e.g. #3

2011-10-12T11:12:00.001-04:00

2011-08-29T02:57:00.002-04:00

Beach Rumble from New Picture Agencies on Vimeo.

2011-07-28T14:35:00.005-04:00

Obama, along with the Congressional Democrats, should just jump off the nearest tall building en masse, right now. It will end the agony for those who thought they voted in 2008 for Hope and Change, and who knows, probably ease their own suffering as well. Since the question in Washington has clearly degenerated into: who can ruin the country sooner, the Democrats should at least out-play the Republicans for once: if you can't, or won't beat them in politics, at least try to beat them in something — crazed mass suicide, for example.

But that is probably too much to ask. We all know the Democratic Party is the party of Losers that Lose. Losing is what they do best: when they win, they lose; when they lose, they will only lose in the shabbiest, most loser-ly way they can.

2011-07-28T00:24:00.003-04:00

Yay, the PCRs that were working, and then suddenly stopped working, are now working again! Such are the voodoo witchcrafts of Molecular Biology... As far as sciences go, Physics is so much, so much better.

2011-07-10T06:09:00.012-04:00

(Buster Keaton)

I find this such a striking and pathetic portrait — perhaps because I just read this?

2011-06-23T22:21:00.003-04:00

Wildlife sightings: skunk (just up the street, almost walked into it), red-tailed hawk (Harvard campus, being mobbed by a flock of starlings), a small weasel (Fresh Pond, thought it was a squirrel at first), and today a young buck deer along the commuter rail.

2011-05-09T23:27:00.001-04:00

2011-04-14T00:06:00.001-04:00

Fool me once

2011-03-12T12:02:00.011-05:00

At this point, I can't see an image of Barack Obama, or hear his voice, without an almost physical revulsion. Since his election, joy has turned to puzzlement, to concern, to frustration, to anger, and as of now my sentiments is about an equal mixture of despair, shame, and contempt. The latest contributions to this process are his pathetic sophistry regarding the shocking treatment of Bradley Manning, and his crouching passivity, masquerading as sophistication and nuance, as he prepares to all but completely abandon Libya to slaughter.

It is more or less completely clear now that this man is a pure transactionalist, who is largely unmoored from a moral or policy center, whose interest is in winning as much as possible with the least risk. Never mind what is the substance of such victories, of course, so long as he can burnish himself with them. Obama would call this "pragmatism"; what it means in reality is giving up challenging the existing condition even before joining the battle.

I wonder now what made me support him so ardently during the last election. I conclude that it was largely for tribal reasons rooted in sentiment; after all his policy differences with Clinton was small, and I would have supported any Democrat against Palin & McCain. Obama's personal charisma and rhetorical powers are undeniable, but I think I supported him largely because I thought we were in the same tribe: liberal academic types who value intellectual rigor and sophistication, and read the New York Review of Books. Obama may still read the NYRB, I don't know, although it has been pretty hard on him.

It says something about modern political campaigns that even after a long and grueling primary, all I had to really go on were these sentiments. It also says even someone who fancies himself to be too sophisticated, too grand, to be confined to mere tribes, can nevertheless be easily fooled by such tribal feelings.

Well, I have certainly learned my lesson: Paul Krugman is always right. Obama doesn't deserve to hold the office of Washington and Lincoln; he certainly doesn't deserve to be reelected. I hope never to be so fooled, and so fool myself, again.

Wherein I am ahead of the curve (yet again)

2011-03-10T08:33:00.003-05:00

I would just like to let you know that I've been on top of this "trend" since, oh, about mid-2003. Not that it make me that much more awesome, you know (although it does).

2011-02-21T18:06:00.005-05:00

Al Jazeera's live blog and live broadcast on the popular uprising in Libya.

2011-02-19T20:10:00.002-05:00

The car thawed out, and more importantly, it starts. This led to a celebratory excursion to Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for among other things: coffee, toffee, rapini, and a couple of duck legs (to make confit).

2011-02-07T09:05:00.002-05:00

Pizza topped with broccoli and lemon zest.

2011-02-04T05:49:00.006-05:00

2011-02-03T11:42:00.008-05:00

Yet another sign that I am throughly disillusioned with Obama: I don't trust him to do the right thing with respect to events in Egypt. While the US still has the ability to influence the situation in a positive way, I don't expect he will do beyond making the minimal noises such as "the future of Egypt is the choice of the Egyptian people", as if there is still the possibility that the Egyptian people will freely choose to keep the Mubarak regime. A clear stand, and/or any concrete action is clearly out of the question because that won't be "pragmatic". In the event of a bloody crack-down, I'm sure Obama will make the usual condemnations, and of course there will be sanctions. But fundamentally breaking relations with the Mubarak regime, who is after all a "crucial ally in the volatile Middle East" wouldn't be "realistic"; what to do then but to disapprove and secretly hoping everything blow over soon. The dead will be forgotten, and the imprisoned still languishes, but hopefully the pragmatic, reality-based US-Egyptian strategic relations will resume its usual course after with only a brief interruption. Maybe I will be wrong, I sure hope so, but things have followed this script so far.

What a pitiful little man this Barack Obama is turning out to be.

2011-02-02T01:46:00.007-05:00

Martha's B-Day 10-09-1985 from New Picture Agencies on Vimeo.

This is awesome.

Statistics

2011-01-28T16:00:00.003-05:00

For the past two months, my guess:

Average number of dinners cooked per week: 2
Average number of dinners eaten out per week: 2
Average number of dinners consisting of toast/Cliff bars: 2

I don't know what happens on the leftover day — leftovers?

2011-01-18T11:18:00.010-05:00

What a physicist wouldn't give to be a fly-on-the-wall there....

2011-01-15T17:53:00.001-05:00

Some days I just don't feel like working...

2011-01-14T20:34:00.006-05:00

What I have been listening more or less non-stop for the last month or so....

2011-01-13T20:30:00.040-05:00

(Noah Vaughn)

And the day after the great snow storm: the sun shone and the sky was blue. In Chicago, such days were also the days when winter was at its sharpest, clear as broken glass. Wool socks on your feet, hands in your pockets, but insulated inside that heavy coat your body still feels an electrical hum, and every breath stings a bit. But that's fine: you are alive, you feel everything, the day is brightly lit, the sky is bluer than you think is possible in real life, it's beautiful.

Today though, here, was warm enough to regret wearing that heavy sweater. The snow has begun to melt into thick, grey pools. One ought to be grateful, but I miss the sudden icy gust that shut your eyes because it hurts, and the ringing sound it leaves in my ear.

My beautiful brown overcoat, it hangs in the closet, unworn for another winter.

2011-01-12T13:23:00.008-05:00

What happens when you look for the new Chinese stealth fighter on radar?

"404: Object not found." (Not funny? Click here.)

A new year, a new blog

2011-01-11T06:37:00.000-05:00

I have started a photo blog, e.g. #4 (naturally). We will see how long that lasts...

