The New City Square

The revitalization of Fountain Square, in downtown Cincinnati, is almost completed, and the grand re-opening takes place on October 14th. Bootsy Collins is the master of ceremonies and there will be performances by the Symphony, the Ballet, and many more. Check out the website for details. City planners still face substantial challenges in breathing fresh life into this important centerpiece of city life (such as leasing out the remaining retail space) - but overall this is a promising new beginning in a town that needs every break it can get.

A gigantic new television screen is a key element of the new Fountain Square. While walking though downtown yesterday I noticed it had been installed - a massive monolithic structure suspended above the public area. It's impressive. There's talk about movies on the square - and a contest is being held to determine a name for the massive screen.

My first reaction was positive, but after thinking about it for a while my traditionalist side took over. Wouldn't it be nice to have places in our civic life without any type of screen? Is it now a radical idea to consider the possibility of public places and town square where our main focus is other live, nearby human beings? These might be our family and neighbors - or some kind of live performance from a cultural group or musicians. The folks putting together the new Fountain Square are working very hard, and their marketing uses the words "Reconnect". It's a worthwhile idea - but it might mean tearing our eyes away from omnipresent screens in our lives and spending some time talking with our neighbors.

Tags: Cincinnati, Fountain Square, Third Spaces

Freedom and Big Apple Pie

People who warned us that big government has gotten too involved in regulating our personal business have sometimes appeared alarmist. But now, sadly, they look visionary: There's a proposal in New York City to completely ban tans fats from being served in restaurants. No more French fries, donuts, or pies. The smoking ban was a qualified success, why stop there?

This is a great reminder that some people will never be happy unless they can meddle in the affairs of others. They will endlessly complain about the way "regressive" religions tend to moralize about right and wrong - but they seek to do something more insidious. Instead of establishing principles, virtue, and values to guide our free decisions - they simply want direct control over other people's behavior. It's not enough to convince people that some food is healthier than others, some cars are better to drive, or certain methods of education are superior. They will actually legislate choice away from the individual - who is implicitly seen as a stupid, pathetic creature.

The essence of freedom is the opportunity to make purely personal decisions that may not always be in one's best interest. We can't keep giving power to the state. Smoking and French fries are bad for our health - of course this is true. But we have every right to shorten our lives, if we choose, by indulging in these creaturely pleasures.

More importantly, here is the real slippery slope that people bitch about: Take away personal freedom on "obvious" issues like public health (smoking, nutrition) - and the scope keeps getting broadened. The busybodies and bureaucrats never will cease to justify their own existence with endless incrementalism, and your freedom will erode slowly, by degrees.

Presidents and Risk Management

Clinton's hotheaded implosion during a Fox interview over the inadequacy of his administration to confront Bin Laden - it's one of those gifts that keeps giving to bloggers and pundits on the right.

Frankly, I part ways with my conservative friends when it comes to wholeheartedly laying blame on the Clinton administration for the events leading to 9/11. Aside from Sandy Berger - who seems like the one of the most loathsome, gutless creatures to assume an executive role in any presidency - I think Bill Clinton's attitude towards these types of external threats was, for better or worse, exactly what we wanted from our president in those years.

Of course Clinton was driven by poll numbers and approval ratings. And now we know the danger of that way of thinking, and we are living with an almost preposterously opposite situation with George W. Bush. Dennis Miller, on the radio recently, explained it succinctly: He said, and I paraphrase, Bush's approval rating could drop to zero and he'd still be going after people who he thinks are the bad guys in the war on terror. We're going to have to tap him on the shoulder and push him out of the way when the next president is ready to go, because he'll be at the podium giving the same speech - for better or worse, whether we like it or not.

Americans are lousy at understanding risk. On one hand we've got a lot of fearlessness and bravery built into our culture - we do asscrazy things like settling a continent, displacing indigenous people, inventing jazz music, and sending people to the moon. But on the other hand we want government investigations, acrimonious lawsuits and warning stickers for the most obvious dangers - from snowblowers to hurricanes to shark attacks, we're ready to hide under the carpet whenever we watch the second segment of news - the human interest stories about all of the horrible, gruesome, and tremendously interesting things that usually don't happen to our families.

It should be no surprise that our political leadership is entirely schizophrenic when it comes to offering solutions. Our choices have been reduced, in the war on terror, to either ignore, deny, and appease - or kick anybody's ass who looks at us sideways.

