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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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| B00ALBR6IC
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| 3.55
| 154
| Dec 18, 2012
| Dec 18, 2012
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Last in the Playbook 2012 series by Politico. They need to be read in order and are an attempt to provide some analysis of events surrounding the reel...more
Last in the Playbook 2012 series by Politico. They need to be read in order and are an attempt to provide some analysis of events surrounding the reelection of President Obama in 2012. There are some nuggets that never made it into the news, or at least the news that escaped my attention. Then again, by October, I was so thoroughly saturated with 48 hour-a-day commentary and news that I was tuning it all out. For someone with supposed administrative ability, Romney made some serious mistakes, some of them one can't help but wonder if the decisions were pushed because they profited his advisers. Political consultant Stevens, for example, made a bundle on the side because it was one of his companies that was hired to run the IT operation and to book the ads, yet they paid five times more for their ads than did the Obama campaign. The IT groups creation, "Orca," never worked the way it was supposed to. As George W. Bush proved in 2004, a twenty-first-century campaign can recover from a flawed, polarizing front man. But it can’t bounce back from mismanagement and poor planning. And Romney’s billion-dollar effort seemed less an enterprise run by a corporate turnaround artist than a family business undermined by its founder’s misguided vision of the marketplace—in Romney’s case, the composition of the American electorate. Romney was brilliant at raising cash; sources on both sides of the race had never expected him to nearly match Obama’s cash machine dollar for dollar, but he very nearly did. Yet he didn’t quite know how to spend it and seemed to mistake micromanagement for management, getting bogged down in minor details that never came within a mile of Obama. One example would resonate with his staffers after it was all over. Following the primary, Romney instituted a point system that assigned a specific numerical value to each event—rallies, speeches, fund-raisers, and so on. The more labor-intensive the event, the more points it was assigned. Romney’s instructions to his assistant were that he was not to exceed nine hundred points on a given day, the better to manage his time. Romney would allocate his time based on the point system, but it was often time not well spent. Obama's lack of business experience was an asset. Rather than micro-manage, he left the details to his "battle-scarred" veterans of the 2008 campaign, which, ironically, had never shut down and just kept working on fine-tuning their ground operation. The Citizens United decision that had everyone in an uproar probably helped, as did the efforts of Republicans at the state-wide level to suppress voting groups likely to vote Democratic. It mostly rallied the troops and brought more people out. (I personally thought Citizens United was the correct decision from a fee speech standpoint and that the controversy had much more to do with the message rather than the money. The Constitution makes it clear that freedom of association is a basic right and that those groups have freedom of political speech, especially. But then I believe the more speech the better. And to argue the money is not speech is ludicrous.) The way the money was spent was far more important, and the Obama decision to get out ahead of the game and begin campaigning against Romney even before he had the nomination made a huge difference. In the end it was God voting for Obama that made the difference. Given the two Hurricanes, one making a mess of the Republican Convention schedule (and thank you Clint Eastwood) and Sandy validating the role of the federal government (not to mention Romney's earlier comments regarding the irrelevance of FEMA) and it was clear God wanted Obama to win. Challenge my logic. :) (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 17, 2013
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Jan 17, 2013
| Kindle Edition
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| 067964508X
| 9780679645085
| 3.46
| 90
| Apr 03, 2012
| Apr 03, 2012
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This short Kindle Single really needs to be read in conjunction with their other Single, The End of the Line and perhaps an earlier one in their Playb...more
This short Kindle Single really needs to be read in conjunction with their other Single, The End of the Line and perhaps an earlier one in their Playbook 2012 series. I avoid TV pundits and daily reportage like the plague, preferring to wait until the dust settles and writers gain a little distance to figure out exactly what happened. I remember avidly reading all the Teddy White "Making of the President" and I've recently started Richard Ben Cramer's "What it Takes", an excellent analysis of the 1988 election. The authors of these two short works don't approach his high standard but they are quite interesting, nevertheless for their revelations and analysis. Romney, we recently learned from one of his sons, never really wanted to be president, anyway, that he was pushed into the race by his family, although that sounds suspiciously like sour grapes. Ironically it was his business experience that may have hurt him the most, always micromanaging rather than delegating to staffers who were probably more competent at assorted tasks. It didn't help that he had to go through the trials of the Republican primary, otherwise known as the circular firing squad. The primary system, which biases toward the extremes of each party forced him into adopting ridiculous positions which he came to rue later even as his staff, off message as usual, portrayed him as moving back to the center after he won the nomination, especially with the Etch-a-Sketch comment which just confirmed to both left and right that Romney had no core values. The authors treat us to lots of fun inside information about the other dysfunctional candidates like Perry and Gingrich and Bachmann, each of whom had their moment in the sun before going down ingloriously in flames. Romney's ultimate selection was perhaps inevitable, but what a bizarre trip. One insider said, "Romney goes into each state, he’s not building a movement. Instead, he goes in, and it’s a machine. They know how to execute really well and take down another candidate and win. But what they don’t know how to do is lift up their own candidate and sell a vision, sell a movement, and get people excited about him. I think it’s troubling that the turnout is lower than in 2008. This should be the year where Republican primary voters are incredibly excited about getting rid of President Obama. Instead, it’s not been that way at all.” As Nate Silver showed with his data analysis, Romney probably never had a chance given the demographics and Electoral College numbers. These books are fun to read for their "real-time" reporting, but probably won't hold up particularly well as historical records. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 16, 2013
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Jan 16, 2013
| ebook
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| B0088PR2IC
| 5.00
| 1
| Nov 19, 2012
| Nov 19, 2012
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Short but enlightening summary of the events and issues surrounding the infamous Google book digitization project. First, let's get my biases out of th...more Short but enlightening summary of the events and issues surrounding the infamous Google book digitization project. First, let's get my biases out of the way. I'm a retired academic library director who also happened to be the IT Director at my college, and as such I drool over the idea of having all of the books in the world available on line and fully searchable. I also believe the publishers and especially the Author's Guild are making a huge mistake by fighting Google on digitization. Rather than seeing this as a way to make money, they remain mired in the 19th century, seeing it only as a threat. The project is the brainchild of the two Google founders and clearly it's a labor of love for them. They often cite the example of the Library of Alexandria which had made an effort to accumulate universal knowledge but was burned in 48 B.C.E. by Julius Caesar, a calamity. Brin and Page simply want all the world's information to be retrievable. "As for Page and Brin themselves, they don’t seem to have cared whether the world thought they were visionaries or villains. They had a task to accomplish. As Winograd [a former teacher at Stanford] said, 'I think if you ask them, [they’d say] this is going to get done, even in five years. This is the technological imperative — information must be searchable. They’re often more in tune to the technological imperative than to social barriers.' " It's ironic that publishers and authors can now been seen as "social barriers" by some. After initial praise, including participation from Harvard, reaction built to apocalyptic proportions, adversaries (now joined by Robert Darnton at Harvard, and, ironically, Lawrence Lessig) claiming that the project represents the end of the world in a conflagration of multiple bibliographic dystopias. " The company’s legal boldness has ruffled authors and publishers, but also made plain just how ill-suited many copyright rules are to an era in which anyone can copy entire books with the click of a mouse." The linkage between the library community and the engineering mindset of Google is fascinating. Librarians generally adopt a philosophy that promotes sharing (although as a board member of a multi-type system in Illinois, it became obvious to me that librarians, public, in particular, really like borrowing, but abhor sharing: God forbid another public library might get first crack at *their* patrons' new books first, something that digital union catalogs has fostered.) Personally, I think Google's reliance on pushing the envelope of what constitutes "fair use" and relying on that to push the frontier, is misplaced. Google should have publicly proposed (they secretly did, and that was a problem, the company's excessive desire for keeping everything secret) a royalty to the author for each access to one of the scanned books. The original settlement between the Author's Guild and Google has been thrown out so what will happen remains to be seen. The Author's Guild original settlement was for a lump sum, which, as far as I can determine, benefited no one except the AG lawyers and staff. All that being said [spoiler alert] the author believes that the battle has petered out and it will be a while before the huge file of books Google has (note that Robert Darnton, who shoved Google's initiative under the bus, has started his own competing initiative, but then he really wants to be Librarian of Congress) ever becomes available. *One fascinating detail is that the University of Michigan under Wilkin (bless him) proceeded to digitize books still under copyright reckoning that since the University was a state agency he could not be sued since copyright law is federal and the 11th amendment prohibited another state or person outside the state from suing a state. (The story of why we have an 11th amendment is fascinating in itself - go look it up, it was a major set back for a new Supreme Court in 1795, Georgia leading the charge against what it perceived as an attack on its sovereignty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleventh...) However--- " in Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123(1908), the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts may enjoin state officials from violating federal law." **For anyone who cares, I've embarked on my own little project. A company in CA will scan books for $1.00 per 100 pages and then send me the digital file as a pdf. (They use the guillotine method that destroys the original so there is no hint of copyright problem since they are merely replacing the format.) I then run the pdf against a really good OCR program which then creates an html file which I then convert to an epub and mobi file in Caliber. Outstanding. I'm doing this for all the big tomes I own which take up so much frigging room and are hard to physically read. Other books I own for which there are digital files, I purchase and then sell the physical copies on Amazon. There are tons of OP books that I wish would get scanned and made available. I'd gladly pay something for them on Google Books, but until they sort out the mess... *** Another interesting tidbit: "To track and record what it was scanning, Google relied on bar codes and bibliographic data from its library partners. But not all the time. Upon visiting its first U.K. partner, Oxford University, Google executives were astonished to discover that large portions of the medieval school’s collections are organized by size rather than U.S.-style subject headings. “You get real efficiencies if you lump all small books together, big books together, and thick books together,” Oxford librarian Michael Popham explained to me." Just think if they had shelved them by color, then the next time someone came in looking for a book of which he could only remember the color...(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 2013
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Jan 01, 2013
| Kindle Edition
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| 1594202346
| 9781594202346
| 4.25
| 1,663
| 2009
| Aug 20, 2009
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"On September 11, 2001, some three thousand Americans were killed by terrorists; our country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure it...more
