Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#870" -- to the end of the URL above.

I'm reading Robert Hughes' Fatal Shore, about the convict beginnings of Australian colonization, as part of a group effort on Horizon -- but my first post about it goes here because of the politics. It's about "Georgian justice," meaning the legal system under George III of England, which Hughes tells us combined a shocking number of hangings with comparatively gentlemanly courtroom procedures:

Georgian justice may look fierce to us, but seen from Europe then it was lenient. The suspect had basic rights not recognized in France, Italy, or Germany: He could not be tortured until he confessed; he could not be held indefinitely without bail or trial; and he was innocent until proven guilty. The liberalism of the English Common Law, compared to their own systems based on Roman and Canon Law, astonished European visitors. They noticed that, although it reduced the likelihood of an innocent man's conviction, it also made it easier for the guilty to escape.

The English knew this, too; hence the draconic laws they created to avenge their sense of a disturbed social order..."

No torture. No incommunicado detention. A presumption of innocence. Even in a place and time that also contained Newgate Prison, there is something to be said for that. Call me a nostalgic old softie, but I used to live in a country that could at least profess such principles without smirking. I miss it.

[UMMM... Well, I've read more of the book. The above seems to be the only favorable comment about British Justice, Georgian or otherwise, in the whole thing. And as for torture, brrr... Maybe the lesson in this is the familiar one that colonial countries behave worst at their peripheries and with most formal respect for justice close to home. Although by that standard you'd think we would still show respect for habeas corpus inside these United States if not elsewhere.]

2/27/05, 12:08 a.m. (Link here)

Once upon a time, in conversations about the limits of journalistic objectivity -- in, for example, the 1980s when I was writing an undergraduate thesis on the subject -- it used to be a reductio ad absurdum to note that if you were "objective" about everything you'd be setting up "evenhanded" debating on "Hitler: Pro or Con?"

Well, now Fox News has apparently put David Duke on the air as a commentator on the Ward Churchill business. David Duke used to be an open Klan leader. Now he's more tactful but hardly less noxious. I don't think this is a joke, though it should be. At least, several weblogs say Duke really did appear on the O'Reilly show, and the writers don't sound like they're joking. See Pandagon, Belgravia Dispatch, and this cache of the Fox News fan newsletter.

Please, someone, tell me this truly is a joke after all. If not, this world is another notch weirder than I thought it was.

[UPDATE 2/27: Yes, this Duke thing appears to be no joke. This is sick.]

2/26/05, 7:03 p.m. (Link here)

"Intimidate" is a term lately overused by Keepers of Order, from the inventors of "broken windows" policing to the wretched security guards at this probably very dull suburban shopping mall. I'm against intimidation, of course. I'm especially against intimidation of the sick or the frail or the very young. I'm against genuine bullying. For that matter I'm against intimidation of teenagers and of, for example, voters and potentially unionizing Wal-Mart workers. I'm also, however, against the use of the word "intimidate" to describe merely annoying activity that does not literally strike fear into any heart whatsoever.

Seriously, civil libertarians need to keep a close watch in these next few years on the loose use of the word "intimidate" to convert legitimate uses of public space into "crimes" against the imputedly cowardly general public.

I'd like to see what the security guards of the Antioch mall consider to be "intimidation." If it's literally anything in the nature of threatening people and taking their money, I'll withdraw the criticism. But I doubt I'll have to.

2/25/05, Friday afternoon (Link here)

Friday catblogging:

In Which The Household's Order Of Dominance Is Revealed.

2/25/05, 11:43 a.m. (Link here)

Today someone forwarded me the "Put Congress On Social Security" Internet letter in a personal email. It turns out to be a Snopes classic, replete with false statements about huge retirement benefits for elected officials, that has appeared in versions both lefty and righty. Although it's wrong on the facts, it's saying something that people want to hear: if our members of Congress are going to legislate the public retirement benefits everyone gets, they ought to be forced to expect to live on that money themselves. Thing being of course that, even though members of Congress apparently do pay into Social Security, they'll also likely be able to supplement their SocSec benefits with savings and other pension entitlements when they retire. They're not going to be living in stinky dangerous hotels on six hundred dollars a month.

Whereas the rest of us of course have to wonder how or where or whether we'll grow old. An SF Chron columnist just this morning -- admittedly, a chronically depressed Chron columnist, but still -- said just in passing in this morning's column, "...When I'm really old (not driving or walking), then I'll watch movies from the comfort of home, never mind that I will be homeless." Destitution hangs over all of us now, the way the nuclear threat used to. What a world. Yes, by all means, let's make retired members of Congress live on the Social Security benefits they have legislated and paid into. Maybe then we'll all have to live a little less scared.

