born live love die

Many American political observers see world events relative to how it reflects on America.  Scott Horton is not one of those.

With his column in yesterday’s Times (“Letter from Istanbul”), Tom Friedman predictably joins the growing chorus of critics of Turkey, led by Walter Russell Mead.Not coincidentally, this is the same chorus that preached the gospel of invasion of Iraq and expressed frustration when America’s only NATO ally in the Middle East declined to support the invasion. Now they are alarmed by the growing rift between Turkey and Israel—though they never explore the underpinnings of that rift, and they instantly call it a rift between Turkey and the United States. Still, this column is vintage Friedman:

it is quite shocking to come back today and find Turkey’s Islamist government seemingly focused not on joining the European Union but the Arab League — no, scratch that, on joining the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran resistance front against Israel.

This is absurd hyperbole. In his signature verbal-drip style, Friedman even admits to that. His sin is not so much his exaggeration (which is bad enough) as his simplification of complex facts—a simplification that leads to bad analysis and false conclusions.

As I noted before, there are emerging difficulties in U.S.–Turkish relations, and they require urgent attention. That needs to start with some self-criticism on the part of the American foreign-policy establishment about its abuse of the Turkish relationship, and it needs to build with a deeper understanding of the forces at work in Turkey today. These forces are indeed troubling. They are eroding the historical self-understanding of Turkish secularism. But it’s not yet entirely clear where these forces are going.

Read the whole thing.

Glenn Beck, Father Guido Sarducci.  Oh, my.

The Institute for Creation Research moved from California to Texas.  In California, they were allowed to confer the Master of Science degree.  They needed accreditation from Texas.

Didn’t happen.

The Institute for Creation Research suffered a significant legal defeat in its lawsuit over the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board’s 2008 decision to deny the ICR’s request for a state certificate of authority to offer a master’s degree in science education from its graduate school. A June 18, 2010, ruling in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas found (PDF, p. 38) that “ICRGS [the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School] has not put forth evidence sufficient to raise a genuine issue of material fact with respect to any claim it brings. Thus, Defendants are entitled to summary judgment on the totality of ICRGS’s claims against them in this lawsuit.”

As NCSE’s Glenn Branch explained in Reports of the NCSE, “When the Institute for Creation Research moved its headquarters from Santee, California, to Dallas, Texas, in June 2007, it expected to be able to continue offering a master’s degree in science education from its graduate school. … But the state’s scientific and educational leaders voiced their opposition, and at its April 24, 2008, meeting, the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board unanimously voted to deny the ICR’s request for a state certificate of authority to offer the degree.” Subsequently, the ICR appealed the decision, while also taking its case to the court of public opinion with a series of press releases and advertisements in Texas newspapers.

The issue was not, strictly speaking, about accreditation, but about temporary state certification, which would have enabled the ICR graduate school to operate while it sought accreditation. When in California, the ICR graduate school was accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, which requires candidate institutions to affirm a list of Biblical Foundations, including “the divine work of non-evolutionary creation including persons in God’s image.” TRACS is not recognized by the state of Texas, however, and after the ICR moved from Santee, California, to Dallas, Texas, the ICR expressed its intention to seek accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

Dig it.

JMan has an easy laugh.  The other kids like him.  He is up more than he is down.

I was sitting out side with him on Friday, at a table in front of a Thai restaurant in downtown Kirkland.  The waitress had taken our order and I started talking about the future.  He stopped me.

“If this is about what I’m going to do when I grow up, I don’t want to talk about it.”

He just turned eleven.  I cracked up with laughter.  He joined in.  I was laughing heartily and I high-fived him.  A wicked thought crossed my mind and I wondered if I could pull it off.

I froze my face, serious and gave him a stare down look.

“Do it anyway.”

I held it for a second or three and then cracked up again just as his face started to react to me.

His explosive laugh hit a high pitched note it doesn’t often hit.  I had gotten him and he knew it.  We laughed for quite a while about it.

At a party recently, I discovered that I was one of the few men who read advice columns.  Most of the women read multiple columns, most of the men did not.  I started to read them when I got divorced, trying to figure out what happened.  What happened is a different story, not to be repeated here where the kids can read it.

I had referenced something from Carolyn Hax before, here, and she ran something from one of her readers that I thought was pretty good.

While I’m away, readers give the advice.

On living together before marriage:

So often I observe — when a young couple has been living together — one partner is far more interested in marriage than the other, but they are both too insecure to break up after investing several years in the relationship. (Not to mention the daunting task of disentangling their finances, furniture, pets, etc.)

The years they lived together were the years they coulda/shoulda been independent: learning to know themselves, to stand on their own two feet and meet other people. I find it heartbreaking to perform these weddings, but haven’t had a lot of luck talking couples out of them.

Bottom line: The lack of courage and money to live independently gives birth to a lot of short-term marriages. Having comfort and companionship like marriage, without the commitment, short-circuits a lot of growing up.

– The Reverend Mrs. E.

