Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
3 December 2006, a Sunday
Bright sunshine and 75, the sun far to the rear of the house as it heads for its rendezvous with the winter solstice, the only way that I can really keep track of the changing year, since 'rainy' and 'dry' don't have any reliable meaning here in La Fortuna.
The NYT shocks me awake this pleasant morning with this NEWS item:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has signaled to New York Democrats she is likely to run for president, officials said.
I mean, who knew?
Also sort of fun to watch is what they're trying to make of Rumsfeld's final memo, complicated by the fact that he left two days later. Was it his suicide note? I laughed at this Washington Post writer's desperate attempt:
Memo written two days before resignation may undercut any attempt by White House to defend a "stay the course" policy in Iraq. -- Ann Scott Tyson
But you're too late, Ann, they abandoned the "stay the course" line quite some time ago, you must have slept in that morning. Or month...how long has it been now that adapting the terminology is all the rage? Nobody ever understood what Bush meant by "stay the course" any more than they did the military phrase "mission accomplished", anyhow. You shouldn't use common military terminology around reporters, anyhow, it only confuses them.
George Will on a Supreme Court case starting next week:
Students can seek admission to any of Seattle's high schools. But the Seattle School District decided to engineer a precise racial balance in its most popular -- because much better -- high schools, which are chosen by more students than they can accommodate. The district wanted each oversubscribed school to reflect the entire system's ratio of 40 percent whites and 60 percent nonwhites. So it adopted a race-based admission plan to shape the schools' "diversity."
When registering children for high school, parents were asked to specify each child's race. If parents did not specify, the district did so based on visual inspection of the parents' or child's pigmentation. The school board president has said that "skin tone matters."
It's hard to believe that even the crazy 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with that argument, because that is the source of racial prejudice, particularly when it comes to black people. I guess most of you are too young to remember the days when people with light-enough skin tone attempted to "pass", as well as those cases where people to appeared to be white were 'outed' as actually having Negro blood, causing them to lose their, ah, status in white society.
All of that used to be called prejudice. Now the school district says that "skin tone matters", but in this case it's not prejudice.
The 9th Circuit, siding with the district, argued two propositions, both of which conflict with Supreme Court precedents.
One was that racial preferences are benign if they do not " unduly harm any students" or " uniformly benefit any race or group of individuals to the detriment of another" (emphases added).
An interesting concept, that of benefit to one group causing detriment to another. Here we stand in front of the country club. I'm black, you're white. Neither one of us are members. You apply and get in. I suppose one can argue that you have received a benefit, compared with your previous non-member status. I apply and am rejected. How can you argue that I have been harmed, since my status remains unchanged from what it was? You could therefore use the 9th's logic (if the Supreme Court hadn't already ruled against it in other cases) to argue that your racial preferences were benign, since I suffered no detriment as a result.
Second, the 9th Circuit said broad deference is owed to the judgments of local school districts. ... And here are samples of the Seattle district's judgments which the 9th Circuit thinks deserve deference:
Until June, the school district's Web site declared that "cultural racism" includes "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology," "having a future time orientation" (planning ahead) and "defining one form of English as standard." The site also asserted that only whites can be racists, and disparaged assimilation as the "giving up" of one's culture. After this propaganda provoked outrage, the district, saying it needed to "provide more context to readers" about "institutional racism," put up a page saying that the district's intention is to avoid "unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality."
It's actually quite sad that something like this has to go all the way to the Supreme Court to be settled. You would think that a school board would have members of sufficient intelligence to realize that the laws of the land apply to them as well as the rest of the community, but I suppose when even the 9th Circuit (the most-often reversed of any Court in the land!) can confuse itself who can blame school board members who may not themselves have completed high school.
And don't you just love the idea that planning ahead is an example of cultural racism, especially since we have said only whites can be racists, because doesn't that then seem to make it an open admission that blacks are unable, as a culture, to plan ahead? And that trying to teach them the importance of that concept is racist?
Similarly, the notion that languages (in this case they have isolated English, but obviously the application would apply to Swahili or Cantonese) which have formal rules are racist! Languages are more often associated with nations, I thought, rather than cultures, although this does require some cultural definition because, for instance, there are different varieties of Spanish spoken in what we call the "Latin" countries outside of Spain.
Of course, just listen to me talking about learning the formal rules of English, since I never did master the subject in school, myself. I never did figure out what many of the strange words meant (a favorite has always been 'pluperfect', I like the word even if I'm not sure what it means, obviously since there is both a 'past' and a 'present' then perfection must not be a permanent feature).
And I'm quite sure that's part of my problem with learning Spanish by studying textbooks...I don't know what the English equivalents mean. I always thought a dangling participle was the reason why jockey shorts were invented, for instance...
I'm glad I'm not living in Seattle, but I gather that we're going to have enough problems of our own down here, pretty soon, although for another reason. It's wryly amusing to find myself once again facing the challenge of sending another young boy off to school and thus worrying about the quality of the schools and teachers, but we're learning from a couple of our neighbors that maybe these schools aren't as good as we had always been told that Costa Rican schools were.
