most disturbing thing i've ever read online. Courtesy of Electrolite.

It's been a strange day. I haven't had the guts to turn on the television and see how the news is playing out there, but online newspaper reporters and webloggers have spent the day trading rumors, excitedly discussing the latest tidbit of information, and waiting. Waiting and watching as the thousands gather and pray. Waiting for the news of the final death of Karol Wojty[l]a, hanging in suspense as if this were the most important event in the world.

I am not a Catholic, nor even a Christian, and death is to me as natural an event as waking up in the morning; but I will be among the hundreds of millions mourning when Karol Wojty[l]a breathes his last breath. While I disagreed with him, and while I consider the Catholic church to be an antiquated institution barely capable of coping with the modern world, I also recognize this fact: by choice or no, Karol Wojty[l]a was one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, and his legacy will not be forgotten by those to whom it mattered the most.

Most of the rhetoric of obituary we will see in the next several days will focus on his tenure as Pope, and perhaps rightly so; that is the way most of the world knew him. He is, indeed, the only pope that anyone under the age of 35 has any active memory of, and has become one of the oldest and longest-lasting world leaders of stature. But I refer not to his time as Pope, for that is to me less interesting than what came before.

Karol Wojty[la], Archbishop of Krakow, was the leading figure in the movement by which the Polish Catholic Church became involved in politics. It was he who successfully led the movement to force the state authorities to authorize the building of a church in Nova Huta (by, essentially, embarassing them into it). It was his decision as Archbishop which allowed dissidents to use church basements to set up discussion groups for anti-regime agitation. It was he who stood as the foremost advocate for the notion that there was a Truth besides that which the state had authorized.

This was a risky move. Other bishops had, in the past, been killed for less; there was a very real possibility, in the atmosphere that followed upon the dissolution of the liberal Prague government in 1968, that the Polish government could have used deadly force to suppress the resistance of the church. Archbishop Wojty[l]a and his associates took a brave gamble: they bet, with their lives, that the Polish government was too afraid of the power of the Church to suppress it. They won the bet.

And, in so doing, they turned the Polish Catholic Church into something unique: it became the only entity in the entirety of communist Eastern Europe which held a moral authority independant of the state. It was the only independant source of power which was tolerated in the communist world anywhere.

A digression, for a moment: it is of course true that the Soviet bloc was never as monolithic as many in the west believed it to have been; often the russians were not in control, used merely as an excuse for local despotism (as, indeed, became quite public in Poland after 1981). But all of the Eastern European communist states operated on the principle that all authority came from the state (which was held, by definition, to be carrying out the will of the working class). It was critical to the functioning of these states, to the success of the revolution, that the civil society of the pre-revolutionary era be utterly destroyed (as otherwise it might harbor counterrevolutionary elements). Karol Wojty[l]a was the first person to successfully challenge, and overcome, this destruction.

That challenge, that success, changed the world. For if the Church could be an independant authority, then why not the trade unions? If freedom of religion could be preserved in a socialist state, why not other freedoms? The independance of the Polish Catholic Church created the space in which Solidarity, and Charter 77, could operate.

Without Archbishop Karol Wojty[l]a first paving the way, Solidarity would have failed; without Solidarity's unmasking of the hypocrisy of state socialism, the Warsaw Pact may well have never collapsed.

And that was even before his famous pilgrimage to Poland, in 1979, in which huge crowds flocked to see him and the power of the state wilted before him.

I do not know if Karol Wojty[l]a was a good Pope; I don't even understand what the criteria are for making that judgment. I know that the Catholic Church has come a long way towards the modern age during his time; that he has sought peace with the Orthodox and the Jews, and that under his leadership the church has atoned for both its treatment of Galileo and its shameful behavior in fascist states. I also know that the church under his leadership has remained socially conservative, closed off to much of western modernity. I do not know from a theological perspective how to judge that; for Catholic Theology is, to me, as incomprehensible as the rites of voodoo, and it is not fair for me to judge Pope John Paul's performace as prelate by my religious beliefs.

Yet I know that Karol Wojty[l]a was a great man, one of the towering figures of his age. Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel - three of the people most qualified to judge - have all said, with much reason, that without this man, and what he did in Poland in the 1970s, the tremendous changes of 1989 would not have been possible. He did not stand alone, but he stood in front, and his footsteps brought the first cracks in the facade of the Iron Curtain, and opened the door for freedom and peace in Europe.

May he rest in peace.

Brandon and Dave will be happy to know that I finally watched Lost in Translation Tuesday night, as a result of some irritating behavior on the part of Netflix. I'd like to acknowledge that it was not what I was expecting; and, to my great surprise, I was even able to tolerate Bill Murray, whose presence in a movie usually causes me to lose interest about half an hour before he walks into it.

Indeed, quite against my will, I found myself liking the movie a great deal.

I had a hard time with one aspect of it: the characters were not behaving like people I know, and were not dealing with their presence in a foreign land in a way which was at all comprehensible to me. (Hey! We're in Japan! Lets hang out and hide in our expensive western hotel!) I had to struggle to overcome my disbelief - not to mention my disinterest - in characters who behaved this way, but somewhere along the line it occurred to me that it didn't matter, because for all that it was set in Japan and it seemed, superficially, to be about functioning in a foreign culture, that was a backdrop for an entirely different story: a story about how ennui, and about disconnected loneliness, and how hard it is to overcome them.

