Remember the spotted owl? I was just a kid when the fight heated up over this little, old-growth-loving bird but I still remember the choice put forth by the logging companies: Owls or jobs. Protecting the owl's habitat, we were told, would cost thousands of loggers their jobs. The thing about this argument is that, even if it was technically true, it was total crap. It wasn't the owl that eliminated those jobs, it was logging. The owls habitat was being protected because most of the old growth-timber in its native range had already been logged.
Old growth is not a very renewable resource. Old-growth trees are typically centuries old and they acquire their sought-after close grain and high density from growing slowly in the shadow of pre-existing, centuries-old trees. Thus, the question is, if the Pacific Northwest had been logged down to a few owl-islands in a little over a century, what were they planning on doing once they'd logged the rest of a resource that takes a good chunk of a millennium to replace? The issue wasn't whether or not to stop logging. It had to stop. The issue was whether to stop before or after destroying an entire ecosystem.
A similar issue stands before us today. Oil prices are rising, apparently as a result of tight-supply in the face of rising world demand. This puts stress on the economy, most directly manifested here in the closing of the GM SUV plant in Janesville. To combat rising oil prices, many would have us drill in areas currently closed to resource exploitation due to environmental sensitivity. We need that oil.
The issue here, again, is that, even if drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve and elsewhere could provide immediate relief (it can't), we'd only slightly postpone the inevitable. We're going to run out of oil and, as production declines and demand continues to rise, it's going to get more expensive. Until SUVs run on something other than gasoline, they're just not going to be that practical. GM would've done well to realize that earlier and re purpose that plant before things got this bad. They didn't.
We will find a way to meet our energy needs without fossil fuels. The choice before us is how much of our world we'll irrevocably destroy before we do.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Just du . . . stupid
Some things you should just let slide. I'm not capable. I was reading a State Journal editorial today and this sentence caught my eye, "Why not? Because a painted chest ban is a dumb idea."
I agree with the thrust of the editorial; banning painted chests at WIAA events does seem to be a solution in search of a problem. What annoys me is that the State Journal Editorial Board seems to be stuck in grade school. I don't remember exactly when it was that it was explained to me that "dumb" means mute, not stupid, but I'm pretty sure it was well before a box of crayons ceased to be a requisite school supply.
Generally, I'm not one of those people who thinks we should all be speaking Victorian English out of reverance for the grand edifice of the English Language. Our language has been changing for as long as it's existed but that's not what's going on here. The editors weren't using some new bit of common parlance to keep up with the times nor were they, in this instance, fudging arcane grammatical rules to match common speech (something that can also drive me insane). They simply chose to use the wrong word. The State Journal could defend this as an attempt to sound less like the literary elite if it weren't for the fact that most people who don't know what "dumb" means haven't learned to read yet. For those people and the State Journal Editorial Board, here are a couple helpful examples of "stupid" and "dumb" properly used in sentences.
1. It's stupid to use a word in a published article that doesn't mean what you're clearly trying to say.*
2. I was literally struck dumb by the inanity of that State Journal editorial.**
. . . Now you try.
* Note my use of the second-person in this sentence where the third would be more formally appropriate. I'm totally hip.
**I also might have underlined "State Journal" but I'm not using the full title and it's the wild, wild internets. Anything goes. Language policing always balls up into a petty game of tit for tat but, really, words should mean what they mean.
I agree with the thrust of the editorial; banning painted chests at WIAA events does seem to be a solution in search of a problem. What annoys me is that the State Journal Editorial Board seems to be stuck in grade school. I don't remember exactly when it was that it was explained to me that "dumb" means mute, not stupid, but I'm pretty sure it was well before a box of crayons ceased to be a requisite school supply.
Generally, I'm not one of those people who thinks we should all be speaking Victorian English out of reverance for the grand edifice of the English Language. Our language has been changing for as long as it's existed but that's not what's going on here. The editors weren't using some new bit of common parlance to keep up with the times nor were they, in this instance, fudging arcane grammatical rules to match common speech (something that can also drive me insane). They simply chose to use the wrong word. The State Journal could defend this as an attempt to sound less like the literary elite if it weren't for the fact that most people who don't know what "dumb" means haven't learned to read yet. For those people and the State Journal Editorial Board, here are a couple helpful examples of "stupid" and "dumb" properly used in sentences.