Good morning

2010-12-12T11:49:00.011-05:00

2010-11-21T20:49:00.003-05:00

Of course here in the US we have unsustainable levels of public debt: so better shape up & cut the deficit, or pretty soon we will go bankrupt like the Greeks & the Irish! Except of course, at 68.5% percentage of GDP, the US debt is smaller than that of Germany, that exemplar of fiscal rectitude, and smaller in fact than that of Austria!

And what would the professed lovers of liberty and Austrian economics have to say about this?

2010-11-18T16:30:00.003-05:00

If you think the politics of this country are screwed-up, just a friendly reminder that it could always be much, much worse.

Urgh, I have got to stop reading the news.

2010-11-11T16:59:00.005-05:00

I am starting to feel bad for Obama (just a little). I wonder what it does to a man to turn from the object of so much adulation to being so throughly disliked, all in so brief span of time. The liberals are disillusioned, the "moderates" have lost interest, and the conservatives haven't been appeased one bit, no matter how timid Mr. President has been.

Of course then I read this:

That appears to be the only way, said David Axelrod, that middle-class taxpayers can keep their tax cuts... "We have to deal with the world as we find it," Axelrod said... "The world of what it takes to get this done."

I suppose it is only pragmatic, but it is the pragmatism of the defeated. Doesn't Obama & co. know that "Change we can believe in" is not merely the conservation and/or accommodation of the status quo?

How does Obama expect people to fight for him and his agenda, when he won't even fight for them himself?

2010-11-04T08:13:00.004-04:00

Every time I read another political obituary for Russ Feingold, I feel the intense desire to sock Barack Obama in the face. What a bloody, bloody waste that someone as principles and courageous as Feingold had to pay for Obama's political cowardice, equivocation, and incompetence. It's not worth it, it's just not worth it.

那天这样了, 那天咱国庆

2010-09-30T19:36:00.004-04:00

2010-09-21T06:36:00.003-04:00

Normally, it takes considerable inbreeding to develop this much upper-class (top 1%, in fact) twit-ishness, but apparently in America, it can develop spontaneously in as little as three generations. I wonder what is in the water...

Sign of the times

2010-09-05T15:19:00.001-04:00

"Obama = Bush", painted on the underpass connecting Trader Joe's and Whole Foods.

I like Chinese too

2010-01-28T21:36:00.001-05:00

OK, I've bad-mouthed China often enough... Now for something completely different:

TWTOTB

2010-01-17T01:10:00.014-05:00

So, while having dinner with Tim & Erika, it was brought up that politics in this country is more or less a diverting past-time without much consequence. In the sense that unless I flame out of academia, whether the health care reform passes, or whether a second stimulus is enacted, or whether financial regulatory reform is enacted, &c., all that is fairly immaterial to me. I hope, with effort & good luck, to land a job with good benefits, job security, and a comfortably middle-class income. And if the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan drags on and on... well, I am sure I am paying a couple of dollars for it every month, but it is hardly onerous. I worry about climate change, but then I am not a farmer whose livelihood may be ruined by it. That I feel strongly about this and that has almost nothing to do with self-interest. Largely, it is only because certain things violate my sense of The Way Things Ought To Be (TWTOTB); but then plenty of things violate that, e.g. fusion cooking, track suits, street layouts in Boston, &c. We mutter under our breath and then we move on.

In this sense politics is rather like professional sports. People get worked-up about teams whose performance is essentially inconsequential to the livelihood & material well-being of most fans, largely on certain notions of TWTOTB. For example, how is it reasonable that a green little team like Tampa Bay ended up winning the World Series when the Cubs have been trying, & failing, for over a century? [Really, I don't care.] Switching sports for a moment, after Michael Jordan retired, the regular refrain in Chicago through the subsequent losing seasons was always: where is the next Michael Jordan? Obama looked like the next Michael Jordan, except that, looking at how things are going, he probably isn't. And the rest of the team still sucks anyway. But so what?

[Of course one could be so unfortunate as to be living in a place like China, where politics can have real consequences. Even if you steer clear of anything remotely dangerous, you may still find that one day, you can no longer log onto Google. But good for you & me, we don't. (Blogger is blocked in China.)]

...

Right, I am not in Chicago anymore. Boston is a fine city, and I heartily approve of the Big Dig (and of removing elevated expressways from urban centers generally), but it feels a bit flat; it lacks grandeur (& Cambridge is just a smug little village). Chicago will always be the first city for me.

此仇不报，不共戴天

2009-10-24T07:02:00.006-04:00

2009-10-24T05:31:00.005-04:00

While writing my paper, and it is a good paper on which I am making good progress, a strange thought came into my head: "This work lacks grandeur." Lacks grandeur? Lacks grandeur?! Well, life in general lacks grandeur. I thought I had grown out of this nonsense a long time ago.

这戏该收场了！

2009-10-05T22:17:00.005-04:00

Please, that is more than enough.

2009-09-03T09:31:00.004-04:00

As the final touches were being put to the thesis, as an encouragement, I have rewarded myself with two pairs of corduroy pants cut in a narrow-legged trouser style that I like. One pair in brown, one pair in black, of course. I look forward to receiving them with more anticipation than is perhaps respectable. That's fine.

Urbs in horto

2009-09-01T21:40:00.019-04:00

The Plan of Chicago, as concieved by Daniel Burnham one hundred years ago

The City of Chicago

Chicago did not become quite what Burnham had envisioned in ink and paper — but it did transform into a great City whose concreteness has in many ways come to equal that visionary grandeur.

2009-06-04T19:42:00.010-04:00

2009-06-03T14:10:00.020-04:00

2009-02-08T22:55:00.003-05:00

2008-12-19T20:32:00.002-05:00

The mean life-time of a 4 oz. bag of Kettle Brand salt & pepper potato chips: kept on the kitchen counter, 2 days; kept in a drawer, about a week.

Yet more proof [some] people aren't all that different from goldfish.

2008-12-16T21:20:00.006-05:00

This shoe-throwing thing really makes me feels bad for Bush, sort of. Not because shoes were thrown at him, but that there was so very little outrage. Here was the President of the United States, his country's face to the world, being publicly insulted to his face. The public response at home? "Eh, he deserved it." It must really really suck to be so throughly disliked.

2008-11-05T03:29:00.000-05:00

Finally finally finally — the Good Guys won.

Style vs. Substance

2008-01-20T04:17:00.000-05:00

What is that I dislike most about the Clintons? The rank hypocrisy? The grandiose sense of entitlement? The brittle pettiness? The shameless self-promotion? The calculating cynicism? The pandering and sweaty-palm glad-handing? The barely disguised contempt for the intelligence of their audience?

It is a matter of style vs. substance — indeed the essential question in my mind is not about substance at all. The substantive difference between all the democratic candidates are minimal. To suggest, as Clinton does, that Obama is somehow anti-choice, or anti-labor, or anti-medicare is simply disingenuous. It is perfectly reasonable there should be differences in particulars even if there is agreement in general. Such points should be discussed, but not on postcards and in sound-bites. But if this is turned into a mere a game of political point-scoring, aiming to embarrass one's opponent and Rah-Rah the own camp, as Clinton tried to do regarding Obama's Reagan remarks — then by what right can the political class expect the people no to dismiss them as mere players, and the political process as a corrupt sport?