"On September 11, 2001, some three thousand Americans were killed by terrorists; our country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But that same year, and every year since then, some twenty thousand Americans died because they couldn’t get health care. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans go bankrupt every year because of medical bills. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country either." This is probably a book everyone should read. It's a dispassionate look at health care systems throughout the world as Reid travels from one country to another to see how his shoulder would be treated and under what circumstances. To start a couple of basic facts: "most rich countries have better national health statistics—longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, better recovery rates from major diseases—than the United States does.Yet all the other rich countries spend far less on health care than the United States does. . . .Among the world’s developed nations, the United States stands at or near the bottom in most important rankings of access to and quality of medical care. The Japanese go to the doctor more often than anyone else, yet their system costs only $3,400 per person; in the United States the cost is $7,400 per person annually. In Canada, the nation has decided that to be the most fair, people should have to wait equally. In Britain, the priority is that all health care should be free to everyone. He begins by identifying the four basic types of mechanisms to pay for health care in the industrialized world. (He discounts the third world since those are all basically pay-as-you-go and available only to the rich.) Conventional wisdom tells us that these other countries depend on "socialized" medicine, yet that is incorrect. Ironically the only pure socialized medical systems exists in Cuba and the United States' VA system which is totally government funded, doctors are paid and employed by the government and veterans pay nothing for its services. Other countries are all a mix of private and public. How they are structured is related to the country's moral fabric. The four systems are the Bismarck (a mix of public and private as in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland); in the Beveridge model there are no medical bills; rather, medical treatment is a public service, like the fire department or the public library, hospitals and clinics are often owned by the government; some doctors are government employees, but there are also private doctors who collect their fees from the government. These systems tend to have low costs per capita, because the government, as the sole payer, controls what doctors can do and what they can charge. The British system is based on the Beveridge model. Canada's system is the third type, a national insurance plan which has elements of both Bismarck and Beveridge. The providers of health care are private, but the payer is a government-run insurance program that every citizen pays into. The last system is the pay-as-you-go in which there is no insurance and people pay for service out of their own pockets. The United States has a mix of all. For those under sixty-five is a modified Bismarckian system for those lucky enough to be employed and have an employer-based system. Those over sixty-five have Medicare more similar to the Canadian system, and for many there is only the pay-as-you-go although most municipalities will not refuse treatment for emergencies which simply means the cost is allocated elsewhere, i.e. everyone else. One of the features of the so-called ObamaCare was to eliminate free-loading and have everyone, or most everyone pay for some form of health insurance. For Native Americans, military personnel, and veterans, we’re Britain, or Cuba. "And yet we’re like no other country, because the United States maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people, and because it relies so heavily on for-profit private insurance plans to pay the bills. All the other countries have settled on one model for everybody, on the theory that this is simpler, cheaper, and fairer. With its fragmented array of providers and payers and overlapping systems, the U.S. health care system doesn’t fit into any of the recognized models." A common complaint leveled against government health care programs is they ration, yet all systems ration. In this country it's done by insurance companies, in others it's done by ethical committees. Here, the decisions are applied inequality and depend on one's plan (and the quality of one's lawyer.) "made, often in secret, by scores of different insurance companies. One person may get coverage for a potentially life-saving operation, while the next person doesn’t. This may be a boon to the person with the more generous insurance policy, but it’s not particularly fair." Some form of rationing *must* be done in order to reduce costs. "Should the system spend its money to keep a ninety-five-year-old Alzheimer’s patient alive until he’s ninety-six? Should an ailing eighty-four-year-old get the same intensive treatment for breast cancer that is provided to an otherwise healthy forty-four-year-old? Should the health system, or the insurance plan, pay for Viagra? For Botox? In a health care system that offers universal coverage, these decisions tend to be made uniformly for everybody." The U.S. spends the most on administrative costs and a system that organized everyone into one plan would clearly cut costs. Ironically, the charge that one system would reduce choice is not true. Other countries, in fact, offer patients more choice. Insurance plans in this country have discourage choice by building preferred networks. In most other countries patients can go wherever they want and see whomever they want since the structure for payment is the same throughout the country. All countries are faced with rising health care costs and all face complaints about their systems. The grass is always greener.... The one constant is complaining. "The American economist Tsung-Mei Cheng has formulated, with tongue only partly in cheek, the Universal Laws of Health Care Systems: 1. “No matter how good the health care in a particular country, people will complain about it.” 2. “No matter how much money is spent on health care, the doctors and hospitals will argue that it is not enough.” 3. “The last reform always failed.”3 Everywhere I went on my global quest, I found that Cheng’s Universal Laws held true. But for all their problems, the other industrialized countries tend to do better than the United States on basic measures of health system performance: coverage, quality, cost control, choice. This was the most surprising and infuriating discovery of my global quest—that the United States of America performs so poorly in this fundamental area of human life. In industry, finance, music, science, arts, academics, athletics,Americans can match or surpass any other country. Why can’t we do that when it comes to health care?" Read the book for part of the answer. Fascinating, yet ultimately quite depressing. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 19, 2012
| Dec 04, 2012
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Nov 19, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 0307377903
| 9780307377906
| 4.09
| 2,398
| Mar 01, 2012
| Mar 13, 2012
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"This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why...more
"This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, . . Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved this complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests and savannas and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of modern societies in just a few thousand years. . . I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational." I hardly feel qualified to make any kind of judgments on this book having little background in philosophy, especially moral philosophy, so I especially appreciate Haidt's lucid summary of the development of moral philosophy through examples and hypotheticals. I remember several years ago having a visit from the local anti-abortion denizens, nice people, very concerned about youth, etc. They steered the conversation to abortion, their favorite topic. Being of a liberal and hopefully rational and reasoned mindset myself, I described a book I had recently read,The Facts of Life: Science and the Abortion Controversy by Harold J. Morowitz, James Trefil, a small, excellent analysis of the abortion debate that contains a plea for looking at the issue rationally. I described their suggestion that we need to decide what constitutes "human" and then see when the fetus acquires the capability (cerebral cortex) to be human, etc. etc. To which the response was, "well, I don't believe that." All debate and discussions ceases when that statement arrives. Now, I could have said, well, you old biddy, I don't give a fuck what you believe, I'm trying to find some common ground here." But, my mother having raised me as a good little boy who is always polite to old people, I merely sat there rather stunned. That's the problem. How do you create a discussion of issues when either side can just say, well, I don't believe that. This is not just a conservative or right-wing problem. Try having a rational or reasonable discussion about the merits of circumcision, climate. autism, raw milk or veganism. I guarantee the true believers will immediately assemble with truckloads of vitriol. We all suffer from what Haidt calls "confirmation bias," that is, our gut tells us what to believe first and then we seek out justifications for that belief. Haidt's book reaffirms what has become fairly obvious: we divide ourselves into tribes and those tribes consist of like-minded people which we use to validate our intuitive predispositions. His stated goal is to attempt to find a way to bridge the divide between two different moral world views., and to find a way for each side to at least understand the other's perspective. Both left and right are motivated by the moral foundations of care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. But they differ qualitatively: liberals tend to care more about suffering and violence; conservatives care about harm done to others but not as intensely. Conservatives, on the other hand, place more emphasis on fairness, i.e. getting what you deserve. Both sides value liberty but have differing definition as to what constitutes the oppressor. Similarly, with fairness, each side values it but define it differently: liberals view it from the standpoint of equality while conservatives look to proportionality, i.e. fairness is being rewarded for your accomplishments and if you work harder you should be rewarded proportionally. The biggest divisions relate to sanctity, authority and loyalty. You can easily guess where the preferences of conservatives and liberals lie. Haidt suggests that liberals will fail to gain wider acceptance until they come to terms with those three moral values and find someway to create their own vocabulary validating them. I would add that liberals will have to be more accepting of groups, particularly religious ones (as much as I despise them,) which serve an evolutionary need to discount selfishness and promote group adherence and benefits. To some extent that's why I am so puzzled by the right's celebration of Ayn Rand who promoted the antithesis of group-think by celebrating independence and selfishness, i.e. think of yourself first and what benefits accrue to yourself through your actions. She hated coercion both governmental and religious, in particular, yet both encourage group adherence and loyalty. I just wonder how much of what Haidt says come from his intuitive side (the elephant) and how much from the rational or reasoning part (the rider.) Here's a quote that struck me: "And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically."(less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 04, 2012
| Sep 17, 2012
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Sep 04, 2012
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| 9781614520016
| 3.78
| 3,013
| May 03, 2011
| 2011
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Having enjoyed Krakauer’s work in the past, I picked up this Kindle single on spec. Turns out to be quite a read. Krakauer was an emotional and financ...more
Having enjoyed Krakauer’s work in the past, I picked up this Kindle single on spec. Turns out to be quite a read. Krakauer was an emotional and financial supporter of Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time, the mountaineer who created a non-profit empire building schools in Pakistan ostensibly as a way to thwart the influence of the Taliban and Islamic revolutionary teaching. He became somewhat of a cult figure and was soon jetting around the country giving inspiring talks about his good works. Emphasis on *his* good works. Krakauer, who had donated $75,000 to Mortenson’s foundation, the Central Asia Institute, became disenchanted as he heard more and more stories of misuse of funds by Mortenson and his lack of accountability. This single is the story of Mortenson and Krakauer’s investigation into the Foundation. That story is interesting enough, but I have become intrigued by the thesis proposed by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind As it happens, I poked around the 60 Minutes website, seeking more information about the Mortenson case. In early April 2011, they broadcast a story detailing some of the allegations against Mortenson and his foundation. I didn’t watch the show, but I did read all 354 comments about the story on their website. Commenters were divided into two camps: those who had an emotional attachment to Mortenson and his good works and who accepted everything he said at face value; and the other, a very small minority (perhaps 10%), who were more interested in presenting evidence of Mortenson’s malfeasance, arguing that just doing “some” good was not enough to ignore facts related to his lack of accountability and problems with the CAI. Both sides would respond to each other but rarely listen to what the other was saying. It seemed to me a classic example of what Haidt saw in the dichotomy between emotional and rational ways of looking at issues. I won’t try to summarize Haidt’s book here but will save that for my review later. Nevertheless, it was disheartening to see how little communication surfaced in the comments between the two groups which consolidated based on their respective pre-conceptions. A good friend and I discussed this with regard to the Wisconsin recall election, Andy unable to understand why so many union members were voting for Walker, totally against their economic interests, and I trying to apply Haidt noting that it represented a difference in prioritizing values. If, for example, you believe in supporting authority and that same-sex marriage is an abomination, your view of the world will be less influenced by the economic interests valued more highly by other groups. (That’s presented perhaps a little simplistically, but I think you’ll get the idea. Since Krakauer’s little essay appeared (by the way, I love Kindle shorts) Mortenson has settled for more than a $million with the Montana Attorney General (he was charged, among other things, with using CAI funds for personal expenses and the IRS was after him also for not declaring those as income.) The CharityWatch organization (American Institute of Philanthropy) has also published several articles detailing the CAI’s malfeasance. References: https://doj.mt.gov/campaigns/investig... http://www.charitywatch.org/articles/...(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 02, 2012
