Summary page 17 of 36

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05 Jul 2006 — A conversation with my wife

(Scene: Oak Square, Brighton, in 90° heat)

“Do you want me to push the stroller?”

“No, it’s OK, I’ll push the stroller.”

“But what will people think, seeing me just walking alongside my 8½-months-pregnant wife while she pushes a double stroller with two children?”

“Do I look pregnant?”

“No, that dress just makes you look fat.”

04 Jul 2006 — ‫די שטערן-באַצירטע פאָהן‬

O’zog, kenstu sehn, wen bagin licht dervacht,
Vos mir hoben bagrist in farnachtigen glihen?
Die shtreifen un shtern, durch shreklicher nacht,
Oif festung zich hoiben galant un zich tsein?
Yeder blitz fun rocket, yeder knal fun kanon,
Hot bawizen durch nacht: az mir halten die Fohn!
O, zog, tzi der “Star Spangled Banner” flatert in roim,
Ueber land fun die freie, fun brave die heim!

via Balkinization

02 Jul 2006 — Triangulate around the flag

I have decided to stop caring about the flag-burning amendment. Carving out this one little exception to American free-speech jurisprudence would be a stupid thing to do, but its practical effect on our ability to express ourselves would be infinitesimal. If the amendment is ever ratified and I’m sufficiently pissed off at the government, I can always burn the Great Seal of the United States or some such. And if some Democratic members of Congress need to curry favor with swing voters, I’d much rather see them do it by voting to restrict flag-burning rights than by voting to restrict abortion rights.

However, the next time this issue comes round on the guitar, I would encourage every non-Southern Democrat to propose a different form of the amendment: Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States, and the flying of the Confederate flag. You want a wedge issue, Mr. Rove? I’ll give you a wedge issue…

30 Jun 2006 — So close

When the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, it held that even if the Guantánamo detainee’s rights under the Geneva Conventions were being violated, an American court had no jurisdiction to intervene; violations of the Geneva Conventions were supposed to be handled through political and diplomatic channels, not through the courts. In response, today’s Supreme Court decision said:

We may assume…even that [the Geneva Conventions of 1949] would, absent some other provision of law, preclude Hamdan’s invocation of the Convention’s provisions as an independent source of law binding the Government’s actions and furnishing petitioner with any enforceable right. For, regardless of the nature of the rights conferred on Hamdan, they are, as the Government does not dispute, part of the law of war. And compliance with the law of war is the condition upon which the authority set forth in [Uniform Code of Military Justice] Article 21 is granted. (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. ___, at 64-65 [footnotes and internal citations omitted])

Observe how, one one level, Justice Stevens is agreeing with the appeals court. The courts’ authority to enforce the Geneva Conventions, he says, stems from the act of Congress incorporating the laws of war into the UCMJ, so he can skip over any question of whether the Conventions’ status as treaties gives the court any power. In other words, if Congress had passed a law that explicitly denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions to prisoners at Guantánamo, the Supreme Court would have probably found it constitutional.

We should be thankful that the Bush Administration didn’t try to push such a law through Congress; back when his approval ratings were above 80 percent, the President could have proposed a law requiring summary execution for all terrorists, and at least half the Democrats in Congress would have voted for it. But think of it from the point of view of Cheney and the other Nixon alumni. Why ask the legislature for permission to do something that, as far as you’re concerned, is part of the “inherent authority” of the executive? No sense in letting the war against al-Qaeda interfere with your plans to seize power from al-Congress…

29 Jun 2006 — The happiest atheists in Oklahoma

American Atheists reports on a legal case, in which a high-school student’s refusal to say the Lord’s Prayer with her basketball team escalated into trumped-up assault charges against the girl’s father:

In closing argument, Edwin told the jury that it really should not be necessary for an Atheist to tell them it is wrong to lie under oath, as he reminded them the Christian school officials and the police had done in their sworn trial testimony. “Thou shall not bare [sic] false witness against thy neighbor. Ninth Commandment. Eight if you are Roman Catholic,” Kagin said.