That's not to say there weren't moments which resonated, in the "sometimes travelling in a strange country is like that" way; it is merely to say that, as far as I could tell, that was background flavor; something to intensify the feeling of ennui and loneliness which was already present in the lives of the characters.

Oddly, perhaps, the movie it reminds me of most is Before Sunrise - albeit a less connected, more tentative and fragile version, deprived of the optimism and joy. A good movie, indeed, but a painful one.

The former Assemblyman and Senator from Santa Cruz has been unanimously confirmed, and sworn in, as Secretary of State. He did an outstanding job as my representative (persuading me to cast my first ever vote for a Republican when he ran for re-election the first time), and I expect he'll do a fine job in his new role.

Steps required to get the new Glen Phillips album, Winter Pays For Summer, on my iPod:

1. Open iTunes, go to the iTunes Music Store, search for 'Glen Phillips'. Receive error: "unable to access iTunes Music Store; try again later.
2. Try again later. Get same message.
3. Try again later, later. Get same message. Remember that iTunes is nagging me to install a new version of the software; maybe that's the problem.
4. Download new version of iTunes to install. Run install. Crash 3/4 of the way through install, probably because Firefox has an iTunes plugin and it was still running.
5. Reboot machine. Re-run install. Get cryptic error.
6. Re-download new version of iTunes. Shut down Firefox. Run install. Success!
7. Buy album from iTunes Music Store.
8. Buy a few other albums that are interesting (eg, American Idiot and the new Moby album).
9. Search for firewire cable that has the right size connector for my laptop. Find it.
10. Connect iPod. Launch iTunes. Wait. Watch iTunes decide to copy *340 songs*, many of which it has already copied to my iPod.
11. Scream in frustration when iTunes informs me that it can't copy everything it wants to because my iPod software is too old.
12. Download new iPod software installer to my laptop.
13. Reboot laptop because I have to reboot for the installer to work.
14. Install new iPod software.
15. Unplug iPod, plug it in to a real power source, so the firmware will update.
16. Wait.
17. Reconnect iPod to laptop. Start iTunes. Get same error message as before.
18. Swear. Reboot laptop. Restart iTunes. No error message, yay! Wait for 340 songs to copy.
19. Howl in frustration when my laptop crashes with a CPU temperature of 71C.
20. Wait for CPU to cool off.
21. Restart machine. reconnect iPod. Copy files. Monitor CPU temperature intently.
22. Success!

I hope it turns out to have been worth it.

I went to a meeting over lunch today in which I was going to receive training on a new procedure for releasing patches. (Fair enough). The meeting basically went like this:

Presenter: QA and Engineering management have determined that we will now use this procedure. [Explain procedure. Demo software tool which is mind-bogglingly easy to use].

Engineering: (Various different people). "That's a stupid procedure." "That's redundant. Our group [one of several] already does it this way." "But that procedure doesn't solve this problem." "Is there going to be a better procedure later?" "What safeguards do you have in place in case a virus accidentally deletes all the backup data". Etc.

I had to give up my lunch for this?

Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who refused the order to relocate to a detention camp during WWII and whose conviction was upheld in an infamous supreme court decision upholding the detention of all persons of Japanese ancestry on the west coast of the United States, died yesterday. He was 86 years old.

In Ohio, domestic violence is classified a fourth-degree felony and, as such, is a more serious crime than mere assault (a first-degree misdemeanor). Also, in Ohio, a judge has ruled that it is impossible to commit domestic violence against an unmarried partner.

The argument is that, because a recently passed state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and/or the legal recognition of relationships which approximate marriage, it would be unconstitutional to interpret the domestic violence law to apply to unmarried couples.

The judge is probably correct in his interpretation. And I doubt it's an unintended consequence; the people writing and sponsiring these amendments are, for the most part, in favor of a return to the sexual and social morality of a bygone era, when sex outside of marriage was frowned upon and condemned, and relationships like these never had the chance to arise in the first place. Marginalizing such relationships, by denying them any legal status whatsoever, would be a good way to decrease their prevalance.

The sad thing is that the voters of Ohio, who presumably aren't in favor of this, let themselves get snookered into it by people playing on their dislike of homosexuality.

The Supreme Court of the United States:

Our 1985 decision recognized that the Oneidas could maintian a federal common-law claim for damages for ancient wrongdoing in which both national and state governments were complicit. Today, we decline to project redress for the Tribe into the present and future, thereby disrupting the governance of central New York's counties and towns.

Once again, the word of the American government, when spoken to the Indians, is worthless.

Some things never change.

Something I missed while in DC last week for a wedding: George F. Kennan, one of the primary architects of US cold war policy, died last week.

Every civilian with a passionate opinion about the iraq war should make time to get out and see Gunner Palace. It won't change your opinion; it's not about the politics of the war. It's a chaotic hip-hop video letter from the soldiers of the 1st Armored Division, and it's fantastic.

Laura Rozen, guest-blogging for CalPundit, references an article written by an American woman with an undergraduate degree in history and a doctorate in international relations, which contains the following painful, funny, and ultimately revealing quote:

Fully a quarter of Marseille's population is of North African origin, and demographers predict that Marseille will be the first city on the European continent with an Islamic majority.

Istanbul? Edirne? Tirana? Sarajevo?

Not cities on the European continent. In the mind of the woman quoted here, "Europe" is either "Christian Europe" or "Western Europe", and the remaining outposts of the Ottoman Empire - once one of the most powerful states in Europe - aren't only irrelevant, they don't exist.

And we wonder why the Islamic world and the secular post-Christian western industrialized world have such a hard time talking to each other.