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Jun 02, 2012
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| 0312262396
| 9780312262396
| 4.30
| 10
| Mar 15, 2001
| Mar 15, 2001
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The book is about a particularly interesting case: Employment Division v Smith. Hidden behind this seemingly innocuous name lay a conflict pitting the...more
The book is about a particularly interesting case: Employment Division v Smith. Hidden behind this seemingly innocuous name lay a conflict pitting the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Perpetually in conflict, those two clauses of the First Amendment create a tension that all feel and few understand. Just how far can the government go in controlling behavior that is in conflict with society’s mores yet which for some may be considered an essential religious practice? For some Native American Indians tribes peyote is a sacred sacrament, a gift that embodies God, much as wine might represent the blood of Christ in Catholic religious practice. Yet peyote was also considered a dangerous drug its use to be prosecuted to the fullest extent under the War on Drugs. It pitted two very interesting men against each other in the oral arguments before the Supreme Court and the result was new legislation, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, that would also be declared unconstitutional four years later as an unconstitutional form of legislative power in City of Boerne v. Flores as an wrong use of the 14th amendment as it applied to the states. This resulted in another congressional action, Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which gave special grants to religious institutions. Whew. Got that? So the RFRA was still constitutional as it applied to the federal government, but not the states. The RFRA has been used by many minority religious groups to challenge federal statutes as being onerous to their religious practice, including payment of income taxes. They have lost, in most cases because the courts have ruled the statutes had a compelling secular interest. Ironically, the Native American Church didn’t exist before 1918 when it was formalized at the suggestion of a white man, James Mooney, as a way of insulating itself and its practices, from mainstream harassment with protection from under the free exercise clause of the Constitution. There has always been tension between the free exercise clause, which permits unfettered religious practice in theory, and the establishment clause, which is intended to prevent government from favoring one religion over another. But even Thomas Jefferson, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom made a distinction between established religions as he saw them and the practices of those “aboriginal inhabitants. . .who inculcate a a sanctimonious reverence for their ancestors.” So the struggle to reconcile peyote use with governmental efforts to ban it had long roots. ** It all got started because of the state of Oregon denying unemployment benefits to two employees because they had used peyote, an illegal drug, as part of a religious ceremony and as a method to help alcoholics. The question before the court was, “Can a state deny unemployment benefits to a worker fired for using prohibited drugs for religious purposes?” The answer, in a six-three decision written by Justice Scalia was, *SPOILER ALERT* “ Yes. Scalia observed that the Court has never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that government is free to regulate. Allowing exceptions to every state law or regulation affecting religion "would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind." Scalia cited as examples compulsory military service, payment of taxes, vaccination requirements, and child-neglect laws” What astonished Court observers was the breadth of the majority opinion which threw out the Sherbert established in Sherbert v Verner in which a Jehovah’s Witness (many landmark religious test cases have involved this sect,) a Sabbatarian who insisted on a Saturday sabbath, was fired when she refused, on religious grounds, to work on a Saturday. The Court ruled that to force her to work on her Sabbath was not “a compelling state interest” and therefore a violation of the free exercise clause and she was entitled to unemployment benefits. A similar case, also involving Jehovah’s Witnesses (Thomas v Review Board) involved a man who refused to work on tanks arguing his personal interpretation of the Bible would prevent him from helping to create instruments of war. He, too, was entitled to unemployment benefits, said the court. One difference in the Smith case was that no state could pass a law prohibiting worship on Saturday; they could, however, declare peyote an illegal drug. But again, this case involved unemployment compensation. The decision caused a whirlwind of legal activity in response to Justice Scalia’s opinion which seemed to go much further than was asked for by the Oregon AG. They essentially overturned the Sherbert test and, in the eyes of some, stripped minority religious groups of special protection under the free exercise clause.The new rule was that if the state didn’t target religion, “then minorities whose practice was destroyed were out of luck.” Epps argues that the case was wrongly decided as an infringement on religious freedom, yet even Thomas Jefferson made a distinction between religious belief and the action that flows therefrom. In Reynolds v US, Justice Waite (a decision surprisingly not mentioned in Epps’ book) made that point in denying the religious right to polygamy. “The court argued that if polygamy was allowed, someone might eventually argue that human sacrifice was a necessary part of their religion, and "to permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself." The Court believed the true spirit of the First Amendment was that Congress could not legislate against opinion, but could legislate against action.” But his harshest words are for Scalia, a “great and powerful judge who had seen the Smith case not as a dispute between real people but as a chance to play with the law, to take away part of our heritage of religious freedom.” Epps does a great job of humanizing those involved in the dispute and getting us to sympathize not only with the claimants, but the state as well. Al Smith had his own alcohol related demons and Attorney General Frohnmayer was fighting to save the lives of his three daughters who had inherited a devastating anemic disease through a recessive gene from him and his wife. It’s a tragic story, and one cannot help but admire Frohnmayer and his family as they suffered one medical calamity after another. He is truly a heroic figure. This is a really good book that will make you think about the meaning of justice and whether that concept as applied by the law can be separated from the individuals and people it is supposed to protect. N.B. There is an odd, but fascinating, chapter on Oregon’s battle with Baghwan Rajneesh and his compound and attempt to create a theocratic state within a state. A more fuller account can be found in James Gordon’s The Golden Guru: The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (not read) and Frances Fitzgerald’s excellent lengthy reportage in Cities on a Hill: A Brilliant Exploration of Visonary Communities Remaking the American Dream and The New Yorker September 22 and 29, 1986 (which I have read.) ** Not to mention polygamy. In Reynolds v United States (1878)the Supreme Court held that religious duty was not a suitable defense to a criminal indictment (Reynolds had been criminally charged with bigamy under new Utah anti-polygamy statutues.) Justice Waite declared in the Constitution "Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of the good order." Another case that might be of interest to those pursuing this divisive issue is LARKIN ET AL. v. GRENDEL'S DEN, INC. of 1982. The court was asked to decide whether a Massachusetts statute, which vests in the governing bodies of churches and schools the power effectively to veto applications for liquor licenses within a 500-foot radius of the church or school, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It ruled the statute unconstitutional under the establishment clause since it effectively gave a religious body the power to make a political decision, i.e. the granting of a liquor license. The only dissent came from Justice Rehnquist and it makes interesting reading because his rationale seems to be solely that the law makes sense. It’s also interesting to note that the Catholic Church was granted an exemption to use wine during Mass during Prohibition. You can hear the oral arguments and opinion announcement at http://www.oyez.org/cases/1980-1989/1....(less) | Notes are private!
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Forgive me if this “review” seems an agglomeration of tidbits, but I really enjoy little facts and pieces of information, and this book was riddled wi...more
Forgive me if this “review” seems an agglomeration of tidbits, but I really enjoy little facts and pieces of information, and this book was riddled with them. I don’t like fish and frankly the idea of eating it raw, no matter how trendy or gussied up it might be, roils my stomach. Be that as it may, this is a fascinating story, following the ascent (descent?) from a despised, lower class food to one prized by the elite. (Lobster made a similar journey: it was once banned as food for prisoners in jail because it was considered so unseemly and dirty.) The story follows Kate at the California Sushi Academy where, a total neophyte, she has decided to learn how to make Sushi from the masters. It has become less Japanese than international and some of the best chefs are from outside Japan. But, I mean how hard can it be to roll up some raw tuna around rice. Surprise, surprise. Interestingly, mold is key to Sushi rice and the particular mold strains are guarded in bank vaults or secret caves. The mold is added to rice and eats it with such tremendous speed that if not properly controlled, the heat generated would overheat the incubator. The moldy rice is then mixed with soybeans along with yeast, bacteria and salt. The mush is shoveled into tubs where it sits for months where the digestive enzymes shorten time from 78 million years to seconds and generate amino acids. It’s the enzymes that we want to create glutamate important to human growth, brain development, etc. (Bear with me, I listened to this book on audio and am trying to recreate it from memory.) Anyway, to make a long, but interesting story short, the result is Miso (for more details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miso). It’s very nutritious and as a paste is used in soups and other dishes including, guess what, sushi. The brown liquid at the edges of the Miso is soy sauce. Msg, monosodium glutamate, is heralded as one of the miracles of this process and an important ingredient in flavoring. Usually associated with Japanese and Chinese food, it’s ubiquitous ands manufactured by the ton, added to meats, chips, fast food, soups , and many other things (it’s hidden under the name hydrolyzed vegetable protein.) Western scientists had always assumed that the human tongue can taste only four flavors: sweet, bitter, sour, and salty. Asian scientists insisted there was another they called “tastiness” triggered by amino acids and was represented by the amino acid glutamate (msg) . Recently scientists at UC San Diego have found specific receptors for this flavor. Fresh water fish can be dangerous when used raw for sushi as it is more likely to contain parasites that cause tapeworm. Salmon and trout, in particular as notorious, and the only way to kill the parasites is by freezing at -31 F for 18 hours or for a week at 0 F. Farmed salmon is not as dangerous filled as it is with PCBs and antibiotics. (Farmed salmon has 5 times the levels of PCB as wild salmon. It takes 3 lbs of ground up fish meal to produce 1 lb of salmon. In the wild they eat krill which gives the flesh its pink color - much like flamingoes.) The more fatty farmed salmon has become much more popular with diners making chefs happy since it is much cheaper. Tuna pose their own special problems, in particular the Bluefin, largest of all the tuna and unusual in that it is warm-blooded and therefore has to age longer, much like terrestrial animals before they are eaten. Another issue is mercury. Since underwater volcanoes and coal-fired energy plants emit mercury which accumulates in the top of the food chain (and Bluefin tuna which often reach 1,500 lbs. are a top predator) pregnant women are told not to eat Bluefin and everyone else is told no more than once-a-week for any kind of tuna. Some of the techniques to factory farm tuna are rather spectacular (I'll resist the temptation to reveal a spoiler but will only say they involve mackerel) and perhaps they might lessen the danger of eating mercury. Another reason to avoid fish. The evolution of sushi is quite a story in itself, moving from rice being used to preserve fish (and smelling like the “vomit of a drunkard” and being thrown out, to a situation where the rice is more important than the fish. Sushi chefs apprentice themselves for years to learn the secrets of good sushi rice. (I have some Norwegian in my genes, but there is no way you will ever get lutefisk** - literally lye fish - past my nose.) A major role of the sushi chef is to scope out the customers and adjust the servings and consistency and appearance to the particular customer's taste. I'll avoid a spoiler here and not reveal why it is that Americans will probably never get an authentic sushi; the kind they are served would be rejected as inedible by most Japanese. I could go on and on. Fascinating book. ** Here’s what Garrison Keillor has to say about it:”Every Advent we entered the purgatory of lutefisk, a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, much as if survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I'd be told, "Just have a little." Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot.”(less) | Notes are private!