How can a broad contempt for the political process and political actors bode well for the machinery of democratic self-government? This is the essential problem with the Clintons' style of politics. The circumstances surrounding every important political consideration — war, peace, justice, economics, welfare — are enormously complicated. It is perfectly possible for two moral, reasonable persons to come to two opposing views regarding many issues. It is important to recognize the existence of such complications, and recognize opposition to our principled views do not mean our opponent is evil, heartless, unpatriotic, foolish, &c. Yet it seems the Clintons' approach to politics is exactly the denial of such complication, to distill such complications into a set of actuarial tables which will score them the most points and propel them to ever great political success. If the Athenians took politics as the great moral duty of a proper citizen, the Clintons seemed to have took it on as an thrilling game, with fantastic prizes, played against enemies at once basely motivated and dangerous, with votes as points to be won, traded-off, or neutralized. Bill Clinton certainly enjoyed being President and I'm sure Hillary would too. Of course what is exciting & great for the players is not necessarily so for the spectators. If the politics is played like a game, then we cannot take its as other than a circus; if every political discourse turns into an attack on the moral quality of our enemies, then we can only conclude all politicians are equally contemptible.

I don't want to single out the Clintons here, since Bush, Cheney, &c., have been successfully playing this very dirty game. The point is Hilary Clinton clearly do not understand what changes there must be, if she thinks "change" means playing the game with a center-left agenda of policy items instead. Really, the substance of the policy is besides the point here. Even the best player must one day exit the game. But the Republic will still stand long after the president is gone, and what is needed is something more enduring. The Clintons are very good at what is that they do, but theirs is an experience this country can ill-afford to experience again.

What the candidates are seeking is the office once held by Washington and Lincoln. They cannot hope to ever become so great, but they must all strive to be worthy.

2007-10-12T17:14:00.001-04:00

A while back Hillary Clinton co-sponsored a bill, the "Flag Protection Act of 2005", which declares its purpose is "to provide the maximum protection against the use of the flag of the United States to promote violence while respecting the liberties that it symbolizes." The bill is rather narrowly written: prohibiting (1) flag burning in order to incite violence, and (2) burning a flag owned by the US government, or another person, on federal land. I would think in either case, existing laws already penalizes the actions described, and so this bill is both meaningless and redundant. Of course Clinton knows all this; that she manages to put her name on such a bill, apparently without embarassment, is a sign of how the chronic practice of politics corrupts those ideals which had motivated the political action in the first place. Or perhaps it is a transparent (and transparently inept) act of political cynicism. Or perhaps it is both.

Obama, of course, got harangued by right-wingers when he stopped wearing a flag lapel pin. Characteristically, it was the youngest, least experienced candidate who, impoliticly, questions the need to wear a fig leaf when one is not in the nude. I suspect a younger Hillary Clinton would have done the same. I wonder how the 23 year old Hillary Rodham might have felt, had she known what will become of her.

2007-09-02T15:33:00.000-04:00

Turns out my advisor Sidney Nagel & Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, Bach, knew each other as kids. Sid is the son of Ernest Nagel, the famous philosopher of science, who was friends with Robert Hofstadter, physics Nobelist and father of Douglas. Greg Huber, a former post-doc here whom I knew, & who also works on soap, had Douglas Hofstadter as an advisor & was involved in the invention of the ambigram.

Which is just to say what a small tribe we in the sciences are.

Let's go!

2007-08-17T12:53:00.001-04:00

Come hither

2007-08-15T20:46:00.001-04:00

2007-08-11T19:26:00.000-04:00

The 16-pack of toilet paper (Cottonelle) came in 8 plastic-wrapped 2-pack mini packages. An absurd square footage of plastic for what? I can just imagine how it happened:

product design: "Hey, what if if we wrap 16 packs of TP in 8 individual 2-packs?"
product manager: "Hey, that's a great idea — that way when you accidentally open the pack to much, you won't get 16 rolls rolling all over the place!"
sales & marketing: "Hey, that's great selling point! Let's do it!"

I am just cranky because I have plastic bags-ful of plastic bags stuffed in the cabinet below the sink. I keep meaning to bring my own bag to the grocery but then I don't. The local cooperative supermarket — a Socialist outfit which is so inept at capitalism that it has been losing money ever since I came here, and is only kept afloat by selling shares (I own a share) and cheap rent from the University — won't recycle their own plastic bags.

2007-08-07T23:33:00.000-04:00

Panhandler: Will someone please help the homeless!

5:11 a.m.

2007-08-05T01:33:00.001-04:00

It's the clapping that gets me.

2007-07-27T05:02:00.001-04:00

(Bat for Lashes)

2007-07-26T00:52:00.000-04:00

Modality, n. Those aspects of a thing which relate to its mode, or manner or state of being, as distinct from its substance or identity; the non-essential aspect or attributes of a concept or entity. Also: a particular quality or attribute denoting the mode or manner of being of something. — OED

Don't ever recall hearing it used in speech, or for that matter seeing it in print outside post-Modernist cultural criticism. Then, within the past few weeks, it's all over NPR, most recently in this painful episode. Urgh, after the Thesaurus, nothing corrupts the language more than Philosophy. I hope to never hear it uttered again.

2007-07-22T11:30:00.000-04:00

First Cheney assumes presidential powers for 3 hours, and now, "Bush Has 5 Polyps Removed in Colon Cancer Test" leads the NY Times' Washington Section. Such are the tempests which buffet the body Republic.

2007-07-21T07:34:00.001-04:00

A Buddhist pilgrim goes on a pilgrimage to a sacred mountain. Walking alone along a remote trail, suddenly he is confronted by a giant ferocious-looking tiger. Seeing there is nowhere to hide, and no trees nearby which he can climb, the fearful pilgrim drops to his knees: "Oh the merciful Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, save me from the jaws of that fierce beast!" As the pilgrim begins to wail and cry for deliverance, he is astonished when the tiger spoke to him in a human voice: "Fear not, pilgrim, for although I am a tiger, I am also a student of Buddha and follow faithfully his Dharma..."

Overjoyed, and wishing to ingratiate himself with the tiger, the pilgrim interrupted: "I too, am a faithful follower of Buddha. I have never departed from his teachings, and never in my entire life have I tasted flesh."

"I'm sorry, but I shall have to eat you then." The tiger replied apologetically. "You see, I keep a strictly vegetarian diet..."

2007-07-21T07:12:00.001-04:00

A patron at a fancy restaurant asks the waiter: "Which of the entrees is vegetarian?"

"I recommend the ravioli with wild mushrooms, sir. It is tonight's special and it is excellent."
"Are you sure it is entirely vegetarian?"

"Yes sir, I am sure of it.", the waiter reassured. And so the patrons orders the ravioli. Shortly, the waiter brings the patron his meal. As he turns about to walk away, the patron calls him back: "Waiter! The raviolis are stuffed with meat!"

"Yes sir, the raviolis are stuffed with ground lamb."
"But you told me the raviolis are entirely vegetarian!"
"Yes sir... You see, lamb comes from sheep..."

