2013 – Page 844

Why Take His Name? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

As a woman in a long-term relationship with another woman in a state where gay marriage is constitutionally banned, and having just had a child, I am reading the thread about women changing their names with great interest. It’s not that the topic is new to me; I’ve had the discussion with many of my straight female friends. But I haven’t seen the experience of same-sex couples reflected your reader’s comments.

For two women (or men, I imagine) who would like to get married and/or start a family, this discussion takes place on a different plane. My partner and I can’t get married, but one of us could change her name. In many states, doing so would require going to court, and in some of those states, a judge can refuse the name change just because he doesn’t agree with the same-sex relationship. For many same-sex couples, going through the stress, financial costs, and potential heartache of getting a name change is an important aspect in declaring their relationship to the public so that they seem “legit.” So this is yet another arena where DOMA and other laws regulating same-sex marriage affect those couples in a way that most straight couples don’t even think about.

My partner and I have retained our respective “maiden” names, but when my son was born three months ago we gave him a hyphenated last name. Admittedly, it isn’t a very elegant name and it is a mouthful, but it was important to us that he be official “ours,” even though right now my partner has no legal ties to him, since I am the birth mother. I’ve read (though not confirmed myself) that in many states, law dictates the last name that is put on the birth certificate, and same-sex parents would not have that option.

The Original Project Glass

by Zoe Pollock

Steve Mann has created computerized eyewear for over 35 years:

I have found these systems to be enormously empowering. For example, when a car’s headlights shine directly into my eyes at night, I can still make out the driver’s face clearly. That’s because the computerized system combines multiple images taken with different exposures before displaying the results to me. I’ve built dozens of these systems, which improve my vision in multiple ways.

Some versions can even take in other spectral bands. If the equipment includes a camera that is sensitive to long-wavelength infrared, for example, I can detect subtle heat signatures, allowing me to see which seats in a lecture hall had just been vacated, or which cars in a parking lot most recently had their engines switched off. Other versions enhance text, making it easy to read signs that would otherwise be too far away to discern or that are printed in languages I don’t know.

Believe me, after you’ve used such eyewear for a while, you don’t want to give up all it offers.

Update from a reader:

I have fond memories of Steven Mann from my undergraduate days at MIT. You’d see him walking around campus occasionally with like 40 pounds of electronics strapped to his back and a massive camera/screen system on his glasses. At first it was quite jarring to see, because you don’t really see stuff like that every day. But after a while I stopped thinking of him as an oddity … one of the occupational hazards of getting educated at MIT that it no longer becomes weird to see a guy with a pentium lashed to his forehead. Just one of the many interesting visionary characters that I was privileged to spy on during my time at the ‘tute, kinda like the guy who ran my freshman physics lab that turned out to have a Nobel prize.. Anyways, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

(Image: “Self-portraits of Mann with ‘Digital Eye Glass’ (wearable computer and Augmediated Reality systems) from 1980s to 2000s” from Wikimedia Commons)

Small Government Theocons?

by Brendan James

Ed Kilgore doesn’t buy the idea that the Christian right is turning libertarian at the expense of its puritan strain:

[O]ne of the most distinctive features of the Tea Party faith has been the divinization of such [libertarian] views, often via idolatry aimed at the Declaration of Independence, thought to reflect a theocratic charter for America making pervasive property rights, strictly limited government and the “rights of the unborn” and “traditional marriage” the only legitimate governing tenets for the country. Libertarians, of course, share some if not all of this agenda. So a growing warmth for libertarianism within the Christian Right is not a problem for its leaders, and does not necessarily mean a growing warmth for any kind of cultural liberalism.

If that last line is true, then what should we make of the data from PRRI/Brookings last week, showing a slim majority (51%) of young white evangelicals now in favor of legalizing gay marriage? (Not to mention the 75% of young Catholics.) Doesn’t that libertarian bent pose a challenge to Christianists’ agenda? And what about the recent signs that these young religious types are less interested in waging the culture wars and more interested in the environment? What’s more, if this growing contradiction is some liberal-media myth, religious conservatives have been fooled: lately they can’t stop talking about it.

While it might be possible to argue for theocon policy on libertarian grounds, as Kilgore suggests, that’s not the route young believers appear to be taking.

The Obama Coalition

by Patrick Appel

Chait assesses it:

The old Democratic coalition was ideologically diffuse, and depended on overwhelming support among white Southern conservatives who elected reactionaries to Congress and frequently defected on the presidential ballot. The current Democratic advantage represents a smaller but more stable ideological plurality. … Something could happen to dissolve the new Democratic majority just as race and the sixties dissolved the last one. Even if it doesn’t, it won’t last forever. The Republicans will adapt to the new political climate, or else they’ll simply bore more deeply into the political institutions, discovering and expanding ways to exercise power without appealing to a majority of America. But the changing contours of America really do seem to have swept aside the old conservative majority, and there’s no foreseeable event to bring it back.

Eric Schickler thinks the GOP will have to remake itself to become competitive again:

[T]he challenge for Republicans is perhaps more difficult than just changing position on a handful of issues: it is to foster an identity that young voters find consistent with their own self-image. Given the demographics of this next generation of voters – including the growing share made up of Latinos – this may well require a substantial “reboot” of the GOP’s approach.

The Sound Of Unoriginality

by Brendan James

Ian Crouch complains that so many contemporary trailers make use of the loud, droning sound popularized by Inception:

Today’s action movies—with pretensions to deep-thinking, and filled with rueful and angry superheroes or geopolitical conflicts that attempt to mirror the fragmented realities of the War on Terror world—demand a more serious treatment, and those thunderous musical cues seem handed down to remind us that even frivolous popcorn movies aren’t supposed to merely be fun anymore. The trailer has been elevated to a minor art form unto itself, and the auteurs behind them seem to have little patience for the gimmicks of the past. Yet one day, hopefully soon, the “duhhhhn” will be gone, abandoned for the next trailer innovation, and will be remembered as a kind of dated sonic cheese.

The Partisan Court

by Doug Allen

Jonathan Bernstein calls on Justice Ginsburg to retire:

There’s every possibility she could not only continue in office beyond the Barack Obama presidency but that she could survive even eight years of a Republican in office after that, if that’s what’s in the cards. And yet: “Every possibility” isn’t good enough. Ginsburg will turn 84 soon after Obama’s successor will be sworn in. Realistically, anyone planning for the future has to assume there’s a 50 percent chance of that successor being a Republican.

He follows up:

I don’t understand the objections that this line of thought is insulting to Ginsburg, or what I think is a related argument that SCOTUS should be above politics. I think that’s a real misunderstanding of the Court. It’s true that Supreme Court justices don’t, and shouldn’t, simply vote the way that Members of Congress vote on issues. But yes, absolutely, the Court is and is meant to be “political” and a part of the US democracy. And during an era in which the polity is highly partisan and polarized, it’s no surprise that the Court is, too. Not only no surprise, but it’s basically what we should want. The idea that the Court should be the same regardless of what voters want is anti-democratic — and, given the Constitution, unrealistic.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #147

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

The leafless trees and an evergreen in the background made me think of a northern climate, but since my guesses are rarely even in the correct hemisphere, I’m going to go out on a limb: The orange tree, yellow house, and white-washed garden walls point to Athens, Greece. The red-tile roofs visible in the photo make me think its in the Old Town area of Athens below the Acropolis.

Another reader:

This is my first time guessing a VFYW. I am not using any investigative tools for this guess; I just have a hunch. The orange tree reminds me of the kind I used to see and pick oranges from walking through Damascus, but the roof shingles on the yellow building and lack of satellite dishes tells me this can’t be an Arab country. However, it does have a Mediterranean feel, just emerging out of winter. Letters on the building could be Greek? It’s be in the news lately. But let’s go with Cyprus. To be more specific: Limassol, Cyprus.

Another:

The first step was to identify the logo in the lower-right corner. It’s ProCredit, and a quick search online reveals that they only operate in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. You’d think after cross-referencing the specific countries where they operate with orange-producing countries you could cross off Eastern Europe and Africa, but that’s not quite true. Since ProCredit’s website doesn’t offer an easy way to display all of their locations in any given country, I’m going to stop here and just guess Guadalajara, Mexico, since Mexico is the #1 orange producing country among countries where ProCredit operates.

Another:

Through a combination of Wikipedia and luck, I identified that building on the right as a ProCredit bank within a ten minutes. But it’s 60 degrees and sunny in New York today, so I’m not going to spend much of it indoors trudging through Google Maps. Time for educated guessing:

Given the week’s news, I suspected Cyprus, but ProCredit lists no branches there. The oranges made me think Mediterranean, where it has branches in Albania and many of the former Yugoslav Republic countries. Then again, Cyprus involves Russia, and Georgia is in the Russian sphere, grows wonderful citrus, and has ProCredit banks. So now I’m leaning Georgia. But hang on — the people who live where the picture was taken are clearly concerned with heavy rain: The drainpipes and gutters are prominent and well-tended. So, a tropical country? I’ll say Nicaragua, because Dish-heads seem to travel off the beaten path, although ProCredit also operates in El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, and Colombia and I think it could just as easily be one of those.

Now I’m going out for some sun.

Another:

I’m going to go with Italy, and I’m going to go with a post-WWII neighborhood of Florence since the orange tree was a symbol of the Medici.

Another:

The picture this week was pretty difficult to due to the lack of coverage in Serbia of Google Street View, but thankfully the photo has a clear view of a Pro Credit Bank branch, and apparently they are pretty common throughout Serbia. The photo also offers other clues such as the “aesthetics be damned, we are putting a Mitsubishi a/c unit in this place, and are going to plop the brilliant white condenser outside the window”, a common practice throughout the city of Vranja, where the citizens, like the rest of the country, prefer to grow apricots on any available area of their back yard to help block out these eyesores.

I doubt I have much of a chance this week, as I am sure somebody’s ex-girlfriend’s cousin happens to be banker’s associate for Pro Credit Bank in Vranja, and has already sent them exact coordinates of the location to send in to The Dish and claim the prize. Nevertheless, if I win, I promise to send in my subscription.

Don’t let a loss stop you! Another reader:

Well, I started in Serbia and ended up in Macedonia. I was able to identify ProCredit Bank on the corner and I figured orange trees grow far enough south in Macedonia that it just might be the place. That’s as far as I can get without some decent software so this is where I have to stop. Prilep, Macedonia:

Another Eastern European country:

I recognized ProCredit bank instantly from my time spent in Moldova doing development work. Problem is, it’s a huge bank, and branches could be anywhere in the developing world. The combination of the fir tree in the back and the unique roof shingles narrow this location down to Eastern Europe (no major Asian countries have ProCredit banks, and those shingles are only found in a handful of countries outside of Asia). It looks like Romanian graffiti on the top of the white brick building, so we could be in Romania or Moldova (Moldovan is essentially Romanian). I’ll limit my Google Maps search to what I know: Moldova.

It doesn’t look like any of the major branches in Moldova (many of which are located in more urban housing than this). From the satellite, I’m guessing it’s possibly this branch: Ştefan cel Mare şi Sfânt 33, Soroca, Moldova.

Yet another:

You sent me on my first ever VFYW witch hunt, searching for ProCredit banks in Kosovo. I could probably spend several more hours trying to pinpoint the locations, but I’m not sure I have the time or the energy (although it is kind of fun to see all the streets named after American politicians, like Eliot L. Engel St in Peja!).

Why my sudden VFYW participation?

A couple years ago, you had a picture of Cartagena, Colombia. I swore it looked familiar as I was planning a trip there for my friend’s wedding. Of course I thought my hunch would have been thousands of miles off. (During my trip, I actually took a picture of the window it was taken from). Then, a few months later, you had an entry from Mozambique. This failure to go with my gut cut much deeper. Not only was my friend the one who had submitted the picture, but I was the one who had advised him to submit something while he was working overseas. After not entering my guesses those two times, I vowed to pursue any future leads.

Now, here I am with no confidence whatsoever in my guess fully aware that some other Dishhead will have pinpointed the exact home from which the picture was taken. It kind of looks like it could have been taken from Haxhi Zeka, in Prizren Kosovo, but I really have no idea.

More coincidences from our contest here and here. Another Kosovo guesser:

Another gets the right country:

I noticed the graffiti on the apartment wall that says “Para Laci”. This appears to be a reference perhaps to the European football team from Laç, Albania. Laç is near an ancient church that is a destination of pilgrimage dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua. There is a dearth of photos and map details of the town. I can’t say for sure the photo is not from somewhere else such as Tirana, but I am going with Laç.

Another gets closer:

Going on the Laçi graffiti, I’m guessing it’s in Albania. There are two ProCredit Bank locations that Google Maps finds there, and one is next to the Hotel Lisus in Lezhe. So perhaps it’s a first or second story hotel window facing north.

Another nails the right city:

What a frustrating contest this week! The more of these I do, I notice how we VFYWers have assembled a collective toolbox, and in this regard narrowing down to the country was mostly an act of standing on the shoulders of giants. Those window units point me to eastern Europe and the geographically limiting orange tree pushes me south. I figured out the commercial bank sign and went to its website to learn the scope of its worldwide footprint. Grafitti confirms the usage of the Latin alphabet. Google “Para Laci”, and the wisdow of crowds points you to … Albania, via links about fooball clubs and rappers, amongst others. Less than an hour to confirm the country, and with the requisite shot of luck we have the city of Tirana, Albania inside another thirty minutes.

From there the toolbox disintegrates. We look at every storefront photo of a ProCredit Bank, but none quite fit right. Albania’s capital has not yet succumbed to the intrusiveness of Street View. Aerial shots are as inscrutable as I wish my own home were. But we’ve found that tallish brick building in a photo, we know we have. But it’s across the street from a different ProCredit branch. We think perhaps there’s another branch, or possibly an abandoned one across the street, but we can’t get behind the brick building to confirm. After nailing the neighborhood in 1.5 hours, we spend 3 more trying to find the window.

Then despair – a mile down the road, another similar brick building, adjacent to another ProCredit branch. It all crumbles. I still believe in Tirana, but I have no confidence in my specifics.

Another Tirana guesser:

A lot of the aerial views of Albanian towns show red-tiled roofs like the one in the photo. And when you go on ProCredit’s Albanian website – whose webmaster is probably wondering why they’ve been getting so many hits this past weekend – you see a lovely picture of this smiling man in a blue shirt:

This is exactly the same image that you see hanging in the window of the ProCredit bank in the VFYW.

A group effort:

So here’s how my weekend went: I had all these plans to catch up on homework for my master’s program. Then the weekly VFYW contest started on Saturday, and my entire afternoon and night were completely shot. Here’s what I did: my girlfriend, a mutual friend, and I all scoured the photo for any evidence. I was the first to realize that the bank was a ProCredit Bank (I googled “ProC” and saw what came up in the AutoComplete box). Then we went to the bank’s web site and started eliminating countries. My girlfriend noticed that the guy on the advertisement on the window of the bank was the same guy that appeared on ProCredit Albania’s web site, so we had a country match.

Since that time, we spent hours and hours on Google Maps and Street View (turns out, satellite imagery of Albania is not quite what it is in, say, New York). We especially focused on Lac, since graffiti on the building on upper left says “para laçi.” Anyway, the point to all this is: we still don’t know which branch it is. Damn ProCredit and its all-too-convenient branches.

So I’m guessing Tirana. Because it seems like the kind of place that might have both a ProCredit Bank branch AND a backyard orange tree. So there.

Another nails the right building:

This week’s “View From Your Window” is located in Tirana, Albania. Of this I am 100% positive. I am also about 99.5% sure that this picture has been taken from the City Hotel Tirana on Rruga Ismail Qemali. If I had to be more specific, I’d say it was taken from the second floor window next to the “E L” in “hotel” on the southern side of the building, facing the alley.

In the event of multiple correct guesses (as is likely; I’m guessing 50-60 correct hotel-level guesses), this is my fifth correct guess. Previous correct guesses include Queenstown, New Zealand; Sausalito, California; Anchorage, Alaska and Kagoshima, Japan.

The number of correct hotel guessers was actually ten (all of whom will now be on the “Correct Guessers” list, which will give them an edge in future contests). But only one of them has guessed more prior views than the above reader without yet winning. That reader’s entry:

That persimmon tree initially had me thinking Asia. But the sign for ProCredit Bank – a surprisingly large network of microloan and retail banking establishments through Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa – quickly redirected me toward SE Europe.

Let this be said: While there may be more Rodeway Inns and local police stations in North America than ProCredit branches in the Balkans, there are still plenty of the latter. What’s more, they’re represented pretty spottily in Google Maps. Most of Serbia’s and Kosovo’s show up in map view, for instance, but you won’t find any in, say, Bosnia-Herzegovina that way.

I had a good feeling about Albania (Wikipedia singles the country out as a regional leader in persimmon cultivation, for whatever that’s worth), but even on ProCredit’s Albanian website, a lot of the branches had no photos available. Google apparently has no Albanian Street View database, and its grasp of exact addresses there is a little shaky. Thank goodness some kind folks took photos in the vicinity of one of the several Tirana branches, this one on Ismail Qemali St.:

The colored outlines correspond to the same on the original VFYW and the Google map view:

The first floor seems the most likely, given the position of the stone wall (light blue) and gate (yellow). And as this image shows, there’s a ventilation unit (in pink!) by the first floor window, southwest corner, matching the one in the original image:

From the photo’s owner:

On a recent trip to Albania for work, I stayed an extra few days to check out Tirana and the surrounding areas. I stayed at a small hotel on a side street that was recommended by a friend called City Hotel on Rruga Ismail Qemali, Nr 8/1. It was taken from the first floor, room #2. I quite liked the orange tree in the yard outside my window and thought I’d share it.

Congrats to that colorful reader on the tough win. This was truly one of the most impressive contests yet. I had picked what I thought would be a really tough photo because I knew I would be especially busy this week with Andrew on vacation and I wanted to cut down on the submissions. Silly me: there were close to 150 entries, half of which were of Albania. Readers still continue to amaze me when it comes to this contest, after nearly three years of running it. As one reader puts it:

The VFYW contest is creepy. Seriously. How can these people – from just ONE random photograph – pinpoint the EXACT location down to the apartment unit it was taken from?! It’s creepy.

(Archive)

Lessons Not Learned

by Doug Allen

Jackson Diehl defends his interventionist stance on both Iraq and Syria:

Iraq was unquestionably costly and painful to the United States — in dollars, in political comity and, above all, in lives, both of Iraqis and Americans. It hasn’t turned out, so far, as we war supporters hoped. Yet in the absence of U.S. intervention, Syria is looking like it could produce a much worse humanitarian disaster and a far more serious strategic reverse for the United States. … The tragedy of the post-Iraq logic embraced by President Obama is that it has ruled out not just George W. Bush-style invasions but also the more modest intervention used by the Clinton administration to prevent humanitarian catastrophes and protect U.S. interests in the 1990s.

Larison scoffs:

One lesson from Iraq that many war opponents have learned is that the U.S. shouldn’t be waging unnecessary wars that serve no discernible U.S. interest. That isn’t the wrong lesson to learn. It’s one that Diehl simply ignores, which is probably why he never really addresses how it would serve U.S. interests to go to war in Syria.

Another lesson is that forcibly collapsing a regime creates far more instability and chaos than leaving it in place would. There is no likely scenario in which hastening regime collapse would have limited the loss of life and displacement of civilians in Syria. …

Military interventions almost always take longer than expected, and that’s always true for interventions that are sold to the public by emphasizing how low-cost and easy they will be. Take an interventionist’s original estimate for how long a given military action will take, and then multiply it by ten or fifteen and you’ll be closer to the real figure. One of the reasons no one trusts the promises of Iraq war hawks is that they were promising a swift and easy war in 2003, too, and all that many of them can say after an eight-year debacle is that it “hasn’t turned out, so far, as we war supporters hoped.”

Why Not Hillary?

by Patrick Appel

Frum claims that Hillary winning the 2016 nomination will be bad for the Democratic party:

After eight years in the White House, a party requires a self-appraisal and a debate over its way forward. Bill Clinton offered Democrats just such a debate in 1992 with his “New Democrat” ideas. Barack Obama offered another in 2008 with his careful but unmistakable criticism of Clinton-era domestic policies and Hillary Clinton’s Iraq war vote. But if Hillary Clinton glides into the nomination in 2016 on the strength of money, name recognition, and a generalized feeling of “It’s her turn,” then Democrats will forgo this necessary renewal.

Kilgore pushes back:

I’m all for fresh talent and helpful intra-party debates, but I’d say what Democrats probably want and need most is a 2016 victory to consolidate the policy achievements of the Obama administration while perhaps convincing Republicans the vicious obstructionism they’ve been exhibiting since 2009 is a dead end.

Agreed. The Democrats have their differences but the party is more ideologically unified now than it has been in decades and the Democratic coalition is basically sound.

Ask Andrew Anything: Processing The Progress On Marriage

by Chris Bodenner

Andrew talks more about his recent trip to West Point here. His analysis of the SCOTUS hearings here and here, and his reaction to Rob Portman’s conversion here. By the way, the reader reaction to the AA reboot has been positive so far:

I just wanted to say that I really liked the new set up and look for the Ask Anything series. I didn’t really like the surreal filter that was used before and often found it more distracting than helpful when listening to the videos. I just watched the AAA on Pope Francis and Ratzinger. The clarity and HD quality used in that video is, in my opinion, preferable to what was set up before. Keep up the great work!

Another:

I really like the un-distorted visuals, larger format, and understated background. And I really really really like that you’ve gotten rid of that horrible typing sound when printing out the questions. A brief (and blessedly silent) title at the beginning works perfectly.

A special thanks to Chas for assembling the Dish mobile studio, shooting the footage, and processing the videos. The Ask Anything series is also available on YouTube.