The jury believed the Atheists. Unanimously.

The night of the verdict, tornados of unusual violence descended on the panhandle of Oklahoma. The home of the Principal who had brought the false charges against Chuck Smalkowski was severely damaged.

This fact has no relationship whatsoever to the verdict.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson: “God bless those atheists.”

via Pharyngula

28 Jun 2006 — Pluralism and hypocrisy

When Kibbutz Degania, the first socialist kibbutz in Israel, announced that it was going to build a synagogue on site, Rabbi Dr. Dalia Sara Marx, a teacher at Hebrew Union College, responded with bewildered disappointment, if not outrage. How, she asked, could a community that carried the flame of progressive Judaism invite—shudder—Orthodox rabbis to oversee their spiritual life¹?

Rabbi Yaakov Menken cited this essay and remarked: “Simply amazing. She’s all for pluralism and tolerance, as long as people don’t choose Orthodoxy.” In a follow-up posting, he expanded on his point: there are many instances in which the Reform movement refers to “pluralism” including both Reform and Orthodox Judaism as a good. But Rabbi Marx, in her op-ed, was not in such an inclusive mood.

I think we can save Rabbi Marx from the charge of hypocrisy if we distinguish value pluralism, the belief that there are multiple (but not infinite) legitimate human values worth pursuing, from political pluralism. If you skim the results of Rabbi Menken’s Google search for “reform pluralistic judaism”, most of them refer to pluralism within the Israeli political system—that is, the Reform movement wants to grant them the same legal powers as the Orthodox rabbinate there currently enjoys. Reform rabbis can want this status without admitting any glimmer of suspicion that the Orthodox way of doing things is right. (If they did, then one could use Pascal’s wager to convince them to become Orthodox.)

“But,” you may object, “Rabbi Marx is still being hypocritical, because while she wants to include Reform in a pluralistic Judaism on the national level, she wants to exclude Orthodoxy on the kibbutz level.” In order to answer this objection, we must address the question: why is political pluralism a good thing? Why² shouldn’t a Reform Jew aspire to replace the Orthodox monopoly on Jewish state religion with a Reform monopoly?

The answer, I think, has to do with our dual nature as social and rational beings. On the one hand, we need to belong to groups in order to accomplish most of the things we want to do in society. On the other hand, once we do belong to a group, the goal of perpetuating and protecting the group, or submitting to high-status members of the group, can easily take priority over whatever goals the group was originally established to advance. (The various Catholic Church sexual-abuse scandals are cases in point.)

One excellent way to prevent this from happening is to set up a society where multiple groups pursue overlapping goals and keep one another in check. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the US government have the overlapping goal of protecting the Constitution. Verizon and Cingular have the overlapping goal of providing cellular phone service. Daily Kos and TAPPED have the overlapping goal of getting Republicans out of power. Etc., etc., etc.

Thus, one could argue that the State of Israel would be better off if it had multiple Jewish state-religious hierarchies³, with the overlapping goal of managing the religious lives of Israeli Jews. At the same time, one could argue, without hypocrisy, that each Jewish community within Israel would be better off inviting the single variant of Judaism that best fit its values. (It’s not like Rabbi Marx was lobbying for a Reform synagogue to be built in Mea Shearim.)

P.S.: While the word “pluralism” frequently carries connotations of warm and fuzzy liberalism, my arguments above for political pluralism, based on a recognition of human frailty, are firmly within the conservative tradition of Edmund Burke.

P.P.S.: There is no single rabbinic or lay organization that speaks for “Orthodox Judaism” as a whole (in the way that, for example, the Central Conference of American Rabbis represents the Reform movement). If you want to know whether a certain borderline practice (e.g., giving aliyot to women or believing that the late Lubavitcher Rebbe is the Messiah) is “really Orthodox” or not, there are a number of well-respected rabbis, some with formal positions of leadership, that will give their opinions, but there is no one institution that is entitled to have the last word. Thus, in the political sense, the Orthodox movement is more pluralist than the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements—perhaps even more pluralist than all of them put together. Neener, neener, neener.

