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March 29, 2005

Synonym Land

 by Jeremy

A friend of ours (as in Cara's friend and mine; I'm not playing around with the editorial 'we') after visiting England for a month started referring to that country as 'synonym land.' It seems they have a different word for a lot of things. Which is fine. But sometimes it looks like they're just doing it out of spite.

When I went with my family to London in 1980 I remember seeing signs warning against letting your dog 'fowl the footway.' And apparently Yield signs over there say something like 'mind the cleavage' (OK, I made that up. But only because I couldn't remember the actual phrase, which was almost as creative a way to be conspicuously different. Maybe a British reader will remind me).

But the point is that we Americans shouldn't be incorporating their fancy talk into our journalism. It would be better for our self esteem to remind ourselves that they can sound just as illiterate we can, innit.

When Cara and I were in England in 1995 I remember reading an article in the London Times about a band of 'Yobs' who attacked an man on the street for no apparent reason. There was no explanation as to what a 'Yob' might be but I concluded, from the context of the article, that we were talking about a band of something like bobcats.

So, yes, let's use their educated-sounding, upper middle class phrases. But let's not forget the more colorful working class ones too('Saudis Gobsmacked by Bush Ultimatum')

But at the end of the day, there's this.

One more thing: here are a few paragraphs of a New York Times article translated into 'Brummie', as spoken in Birmingham, England:

a federal judge fined a british tobacco company $250,000 on mondoy for "egregious lack of candor" in violaten an earlier order in the justice department's lawsuit anent the cigarette industry.

the fine, imposed by the judge, gladys kessler of federal district court, grows ert of the efforts of the company, british american tobacco, ter keep a potentially damagen memorandum ert of the racketeeren trial of cigarette manufacturers.

the company acknowledged lus month that it 'ad falsely claimed that an executiv' was able ter answer questions frum government lawyers abart parts of the memorandum that 'ad miskin publicly revealed, judge kessler said. the judge 'ad earlier ordered the company ter mek available an executiv' who cud terk abart the memorandum.

Posted by Jeremy at 08:10 AM | Comments (3)

March 22, 2005

Feeding Tubes are Not the Issue

 by Jeremy

I hadn't previously expected to blog on the Terry Shiavo situation, but it's getting so heated up that I find myself getting emotionally involved in the debate.

I admit to not having read much thus far about the case, so I'm speaking here more about the public debate rather than the actual person and her medical situation.

But there seems to be this notion that a feeding tube is in itself some kind of extraordinary life support measure and that removing it can be considered removing someone from life support. I think this is an emotional reaction. No one would want to live that way, perhaps, but if you had to you'd adapt to it better than you think.

I have a very mild case of gastroparesis compared to the people I'm going to refer to, but there's an online support group I've accessed in the past in which there are people with very severe case of this digestive disorder. Many of them live on various kinds of feeding tubes. Here's what a person on a feeding tube sounds like:

Hi everyone, I am confused when tubes are mentioned to which is what.

OK, NG Tube (naso gastric) I understand as what I put up my nos and
into my stomach. I had what was called a PEG Tube but I don't hear
that mentioned on the site. It was a tube direct into my stomach, I was told instead of a J Tube that would have gone into the jejunum
(bowel bit) because my bowel is limp and/or spastic.

So what is a NJ Tube?

...or have I got the whole lot wrong? Sorry to take time, hope everyone is having troubeless tums, regards and thankyou.

And I remember a different woman, who said she was a very athletic person, asking the group whether anyone had tried jogging with a feeding tube.

My point is just that these aren't people who would want to die simply because they're on feeding tubes. So let's drop the feeding tube out of the equation. That's not Terry Shiavo's problem. Her problem is that she (as I understand the facts) is in a permanent vegetative state.

Removing her feeding tube is not a right to die issue as much as a euthanasia issue. It may very well have been her wish to be euthanized in such a case and it may very well be a compassionate thing to do. But if they're going to do it, they should do it quickly and humanely. Removing her tube is not the way to do it.

Nevertheless, the state court decided this was allowable. The only basis on which I can understand federal intrusion into this is if a federal body of one sort or another wants to rule that there has been a violation of her civil rights on the basis of some mismanagement of state law. And maybe what is going on is some version of that.

Of course the whole thing is getting muddled by the fact that it's also a pet cause for religious Right. But it's foolish to take that into account when forming an opinion on this sort of issue. And it seems to me there's a good case for saying that in the absence of a living will there should be the maximum amount of judicial review possible, including federal, before a person is euthanized.

