It’s a potentially life-saving tool, a last line of defense in the event of an active shooter situation, and that was basically the thinking behind [University of Maryland Eastern Shore president] Juliette B. Bell’s decision to spend $59,800 on the whiteboards/shields. “We are not really doing this in response to a specific event; I see it more as an opportunity to be prepared and to be proactive in our approach to safety on campus,” Bell said. “We think that it’s worthwhile.”
First, thanks for sharing the story about Eddy’s delayed grief for losing her friend Dusty. I thought I’d share a story about when I lost one of my two cats many years ago. Molly was really the first cat I owned (my mom didn’t like cats, so we grew up with dogs). I was renting a small house and took in the stray who stayed there; it was easier to give Custard a home rather than cleaning up the mess he made of the trash cans. While Molly and Custard generally got along, they never seemed particularly close.
Then one day, I was going out of town to visit some friends in New Orleans for a week, so I made arrangements for a co-worker to feed Molly and Custard while I was gone. On my first day in New Orleans, I got a call from Steve – he had gone to feed the cats and found Custard dead. I never learned what happened, but Custard sometimes had the habit of his former stray self and would stuff himself when he had a really large bowl of food and would later vomit. I had a feeling that is what happened, and he probably choked on the extra food he had consumed. Steve very generously offered to bury Custard.
When I got home, I emotionally prepared myself for the loss of one cat but I suspected no emotional response from Molly. After all, cats never gave you any sympathy when you needed it. When I got home, I found a house with no cats and a note from Steve. He said that Molly had gotten away from him and escaped from the house. She then watched him bury Custard from a distance.
He returned a couple of times and left food on the porch but didn’t see Molly. I also didn’t see anything of her the night I got back, but she was at the door early the next morning. The first thing I noticed were that her front claws were completely worn down, and there were marks on the ground where Steve had buried Custard.
She had spent some time digging at the spot where her friend had been buried. My idea of having a cat who paid no attention to Custard’s death was completely wrong. Molly was clearly upset, and my formerly tough, independent cat kept very close to me the next few days. While she eventually calmed down, this represented a permanent change; she spent the rest of her life being much more dependent on me because of the loss of Custard. There clearly had been some deep bond between them I had never perceived.
I’m old enough now to have experienced the death of several pets – dogs in childhood, cats since I’ve been on my own. Dogs and cats can bring a tremendous richness to our lives – it’s just unfortunate we have to experience the pain of their deaths. I hope that you and your husband will take care of each other, along with Eddy, and perhaps consider adopting another dog when your hearts tell you it is the right time.
Another reader remarks on the unparalleled company that pets often keep:
I care for two dogs, brothers/littermates, now just over 10. They have literally never spent a night apart (although at times have slept in different rooms). It is almost unheard of them to not both go on walks at the same time. The only time they are separated for any time is when one or the other goes to the vet.
I live in dread of the impact of the loss of one on the other. They have different personalities, and I can see them reacting differently, but I know the survivor will show grief and possibly worse (if already aged, I think it could speed the process). As much grief as I’ll be feeling, the most important thing I can do at that point is to be there for the surviving brother.
The post that sparked this thread – a reflection on Barbara King’s recent book, How Animals Grieve – can be read here. The long and emotional thread “The Last Lesson We Learn From Our Pets” can be found here.
Matt Taibbi tackles the college loan industry and the political machinations that enable it:
Democrats – who, incidentally, receive at least twice as much money from the education lobby as Republicans – like to see the raging river of free-flowing student loans as a triumph of educational access. Any suggestion that saddling befuddled youngsters with tens of thousands of dollars in school debts is somehow harmful or counterproductive to society is often swiftly shot down by politicians or industry insiders as an anti-student position. The idea that limitless government credit might be at least enabling high education costs tends to be derisively described as the “Bennett hypothesis,” since right-wing moralist and notorious gambler/dick/hypocrite Bill Bennett once touted the same idea. …
Conservatives, meanwhile, with their usual “Fuck everybody who complains about anything unless it’s us” mentality, tend to portray the student-loan “problem” as a bunch of spoiled, irresponsible losers who are simply whining about having to pay back money they borrowed with their eyes wide open. When Yale and Penn recently began suing students who were defaulting on their federal Perkins loans, a Cato Institute analyst named Neal McCluskey pretty much summed up the conservative take. “You could take a job at Subway or wherever to pay the bills,” he said. “It seems like basic responsibility to me.”
The most interesting revelation in this important and disturbing piece is that, by its own estimates, the government ends up collecting close to or even more than the original principal balance on student loans that default.
