Summary page 29 of 36

Warning: This has been migrated from an earlier blog server. Links, images, and styles from postings before 2018 may be funky.

12 Mar 2004 — Hoy todos somos madrileños

flag from Patricio López Guzmán via Boing Boing

09 Mar 2004 — The following script is licensed to the Kerry campaign

[Fade in. A TV, playing a tape of the Carter-Reagan 1980 debate, fills most of the screen.]

REAGAN [on tape]: It might be well if you ask yourself: are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe? That we’re as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions yes, why then I think your choice is very obvious as to who you’ll vote for. If you don’t agree, if you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.

[Pan to KERRY, who is watching the TV. He turns to the camera.]

KERRY: I’m John Kerry, and I authorized this message.

[Fade out.]

08 Mar 2004 — Sue your doctor, go to blacklist

Some doctors in Texas have compiled an online database of malpratice plaintiffs. They intended this as a service for doctors who want to avoid taking on litigious patients. Since the database does not distinguish between patients who filed frivolous lawsuits and patients who won well-deserved victories in court, it provides the New York Times with an opportunity to remind us why we have malpractice law in the first place:

Among other people listed were Dolores and Ricardo Romero of Humble, Tex. In 1998, Mrs. Romero said, her husband, then 40, went into the hospital to have a herniated disk repaired. The operation went awry and he nearly bled to death on the operating table, suffering serious brain damage. Now, he can barely walk or see and needs help feeding himself and using the toilet.

The Romeros’s lawsuit revealed that the surgeon, Dr. Merrimon Baker, was addicted to painkillers, had once left a surgical sponge inside a patient, and on other occasions operated on the wrong hip and amputated the wrong leg. The jury, finding that the hospital acted with malice since it knew of the doctor’s history, awarded the Romeros $40.9 million. A higher court overturned the malice finding and an appeal is pending.

Dr. Baker, who is practicing outside Houston, did not respond to a message left with his office.

As a believer in the Transparent Society, I suppose this kind of thing is inevitable. Patients (in Massachusetts, at least) can consult a public database of what doctors have lost malpractice suits, so perhaps it’s only fair that doctors can consult a public database of what patients have filed malpractice suits. But I want to know which doctors have been using that database, so I can take my business to the ones who avoid lawsuits the old-fashioned way, by doing their job right. As the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

via Slashdot

05 Mar 2004 — Not gonna happen

Rumors are afoot that Dubya will dump Cheney and run with a different VP candidate in the fall. Oh, come on.

Our MBA-in-Chief will tolerate any kind of gross incompetence from his subordinates, except for saying something the boss doesn’t want to hear. Contrast George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, with Paul O’Neill, former Secretary of the Treasury.

When the White House gave up claiming that we would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq Real Soon Now, it blamed the CIA for overestimating Saddam Hussein’s WMD stocks. (The old party line, of course, criticized the CIA for underestimating Saddam’s menace to the world. But never mind that. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.) If the CIA really had been so incompetent as to mislead the President on an issue that he had used to sell a war to the American people, then Tenet should be shown the door. If firing Tenet would be politically dangerous, because he knows where so many bodies are buried, then Bush could have at least found some undersecretary to serve as a fall guy. But no. Tenet, we are assured, has the full confidence of the President.

On the other hand, when O’Neill told Bush that he would not publically support a second round of tax cuts for the wealthy, he was Cheney fired him. And O’Neill does know where a few bodies are buried: he gave journalist Ron Suskind 19,000 digitized documents that crossed his desk during his tenure under Bush. Perhaps Bush, Cheney, and Rove should have seriously considered O’Neill’s position that tax cuts were not the right response to a booming deficit. Perhaps, at least, they should have realized that someone with as much political and executive experience as O’Neill would take the precaution of making a Pearl Harbor File, and consider how keeping him happy might be in the Administration’s political interest. But no.