This is the bit I mentioned at the party, and while the guys didn’t read the stuff, they all agreed with it.  As a divorced parent of small children, I often wonder what paths they will take in life.  I want them to think that being a partner, being married, having a family is a good thing and fulfilling.  Too many children of divorce bounce around a lot before figuring those things out.  I don’t know if that is just the way these things work, but my hope for them is an opportunity for happiness.

HuffPo has an overview of two op-ed pieces, one by Paul Krugman, the other by Alan Greenspan.  Krugman warns against allowing economic recovery to falter by restricting spending, Greenspan worries about debts growing too large.

The key issue for both Krugman and Greenspan, of course, is deficits and spending. For Krugman, the world’s recent turn toward austerity, evinced by Congress’s recent refusal to extend unemployment benefits and cutbacks in social services across Europe, is a sign that governments are afraid to spend enough to stimulate economic growth. “Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in,” he writes.

Greenspan, for his part, is more concerned with looming pain than current economic hardships. Noting that in the last 18 months, the U.S. deficit has ballooned to 8.6 trillion from $5.5 trillion, Greenspan argues that the world needs “tectonic shift in fiscal policy.” And, growth, he posits can’t and won’t come from government spending. (Though, to be fair, other than budget cuts, Greenspan offers no alternative to government spending to boost the economy.)

My question for Greenspan is, “When is the last time you were right?”  I listened with incredulity when Greenspan gave the green light to tax cuts under Bush that wiped out the budget surplus and brought on a decade of deficits by saying that there were dangers that a country with no debt would not be stable, or words to that effect.

Greenspan is like a performance artist, but most people don’t know it.

JMan is at dinner and his feelings were a little crumpled around the edges.  Bookzilla laughed when he started to talk.  His feelings got a little more dinged.  He started to talk again and Bookzilla waited and zinged him with a laugh at just the right time.

I called her on it.  I told her that I saw her timing her laugh.  ”You wouldn’t like it if your roles were reversed”.  She replied:

“Stupid empathy”.

David Rakoff was on The Daily Show a few years ago and this clip is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Justice Soutar left the court and has started to talk about the process of being a judge.  Dahlia sez:

Almost two weeks ago, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter gave the commencement speech at Harvard, a speech that’s been variously described by some of my favorite legal writers as a denunciation of “originalism,” a defense of “living constitutionalism,” and a suggestion that “judicial activism” is a game both liberals and conservatives can play. But the striking aspect of Souter’s remarkable speech is that it rejected virtually all of these easy ideological labels and addressed itself to two much simpler questions: Is the meaning of the Constitution clear? And is the task of divining that meaning easy? These incisive questions themselves beg an even more pressing constitutional question: Why must justices first leave the bench before they can speak seriously about the importance of the court?

She explores the subject of what does it take to be a Supreme Court justice and then gets to the heart of it.

What Souter asked Americans to do in his Harvard speech is to live with ambiguity. To, in his words, acknowledge that there is a “basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise,” while recognizing, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ formulation, that “certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny.” He is telling us to stop dreaming of oracular judges with perfect answers to simple constitutional questions. He is telling us, in other words, to grow up.

Growing up would be good.

It saddens me to think that it took Justice Souter 19 years of heavy constitutional lifting and departure from the court before he could turn to the American people and explain clearly that much as we might want judging to be easy, it never can be. It terrifies me even more to think that we’ve crafted a confirmation process in which the consistent message is that judging is so simple that any old bozo can do it. If we continue to believe that this is so, we will be on the road to confirming any old bozo that stumbles along.

Too late, that already happened.

Read the whole thing.

I support capital punishment.  But before We, The People put someone to death, we should make sure that the person has committed the egregious crime that our society believes warrants the taking of someone’s life.  Currently, we seem to think that the adversarial court system is all that is required to protect the rights of the accused.  I don’t address that issue.  I address the responsibilities that we have as The People.  Those responsibilities are not being met.

This article on Slate is about a case in Texas that is typical.  The police and prosecutors, when they thought they had a likely suspect, stopped looking and bent the narratives toward that suspect.

Most of these flaws have been litigated, and the courts have found that none of them is enough to win Skinner a new trial. But the most troubling aspect of Skinner’s case is the biological material collected from the crime scene. Law enforcement officials tested the small blood smears on Skinner’s shirt, and those matched two of the three victims. But given that Skinner admits he was at the crime scene and says he awoke to find the victims’ bodies, it isn’t surprising that he’d have some of their blood on his shirt. The blood on the murder weapons has never been DNA tested. Nor has any material from the rape kit taken from Busby. The state also never tested skin cells taken from under Busby’s fingernails, or a blood-stained windbreaker left at the scene that witnesses say matched one often worn by Donnell. “They only tested the material they thought would implicate Skinner,” Protess told me via phone. “They fixated on their suspect, and once they thought they had enough for a conviction, they stopped.”

We need

• national standards for investigations – currently each government jurisdiction has the rights to set standards
• national standards for police training – currently each government jurisdiction sets the standards for education
• national crime labs – there are private labs that do testing, and there is expense associated with testing; by having a national lab as a fall back, all biological material from a crime scene could be scheduled for testing, even after a conviction.

Read the whole thing.