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This is a Kindle "Single." I guess it's a good idea. Reads like a nice, in-depth New Yorker article (a good thing.) (People unfamiliar with Bissonette...more
This is a Kindle "Single." I guess it's a good idea. Reads like a nice, in-depth New Yorker article (a good thing.) (People unfamiliar with Bissonette's story should stop reading here.) The story follows the tragic career of a very troubled priest, Father Barney Bissonette, who, unconscionably, was moved from one parish to another in order for the Catholic Church to hide Bissonette's proclivity for molesting church acolytes. One family of thirteen -- despite several very dangerous pregnancies the Church had insisted the parents not use birth-control as being too "selfish" -- was particularly hard hit and Thomas Deary, one of the older boys,committed suicide, unable to bear the shame and secrecy of it all. So three of his brothers decide to get even with Bissonette, now retired and ill in New Mexico. The banality of the situation (or in Hannah Arendt's view, evil) is driven home sharply by the prosaic nature of the settlements agreed to by the Church: While Bissonnette cost the Santa Fe Archdiocese (or its insurers) $2 million or more in settlements, the individual payouts were actually quite modest. As always, the law broke things down very pragmatically: fondling (a one-time occurrence brought about $25,000) was worth less than oral sex, oral sex less than anal sex, anal sex less than anal sex with bleeding. Also factored in was the frequency and duration of the abuse. Not only the Church but its victims -- more determined to avoid embarrassment than to cash in to the max -- wanted these matters disposed of quietly and quickly. So the highest awards went for only around $300,000. This may explain why no one ever wrote much about Bissonnette; when it comes to public censure, he got pretty much of a pass.(less) | Notes are private!
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The recent gubernatorial election in California focused attention on two women who had been CEO’s of major corporations. I don’t know much about Meg W...more
The recent gubernatorial election in California focused attention on two women who had been CEO’s of major corporations. I don’t know much about Meg Whitman, although I think most ebay users were pleased to see her leave, but Carly Fiorina, darling of the business media several years ago, is examined more critically in this examination of the travails of HP after the death of Hewlett and Packard. HP’s first foray into the computer business was the 2216A, a computerized instrumentation package that sold for over $22,000, or didn’t sell at first until Tom Perkins, their marketing guru, began promoting it for what it was, and how he discovered it was being used, a computer. HP had been terrified to call it such fearing that IBM, the giant in the business, would “squash” them if they discovered HP was trying to get into the computer business. Their next project could have been revolutionary. Perkins, who by now had been promoted to GM of the Long Beach operation, sunk huge amounts of capital into the “Omega” project which would have been a quantum leap forward in computer power and design using 32 bits, double to processing power of the then current 16-bit machines. Perkins was to become a major player in the bitter boardroom battles and was back on the board after several interim escapades with other firms and his forays into the world of venture capital. He proved to be a particularly difficult adversary during Spygate for Patricia Dunn, who, by this time had been through bouts with three different kids of cancer, the most recent being ovarian. The biggest lie is always the best. And it's always the cover-up that bring ruin. The cover-up at HP pales in comparison to the lies at Wall Street, WMD, and Madoff, but it says a lot about business practices at the top. I was so glad that Carly Fiorina lost in California as this author lays much of the blame for HP’s repudiation of its long-standing ethical workplace directly at her feet. The record of the interpersonal dysfunctional relationships is sad, indeed. It’s amazing the company still functions given the level of vitriol, narcissism, and back-biting that the company descended into. Mark Hurd, who took over after two short-lived CEO’s (Patricia Dunn’s tenure was racked by scandal) left himself under an expense account and sexual harassment scandal in 2010. (He was recently hired by his friend Larry Ellison at Oracle, who has had his own problems with misanthropy.) The author suggests that it was Hurd's total lack of moral fiber that passed the blame for his actions to Patricia Dunn, his predecessor, and made her the scapegoat while she was battling terminal cancer. The merger of Compaq and HP, fought bitterly by the Hewlett family, initially looked like it would be a big success, but ultimately it failed to translate into increased market share, the goal of every business. HP’s stock fell to such a level it attracted possible buyouts. Fiorina’s response was to place the blame on three of her subordinates whom she fired. The facts was that much of the initial success was due to talent at Compaq, but many of those managers couldn’t wait to abandon the new company given Fiorina’s antagonistic style of management. It became apparent to the HP directors that Fiorina had no interest of aptitude for the “hard, unglamourous work of managing a complex company day-to-day.” That had been the forte of the Compaq CEO who had quit just six months after the merger, unable to stand Fiorina. It was the replacement of Fiorina with Mark Hurd that started the ball rolling downhill. The leaks were flowing worse than the hole in the proverbial dyke, and in an attempt to plug the leaks, Dunn embarked on an internal surveillance program -- the UDT, Unauthorized Disclosure Team, that ran code-named operations called Kona 1 and Kona 2 named after Dunn’s mansion in Hawaii -- that soon had everyone in a major snit pointing fingers at her and each other. HP’s internal security division became a loose cannon in its investigation hiring a firm specializing in “pretexting” to obtain the phone numbers and records of HP directors, staff, journalists, and relatives. The blame finally settled on Dunn, and at a time when she had stage-four cancer, and was given four felony counts. Those charges were later dropped and as far as I can tell she is beating the latest cancer. Ann Baskin, HP’s general counsel resign just before appearing before Congress where she and several other high-ranking HP officials invoked the Fifth Amendment. I’ve read a lot of books recently about large corporations, Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, etc. etc., and what is becoming apparent is that CEOs and boards of directors, seem to have their own pecuniary interests at heart in the short-term, caring less about long-term prospects for the company. Top management becomes a battle ground of incestuous relationships as each seeks to maximize power and profit for him/herself jacking up stock prices by laying off workers and using creative buyouts with little thought for the long-term profitability of the company, often with little regard to the legality of their actions. I feel sorry for the average employee who often suffers as a result of these machinations. Next time you get upset when your second grader misbehaves in school, you can despair a little more because it appears adults in big corporations haven’t left the second grade either. When you take a bunch of rapacious people operating at the emotional level of children and put them in charge of large corporations you get disaster, but a really fun story.(less) | Notes are private!
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Henry Rosovsky should be read by everyone interested in higher education, but particularly by students. It will provide them with a very practical int...more
Henry Rosovsky should be read by everyone interested in higher education, but particularly by students. It will provide them with a very practical introduction to the American university. Rosovsky discusses the value of the research university compared to the independent college, graduate students as teachers, and the relative responsibilities of the administrators compared to those of the faculty. Rosovsky, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, makes an excellent case for the advantage to students of attending a research oriented university as opposed to the more pedagogioally oriented independent colleges. He defines research as "studíous inquiry, usually critical and exhaustive investigation of experimentation having for its aim the revision of accepted conclusions in the light of newly discovered facts." Emphasis on research implies a love of learning and abiding faith in the notion of progress, i.e. a basic optimism about the human condition. He infers from this that research oriented professors will be less likely to be cynical or reactionary and less likely to suffer burnout from basically repetitions teaching. He also proposes that research quality is much easier to measure and define than teaching quality, and therefore one is more likely to find quality in a research oriented institution. (A risky proposition at best.) Rosovsky delivers an impassioned plea for a liberal education as opposed to merely training for a task. "General education means the whole development of the individual, apart from his occupational training. It includes the civilizing of his life purposes, the refining of his emotional reactions, and the maturing of his understanding about the nature of things according to the best knowledge of our time." This liberal education should be enable the student to: 1. Think and write clearly; to communicate with precision and force. 2. Develop a critical appreciation for the manner in which we gain knowledge. This means teaching historical and quantitative techniques of analysis. 3. View personal experience within a wider, multicultural context. 4. Gain experience ín thinking about ethical and moral dilemmas. 5. Achieve some depth of knowledge in a particular field (i.e. the "major".) He addresses Bloom’s nostalgic concern for a common body of knowledge and argues that this sentiment for a "better time" does not reflect reality as it existed 30 years ago. Instead it expresses an inadvertent realization of and yearning for the homogeneity of the past, which Rosovsky implies was "a consequence of narrow class privilege." At entry to college the race is uneven, not everyone starts with equal handicaps. Our concern should be for how the race ends. A liberal education can help. Training may be too restrictive. ”Up-to-date information can always be acquired without too much difficulty, human understanding cannot be reduced to asking the computer a few questions." (less) | Notes are private!