Unless Cheney is hit with a stroke or an indictment, he will be running for VP in the fall. I suspect that rumors to the contrary are being spread by Republicans who are unhappy with the way the country has been going over the past three years, but who can’t bring themselves to blame the man at the top.

04 Mar 2004 — The future of women in computer programming

[Updated: Minor edits.]

Due to an accident involving a black hole, the National Reconnaisance Office, and the Verizon Wireless switching network, I found myself talking on my cell phone with my great-great-granddaughter, Chayya Mushka Sunshine Gordon. As soon as I realized that I was hearing a voice from a century in the future, I wanted to ask her for the point spread on next year’s Super Bowl, but forced myself to make some small talk first.

“So what do you do?” I asked.

“I’m a computer programmer. My company develops networked applications for intelligent textiles.”

“Cool! That’s what I do, too.”

“They had intelligent textiles in 2004?”

“No. I mean, I’m a programmer.”

“Oh.” I could hear the wrinkled nose in her voice. In the background, a bus door opened and closed, and other passengers babbled to each other. “What’s it like, being a male programmer?”

“You might as well ask what it’s like to drive a car with an internal-combustion engine. Most of the programmers I know are men.”

“Oh,” she said, without the wrinkle this time.

“Do IT managers in 2104 discriminate against men?”

“Sex discrimination is illegal nowadays. It’s just that men don’t have, you know, the temprament, the right way of thinking, to be good programmers.” Her tone became more animated. “Where I used to work, there was a man on my team responsible for the database design, and it was the most incredible mess. To do the simplest thing, I had to spend days trying to figure out where the information was, or how to add something to one table without screwing up five others. I was venting about it to a friend of mine, and she said, ‘If you can’t get a man to put the toilet seat down, how can you expect him to normalize a database schema?’ —No offense.”

“None taken.”

“So most of the programmers in the 20th century were men? No wonder they had so much buggy software. Why didn’t women look for programming jobs? Discrimination?”

“I assume that’s one of the reasons. Also, I suspect a lot of girls were turned off to computer classes because they associated programming with math.”

“Math?! You have to make up your algorithms and data structures from scratch and prove that they work?”

“Most programmers haven’t had to deal with that kind of thing since the 1970s, at least. But the news hasn’t filtered down to the sixth-graders yet.”

“That’s just crazy! Programming is all about communication. You have to communicate with the customer to learn about the problem they want to solve, with your co-workers to make sure that all the pieces will building will work together, with the programmers who come after you so they’ll be able to maintain what you did…”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“And women have always been the communicators in society. That’s why men always tease us for talking so much. That’s why women have always been concentrated in jobs that involve communication: teaching, library science, human resources, secretarial work…”

I cleared my throat. “Funny you should say that about secretaries—”

“Oy, I have to go.” The doors opened again. “It’s been great talking to you, but I have to get to my other job now.”

“Other job?”

“I work the second shift at the Holiday Inn reception desk. You don’t think I could pay the rent on a programmer’s salary, did you?”

“Some things never change, I guess.”

02 Mar 2004 — Priorities, priorities

I’m not sure how concerned I should be about The Passion of the Christ. Jews, of all people, should know that no text is self-interpreting. If millions of people see the movie, and none of them interpret it in a way that does not inspire them to harm Jews, I have nothing to complain about. If some of them consider it an antisemitic movie, but respond by abandoning Christianity, likewise. If some of them are inspired to commit violence against Jews, the actual violence is a matter for the police.

Also, I can’t shake the feeling that Gibson, observing what Christian outrage did for the box-office sales of Hail Mary and The Last Temptation of Christ, has stoked Jewish outrage to sell tickets.

I am sure of one thing, though. If, God forbid, I were a Christian — especially a Catholic — I would be very concerned about this movie. After all, if I were a Christian, this gore-fest with feints at “historical accuracy” (Aramaic dialogue, but a white Jesus?!) would be purporting to represent my religion.