For one thing, they have only half-day classes. For another, and this is our biggest worry with Tony, they do not promote or segregate on the basis of ability, it's a bureaucratic thing, and Tony is very bright (I like to call that genetics-by-association) and we are worried that he will be bored, bored, bored, which usually leads to kids getting into trouble, trouble, trouble, simply in order to amuse themselves.
Luis is working today, soon we'll be stringing Christmas lights (ugh!) but right now he is measuring something and I was holding the idiot end of the tape for him. Tony walked along the tape counting "uno, dos, tres..."
Jim Hoagland is having a goodbye conference with Kofi Annan that makes me glad he's leaving!
"I have told the United States and Britain to be careful, to be sure that the Iranians don't come out of a Security Council debate laughing" because sanctions are not adopted by a divided body, he says. Later Annan adds: "Iran feels itself to be a powerful nation. Its president looked me in the eyes" and said exactly that.
Annan says the simultaneous confrontations with Iran and North Korea demonstrate that "you can't do nonproliferation on a case-by-case basis. You have to find a real mechanism" to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to new states or even terrorist groups. That is likely to happen only if recognized nuclear states begin to fulfill existing treaty obligations to eventually give up nuclear weapons, rather than continually modernizing them.
Boy, that would sure convince Iran and North Korea to stop, wouldn't it? The US, Israel, France, China...we all give up our nuclear weapons, at which point Iran says why do I need these foolish things if they don't?
Well, maybe just this one...
The Washington Times has a special article titled Under the knife overseas that I would highly recommend: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/AR2006120101522.html
Growing
numbers of Americans are traveling abroad to undergo medical and dental
procedures that are much less expensive than they are in this country -- and
sometimes not available in the United States at all.
These so-called "medical tourists" have a vacation in an exotic place
where they can soak up the sun, visit a few golden temples or other
landmarks and end up with a new hip or knee, a healthy heart -- or a
robot-controlled joint replacement, a procedure that has not yet been
approved in this country.
In addition, "they return with a lot more money left in their pockets --
sometimes 70 [percent] to 80 percent more than if they'd been treated in the
United States,"
Read the article. Costa Rica is barely mentioned, but I know it's considered a good place for cosmetic surgery and dental work and things are much, MUCH cheaper than in the U.S.
A lot of people like to come for plastic surgery, I'm told, because you can get away from home and inquisitive friends for a couple of weeks while all of the bruising and stitches heal, enjoy a vacation, and still be money ahead.
This article by Kenneth R. Timmerman should be on the front page...but it isn't:
Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has followed up his 18-page letter to
President Bush earlier this year with a five-page missive to the American
people.
In the earlier letter, which left the Bush White House shaking their
heads with wonderment, the Iranian invited Mr. Bush to embrace Islam. That
is a well-established Islamic tradition when dealing with an enemy just
prior to war. If they refuse, then the Muslims are "justified" in destroying
them.
The letter released Wednesday by Iran's mission to the United Nations in
New York followed a similar pattern. In it, Mr. Ahmadinejad lays out his
case for America's "injustice," using the term no fewer than 12 times in
five pages.
The concept of justice lies at the very center of the Islamic faith.
Justice is considered the backbone of all creation, handed down by the
Almighty. The faithful should strive to achieve justice, to "secure
justice," as Mr. Ahmadinejad puts it. Those who pursue injustice, on the
contrary, are spitting in the face of Allah. Mr. Ahmadinejad claims that
America, under Mr. Bush, is pursuing injustice.
It also sets out the terms of the traditional Muslim warning to the enemies of Allah. "And never will your Lord destroy the towns until He sends to their mother town a Messenger reciting to them Our Verses." This is precisely what Mr. Ahmadinejad does in his letter.
Remember: Osama bin Laden formally declared war on the United States. We didn't listen, until after 9/11 happened.
Now we've had this declaration. Was it even front-page big-time news?
One of the complaints I've heard about our, ah, mishandling of events in the Middle East, particularly about Iraq, is that we do not understand their culture.
You have just had some of it explained to you.
The formal notice, according to their terms, has been properly addressed and delivered.
Here's a great Mark Steyn, a redundancy, I know, you really need to read it:
I wonder whether the commission thought to hear from anyone such as Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore. A couple of years back, on a visit to Washington just as the Democrat-media headless-chicken quagmire-frenzy was getting into gear, he summed it up beautifully: ''The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail.''
I'm too demoralize to comment on it. I think the American will isn't there. Credibility disappears when will does.
...as one Baker Commission grandee told the New York Times, ''We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out.''
An ''exit strategy'' on those terms is the path out not just from Iraq but from a lot of other places, too -- including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Russia, China, the South Sandwich Islands. For America would be revealed to the world as a fraud: a hyperpower that's all hype and no power -- or, at any rate, no will.
Welcome to the new Chinese hegemony...no, wait, those guys really believe in Empire, they know how to do that. The good news is that we didn't lose. As in Vietnam, we just left the field to the other players.
Come to think of it, maybe my friends are right...that IS a loss!