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"Oral argument in the Supreme Court is the thinking man's spectator sport and a grand one at that." It's ironic that Justice Scalia, who years ago des...more
"Oral argument in the Supreme Court is the thinking man's spectator sport and a grand one at that." It's ironic that Justice Scalia, who years ago described oral arguments as "that dog and pony show," now that he has been on the court for a decade, says that oral arguments are indeed worthwhile. But then perhaps it's because now he's the one who's the center of attention. Oral arguments themselves can provide riveting theater and the Oyez Project is now making them available online (www.oyez.org) for audio download or simultaneous audio and transcript. This book, a series of essays by esteemed Supreme Court journalists, presents analysis of good and bad arguments before the court. If you've ever listened to the arguments presented before the court, you'll realize what dunderheads some of the lawyers are who appear before the court. In something a little unusual, quotes are referenced to audio clips available at www.goodquarrel.com. If you read this book with your laptop on you lap you can do that, although I much prefer listening to the entire arguments found at Oyez. In Elk Grove Village School District v Newdow, Dahlia Lithwick uses a the most unusual appearance of the child's father as the plaintiff attorney to demonstrate several rules that are regarded as de rigeur when appearing before the court. Newdow had challenged the Pledge of Allegiance as an unconstitutional establishment of religion by using the words "under god," a phrase that was added only in 1954. He suggested that by forcing his daughter to say those words the school district was saying your father's world view is wrong (Newdow is an atheist." Newdow broke one of the first rules in his first paragraph by using the pronoun "I" and personalizing the case. This is just not done. The justices could care less what the advocates think or feel. To quote Lithwick, their concerns are the following in order of importance: "(1) the Constitution;(2) the Court; (3) not looking stupid; (4)not overtly overruling anything; (5)the dignity of the states; (6) the dignity of the parties; (7) what they are going to eat for dinner; (8) what the oral advocates want." The issue of standing brought up by Justice Kennedy provoked a very interesting exchange as Newdow who had become estranged from his wife (who did not object to the pledge) and did not have full custody. Newdow had broken another cardinal rule: "Thou shalt not insult the court or the judiciary." He had done so by filing a successful motion that Scalia recuse himself because of public statements he had made about the case. His success was, in itself, quite extraordinary. Newdow violated several other rules, including "Thou shalt not suggest you are smarter than the Justices." Newdow at one point suggested that what Justice Kennedy thought was irrelevant. Not necessarily a winning strategy. He even got the spectators to clap at one of his remarks at the expense of Chief Justice Rehnquist, a major no-no in court decorum. Ironically, although Newdow violated most of the commandments and lost the case -- based on losing standing -- his presentation and arguments have been considered some of the most effective ever presented. Perhaps my favorite case was Forsyth County, GA v Nationalist Movement. In response to a huge Civil Rights Movement demonstration that had cost the taxpayers of Forsyth County (the state actually picked up the tab)$670,000 in police protection and other costs Forsyth County (which was 99% white and had a long history of racial antagonism) passed an ordinance requiring a parade permit and permitting the assessment of costs associated with the parade or demonstration. Ironically, it was the minute racist organization that filed a lawsuit against the county claiming the $100 fee they had been assessed for a permit was unconstitutional. This was a bizarre little group located in a small town in Mississippi (on a personal note, I like taking the train down south so I get to pee on Mississippi) whose lawyer, just before he was to argue their case before the court stood on the steps of the court and, in an interview with ABC news, proclaimed that for Biblical reasons blacks should be barred from positions of authority in government and that the Bible overruled anything the court might say. (Clarence Thomas had just been seated to fill Thurgood Marshall's seat.) The lawyer, Richard Barrett, had been barred from appearances in lower courts because of legal transgressions like lying and not admitting that he had a stake in the outcome. "Concealing or misrepresenting facts is a serious offense for a practicing attorney." The court could have removed Barrett since you do not have a constitutional right to defend yourself before the Supreme Court, and especially after he announced in the pre-argument orientation by the court clerk that he would not answer any questions put to him by Justice Thomas, but would instead stand mute and ignore him. [A review of his biography on Wikipaedia revealed that Barrett was murdered in April 2010 by a man who was outraged by homosexual advances made to him by Barrett, who had been quite vocal in his opposition to homosexuality. As I have always said, people specialize in their deficiencies.:] In this case, however, Barrett had the First Amendment going for him and the justices were naturally skeptical of any ordinance, particularly one with seemingly subjective assessments making it liable for abuse on content grounds. The commentary the authors add to quotations from the oral arguments are particularly helpful. Lyle Denniston's (a long-time Supreme Court reporter) analysis of the Casey case was especially instructive and he pointed out many little idiosyncrasies of the arguments that I did not catch when listening to the entire presentation. I did not realize that abortion had been legal when the Constitution was written. The anti-abortion folks were relying on the 14th Amendment in passed 1868 when abortion was illegal so Kolbert was argued that the Justices needed to be careful in falling back on whether something was illegal in 1868 in making their decision; her main purpose being to get them to reaffirm Roe rather than just narrowly look at the peculiarities of the Pennsylvania statute. And peculiar it was, as several justices noted in their questions. The law required wives to notify (request permission, really) of their husbands before getting an abortion, not a lover, or acquaintance, or father of the child, only her husband. The idea was to "uphold marital integrity," but as Justice Stevens pointed out, the law was aimed at only a very small number of people, those women who were not likely to discuss the issue with their husbands. It was almost as if the statute didn't matter according to the state's Attorney General. That puzzled several Justices. Scalia, it is clear, aside from obviously making funny remarks, often tries to rehabilitate an advocate's argument, i.e., steer him/her in a more appropriate direction if Scalia feels s/he isn't being persuasive enough in the direction Scalia would like him/her to go. One thought struck me and that was that both Preate and Kenneth Starr, arguing for the administration in support of the statute, seemed to go out of their way to note that they were not arguing for overturning Roe. The ultimate result was that even though the Court had specifically said it was not going to hear arguments related to overturning Roe, in their decision by a 5-4 majority they specifically noted it was to be considered affirmed law although not as a fundamental right which would have required "strict scrutiny," but rather the "undue-burden" test. Whether that satisfied the very astute attorney for Planned Parenthood, Kathryn Kolbert is not know - to me , anyway. They also overturned the husband notification provision. The Glickman case was especially instructive, if not very entertaining. Without going into details of the case, it resulted in the lawyer for the growers being sued because he did not defer to a specialist in Supreme Court advocacy, a specialist in First Amendment law who might have won the case for them since the decision was a narrow one, 5-4, but had profound implications for government agricultural policy and check-offs. This is really a fascinating book featuring eleven different cases written by eleven different reporters. I urge listening to the entire arguments after reading each section to really get a flavor and understanding of the different positions.(less) | Notes are private!
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This book is in the tradition of Theodore White's great Making of a President series, which I devoured years ago as soon as they appeared, on the insi...more
This book is in the tradition of Theodore White's great Making of a President series, which I devoured years ago as soon as they appeared, on the inside story of presidential campaigns. This one is just as good, high praise, indeed. Another great example of how we are failed by the media and need to learn details a coujple of years after the fact. Fascinating details such as how many Senators were urging Obama to run. The field looked weak. Edwards was considered shallow, Gofre was not interested, no one else particularly strong around except Hillary and they were terrified because if she had gotten the nomination, all the increasingly common rumors of Bill's continued infidelities would surface. Not to mention her vote on the war. It was also clear that her campaign staff, while very loyal, was not as good as one would have liked. Clearly, the Clinton campaign presumed to believe the nomination was theirs, and Hillary had even put together a transition staff already in October of 2007. The only thing, she believed standing in their way was Iowa, and they didn't expect to lose that state. Axelrod believed correctly that Mark Penn, Clinton's campaign manager, was locked into a strategy borrowed from the 1990 succesful campaign and wqould be unable to change even though times had changed drstically. Iowa was a game changer: Obama slaughterd the opposition and Huckabee came out of nowhere to beat the other front-runners. Clinton had spent more than $23 million on Iowa, more than $500,00 per vote obtained. It was also becoming abundantly clear that two major factors were preventing Hillary from doing better: her dysfunctional campaign that she seemed unable to organize or control; and Bill, an out-of-control ex-president who could not bear the idea of being out of the limelight. Hillary had difficulty dealing with personnel issues and was reluctant to deal with problems directly (one wonders how that might have translated to her administration had she won.) In fact, when a staffer asked her to deal with Bill and control him, she wanted to delegate that to someone else, arguing she couldn't do it. All of the candidates assiduously courted the Kennedy endorsement. They had long ties to the Clintons, but Edward Kennedy and his family were charmed by the similarities Obama had to their fallen icon JFK: the hope, the charisma, the intelligence, and wonderful speech-making. Bill Clinton, on one of his trips to the Kennedy compound to gain support, nailed his own -- and his wife's -- chances for success, by remarking during a discussion with Teddy refering to Obama's age, and perhaps totally losing any subconscious symbolism, that "just a few years ago, that boy would have been serving us the coffee." That remark totally offended Edward Kennedy. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign was suffering from a candidate who wasn't that popular with the Repoublican base and who knew it. "Why would I want to be the leader of a party of such assholes," he said. His stance on amnesty for undocumented workers was anathema to the right, and he had difficulty mustering any kind of enthusiam for a protracted campaign especially after what the Bush folks had done to him in South Carolina in 2000. At one point during a debate prep session, McCain was asked to explain the difference between same-sex marriage and civil unions. Tired of everything, he shouted, "I don't give a fuck." The choice of Palin was a last ditch, unplanned, and very unprepared for attempt at revival. He worked to some extent, energizing the base. But it also lost support for McCain from moderate Republicans, many of them long-time supporters of McCain, who saw the move as a slap in the face. They viewed her as clearly unprepared to be president, and, as one large campaign donor and long-time supporter of McCain explained his switch to Obama simply by saying: "Palin."(less) | Notes are private!
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OK, so I like to watch all the legal shows, "Raising the Bar," "Shark," "Boston Legal," etc. David Feige was a public defender in New York and this bo...more
OK, so I like to watch all the legal shows, "Raising the Bar," "Shark," "Boston Legal," etc. David Feige was a public defender in New York and this book reflects those experiences. Something the book and all the shows have in common is that how you fare in court probably has less to do with guilt or innocence than with the internal politics and enmities of the "professionals" who run the show. I find that disheartening. Never having been in court (knock wood) I couldn't say but Feige has, and the picture painted is not pretty. It's all about client and time management. Public defenders often have a client load of between 75 and 120 cases. ADAs have a very different perspective because they are case centered rather than client centered so they can practice a zone offense. The public defender has to be with his/her client so he might be in seven or 10 courtrooms during the day, juggling phone calls meetings, and other duties while an ADA (who probably knows nothing of the case - often an advantage for the defense) tries to handle whatever case comes up in whatever courtroom he/she (enough of this he/she stuff - if I use he, assume s/he) might have been assigned to. The client every defense attorney has nightmares regarding is the innocent one. No one wants to defend an innocent client, yet those are the ones who mostly likely wind up going to trial. The guilty have everything to gain by accepting a plea -- pleas are the grease that keep the wheels of justice (hah!) from seizing up entirely. If an innocent person is found guilty, not an infrequent occurrence given that the deck is so heavily stacked against them, the defense attorney suffers through extraordinary self-examination, i.e., what could he have done better? What mistakes might he have made. "Defending the guilty is easy. . . The responsibility for the innocent can simply be too much. Sometimes it's better not even to wonder." It's interesting how the system is often used by lawyers and clients to simple find a place to exist. One homeless fellow would arrange to be charged with beating out on a restaurant tab in order to plead guilty to a minor theft charge and he always insisted on not accepting a plea and getting locked up for the winter months. Everyone knew what was going on. He had no money, no place to live and the entire system conspired to put him in jail for the winter. In another case, Cassandra, suffering from multiple mental issues, unable to afford drugs that helped to stabilize her condition, unable to qualify for any program, was helped back to jail by Feige so that she could obtain some of the medications she needed. Having a black face always means being treated differently. Big gangsters like Giotti et al strike the fancy of the media and public. The "ordinary" criminal rarely receives any kind of redemptive opportunity. "Fundamentalist Christians constantly speak passionately about seeing the possibility of redemption in everyone, and no one bats an eye. But make this same point in the secular context of the criminal justice system, and rather than praiseworthy piety it is heard as liberal gibberish." Learning to read judges is an important skill. Many of the judges are political hacks -- "overwhelmingly white, politically connected former prosecutors, they terrorized both defendants and the lawyers who appeared before them, meting out justice that was informed more by the code of the streets than by any legislation." They have extraordinary power and many use it to bully. The Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial. That's a joke. Those charged who have no money for bail often must spend as long as 12-15 months at Rikers Island in New York in a series of delays and motions before a trial can begin. So much for the presumption of innocence. Of course, if you are rich, it's a whole different ball game. An important hard-to-put-down book. See also Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse(less) | Notes are private!