But my main point is this: be careful before you tell people or write in a living will that you'd rather die than live on a feeding tube, because that is almost certainly not how you'd feel if you ever found yourself in that predicament.

Posted by Jeremy at 10:00 AM | Comments (2)

March 19, 2005

"Something Radical Has Happened"

 by Cara

So?the Left begins to search for its soul, eh?

In a way I'm shocked that this has started so soon after the fashionable lefty "Bush=Hitler" meme, but in another way I'm infinitely depressed that this process didn?t start two years ago. And again I'm hesitant at how far it will go. I'm not getting my hopes up yet. The Left has continually demonstrated a preference for sweeping their blind spots, once they?ve become finally visible, under the rug of denial, over a straightforward look at the truth, owning up, and making adjustments respectively through honest self-reflection.

Roger Simon points to Charles Krauthammer, who once again articulates all this beautifully, and it bears repeating some key bits (emphasis mine):

When a Le Monde editorial titled "Arab Spring" acknowledges "the merit of George W. Bush," when the cover headline of London's The Independent is "Was Bush Right After All?" and when a column in Der Spiegel asks "Could George W. Bush Be Right?" you know that something radical has happened.

The left's patronizing, quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.

And, also, thank you Charles!

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Cara at 02:17 PM | Comments (1)

March 17, 2005

Welcome to the Bizarro World

 by Jeremy

I honesty, truly thought this was a joke. I was so convinced of it, in fact, that I was depressed over my inability to come up with anything quite so wickedly funny for my "Fair Use Friday" series. But this, friends, is real:

(CNSNews.com) - Almost two weeks after saying that former KKK member, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) would have been a great senator and leader even during the Civil War, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) has apologized.

Dodd said Wednesday he is sorry if anyone was offended by his comments during the April 1 tribute of Byrd after the West Virginia senator cast his 17,000th vote.

"Words can sting and hurt," Dodd told The Associated Press Wednesday. "If in any way, in my referencing the Civil War, I offended anyone, I apologize."

Senator Byrd, who happens to reside at the bottom of the barrel, has been getting a lot of apologies from American 'liberals' for his recent remarks in which he compared Republican talk of rescinding the filibuster to the political tactics of Adolf Hitler. He has, in fact, been praised by liberals over the years for being a vocal opponent of president Bush. I know this has been commented on a great deal but I have to chime in on this because it has been driving me crazy.

Is this guy the best the American Left can come up with for passionately outspoken moral leader [emphasis mine]:

Mr. Byrd told Fox News that "There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time, if you want to use that word. But we all -- we all -- we just need to work together to make our country a better country and I -- I'd just as soon quit talking about it so much."

Mr. Byrd quickly apologized, but he wasn't denounced by Democrats, much less by the Clintons. Nor did the press corps use the opportunity to wallow in other Byrd racial lowlights, such as the 14 hours and 13 minutes he spent in an unsuccessful filibuster during the debate over the 1964 civil rights act, which he voted against along with 20 other Senate Democrats. The political press also didn't dredge up his votes against both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, votes that made him the only Senator to have opposed the only two black Supreme Court nominees in U.S. history.

At the time of his "white nigger" remarks last year, no national papers bothered to mention two letters that the Senator had distanced himself from, Clinton-style, by saying he didn't recall writing them, though he also didn't dispute them. The New York Times reported in 1971 on a letter Mr. Byrd wrote in 1946, after leaving the Klan. Writing to the Klan's Imperial Wizard, Mr. Byrd identified himself as a former Kleagle and recommended a person to serve as state Klan coordinator. He wrote, "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia...It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibilities of rebuilding the Klan realm of W. Va?"

And in a 1947 letter, after Mr. Byrd had been elected to the state senate, he wrote that he would "never submit to fight beneath that banner (the American flag) with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

'OK', I hear some of you saying, 'so he said or wrote one or two or three or four or five bad things...'

He does like that filibuster, doesn't he?

So anyway it's hilarious that Senator Dodd apologizes for the possibility that he hurt people's feelings by happening to mention the Civil War. But it's funnier still that he ads this explanation:

Dodd said he was not thinking about Byrd's Klan membership or his vote against the Civil Rights Act when he made his comments.

The lack of backlash over this is in stark contrast to the (warranted) outrage that Trent Lott generated not long ago in that amazingly similar incident concerning Strom Thurmond.