¹ One could just as easily ask: why, despite the general Israeli public’s low opinion of the rabbinic establishment, has the Reform movement had so little traction among native-born Israelis?

² Aside from political expediency, which of course is never a factor in Israeli politics. (No, never! What, never? Well…hardly ever.)

³ Alternatively, Yeshiahu Leibowitz argued that the State of Israel would be better off without any state religion at all, and the Orthodox rabbinate would be better off without depending on government subsidy. I am more inclined to this point of view.

23 Jun 2006 — Life --- art

So when was the last time you had this dizzy sensation that your country had not merely degenerated, but passed into some terrifying Dimension of Suck, making you want to curl up in a fetal position and wait for a meteor strike to rescue you from the pure psychotic ludicrousness of it all?

In my case, it was about the time I read this.

via TBogg via TAPPED

18 Jun 2006 — We're baaaack...

The switchover from Speakeasy to Verizon DSL is, thank God and Shannon, complete.

Unfortunately, paragraph 3, clause (j), of Verizon’s Acceptable Use Policy states that I may not use their DSL service “to damage the name or reputation of Verizon, its parent, affiliates and subsidiaries, or any third parties”, so I don’t think I can tell the whole story of why this took so long until I’m back at work.

09 Jun 2006 — They took the inter out of my internet

As previously noted, I am transferring my DSL service from Speakeasy ($70/month) to Verizon ($15/month). What I didn’t expect, when I made that fateful call to cancel my Speakeasy service, is there are a few (three? five? O Lord, when will it end?) days of lag between Speakeasy cutting me off and Verizon even starting to hook me up to its own systems.

After about two hours on the phone with Verizon’s tech-support department, its provisioning department, its sales department, and its those-­that-­tremble-­as-­if-­they-­were-­mad department, we have finally heard from someone who sounds technically clueful, and she has convinced us that “it takes three to five days” is not phone-company shorthand for “three to five days after the order shows up in our in-box, some technician finds the time to come down to the central office and disconnect two cables”. So I can’t get too mad at Verizon for the delay.

But in the meantime, our house is off the Net. My wife and I can’t surf the Web from home; we can’t email from home. More importantly, we can’t manage our online bill payment from home, we can’t work on selling our car through Craigslist from home, and I can’t log in to work from home. How did people ever live this way?

31 May 2006 — Well, that explains a lot

Excerpt from a footnote in Justice Souter’s dissent from Garcetti v. Ceballos:

31 May 2006 — Attention, teenagers!

The next time you hear your elders decry the loose morals of your generation, you can blame them for setting a bad example.

Doctors said sexually transmitted diseases among senior citizens are running rampant at a popular Central Florida retirement community, according to a Local 6 News report.

A gynecologist at The Villages community near Orlando, Fla., said she treats more cases of herpes and the human papilloma virus in the retirement community than she did in the city of Miami....

A doctor blamed Viagra, a lack of sex education and no risk for pregnancy for the spike in sexually transmitted diseases at The Villages.

(emphasis added)

26 May 2006 — Greetings from Virginia

If you can see this (and the domain name in your browser doesn’t begin with “groundcherry”), then your DNS client can see ropine.com at its new IP address, which points to a virtual server run by the nice folks at OpenHosting.

There is a certain cachet to being able to tell people “go to this URL and you will see a Web page served from a computer that is in my basement”, but it’s not worth the tzuris of losing a long weekend’s worth of hits, or more, when the server flakes out and I can’t go down to that basement and fix it right away.

Also, it turns out that it will cost less for me to get a virtual server at OpenHosting (where I am still root within my sandbox) plus a standard DSL service for home (the kind that doesn’t let me run a server), than it’s costing me now to have a static IP address (the kind that does let me run a server in my basement) through Speakeasy.