2/24/05, 12:08 p.m. (Link here)

Slashdot has a new jolt for us. A representative of a pop-up advertising firm has been placed on the Homeland Security consumer privacy board.

2/24/05, 10:48 a.m. (Link here)

...and Hunter Thompson's absence is already making itself felt. Strange De Joel missed the good Doctor sorely on reading this morning's news item about a 425-pound male tiger found "roaming the hills near the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley."

[UPDATE: Big juicy tribute page at the UK Guardian.]

2/23/05, 12:29 p.m. (Link here)

Now that I have your attention with that sex item (I'm stealing Echidne's idea here), I'd like to talk about something that really yanks my chain.

Gavin Newsom, recently seen showing his oh-so-kindly outreach-to-the-homeless face, is leading a War On Litterbugs. Naturally, not just any litterbugs, but litterbugs in poor neighborhoods. This morning's SF Chronicle has news from Mohammed Nuru, the deputy public works director who's in charge of using Public Works staff to make life as uncomfortable as possible for homeless San Franciscans by taking away their property, wetting down the sidewalks, setting up official-looking sawhorses to keep people from sleeping alongside vacant buildings, etc., etc. Now Nuru says he's going to have littering enforcement staff out to "saturate the Tenderloin" specifically in the first few days of March. In other words, every single person who collects a welfare check, goes and buys a celebratory beer or sandwich, consumes same, and sets down the bottle and/or wrapper anywhere other than a trash can, is going to get a criminal record. I seriously doubt this effort will do anything about littering. I don't doubt at all that it will continue the standard SF official practice of making life as difficult as possible for poor people who spend a lot of time on downtown streets. The hope is that with enough punishment they'll simply go away so the city's paying customers -- tourists and yuppies -- don't have to look at them. It simply doesn't enter the minds of these folks that homeless people are also citizens and that the Department of Public Works, and even the police department, are public servants -- servants as much of the destitute camper outside the storefront as they are of the landlord who owns the store.

2/23/05, 11:57 a.m. (Link here)

Hereby nominated for (non-)wankers of the week, as Atrios (probably wouldn't) put it:

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supremes who upheld their decision, for saying sex toys are on a slippery slope toward prostitution.

Excuse me, they think that depriving Alabamians of the means to solitary self-amusement will discourage prostitution?

2/23/05, 11:43 a.m. (Link here)

Alan Allport of Horizon, who also lives in Pennsylvania, has heard another side of the gorilla story:

"Apparently the kid in question is pretty hefty, and with the gorilla mask and sheepskin coat he was wearing he did genuinely look rather threatening. Also, for reasons unknown, he chose not to identify himself when approached by school staff; and he had taped over the license plate on his car when arriving at the school grounds (in order to remain anonymous, he hoped), thus looking even more suspicious."

His source "thinks on balance that the school probably did overreact a bit, but it wasn't quite the fuss-over-nothing that some people have suggested. However, if you want to complicate things with a bit of social outrage, it seems that the only reason the school has decided not to expel the kid is that his father is a big-shot lawyer."

2/22/05, 10:59 a.m. (Link here)

From a relative in PA:

"The major local news is that a high school senior decided to shake up their standardized testing day by dressing in a gorilla suit and climbing on the roof of the school to peek in the windows. At the same time a teacher had inadvertently left his lunchbag outside by the flagpole, which necessitated calling the FBI and bomb-sniffing dogs, in addition to the police. Why don't we just admit it: the terrorists have succeeded in terrifying us? (Not to mention our federal leadership)."

2/20/05, 11:03 p.m. (Link here)

Well, the Hunter Thompson obits are going to fill tomorrow's papers with tut-tutting at the wages of psychedelia being addlement and etcetera. There'll be more dimwit stuff like the BBC referring to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, a book of astute and mainly factual political reporting (not counting the famous Ibogaine hoax), as a satire.

Well, I for one am going to remember the political journalist who wrote like this:

When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the waiters hurrry to shut the venetian blinds in the lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately seems more cheerful....

And like this:

...The entire White House press corps apparently lives in fear of somehow getting on the wrong side of Ziegler. He is their only human connection with the man they're supposed to be covering -- and since they can't possibly get to Nixon on their own, they have to deal with Ron. Every once in a while someone will freak out and start yelling at him, but that involves serious risks. It is just about impossible to stay on the White House beat if Ziegler won't talk to you, and if you push him far enough that's exactly what will happen.

Even king-bee types like the Associated Press correspondent Walter Mears and the New York Times's Bob Semple are nervous in Ziegler's presence. The White House beat is one of the most prestigious in American journalism, but Ziegler manages to make it so uncomfortable and potentially humiliating that only the most ambitious reporters still push for it.