1. It's stupid to use a word in a published article that doesn't mean what you're clearly trying to say.*
2. I was literally struck dumb by the inanity of that State Journal editorial.**
. . . Now you try.
* Note my use of the second-person in this sentence where the third would be more formally appropriate. I'm totally hip.
**I also might have underlined "State Journal" but I'm not using the full title and it's the wild, wild internets. Anything goes. Language policing always balls up into a petty game of tit for tat but, really, words should mean what they mean.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
I will still not have met the president
My last year in college, after semesters of sniping at their columnists in the feedback forums, the Badger Herald offered me a column of my own. I hadn't expected there to be any journalistic trappings but, one morning, I found myself heading to Milwaukee with some colleagues to a forum on the USA Patriot Act sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union.
We were the first people to wander into the room and, after I'd relished first pick of the donuts and continental breakfast, I took a seat just near enough the end of the U-shaped conference table to be inconspicuous (any closer would've looked weird for the first people in). As I enjoyed my fruit medley, a well-dressed gentleman sat down next me. It was ex-Clinton-nemesis turned libertarian evangelist, Bob Barr. He was accompanied by his lovely wife and we had a polite conversation innocuous enough that I've completely forgotten what we talked about; then he and ACLU President Nadine Strossen gave a presentation on the abuses of the Patriot Act.
All in all, my encounter with Bob Barr was thoroughly unremarkable. He's a pleasant, principled man . . . who will not be president.
We were the first people to wander into the room and, after I'd relished first pick of the donuts and continental breakfast, I took a seat just near enough the end of the U-shaped conference table to be inconspicuous (any closer would've looked weird for the first people in). As I enjoyed my fruit medley, a well-dressed gentleman sat down next me. It was ex-Clinton-nemesis turned libertarian evangelist, Bob Barr. He was accompanied by his lovely wife and we had a polite conversation innocuous enough that I've completely forgotten what we talked about; then he and ACLU President Nadine Strossen gave a presentation on the abuses of the Patriot Act.
All in all, my encounter with Bob Barr was thoroughly unremarkable. He's a pleasant, principled man . . . who will not be president.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Esenbergian Philosophy
A while ago, I decided to count the phrase "activist judge" among the ranks of "terrorist" and "fascist." Words (in this case a phrase) which used to have a defined, common meaning but have been reduced to epithets. You can't really tell anything about someone to whom these words are applied (in contemporary parlance) other than the obvious fact that the person who did the applying disagrees with him or her . . . vehemently, and would rather not have a civil argument.
Enter Rick Esenberg who applied the "activist" label to a decision of the California State Supreme Court last week (he did scrupulously avoid an ad hominem attak). He alleges the four majority justices disregarded the meaning of the plain language of the California State Constitution (which I'd wager he's not familiar with) when they rendered their decision (which he admits he hasn't read). I can't argue with that. We'd both need to know what we were talking about. Fortunately, his actual argument is philosophical . . . and wrong.
His first stab recycles a popular conservative yarn about the procreative nature of marriage. He's not a bigot, you see, marriage is just about creating a framework for raising children.
This is nonsense. Disregarding, for the moment, the fact that marriage has, historically, mostly been about property rights, (I remember attending a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony where the contract illustrated this pretty clearly) there's the inconvenient fact that couples without the ability or intent to have children get married all the time. There's also the intention of many same-sex couples to adopt children. Conservatives would be quick to point out the potential "damage" to the child but, with mounting evidence, nobody's ever been able to demonstrate any systemic disadvantage to the children of gay and lesbian parents. What would be needed to make a compelling argument against same-sex marriage is a clear disqualification unique to same-sex couples. This argument fails to disqualify and the absence of a functional, matched pair of reproductive organs (with intent to procreate) is not unique.