(It's particularly disturbing, by the way, that a woman with a degree in modern history and another degree in international relations, could describe Marseille in this fashion).

Some people have no business working in the tech industry.

In my current job, I end up doing some integration-related tasks. In this story, the manager of another group asked me to look at a problem wherein a particular label ("label" meaning "set of associated file versions") does not compile. It does not compile for two reasons:

1. It contains an improperly defined enum;

2. It contains code which looks like the following:

====


#ifdef SOME_VAR
#include "some_h"
#endif

some_type foo(some_other_type_defined_in_some_h bar);


====

So I contact the programmer, ask how he wants me to fix the enum, and if SOME_VAR should be defined in the build. I also tell him that i'm going to wrap the declaration *and* definition of foo() in a SOME_VAR ifdef.

The manager calls me today. He wants to know when my new label will be available, and what's going to be in it. I list the files I'm changing. He thinks I should just force the define at compilation and not wrap the function declaration and definition.

So you want the code to fail to compile when SOME_VAR isn't defined?

No. It should always be defined.

Yes, i'm going to change the build to do that. But I can't guarantee that the header will always be used in that context, and it should always compile, even if it isn't useful. Failure to compile because a type definition is wrapped inside an IFDEF and the functions using that type aren't is unacceptable in a production environment.

How can you possibly be managing a production development group and not know that?

I should be happy about this. I should be excited. Instead, i'm ... anxious. Unsettled. Afraid.

[$UnnamedCompany], the corporation with which I am contracting, is playing its internal corporate games to see if it can hire me full time. The current plan is for an integration position - which, in their world, involves being the primary engineering contact for QA and their OEM, and involves development of interface layers for new hardware, as well as build engineering.

This would be as close to an ideal job in the engineering world as I could get: a decent level fo responsibility combined with a high need for personal interaction, and the offer of genuine satisfaction in terms of helping people (QA, OEMs). The manager I talked with about it today suggested that it's important to find people who don't find that aspect of the job a nuisance; I'd find it the best part of the job.

And yet ...

It's amazing how profoundly unsettling this is; how scary it is. A full-time job is a different kind of commitment than being a contractor is. Right now, I have no attachment to this company, no attachment to anything - I'm a free agent. Being employed, regularly employed, in a salaried position, is something else entirely.

What if it turns out the way the last one did?

On one level, I know the answer: I define my limits beforehand and if they're violated, I walk. Jared, and my friends, will push me on this if I need it.

And yet.

I know these people. I've worked here for half a year. I've made a good impression. It's a relatively professional place that doesn't seem to have the weird politics of my last employer. Aside from one person who irritates the hell out of me every time he emails me, everyone is fairly low key - professional, hard working, but without the constant the-world-is-going-to-end-and-the-company-is-going-to-go-out-of-business-if-this-doesnt-happen feeling.

But how much of that is me, as a contractor, being immune, and free to ignore it?

We talked a bit about hours; the manager - who is new - was very much of the opinion that he doesn't want to run a shop where working late is a regular thing, and thinks that this project is one where, aside from occasional emergencies, it shouldn't be. But how realistic is that?

I don't like being afraid of the unknown. I wasn't, always. But the ghost of a long relationship with a company I loved, whose management took advantage of that fact and expected the unreasonable from everyone on a regular basis, spooks me.

I know that the only way to dispel that ghost is to walk forward.

I know that.

But it doesn't help defeat the spectre.

A memo to all of those who claim that the US doesn't engage in torture:

You're either lying or you are misinformed. Some of you get the benefit of the doubt. Some of you don't.

The Afghan guards -- paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit -- dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials say.

As night fell, predictably, so did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

The CIA official responsible has allegedly been promoted. He should be arrested, tried, and sent to jail for a very long time. But more importantly, whatever disease it is in CIA corporate culture that allows this to happen needs to be stamped out, and those responsible for allowing it to grow should be quite publically held to account for their sins.

Outrageous and shameful don't even begin to encompass this.

(Hat Tip: Ezra Klein).

I do not support the death penalty; it is a barbaric practice better left to a more barbaric age, and the fact that the US persists in practicing it both dishonors us and betrays us as unwilling to face our better instincts as a people.

That said, the Supreme Court's logic is troubling, and the way they are measuring "evolving standards of decency" is perplexing. 30 states have banned the execution of juveniles. But 12 of those don't allow the death penalty at all. So, really, 18 of the 38 states which do allow execution allowed the execution of juveniles before today.

These numbers constitute "evidence of a national consensus against the death penalty for juveniles?" Alas, I wish the consensus were there; but it isn't. Indeed, the political trends of recent years have been towards making it easier to treat late adolescents as adults in criminal proceedings.

It is certainly a reasonable position that juveniles are "categorically less culpable than the average criminal". It is also a reasonable position that execution is cruel and unusual and is not allowed by the Constitution. But it's an absurd proposition that the fact that 18 out of the 38 states which allow executions do not allow execution of juveniles somehow demonstrates a national consensus supporting that proposition.

To the extent that today's decision by the Supreme Court - holding that such executions are barred by the eighth amendment - relies on that proposition, it is a travesty. If they wanted to overturn their decision in Stanford v. Kentucky, they should have done so; but inventing a bizarre and arbitrary form of numeracy in order to create a fake sense of consistency, thereby to pretend that they aren't throwing precedent out the window, is intellectually dishonest and, therefore, disgraceful.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", Mr. Emerson said. This decision would make him weep.