To their credit, some Christians have looked at the movie and recoiled. Andrew Sullivan, for example, called it “some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino.” Greg Easterbrook compares and contrasts: “The Gospels emphasize Christ’s suffering on the cross; Gibson has decided to emphasize Christ’s suffering via the whip. Strange that Gibson should feel he understands Jesus’ final hours better than the Gospel writers did.” William Safire asks: “At a moment when a wave of anti-Semitic violence is sweeping Europe and the Middle East, is religion well served by updating the Jew-baiting passion plays of Oberammergau on DVD?”

Then we have the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Office for Film & Broadcasting, whose review has the following high points: “However … And though … ‘Nostra Aetate’ … Overall … However … However … Nonetheless … flaws as well as triumphs …” The review concludes by rating the movie “A-III”, meaning that Passion, like Left Behind: The Movie, is appropriate for all adults without reservation, but not for children and adolescents.

So what movies does this august body not consider appropriate for any random grown-up to sit back and enjoy? A selection follows. All direct quotes are from reviews on the USCCB’s Web site.

The USCCB rates the following movies as “A-IV” or “L”, meaning that they have “problematic content” or “require caution and some analysis”:

Bedazzled: Dudley Moore plays a short-order cook in a parody/update of the Faust legend in which “the lust sequence gets a bit too sinful and another satirizing the image of nuns may seem more distasteful than funny.”
The Believer: A self-hating Jew rises through the ranks of a neo-Nazi organization in a movie with “some hateful violence, a suicide, a sexual encounter with nudity and recurring rough language.”
The Body: Antonio Banderas plays a Catholic priest who investigates a first-century corpse that bears a remarkable resemblance to You-Know-Who. The film is “remains shallow in its exploration and eventual affirmation of the resurrection.”
The Exorcist: “[T]he movie is on shaky ground theologically and its special effects are horrific but the result is an exciting horror fantasy for those with strong stomachs.”
Flawless: A homophobe with a stroke gets speech therapy from a drag queen in a movie with “ambiguous depiction of gay lifestyles”.
The Godfather, Part III: This sequel, unlike the first two films in the series, loses points for “an unedifying ficitional depiction of some religious figures”.
Philadelphia: A gay lawyer with AIDS sues his former employer for discrimination. “[T]he emotionally manipulative script and Hanks’ restrained, powerful performance reduce complex social issues to the personal level of one victim’s humanity and search for justice. Sympathetic depiction of gay relationships, fleeting nudity and a few sexist and sexual slurs.”

The USCCB rates the following movies as “O”, meaning that they are “morally offensive”:

Dogma: Lisa Fiorentino plays the last known descendant of Jesus, working at an abortion clinic; Chris Rock plays Rufus, the black apostle; Matt Damon and Ben Affleck play fallen angels; Alanis Morisette plays God. “The unfunny proceedings rely on a mindless mix of irreverence and absurdity in poking fun at biblical characters and Christian stereotypes.”
Hail Mary: A modernized story of the Incarnation and Virgin Birth, whose “extensive use of nudity and extremely rough language in a context so sacred to Christians will be offensive to many.”
The Last Temptation of Christ: Satan tempts Jesus by holding out the prospect of a normal life off the cross. The movie “fails because of artistic inadequacy rather than anti-religious bias … insistence on gore and brutality [sic!], as well as a preoccupation with sexual rather than spirtual love.”
The Omen: Gregory Peck is the foster father of the anti-Christ. The film’s “only interest in religion is in terms of its exploitation potential.”
The Rapture: A woman joins an apocalyptic Christian sect. Then the Apocalypse happens. “Excessively graphic depictions of sexual encounters, eccentric interpretations of biblical texts and occasional rough language.”
Rosemary’s Baby: Mia Farrow discovers that she has been impregnated by Satan. “[T]he movie’s inverted Christian elements denigrate religious beliefs.”

