Did Israel decide Iran had enough rope?

So Israel has decided to treat the latest act of war by Hezbollah as, by gum, an act in a war, and is fighting a war in return. Israel's ambassador to Washington is also talking very tough about Iran's part in Hezbollah's activities.

I wonder if this is as much about how to solve the problem of Iran-about-to-have-nukes as about Hezbollah. Perhaps Israel has been biding its time, waiting for Iran's interference in Lebanon to become blatant enough that (a) there'd be sufficient provocation to go into Lebanon and (b) attacking Iran would be a logical next step. If Iran's nuclear program wasn't sufficient casus belli, now Israel has a better one.

Meme offered -- jobs you'd be lousy at

As I was wondering what the heck I could post, since I haven't been posting often enough for anyone to keep checking my blog, I recalled occasional past thoughts of being a columnist. Clearly I don't have something to say often enough to be good at that job. Hence the meme: what jobs would you be lousy at, suck at, be promptly fired from?

--Cook. I barely and rarely cook, even after producing a daughter who claims to want to be a chef. When I do cook, it's either assisting her, or using the crockpot. I'd say I generally assemble meals rather than cook them.

--Taxi driver. I have overcome a fear of driving that haunted me through and beyond my 20's, but I still have no sense of direction to speak of. I could get people places, but I'd spend too long studying maps.

--Truck driver. I do not like driving anything big. My CR-V is at my limit.

--Teacher of masses of young children. I have insufficient patience, am not very playful (except verbally, to some extent), and have no idea how to control more than three kids at a time. (I have two.)

--Waitress. In college, when people typically brought coffee back to a tableful of people in the dining room, I could barely manage two cups. I do not have much upper body strength and couldn't balance anything tricky with one arm. I have a fairly bad memory, and I constantly forget what I left or entered a room for. The diners would lynch me before my first shift ended.

--Anything that requires a lot of physical strength/lifting ability.

--Con artist. I'm a lousy liar and dislike trying to lie.

Anyone else want to play?...

There shouldn't be a way to get there from here

OK, here is how the National Academy of Sciences summarizes its recent report on global temperature over the centuries:

"There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" to say with confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new National Research Council report. There is less confidence in reconstructions of surface temperatures from 1600 back to A.D. 900, and very little confidence in findings on average temperatures before then."

And here's how the Associated Press summarizes the same report:

"It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since the Earth has run such a fever.
The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress . . . ."

Scuse me?? !

Not only in biology

I gather there has been some recent support for the hypothesis that too clean an environment is bad for children's development. If kids don't have bacteria and dirt to exercise their growing immune systems, those systems don't, in effect, learn what they're supposed to be doing, and instead go apeshit about the wrong stimuli. Result, the ongoing increase in allergies and asthma.

Is it too cute to draw a parallel between this problem and the effect of our overall societal obsession with safety? If people don't grow up in an environment with a certain baseline level of risk, if they don't learn how to handle some risk as a matter of course, what may be the permanent distortions in their social and political development, and what sort of society will they produce?...

the Dixie Chicks are dissing me

I was not particularly hot and bothered about the infamous Dixie Chicks remark (something like "we're embarrassed the President is from Texas") -- although I didn't think much of their (well, her -- the lead singer's, I guess) judgment in making this crack to an audience outside the U.S. I don't know whether it was more self-expression or pandering to an anti-Bush audience. Certainly, some of the reported reaction was way out of line. (Boycott, sure, if you feel like that. Death threats, go lock yourself up.) But I think I am by now fed up with the angry smugness and offhand condescension that has been showing up in their interviews. They seem to be making a point of telling country music listeners that the Chicks are too smart and cool and progressive to want their patronage.

So why is their new album -- consistently reviewed as not really country in sound -- going to debut as #1 on some country music chart(s)?? Do that many listeners miss their music that much??

Publicity is not always the obvious answer

So. We have personal data on millions of veterans in a laptop computer. It's stolen in a routine burglary. The chance that either the thief or the fence knows they have a gold mine of data: pretty small. Eventually, some user may stumble on this data. Chance that this user, this purchaser of a hot laptop, will have the know-how and mindset for massive identity theft, or for marketing the personal data: hard to determine.

