Is it just me, or are the increasingly implausible encomiums of Rumsfeld coming out of the Bush administration starting to sound a little Manchurian Candidate-esque?

George Bush: Mr. Secretary, thank you for your hospitality, and thank you for your leadership. You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror. You’re doing a superb job. You are a strong Secretary of Defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.

Dick Cheney: As a former secretary of defense, I think Donald Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had.

Bennett Marco: Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Maybe someone should ask the president if he’d like to pass the time by playing a little solitaire, just to see what happens.

Via Edward at Obsidian Wings, I see that the state of Virginia has been busy digging a trench to the 19th century.

The Virginia General Assembly… passed with veto-proof majorities a jaw-dropping bill that bans not only civil unions but any “partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage.” And it declares “void in all respects” and “unenforceable” in the commonwealth any such arrangement made in another state.

In other words, not only is any public affirmation of gay relationships banned but even private legal arrangements between two people who love each other are prohibited. The bill’s broad language would preclude contracts to share assets or provide for medical powers of attorney, and though its sponsors deny they intend to do so, it would seem to ban even certain contractual business relationships undertaken by people who happen to be of the same gender.

One of the arguments against gay marriage is that gays don’t need it. They can get the rights of married people by making their own contractual arrangements. That’s not exactly true- some rights, such as immigration rights, cannot be obtained by contract

The legislators who passed this bill are wasting their words. A protestor in

http://www.blackeyedgirl.com/nazis.jpg

I started blogging two years ago as an extension of/complement to my mailing list, which had been running since December, 2001. It’s funny that in that first post I describe blogging as “an online forum usually with one main author/contributor” and now here I am on a group blog. I did not see the benefits of the latter until I joined CT, which has been a delight, so thanks!

I wish I knew who were the first few dozen readers of “Eszter’s Blog” so I could express my appreciation to them. (Perhaps they are still with me in which case saying thank you here should work.:-) Those visits encouraged me to keep going and make this exciting and interesting – albeit at times quite frustrating – activity part of my daily routine. Writing blog entries has definitely pushed me to think about certain issues and ideas in the sort of detail that an occasional random thought would not require of me. It has also helped me meet some wonderful people. Thank you!

It’s Dylan-goes-electric time over at AndrewSullivan.com:

The question I have asked myself in the wake of Abu Ghraib is simply the following: if I knew before the war what I know now, would I still have supported it? I cannot deny that the terrible mismanagement of the post-war – something that no reasonable person can now ignore – has, perhaps fatally, wrecked the mission. But does it make the case for war in retrospect invalid? My tentative answer – and this is a blog, written day by day and hour by hour, not a carefully collected summary of my views – is yes, I still would have supported the war. But only just. And whether the “just” turns into a “no” depends on how we deal with the huge challenge now in front of us….

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.….

By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led – and should lead – to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it.

(emphasis added) He ends with a call to win, I should point out. Nonetheless, when this Administration has lost Sully, they’ve done very badly indeed. More to come.

What kind of America-hating lefty would seize on an isolated incident like this?

Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.

then follow up with this ?

We handcuff her… because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities.

What kind of slippery-slope argument do you think is going to follow?

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Following recommendations from a number of CT readers, I watched Wim Wenders’s beautiful Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) on DVD last night. Ausgezeichnet! (or, maybe, splendid! ). No doubt everyone but me has seen it already, but I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t, so, by way of recommendation, I’ll just say that some lines from Dennis Potter’s final interview came into my head whilst watching it, and have stayed there. Potter, facing death from cancer, spoke thusly:

bq. I can celebrate life. Below my window there’s an apple tree in blossom. It’s white. And looking at it — instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s a nice blossom’ — now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. If you see the present tense — boy, do you see it. And boy, do you celebrate it.

The release of the movie Troy prompts me to wonder again about why certain things are named after the Trojans. Take sports teams, for example, like the USC Trojans. Now, there is just one story cycle involving the Trojans and conflict, and in it the Trojans decisively, utterly lose. I’m not saying they’re losers, per se; I’m always rooting for the Trojans because I love Hector. But imagine a coach giving an inspirational speech along these lines: “Guys, I want to you get out there and fight with all your hearts, only to see all you hold dear destroyed. At the end of this bowl game, I want you to feel like the original Trojans did when the saw their ancestral altar run red with the blood of aged Priam, beheld the pitiful spectacle of little Astyanax’ body broken on the walls of Troy, and heard the lamentations of their daughters, mothers and wives as they were reduced to slavery in a foreign land.” It’s not exactly “win one for the Gipper”, is it?