Passion review via Uggabugga

01 Mar 2004 — Indifferent creation, purposeful creation

I was a good boy (in one respect) this week: I read the whole parsha, twice in Hebrew and once in translation. But I still can’t think of anything remotely profound to say about it. So I’m going to crib from one of my favorite comentators, Yeshayahu Leibowitz ztz”l. The following is excerpted from Accepting the Yoke of Heaven, his anthology of divrei Torah that were originally given on Israeli radio and TV.

Reb Leibowitz observes that while the whole story of the creation of the world takes up less than 40 verses, this parsha has over 250 verses describing the construction of the Sanctuary and its various utensils. He goes on:

The Torah did not come to give man information on the construction of the world, but to tell him something about the significance of the existence of man himself within the framework of the world: and the significance of this is that one must serve God. The world in itself, as we recognize it, was given to us as something that God had created; whatever is — is, regardless of how man relates to it. That is why all of creation is indifferent in regard to goals, duties, or obligations, and even in regard to man’s beliefs, views, opinions, expectations, hopes and visions.
But this small sanctuary was not a natural given, but the product of human activity in accordance with a mitzvah of the Torah…

That means that only what is related to the tasks imposed on man, and not what is given to him naturally — i.e., only expresses a demand made upon man, or obligations imposed upon him — it is this that is of importance and significance. The world and all in it lack significance, and if I know it as we know it from scientific research, there is nothing left for me to ask about my relation to it. But in the world of values, the mitzvot imposed upon man, the obligations that man accepts upon himself — these are not givens of nature. And this sanctuary, which has no meaning except for the goal of serving God, and man constructs it for that purpose — it is that which symbolizes the service of God as the highest value…

…It is not the world in itself that is significant: what is significant is the service of God in the world.

29 Feb 2004 — It takes one to know one

Oliver Smoot, MIT class of 1962, who earned lasting fame as the unit of measurement for the Harvard Bridge, is the immediate past chairman of the American National Standards Institute, and now serves as president of the International Standardization Organization.

via anil dash

26 Feb 2004 — The ultimate insider-trading scandal

According to a recent study, the personal stock portfolios of United States senators outperformed the market by an average of 12 percent per year. (Republicans and Democrats performed equally well.) By comparison, senior executives outperform the market by 5 percent, and the average share-holding household underperforms the market by 1.44 percent.

I’m still having trouble deciding whether to vote for Senator Kerry or Senator Edwards in next week’s Democratic primary. Perhaps one of these gentlemen could demonstrate his commitment to constituent service by e-mailing me a few stock tips.

via Calpundit

25 Feb 2004 — One cheer for slavery

[Updated.]

Nobody seems to put in a good word for slavery these days. When the Confederate States of America was still a going concern, leaders on both the Union and Rebel sides acknowledged that preservation of slavery was the CSA’s raison d’etre; today, the South is full of nutbars (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) who apologize for every aspect of the CSA except for slavery, and who insist that freeing the slaves had nothing to do with the War of Northern Agression.

Furthermore, back in the early 19th century, when abolitionists declared slavery to be immoral, conservatives had a simple reply: the Bible says it’s OK. The “Old Testament” authorizes Jews to purchase slaves from other nations and keep them indefinitely (Leviticus 25:44–46); St. Paul told slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5); ergo, slavery is OK. This line of argument, too, seems out of favor these days.

It is possible, however, to take the Bible seriously as a moral touchstone, legalized slavery and all, and be grateful for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Consider the economic environment for most of recorded history, i.e., between the invention of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution. Without a modern banking system, the most effective way to accumulate (or liquidate) wealth was to buy (or sell) food-producing real estate. If you didn’t own any such land, and you or your spouse weren’t among the very few people who could support themselves year-round with non-agricultural work, you were screwed. In this kind of situation, slavery could be an impoverished person’s least bad option, especially because during a slack season, even when there was no work to be done, the master was still obliged to feed and house the slave.