Last week, the prominent political theorist, Christian ethicist, and public intellectual passed away at the age of 72. Elshtain was perhaps best known for making the ethical case for American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11, outlined in her book Just War Against Terror. The NYT obituary describes her impact this way:
In the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Dr. Elshtain was among a handful of scholars and religious leaders, including Franklin Graham and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, invited to meet with President George W. Bush to discuss the response he was considering. Dr. Elshtain had expertise in one particular area of interest to the president, her husband recalled: she had written extensively on the fourth-century Christian bishop later known as St. Augustine and his doctrine of the Just War. That doctrine held that while Christians could not justify killing to protect themselves, they could engage in war to protect the lives of others. The notion became central to the Bush administration’s justification of the war in Iraq as in large part a humanitarian project to free the Iraqi people from a tyrant.
Despite her arguments on behalf of war, many remembrances are emphasizing the difficulty in applying labels to her thinking. Carl Scott summarizes her this way:
[S]he was something of a difference feminist, something of an Augustinian, something of a Jane Addams-ite battler for social justice, something of a communitarian, and something of a foreign-policy neo-conservative.
Her most lasting legacy might be that, unlike many academic political theorists, she sought to engage religious thought in her work, long before it was trendy:
“Her joint appointment in political science and the divinity school at [the University of] Chicago was truly unusual,” said Erik Owens, a professor at Boston College who worked with Elshtain when she was his dissertation adviser. “Religion was not taken seriously enough as a proper subject of study by political scientists through most of her career, and political science was equally suspect in most divinity schools. She helped to bring these two disciplinary guilds into conversation with one another. This may be one of her greatest legacies as a professional academic.”
Biographically, her concern for ordinary people, and the weak and disabled among us, came from her own experiences – especially with illness, as Robbie George, who served with her on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, points out:
She was a daughter of the west—born and bred in Colorado. She did not enter the world with a silver spoon in her mouth, nor was she given a gilt-edged education. She was among the last cohort of Americans to be struck by polio. She limped throughout her life, but never complained of her affliction or let it slow her down.
Marc Livecche, a former student of Elshtain’s, recalls her refusal “to change anything she thought or to attempt to change anything you thought simply in order to reach an agreeable reconciliation”:
Believing instead that falsehood is the opposite of dialogue, and that real disagreement is a hard won victory accessible only through an honest meeting of minds, she gave it to you straight and demonstrated the refreshing value of frankness-with-charity and invective-against-twaddle. This led to her belief that what the world most needed from Christians was, in Camus’ terms, “Christians who remain Christians.” For Elshtain this meant that Christians have to speak out loudly and clearly, in witness to their normative grounding, against evil in the world, never leaving the world in doubt that we stand against those bloodstained regimes that put the innocent to torture. She bore none of the utopian sentimentalism that believed we could end evil in history but neither did she give in to cynicism by refusing to believe we might end some evils and diminish others.
One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized ‘forgetting,’ a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable words from The Great Gatsby. This historic recognition should not occasion resentment or dour heaviness; rather, it should instill gratitude. As this book drew to a close, I realized that it was no culminating magnum opus — few books are — but, rather, a contribution to the shared memory of our time and place. And that is enough.
For more, especially if interested in her work in political theory, read Russell Arben Fox’s richly detailed thoughts on Elshtain here. For a critical take on her writings, on torture in particular, see Corey Robin here.
Marcotte’s Dutch example of more progressive attitudes toward teen sex is not unique to the Netherlands. When I was living abroad, a German friend explained to me that when she and every other girl she knew growing up turned 16, their mothers would take them to get birth control pills. It was entirely permissible for her to have a boyfriend spend the night and have sex with him in her parents’ home. In fact, she said, her parents would probably be concerned if she had a boy over and they DIDN’T hear them doing it. It’s worth noting that this young woman was not the daughter of freethinking hippies, but rather straight, conservative Bavarian Catholics; her dad is a cop and her mother is a theologian (yes, really). She always said she couldn’t understand why American parents were so afraid of their teenage children having sex. As a matter of simple logic, it just didn’t make any sense to her, given how many of them end up pregnant, with STIs, or in unhealthy relationships as a result of having no guidance on the subject.
Ferrett Steinmet focuses on the father-daughter dynamic:
There’s a piece of twaddle going aroundtheinternet called 10 Rules For Dating My Daughter, which is packed with “funny” threats like this:
“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.” All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”
Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.
Another reader:
Slightly off topic: A gay couple I know has an elementary school-age son and daughter who have lots of friends and who adore their parents. The couple is also popular with neighbors and fellow school parents. The daughter has girlfriends on sleepovers as often as the other girls – meaning all the time. But an awkward and sad problem: The fathers of the boy’s friends, as much as they get along with the two gay fathers, refuse to allow their boys on a sleepover at the gay men’s home. So the boy gets no sleepover parties like his sister and friends get.