I guess I'm too tired tonight. I read Byron Calame's column and I thought he was so full of cow-flop that it couldn't be intentional, he must really believe what he is writing. I looked at it and thought, no, I'll be up for hours dealing with this, and I'm already tired. Mentally tired, not physically.
I put in a little work outside today, for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing. Luis showed up for work and so we got one more window covered with security bars. Got started on another. Then put up the Christmas lights, a horrible chore because some lights in the string go on and some do not, even in the same string, and...well, you all know this, I'm sure. I'm also sure all of these lights were made in China and designed to last only one season, if that.
Anyhow, enough are up to make Carol happy (and Tony was delighted!) so I'm happy.
I tried to spend a little time pressure-washing on this sunny afternoon, with scant success. My point for those of you who are considering retiring to the Tropics is this: everything grows FIERCELY down here, including various forms of fungus, so plan on bringing the stoutest pressure-washer and weed-eaters you can find. Well, you can hire the latter work done, to be sure, and if you don't mind them whacking off an occasional water faucet or plant that you REALLY like, they'll do. But, somewhat to my surprise in this rather entrepreneurial culture, we don't seem to have any wandering pressure-washers.
We have at least two kinds of fungus that simply love concrete surfaces, one black-colored and the other green, the black being the most tenacious, and when they get wet (which is almost every day) they get very slippery underfoot. Blasting them off with high-pressure water is the fastest solution, but you really should follow that immediately afterwards with a Clorox wash, which I haven't been doing. Ideally, of course, if you were rich enough you'd simply tile the driveway and the sidewalk, which doesn't eliminate the fungus but greatly reduces it as well as makes cleaning much, much easier.
Anyhow, my point was that this fungus, when wet, is really slippery...and I have to flash back to the fact that one of the reasons we were so glad to leave our Jackson/Pine Grove house was that the back steps got icy every winter and we damn near broke our asses on them several times. Since being here, ironically enough, Carol fell and broke her ankle and Dad fell and broke his hip...but neither one of them were because of slippery conditions!
As much as I hate to admit it, I need to figure out how to, well, organize my unscheduled retirement day. I like to get up to a period of peace and quiet, wake over a cup of coffee and the internet news pages, and sort of stretch my mental legs before the day begins.
What happens is that I get led down the slippery slope of blogging and it's noon and I'm guilty of what they say we are: I'm still in my pajamas, or would be if I wore any.
Shaving becomes one of those things were I feel my face and ask myself where the hell the stubble came from, didn't I just shave? It's amusing because I like to kiss Tony quite a lot and he can't figure out why sometimes my face is smooth and other times it isn't. I shave in the shower these days, so he has never seen me shave, I cannot even imagine what he thinks the difference is from time to time. For my part, I cannot understand how fast it grows...aha, must be that Tropics thing, again.
(Anyone remember the name of the town where I went to high school, beginning in 1948? Tropic, Utah.)
Anyhow, apart from the fungus and some of the bugs, one of the things I really like about living down here is that things GROW with little of your attention required. I like to grow things, I really do enjoy planting things and seeing the results, but I don't have the necessary attention span to look after them on a regular basis. Especially once I have gotten them rooted and the first leaves appear. Having God look after them works much better for me, which is why our eastern fence has some truly impressive bougainvillea, a hardy plant that doesn't seem to need a whole lot of attention from either one of us. Beautiful, too.
Anyhow, here I sit tonight, laughing at myself...remember that old poem about "laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone"?...about how here I am, old and retired, trying to figure out how to schedule things so that I can work everything in?
I had a bad year this year when my Dad died. He came down here to live with us during his last few years, did really well until suddenly the end came and he just sort of disappeared from us, despite our efforts. I don't want to say too much about that right now except to illustrate what I'm talking about here. There came a point with my Dad when, despite the fact that I knew he loved all of us and was really concerned about Tony's future, he just sort of lost interest in everything. Like his computer, which he loved, fought with, struggled against, engaged in continuous battle (he spent more hours on earphones learning about Windows XP than anyone else in the universe), and then it meant nothing. He used to like to fly on Microsoft Flight Simulator...and then he did nto. Even the solitaire games he loved to play he told me were all the same hands, over and over, they didn't matter.
When he lost interest in all of these things, one by one, bit by bit, we had no way to keep him with us any longer. There simply wasn't anything he wanted to do, other than to encourage me to continue along the path he had already set and counted on me to follow, although I wouldn't mind it at all if he was still here giving me a nudge every now and then.
I miss my Dad, and it hurts an awful lot sometimes, but then I look at Tony and see that this is the ball my Dad handed off to me to carry as best I could, his final act that he really cared about when the time came that he really did not care about anything else.
I'll never forget his final charge to me. Carol and I were worried about how taking on Tony would impact Dad's life here, so I asked him what he thought we should do.
He looked at me almost in surprise...no, that's not the right word...he just looked at me and said, in an ordinary way, that of course we would do whatever needed to be done.
Of course.
What decision?
Tony-O, one of the things I need to do for you is write a story about the abuelo you never really knew, the man who made your future life possible..