Thus, last week’s parsha teaches that a Jewish slave can choose to stay bound to his master “forever” (Exodus 21:6) — but in the jubilee year, when every Jewish family gets back its share of Eretz Yisrael’s real estate, even this slave goes free (Leviticus 25:40–41). Non-Jewish slaves were not automatically released because they did not automatically have anywhere to go to.

So if slavery was such a good thing back then, why did it stop being a good thing a few hundred years ago, when America was still a primarily agricultural society?

The simple answer is that just because the Torah permits something, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The Torah has a positive commandment for how a man should divorce his wife, but that doesn’t mean every man should do it.

An additional reason, however, deserves mention. As Evsey Domar and Brad DeLong point out, when land in a pre-industrial society is scarce, the wages of free workers, or the shares of sharecroppers, are so low that there’s no benefit to enslaving them. Thus, in the ancient Middle East, slaves were almost always debtors or prisoners of war; slavery was a by-product of other social institutions, not an engine of the economy. In medieval Europe, similarly, serfdom was legal, but actual serfs were rare.

By contrast, in antebellum America, white landowners faced an abundance of cheap land, and the potential for great profits by selling staple products. Free workers would bid up the price of their labor and cut into the landowners’ profits; slaves working on a cotton farm were easy to control. Therefore, the white aristocracy did not merely enslave people who happened to be on the losing side of a war; they (or their agents) made war on other ethnic groups for the sake of capturing and selling slaves, and convinced one another that the victims of these wars, and their descendants, deserved what they got.

The Jewish slave-owners of a few thousand years back were not only constantly reminded that their ancestors were slaves in Egypt; they knew that with a run of bad financial luck, or a Jewish military defeat, they could personally end up as slaves. White plantation owners in the South had no such fear.

25 Feb 2004 — A free tip to writers of all political stripes

If you find yourself writing an article about certain Jews, and pat yourself on the back by writing “Anyone who does [what I’m doing] can count on automatically being smeared as an anti-Semite,” you’re an anti-Semite. (Likewise for other kinds of bigotry, of course.) As the Talmud says, if one person calls you a jackass, ignore it, but if two people call you a jackass, consider getting a saddle. If you’re going to be an anti-Semite, can you at least have the balls to be proud of it?

via Alas, a blog

24 Feb 2004 — Dubya’s Mardi Gras present to the gay community

Excerpt from Bush’s speech today:

Today, I call upon the Congress to promptly pass and to send to the states for ratification an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife.

The amendment should fully protect marriage, while leaving the state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage.

Contrast this with the Kerry campaign Web site:

John Kerry supports same-sex civil unions so that gay couples can benefit from the health benefits, inheritance rights, or Social Security survivor benefits guaranteed for heterosexual couples.

Got it? Bush wants to preserve marriage as a heterosexual-only institution, while leaving state legislatures free to authorize civil unions. Kerry, on the other hand, wants to preserve marriage as a heterosexual-only institution, while leaving state legislatures free to authorize civil unions.

OK, there is one significant difference: Kerry would want members of civil unions to be eligible for Federal benefits, such as Social Security, on the same terms as married couples. However, since the Republicans are likely to control Congress no matter who wins the Presidential election, any bill proposing to change those eligibility rules would go down in flames.

Note to evangelical Christians: Now that both parties have demonstrated their profound disinterest in writing your sexual morals into the law, perhaps you could review the other sins that Jesus called attention to, and decide which party’s platform is more consistent with Christian morality as a whole. If “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Mark 10:25), what effect will the Bush tax cuts have on celestial population growth?

via Balkinization

24 Feb 2004 — Algebra, Al-Qaeda, what’s the difference?

A few months ago, conservatives were lecturing us naughty left-wingers for our poor manners. It seems that liberals, by criticizing our Commander-in-Chief, are debasing public discourse in America, undermining the high standards set by Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter.