The board of directors of a world-famous high-profile company fires its CEO for failure to execute its strategy successfully, and the Bush administration sees a fabulous candidate to run the World Bank?

Accountability. It's not just a buzzword anymore: it's a myth.

Why is a $7 recycling fee on new bicycles, $3 of which is refundable if you recycle your bicycle, a good idea? Is there really an enormous statewide problem with unrecycled bicycle frames? (I say 'frames' because that's really the only independantly identifiable part of a bicycle; there's no way to know that the tires, seats, handlebars, etc that are attached to a frame at the time of recycling are the same ones that were there at the time of sale). And what's the basis for the claim that California landfills absorb 250,000 bicycles a year?

It's possible that Assemblywoman Karnette has a point. But I'm skeptical.

UPDATE: I've emailed Assemblywoman Karnette with an enquiry as to the origin of her statistic. We'll see if she responds.

There's a lot of talk in the state press today about public reaction to Schwarzenegger's reform proposals (regarding redistricting, merit pay for teachers, abolition of the public employees' retirement system, and consolidation of state agencies) as demonstrated by yesterday's release of a poll on the matter by the Field Institute.

There hasn't been much focus, however, on this: while a plurality of surveyed registered voters with an opinion on the subject thought that the 2000 redistricting was not "fair and balanced" (43% unfair, 18% fair, 39% no opinion), registered Democrats surveyed were generally speaking more likely to think it was unfair (48% unfair, 15% fair, 37% no opinion) than were registered Republicans surveyed(39% unfair, 20% fair, 41% no opinion).

As most of the rhetorical condemnation I've seen of the 2000 redistricting has come from conservative activists who believe it unfairly benefitted Democrats, this is a surprising result.

Another surprising result: while 39% of registered voters surveyed had no opinion as to whether the 2000 redistricting was fair, only 12% of registered voters surveyed had no opinion on Schwarzenegger's redistricting proposal. Which means a lot of people are not basing their support for the measure on their opinion of the current district lines, a datum which is reinforced by the fact that 61% of Republicans surveyed supported the plan (even though only 39% of Republicans surveyed thought the current district lines were unfair).

I'm somewhat disappointed in the at least 1% of registered Democrats surveyed who think that the current plan is unfair but oppose plans to change it, too.

This New York Times review notwithstanding, Constantine was the best b-grade movie i've seen in a long time. It had internal plot consistency; it had decent acting; it had an atmosphere nearly as effective as that in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow without nearly as many problems in the rest of the movie. It executed an interesting concept well.

I think the NYT reviewer just couldn't suspend his disbelief, which is understandable, but still means he should have been disqualified from reviewing.

Jonathon Chait argues, in the February 28th issue of The New Republic, that the liberal and conservative approaches to economics are not analagous; that, if an infallible source were to proclaim conservative economic theories empirically correct, liberals would abandon their theories (because they are only interested in outcomes and support state intervention for that purpose), while conservatives, in the face of an infallible source proclaiming liberal theories to be empiracally correct, would decline to abandon theirs (because their interest in economic policy outcomes is secondary to their ideological opposition to state intervention).

This is an interesting approach to the issue, and it contains at least a kernel of truth. Most liberals don't believe that the state is per se the answer to all problems - they view it as a preferable counterbalance to other perfidous actors, and acknowledge that it belongs in a certain sphere and should stay out of another sphere. Yet it simply isn't true that all conservatives reject this view and maintain that the state should have no sphere at all: the conservatives I've talked to all maintain that the state should have as small a sphere as possible, which is a far cry from the kind of ideological purity that Chait observes.

And yet ... I am reminded of conversations I've had with [redacted], over many years. [Redacted] is an ideological small-government conservative living in Santa Cruz County, and his politics are influenced by the defensiveness of being part of a local political minority. He is categorically opposed to any solution to any problem which involves government action (except, sadly, for government action which - like banning spam - he thinks would personally help him); his opposition often takes on an irrational, emotional form, as if he is fundamentally allergic to the very suggestion. Government, in his worldview, may occasionally be a necessary evil - but it is always an evil, always corrupt and inefficient and broken, and not only should its sphere be tiny, but every possibility of shrinking its sphere should be undertaken.

I don't know to what degree he is representative of conservative thought in general, but his views echo the general tenor of rhetoric I see elsewhere. Conservatives, broadly speaking, believe government to be the problem, not the solution; and I suspect that Chait is right when he says that they do so out of an ideology, not pragmatics.

Chait goes further than this, however, when he speculates:

If liberalism is not the mirror image of conservatism, what is? The more apt parallel is probably socialism. True socialists believe that allowing capitalists to keep some of the fruits of workers' labor is inherently immoral. They also tend to believe that free enterprise does not work very well. But, like the conservative belief that big government doesn't work well, this empirical belief merely sits atop a deeper normative belief. For committed socialists, doing away with "exploitation" is an end in itself.

I don't know if this is observation is apposite, but it does portend an explanation to something which has often puzzled me: why is it that many conservatives seem to conflate moderate liberalism with socialism? I have been told that the post office - a venerable institution whose residence within the government is a tradition dating to ancient times - is socialist. I have been told that support for public education is socialist. I have been told that any form of wealth transfer or public welfare is socialist. None of these involve state control of the entire economy; none of them presuppose a doctrinaire belief that market economics is inherently immoral. All of them stem from the general pragmatic moderate-liberal programme. Whence comes this association with socialism so prominent in the minds of their opponents?