2007-02-03T03:21:00.000-05:00

“社会主义法制” 到底是那门子事？罗干大人说的好，就是“忠于党、忠于国家、忠于人民、忠于法律”。比起党来，国家人民都得靠后站，你“法律”算老几？

"Faithful to the Party, fathful to the Nation, faithful to the People, and faithful to the Law." Socialist rule-of-law as explained by Mr Luo Gan, member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Party Department of Law.

2006-05-16T14:47:00.000-04:00

2006-05-02T00:17:00.000-04:00

Was walking along tonight, about 10 p.m., not so well-lit, & saw two black youth coming towards me on the sidewalk. Pausing for a moment, my first reaction was to cross the street, and immediately felt pretty silly about it. Just because some one is young, black, wears baggy sports clothing doesn't mean he his going to mug you. Anyway, there was a car driving down the street at the moment. I kept walking, passed them, made eye contact —— of course they didn't do anything.

Then, as the car drove out of sight, I heard steps. Turning around I saw them running towards me. I darted across the street and ran down the other sidewalk —— they followed for a bit, then stopped & turned around. I kept running until I hit a major street.

What are we supposed to do about this? Not all young black men are muggers, but most muggings in the neighbourhood are committed by young black men. When I walk home in the evening, I hate the idea I may have consider every young black man in baggy pants I encounter as a potential mugger & cross the street to avoid them, but I don't want to be beaten up and robbed either. What are we supposed to do?

2006-03-26T02:08:00.000-05:00

Went & saw "The Glass Menagerie" — two hours, no intermission, and I didn't notice at all. It was the best play-going experience I have had since last year's "I Am My Own Wife".

What I did notice was the peals of audience laughter during the awkwardly painful encounter between Jim O'Connor and the Wingfields. Amanda Wingfield's deluded self-absorption is ridiculous enough, and the reminiscences between Laura & Jim has enough awkward airs — but it is their desperation & fragile sadness that stuck in the throat. I am not sure how one can laugh here — out of discomfort, perhaps. Or rather I am reminded of Daniel Mendelsohn's perceptive review of the play's recent Broadway revival:

As the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre—the theater where Williams's Streetcar had its New York première in 1948—leapt to its feet for the by now ritual standing ovation at the conclusion of this meaningless production of a play that is, more than almost any other in the Williams canon, about the destruction of beauty and the inevitability of failure, I wondered whether the delicate emotions of such a play are beyond current audiences —whether great drama's demand that we identify with the helpless victims, and with the strident suffering made visible to us on stage, makes us so uncomfortable that it can only be played for laughs. As I got up to leave, a teenaged girl sitting behind me turned to her parents and said, "But I thought this was supposed to be sad." So did I. The only heartbreak in the theater that night was that there was no heartbreak at all.

Hometown noodle in the news!

2006-03-04T00:12:00.000-05:00

My beloved beef noodles is in the news — in the New York Times. And no, there aren't any Lanzhou-style noodle houses in the US, there aren't any decent ones in Beijing either.

For a bit of perspective: 20 years ago a big bowl of noodles cost about 0.30 RMB, which was 10 cents (by the then official exchange rate), or 3 cents (by the then black-market rate & the current semi-free-market rate). Well, twenty years ago an lower-middle class wage is about 100 RMB ($30 or $10) a month, nowadays it is about 500 RMB ($60) — although with the large number of laid-off worker from closed-up heavy industries, there are a lot of poor people in Lanzhou.

Carnivory: between sentiment and reason

2006-03-02T00:39:00.000-05:00

Another installment of our occasional series on eating animals...

In the middle of reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Castello, in particular having just finished the two chapters: "The Lives of Animals"; these were originally given by Coetzee as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Princeton University in 1997.

When push comes to shove, sentiment beats reason every time, as any economist can tell you. This is why I find it impossible to rationally argue against Elizabeth Costello (vis-à-vis Coetzee?). Veal repels my sentiments, but not beef — not rational but my sentiment is what it is, I cannot justify it via reason but then I am as sure of it as I am sure of Socrates' mortality. Does there exist any consistent argument against veal that does not exclude beef at the same time? While we are at it, how rational is any argument against eating cats and dogs that do not at the same be against eating pigs? What is so fundamentally different between a cat or a dog, which I won't think of eating, and the pig which provided some of my dinner tonight, except on the level of sentiment?

There are the rational arguments for meat-eating, i.e. culture & evolutionary history, dentition, digestive tract, nutrition &c, and rational arguments against it, i.e. cultural & evolutionary history, health, ecology &c. These all seemed rather bloodless to me, in that I can't see how they can ever persuade a skeptic. Sentimental arguments, like Costello's, do not persuade either but they are the ones almost anyone can understand, and when well-put as is Costello's it is almost impossible not to sympathize. That is the power of literature and of art, which is fundamentally a sentimental power.

Back to meat eating: while a rational counter to Costello cannot be posed, I think I can pose a sentimental one. There is something so utterly pleasurable in a good bowl of beef noodles — indeed one of the chief pleasures of this life — how can there possibly be anything wrong with it?

A more modest example

2006-02-16T15:46:00.000-05:00

This thing is not quite dead, not quite. Although if it is to revive, it seems a few changes are in order: (1) less philosophical discursions, (2) more modesty. But rule #3 remains in force: no science.

As an example of a modest but in its own way a very charming blog, take a look at Cute Overload.

2005-09-03T22:56:00.000-04:00

"... the mayor [of New Oleans Ray Nagin] can order an evacuation and try to evacuate the city, but if the mayor does not have the resources to get the poor, elderly, the disabled, those who cannot, out, or if he does not even have police capacity to enforce the mandatory evacuation, to make people leave, then you end up with the kind of situation we have right now in New Orleans."
— Michael D. Brown, as quoted in The Washington Post

What a shameless mother-f—ing son of a bitch — I suppose Mr Under Secretary thinks he would have been able to do a much better job if no-one evacuated ahead of the storm. God Bless America and plenty of it if this sort of incompetent political hackster who has apparently no shame, no capacity for self-examination, and no higher motivation than political self-preservation is what constitutes the ruling class of this country.

This guy looks like a winner

2005-08-11T17:01:00.000-04:00

And here is the winning quote: "The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal."

Well, he is probably right — he looks like someone who's got a clue. I wonder if he ever did anything "creative" beyond those kindergarten craft paper & crayon days.

2005-08-09T23:25:00.000-04:00

Is this the most sensible thing The New York Times has published in ages? Yes.

Neither the watery word "tolerance" nor the slippery phrase "mutual respect" will cut it as a guiding value. Why tolerate violent bigotry? Where's the "mutual" in that version of mutual respect? Amin Maalouf, a French-Arab novelist, nailed this point when he wrote that "traditions deserve respect only insofar as they are respectable - that is, exactly insofar as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of men and women."
from "Why Tolerate the Hate", an op-ed by Irshad Manji

Summer Cooking: Sugar Snap Peas & Shell Pasta

2005-08-09T20:07:00.000-04:00

Ingredients for 2:
1/2 lb. fresh sugar snap peas
1 1/2 cup shell pasta
hard salty cheese: parmesan, asiago, or romano
white wine vinegar
extra-virgin olive oil
fresh parsley (good handful), fresh thyme (several sprigs), garlic (2 cloves)

De-string the sugar snap peas; wash & dry.

