Glorfindel of Gondolin

Dinner tonight: lamb shoulder, rare, served with purple amaranth leaves sauteed in butter with shallots, pearl onions, sherry vinegar, and walnuts. Yum!

Posted by Carey at 11:18 PM | | Permalink | Comments (0)

Moving from one apartment to another is a pain in the ass. But at least moving can remind you of how much crap you really have. It may induce you to finally get rid of some of it.

Best, though, would be if moving all of that crap reminded you not to accumulate so much of it in the first place.

Posted by Carey at 05:22 PM | | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's Friday, which means it's time for catblogging!

Today we have my big cat Silver. Alias: Mr. Snuggles.







As a bonus, here we have the Big Silv with my new little puppy. Twice the fun!





About the cuteness of that little puppy: no comment.

Posted by Carey at 12:01 AM | | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've always vaguely believed that being an asshole now and then is somehow part of being a good businessman. Here, Rick Saenz explores the relationship between business practices and neighborliness, and provides a historical argument to support my vague belief. After quoting an almost perfectly chosen passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder, Saenz writes:

What the people of DeSmet have forgotten, along with the rest of us, is that business practices were explicitly developed as an alternative to neighborliness, not an elaboration or enhancement of it. Karl Polanyi points out in his book The Great Transformation that until recently business trade was a relatively limited endeavor, taking place between towns and cities, leaving the countryside (and most of the population) largely unaffected. The reason was that there was no reliable means of enforcing business arrangements with villagers; until recently, a business dispute with a customer in a village had to be settled in that hard-to-get-to village, before a council of elders that might very well decide in favor of the villager if it was determined that the deal was somehow unfair to him. Business practices, especially enforcable legal contractual obligations, were developed specifically so people could conduct transactions with people who weren’t their neighbors.

Let's put aside all the possible objections to this account and assume it's mostly accurate. The consequences both good and bad are obvious. The good: we can rely on commercial engagements with people who live far away and who aren't neighbors. We can avail ourselves, therefore, of a wider range of goods at a wider range of prices. Mostly because we can, as businessmen, afford to ignore much of the personality of those people we deal with.

The bad: by expanding our commercial reach by reducing human beings to narrowly defined roles, we sacrifice our sensitivity to the broader consequences of what we do. This is, in fact, the central problem with the "industrial" society that agrarianism attempts to reveal and to criticize. How do we justify the cruelty, the waste, and the destruction of globalized industrial society? We don't, because we don't have to. We've changed the rules so that we can ignore these things and, to the extent that we recognize their existence, we can treat them as problems external to our own actions, to be ameliorated with whatever charitable impulses we care to indulge in from time to time.

One obvious way to cure the faults of purely business relationships is legal. Good law governing contracts can help to minimize the gap between "treating people right" and relating on a purely business level with your contract partners. More generally, can we ameliorate the problems of global industrialized society with good regulation by the state? Maybe so, if these regulations force us to deal with the previously unseen and unrecognized "externalities" of our behavior. E.g., a regulation prohibiting the sale of shirts made in sweatshops prevents us from buying these, even when we're largely unaware of how or where our clothes are made on the other side of the world. Assuming a well-functioning government, this approach might work -- but that kind of government seems fantastical.

Posted by Carey at 09:26 PM | | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm surprised we don't see this more often.

During the year that I drove an ambulance, I had to deal with a) oblivious drivers, for whom my lights and sirens were like the sound of falling golf clubs to Tiger Woods, and b) crazy-ass Denver Health paramedics who drove like nutjobs.

Needless to say, I wouldn't be surprised if either vehicle was at fault for this crash.

Posted by Carey at 12:40 AM | | Permalink | Comments (0)

As is often the case, Glenn Greenwald's latest blog post must be read:

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau has a long, prominent article today on the pending debate over FISA and telecom amnesty -- headlined: "Return to Old Spy Rules Is Seen as Deadline Nears" -- that features (and endorses) virtually every blatant falsehood that has distorted these spying issues from the beginning, and which is built on every shoddy journalistic practice that has made clear debate over these issues almost impossible. The article strongly suggests that a so-called "compromise" is imminent, a "compromise" which will deliver to the President virtually everything he seeks in the way of new warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom amnesty.

Posted by Carey at 02:21 AM | | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's an excellent discussion going on over at Stanley Fish's NYT column about the role of political beliefs among college professors. I tend to agree with Fish. The University of Colorado's attempts to recruit conservative faculty members are misplaced and should embarrass all Coloradans.

In my own experience, I've found that a diversity of political views within the student body is far more important for a student's experience than that within the faculty. As Fish argues, most competent professors can and do bracket their own political views in the classroom. But students, in conversations outside of class, can't and shouldn't do the same thing. This means that if you're on a campus where 98 percent of your fellow students are liberal (or conservative), you're unlikely to encounter a serious challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy in your conversations at lunch and in the dorm.