The handful of McGovern exiles who traveled with Nixon to California found themselves standing off in little knots by themselves in the press room of Los Angeles' Century Plaza Hotel, and saying things like: 'Jesus, this is really incredible! These White House guys are totally broken, they act like sick sheep... Christ, McGovern would laugh all night if he could see guys like Mears and Semple whimpering around and kissing Ron Ziegler's ass.'...

Jesus Babbling Christ! The phone is ringing again, and this time I know what it is for sure. Last time it was the Land Commissioner of Texas, threatening to have my legs broken because of something I wrote about him... But now it is the grim reaper; he has come for my final page and in exactly 13 minutes that goddamn mojo wire across the room will erupt in a frenzy of beeping and I will have to feed it again...

[UPDATE: For more, see the Horizon thread on same.]

2/20/05, 12:56 p.m. (Link here)

There's good news for once in the paper. Meet Pedro Zerolo, a kind of Spanish politician who only recently became possible.

2/20/05, 12:00 p.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel strikes again:

"Wouldn't you just expect someone named Ruud Lubbers to have to quit over a sex scandal?"

2/19/05, 10:33 p.m. (Link here)

Am happy to live in a city where shops are called things like "Lucky Ocean Donuts." Knowing that the name belongs to a donut shop on Ocean Avenue takes away most of its mystery, but doesn't "Lucky Ocean Donuts" by itself sound wonderful?

2/19/05, 1:25 a.m. (Link here)

Professor Kim has the Larry Summers transcript. The things he said were not taken out of context, blown out of proportion, etc., etc. They're very familiar. They're the kind of very familiar standard-issue sexist bloviating that was still almost acceptable as public discourse during my own early education. They're the kind of crap I'd expected the current generation of college students would not have to fight their way through or past. Goddammit, still true: behind every successful woman is (a) a surprised man, or (b) a man who tried to stop her.

2/18/05, 6:26 p.m. (Link here)

Catblogging time:

"Cheerios? What Cheerios? I ain't seen yer Cheerios. You must be thinkin' of some other cat..."

2/18/05, 4:43 p.m. (Link here)

Rabbi Hillel's ghost should sue the Doritos company.

2/17/05, 5:32 p.m. (Link here)

Something to be said for U.S. publishers' approach to readers who have stopped reading. They're trying bigger print. Before you laugh consider that a sizeable number of people in the U.S. can't afford eyeglasses. No, I don't know how sizeable, but anyhow it's at least the people without insurance, plus the people on stingy public benefits like Medicaid who can't always persuade the responsible officials to authorize a pair of glasses.

2/16/05, 9:19 p.m. (Link here)

Further proof, if needed, that making a stink does work: the rural California school that was RFID-tagging its students has had to stop because the company providing the tags has backed out of the deal.

2/16/05, 6:13 p.m. (Link here)

I do trust that the many advocates of faith-based volunteerism in these fine United States will be generous in their praise and mourning of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun martyred in Brazil for her defense of the rights of poor farmers.

Or wasn't her faith-based volunteerism the right kind?

2/14/05, 3:33 p.m. (Link here)

About Dean, we're in for a long round of this kind of hooey, claiming his election to head the Democratic Party means the Democrats aren't "interested in reaching out to mainstream Americans." No, that's not it. It's that the Beltway cocktail-party circuit doesn't know where mainstream Americans are. Couldn't find 'em with a ten-foot pole (nor want to touch 'em with one, I don't suppose). Your actual American mainstream is a lot poorer than as pictured by top-flight columnists. The U.S. estimated family median income for 2005 is $58,000, which means fully half of us live in households poorer than that. And Howard Dean is actually more conservative than he really ought to be. I don't, for example, think anyone who got cut off public benefits in Vermont during Dean's "welfare reform" days would mistake him for even a lukewarm liberal, let alone a "McGovern" liberal. And IIRC his health plan was for an improved insurance scheme, not the actual transition to national health that we'll have to make sooner or later. So the real sign of the times is the fact that Democratic Party liberals are not being heard to complain in large numbers about the party's decision once again to elect one of its moderate-to-conservative members.