Chop parsley & mince garlic — make about half a cup. Add thyme. Add vinegar & olive oil, stir well. It should be less like a vinaigrette than a small portion of parsley salad. Do not add to peas.

Cook shells in salt water — but absolutely do not overcook or you will get a gelatinous mess. Drain & wash with cold water. Drain again thoroughly.

Toss together the shells & peas. Add parsley mixture. Shave a bit of cheese over top. Toss well & serve. The saltiness of the cheese balances the sweetness of the peas and the acidity of the vinegar, & the parsley makes it a rather refreshing & light meal for hot days.

Summer Cooking: Simple Gazpacho

2005-08-09T19:28:00.000-04:00

Two things off the bat: 1) no bread crumbs — I hate the soggy mush they serve in so many restaurants — which means 2) this isn't an authentic gazpacho, boo hoo.

Ingredients for 2:
4-5 good ripe tomatoes, pay $2.99 a pound if you have to, otherwise make something else
1/2 cucumber, seedless English variety
2 cloves of garlic
several sprigs of fresh thyme — fresh, not dried
good quality vinegar, sherry, wine, or balsamic
good extra-virgin olive oil
salt & pepper

Dice the tomatoes, or if you are lazy, coarsely chop the tomatoes in a food processor — the result of which, however, doesn't look as nice as the hand chopped variety. Some people like to puree the tomatoes & then strain out the bit of skin & seeds, I am not sure why. Add salt & pepper to the tomatoes & set aside.

Dice the cucumber. Some people add chopped green peppers, you may be one of them — I hate green peppers. Add to the tomatoes.

Mince the garlic. Strip the leaflets of the thyme sprigs, give a coarse chop. Add garlic & thyme to the tomatoes & cucumber.

Add vinegar & olive oil. Mix throughly & set in the refrigerator to cool for about 30 min - 1 hour, or not. Eat with bread, if you really must have bread in the gazpacho, tear some chunks and throw it in.

What else? If the tomatoes are very acidic, add less vinegar. If the tomatoes lack in sweetness, add a bit of sugar. Try a few times to find you preferred balance of the sweet vs acidic vs salt. As for fresh herbs, oregano works well, so does mint. Don't add too many varieties at once — often simpler is better. The really great thing about this is you don't need to turn on the stove.

2005-05-10T01:05:00.000-04:00

The Mouse's Nest, by John Clare

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And proged it as I passed and went away
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned again and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.

2005-03-11T20:45:00.000-05:00

Is this the most tone-deaf piece of Leftist navel-gazing I have read in a good while? "Why Don't They Listen to Us? Speaking to the Working Class" by Lillian B. Rubin — the title says it all, doen't it?

As racial and identity politics became increasingly strident, we were right on economic issues but tone deaf to the cultural and emotional sources of white working-class fear and anger. They objected to what they saw as minority privilege, and we called them racist, which was probably true but did nothing to facilitate an alliance with them. I'm not saying that we should have backed away from our support of affirmative action, minority scholarships, and other attempts to level the playing field. And perhaps their rage and fear were so great that no bridge was possible. We'll never know because we couldn't hear their cri de coeur. Instead, we spoke from our own privileged position and tried to silence their resentment by reminding them that they were the beneficiaries of a long history of white privilege.
—
There's much to do in the coming years to build a set of institutions that can begin to compete with the highly organized, enormously well-funded network of newspapers, periodicals, think tanks, publishing houses, and television and radio stations the right already has in place. But no institutions will save us until we find the way to reframe the debate so that it's on our terms, not theirs. That means opening up discussion among ourselves to debate and develop positions and strategies that, while honoring our own beliefs and values, enable us to build bridges across which we can speak to those who now see us as an alien other.

It's not enough to speak in another voice, however. We must learn to listen as well, to develop a third ear so that we can hear beneath their rage to the anguish it's covering up. Only then will we find our way into the hearts and minds of those Americans who have been seduced and exploited by the radical right into "strangling their own life chances." Only then will we be able to stop asking, "Why don't they listen to us?"

Only a Leftist who has been living in a snug cocoon of self-satisfied self-absorption for the last 40 years could come up with the notion somehow Affirmative Action, Political correctness, Abortion, and Gay Marriage are what did the Left in with the white working class. There is nothing paradoxical about the white working class voting against their own economic interests — can anyone point out exactly what, if anything, the Left had done to improve the economic well-being of the working class since the 1960's? Blacks have been faithfully voting Democratic for decades, and what have the Left done for their economic well-being? Black urban slums in the North from 40 years ago are still largely slums now, rural Black poor in the South then are still dirt poor now — those anyway, not yet forced off the farm. The Left talked about improving economic well-being of the working class, black and white, for decades with nothing to show for it — it's pretty understandable people are getting fed up with it. The Republicans know better than to promise all that pie-in-the-sky business; what they do offer — a sense of collective grievance and also moral superiority, a sense of being in control of something — the afterlife, say — they deliver with abundance. Cheap enough, as it were.

2005-02-14T18:34:00.000-05:00

The Guardian's choice, for me, of the proper poetry for this Valentine's Day.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th'earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
- Whose soul is sense - cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

2004-12-27T20:56:00.000-05:00

So what is literature good for? Am I, Hölderlin asked himself, to fare like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love but were seized by the avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises immortality in sighs alone? The synoptic view across the barrier of death presented by the poet in these lines is both overshadowed and illuminated, however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done. There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship. A place that is at the service of such a task is therefore very appropriate in Stuttgart, and I wish it and the city that shelters it well for the future.

From the address by W. G. Sebald: "An attempt at restitution".

The company one keeps

2004-11-29T11:18:00.001-05:00

Red state, in this case, Alabama, in action:

The amendment had two main parts: the removal of the separate-schools language and the removal of a passage — inserted in the 1950s in an attempt to counter the Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated public schools — that said Alabama's constitution does not guarantee a right to a public education. Leading opponents, such as Alabama Christian Coalition President John Giles, said they did not object to removing the passage about separate schools for "white and colored children." But, employing an argument that was ridiculed by most of the state's newspapers and by legions of legal experts, Giles and others said guaranteeing a right to a public education would have opened a door for "rogue" federal judges to order the state to raise taxes to pay for improvements in its public school system.
—

Much ink has been spilled from various conservative commentators to the effect the "moral values"is not an euphemism for "gay-bashing, abortion-baiting, white Christian fundamentalism", and that most Bush voters are not God-addled extremist bigots. And of course they are right. Most conservatives, but not apparently those in South Carolina and Oklahoma, would be appalled by the suggestion teachers who are single mothers be barred from schools, or that doctors who provide abortion should be put to death. But it is suggestive that nevertheless many of them find it possible to hold their noses and keep company with such people, to vote for a party that openly appeals to gay-bashing bigotry, that openly panders to the worst tribal instincts in people to gang up against various despised minorities, a party where religious fundamentalists who want to blur the division between state and religion exercises a disproportionate influence. You are the company you keep; if you accept unsavory company, you are bound to smell bad. The compromises you make in order to have what you want say a great deal about who you are.