In today’s video from Kate, she responds to the idea that not getting married is some kind of personal failure:
Kate is currently working on her first book, Among the Suitors: On Being a Woman, Alone, to be published next year by Crown/Random House. She is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and writes regularly for Elle, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate. Her 2011 Atlantic cover story, “All the Single Ladies”, addressed why more and more women are choosing, as she has, not to get married. The Dish debated the piece here and here. A reader quotes another on Kate’s latest video:
In my experience, Bolick is completely wrong. The idea that friends will fill in the gaps where a spouse or family used to be is nonsense. … I am also not married, but I’m terrified about what will happen to me later in life without children to look after me.
As a middle-aged man who is married, but child-free by choice, I will say that this is an oft-discussed topic amongst the child-free. One of the comments we get most when people learn we have chosen to be child-free is “Who will look after you in your old age?” However, just ask any home healthcare worker or nursing home employee about how much familial involvement they see for those they look after and you’ll find it’s exceedingly low. There is no guarantee that your children will have the time, proximity or even inclination to provide any assistance in your old age. Having a spouse and/or children primarily as a hedge against late-life health woes seems like a pretty poor reason for getting married or having kids in the here-and-now.
Kate’s first two videos are here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.
The liberal salting of English words into German sentences is called “Denglisch” (Deutsch and Englisch), and it tends to annoy traditionalists. … What Brits call a mobile and Americans call a cell phone, Germans call a Handy—a word that looks borrowed from English, but isn’t. The baseball cap—a common faux-hip ornament in today’s Germany—is a Basecap. And Germans call table football Kicker, a game unknown in the English-speaking world. (The mangling goes both ways, as Americans alter the German Fussball to foosball.)
And when a rude word is borrowed, its taboo in the original language does not always travel with it. Angela Merkel is just one of many Germans who don’t realize that you can’t just casually uses the word Shitstormin a press conference. The word has become common enough to be added to Germany’s most prestigious dictionary, the Duden.
Update from a reader:
With regard to the use of false Anglicisms in German, you missed my very favorite one: in German, a compulsive hoarder is called a “Messie”. Like this: “Der Mann ist ein Messie” (“that man’s a hoarder”).
The thing that sets the bot apart from his contemporaries is a visual feedback system, a technological set of eyes that continually checks to see how close he’s coming to the mark. Every so often, e-David will take a photograph of his canvas and, after some image correction, subtract it from the image he’s trying to reproduce. Looking at the difference between the two, it determines which areas of the canvas are too dark or too light, generates a hundred or so potential brush strokes, and then chooses which of those are best suited to minimize that difference.
In many ways, the project sidesteps some of the thornier conceptual issues painting robots typically grapple with–concerns like authorship and intent. “Regardless of what we implement, the machine will never be a person,” Oliver Deussen, one of the researchers behind the effort, explained to WIRED UK. “It will only have a very limited idea about what it is doing, no intention. Our simulation is only about the craftsmanship that is involved in the painting process.” In other words, Deussen and his collaborators don’t expect their robotic arm to think like an artist. They just want it to paint like one.
Gregory Djerejian is disappointed with Obama’s foreign policy:
[T]he President does have one thing going in his favor. The opposition party would have mounted an even more disastrous foreign policy, I suspect, proactively blundering about saber-rattling with the usual recycled neo-con nostrums, bogging us down in even more theaters than at present. Obama at least has spared us these indignities, ‘leading from behind’ adventures like Libya (and its ugly hangovers) apart. But it is not a particularly proud legacy to say ‘at least I was better than the other guy would have been’. This is not the stuff of a great Presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy.
Of course, there has been and is much work to accomplish at home, and while not the topic here, whether jobs, infrastructure, Wall Street reform, and more; we should not conclude the Administration necessarily covered itself in glory there either, beyond the easy myths that ‘but for’ pork-infested stimulus, QE-infinity and serial bailouts Great Depression II beckoned (this is not to take away from the gravity of the economic situation we faced in late ’08 and early ’09, nor some of the Administration’s crisis management at the time, or indeed, the prior Administration’s). But while I understand a great power can only remain so from a base of strongly rooted strength at home, and Obama’s apparent focus on domestic politics therefore is not ill-advised, it is another thing to look alternatively peeved, bored, listless and simply largely adrift on foreign policy. Leaders, whether Sisi or Putin, have noticed. We simply must do better, and please, this does not mean better, or more, speeches. It means strategic execution of statecraft in a turbulent, unsettled age of great geopolitical transition, one of the Presidency’s most solemn responsibilities, or at least one might hope, a solemn aspiration. And its manifest absence represents a season of disappointments the international community can ill afford at this juncture.
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The Dish 