July 26, 2008
In Praise of Farm Trucks
There must be a lot of farm trucks coming into DC. One I like, and which sets up only a few blocks away so extremely convenient for me, is New Morning Farm, from south-central Pennsylvania. If you're in DC but don't know of them I highly recommend them — their prices are slightly higher than Whole Foods, but the produce is much, much better quality. At the moment peaches and tomatoes are particularly good, as are melons. Nothing like a sweet, juicy, flavorful musk melon with a little salt! Also tomato, cucumber and fresh onions (can't have too many onions) chopped up with some chunks of turkey, with blue cheese dressing, makes a wonderful salad.
July 23, 2008
Scratch Edwards Off the VP List
You won't see this in the NYT but occasionally the National Enquirer gets the story. It's not a "the friend of so-and-so's housekeeper says," it's "our reporters were on the scene and this is what they saw." And what they saw was Edwards sneaking late at night into a hotel where he wasn't registered and sneaking out early the next morning. Otherwise, the Enquirer's account about Edwards meeting his mistress and love-child seem based on supposition. Interesting supposition, but still. Whatever the truth about this — and I have no doubt that Edwards was observed by reporters entering and leaving the hotel — it completely blows Edwards' chances of being VP out of the water. (Also picked up by Wonkette and Gawker.)
July 18, 2008
Poverty, Wealth, Power
Having granted corporations legal personhood, thereby fuzzing up our notions of accountability, we seem to have trouble talking sensibly about rich people's influence on politics. It's "money in politics," a generic notion, that everybody agrees needs to be controlled. Nobody, or almost nobody, talks about controlling the rich. But money doesn't have a mind of its own. If you think about it carefully, it's rich people who need to be controlled and — if you're willing to suspend certain of the most common assumptions of our culture — the problem in its simplest form is whether it makes sense for society to permit an effectively unlimited acquisition of wealth or instead to impose boundaries.
July 15, 2008
Energy Canoodlers
Proving that American politics is broken Democrats in Congress wish to take advantage of high gasoline prices to strike back at... oil futures traders. Only the Democrats' bumbling over detail prevents them from drawing up a bill for debate. Had they one to vote on they would. Instead, the intelligent thing to do would be to propose a new (potential) tax on oil: if prices go below where they are now the tax kicks in. Even if prices don't fall, and they probably won't, such a tax would help foster investments in alternatives. If proposing such a tax were politically impossible, and it is, the next best thing would be to put together a sensible package of incentives for alternatives, including revised and much higher CAFE standards. Beyond such constructive actions there's a very easy thing that Congress could do but which by not doing tells us their intentions are not serious. They could demand to know how much oil is left in Saudi Arabia.
July 14, 2008
Caveman Talk
Those ads may have more truth to them than anybody thought. In a fine argument several paleoanthropologists suggest that some form of speech in early humans may have developed half a million years ago — in contrast to conventional wisdom which has speech emerging suddenly only about fifty thousand years ago, more or less contemporaneously with the development of modern man. The more ancient date intuitively makes more sense if one is willing to ascribe communication skills to other animals, leaving, indeed, quite lengthy evolutionary branches.
July 6, 2008
The Ugly American
Sometimes living in the U.S. feels like living in the third world. Take, for example, this statistic: 20% of adult Americans think the sun rotates around the earth. When I first saw this mentioned (but not sourced) in a NYT op-ed recently I couldn't believe it. I mean, I know they have fact-checkers at the Times and all, but still, how could it be?? So I looked around and found two sources. One, reported a couple years ago in the Times finds the errant crowd more numerous; another, reported recently in a National Science Foundation survey, confirms the 20% figure. And according to that survey only 55% know how long it takes for the earth to orbit the sun. C'mon now. I want to feel sorry for these people but, to be honest, I have trouble imagining myself talking to them.
Post-Constitutional Realities
Two essays on FISA are worth a look. Glenn Greenwald has one of his typically well-argued, somewhat wordy dissections of how administration practice is illegal. (Parenthetically, I would suggest — from my experience dealing with her — that his criticism of Nancy Soderberg does not unfairly single her out: when Soderberg takes time to argue for trashing the law she reflects at least one strain of high level Democratic establishment thinking.) Greenwald briefly mentions the real problem in passing, but Julian Sanchez hits the nail on the head. We don't want FISA loosening because we don't want government's broad surveillance powers used for political reasons. As it has been, always, in the past. Taking a page from Sanchez it makes much more sense to argue the pragmatical problem than the ethereal Constitutional limits, particularly in a de facto post-Constitutional era.
July 3, 2008
Is It Clobberin' Time Yet?
Last year I felt worried that something might be in the works re Iran. This year things feel to me very much off the hair trigger. The most recent slew of rumors seems unfounded. Public advocates of an attack on Iran can indulge their psychotic ravings but what all that amounts to, it seems to me, is the laying down of markers for whoever gets elected in November, not some call to arms for an imminent new war.
July 1, 2008
July EP Podcast Schedule
First up in July, on the fourth, is Philippe Sands, talking about his new book Torture Team