And then, there are the condoms. What do you think of when you hear the word “Trojan”? Possibly, you think of the heartbreaking scene of farewell between Hector and Andromache, when little Astyanax is frightened by the nodding plumes of Hector’s helmet. But probably not. Probably, you think: Trojan horse. So consider the context. There’s this big…item outside your walled citadel, and you are unsure whether to let it inside. After hearing the pros and cons (and seeing some people eaten by snakes), you open the gates and drag the big old thing inside. Then, you get drunk. At the height of the party, hundreds of little guys come spilling out of the thing and sow destruction, breaking “Troy’s hallowed coronal”, as they say. Is this, all things considered, the ideal story for condom manufacturers to evoke? Just asking.

Recent opinion polls in Australia have shown overwhelming majorities in favour of devoting any additional resources to improvements in public services, particularly health and education, rather than to tax cuts. Discussing these results, Andrew Norton notes that some people may be “giving the socially acceptable answer, rather than what they really want” (see also here)[1]. I think he’s probably right, and I certainly hope so.

The reason I think Norton is probably right is that the majorities are so overwhelming (75-22 in this Nielsen poll and even more in others) that a fair number of people in the majority (people on above-average incomes with below-average needs for services) would almost certainly be worse off in a narrow personal sense. While some of these may be consistently altruistic, others may want to appear altruistic in a poll but might actually prefer the cash. Taking account of these responses would produce a less lopsided majority for services, but still a majority, as is shown by Labor’s electoral dominance at the state level.

The reason I hope he’s right is that it means that social democracy has won the public debate, at least for the moment. After all, if everyone believed that tax cuts would benefit, not merely a subset of high-income earners but the entire community, then the socially acceptable answer would be to support tax cuts. That certainly seemed to be the way things worked during the tax revolt of the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, opposing tax cuts was socially unacceptable. Well into the 1990s, anyone who advocate higher taxes was treated as a heretic (I should know!). Obviously, this has changed, though the political parties have been slower to catch up than the commentariat.

fn1. There are some other issues to do with “status quo bias”. People are more willing to express preferences for change in relation to the allocation of “extra” money than to support a change in the status quo, such as an increase in taxes to fund new services, or a reduction in services to fund tax cuts. But in the terminology of Kahneman and Tversky, this is essentially a quesiton of “framing”.

I’ve just been over to Electrolite, where Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted this stunning excerpt from the New York Times :

bq. … the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

bq. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

The article is full of other examples of routine abuse in US prisons, for example:

bq. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of humiliation. At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl. … [S]ome of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, [where] guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

A few interesting things to link to in today’s papers. In the Guardian David Lodge writes about Nabokov and there’s an interesting account of how Roman Abramovich and the other Russian oligarchs enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people. In the Times Matthew Parris explains that he wants Bush re-elected so that neoconservatives won’t be able to claim that their ideas never got a fair trial. And Simon Kuper in the FT tells us why last week’s football occupies his brain more than other, more serious, matters. So far as I can see there is no common thread that unites these various pieces, except for their readability.

Currently appearing in the Straits Times is one of the least compelling arguments I’ve ever heard. Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing stooges are running candidates in the geographical constituencies in the next election, as well as in the “functional” constituencies, which are decided by a small group of hand-picked voters. As the Straits Times dryly notes, “Pro-democracy candidates tend to sweep directly elected Legco seats [i.e., the geographical constituencies] because they enjoy support from the population.” Oh, that. But Mr. James Tien, chairman of the pro-government Liberal Party, thinks that should change.

Mr Tien said: ‘If the central government sees a willingness among Hong Kong people to vote too for conservative businessmen, it will then have more confidence in the territory and might allow Hong Kong people universal suffrage earlier than is otherwise the case.’

And Mr. Ma Lik, of the reassuringly-named Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong (democratic in the “Democratic Republic of Congo” sense, it seems), agrees: ‘The central government would become more apprehensive about speeding up democratic development in Hong Kong if the democrats won a landslide victory.’

So, Beijing won’t let you vote, because they know you won’t vote the way they want. But, if you vote the way they want, maybe they’ll let you vote again later, and for more things, at which point you can…um…vote the way they want again, or risk the dreaded “instability”. If this is an advertisement for “one country, two systems”, then don’t expect to see Taiwan rushing to sign up.

Shorter :

I really believe that the feminists, and the media, and the gays and the lesbians, academics, the Clintons–all of them who have tried to liberalize America–I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

There’ll be more where this came from, I’m sure.

Paul Krugman has a piece on oil. This is as good a time as any to put up a long post I’ve been working on about oil and whether it’s finally going to run short, points on which I broadly agree with Krugman.

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There’s a fascinating piece in the Economist about the 17-year cicadas that are about to emerge — in “a plague of biblical proportions” — all over the eastern United States, why they (and their 13-year cousins) have prime-numbered life-cycles, how parasites evolve strategies to match, and other cool stuff. Enjoy!