Street corner charity

2004-11-22T12:18:00.000-05:00

Last night, walking home, I gave money to a man, fifty or so, a bit shabbily dressed — an English teacher, he said — who did a song and dance number about having driven his wife to the emergency room, only to have ran out of gas, and his little daughter is waiting in the car, freezing, and would...? On the verge of tears, he seemed, and grateful, afterwards.

We can be analytical about this. Let P_T be the probability, however small, that the man is telling the truth; let C_T be how bad I would feel if he was telling the truth and I did not give him any help. Also, let C_F be how stupid I would feel to have been taken in by a con with talent for tearing up. I should give him money provided the following relation is satisfied:

P_T C_T ≥ (1 – P_T) C_F

The probabilities and costs, of course, must be individually evaluated. It seemed about right to me, at the time. So how come I feel pretty much like a fool?

Here is another way to look at this. Around here, one can't walk down the street for a few blocks without having someone, often obviously homeless, asking for two dollars "for the bus". I never give them money, part of the reason being I think they are lying, i.e., the money will be spent on smokes and beer. However, if one of them comes to me, on the verge of tears, saying he has just lost his wallet, but he needs to get to work or he will lose his job — then it will be much harder to refuse. This is not because his story is likely to be true, it is less — that so many panhandlers ask for bus money undoubtedly reflects the fact many of them really do need to take the bus. The consequence of a story increases rapidly with its improbability, and one of the things I learned in science is how difficult it is for lay people and scientists alike, to estimate the probability of unlikely events in complex situations.

What this does is to rewards liars. The more elaborate the lie, the more unlikely it is, the more consequential it is, then the more likely the lie will be rewarded (even if not entirely believed); and it doesn't hurt one to put on a good act, tear up a little, say. If he tells you he needs to take the bus to a homeless shelter, he gets nothing; if she gives you a sobbing story about being beaten up and kicked out by her abusive boyfriend and has no place to go, she gets forty bucks so she can "get a room for the night". After a while, no-one believes anything anyone has to say under a similar circumstance, and one of these circumstances will turn out to be true.

Analysis means literally to divide and divide again, to reduce complications into a collection of graspable atoms; what analysis cannot always do is to tell one how to interpret and act on this newly acquired insight. The latter has always required judgment, an ill-defined sense of the right thing to do, regardless what naïve scientific objectivism would have you believe. As for the issue at hand, there is a simple cop out: avoid carrying cash in your wallet if possible; that way, you can tell the guy: "Sorry, can't help you, I don't have any money."

2004-11-21T02:05:00.000-05:00

Check out The Swift Report, a newish weblog. Andrew Sullivan, for one, seems a bit miffed by it.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Vonnegut

2004-11-11T19:50:00.000-05:00

Today is Kurt Vonnegut's 91st birthday, so happy birthday to you, Mr Vonnegut.

Years ago, in high school and the first few years in college, I called Kurt Vonnegut "the greatest living writer". I kept a copy of his essay collection Palm Sunday in my jacket pocket, and read a few pages or more when I had a a bit of unattended time. I knew, or felt I knew, Kilgore Trout, or Eliot Rosewater, as real familiars.

Some of his writing read to me a bit thin now, and some of the commentaries at In These Times are simply cantankerous. But in his best work: the novels Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five, Jail Bird, and the essay collection Palm Sunday, with his deeply-felt humanism, and his bitterly flabbergasted sense of modesty and decency, his voice is as tremendously moving now as ever. He got it right where so many more "serious", more self-regarding writers and thinker did not, could not: be embarrassed, be kind, mind your manners, and above all, do no harm — that is what anyone can really do, in this life, to be good, so you might as well give it a try.

2004-11-10T03:52:00.000-05:00

Miriam and I, at Sarah's wedding in May.

2004-11-05T16:24:00.000-05:00

Tara Leslie, Cary's wife, has been praying for President Bush, too, and now she is saying, "I think it's so important to have a society of moral absolutes."

—
"Jobs will come and go. But your character — you have to hang on to that," he [husband Cary Leslie] says. "It's what you're defined by." [Full article from The Washington Post.]

Can governments really deliver economic well-being to the working poor? That it can indeed so deliver has been the central plank of Democratic Party for the past 50 years; I am not sure the Democrats have in fact delivered. At best, the government can open up opportunities — education, financial incentives for savings, job training — for the poor to pulled themselves out of their poverty; but the government can't do the pulling for the poor any more than the poor can be made to disappear by throwing money at them. The Left simply cannot keep on promising the poor a pie in the sky that they can't possibly deliver — that is dishonest and manipulative, and eventually, people won't believe anything you say anymore, even if it is true.

The Republicans can't deliver the poor either, and they don't promise to do so. But at least they offer the frustrated working poor a sense of righteousness and self-esteem; talk is cheap enough.

2004-11-04T15:25:00.000-05:00

"Measure in generations, not elections". Well put.

Year Eighteen

2004-11-01T14:31:00.000-05:00

A day late, but here is to my eighteenth year in America. I always thought there is some justice in my landing here on October 31: trick or treat?

2004-10-28T14:19:00.000-04:00

The Economist reluctantly endorses John Kerry.

After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America's moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him, given a viable alternative. John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would be in a better position to carry on with America's great tasks.

Marx on the bus

2004-10-26T18:43:00.000-04:00

Saw someone reading this on the bus a few days ago:

which reminds me that reading Marx is still publicly reputable in a way, say, reading The National Socialist Reader or The Fascist Reader, if those books existed, wouldn't be. Not that I want such or any books banned: there is value, even if only negative, admonishing value, in reading them; what I would like is if people would read these things with more embarrassment, more of a sense of shame. There is an undeniable attractiveness in utopian visions of perfectible Justice, as there is in the Romantic notions of dialectical struggle between Good and Evil as the teleological motive of Historical Progress. But emanating from that golden, glowing, hue was the blackest, most blood-thirsty, most ruthless political movement in all history, besides whose toll of the death and misery the works of Fascism place a pale second.

Marx did himself a whole lot of good by dying before Communism gained political power in Russia and elsewhere. And so it is still possible for reputable people to defend Marx by making distinctions between his philosophy and the people who tried to put his philosophy into practice. But ideas must always be evaluated in the light of their consequences, and the consequence of Marx's ideas are hideous. That he was dead by the time the bloodlust started was a historical accident — if only Hitler or Stalin suffered a similar fate — and a convenient accident is excuse for no-one.

What is the worst that can happen?

2004-10-18T21:14:00.000-04:00

"The election and America's future", in this latest issue of The New York Review of Books, is not a pleasant read. By turns somber, angry, bitter, incredulous, and perhaps also with a measure of despair; there is not an optimistic note — the sunny "Hope is on the way!" sloganeering of Kerry & Edwards notwithstanding.

