Picture of the day

Class divide

From an article in the Guardian UK: "Revealed: the hidden benefits of a private-school education."

...fee-paying pupils benefit from an emphasis on "soft skills" such as teamwork and communication, which are imparted through sport, music and drama. With more pupils now getting the academic grades needed for university, private pupils get ahead because of their more rounded CVs and confident presentation.

That's been my observation as well. Shows how stupid it is for public schools to cut sports, music, drama, and other arts in favor of class after class of reading and math focusing almost exclusively on test prep. Yet another area in which conservatives get it totally wrong.

Brooklyn summer

As regular readers know, I hate New York like any animal hates its cage. The noise, blah blah, the grime, blah blah, the godawful noise, blah blah, blah blah.

But it's not all bad. Last night I agreed to take John Bob to see the new Harry Potter movie. The weather was perfect. Warm, not too humid with a nice breeze. We walked through Prospect Park to get to the theater. We had an hour and a half to kill after buying the tickets so we walked across the street, back into the park to the bandshell, bought a glass of wine and caught the end of the (free) King Sunny Adé concert. By pure happenstance, we sat down on the lawn by some friends, so we sat around and had a nice chat after the concert.

The Potter movie wasn't as bad as I feared. I've read all the books because of the kids. I enjoy them. Not great literature, but page turners with a small amount of emotional impact here and there. I don't like any of the movies though. And I didn't like this one that much either, but it was significantly different than the rest. It was mostly about the awkwardness of teen sexuality and actually did a fairly good job of portraying it. There was some beautiful nature shots as well. All the wizarding mumbo jumbo seemed incidental.

Anyway, the movie got out about 11:30. We popped in a little restaurant for some sushi and I had a large Sapporo, then we hopped on the Subway for a couple stops to get back home. All in all, a nice urban experience.

Scoop

Like everyone else, we here at chuckling on-line magazine have been following the Sarah Palin phenomena. We've managed to infiltrate her organization in the midwest and have learned many disturbing new facts. Most disturbing of all, we can now report, is that her followers are organizing themselves, or perhaps being organized, into secret societies modeled after Christian organizations from the dark ages. They've even got a stupid vow, which initiates must recite when entering the order:

I swear that I am not now nor have ever been a liberal, that I do not accept the overthrow of the rightful American government by the pagan usurper, Barack Obama. That I do not accept gay marriage or the separation of church and state or the metric system. That I will not answer the census questions. That I will never again steal or drink or use illegal drugs or fornicate out of vice. And that I will give my life for my religion and Sarah Palin.

More tk. Lots more, I fear.

Domestic updates

Several times in the past few years we've sent our children to stay with relatives in France during summer vacation. Payback arrived last week in the form of three Parisian teenagers who will be living with us for the next six weeks. As if New York teenagers weren't shallow enough.

Just kidding. Though quite fashionable, they are good kids. The only problem so far is that one of them seems to have made all his fashion decisions based on gangster rap videos. The second day here he came out with his pants down below his butt showing off his boxer shorts while wearing a wife beater shirt, a thick gold chain around his neck and a NY Yankees cap tipped sideways. He had the look nailed, the only problem being it was a bit too precise. Of course we told him he had to pull up his pants while he's in our house. And we asked him to please not go around like that in our neighborhood. In Manhattan he can wear his pants around his ankles for all we care.

Are we old fogies? Maybe some, but for the most part I don't think so. My main concern is for his safety. People Brooklyn in generally don't want to see kids adverting themselves as thugs walking around their neighborhoods and it's not unusual for local toughs to do something about it. Brooklyn ain't Manhattan. Then there are the cops who are likely to hassle the gangster types. And I also fear that real ghetto kids might not take kindly to some French kid posing as a thug. Cause tough guy he ain't. After putting away his gangbanger costumes he busted out with a series of athletic wear ensembles. Better a pimp than a punk, I guess. Those French and their fashions. Just gotta laugh.

The girl, who is 15, bears a strong family resemblance to my wife. I've found that a bit uncomfortable, but I'm coping. I'm not one of those disgusting old guys that ogles young women. My daughter's friends, for example, are mostly attractive young girls and I don't need any self control not to ogle them. One time I walked in when they weren't expecting me and caught them dancing topless. I got a laugh off their embarrassment, but that was it. But none of them look remotely like my wife, unlike her little French niece. It's taking some effort not to look at her. Lola was pretty cute way back when.

Anyway, I was afraid having three teen visitors in our tiny New York apartment would be difficult, but it's gone all right so far. John Bob's had a lot of sleepovers and now he's away at camp for 10 days. Jane Bob is spending a month in France, so it's not that much more crowded than normal. This time she's not staying with relatives. She got in one of those education abroad programs where they study something and live with a family. Of course she's not writing much and hasn't called, but the few notes we've gotten indicate she's having the time of her life. A bunch of 17 year-olds running free in Paris? Yea, that would be fun. Now she's with the family in Arles and seems to be having a fantastic time there as well. About the time Jane Bob gets back I'm going to Quebec for a couple weeks, so I'll be free. But it's too bad for her French cousins that she's away. They're kind of lost and are spending most of their time playing the Wii.

Periodically, I've told you about the ever-ongoing changes to the businesses in my neighborhood. It's been a little slow lately. A dry cleaner took over a clothing store and dentist office that closed. His old shop is now for rent. A Russian bakery went out of business. I walked by there late the other night and five Chinese guys were playing poker. I don't know if they were workers remodeling or if it's now going to be an illegal poker parlor. I wouldn't be a bit surprised either way.