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Jun 08, 2010
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| 0140112405
| 9780140112405
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I was reminded of this book recently when it was mentioned in a recent Times Book Review article on campaign books. Read it years ago and it was terri...more
I was reminded of this book recently when it was mentioned in a recent Times Book Review article on campaign books. Read it years ago and it was terrific. Unlike the standard campaign book invented by Theodore White (I devoured all of those books) McGinnis focused on how candidates were marketed. I suspect it would be equally valid today. (less)
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Mar 20, 2010
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| 1594200823
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Update 5/23/2010 Terrific piece by Michael Pollan in the NYRB June 10, 2010, "The Food Movement, Rising" in which he reviews five books: Everything I...more
Update 5/23/2010 Terrific piece by Michael Pollan in the NYRB June 10, 2010, "The Food Movement, Rising" in which he reviews five books: Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities, All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, Eating Animals I am beginning to wallow and bask in the mire of food politics, subject of Pollan's piece. It's interesting to read the comments section after any article dealing with meat or vegetarianism. One can almost see the participants spitting on each other. It's like watching Mormon fundamentalists defend polygamy to the College of Cardinals. To quote Troy Duster (from Pollan's piece) "No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar, and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close." And as we learned from OD, food is all politics from the huge changes initiated by the Nixon administration to bring down the price of food to Michelle Obama's efforts to change the way kids eat. As long as there is government to promote the interests of one group or another, there will be these kinds of battles, but I doubt any of us would wish the total absence of regulation desired by Joel Salatin - except maybe Rand Paul. It's an interesting communitarian movement, perhaps a throwback to the sixties, but one that appeals to both right and left: the desire to localize and remove oneself from the larger society. That is largely what I meant when I referred elsewhere to Pollan's book as a Libertarian Manifesto. In his 2006 book Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, ... America, Rod Dreher identifies a strain of libertarian conservatism, often evangelical, that regards fast food as anathema to family values, and has seized on local food as a kind of culinary counterpart to home schooling. Major editing 5/23/2010 about half the content identical to my review of Foer's Eating Animals. minor editing 4/16/10 Let's see, things we can't or shouldn't eat: butter, steak, meat, spinach because of the salmonella (or maybe it's only the organic spinach that gets contaminated), apples because of the alar, salt, sugar, fat, any food not bought at a farmer's market, any food bought at a non-union grocery, any food bought at a chain, any food that's not organic, any food that's labeled organic by the USDA because their standards aren't strict enough, kosher food, non-kosher, non-grass fed beef (and now we've learned that grass-fed beef is salmonella contaminated, too - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12...,) pasteurized milk, raw milk, etc. etc), This issue seems to engender as much animosity as whether communion should be allowed to non-Catholics. Factions abound, each with a slightly different take on the issue: those who believe eating meat is immoral; those who believe eating meat from factory farms is immoral; those who believe eating meat is immoral because it's environmentally unsound; those who believe eating meat is bad for your health; those who believe eating meat is fine; those who believe eating some kinds of meat is fine; those who believe eating meat is immoral because animals are sentient beings; and those who think the issue is cultural rather than moral or environmental. How to reconcile these views and where does each of the authors take a stance. All of these views represent a moral position, i.e. a personal one in which the believer needs to persuade others of the necessity of adopting his view to the exclusion of the others and convince that not to do so will result in calamity. Up front we have to recognize that only people who have tons of food available, i.e., the rich, would even consider any of the positions. Let me state my biases up front. I am very skeptical of any argument that proposes calamity will result if a particular position is not adopted. I am skeptical of moral arguments (not ethical ones). I believe that the most difficult decisions require choosing between grays, not black and white; that sentience as we understand it requires some form of self-awareness and we have little way to judge that in beings that we don't understand (can't communicate with) and that sentience varies tremendously across species, indeed across individuals within that species; and that pain as we understand it may be very different across animals and plants with structures. (David Foster Wallace in "Consider the Lobster" discusses scientific evidence that lobsters, because of their structure, may in fact feel a state of euphoria when being boiled rather than pain as we understand it.) I worked on two dairy farms for several years, milking about 120 cows, both in stanchions and and parlors, dehorning calves, and shoveling shit. Contrary to Foer's claims, cows are not treated regularly with antibiotics. A test tube of milk coming out of the farmer's tank is pulled before loading on the truck, and this is tested at the plant before being mixed with the rest, and if any suspicion of antibiotic is found, the entire load is dumped and the farmer loses the value of the entire load. We were meticulous about dumping milk from any treated cow (usually for mastitis) for the required period before selling it. Those who think drinking raw milk is the answer are asking for trouble. We did, but that was probably stupid. Besides that I saw what was in the strainer sometimes. None of that milk is tested and come on folks, there's a good reason why we started pasteurizing milk. It saved a lot of lives. I don't have any experience with feedlots, but I do know that stress on animals is to be avoided at all costs as it slows the rate of growth, cuts profits, and leads to disease. It's impossible to discuss these books in a vacuum, and I need to start out by making clear several assumptions: 1. Humans are omnivores biologically and, in fact, only very recently (say about 10,000 years ago) began to farm grains for food. Before that we were hunter/gatherers relying primarily on meat and berries. 2. Everything is interconnected. Just not eating meat will not even begin to address the issues of environmental degradation. Computers, roads, cars, pets, travel, ipods, plastics, toilet paper, etc., all have their downsides. If Foer and Pollan and Berry et all choose to emphasis one aspect of life and deliver broadsides against that particular activity that's fine as long as we understand that limiting that activity will have a minuscule effect on the environment. More effect would be had if all the hand-wringers stopped flying about the country wasting fuel and polluting the environment, just staying put. Problem is that apocalyptic thinking and lecturing is very profitable. 3. Environmental activism is very much a white, rich, western game. People who have no money and who live a hand-to-mouth existence can't afford to choose. The best way to promote conscious environmental action is by raising living standards around the world. It also reduces the rate of population growth. 4. My very strong bias is that the only practical solution to the myriad number of problems is technological. Some examples: algae oil is already being used successfully mixed with Jet-A by Continental Airlines and the results are a reduction in carbon-footprint of 60-80% and fuel efficiency of 1-2%; production of methane gas as an energy source (very clean burning) from large factory-farms, something not possible if the animals are parsed out in smaller farms where runoff occurs in large quantities, etc., etc. 5. We quite naturally tend to read and find books and data that support a preconceived opinion and avoid those that present an opposing view. 6. My other bias is that I'm very sympathetic to vegetarianism, not veganism, for I love my bread and butter and cheese way too much. I milked cows for several years, churned my own butter and would gladly have turned several fresh heifers into instant hamburger had I been able to after wiping their manure off my face. (If you've ever milked cows you know exactly what I'm talking about.) NB: I have a problem with beliefs that are so strongly held that believers think they have to claim apocalypse will result if their beliefs aren't adopted by everyone. The Inuit diet consisted of meat alone and meat taken from what is clearly a sentient animal. To suggest they adopt a western, citified, cereal diet is wrong and ridiculous. This is why one of my heroes is Norman Borlaug who virtually single-handedly began the green revolution that increased wheat yields spectacularly (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/pe...). He DID something, unlike the Paul Ehrlichs who just ran around making a fortune proclaiming the sky is falling. ALL of Ehrlich's predictions have been wrong because of people like Borlaug. I find the definition of what constitutes sentience to be worse than muddled and mixing up moral issues with that and environmental concerns makes the issues even murkier. There are clearly differences in "sentienceness" from one species to another (no one would argue that a snail has the same level of consciousness as a dog) and whether that should play any part in deciding what to eat or not makes an interesting debate. Personally, I wish the discussion would leave the realm of "morality" with its concomitant religious overtones and focus on the more rational (IMHO) environmental concerns. I very much enjoyed Pollan, much to my surprise. (I actually listened to this and while Scott Brick is one of my favorite readers, he was all wrong for this book. Way too pedantic sounding.) A very interesting book with tons of detail (which I like) displaying the symbiotic relationship we have with corn and fossil fuels, a very destructive relationship, but one that nevertheless has allowed us to feed many, many more people than would have been possible otherwise. Ultimately, something will have to change, we cannot continue to use 1.5 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food. Pollan emphasizes the mono-culture of corn but the same problems exist with the banana and other crops. In order to ship food to where it's needed requires products that mature at the same time, don't bruise easily, etc. He also shows that virtually all the food we eat has been genetically modified, if not at the gene level, certainly through seed selection, chosen for productivity , disease resistance, and a variety of other qualities. I learned that in order to increase yields the nitrogen that was added was in the form of ammonium nitrate which existed as a surplus after world war two, no longer needed for explosives. That nitrogen leaches off the ground, into wells, (blue baby syndrome, too much nitrogen cause respiratory issues,) and into the water supply in other ways. (As an aside, no one around here uses much of that, preferring anhydrous ammonia injection directly into the soil with presumably much less runoff.) I do have some issues with his very limited perspective on industrial farming, which he never defines, by the way. My neighbors, family farms all, farm thousands of acres. At what point does the size become optimum? Families run feedlots, too. My veterinarian has 40 steers in a feedlot. Is that a factory farm? They have the same conditions, the same feed, etc., as the larger feedlot a few miles away. It's almost as if Pollan had decided that farming on a grand scale was apocalyptic and then pulled together data to support his view. His data with regard to corn prices are woefully out of date. Just check commodity prices over the last five years. His choice of George Naylor must have required considerable searching in order to find someone who thought just the way he did. The history of price supports and the switch under the Nixon administration from a "loan" program to direct payments was something I had completely forgotten and had no idea how much influence it would have on corn production. On the other hand, Butz's intent was to increase production to take the heat off Nixon following the huge increase in food prices as the price for corn had increased so dramatically. All that being said, there's a lot of useful information, particularly with regard to government policy, and lots of fuel to support the libertarian side of the equation. There is no question that our over reliance on fossil fuels will get us into serious trouble very soon. A final comment. All of the recent food books could only have been written by a society that doesn't have to worry about where its next meal is coming from. The problem we have is scale. Wrigley just changed their gum wrappers from the little foil wrap to paper and thereby saved the equivalent of 60 million cans of aluminum. There's the problem in a nutshell Fun trivia: the corn plant has 32,000 genes, more than humans. Astonishing. (Knowledge Magazine Mr/Apr 2010) (less) | Notes are private!