If I had to decide whether to alert millions of veterans, giving them a chance to protect themselves but greatly increasing the chance that some bad guy would know what s/he was sitting on -- it wouldn't be an easy call, and I probably wouldn't make it overnight.

So maybe we should cut the VA some slack on this one.

Open Bed, Insert Child

My daughter liked that description of how quickly I would put her to bed if I allowed her to stay up and watch a late-evening television show on a school night. (Her usual bedtime ritual is a good deal more prolonged.)

About that wolf

I consider it simplistic and inaccurate to label Bush's actions re Iraqi WMD as "crying wolf". However, even accepting that formulation for the sake of argument, and considering the threat posed by Iran in that light, there is a fairly important aspect of the original fable that people should keep in mind:

The last time, when the villagers didn't come running, a real wolf showed up.

And the flock Bush is guarding is us.

Nice Jewish dog

It turns out our dog is well situated in our more-or-less-Jewish household. We had our seder the other night, and the dog loves both gefilte fish and matzoh ball soup.

slightly sheepish about Daylight Savings Time

I was adamantly and loudly opposed to Indiana's going on Daylight Savings Time -- especially if we were to remain in the Eastern time zone, where we don't really belong. I made a point of asking whether perhaps Gov. Mitch Daniels' mother should have said more often, "I don't care what all your friends are doing. If your friends were jumping off a cliff . . . ."

So I feel compelled to report that I am enjoying having light so late in the evening. Taking the puppy outside at 8 p.m. and not needing a flashlight is pretty neat.

I am still indignant on behalf of the schoolkids walking to, and standing at, school bus stops in darkness or near-dark. But I must acknowledge that I'm getting something good out of the change.

Bambi and Hitlerjunge Quex

I was pondering the anti-human undercurrent in many environmentalists' world view, and wondering where it comes from. What leads people to view their own group as the enemy? One answer is: propaganda. Bambi is perhaps the clearest, but far from the only story anthropomorphizing animals and omitting any humanity from the human portrait.

I happen to know from family history that this sort of storytelling can have the effect I speak of. My father grew up a Jew in Nazi Germany (in Berlin). At age 12 or 13, he, like all Berlin's schoolchildren his age, were taken to see the Nazi propaganda movie Hitlerjunge Quex. This was the story of a young German boy with Communist parents, martyred because of his loyalty to Hitler and National Socialism. My father found himself profoundly moved by the film, identifying with the boy, and -- briefly -- hating those villianous Jews....

My husband, the Hoosier Gadfly, notes that religions preaching self-abnegation have had an appeal for centuries, with Medieval Christianity an important example.

Are Harvard and Stanford as bad as Yale?

I've read a few news stories and blog posts about Yale's welcome of the former Taliban spokesman (the context definitely does NOT suggest the word "spokesperson"), Rahmatullah Hashemi, as a student. The common theme of the (few) responses from both students and the administration is moral relativism. As Penraker points out, the Yale community is more than ready to be morally intolerant of various domestic figures and positions, but where a foreigner is concerned, perish the thought.

I was a Stanford undergrad and went to Harvard Law School. (I don't usually admit the latter straight out -- for some reason I usually adopt the customary circumlocution that I went to law school "back East" -- but my point precludes adhering to that silliness here.) I wonder whether either Stanford or Harvard has a less appalling political/moral environment than that to which Yale has descended.