Chait's thesis offers a possibility. If it is true that conservatives are motivated primarily by an ideological belief that markets are always good and government is always bad, does it not follow that those who believe in such a thing assume that their political opponents are also ideologically motivated? If Chait's thesis is correct, than it is possible that many conservatives equate liberalism with socialism because they are incapable of believing that anyone could have an ambivalent view of markets or of government - that the idea that one might support the pragmatic use of each tool when each tool is appropriate strikes them as simply being inchoate. Liberals must be socialists, under such a line of reasoning.

The explanatory power of this idea, of course, vanishes if Chait's thesis is demonstrated to be false. Yet, even then, it would not pass out of the realm of interesting speculations.

Jared had an amusing, and astute, observation about the news that John Negroponte, American ambassador-proconsul to Iraq, has been named intelligence czar: if there is truth in the rumors that the Bush administration has been having trouble getting people to take the job because it combines a high level of responsibility with a low level of power and authority, than Negroponte's new job isn't terribly different from his old one.

One of the common refrains during the recall election - or, for that matter, during the depressing election of the previous year in which neither major party candidate for Governor really had anything to recommend him - was a plaintive wail: "Why, oh why, can't we have a governor like Pat Brown?" Pat Brown, according to the myth embodied in this question, was the last truly successful progressive governor of California; he presided over the waning years of the glory age, when the state built the massive California Aqueduct, enlarged the University system, invested in highway construction on a large scale. He was a successful governor, who sheperded the diverse political interests of the state towards a fixation on a common goal, and harnessed the power of a wondrous land in service of the goal of building a better commonwealth for everyone.

This sort of adulation of Pat Brown easily crosses the line into hagiography. But it's a useful hagiography, and this accounts for much of its popularity. It gives conservatives a foil with which to denounce the incompetence and corruption of the current government. It gives liberals a goalpost, a heroic mythical figure whose greatness modern politicians can only aspire to. Like most such accounts, however, it is largely a myth - at least, if California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown, a new biography of the Governor (by Ethan Rarick) is to be believed.

Rarick appears to have had access to a wide range of previously unmined sources, including interviews with Brown's widow, the more than 1000 cartons of papers in Pat Brown's paper collection at the Bancroft Library, and Pat Brown's heretofore unavailable diary. Such access is, of course, no guarantor of quality research - and in particular it gives rise to the inevitable concern that the book might treat Brown too gingerly. But the picture the book paints of him is hardly flattering, and the use Rarick made of his sources grants the book considerable heft.

While Dan Walters' critical review of the book is right on some counts - the book does avoid discussion of the feud between Brown and Jesse Unruh, it mostly ignores the question of his troubled relationship with his son, it skimps on the last several years of Brown's governorship, and it is entirely silent on the question of Brown's retirement - his general thesis is sufficiently off-base as to be perplexing. It is unclear to me how Walters can maintain that "Rarick only occasionally hints at the essential truth of [Brown's] governorship: While Brown sincerely wanted to be a good governor, amny of the achievements ascribed to him should be credited to others, and he was chronically indecisive, often duplicitious, and made many mistakes" when the book's entire premise is that "the kindness of nostalgia burnished memory".

The picture presented of Brown is not a kind one. He comes across as a gifted politician with a knack for making people like him - a good old boy, in short - who had a serous problem with indecisiveness, convincing everyone that he wanted what they wanted and siding with whomever saw him last. (Oddly enough, many biographies of Franklin Roosevelt present the same image). Rarick's interpretation of Brown's governorship is that it held great promise that was undermined by Brown's flaws, most clearly in the case of Caryl Chessman (an inmate executed for rape after a protracted political crisis, including numerous changes of position on Brown's part and a last-minute stay of execution while Brown asked the legislature to abolish capital punishment):

And yet at the crucial moment of the most famous capital case he would ever face, Brown's resolution flickered. Bernice Brown was right: Her husband was alone in a great big house, talking to his only son. But being in charge is about being alone, even at night, even in a great big house, even when your own son calls.

What Pat Brown needed that night was not a desire to abolish capital punishment or sympathize with his son or even listen to the futile admonitions of his own conscience. What he needed that night was a hard, rigorous self-discipline, an acceptance of an unpleasant reality, and a willingness to see it through. His wife knew it. His friends knew it. Even he knew it. And he didn't have it.

Hardly a ringing endorsement of Brown's governorship. But, harsh as that passage is, the book is even-handed. It gives Brown credit where it is due: his success in getting the voters to support the state water project (involving a bond issue equal to *3/4* of annual revenue!) was amazing, the negotiation of an agreement between the University of California and the California State College system (which agreement is, according to today's news, fraying) was a huge success, as was the cigarette tax and the creation of the fair employment practices commission. Yet at the same time, Brown's mismanagement of the politics of the Rumsford Act (a housing nondiscrimination act which was repealed by a referendum), his mishandling of the 1960 presidential convention delegation, and his utter inability to deal with the rebellion of Sam Yorty come in for well-deserved condemnation.

In the end, Rarick's book presents a diminished, but still ultimately good, view of Brown. Pat Brown was not the mythical last great governor of California, capable of achieving anything and towering over his successors as a giant; nor was he the bumbling fool of Reaganite propoganda. He was an unusually successful politician, great at making people like him, who had many successes and many failures; he was, in a way, a tragic figure whose flaws actively interfered with his achievements.

It's somewhat amazing how strong that theme is in progressive politics.

Yes, that Jerry Brown.