(If you do want to host a Web server in your basement, or have some other reason to want a geek-friendly ISP, we heartily recommend Speakeasy. We have no complaints about the service they’ve given us; it’s just that we’re moving on to a different kind of service.)

P.S.: Sorry for the hiatus; between Pesach, a string of illnesses in the nuclear family, and a string of visits to and from the extended family, blogging time has been, shall we say, constrained.

P.P.S.: Happy third blogiversary to me!

05 Apr 2006 — Maybe they had slept through their derekh eretz class

Abayye said:... One who reads and learns and serves Torah scholars, and his buying and selling is not honest, and he does not speak pleasantly to people: what will people say about him? “Woe to so-and-so who learned Torah! Woe to his father who taught him Torah! Woe to his rabbi who taught him Torah! So-and-so, who learned Torah—look at how destructive his deeds are, and how ugly his ways are!” Regarding him, it is written (Ezekiel 36:20): “People said about them, ‘This is the nation of the Eternal, who left His land’”. —Yoma 86a

Once upon a time, an alumnus of a world-famous yeshiva was convicted of embezzlement. A reporter asked the rosh yeshiva, “How do you feel about this failure of your educational system?” The rosh yeshiva replied, “On the contrary, I consider him one of our system’s greatest successes. Sure, he ended up an embezzler, but if he hadn’t gone to our school, he would have become, God forbid, a murderer!”

In that vein, I suppose it’s a good thing that the lads in Borough Park, unlike us poor benighted Modern Orthodox folks, have community leaders who are “so suffused with Torah excellence that [their] world view is a refraction of Torah itself”. Imagine how bad the violence would have been if those leaders hadn’t been so suffused.

01 Apr 2006 — At last, a domain for the decadent

WASHINGTON, April 1 (AFP)—After years of tussling with Congress over establishing an .xxx top-level domain for pornography, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has unveiled a compromise: a new top-level domain encompassing not only pornography, but any Internet content deemed “not safe for work”.

While everyone has their own opinion about how to define pornography, the new .nsfw domain will be governed by simple and objective standards. Any employer who believes that the content available on a Web site is not safe for work may file a complaint with a special ICANN committee, whose members are nominated by the United States Chamber of Commerce. The committee has the authority to reassign any IP address to a new domain in the .nsfw hierarchy. Employers can filter access to all these domains, and be assured that their workers are not endangering themselves on the Internet. Consumers will be allowed to access .nsfw domains from home, of course, but if they have trouble reaching them, they will not be able to get help from their Internet service providers, since the ISP’s technical-support workers will have their access filtered.

If the owner of a site believes that he or she was put in the .nsfw domain by mistake, he or she can petition the NSFW Board of Appeal, which meets to hear such disputes in the bar of the Raffles Hotel, in Singapore, from 10:00 a.m. to noon every February 29.

A spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation could not be reached for comment.

23 Mar 2006 — Don't try this at home (or in the maternity ward)

Some artist with his finger on the pulse of American taste has made a sculpture of Britney Spears, nude, giving birth (NVSFW)—a sculpture which “reveals the crowning of baby Sean’s head” and “also acknowledges the pop-diva’s pin-up past by showing Spears seductively posed on all fours atop a bearskin rug with back arched, pelvis thrust upward, as she clutches the bear’s ears…”

Free advice to any pregnant women out there who might take a statue of Ms. Spears as a role model: in the early stages of labor, if your baby is sunny-side up, this posture can make you more comfortable and maybe convince the kid to roll over. Once the baby is ready to come out, all-fours can be a good position to push from, but not with your pelvis in the air like a bitch in heat. Unless, of course, you are enjoying the contractions so much that you want to push the baby against the force of gravity.

P.S.: According to Wikipedia, the actual Spears baby was delivered by an elective C-section.

via jwz
see other pregnancy snark from the mother of my sunny-side-up pre-schooler

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