Next, there's the strain on poor marriage. Already she's endured the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce, another rapid change could do the old gal in.
Personally, I don't think the cultural defense argument really holds any water. It seems singularly unamerican to place the perceived welfare of some cultural orthodoxy ahead of individual liberty. At any rate, two years after its own decision, Massachusetts' divorce rate doesn't appear to have shot through the roof.
Then, finally, we get to the meat of the "activist" accusation. Regardless of what the California constitution says, when its framers said "equal treament," or words to that effect, they couldn't possibly have meant to include gay people. Everybody hated gay people until "a few years ago."
When one attempts to characterize constructionism by claiming its adherents are simply attempting to divine the thoughts and subliminal intentions of a law's authors, (unless it's an environmental-protection or anti-discrimination law) one is usually in for a verbal thrashing. In this case, I fail to see what else Esenberg could be doing. When the founding fathers said "All men are created equal," it is likely that they did, in fact, mean just men, and only white ones. Since then, it has often been the "activist" courts who have had to be at the fore in saying that, in plain language, equal means equal, and there's no substantive distinction between white men and black men, men and women, or straight women and lesbians. Yes, it's taken a while to figure this out but do we really expect the courts to pretend the last two-hundred years never happened? We know more than our forefathers did and we'd be fools to ignore that knowledge.
But wasn't the court overturning the "will of the people?" Yes, and so what? If this were actually a direct democracy, we wouldn't need a constitution in the first place. If it was allowed a vote, the body politic may indeed come to a different opinion about what should be done with my hair or my lawn but they don't get a vote. It's my hair, its my lawn and its my marriage. The idea that civil liberties should be put to a vote is ridiculous. Regulation of public behavior is something we do, for better or worse, quite regularly. Regulation of private conduct and access to public institutions is rarer and requires greater care than a year-long slug-fest/slogan-contest over a poorly worded ballot question. It requires actual evidence that curtailing freedom yields a public good overriding the violation of private liberty. A history, however long, of violating that liberty for no good reason does not constitute a justification.
So was the California court being "activist" when it decided to look at the world in front of its nose rather than gazing into Antonin Scalia's crystal ball? Who cares? Regardless of what label gets attached to the decision, it's left the state of California freer and more fair.
Enter Rick Esenberg who applied the "activist" label to a decision of the California State Supreme Court last week (he did scrupulously avoid an ad hominem attak). He alleges the four majority justices disregarded the meaning of the plain language of the California State Constitution (which I'd wager he's not familiar with) when they rendered their decision (which he admits he hasn't read). I can't argue with that. We'd both need to know what we were talking about. Fortunately, his actual argument is philosophical . . . and wrong.
His first stab recycles a popular conservative yarn about the procreative nature of marriage. He's not a bigot, you see, marriage is just about creating a framework for raising children.
This is nonsense. Disregarding, for the moment, the fact that marriage has, historically, mostly been about property rights, (I remember attending a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony where the contract illustrated this pretty clearly) there's the inconvenient fact that couples without the ability or intent to have children get married all the time. There's also the intention of many same-sex couples to adopt children. Conservatives would be quick to point out the potential "damage" to the child but, with mounting evidence, nobody's ever been able to demonstrate any systemic disadvantage to the children of gay and lesbian parents. What would be needed to make a compelling argument against same-sex marriage is a clear disqualification unique to same-sex couples. This argument fails to disqualify and the absence of a functional, matched pair of reproductive organs (with intent to procreate) is not unique.
Next, there's the strain on poor marriage. Already she's endured the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce, another rapid change could do the old gal in.
Personally, I don't think the cultural defense argument really holds any water. It seems singularly unamerican to place the perceived welfare of some cultural orthodoxy ahead of individual liberty. At any rate, two years after its own decision, Massachusetts' divorce rate doesn't appear to have shot through the roof.
Then, finally, we get to the meat of the "activist" accusation. Regardless of what the California constitution says, when its framers said "equal treament," or words to that effect, they couldn't possibly have meant to include gay people. Everybody hated gay people until "a few years ago."