What is the worst that can happen, should Bush be re-elected? So the Iraq War drags on for another five or eight years, and the America takes another 10,000 deaths, would that be sufficient to irrevocably weaken the US? Vietnam was far more painful than Iraq will likely be, and the US, stun, defeated, was still strong enough to face down the Soviet Union. Will defeat in Iraq spell the end of the US as the greatest power in the world? No. Will defeat in Iraq mean less security here at home? Perhaps, but Islamic terrorism, no matter what Bush &c. wants the public to believe, is not remotely the existential threat to (Western) liberal democracy and security the Soviet Union was.

So the war costs and Bush's fiscal recklessness will become a heavy burden for future economic progress. But proportionally to the US economy as a whole, these burdens are not any heavier than the cost of Vietnam and of the Cold War in general. So instead of a quick return to the prosperity of late 1990s, the US experiences an additional decade of economic stagnation, high interest rates, possibly inflation. The stagflation of the 1970s did not reduce the US to a secondary economic power and a future episode of the same won't either.

So a re-elected Bush administration will entrench conservative judges, who may limit, or even overturn, Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, separation of Church and State, &c. But even judges with life-appointments are not immune to political & social pressures. The overturning of the Texas sodomy laws, possible in part by a change in opinion by Justice O'Connor, illustrates the fact judges are not hermetically sealed-off philosophical absolutists, but are embedded in the broader society and are influenced by emerging social consensus. The broad historical pattern of the American society has always been one of increasing tolerance and acceptance of ever more diverse liberties; that is unlikely to change whoever becomes the president.

Finally, America is after all, a democracy, and democracy is self-correcting, perhaps not this election, but next, or the next thereafter. The Soviet Union made colossal mistake after colossal mistake for 70 years, until it was buried by them. I doubt America will ever be so wrong for so long.

"Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize!"

2004-09-29T15:09:00.000-04:00

J. M. Coetzee's Nobel Prize acceptance speech — a reminder that if you are doing what you do in order to win prizes, you are doing it for the wrong reasons.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen; Distinguished Guests, Friends:

The other day, suddenly, out of the blue, while we were talking about something completely different, my partner Dorothy burst out as follows: "On the other hand," she said, "on the other hand, how proud your mother would have been! What a pity she isn't still alive! And your father too! How proud they would have been of you!"

"Even prouder than of my son the doctor?" I said. "Even prouder than of my son the professor?"

"Even prouder."

"If my mother were still alive," I said, "she would be ninety-nine and a half. She would probably have senile dementia. She would not know what was going on around her."

But of course I missed the point. Dorothy was right. My mother would have been bursting with pride. My son the Nobel Prize winner. And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?
"Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize!"

"That's wonderful, my dear. Now eat your carrots before they get cold."
Why must our mothers be ninety-nine and long in the grave before we can come running home with the prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?

To Alfred Nobel, 107 years in the grave, and to the Foundation that so faithfully administers his will and that has created this magnificent evening for us, my heartfelt gratitude. To my parents, how sorry I am that you cannot be here.

Thank you.

Photo: Hans Mehlin, Nobelprize.org

Potato gnocchi in roasted garlic & sage cream sauce

2004-09-28T14:59:00.000-04:00

Sage, garlic, and potatoes make a proper combination. The following is a simple but effective recipe, particularly for colder weather.

Potatoes
Flour
Fresh sage
Garlic
Tomatoes

Peel & quarter potatoes, boil until cooked through, about 20 minutes. Mash, mix with eggs and add enough flour to form a firm & non-sticky dough. Knead dough & roll into a cylinder about the thickness of a finger. Cut into small pieces (gnocchi). Dust with flour and set aside.

Put a half dozen or more garlic cloves, unpeeled, into a shallow saute pan. Roast covered at medium/low heat on the stove for about 15 minutes; turn once halfway through. You can do this while the potatoes are boiling. Once roasted, remove skins from the cloves, mash the cloves, which should be very soft, into a paste with a fork.

Melt butter in a saute pan over medium/low heat. Add mashed garlic & finely julienned fresh sage leaves (chiffonade) to butter, cook until aromatic, about a minute. Meanwhile bring a pot of salted water to boil.

Add diced tomatoes. Season with salt and white pepper. Cook until it forms a stiff paste, about 5 minutes.

Turn heat to low. Add half and half or heavy cream, stir constantly, until the sauce is thick and coats a spoon, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

While reducing the sauce, toss gnocchi into boiling water. Remove with a slotted spoon once they float.

Toss the cooked, drained gnocchi in the sauce; coat well. Garnish with fresh sage chiffonade and grated cheese (Romano, Parmesan, Asiago, &c.). Serve immediately.

—

I like Yukon gold, which makes for a pale yellow gnocchi; but any starchy potatoe will do. 1 cup of mashed potatoes (=1 large potatoe) plus 1 egg and about 1 cup of flour makes enough gnocchi for two.

Don't worry about the garlic; once roasted they are very mellow. But make sure they don't burn.

The tomatoes do nothing except add body to the sauce, so in fact the milder the tomatoe the better; cheap commercial tomatoes with no flavour is perfect. I like yellow tomatoes, which are sweeter and not so acidic, and also makes the sauce a pale yellow which looks very buttery. I imagine you can substitute yellow bell-pepper, pureed, for the tomato. You can omit the tomato altogether and stirr in grated cheese at end to give the sauce body; it's a bit heavy for me though.

Half-and-half is a compromise. Can also use heavy cream or milk, depends on how creamy you want it. Figure 1 cup of chopped tomato and 1/2 cup of half-and-half.

2004-09-25T22:10:00.000-04:00

From The New York Times, "Live from Miami, a style showdown":

What Mr. Kerry should do, she [Susan Batson, a longtime acting coach] explained, is open himself up. If he tries to be like the resolute Mr. Bush, he'll fall into his old trap: woodenness.

His greatest opportunity, she said, is to laugh more, to radiate a vulnerability with his eyes, a sense of compassion and wisdom, as opposed to single-mindedness and aggression. He can be "sort of a combination of Henry Fonda and James Stewart," she said.

—

Equally important to Mr. Kerry, she [Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania] said, is to refrain from using words like "gilded" and "panoply" at the lectern, as he has on the stump.

"Words found on the SAT verbal exam," she added, "should not appear in candidate's speeches."

Goddamn it — who the bloody hell are these people — and why does anyone pay any heed to this kind of inane, so-called "advice"? A political leader needs fore-mostly to be able to change and shape public opinion, i.e., to lead; those who can't, but instead pander to the public with a total lack of judgement and intelligence, are not fit to govern. Which is depressing, since on this regard Bush and the Republicans have been doing such a better job.

2004-09-21T18:25:00.000-04:00

This amuses me.

2004-09-18T22:45:00.000-04:00

福寿禄

From a new photo weblog BadJianZhu (jian zhu 建筑 is Chinese for architecture): "An investigation of the not-so-subtle in Beijing architecture." More on the Chinese architecture glut here and here.

Below: the controversial new Grand National Theatre in Beijing, locally known as the "stainless steel duck egg".

2004-09-16T02:07:00.003-04:00

Haller's Round Ray
Urobatis halleri

Photograph from the Department of Ichthyology, California Academy of Sciences. More here.

