Technically, My Writing Is Awful
Well, the last week I have been quite ill, but I have also been working very hard on getting something published. One of my smarter friends reviewed an earlier version of my work, and had this classic comment:
your ideas are excellent. i am as impressed as i expected to be. technically, your writing is awful. i say this out of genuine concern. you should take a remedial course.
Ouch!
Update: I tried defending myself by arguing I am just careless, and that my writing is quite acceptable when I bother to review it. My friend had none of this:
i'd like to see some writing you've done that you've checked carefully. then i would be able to know if you really know how to do it.... i don't mean to pick on careless errors. i would never even be able to write a draft that looks like what you did. it also shows a basic ignorance of some simple grammar rules you have never been taught because of inadequate schooling (and a gigantic lack of interest i suspect). but that's your deal....
Big Ouch!
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Monday, March 28, 2005
Sunday, March 27, 2005
$3.00 a Gallon Gas?
Bring it on! Seriously, this may become the reality with the growth of the Chinese economy (not to mention the growth of the Indian economy). Ever-increasing demand and stable supply equals long-term price increases. I've said in the past that we need to create incentives to consume less oil. The best incentive would be a tax on gas, but accompanied with tax cuts in other sectors to keep the government's revenue and the change in overall tax burden neutral.
Bring it on! Seriously, this may become the reality with the growth of the Chinese economy (not to mention the growth of the Indian economy). Ever-increasing demand and stable supply equals long-term price increases. I've said in the past that we need to create incentives to consume less oil. The best incentive would be a tax on gas, but accompanied with tax cuts in other sectors to keep the government's revenue and the change in overall tax burden neutral.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Schiavo
A lot of people have asked me what I think about the Schiavo case. I've been avoiding it in general, but now that the case is now coming to an end (the 11th circuit denied appeal, and you can bet good money that the supremes aren't going to grant cert.), I'll put down a few general thoughts.
1) Everybody's motivation here is suspect
2) We get quite animated when we look at the possiblity of triage in health care, whether it is real or presupposed.
3) The question of who gets to make the choice in deciding to triage is just as difficult, yet important, as the decision of whether triage is acceptable. Should we care about the husband not being able to move on when the parents are more than willing to keep their daughter alive? In different cases, should there be a diminshed standard of tolerance for unlikelihood of recovery when relatives are not willing to pony up the money to pay for life support? Should it matter that the daughter may have told the husband that she would not have wanted to end up like this?
Mickey Kaus pointed me to NRO which had this interview with Professor Robert George dealing in part with this last question.
4) Regardless of all these points, involving the federal government is a questionable at best decision, and is a further signal of the hypocrisy of some of my republican allies professed concern for state rights. Take a look at the following thoughts by Charles Fried:
Congress's intervention in the Schiavo case is equally mischievous. It demanded that a federal court decide this issue without giving any deference to state law or the previous course of state court proceedings. This is exactly the sort of episodic federal intervention without regard for the integrity of state processes that plagued death penalty cases for years, and that Congress moved to end when it passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And the real possibility now of the case bouncing back and forth between the federal district court and the federal appeals court, and maybe even back to state court, is just what Congress tried to shut down in death penalty cases.
For years now, Congress has more and more stringently demanded that federal court intervention be limited to cases where the state courts have acted not just technically incorrectly, but with egregious lack of reason. Whatever might be said of the Florida state court proceedings in this case, they certainly have not crossed that line, and indeed probably accord with what state courts all over the country have ordered or permitted for years in these difficult and agonizing cases.
Finally, the law passed by Congress on Monday was an obvious attempt - under the pretense of allowing the determination of federal constitutional rights - to delay the outcome decreed by Florida state law with the hope of making that outcome impossible. That is precisely the worrisome tactic employed with increasingly imaginative stays and orders of re-litigation in a number of federal courts, most noticeably the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine Western states. And it is also precisely the sort of tactic that Congress sought to discipline in the Effective Death Penalty Act.
5) Finally, the mainstream media (MSM) has once again failed us. Some good examples here and here.
Well, those are my general thoughts. Hope you either enjoyed them, or stopped reading them a bit ago.
A lot of people have asked me what I think about the Schiavo case. I've been avoiding it in general, but now that the case is now coming to an end (the 11th circuit denied appeal, and you can bet good money that the supremes aren't going to grant cert.), I'll put down a few general thoughts.