When one attempts to characterize constructionism by claiming its adherents are simply attempting to divine the thoughts and subliminal intentions of a law's authors, (unless it's an environmental-protection or anti-discrimination law) one is usually in for a verbal thrashing. In this case, I fail to see what else Esenberg could be doing. When the founding fathers said "All men are created equal," it is likely that they did, in fact, mean just men, and only white ones. Since then, it has often been the "activist" courts who have had to be at the fore in saying that, in plain language, equal means equal, and there's no substantive distinction between white men and black men, men and women, or straight women and lesbians. Yes, it's taken a while to figure this out but do we really expect the courts to pretend the last two-hundred years never happened? We know more than our forefathers did and we'd be fools to ignore that knowledge.
But wasn't the court overturning the "will of the people?" Yes, and so what? If this were actually a direct democracy, we wouldn't need a constitution in the first place. If it was allowed a vote, the body politic may indeed come to a different opinion about what should be done with my hair or my lawn but they don't get a vote. It's my hair, its my lawn and its my marriage. The idea that civil liberties should be put to a vote is ridiculous. Regulation of public behavior is something we do, for better or worse, quite regularly. Regulation of private conduct and access to public institutions is rarer and requires greater care than a year-long slug-fest/slogan-contest over a poorly worded ballot question. It requires actual evidence that curtailing freedom yields a public good overriding the violation of private liberty. A history, however long, of violating that liberty for no good reason does not constitute a justification.
So was the California court being "activist" when it decided to look at the world in front of its nose rather than gazing into Antonin Scalia's crystal ball? Who cares? Regardless of what label gets attached to the decision, it's left the state of California freer and more fair.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Hypothetical Kindness
The Chicago Tribune is calling it a backlash. After three unsolved murders, some in Madison have decided to pin the guilt collectively on the city's homeless community. Thus, after nearly a decade of failed social and economic policies have driven thousands of people formerly on the margins over the edge into homelessness, our overdue public dialogue about the homeless centers on how best to lynch them.
Fred Mohs' "Out of My Backyard" suggestion simply moves the problem to a different part of town. The Trib article points out that one possible reason for increased trouble in downtown student neighborhoods is recent efforts to move panhandlers off of State Street. The rants since the start of the latest "backlash" seem to fall into two camps (apart from David Blaska's macabre, victorian workhouse fantasy). First there's the "let's all throw away this namby-pamby, liberal compassion pretense and judge them!" response. John Roach, for instance, suggests we dedicate an official month to brainstorming ideas for combatting the homeless menace. This dovetails nicely into the "Throw them all in prison!" camp, which is really what these people are getting at. Fining people with no money doesn't work. Moving them around the city with petty restrictions doesn't work. We're talking about incarcerating a group a people we're afraid of. Imprisoning Madison's estimated 3400 homeless residents, at $30,000 per inmate, would cost right around $102 million a year. Are these people really willing to spend this much? If they are, I've got a better idea.
Let's return to reality for a moment. Let's come back to the world where (assuming it even was a homeless person) we're worked up about one guy in a community of thousands of people who've been completely neglected by society and whose only common offense is lacking a roof and four walls. How about we take just a fraction of that hundred-million-dollars a year (say a tenth) and invest it in transitional housing, humane mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, and even a few more level-headed beat cops like Officer Meredith York (featured in the Tribune article).
Will it mean an end to unsolved murders, aggressive panhandling and even homelessness? Of course not. There are too many issues here and too many individuals to fall under any blanket solution, especially with the poverty rate rising. What it will do is get more of these people off the streets and into programs focused on helping them, rather than prisons focused on punishing them.
Regardless of who's to "blame" for any one person's homelessness, there are people in this city in need of shelter. We can deal with them constructively or we can deal with them punitively. . . or we can try not to deal with them at all. No points for guessing which we'll choose.