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Feb 07, 2010
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| 0739385062
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Feb 02, 2010
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Addendum 2/11/10 at bottom, edited to remove some grammatical errors 5/20/10 For Feb reading club. This NYTimes science article should help heat things...more Addendum 2/11/10 at bottom, edited to remove some grammatical errors 5/20/10 For Feb reading club. This NYTimes science article should help heat things up: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/sci... Joint review with Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma Let's see, things we can't or shouldn't eat: butter, steak, meat, spinach because of the salmonella (or maybe it's only the organic spinach that gets contaminated), apples because of the alar, salt, sugar, fat, any food not bought at a farmer's market, any food bought at a non-union grocery, any food bought at a chain, any food that's not organic, any food that's labeled organic by the USDA because their standards aren't strict enough, kosher food, non-kosher, non-grass fed beef (and now we've learned that grass-fed beef is salmonella contaminated, too - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12...,) pasteurized milk, raw milk, etc. etc), This issue seems to engender as much animosity as whether communion should be allowed to non-Catholics. Factions abound, each with a slightly different take on the issue: those who believe eating meat is immoral; those who believe eating meat from factory farms is immoral; those who believe eating meat is immoral because it's environmentally unsound; those who believe eating meat is bad for your health; those who believe eating meat is fine; those who believe eating some kinds of meat is fine; those who believe eating meat is immoral because animals are sentient beings; and those who think the issue is cultural rather than moral or environmental. How can one reconcile these views and where does each of the authors take a stance. All of these views represent a moral position, i.e. a personal one in which the believer needs to persuade others of the necessity of adopting his view to the exclusion of the others and convince that not to do so will result in calamity. Up front we have to recognize that only people who have tons of food available, i.e., the rich, would even consider any of the positions. Let me state my biases up front. I am very skeptical of any argument that proposes calamity will result if a particular position is not adopted and I am skeptical of moral arguments (not ethical ones). I believe that the most difficult decisions require choosing between grays, not black and white; that sentience as we understand it requires some form of self-awareness and we have no way to judge that in beings that we can't communicate with, and that sentience varies tremendously across species, indeed across individuals within that species; and that pain as we understand it may be very different across animals and plants with structures. (David Foster Wallace in "Consider the Lobster" discusses scientific evidence that lobsters, because of their structure, may in fact feel a state of euphoria when being boiled rather than pain as we understand it.) I worked on two dairy farms for several years, milking about 120 cows, both in stanchions and and parlors, dehorning calves, and shoveling shit. Contrary to Foer's claims, cows are not treated regularly with antibiotics. A test tube of milk coming out of the farmer's tank is pulled before loading on the truck, and this is tested at the plant before being mixed with the rest, and if any suspicion of antibiotic is found, the entire load is dumped and the farmer loses the value of the entire load. We were meticulous about dumping milk from any treated cow (usually for mastitis) for the required period before selling it. Those who think drinking raw milk is the answer are asking for trouble. We did, but that was probably stupid. Besides that, I saw what was in the strainer sometimes. None of that milk is tested and come on folks, there's a good reason why we started pasteurizing milk. It saved a lot of lives. I don't have any experience with feedlots, but I do know that stress on animals is to be avoided at all costs as it slows the rate of growth, cuts profits, and leads to disease. It's impossible to discuss these books in a vacuum, and I need to start out by making clear several assumptions: 1. Humans are omnivores biologically and, in fact, only very recently (say about 10,000 years ago) began to farm grains for food. Before that we were hunter/gatherers relying primarily on meat and berries. I find the push for grass-fed beef somewhat amusing, since corn is actually a grass. 2. Everything is interconnected. Just not eating meat will not even begin to address the issues of environmental degradation. Computers, roads, cars, pets, travel, ipods, plastics, toilet paper, etc., all have their downsides. If Foer and Pollan and Berry et al choose to emphasize one aspect of life and deliver broadsides against a particular activity, that's fine as long as we understand that limiting that activity will have a minuscule effect on the environment. More benefit would accrue if all the hand-wringers stopped flying about the country wasting fuel and polluting the environment, just staying put. Problem is that apocalyptic thinking and lecturing is very profitable. 3. Environmental activism is very much a white, rich, western game. People who have no money and who live a hand-to-mouth existence can't afford to choose. The best way to promote conscious environmental action is by raising living standards around the world. It also reduces the rate of population growth. 4. My very strong bias is that the only practical solution to the myriad number of problems is technological. Some examples: algae oil is already being used successfully mixed with Jet-A by Continental Airlines and the results are a reduction in carbon-footprint of 60-80% and fuel efficiency of 1-2%; production of methane gas as an energy source (very clean burning) from large factory-farms, something not possible if the animals are parsed out in smaller farms where runoff occurs in large quantities, etc., etc. 5. We quite naturally tend to read and find books and data that support a preconceived opinion and avoid those that present an opposing view. 6. My other bias is that I'm very sympathetic to vegetarianism, not veganism, for I love my bread and butter and cheese way too much. I milked cows for several years, churned my own butter and would gladly have turned several fresh heifers into instant hamburger had I been able to after wiping their manure off my face. (If you've ever milked cows you know exactly what I'm talking about.) One of my heroes is Norman Borlaug who virtually single-handedly began the green revolution that increased wheat yields spectacularly (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/pe...). He DID something, unlike the Paul Ehrlichs who just run around making a fortune proclaiming the sky is falling. ALL of Ehrlich's predictions have been wrong because of people like Borlaug. I find the definition of what constitutes sentience to be worse than muddled and mixing up moral issues with that and environmental concerns makes the issues even murkier. There are clearly differences in "sentienceness" from one species to another (no one would argue that a snail has the same level of consciousness as a dog) and whether that should play any part in deciding what to eat or not makes an interesting debate. Personally, I wish the discussion would leave the realm of "morality" with its concomitant religious overtones and focus on the more rational (IMHO) environmental concerns. OK, now to the books in question. Foer is, interestingly, apparently not a vegan and his main target seems to be factory-farming, not surprising since he sits on the board of Farm Forward and has several links to PETA. His moral stance against factory farming and an almost slavish love for the "family farm" seems oxymoronic since many factory farms are family owned. (I know several extremely large dairy farms owned and operated by families.) Perfect book for the masses since the message seems to be "eating meat is wrong for me but might not be for you if you kill animals and treat them in an approved manner." I read The Jungle many years ago and while reading kept suffering from severe deja vu although, if I remember correctly, Sinclair's emphasis was on the maltreatment of the workers (still an issue today in meat-packing plants) not the animals. Foer, like any good muck-raking journalist, likes to shock and shock the book does with horrifying images of the worst of the cattle industry. He takes a moral position. I have no problem with that. If you don't want to eat meat, more power to you. But from a larger view you have to then also have to look carefully at the pet industry which uses a lot of meat from those same slaughterhouses. Cats and dogs can survive on plants but not well, they did not evolve into omnivores - just look at the teeth. Foer has written a very religious book. He clearly starts from the premise that eating meat is morally reprehensible and then marshals very effective arguments against the way in which we treat animals. He takes a moral position. When we lived on the farm we raise a steer. I took it next door, the neighbor shot it and butchered it and we (I) ate it. My wife wouldn't because she knew the steer as a calf. (How many of you out there know the difference between a heifer, steer, and a bull?) The irony of it is that people raised on family farms (she wasn't) are much less sentimental than those who never had to shovel manure two or three times a day. But ultimately he doesn't come down against eating meat but against the way we get it ready to eat. And he doesn't deal with the distinction I have seen often, that we can't eat sentient animals. I don't want to get into a debate over what constitutes sentience in non-human animals, but I do think one could make a distinction between a a dog and a snail. So is it OK to eat a snail? Or an oyster? A recent article on why it was OK for vegetarians to eat oysters raise a firestorm of protest. We hear from many people (and Foer) that animals suffer pain when they are killed and because of that it's immoral to eat them. What if pain could be removed from the equation. In Knowledge Magazine (April 2010) a philosopher (and vegetarian), Adam Shriver, suggests that it will soon be possible to genetically raise animals that are immune to pain (as we know it.) His argument is that factory farming will be with us for a long time and if we have the ability to eliminate pain in those animals isn't it morally irresponsible not to do so. see also Adam Shriver (2006). Minding Mammals. Philosophical Psychology 19 (4):433-442. I actually enjoyed the book immensely, fun, lots of humor (why we should all eat dogs...) and personal anecdotes and he makes a very strong case. Will it change anyone's mind? Nope. Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma Another book I enjoyed. (I actually listened to this and while Scott Brick is one of my favorite readers, he was all wrong for this book. Way too pedantic sounding.) A very interesting book with tons of detail (which I like) displaying the symbiotic relationship we have with corn and fossil fuels, a very destructive relationship, but one that nevertheless has allowed us to feed many, many more people than would have been possible otherwise. Ultimately, something will have to change, we cannot continue to use 1.5 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food. Pollan emphasizes the mono-culture of corn but the same problems exist with the banana and other crops. In order to ship food to where it's needed requires products that mature at the same time, don't bruise easily, etc. He also shows that virtually all the food we eat has been genetically modified, if not at the gene level, certainly through seed selection, chosen for productivity , disease resistance, and a variety of other qualities. I learned that in order to increase yields the nitrogen that was added was in the form of ammonium nitrate which existed as a surplus after world war two, no longer needed for explosives. That nitrogen leaches off the ground, into wells, (blue baby syndrome, too much nitrogen cause respiratory issues,) and into the water supply in other ways. (As an aside, no one around here uses much of that, preferring anhydrous ammonia injection directly into the soil with presumably much less runoff.) I do have some issues with his very limited perspective on industrial farming, which he never defines, by the way. My neighbors, family farms all, farm thousands of acres. At what point does the size become optimum? Families run feedlots, too. My veterinarian has 40 steers in a feedlot. Is that a factory farm? They have the same conditions, the same feed, etc., as the larger feedlot a few miles away. It's almost as if Pollan had decided that farming on a grand scale was apocalyptic and then pulled together data to support his view. His data with regard to corn prices are woefully out of date. Just check commodity prices over the last five years. His choice of George Naylor must have required considerable searching in order to find someone who thought just the way he did. The history of price supports and the switch under the Nixon administration from a "loan" program to direct payments was something I had completely forgotten and had no idea how much influence it would have on corn production. On the other hand, Butz's intent was to increase production to take the heat off Nixon following the huge increase in food prices as the price for corn had increased so dramatically. All that being said, there's a lot of useful information, particularly with regard to government policy, and lots of fuel to support the libertarian side of the equation. There is no question that our over reliance on fossil fuels will get us into serious trouble very soon. A final comment. All of the recent food books could only have been written by a society that doesn't have to worry about where its next meal is coming from. The problem we have is scale. Wrigley just changed their gum wrappers from the little foil wrap to paper and thereby saved the equivalent of 60 million cans of aluminum. There's the problem in a nutshell Fun trivia: the corn plant has 32,000 genes, more than humans. Astonishing. (Knowledge Magazine Mr/Apr 2010) Addendum: I decided to check out a couple of Foer's citations. I chose one related to downer cattle, something I know just a little about. He presents the alarming statistic that each year it's estimated there are 200,000 downer cows (pg 56.) He uses that as a segue to discuss the Food Sanctuary program. I looked up the source of his data in Bovine Practitioner and something from the article he didn't tell you is that the incidence of downed cattle: "Results of the herd-size analysis showed that dairy herds with <50 cows and beef herds with <100 cows were at the highest risk for unknown non-progressive plus unknown and total progressive cases in this study." This would indicate to me that larger farms manage the cause of down cattle better. Causes of "downers" include calving (46%) and "cows with metabolic problems, such as milk fever (low calcium in the blood), grass tetani (low magnesium) or winter tetani (low calcium and magnesium)." [source: http://www.copperwiki.org/index.php/D... ] Treatment for milk fever and downing as a result of calving stress are quite simple and easy with very good results. The total number of cattle on farms in the U.S. in 2000 was a little over 98,048,000, down somewhat from 1999. The 200,000 number, while on its face high, represents .2% of the total. A very small number indeed. (less) | Notes are private!