The big news here is that a local Mexican restaurant went rogue and turned into an illegal nightclub. Hundreds of people are in and out of there till four in the morning. There's dancing, bright lights and thumpa thumpa all night long. There's been at least one knife fight, a few women have been slapped around on the street, and the noise is pretty much constant from 2 am to 4:30. The worst of it is that taxis continuously pull up and honk. We can drown out most of it, but the honks pierce any white noise we throw up against them.

You might think that it would be easy to close down an illegal nightclub but that's not proving to be the case. The neighbors are up in arms. The neighborhood association has had numerous meetings and repeatedly contacted the police and elected officials. The authorities have been responsive. They learned that the restaurant's liquor license only goes till 10 pm and claim to be working to get that rescinded. The police say they have given the owner numerous summons's and at one point they jailed him for four days. But the day he got out it was open again and has been open ever since.

I'm not without sympathy. Guy's trying to make a buck in tough economic times. Apparently there's a great need for nightclubs among the Mexican population. Those people work hard doing the shittiest jobs around. Why shouldn't they be able to party? The answer is that if the guy wants to run a nightclub, he should open one in a non-residential neighborhood where it's legal.

Nobody round here quite understands why it's so difficult to shut the place down. How can someone just defy the authorities like that? If I sat up a table and start selling beer on the sidewalk it wouldn't be an hour before the police closed me down. And since he doesn't have a liquor license for a nightclub now, I'm skeptical that taking away his daytime license is going to have any effect. Why won't he just continue telling the cops and politicians and the neighbors to fuck off? Apparently he's making a lot more money than being illegal is costing him. But I don't really care about his reasoning. What's with the cops? Are they really such big helpless pussies when confronted with a Mexican who doesn't want to obey the law?

Picture of the day

How little I knew

The feature article* in this month's Harper's argues that Barack Obama is the next Herbert Hoover. Of course I've heard that he's the next Bin Laden, the next Hitler, the next Stalin and the anti-Christ if not Satan himself, so it's hardly surprising someone would throw Herbert Hoover into the mix. Hoover was, as we all know, the cold hearted architect of the Great Depression, a very bad person with no redeeming qualities and a typical big business Republican. Like you, I am sick of all that shit and passed over reading the article.

But this was Harper's and after reading everything else, I came back to it. And little did I know. Herbert Hoover was not at all like I thought he was. He's actually a lot like Obama, except far more interesting.

Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, “As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.”

Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle’s office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $85 million in today’s dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. “The ideal of service,” he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a “great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world.”

He had long lived up to his ideals. Caught in the siege of the Western delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, only Hoover and his fearless wife, Lou, cared enough to sneak food and water to the Chinese Christians besieged elsewhere in the city. He first came to national attention after the start of World War I, when he led the effort to feed the 7 million people of occupied Belgium and France. He worked for free, donated part of his own fortune to the cause, and risked his life repeatedly crossing the U-boat–infested waters of the North Atlantic. His postwar relief efforts rescued millions more throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union; it’s unlikely that any other individual in human history saved so many people from death by starvation and want. Questioned about feeding populations under Bolshevik control, he banged a table and insisted, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” In 1920, many people in both major parties wanted to run him for president, but he opted for the Republican cabinet. As secretary of commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he was a dynamic figure, tirelessly promoting new technologies, work-safety rules, and voluntary industry standards; he supervised relief to Mississippi and Louisiana during the terrible 1927 floods and advocated cooperation between labor and management.

“We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved,” the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote of Hoover’s inauguration in March 1929, in words that might easily have been used in January 2009. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.”

The article goes on to describe the similarities between Obama and Hoover's governing philosophies. It repeatedly makes the point that both of them understood what was happening better than everyone around them. It details how Obama is taking the same approach as Hoover did across a wide range of issues. It details how and why Hoover failed and argues that Obama is making the exact same mistakes. It's a depressing read. Makes way too much sense. Uncomfortable. I fear all too prescient. Worth reading, nevertheless. At least it was for me. Turned out I knew next to nothing about Herbert Hoover.

* Subscription required. Go ahead, subscribe. Harper's is easily the best magazine still publishing.

SOL birthday

And it's one, two, three...

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Does anyone even ask? Does anyone even give a damn?

The U.S. has reportedly launched an invasion of Afghanistan's Helmand Province. Helmand Province is roughly the size of West Virginia and home to 740,000 people, almost all of whom hate us. Why are we doing that?

The first major operation launched with the additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama is devised to clear Taliban havens across a strategic southern province — and then, in a marked departure from past practice, to leave clusters of Marines in small bases close to the villagers they were sent to guard and aid, according to senior military officers.

Why? Why do we want a presence in every little village in a dusty province half a world away? Isn't there some better way we could spend our money and energy?

“Essentially what they are trying to do is create and sustain a productive presence in Helmand Province, including both combat power and civil-engagement capabilities,” a senior military officer said.

Again, why? Even if 4000 troops can conquer and hold this province, why is it worth such a massive expenditure in lives and fortune?

The silence is deafening. Let's try Google. It has an answer for everything.


OMG. The all-knowing internet doesn't even know why we are fighting in Afghanistan. It's a mystery of our times.

Yea, I know, it supposedly has something to do with 9/11, but whatever the poor villagers of Helmand Province might have had to do with hijacking those airplanes has been lost to the mists of time. At this late date, we seem to be engaging in military operations just for the sake of engaging in military operations. Once a military operation starts, it has to continue until total victory has been achieved. Otherwise we've lost. What have we lost? That's not exactly clear.

Oh well, in these troubled times maybe it's best to have the military occupied in some hellhole half a world away. By all reports, the military is a very conservative institution and right wing Christianist extremists have been successfully infiltrating it. Maybe it's best they expend their energy trying to conquer and convert Afghanistan to right wing Christianity. With too much time on their hands they might try to conquer and convert us.