Fred Mohs' "Out of My Backyard" suggestion simply moves the problem to a different part of town. The Trib article points out that one possible reason for increased trouble in downtown student neighborhoods is recent efforts to move panhandlers off of State Street. The rants since the start of the latest "backlash" seem to fall into two camps (apart from David Blaska's macabre, victorian workhouse fantasy). First there's the "let's all throw away this namby-pamby, liberal compassion pretense and judge them!" response. John Roach, for instance, suggests we dedicate an official month to brainstorming ideas for combatting the homeless menace. This dovetails nicely into the "Throw them all in prison!" camp, which is really what these people are getting at. Fining people with no money doesn't work. Moving them around the city with petty restrictions doesn't work. We're talking about incarcerating a group a people we're afraid of. Imprisoning Madison's estimated 3400 homeless residents, at $30,000 per inmate, would cost right around $102 million a year. Are these people really willing to spend this much? If they are, I've got a better idea.
Let's return to reality for a moment. Let's come back to the world where (assuming it even was a homeless person) we're worked up about one guy in a community of thousands of people who've been completely neglected by society and whose only common offense is lacking a roof and four walls. How about we take just a fraction of that hundred-million-dollars a year (say a tenth) and invest it in transitional housing, humane mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, and even a few more level-headed beat cops like Officer Meredith York (featured in the Tribune article).
Will it mean an end to unsolved murders, aggressive panhandling and even homelessness? Of course not. There are too many issues here and too many individuals to fall under any blanket solution, especially with the poverty rate rising. What it will do is get more of these people off the streets and into programs focused on helping them, rather than prisons focused on punishing them.
Regardless of who's to "blame" for any one person's homelessness, there are people in this city in need of shelter. We can deal with them constructively or we can deal with them punitively. . . or we can try not to deal with them at all. No points for guessing which we'll choose.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Now Fear This
A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a short op-ed piece responding to Governor Doyle's characterization of the results of Tuesday's Supreme Court election as a "a tragedy". To be fair to Doyle, he was actually characterizing the loss to the state of Louis Butler, paying Butler a compliment more than making a comment on the election process. I, on the other hand, would characterize the entire election as "a tragedy" without any reservation.
The Journal goes on to frame the election as a contest between a liberal judicial philosophy and a conservative one and, after listing Justice Butler's myriad assaults on corporate liability protections ends with this stern warning, "A seat on the bench is not a sinecure, and justices who abuse or contort the law must sometimes answer for their actions."
What a load of crap. The merit of the right's all-encompassing "activism" label notwithstanding (it's implied here and used explicitly earlier in the piece) to frame the discourse of this election as having anything but the slightest connection to corporate liability is horribly dishonest. To be sure, protection from civil liability was at the heart of the corporatist push to elect their hired man at any cost but this wasn't something the Gableman campaign or any of its surrogates were eager to share with the public. "Elect me and I'll slam the courthouse door in your face." isn't a rallying cry that really resonates with the rank and file. No, apart from using a liberal enough sprinkling of the "activist" label to make it clear that even he wasn't sure what he meant, Mike Gableman ran his campaign on pure fear.
In tough times, the right has made fear its weapon of choice. Fear of communists, fear of minorities, fear of homosexuals, fear of terrorists, they've all been used to justify and defend some of the worst decisions in this nation's history, everything from draconian civil-rights abuses to our current, disastrous foreign policy.
Gableman's choice was fear of criminals. He used it to blind the public to the true role of Supreme Court in Wisconsin's judicial system to say nothing of the role of public defenders. In Gableman's world, there was no presumption of innocence, no right to due process of law and no ethical obligation to ably represent the accused. He wanted you to think that Butler was just trying to let these people out SO THEY COULD KILL YOU!!!
So do I, as the Journal suggests of Doyle, think too little of the Wisconsin electorate? If I thought so, I wouldn't be writing this. These types of scare tactics have played far too large a role in our public discourse lately and they wouldn't work if people took the trouble to think about what's really going on. We live in a state that incarcerates twice as many people as Minnesota (at $30,000 a piece) with no real difference in crime rate to show for it. We live in a state that barred equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians without a shred of credible evidence that fears of some catastrophic societal degradation were remotely founded. We now live in a state where corporate interests from all corners of the globe can sully our airwaves and lie to our faces for months and be rewarded with a bought-and-paid-for partisan hack on the Supreme Court bench, twice!