Fed up with yet another aspect of Islam

OK, this is f---ing ridiculous. Afghanistan, post-"liberation", is getting ready to try and quite possibly execute someone for the capital crime of converting from Islam to Christianity. What kind of religion depends on death threats to keep its adherents? What the hell is this kind of judicial set-up doing in a country with any connection to the modern world? Where are the protests from "moderate" Muslim leaders worldwide? (Maybe I just haven't heard about them yet. Any bets?) And are we, the U.S., going to apply any diplomatic muscle to get this guy sprung?

robberies and filibusters

I've noticed that in many robberies of banks, stores, etc., there's no weapon displayed -- and the news reports don't indicate that any was even mentioned. It appears to be common these days to hand someone a note saying "This is a robbery", and immediately get cash handed over. I understand that the rob-ees don't want to ask "Well, are you armed?" and get a fatal, nonverbal reply. I believe that most employers tell their employees to be very cooperative with robbers to reduce the chance of violence. Reasonable as those attitudes may be, they still feel somehow odd to me. I'm reminded of filibusters. Back when, a filibuster was work. You had to actually stand up and pontificate for hours on end. Now, a senator essentially hands the Senate a note saying "This is a filibuster", and the Senate rolls over and gives up the intended legislation. In both circumstances, neither the victim's powers of resistance nor the determination of the perpetrator are tested. Am I being an old crank to sense a whiff of decadence?

Any good enough translation software yet?

I haven't kept up on translation software -- but if there are any programs that're more than halfway decent, for translating Arabic to English (or to any other widely read language), let's give 'em a crack at the newly available trove of Saddam documents! (They are in Arabic, aren't they?)

Guantanamo and marijuana policy

I wish I could believe that anytime soon, the U.S. government would acknowledge that a number of the prisoners at Guantanamo don't need to be held, and release them. I strongly suspect that is so -- not necessarily of a majority of those held, but of some not-trivial percentage. However, any such acknowledgement would be an implicit admission of having overreacted, cast too wide a net, skipped a crucial weeding-out step (to mix my agricultural metaphors). Admitting that a government policy was a goof doesn't come naturally to governments. Continuing a misguided and counterproductive policy to avoid such an admission comes far more easily. Hence we still have not only a drug war, but an active war against possession, growth and sale of marijuana. When the DEA admits that marijuana should be taxed and sold in liquor stores and served in tea shops, I'll hope for a thorough and accurate review of detentions at Guantanamo.

pet euthanasia and capital punishment

Is there any doubt that the injections used to put sick dogs and cats to "sleep" are essentially painless? If so, a lot of pet owners would want to know it. If not, would that be a simpler approach than the multi-stage "lethal injection" for condemned humans, now the subject of several court cases?

Related question: why do states insist that lethal injections be administered by the one group -- medical professionals -- whose code of ethics prohibits doing harm? I suppose it'd be impractical to have "executioner" as a non-medical technical career -- there wouldn't be enough work to keep anyone fully employed. One hopes.

Meme: pet names for pets

I'm sure we're not the only family that gives pet names to pets. Our dog is "Sweet doggy-dog" to one, "Puppalicious creature" to another.... Anyone care to confess to any such?

Jihadists and Greens -- room for temporary alliance?

My husband, the Hoosier Gadfly, now and then comments that environmental extremists are the greater enemy, but that it appears we'll have to deal with Islamic jihadists first. It occurred to me this morning that there is some possibility we'll at some point be dealing with them simultaneously. If bin Laden and Saddam Hussein could contemplate some mutual assistance, despite fundamental differences in their world views, then mightn't these two groups, both of whom are deeply suspicious of scientific and technological progress (though willing to use same for their own purposes), both of whom are nostalgic for eras several centuries past, find ways to help each other out in the short term?

I am more worried than I used to be about the worldwide vigor of an Islam that wishes not to tolerate various democratic freedoms. The chance that environmental extremists will try to tap that energy or benefit from it in some way may not be huge, but it exists.

Climb in and stay a while

This morning my husband and I and younger daughter had the day off, and my older daughter did not. And it was very cold out. So in addition to getting up and making sure she made it out the door to the school bus, I drove her there and waited until the bus came. (This is harder to do when I have to get ready to take daughter #2 to school.) Then I came home and got back into bed, and spent some time contemplating beds, sleep, sleeping positions, expensive mattresses we don't have that may be very comfortable, etc. One thing that occurred to me is that most of the pleasure of getting into bed (leaving out any sexual possibilities) comes from knowing you'll be allowed to stay there for a while. It's an anticipatory pleasure. Having a young child or (as in our case) puppy in the household makes the prospect of staying in bed somewhat iffy.