(The kind of unearned swagger of moral superiority implied in all this, by the way, is why the Democrats are not in the White House, for those of you still keeping track.)

Also by way of contrast is this bit of crazily backward logic from the Guardian in a piece explaining why it would be very bad if Paul Wolfowitz were to be made president of the World Bank (via Norm):

Some worry that his strong emphasis on human rights may complicate relations with China.

And perhaps most insane of all is the likelihood that most of my friends and family would read this post as a conservative screed. Please beam me up now.

Oh, by the way: what's a good term for the amazing scarcity of news stories recounting Byrd's racist past and the Dodd/Byrd faux pas? I think this is what you'd call a "press pass."

Posted by Jeremy at 05:55 PM | Comments (1)

March 15, 2005

New Pro-Bush Demographic?

 by Cara

It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right. - Youseff Ibrahim

These folks all wonder if George W. Bush is becoming, as Glenn puts it, a ?hero of the Arab street?, as Lebanese protest banners quote W. himself.

James Taranto of Opinion Journal links to Nicholas Blanford?s Christian Science Monitor article in USA Today and quotes the AP from Beirut:

Hundreds of thousands of opposition demonstrators chanted "Freedom, sovereignty, independence" and unfurled a huge Lebanese flag in Beirut on Monday, the biggest protest yet in the opposition's duel of street rallies with supporters of the Damascus-backed government. . . .

"Syria out, no half measures", read a banner, borrowing from President Bush's description of Damascus' gradual withdrawal from this country of 3.5 million.

James continues:

That's right, they're quoting President Bush, the simian-American unilateralist cowboy! And they're not alone. In a Washington Post essay, Youssef Ibrahim, formerly a reporter for the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and now a Dubai-based consultant, says that throughout the Arab world are coming "murmurs of approval for the devoutly Christian U.S. president, whose persistent calls for democracy in the Middle East are looking less like preaching and more like timely encouragement":

"His talk about democracy is good," an Egyptian-born woman was telling companions at the Fatafeet (or "Crumbs") restaurant the other night, exuberant enough for her voice to carry to neighboring tables. "He keeps hitting this nail. That's good, by God, isn't it?" At another table, a Lebanese man was waxing enthusiastic over Bush's blunt and irreverent manner toward Arab autocrats. "It is good to light a fire under their feet," he said.

From Casablanca to Kuwait City, the writings of newspaper columnists and the chatter of pundits on Arabic language satellite television suggest a change in climate for advocates of human rights, constitutional reforms, business transparency, women's rights and limits on power. And while developments differ vastly from country to country, their common feature is a lifting--albeit a tentative one--of the fear that has for decades constricted the Arab mind.

Regardless of Bush's intentions--which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion--the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills.

Posted by Cara at 08:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2005

Too Late to Shut Them Up

 by Jeremy

That official pro Syria demonstration last week has not only failed to silence the popular anti-Baathist occupation movement in Lebanon, it sure seems to have spurred it on:

More than 500,000 protesters in Beirut rallied against Syria Monday, far outnumbering last week's demonstration organized by Hizbullah that drew Syrian supporters.

It may have been closer to 800,000:

There were no official estimates of the crowd size, but an Associated Press estimate put it at around 800,000 before the protest formally started, making it the biggest demonstration ever seen in the nation of 3.5 million.

This week of demonstration, canned counter demonstration, etc. reminded me of a cartoon by the amazing Argentinean cartoonist, Quino...Hmm, I can't find my Quino book. The cartoon I had in mind depicted two crowds of demonstrators in a public square. One group held a large sign bearing the image of a mouth in the act of shouting. The other -- more nicely dressed -- group of protestors held a large sign showing the image of a closed mouth with a shushing finger held to its lips.

I'm not sure Quino would agree with me regarding the course of world events today, but his work speaks for itself. I'll post the image if I can find it.

Posted by Jeremy at 10:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2005

I'm Back Now

 by Jeremy

My apologies to those of you who have clicked over to find the tumbleweeds and dust bunnies rolling through this homepage. I've been in a bit of a zone of lethargy (tune in next week for more exciting adventures in the subtly evolving minutiae of our heroes' collective journey toward self actualization in another episode of...Zone of Lethargy).

It's a Winter thing, it's the bad cold I'm getting over, etc., etc.