So I guess it’s our fault that the US Secretary of Education called the NEA a “terrorist organization”. (The NEA is the largest teachers’ union in the US, with 2.7 million members.) Perhaps we should send the NEA’s executive committee to Guantánamo. I’m sure the kids locked up there could use some teachers. They could start, of course, with some lessons in good manners.

23 Feb 2004 — Database rock

So the other night, I was listening to one of our Schoolhouse Rock CDs, and was struck by some kind of infernal inspiration. Maybe if I publish this I can get it out of my head…

A Field is a Number, Time, or String

to the tune of “A Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing” by Lynn Ahrens

Well, every number you can share

And every time that you can spare

And every string you can compare

You know they’re fields.

A field’s part of a database row

Which records a fact someone should know;

I find it quite interesting.

A field’s a number, time, or string.

Oh, I bought a ticket for the 10 a.m. New York plane.

A man tried to sit in the seat where I was staying.

The stewardess said, “Get off this flight;

“Your plane doesn’t leave ’till 10 at night.”

I bought a ticket for the 10 a.m. New York plane.

Well, every number you can share

(like the number of miles to New York)

And every time that you can spare

(like 10 a.m. or 10 p.m.)

And any string you can compare

(like the name of an airline or an airport)

You know they’re fields.

You know they’re fields, oh…

Mei-Li worked as a clerk at the R.M.V.,

Giving the tests to see whether people could see.

She tested a man with a long last name

And now their addresses are the same.

Mei-Li worked as a clerk at the R.M.V.

Well, every number you can share

(like the “20” in “20/20 vision”)

And every time that you can spare

(like now or yesterday or tomorrow)

And any string you can compare

(like an address or a last name)

You know they’re fields.

You know they’re fields, oh…

Mr. Jones logs in to a bank on Hudson Street.

He left his password for a second where his daughter could see it.

She took all his money out of the bank

And put his credit rating in the tank.

Mr. Jones logs in to a bank on Hudson Street.

Well, every number you can share

(like the balance in a bank account)

And every time that you can spare

(like a second or a minute or an hour)

And any string you can compare

(like the password or the name of a bank)

You know they’re fields.

A field’s part of a database row

Which records a fact someone should know;

I find it quite interesting.

A field’s a number, time, or string.

A field is a number, time, or string.

19 Feb 2004 — You can run, but you can’t hide

Here are some of the questions asked at yesterday’s White House press briefing. Try writing your own answers, and then follow the link to see if you can spin as well as Scott McClellan.

Scott, does the White House stand behind its report issued just nine days ago, the Economic Report, there will be 2.6 million new jobs created this year?…

Well, you say this is a changing economy, and you also said earlier that this report was based on economic data that is now three months old. So would it be wrong for the Democrats, later this year — if you don’t meet this 2.6 million forecast of jobs — would it be wrong for them to beat you on the head about it?…

When you dismissed the premise of John’s question by saying, people can debate the numbers, let’s be realistic here, the debate is going on between your Council of Economic Advisors and Treasury Secretary John Snow. Are there people here in this White House who never believed that forecast?…

Can you answer the specific question, though? Was this report — was the prediction of this many jobs, 2.6 million jobs, vetted prior to publication by the entire economic team?…

That’s not the question. Was it or was it not vetted by the entire economic team?…

So you don’t know, or it was, or it wasn’t?…

Why — if you’re suggesting that people will debate the numbers, that’s kind of a backhanded way to say, oh, who cares about the numbers. Well, apparently, the President’s top economic advisors do, because that’s why they wrote a very large report and sent it to Congress. So why was the prediction made in the first place, if the President and you and his Treasury Secretary were going to just back away from it?

Then why predict a number? Why was the number predicted? Why was the number predicted? You can’t get away with not — just answer the question. Why was that number predicted?…

No, you have not answered. And everybody watching knows you haven’t answered.

Meanwhile, in polls of likely voters, both Kerry and Edwards beat Bush by ten points.

Later posts / Earlier posts