I can understand, and am even to some degree sympathetic to, the principle that regimes which arise as a result of revolution should not be held financially responsible for the acts of the regime against which the revolution took place¹. Even so, there is something downright sickening about the US Government's position in this case.

Seventeen American Prisoners of War, held by Iraq during the Gulf War (I), filed suit in 2002, seeking monetary damages as compensation for the pain, suffering, and mental distress caused by being tortured by the Iraqi government. The lawsuit was allowed under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, which waived sovereign immunity for states that engaged in torture (among other things). They won their case, and were awarded $653 million in compensation (and Iraq was assessed an additional $306 million in punitive damages).

The Bush administration argues that, because Congress lifted sanctions against Iraq as part of an emergency appropriations bill to pay for the war against and subsequent occupation of Iraq, Bush was entitled to remove Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, thereby voiding the provision of the Anti-Terrorism Act which allowed the suit.

We have thus ended up in the somewhat bizarre situation that, while the US agrees that it is financially liable for damages payable to those who were tortured in Abu Gharib, it also claims that nobody is financially laible for damages payable to those American soldiers who were tortured by Hussein. Ethically speaking, this is problematic; and pragmatically speaking, it's got to be terrible for soldier morale: we're literally placing a higher value on the claims of those who say the US Army has tortured them than we are on the claims of those in the US Army who say they have been tortured.

There's a somewhat nasty rational logic to this. There's a nasty procedural logic - there is simply no authorization at law for this suit - and there's a nasty political logic - the new government isn't responsible and shouldn't be required to pay. This is, in short, a test case for the proposition that the rational application of well-intended bureaucratic rules yields results which are absurd. Or, as Timothy Burke put it in respect to a different set of issues, "A force that exerts moral or cultural authority without seeming to understand the common sense underpinnings or everyday knowledges about the issues it addresses."

There has to be a middle ground here: a way that the desire of American soldiers for compensation can be squared with the desire of our policymakers to not force the new Iraqi government to pay for the sins of its predecessor. The suit should be allowed to continue (it was thrown out on appeal, but further appeals are pending), and then the claims of these soldiers should be lumped together with all other claims against the Hussein regime, and dealt with exactly as they are, rather than being singularly tossed out of United States court as a result of a bureaucratic absurdity promulgated by the Bush administration.

--

¹There's a strong counter-argument, of course:
A general rule forgiving the debts of an odious regime upon its overthrow in a revolution may be problematic because such a rule would encourage creditors of that regime to assist it in subduing revolutions, leading to a result which would be worse for the revolutionary populace than an outcome in which they are required to repay the debts of their predecessor and foreign creditors have no incentive to take sides.

Castle In The Sky has the reputation of being Hayao Miyazki's most accessible film - the easiest for American audiences to understand and enjoy. That may or may not be true (i'm skeptical), but it's also the least enjoyable or interesting of the Miyazaki films that i have seen.

The best of Miyazaki's works combine an incredible sense for atmosphere (the train scene in Spirited Away, the cat bus scene in Totoro, the incredible scenery of the forest in Nausicaa) with interesting characters going through interesting stories. Castle in the Sky ought to have both of these: Laputa should qualify for atmosphere, and the plight of Sheeta - and the blossoming love of Pazu - ought to qualify for interesting characters and an interesting story.

Yet - somehow - it doesn't. Laputa was visually stunning, no doubt, but the sublime mixture of spookiness and beauty that Miyazaki's other films have conjured was missing. Similarly, the characters fall flat; the emotional content feels forced and doesn't flow naturally.

It's not a bad film. It just doesn't resonate the way all of his other movies do. And in that, it was a disappointment.

Hopefully Howl's Moving Castle will be better.

Apparently UPN did a Twilight Zone remake in 2002, hosted by Forrest Whittaker. Not being TV-enabled, I missed it; but I attempted to remedy that situation by adding the entire series (it only aired for one season) to my Netflix queue.

Judging from the first disc, at any rate, it's terrible. Jared pointedly commented in the middle: "if you're going to watch trash, at least watch good trash", and he had a point. Of the seven episodes on the first disc, only two of them (a story about a suburban dystopia and a story about death attempting to retire) were interesting, and only two of them were haunting (the suburban dystopia and a parable about racism). But even those three weren't new in any meaningful sense; all seven stories were retreads, and all seven "twist endings" were predictable a third of the way into the story.

I'd be exaggerating if I said I'd never been so bitterly disappointed by a tv show in my life, so I won't say that; but I was pretty disappointed. I'd expected better from Forrest Whittaker, and i'd expected better from the bearers of the Twilight Zone flag. (It is possible that i'm overreacting and prejudging; even the original series was spotty, producing some excellent episodes and some outright drivel. So i'll watch the rest of them. But at this point it's more out of a morbid curiosity "how bad can it get" than out of delight and a desire to enjoy more.)

About 3.45 on Friday afternoon, discontent.com stopped responding to connection requests from the outside world. This was annoying; my email goes through this box, and lately i've been running IRC from it while at work, as well. Nor was I the only one annoyed; Brandon called a bit after, wanting to know what was up.

What *was* up?

I was fairly certain from the way that things were responding - chrononaut.org was also down - that the problem was a networking problem, not a problem with discontent.com. My network has been shut down before when a windows box in my house became infested with an annoying trojan that drew the attention of someone who complained to my ISP, and it's always possible that I've forgotten to pay the bill. (That shouldn't happen, as it's an automatic payment, but it's at least theoretically possible that the account generating the automatic payment doesn't have the correct amount of money in it at the time the bill is supposed to be paid). I could check the latter from work, but to check the former, I wanted to be home where I could play with the network.