A century ago Wisconsin cleaned up nonsense like this and I think we can do it again. All it takes is understanding where the true threats lie, not to fear them, but to face them.
The Journal goes on to frame the election as a contest between a liberal judicial philosophy and a conservative one and, after listing Justice Butler's myriad assaults on corporate liability protections ends with this stern warning, "A seat on the bench is not a sinecure, and justices who abuse or contort the law must sometimes answer for their actions."
What a load of crap. The merit of the right's all-encompassing "activism" label notwithstanding (it's implied here and used explicitly earlier in the piece) to frame the discourse of this election as having anything but the slightest connection to corporate liability is horribly dishonest. To be sure, protection from civil liability was at the heart of the corporatist push to elect their hired man at any cost but this wasn't something the Gableman campaign or any of its surrogates were eager to share with the public. "Elect me and I'll slam the courthouse door in your face." isn't a rallying cry that really resonates with the rank and file. No, apart from using a liberal enough sprinkling of the "activist" label to make it clear that even he wasn't sure what he meant, Mike Gableman ran his campaign on pure fear.
In tough times, the right has made fear its weapon of choice. Fear of communists, fear of minorities, fear of homosexuals, fear of terrorists, they've all been used to justify and defend some of the worst decisions in this nation's history, everything from draconian civil-rights abuses to our current, disastrous foreign policy.
Gableman's choice was fear of criminals. He used it to blind the public to the true role of Supreme Court in Wisconsin's judicial system to say nothing of the role of public defenders. In Gableman's world, there was no presumption of innocence, no right to due process of law and no ethical obligation to ably represent the accused. He wanted you to think that Butler was just trying to let these people out SO THEY COULD KILL YOU!!!
So do I, as the Journal suggests of Doyle, think too little of the Wisconsin electorate? If I thought so, I wouldn't be writing this. These types of scare tactics have played far too large a role in our public discourse lately and they wouldn't work if people took the trouble to think about what's really going on. We live in a state that incarcerates twice as many people as Minnesota (at $30,000 a piece) with no real difference in crime rate to show for it. We live in a state that barred equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians without a shred of credible evidence that fears of some catastrophic societal degradation were remotely founded. We now live in a state where corporate interests from all corners of the globe can sully our airwaves and lie to our faces for months and be rewarded with a bought-and-paid-for partisan hack on the Supreme Court bench, twice!
A century ago Wisconsin cleaned up nonsense like this and I think we can do it again. All it takes is understanding where the true threats lie, not to fear them, but to face them.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Live Radio
So I had perhaps my largest audience to-date today as I performed the Benedictus from the B-Minor Mass on WPR's "Sunday Afternoon Live from the Chazen." It was a good experience and, above all, I learned one thing. Hydration is tricky. . . The bladder can be as limiting as the larynx.
The Benedictus is no cakewalk and, especially for a younger tenor, it's not so easy to pull off those high notes in a tone that would be widely considered appropriate for Bach (my effort was marginally successful), especially when one is expected to sit silent for a half-hour before getting up to sing (singers begin to de-warm-up after about ten minutes). The solution, hydration! The more water I've got in me the happier my cords are. But therein lies the problem: I have to sit silent for a half-hour after loading myself up with as much water as I think I can hold. Nobody was looking forward to that intermission more than I.
The Benedictus is no cakewalk and, especially for a younger tenor, it's not so easy to pull off those high notes in a tone that would be widely considered appropriate for Bach (my effort was marginally successful), especially when one is expected to sit silent for a half-hour before getting up to sing (singers begin to de-warm-up after about ten minutes). The solution, hydration! The more water I've got in me the happier my cords are. But therein lies the problem: I have to sit silent for a half-hour after loading myself up with as much water as I think I can hold. Nobody was looking forward to that intermission more than I.
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