1) Everybody's motivation here is suspect
2) We get quite animated when we look at the possiblity of triage in health care, whether it is real or presupposed.
3) The question of who gets to make the choice in deciding to triage is just as difficult, yet important, as the decision of whether triage is acceptable. Should we care about the husband not being able to move on when the parents are more than willing to keep their daughter alive? In different cases, should there be a diminshed standard of tolerance for unlikelihood of recovery when relatives are not willing to pony up the money to pay for life support? Should it matter that the daughter may have told the husband that she would not have wanted to end up like this?
Mickey Kaus pointed me to NRO which had this interview with Professor Robert George dealing in part with this last question.
NRO: As you know, there's some question about what Terri Schiavo's wishes were or would be now. How much should turn on this question?
George: It is the wrong question. It is pointless to ask whether Terri Schiavo had somehow formed a conditional intention to have herself starved to death if eventually she found herself in a brain-damaged condition. ...[snip]
Even if we were to credit Michael Schiavo's account of his conversation with Terri before her injury — which I am not inclined to do — it is a mistake to assume that people can make decisions in advance about whether to have themselves starved to death if they eventually find themselves disabled. That's why living wills have proven to be so often unreliable. One does not know how one will actually feel, or how one will feel about one's life and the prospect of death, or whether one will retain a desire to live despite a mental or physical disability, when one is not actually in that condition and when one is envisaging it from the perspective of more or less robust health.
Consider the case of a beautiful young woman — an actress or fashion model perhaps — who is severely burned in a fire. Prior to actually finding herself in such a condition, she might have supposed — and even said, if the subject had come up in a conversation — that she would rather be dead than live with her face grotesquely disfigured. But no one would be surprised if in the actual event she did not try to kill herself by starvation or some other means, and did not want to die.
4) Regardless of all these points, involving the federal government is a questionable at best decision, and is a further signal of the hypocrisy of some of my republican allies professed concern for state rights. Take a look at the following thoughts by Charles Fried:
Congress's intervention in the Schiavo case is equally mischievous. It demanded that a federal court decide this issue without giving any deference to state law or the previous course of state court proceedings. This is exactly the sort of episodic federal intervention without regard for the integrity of state processes that plagued death penalty cases for years, and that Congress moved to end when it passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And the real possibility now of the case bouncing back and forth between the federal district court and the federal appeals court, and maybe even back to state court, is just what Congress tried to shut down in death penalty cases.
For years now, Congress has more and more stringently demanded that federal court intervention be limited to cases where the state courts have acted not just technically incorrectly, but with egregious lack of reason. Whatever might be said of the Florida state court proceedings in this case, they certainly have not crossed that line, and indeed probably accord with what state courts all over the country have ordered or permitted for years in these difficult and agonizing cases.
Finally, the law passed by Congress on Monday was an obvious attempt - under the pretense of allowing the determination of federal constitutional rights - to delay the outcome decreed by Florida state law with the hope of making that outcome impossible. That is precisely the worrisome tactic employed with increasingly imaginative stays and orders of re-litigation in a number of federal courts, most noticeably the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine Western states. And it is also precisely the sort of tactic that Congress sought to discipline in the Effective Death Penalty Act.
5) Finally, the mainstream media (MSM) has once again failed us. Some good examples here and here.
Well, those are my general thoughts. Hope you either enjoyed them, or stopped reading them a bit ago.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Report on San Jose Iraq Invasion Anniversary Protests
A friend sends this email:
My friends,
Really not much to report: Pretty small turnout, I'd say, about 500 to 1000 at the Ceasar Chavez Plaza in San Jose for the Anti American, end the war, end the occupation everywhere, protest. Actually most of those present were the hard core, burntout, 50 to 70 year old Caucasoid commie peaceniks from the usual peace and justice brigades. There didn't seem to be a lot of Muslim/Arab folks who are usually younger and more threatening. However, (this is an exaggeration) about every third person seemed to be a Jew...Jews for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and even an Israeli Jew with an "End the Occupation "T"shirt. There were six of us good guys: Bob and Lisa Cohen (of course), Marty Wasserman (who has an amazing talent to keep calm and soft-spoken in his verbal encounters with these guys,) Isaac Kight, a young man who's been active in pro-Israel causes on the college campus, Dan Milgram and his two young sons about 5 and 3 years of age, and myself. There was also a guy from a group called "proAmericaspirit.org" who stood with us. While the rest of us carried American flags, and signs denouncing terrorism and promoting democracy and liberty in the Middle East, Dan draped himself in the Israeli flag (not real crowd pleasing attire for most of the "end the occupation" protest attendees.) Several of them read our signs and tried to engage us in debate. Nowadays, before I talk to any of these folks, I ask the standard (Ward Churchill) question: "Did America get what it deserved on 9/11?" All the protesters I spoke to answered in the affirmative. Maybe it's just me, but I find it really kind of hard to have a reasoned discussion with such people. (I'm open to suggestions and tutorials about this.) We did encounter an unusual protester who bears a mention. This guy, it turns out, seemed to be one of your old-time, old school, no bones about it, anti-semites. He belonged to none of the organizations or groups at the rally; he was, he proudly claimed, an "independent jew hater." As he walked by us, he stopped and advised us how all jews should be killed. He said he would like to do it himself if he could. I pointed to Dan's two young children and asked if he wanted to kill those children too. "Absolutely," he responded, and then he took a step toward me and asked if I had a problem with that? (Actually I think guys like this are valuable to have around. I was looking for a TV person to get him interviewed; for our puposes, he would have made a great protest rally poster boy. But alas, where are the cameras and reporters when you need them?)