It wasn't the former. The guy on the tech support line was quite helpful. (I've *never* had a bad experience with sonic.net, and I sincerely hope that they're able to continue providing service in light of recent court rulings deregulating the prices that local phone companies are allowed to charge independant ISPs for the use of their wires. I've never had a good experience with SBC.) Granted, it took nearly forty minutes of being on hold before I got to talk to someone (grumble), but once that happened we poked at things a bit, tried different solutions, and discovered the following:

Tech Support's probe tools could see the DSL modem, and the DSL modem still believed that it had four machines connected to it, despite the fact that I had disconnected all four and connected one machine directly to it without going through an intervening switch. My machine could see the DSL modem if it adopted an address in the subnet of the DSL modem's internal IP address, but could not obtain an address from it, nor could it send packets through it to the outside world. Machines in the net, in other words, could see the modem but could not see through it; machines outside the net could see the modem but could not see through it.

My DSL modem had gone on strike. Perhaps it was protesting the lack of vacation. Perhaps it was upset that it has no downtime. Perhaps, instead of being on strike, it had been infested by some bizarre sort of software virus. All I knew was that it had simply ceased being willing to serve as a bridge, devolving instead into a useless chunk of plastic sitting on the countertop.

"We'll send you a new one, but you'll have to pay for shipping." OK. "Hmm. Wait. If you're still under warranty you don't have to pay for shipping." (Excuse me? I can get a replacement for free whether I'm under warranty or not, but being under warranty frees me from having to pay for shipping? How bizarre). Even better. "*If* we have one in stock, they'll ship it out Monday."

If?

The weekend passed. I did entertaining things. Jared and I watched much of the fourth season of Oz. We played board games Sunday night and had dinner with a friend. I went to see Bad Education with Jared's mom. I could even get online to read news, etc, using an open wireless network belonging to someone else in my condo complex.

But there was one small problem: I couldn't check my email.

It's been six months since the last time I went more than a day without being able to check my email. But, then, it was deliberate: I was in a controlled environment cut off from the world in any event. It's been thirteen months sine the last time I wasn't able to check my email for more than a day without being in such a controlled environment. But then I was travelling; I was in Turkey, and internet access was intermittent. It's been THIRTEEN YEARS since the last time I was unable to check my email for more than a day without travelling or being in a controlled environment.

If i'm home, I usually check email regularly. As in, once every couple of hours. Even knowing that I couldn't check email, I'd still reflexively launch a browser window, only to find myself confused, unsure what I was trying to do. What made it even more surreal was knowing that the machine on which my email is stored was *just down the hall*, that - if I hadn't turned it off to conserve power during the days when it was useless - I could connect to it just fine via the internal house network, and that it was utterly pointless to do so because it couldn't get the email in the first place.

E-mail is like crack, and there is no frustration in my experience like not being able to get it once you've been hooked.

I'm very happy to report that discontent is back. The DSL modem shipped on schedule Monday, arrived in the midst of a downpour yesterday (the UPS guy had nicely put it in a plastic bag, but i'd worked from home in any event), and we were up and running again about half an hour later.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with the dead DSL modem. Any suggestions?

Sunday's New York Times has an Amusing report about a plan, mooted by the CEO of Harper Collins, to change marketing in such a way as to draw attention to the publisher of books. The goal is to get people to view the Harper Collins brand as a guarantor of quality, thereby causing them to seek out the "new Harper Collins book" instead of the "new Michael Crichton novel". According to the article, this is an earthshaking change in business models with no precedent in the publishing industry.

It's an interesting idea. The movie industry used to play this game, but stopped long ago. But it is by no means a new idea in the publishing world. For all that the New York Times claims this:

[M]ost people do not walk into a bookstore looking for a Doubleday novel or a Simon & Schuster title. Rather, they go in search of a Dan Brown thriller or the new Bob Woodward best seller.

People do walk into a bookstore looking for the latest Harlequin romance, and discerning readers have long known that the label of Tor Books is a mark of quality.

I don't know if Harper Collins will succeed in its quest. But the Times' depiction of the concept as a new marketing idea, an iconoclastic fight to change the way the publishing industry works, strikes this observer as nothing more than an entertaining fairy tale.

The Supreme Court of the State of New York of New York County¹ has ruled that

under the New York state constitution, [same-sex couples] are entitled to treatment equal to that of opposite-sex couples with regard to the issuance of marriage licenses and access to civil marriage.

The case involved a challenge to the decision by the office of the City Clerk to not issue marriage licenses to five same-sex couples, who subsequently sued, claiming that the City Clerk had been incorrect in his interpretation of state law (eg, that state law already authorized same sex marriages) and that, if he had not been incorrect, state law was an unconstitutional violation of the state's due process clause and the state's equal protection clause.

The court accepted that the City Clerk was correct in his interpretation of state statute, noting that the state's family law was riddled with implicit assumptions about marriage being between a man and a woman. It then determined that the law was in violation of the due process clause of the state constitution.²

The New York state Constitution - echoing the federal constitution - specifies that:

No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

If the right to marry is a fundamental right protected by substantive due process, then this provision makes denial of that right questionable. But is it a fundamental right? The Court, referring at length to a variety of cases which clearly place the right of marriage within the right of privacy³, held that "[Marriage] is a fundamental right of free men."It then proceeded to skewer the claim that gay couples are not denied marriage rights because they can marry members of the opposite sex if they so choose. It relied specifically on a decision handed down by the Court of Appeals, which held:

"Thus, clearly falling within [the right to privacy]'s scope are matters relating to the decision of whom one will marry.

and a different decision, in which the Court of Appeals held:

The government is prevented from interfering with an individual's decision about whom to marry.