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Dec 25, 2009
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| 0374180652
| 9780374180652
| 4.18
| 2,755
| 2009
| Sep 15, 2009
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I love books like this: they challenge the mind and lead to great discussions. Michael Sandel teaches a very popular course at Harvard entitled “Justic...more I love books like this: they challenge the mind and lead to great discussions. Michael Sandel teaches a very popular course at Harvard entitled “Justice.” It’s available in video through the iTunes University (a phenomenal resource, I might add.) Sandel uses a series of hypothetical situations to focus the class on the different ways philosophers would have analyzed and puzzled out solutions to the problems raised in the hypotheticals. (This somewhat Socratic method is also used very effectively in several magnificent series created by Fred Friendly: The Constitution: That Delicate Balance and Ethics in America I & II - both available for free and I cannot recommend them too highly.)* Sandel, reprises some of the major themes of that course in this fascinating book. I listened to this book as an audiobook and it’s read by Sandel who does an excellent narration. He again begins by posing several moral dilemmas and uses those as jumping off points for a discussion of the three philosophical theories and asking how they might help us decide what constitutes justice: that which provides the maximum good to the largest possible number of people; individual freedoms as opposed to collective virtues; or that which promotes the development of harmonious communities. One example of a moral dilemma is taken from a true story. A platoon sergeant in Afghanistan was behind Taliban lines with three other soldiers on patrol when they came across two goat herders with their flock. Knowing that if they released the goat herders their position might be revealed they had to make a decision: whether to kill the goat herders and possibly save themselves, or whether to let them go and assume they were innocent civilians. They had no way to simply disable the man and boy and leave them. The sergeant polled his men and the vote was to kill them, but, examining his “Christian conscience” the sergeant decided to let them live. They were later ambushed by the Taliban and all of his men were killed and he barely escaped having been severely injured. In fact the rescue chopper sent to rescue them was shot down killing those on board. The sergeant later said he had made the wrong decision and should have killed the goat herders. Thank goodness I have never been faced with such a dilemma. A really intriguing case was that of how we view our bodies. The Libertarian argues we own our bodies and therefore can do whatever we want with them. Can we then sell our body parts? Let’s envision the poor Indian who desperately wants to send his children to college. He sells one kidney. Problems yet? Now along comes a second child and the man is willing to sell his second kidney for his child even knowing that he cannot survive. How many of us would approve of his decision? Is he despicable? or a hero? So if he is despciable, how about the man who throws himself in front of the train to push his child out of the way who wandered on to the tracks. I suspect most people would consider him a hero, yet he is deliberately sacrificing his life for that of the child? How is that different from the Indian? A real case involved a prisoner in the Califonia prison system (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article...) who wanted to donate his remaining kidney to his daughter (the first donation had failed to take.) How is his willingness to self-sacrifice his life for his child different from the fellow with the fellow who saves his daughter from the train? The UC Ethics board denied his request. So does their decision mean that the state owns his body and can determine what to do with it? And what if a pregnant woman decided to sell (does it make a difference if it’s a donation as opposed to a sale?) her fetus? What are the rights of the state? Sandel uses the last couple of chapters to state his own preference of what constitutes Justice. I found these the least interesting of the book. The best part if his weaving of the hypotheticals with a deep understanding of the historical and philosophical viewpoints. Listening to this book, I was reminded of a talk I heard given by Rushworth Kidder whose point was that deciding between good and evil is easy; the hard decisions are those that require choosing between two goods each of which may have a different outcome. My wife and I listened to this book on a trip and the dilemmas posed some very lively discussions. * http://www.learner.org/resources/seri... and http://www.learner.org/resources/seri...(less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 28, 2009
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| 0805087494
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| 3.64
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| Oct 13, 2009
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Read the reviews by Trevor (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) and Lena (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) They are better, but I could...more
Read the reviews by Trevor (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) and Lena (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) They are better, but I couldn’t resist a few comments. I didn’t expect to like this book. I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about Nickle and Dimed, but this title was chosen for our reading club, so I gave it a whirl. Ehrenreich uses her personal experience with breast cancer as a jumping off point.which led to her loathing for the pink-ribbon-cancer-is-a-blessing-and-will-make-you-stronger theories that surround the modern cancer patient. Ehrenreich who has a Ph.D. in cell physiology is well trained to look at much of the so-called evidence for the idea that being happy reduce the risk of cancer. She also notes that skeptics tend to be marginalized so the general public is bombarded by pseudo-science and quackery. She was especially troubled by the idea promoted in some quarters that cancer is a good thing, that it makes you appreciate life and helps you “evolve to a much higher level of humanity.” I suppose if all that were true perhaps we should be handing out Carter’s Little Cancer pills so we could all be more enlightened. The destructive downside to this is that getting sick is all the patient’s fault. (I hear this constantly from my Republican friends as they decry health care. If people would only eat right, exercise, etc. everyone would be healthy.) If only we had been happier we would not have become sick. This kind of thinking just makes one more burden for the patient to bear. “Failure to think positively can weigh on the patient like a second disease.” She demolishes the idea that we need to magnetize our minds since positive thoughts are like little magnets that attract positive energy. Thoughts do indeed generate tiny electromagnetic fields since they are the result of electrons firing around the brain, but it’s a pathetically weak one. As Michael Shermer noted in Scientific American the magnetic field registers at 10 to the -15 Tesla which is promptly swamped by the earth’s magnetic field of 10 to the minus 5, a difference of 10 billion to 1. “Our heads are not attracted to our refrigerators.” Then there is the abuse of quantum physics by New Age thinkers. The wave particle duality of matter is translated into human beings being waves and vibrations. The uncertainty principle also comes in for abuse. “The mind is actually shaping the very thing that is perceived,” they say, so we are creating the entire universe with our minds. “Quantum flapdoodle,” said one physicist. These folks have abandoned science where evidence is examined and results are replicated in favor of revelation. The live in a false world where anyone can believe whatever they want.” Having suffered through countless team-building sessions, I recognize their silliness and bemoan the enormous amounts of money being spent on them. They don’t always achieve their stated goals, however. I remember two in particular. One was in the early years of my career and there was no question the members of the group needed something to bring them together. After going through countless exercises,, e.g., face your supervisor and each of you tell what’s wrong with the other, - even I could have told them that wouldn’t work, over a couple of days, the leader, a well-known psychologist at the university, announced we were his first failure and that it was apparent our management team was dysfunctional. Well, daaah. So things continued happily as before until many of the problems were solved demographically, i.e. the old died off. At another state-wide attempt at team building, about a hundred of us were chosen (most of us were directors) to attend a three-day workshop that I suppose was to get us all into a positive-thinking frame of mind. About the only thing good about it was the constantly replenished bowls of M&Ms on each table. We did things like take pictures of each other with Polaroids and then make collages, lots of cutting and pasting, kindergarten stuff. I think the leader got a lot of push back, because on the last day she tearfully told us how much trouble she was having. What a crock of shit. About the only positive thing to come out of the meetings I could tell was that an affair developed between two of the directors in a hot tub and they later got married. At the college where I spent most of my career, about 25 years, and rose through the ranks of management, we really did quite well, and most of the issues seen as problems were not endemic to the institution. A larger problem that several of us tried to address was the recurring nature of initiatives. Three of us even made a presentation to the Board plotting each initiative and its outcome over three decades and demonstrating that each initiative (MBO, different budgeting schemes, diversity awareness, AQIP, etc., etc.) was good but never became institutionalized over the long haul. We struggled up the hill, almost reached the summit, but never quite made it over the top, and soon one initiative was replaced by another. For those of us who represented a lot of institutional memory, that could be demoralizing and made us perhaps less enthusiastic about the latest institutional fad. One can only speculate on the desperation leaders must wallow in to try and solve what may be serious management issues with such trivia and balderdash. What’s even worse is to go on one of these management seminar retreats, have everyone do some serious thinking and develop proposals, and then have senior management ignore all the recommendations. And let’s face it, to paraphrase Ehrenreich. If you can be motivated by a pretty girl and superficial speaker you are probably in a very easy job that will soon be done by a robot. But I shouldn’t be so negative and will try to be positive. The food was always great. Good quote: "We go through life mis-hearing, and mis-seeing, and mis-understanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up." Janet Malcolm(less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 15, 2009
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| 1594488940
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This book has a kazillion ratings and reviews so I doubt there is little I can add. I found the story and dialog to be quite believable. As someone wh...more
This book has a kazillion ratings and reviews so I doubt there is little I can add. I found the story and dialog to be quite believable. As someone who came of age during the sixties I well remember the battles, both physical and verbal, between the “separate-but-equal” crowd and those pushing hard for civil rights. We lived in a suburb of Philadelphia and my mother had a lady come in once a week to do the cleaning. I happened to be home from school one day - it must have been a holiday or something - and at lunch I took my bowl of soup and crackers into the dining room with my book (reading, not TV, is the foundation of anti-social behavior) while my mother and the cleaning lady (it still is irksome to use that term) ate in the kitchen. My mother later told me the lady said it was the first time she had ever sat at the same table to eat something with a white woman. (My mother had issues of her own, but they had more to do with educational elitism than race per se, witness her early antipathy to our adoption of several mixed-race children whom she perceived to be a less than stellar intellect. This was in the early seventies when cross-racial adoption was still a rarity.) Much as I despise religion, I have to give it credit for providing the impetus (at least in the north, but also in some churches in the south) for the civil rights movement. It was distinctly a religious crusade, fostered by the National of Islam under Elijah Mohammed (the so-called Black Muslims,) some Catholic priests like the Berrigans (much to the dismay of their bishops) and many Protestant ministers. Bombings of churches could only lend more credibility to the marchers. I was attending a Quaker school and remember hearing stories about one family in the Meeting that adamantly refused to permit letting blacks into the Meeting. This was in the fifties. Since Quakers have to do everything by consensus, they could essential block black membership. The issue remained unresolved until the family saw the proverbial handwriting on the wall and moved away. I read many of the reviews and comments on Amazon and was struck by a couple who thought the book demeaned black maids. I found just the contrary, that if any group was degraded, it was the clique of white girls who, with only a few exceptions, didn’t do anything of worth and cared mostly for clothes, boyfriends, and whether a black ass had sat on their white toilet seat. Some African American readers felt the black maids were demeaned by the book. I find many of these comments quite interesting because I don't think the book is about black maids at all. I think it's about a vapid white culture that is concerned with appearances and boys, and make-up and whether their precious behinds will be soiled by sitting on a toilet that might have been used by a black person. For me, the book ridiculed that white culture and showed how one person made an attempt to cross over and understand the other culture's point of view, but it remains the perception of the white culture at the time so by necessity, the view of black dialect and actions must be a flawed one. I loved the scene where Abilene is trying to potty-train Mae Mobley and is in a quandary because the child needs to see how adults do it, yet Abilene is terrified to use the bathroom in the white house rather than the colored one built for her in the garage. So she shows her the colored one which Mae Mobley Leefolt then wants to use all the time, to her white mother’s horror. Yes, there are some anachronistic events, yes, the dialect seems forced sometimes. So what. Outstanding book that reveals the tensions of being black and a decadent and dying white culture in the United States during a period of cultural upheaval.(less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 13, 2009
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