We kept an eye out for media but it wasn't too heavily covered. Lisa gave a long interview, in Spanish, to Channel 14 Spanish Language TV. We also gave an interview to a very nice young woman who was reporting for the San Jose State Univ. newspaper. We got to express our views. And we tried to paint these protesters as out of touch, Ward Churchill type fanatics on their own misguided warpath of hate Americanism. And of course, I suspect, we caused a lot of annoyance to the great humanitarians of this rally who still long for the days of Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms.
Respectfully submittted,
my impressions only.
A friend sends this email:
My friends,
Really not much to report: Pretty small turnout, I'd say, about 500 to 1000 at the Ceasar Chavez Plaza in San Jose for the Anti American, end the war, end the occupation everywhere, protest. Actually most of those present were the hard core, burntout, 50 to 70 year old Caucasoid commie peaceniks from the usual peace and justice brigades. There didn't seem to be a lot of Muslim/Arab folks who are usually younger and more threatening. However, (this is an exaggeration) about every third person seemed to be a Jew...Jews for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and even an Israeli Jew with an "End the Occupation "T"shirt. There were six of us good guys: Bob and Lisa Cohen (of course), Marty Wasserman (who has an amazing talent to keep calm and soft-spoken in his verbal encounters with these guys,) Isaac Kight, a young man who's been active in pro-Israel causes on the college campus, Dan Milgram and his two young sons about 5 and 3 years of age, and myself. There was also a guy from a group called "proAmericaspirit.org" who stood with us. While the rest of us carried American flags, and signs denouncing terrorism and promoting democracy and liberty in the Middle East, Dan draped himself in the Israeli flag (not real crowd pleasing attire for most of the "end the occupation" protest attendees.) Several of them read our signs and tried to engage us in debate. Nowadays, before I talk to any of these folks, I ask the standard (Ward Churchill) question: "Did America get what it deserved on 9/11?" All the protesters I spoke to answered in the affirmative. Maybe it's just me, but I find it really kind of hard to have a reasoned discussion with such people. (I'm open to suggestions and tutorials about this.) We did encounter an unusual protester who bears a mention. This guy, it turns out, seemed to be one of your old-time, old school, no bones about it, anti-semites. He belonged to none of the organizations or groups at the rally; he was, he proudly claimed, an "independent jew hater." As he walked by us, he stopped and advised us how all jews should be killed. He said he would like to do it himself if he could. I pointed to Dan's two young children and asked if he wanted to kill those children too. "Absolutely," he responded, and then he took a step toward me and asked if I had a problem with that? (Actually I think guys like this are valuable to have around. I was looking for a TV person to get him interviewed; for our puposes, he would have made a great protest rally poster boy. But alas, where are the cameras and reporters when you need them?)
We kept an eye out for media but it wasn't too heavily covered. Lisa gave a long interview, in Spanish, to Channel 14 Spanish Language TV. We also gave an interview to a very nice young woman who was reporting for the San Jose State Univ. newspaper. We got to express our views. And we tried to paint these protesters as out of touch, Ward Churchill type fanatics on their own misguided warpath of hate Americanism. And of course, I suspect, we caused a lot of annoyance to the great humanitarians of this rally who still long for the days of Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms.
Respectfully submittted,
my impressions only.
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