Having established that marriage was a fundamental right which was denied⁴ to gay couples, the court then proceeded to consider whether or not the denial of the right constituted a denial of due process, under the theory which holds that the due process clause requires courts to "balance the individual's liberty interest against the State's asserted compelling need". It enquired as to whether or not the state had a compelling interest in denying gay couples the right to marry.

The attorneys for the City Clerk had offered up two arguments:

• That such a law fosters the traditional institution of marriage;
• That such a law is necessary to avoid problems which might arise if other states refuse to recognize same-sex marriages.

The Court skewered the first argument by noting:

Both the New York Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court have made clear that the State may not deny rights to a group of people based on no more than traditional attitudes or disapproval⁵ ... Furthermore, that prejudice against gay people may still prevail elsewhere cannot be a legitimate justification for maintaing it in the marriage laws of this State.

The second argument, according to the court, was also problematic:

At its root, defendant's second argument is that the State may excuse its own deprivation of plaintiffs' constitutional rights on the basis of discrimination countenanced by other States and the Federal government. But this simply cannot be a legitimate ground for denying a liberty interest as important as marriage.⁶

Thus:

Marriage, as it is understood today, is both a partnership of two loving eqauls who choose to commit themselves to each other and a State institution designed to promote stability for the couple and their children. The relationships of plaintifss fit within this definition of marriage.
Similar to opposite-sex couples, same-sex couples are entitled to the same fundamental right to follow their hearts and publicly commit to a lifetime partnership with the person of their choosing.

--

¹New York's judiciary has some seriously weird nomenclature. The Supreme Court is New York's lowest-level court, equivalent to what we would call Superior Court in California. This decision is therefore appealable, and I would expect the Bloomberg administration to appeal it.

²It declined to address the equal protection claim, seeing no point in doing so after it had already found the law unconstitutional.

³A bizarre place to find it.

⁴The decision made it quite clear what the cost of denying such licenses is (formatting added):

It is not disputed, for example, that among many other disadvantages, plaintiff couples may not

• own property by the entireties;

• file joint state income tax returns;

• obtain health insurance through a partner's coverage;

• obtain joint liability or homeowner's insurance;

• collect from a partner's pension benefits;

• have one partner of the two-women couples be the legal parent of the other partner's artificially inseminated child, without the expense of an adoption proceeding;

• invoke the spousal evidentiary privilige;

• recover damages for an injury to, or the wrongful death of, a partner;

• have the right to make important medical decisions for a partner in emergencies;

• inherit from a deceased partner's intestate estate;

• or determine a partner's funeral and burial arrangements.

⁵Opponents of Lawrence will be gleeful to note that Lawrence is one of the cases cited in defense of this proposition.

⁶Not to mention that it's a bizarre argument in the first place: "we can't recognize marriages [n] because if we do and other people don't it might cause a hardship to the people in those marriages." But isn't that less of a hardship than would be imposed if you didn't recognize them?

What's the best thing you can do when you're an unpopular king who is widely suspected of having murdered his father and brother, trying to run a country in which a weak and ineffectual Parliament seems to be opposed to almost everything you want to do, and much of the country is under the control of the world's last major Maoist revolutionary group?

Hint: Firing the Parliament and announcing that you're creating a new government answerable only to you isn't it. That road leads to a Maoist victory; the democrats in the bourgeoisie will now be more afraid of royal tyranny than of the guerrillas.

If these numbers are true - turnout of between 57 and 60 percent, with one major player boycotting and everyone else turning out despite the threat that they'll be killed if they do - the result is nothing short of amazing.

if the insurgents wanted to stop people in Baghdad from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner.

The article demonstrates, in other passages, that execution wasn't perfect and flawless; but nobody expected it to be. Hell, elections here aren't. Regardless, the low violence and respectable turnout are incredibly good news.

California Elections Code Section 12223 provides:

Whenever a jurisdiction is divided into election precincts or whenever the boundary of an established precinct is changed or a new precinct is created, the precinct boundary shall be
fixed in a manner so that the number of voters in the precinct does not exceed 1,000 on the 88th day prior to the day of election, unless otherwise provided by law.

While this paragraph is clearly not binding on other jurisdictions, it is nonetheless useful as an estimate of what we consider to be a reasonable ratio of voters to polling stations in an established democracy with a reasonably well-run electoral system. One thousand is the number we've set as a baseline in California. Assuming 100% turnout, a polling place is assumed to be able to process an average of 77 voters an hour. (Of course, we never get 100% turnout in precinct; the combination of low turnout and absentee ballots means we usually get around 40% in-precinct turnout, in my experience).

It's somewhat difficult to reconcile that with the numbers provided in this New York Times report about the preparations for elections in Mosul. According to the report, the city has a population of 1,600,000 - for whom eighty polling places have been set up. Assuming that only half of the population is of voting age (a ridiculously high estimate of the number of children), that's 800,000 voters for 80 polling places - an average of 10,000 each.

10,000 voters per polling place. Ten times the legal standard for an election in California. Assuming the polls are open for 20 hours on election day - more time than they'll actually be open for, but it simplifies the math - that's 500 voters an hour at 100% turnout. Given the reports that elections in Mosul will call for