2/12/05, 9:07 p.m. (Link here)

Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, when it turned to General Gordon, had me turning down every page corner due to contemporary relevance as soon as General Gordon got to Sudan. Starting with this:

The unexplored and pestilential region of Equatoria, stretching southwards to the great lakes and the sources of the Nile, had been annexed to Egypt by the Khedive Ismail, who, while he squandered his millions on Parisian ballet-dancers, dreamt strange dreams of glory and empire. Those dim tracts of swamp and forest in Central Africa were—so he declared—to be “opened up,” they were to receive the blessings of civilisation, they were to become a source of eternal honour to himself and Egypt. The slave-trade, which flourished there, was to be put down; the savage inhabitants were to become acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a government monopoly in ivory was to be established, and the place was to be made a paying concern....

And, behind all these questions, a still larger question loomed. The position of the English in Egypt itself was still ambiguous; the future was obscure; how long, in reality, would an English army remain in Egypt? Was not one thing, at least, obvious—that if the English were to conquer and occupy the Sudan, their evacuation of Egypt would become impossible?

At any rate it had all ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.

2/11/05, 11:10 a.m. (Link here)

Friday catblogging:

This is our newspaper-reading cat after reading the newspaper.

The newspaper has that effect on me too.

2/10/05, 10:07 p.m. (Link here)

Some further salutary words for the loftily disgusting Larry Summers from Chris Nolan here. To add to her thoughts on men's 2000-year advantage and Harvard's only quite recent recognition that women are real human beings: did you know that until 1969, Harvard's undergraduate Lamont Library was actually off-limits to female undergraduates on the grounds that they might distract the young gentlemen from their studies? No joke. Saudi-scale instances of officially imposed gender segregation are part of quite recent American history. We can't recover in only two generations.

2/10/05, 9:45 p.m. (Link here)

Echidne has a nice counterpoint here to Steven Pinker's smugly dishonest defense of Harvard's latest self-disgrace.

Further thought of my own: it's an old stereotype that women are by nature only middling in their talent at anything; that they never go to extremes; that they're neither brilliant successes nor meteoric failures. Etc., etc. All very easy to blame that on women's "nature" until you consider the weight of little interrupting obligations imposed on girls and young women, and the pats on the head they get for being "thoughtful" and "considerate" and "kind" by putting others ahead of their own success, and the inducements they receive to become frumpy little mothers before they've ever had the chance to live for themselves -- all braided deeply into their psyches from earliest childhood by the people they love and respect the most. It's why women, when they do succeed brilliantly, often do so later in life than men. Before they can get anything done they have to unlearn the burden of wanting too badly to be liked.

2/10/05, 8:19 p.m. (Link here)

Blumenthal has a phrase worth repeating: "The war on the New Deal."

2/9/05, 11:30 a.m. (Link here)

Well, guess what? The Virginia State Legislature has come up with a facially neutral (well, midriffly neutral anyhow) law that's certain to have a disparate impact on its African American constituents. Surprise, surprise.

2/8/05, 4:49 p.m. (Link here)

I'm getting mailings from immigrants' rights lists today asking voters to call their members of Congress about the "REAL ID Act," which reportedly goes to a vote tomorrow. They're saying this law would make it more difficult for victims of political persecution to qualify for asylum in the United States. For more information, and to send a letter if you wish, see the Human Rights First website.

2/8/05, 9:48 a.m. (Link here)

I guess the advocates of torture may be right. The atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are pretty much on the same level as fraternity hazing and the youth boot camps of our continent's history-stained interior. In fact, there are striking similarities.

Seriously, we have to face our duty to live down the deep and old American mean streak. Anywhere we tolerate it, we feed it. Whatever the rest of the world may think, we are not simple, foolish, or innocent people. We are able deniers who are so good at pretending to be simple that we often fool even ourselves.

[A further thought in the afternoon: yes, the coasts are stained by history too. Faneuil Hall was built with slave trade money. We've all got things to live down.]

2/7/05, 3:10 p.m. (Link here)

I cut across Civic Center Plaza taking some papers to City Hall today. In the playground some kids were playing tag. A little older than usual for that spot -- maybe ten or twelve years old instead of nursery-level. A black kid was chasing a white kid. Being your basic hopeful liberal I thought oh, how nice, an actual live instance of the relaxed, laughing colorblind harmony depicted on government report covers and in the better sitcoms. Half forgot it by the time I walked past a wall where a black couple were sitting and watching from a distance. One said to the other, "Stupid. He playing tag on white children..." I couldn't catch the rest. I guessed she might have gone on to say it was an easy way for a part-grown boy to get himself accused of something. Which possibly it was. Sheesh, we're 142 years beyond slavery. Do black children still have to learn a kind of defensive driving -- defensive living -- that includes not tagging white children in a game? I don't know the answer to this question.

2/6/05, 1:16 p.m. (Link here)

Never say San Franciscans are unshockable. this is the kind of obvious immorality that shocks us.