2004-09-07T14:04:00.000-04:00

"Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt", a short essay by Umberto Eco.

Exiles at home and abroad

2004-09-03T19:39:00.000-04:00

A pair of remarkable and remarkably somber novels, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Age of Iron, by J. M. Coetzee, speak with very different languages on the same idea: the Exile, dislocated within and without, at once struggling furiously against the fractured history that uproots him (her), and drowning by it.

Whereas an Expatriate is at home where-ever he happens to be, his present locale woven into his past narrative, a history which is seamless despite the removal of time and distance, the Exile is nowhere at home. He does not have a homeland. He is stranger even to the place of his birth, even if he should be able to return to it, even if he has never left. What the Exile has is an idea of home, in his head, much like Paradise of religion, an idealised place of pure and complete belonging rather than a place to live the less-than-pure, less-than-complete life full of compromise. And he does not have a history. Or rather, his history is broken into a Before, which in time slowly withers away, becoming transparent from recall; and an After, which since it is disconnected, weightless, is easily swept away in the daily flood of minutiae — detritus, as it were.

Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001, was a German exile, albeit voluntary, teaching German language and literature in England. Born during WWII, in 1944, he grew up in the western part of the divided country trying at once to come to terms with its Nazi past and to leave it behind. Coetzee, born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa, coming to age just as the Apartheid regime came into full force. He emigrated to Australia in 2002. It may seem strange that both chose to be exile, when Germany reunited has repudiated its Nazi past and Apartheid is dead; but an Exile can never go home again.

2004-09-01T23:56:00.000-04:00

From 沙祖康 Sha Zu-Kang, head of the Chinese delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, remarking on the failed motion, brought by the US in April this year, criticising China's human rights record.

我公开讲过，中国今天的人权状况就比美国的人权状况要好，中国人口比美国多五倍，如果按照人口比例来讲，我们问题至少应该比美国多五倍，那才说明我们人权状况和美国一样。但现实是，我们目前人权状况比美国的好，说明中国人权至少比美国好五倍。我在大会上讲这话引起会场上哄堂大笑，大家都鼓掌，也可以看出美国不得人心，他们把人权问题高度政治化，为本国政治服务，把人权问题作为工具，做法很不得人心。

As I have said publicly before: the human rights situation in China today is better than that in the US. China has five times the population as the US, on a per capita basis, we should have five times more problems as the US and only then can we say China and the US have similar human rights situations. But in reality, the current human rights situation in China is better than that in the US, meaning human rights in China is at least five times better than in the US. When I made this remark at the meeting [of the UN Human Rights Commission], it was met with great laughter and applause from everyone. From this we can see the US position has no support. The US's stance on human rights is a highly politicized one meant to serve its own interests; the human rights question is only a tool for US policy, and they have no broad support in this.

2004-08-27T18:40:00.000-04:00

From the leader in this week's The Economist:

Effective execution is partly a matter of experience. There are signs, including in Iraq, that the Bush administration has learned from its mistakes. The Economist's bigger disagreements with Mr Bush lie beyond the war on terror, in areas where Mr Bush's very aims are questionable or worse.

—

The only clear political division that exists, it seems to me, is whether one is willing to sacrifice some property, if needed be, in order to secure liberty, not just for oneself, but universally. Property is undeniably a fundamental liberty, but its possession also gives the better possessed enormous power over everyone else. That such an unpleasant choice exists at all is because the propertied classes haven't had a sterling record as advocates of liberty: they were the enthusiastic cheerleaders for the Great Game, they were the ready backers of Mussolini and Hitler, they are an integral part of the military/clerical/plutocrat juntas that misrule good parts of the world, and now they are jumping into bed with supposed communists in China.

That the propertied classes act so often as de facto enemies of liberty is not because they are "evil" (a meaningless characterisation to start, and stupid to boot), but because they are so well-insulated by the social power of their properties that they simply can't imagine their own liberty taken away from them. It is the same sort of lacking in imagination that gave us "Let them eat cake." To them, their property is the source and the guarantee of their liberties, to defend their property is to defend their liberty. But hardly any or them realise such is not the case for most people, that the least propertied are also whose liberty are most threatened; nor do I think many of them really care.

It is a great credit to America that so many Americans, not only the very rich but also many who are not at all, lack the imagination to imagine their own not being free. Actually, liberty is so easy to come by in this country I doubt if that many Americans really care a whole lot about it. Youth is wasted on the young.

To give it due credit, The Economist has always taken a principled and conscientious stand on human rights, freedom of expression, and individual liberties; it criticised from the beginning Bush's arbitrary detention of so-called "unlawful combatants" without due process, and it was the first (and as far as I know) conservative newspaper to call for Rumsfeld's resignation over the Abu Gharib tortures. But that it thinks Bush's budget deficit and protectionist pandering to farm and steel are somehow worse than his contempt for liberty and the rule of law is tremendously depressing.

2004-08-26T19:39:00.000-04:00

Lopped off a few inches, so my nose and eyes are no longer constantly tickled by the odd strands of hair; which makes staring down the microscope a lot more pleasant. At some point, say about now, whatever advantages of longish hair may have — real or imaged attractiveness to members of the opposite sex, parental disapproval, extra $20 in my pocket, &c. &c. — will no longer seems to worth the trouble of having to hold it back when eating soup. [Sigh.]

2004-08-23T22:16:00.000-04:00

Hm... you can free up a lot of room when you do without boxes.

2004-07-29T17:37:00.000-04:00

I am who we are.

This Land is Your Land...

2004-07-23T16:59:00.001-04:00

Pasta with rosemary & caramelised onion

2004-07-07T15:02:00.000-04:00

Since Sarah's anticipated cooking blog has yet to come into being, here is my attempt:

garlic
sweet onion, such as vidalia
fresh rosemary
relatively firm vegetables, such as mushrooms, green and/or yellow squash, broccoli, &c.
sweet white vinegar or lemon juice
parmesan and/or asiago cheese
olive oil or butter
salt

On medium-low heat, add olive oil or butter to the pan; add garlic & onion. Cook until onions turn translucent and caramelised.

If using mushrooms, add mushrooms and cook until the released liquids cook away. Add squash, broccoli, &c, cook down until soft & well-caramelised.

Add rosemary, vinegar or lemon juice, salt, and cook until aromatic, about one minute. Remove from heat, stir in grated cheese.

Total cooking time about 15 minutes. If you started boiling water for pasta at the same time as you started cooking the onions, it should be done just in time. Drain pasta well, toss with a bit of olive oil or butter, then toss well with the cooked vegetables.

2004-06-29T22:03:00.000-04:00

From Anthony Scalia's dissenting opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (starting on page 52):

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis — that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it. Because the Court has proceeded to meet the current emergency in a manner the Constitution does not envision, I respectfully dissent.

I am philosophically antagonistic with Scalia, but this is an opinion that not only demands my respect but also my agreement. It is easy to vilify Scalia as Dick Cheney's duck-hunting crony, but I will prefer a Supreme Court Justice with whom I respectfully disagree over any despot, enlightened or not, with whom I do.