I speak from experience. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I couldn't make any political statement wihout being strongly challenged by some fellow student who profoundly disagreed with me. After transferring to Reed College, all the students were so overwhelmingly liberal that my left-leaning statements were given a free pass, while my right-leaning statements were appropriately and skillfully attacked. Fifty percent* of the arguments that I would have had at Chicago, disappeared at Reed. I loved both schools, but the politically more diverse student body at Chicago made for a more interesting intellectual experience there.

As for the faculty at both schools, I couldn't tell a thing about their personal political beliefs from their classroom teaching.

*I like to think that orthodox liberals would strongly object to about half of my political positions.

Posted by Carey at 01:04 AM | | Permalink | Comments (1)

Waiting for my girlfriend's plane from L.A. to land, I listened closely to Stool... uh, Tool, in the parking lot at O'Hare airport at 5 am after I'd worked all night in the ER. It was sublime:

And then this always makes me think of those cold nights camped under the stars in Wyoming:

Posted by Carey at 02:45 AM | | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Michael Froomkin comes this great piece from Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. Anyone doubting that we've made some progress in race relations should read some of these letters written by white Chicagoans during the civil rights era. Read their letters, feel their fear. (And note, please, how often their racism was defended by appeals to "property rights" and "freedom.")

Our history of racism makes it delicious that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President. But his nomination is delicious for more reasons than just race. After so many years of ceding the nation's political culture to candidates who feel compelled to identify themselves with rural Texas or Arkansas or some other Southern locale, I'm thrilled that Obama's acknowledged political home base is the city of Chicago. And after so many years of ceding our political culture to the rednecks, it's refreshing that Obama is obviously an intellectual who couldn't bowl his way out of a paper bag. It's about time! Of course, all of this is useless if Obama loses to McCain, but I'm still hopeful that that won't happen.

Now, I shall set forth upon my cultural rant -- apologies in advance:

Start with politics. The free-market and social conservativism that dominates our political discourse needs to be checked. Our long love affair with conservatism has led to the middle class disappearing, our bridges collapsing, our cities drowning, and our civil liberties evaporating. Our military is in Iraq on false pretenses, waging a war of choice, and may now be settling in for the very long-term. These depressing political developments have been aided, if not caused, by a political culture that has privileged the yahoo and the redneck over the erudite, urbane, and intellectual.

What do I mean by that? Consider that for decades, politicians won by ridiculing "effete intellectuals" and more recently, "latte liberals." Reagan the Rancher beat Mondale the Minnesotan. Bush 41 beat Dukakis in part because the latter seemed more urbane, and thus more wimpy -- mostly because of that unfortunate tank helmet, but also because Dukakis looked like the product of civilized Massachusetts. Clinton turned the tables on the Republicans by being more rednecky than both Bush 41 and the witty but non-redneck Bob Dole. That Gore and Kerry both came close to beating the most anti-intellectual president ever suggested that our national infatuation with yahoos continued, but that it might have limits.

Conversely, I challenge you to name a successful national politician who won by casting his opponent as an uneducated redneck. Who mocked his opponent's Ford F150 with the gun rack. Who held up his Starbucks proudly while denouncing his opponent's preference for Diet Coke and fries.

I thought not. Intellectualism hasn't fared too well in American politics of late.

I'm not saying that the right wing doesn't have its share of intellectuals. In fact, the left has long envied the academic output of the partisan right even as they denounce the specific arguments for endless tax cuts as ideological extremism. Despite George W. Bush's appalling lack of curiosity and aggressive anti-intellectualism, the real damage of this presidency has been done by the highly-educated David Addingtons and John Yoos in the administration who use their skills to push pernicious policies: the "unitary executive", the GWOT, signing statements, deregulation and tax cuts. These days, everyone across the political spectrum wants their own Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation.

What I'm saying is that as we've been seduced by the politics of the right wing, we've also been seduced by the culture of the redneck. I don't think this is a coincidence. They often go hand-in-hand. The pejorative term "redneck" conjures up images of people more zealous about the literal truth of the Bible than about their own reason, more attached to their pickup truck than to the health of ANWR, more committed to their hatred for gays than to their appreciation of diversity. These are the cultural markers that right-wing Republicans have been celebrating for decades.

Moreover, these cultural markers are sadly much more visible in rural areas than they are in big cities. This site stereotypes the difference too much, but there's a core of truth to the general claim that liberalism flourishes in big cities and withers in the hinterlands. If you doubt this, look at the map: there aren't red and blue states; there are red rural areas and blue cities. John Kerry won every city in the country with more than 500,000 people.

Republican campaign success over the past twenty years has hewed more or less loosely to the formula: praise the the rural and the redneck, villify the educated and and the urban. Thankfully, things are changing. We'll have to see how Barack Obama does in November, but this time around, my money's on the intellectual guy from Chicago. Delicious.

Posted by Carey at 06:55 PM | | Permalink | Comments (4)