2/5/05, 12:45 p.m. (Link here)

Good good good: another dissenting member of Congress finding a more interesting way to use the Web. Up 'til now, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has been the only Democrat really using anything like the potential of his official website. BTW glad The Nation finally gave Waxman his due in a feature this month.

2/4/05, late morning (Link here)
[Sorry, I forgot the date/time signature on this item earlier. I've added it now.]

Annie Nakao has a good article in s'morning's SF Chron on the "Ritchie Boys" -- refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe who went back with the U.S. Army as psychological warfare experts. They're soon to be featured in a documentary film.

A comment in passing, not the main point of the story at all:

If war was hell, the Ritchie boys did their jobs, sometimes with humor.

Stern and fellow interrogator Fred Howard played cat and mouse with German POWs, who were terrified of Russians. Stern would disguise himself as "Kommissar Krukov," cursing in broken German. Howard played the role of the good cop and "rescued" the prisoner from "Krukov."

Their creativity, however, always adhered to the Geneva Convention. When hearing of the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Michaels and other Ritchie boys were shocked.

"People have forgotten basic truths," he says.

2/3/05 7:25 p.m. (Link here)

I guess I'd better watch my language. Someone visited my site today from the "playboy.com" domain name. I wonder what attracted their text searches, the low-cut blue dress or the bullwhip?

2/3/05 2:05 p.m. (Link here)

My favorite response to the State of the Union so far is from Bobby at Horizon. At not-quite-51, he's thrilled to be classified among "younger workers."

2/3/05 9:07 a.m. (Link here)

Yesterday there were jackhammers next door so I took my laptop over to the cafe area of our the new local yuppie market. I looked up from typing a boring legal document and saw three women were doing a fashion shoot. Actually, an annex to a fashion shoot: they were on their lunch break from the real project and decided they might as well take some pictures at a table by the window.

The model was an airhead in a low-cut blue dress. They borrowed a guy's newspaper and asked her to pretend to be reading it. She started with one of the Chron's colorful sections, then they swapped it for the business pages as being more appropriate. What I'm trying to remember is whether it was before or after they handed her the business news (I think it was before) that she said, "Ooh, I'm so smart." And I want to know if my memory is playing tricks when it suggests the full comment was, "Ooh, I'm so smart, I'm reading the newspaper." Then they borrowed my laptop so she could pose in front of that. Which she did with her wrists arched high like it was a piano. Now, my mother would say that high wrist posture is not only the most correct for typing but also the most likely to avoid carpal tunnel damage. But I've never seen anyone really type on a laptop like that. For one thing it would have helped to touch the keys.

Have we gotten to the point where some people think only intellectuals read newspapers? If so, beam me up, Scotty. Soonish.

In other news, John Yoo is co-author of an op-ed in yesterday's Chron that essentially calls the Geneva Convention quaint all over again. What the hell must the rest of the world think of us?

Scotty, where are you? Scotty...?

2/2/05 5:15 p.m. (Link here)

This afternoon a guy on the street tried to sell me a bullwhip.

He said, "Who knows? You might need it."

2/2/05 10:23 a.m. (Link here)

I've got a useful project for those God-bothered and well-connected advocates of Faith-Based Activity In Our Communities who usually turn up when least wanted.

See, an artist got permission from a friendly storekeeper in the Bay Area suburb of San Rafael to build a plywood approximation of a chapel as a place for the local Latino day laborers to pray. It was nearly done when the storekeeper's landlord objected. Now the artist has been ordered to remove it.

I remember when a whole nationwide crowd of letter-writers and talk-show howlers materialized to object when my home town in Massachusetts tried to stop a veterans' group from cheapening the national flag by putting a Fourth of July display on town property every damn day of the year. That Ten Commandments guy had a similar cheering squad when he put specifically Old Testament stone tablets in a publicly funded courthouse that had to represent taxpayers professing all religions and no religion.

So when someone actually tries to do something nice, on private property, for poor believers who have few other places to exercise their faith, and a bunch of snobs try to stop the project, we've got a chance for the Bible-thumpers to do some good. So where oh where are they now?

2/1/05 4:31 p.m. (Link here)

Credit where credit is due:

I admit I hadn't expected to find Laura Bush still mentioning Afghan women in public appearances. Actually, she mentioned them repeatedly last October and once in November. Turns out that during the last days of the presidential election it was a standard element of her stump speech to express pride that an Afghan election had been held with a 19-year-old woman casting the first ballot.

Now, of course, our First Lady has much left to do in ending the continuing enslavement of many Afghan women, and I suspect Eleanor Roosevelt, had she taken up the task, might have acted with more vigor. But I do wish her the very best with her continued efforts.

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