But also this: if, rather than merely contemplating my navel in the comfort of my arm chair, I am going to maintain a blog that is what the French would call "engag?" then I am going to have to spend some time every now and then in active participation in the carnival of life around me. How can one write when one has not interrogated one's universe, when one has not bent one's back in the collective struggle, when one has not put one's chisel to the raw marble of one's environment?

I'll give you an example. Yesterday I was smoking a cigar (a Padron "Fuma") and almost immediately upon lighting it with my pig lighter (it's pink, has a rubbery, sow's ear texture, and two flames emerge from its nostrils, which I shouldn't have to tell you is a perfect arrangement for lighting a cigar) I dropped the cigar in the deep snow. It was not the very best cigar in the humidor but much too good to let get away so easily. So I fished it out of the snow, brushed it off and popped it back in my mouth expecting to have to relight it.

But I didn't have to relight it. In fact -- and this is where it gets scientifically interesting -- it was suddenly burning much hotter than it had been just a few seconds earlier, much hotter than that particular brand of cigar had ever burned before. The smoke was unpleasantly acrid and it nearly burned my tongue as I drew it into my mouth.

The question was, how could dropping a cigar in the snow make it burn hotter than before? If you want to work out the answer for yourself then don't read the next paragraph just yet. I'll just say that it only took me until the next puff to realize in a flash how this was possible.

Your next hint is that I am a freakish moron who should probably have twenty four hour supervision. Guessed it yet? Yes, I had put the lit end in my mouth.

Anyway, I've been living. For God's sake, I've been living. And now that I have returned, I can expect to have something to say to the world that might be worth the hearing (starting, I guess, after this post).

Plus, I'll have another waiting dog a bit later this evening.

Posted by Jeremy at 01:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 08, 2005

I'm Still Here

 by Jeremy

I guess this has been an unscheduled blogging break. I will be back on the job within the next day or two. And I'll do my best to make that snow sculpture scroll down the page a bit.

See you soon.

Posted by Jeremy at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 06, 2005

No Dog Today

 by Jeremy

It's tough to find waiting dogs in the Winter. So, though I actually think Winter deserves more respect than this, I give you the following picture I found on the web somewhere:

Note: I cleared this with Mother Nature before posting. She shrugged, which I took to be a full endorsement.

Posted by Jeremy at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 04, 2005

I Feel Safer Already

 by Jeremy

Putin Contracts for Dismantling of Nukes

By JEREMY BROWN
Published: March 4, 2005

During talks with President George W. Bush concerning the security of Russia's arsenal of nuclear materials, Vladimir Putin declared that the Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) purchase agreement which, under former president Clinton sought to provide financial incentive for the former Soviet Union to convert its HEU stockpile to nuclear fuel for sale to the United States, has been revived.

Far from having floundered, Putin assured the President, the program has been expanded considerably, with contracts now extended to numerous other nations in addition to the United States.

"And it's easier for us now," Putin said at a February 25th press conference, "because we don't have to bother to convert the stuff beforehand. We let the countries securing the material do the conversion themselves." Nations now assisting in the decommissioning of HEU and other nuclear materials -- now to include reactors and warheads -- will include Syria and Iran, Putin said.

* * * To see the previous posts in this series click here.

Posted by Jeremy at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 02, 2005

I Wish You Woulda Been Here

 by Jeremy

Did you ever get a long voicemail message that just droned on and you wondered whether it would be OK to just skip over it? Me too. Sometimes, though, those long messages have an epic scope, approaching the dimensions of classical tragedy. Consider this description of that unique narrative device, the Greek chorus [emphasis mine]:

The Greek chorus continued to play an important role in classical Greek drama, especially in tragedy. Ranging in number from 50 in the time of Thespis to 15 in later classical Greek drama, the chorus consisted of Athenian citizens and were not professional actors. They function, scholars have suggested variously, to offer a sense of rich spectacle to the drama; to provide time for scene changes and give the principle actors a break; to offer important background and summary information that facilitates an audience's ability to follow the live performance; to offer commentary about and underline main themes animating the action; and to model an ideal audiences response to the unfolding drama.

Nietzsche suggests that it was the rhythmic dance and chants of the chorus, positioned always to mediate the physical space separating audience and actor, that evoked the visionary experience that was the very essence of tragedy.

Ever receive a voicemail message like that? Me neither. But somebody named Mark did (Hat tip: Baldilocks).

Posted by Jeremy at 09:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack