Category: Old Dish

KELO/RAICH

If you grow pot in your attic solely to help you survive chemotherapy, you can be prosecuted by the feds under the “inter-state commerce” rationale. Now you can have your property stolen by Walmart and be unable to get any recompense either, as long as your local representatives, financed by the real estate lobby, go along. Is this an unfree country or what? And, of course, none of this breaks new ground. That’s the really depressing part. It seems to me that the most inspired pick for the Supreme Court would be a thoroughgoing economic and social libertarian. The freedom-loving part of the Republican coalition has already been alienated in so many ways by this administration. A libertarian SCOTUS pick would go some way to winning them back.
UPDATE: I’m also guilty of hyperbole. As one reader reminds me: “I’m with the dissent. Nevertheless, ‘unable to get any recompense’ is flat out wrong. They still have to compensate the owners for their property.” Point taken. It’s just a lot easier for the government now than it was.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“Turing might be known primarily as a mathematician and the founder of computer science, but he was truly a full-fledged scientist of incredible insight. A decade ago, as an undergraduate student, I stumbled across some articles on “Turing structures,” which were Turing’s theory as to how certain complex biological patterns (zebra stripes, cow spots, etc) could arise from relatively simple (and well-understood) chemical equations. Some 40 years after his theory, scientists discovered that his hypothesis had real-world application. Looking at his original paper, I was amazed at how clearly and concisely he wrote, with an obvious concern for the lay reader who lacked his mathematical brilliance.
For a long but entertaining read, I recommend Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon,” which includes some highly enjoyable historical speculations on the breaking of Enigma.”

ALAN TURING, RIP

Today is the late math genius’s birthday. Turing was a brilliant Englishman, one of the founding fathers of computer science, and a patriot whose cracking of the Nazis’ Enigma Code was critical to winning the war against Hitler. His amazing work was rewarded by being offered the choice in 1952 of choosing chemical castration or imprisonment for being gay. Two years later, a broken man, he killed himself. Today is a day for honoring him and the countless men and women over the centuries whose gifts and dignity were obliterated by ignorance, oppression and hate, hate that is still being excused and perpetrated today. May those of us lucky enough to have been born in their wake never forget what they went through, never forget the cruelty and evil they had to confront, and do everything we can to prevent these wounds being passed to the next generation.

STAYING THE COURSE

Two great columns today from David Brooks and Max Boot. I second both. I don’t think withdrawal of any troops is an option in the current presidential term (I think we need more troops, not fewer); and we need, as Max says, to do a far better job of securing the borders. But we have an absolute moral obligation to stand by those Iraqis who risked their lives to vote last January; and the president needs to do a far better job of being honest with the American people about the huge commitment still required for several years to make this a (by no means assured) success. His policy of Pollyannaish platitudes has failed. And if he doesn’t turn around American public opinion on this, we will lose.

RE-THINKING THE WAR

Ever since a key rationale for the war to depose Saddam – existing stockpiles of WMDs – was debunked, the interesting theoretical question is: if we’d known then what we know now, would we still have launched a war? In general, I agree with Bob Kagan. We too often forget the consequences of the alternative: hideously cruel and corrupt sanctions, the maintenance of Saddam’s barbarism, the entrenchment of despotism in the Arab world, the encouragement of Jihadists who could interpret inaction as weakness, and the fact that sanctions would eventually have collapsed and that Saddam could have gotten his WMDs in the near future anyway. It would be dishonest to say I’m not chastened by the inept post-war, Abu Ghraib, the abandonment of the ban on “cruel and inhumane treatment” of prisoners, the resilience of the insurgency, the ineffectiveness of reconstruction and the loss of 12,000 Iraqi lives while we were responsible for their security. But I still think that, even knowing what we know now, the war was worth it, if only for the potential for Arab democratization that has opened up; and the end of Saddam’s brutality. Nevertheless, Spencer Ackerman makes some good cointer-points here. I link; you mull it over.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I agree with you about Durbin. While ineloquently phrased, the sentiment is true. We don’t expect our troops to do the things we hear about them doing in Gitmo. Still, any politician shoud be smart enough to know that comparisons to Nazis, Stalin, Khmer Rouge, et. al. are not only inaccurate, but going to create a terrible shitstorm. Instead, I’d recommend the words of the most America loving author, and a true literary giant. Here’s what he had to say about the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine rebellion:

“We have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandits’ work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world …” (Mark Twain, “On the Damned Human Race”).

I don’t think that even the far right is going to castigate Mr. Clemens for insufficient patriotism.”