Back to the topic of Clinton, though: This guy is digging a hole. He has guaranteed that all of the bureaucrats, people who would have otherwise stayed quiet - will now be coming out of the woodwork to verify that he'd been briefed, but he was preoccupied, and never picked up the call.

Warped October Politics

Driving through my neighborhood yesterday I was pleased to see teenagers - including the sons and daughters of various families we know - lined up on the corners waving political signs in support of various candidates. Call me a misty-eyed patriot, but I like civics in action and the kids involved, especially during political season.

Unfortunately, everything else about this month, in terms of current events, is so warped and slanted that it's difficult to obtain any objective news.

Is Bill Frist's attempt to pass a bill on immigration anything less than an attempt to set up Democrats for the political advertisements that have almost certainly been filmed already? Are news items like the MSNBC headline, "Sign of the Times", about the cooling real estate market, anything less than a subtle play at reinforcing the increasingly difficult-to-believe narrative that the economy is lousy? Oil prices just dropped to 15-year lows - I suppose that headline will bubble to the top of Fox News, right next to Clinton's Angry Face.

Meanwhile the New York Times, without question, has a steady arsenal of 'news analysis' front-pagers that are ready to be deployed in the next five weeks - with read meat indictments on Rumsfeld, tribunals, Gonzalez, religious conservatives - the whole hot button array of Left GOTV topics. Meanwhile Karl Rove is probably in a black tower somewhere, surrounded by the carcasses of small, cute animals, waiting to see how events play out - but ready, if necessary, to unleash the October Surprise. Another attack thwarted? Or maybe they finally croaked OBL?

I wouldn’t want to do anything to diminish the enthusiasm of those aforementioned fresh-faced, sign-waving youngsters – but I hope they have an adult nearby to help them read the news between now and election day. Very few big items will be reported without some kind of bias, and it’s more important than ever in this hyper-politicized environment to read between the lines.

Tags: 2008, Election, October Surprise, Bill Frist

Exquisite Cartoon Corps

Editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman - winner of virtually every honor and award in his field - jumped headlong into the world of blogging several months ago. I've always enjoyed his evergreen wit, and the new online format affords the opportunity to peek behind the scenes at the notes in his sketchbook.

It's worth a regular visit, or a newsfeed subscription.

In one of his latest posts he throws out the idea of making available a way for the audience to participate in a more visual discussion of the events of the day. Instead of adding comments readers would upload sketches, cartoons, and drawings of various kinds in a pictorial the back-and-forth.

The concept of visual dialogue brings to mind the surrealists, who invented a game (the "Exquisite Corpse") in the 1920s by which various artists could contribute in a group collage. Adding something similar to information-age discourse could add some sorely-needed variety to the proceedings - which too often consists of braying, too-verbal loudmouths like myself.

Numbers and Agenda

On September 19th, 2,000 people participated in a protest outside of the UN on the eve of President Bush's speech - protesting the Iraq war, of course. This was covered by several major news outfits.

On September 20th, 35,000 people participated in a protest outside of the UN on the eve of Iranian President Eugene Ahmadinejad’'s speech - protesting in support of Security Council Resolution 1701 and the right of Israel to protect itself against people who openly seek it's destruction. Did this attract any news coverage from those same outlets?

Go ahead, guess the answer.

Via Meryl Yourish (who links the sources), by way of Instapundit.

Lifestyle Espionage

Four staffers from Martha Stewart's show tried to sneak into a taping of junior domestic diva Rachael Ray's show last week, but a security guard who works for both shows recognized them and had them ejected.

http://www.tmz.com/2006/09/18/rachael-to-martha-out-of-my-kitchen-bee-yotch/

Shut Up, Chavez

Bush is the devil?

You've come to New York City, a glittering monument to capitalist democracy, to claim in front of the international funny-hat squad that Bush is a devil who seeks "domination, exploitation and pillage"? Are we talking about the same former Texas governor who slacked though Yale, had a problem with nose candy, and can't get through a speech without biffing it up so much that even his most faithful supporters wince and grip the arm of the sofa?

You're saying this particular dude is the devil?

Love him or hate him, he’s our president. Most Americans to the political right of Berkeley California feel some sense of obliging loyalty to the institutions he was elected (at least once, possibly twice) to represent on our behalf. And if you stood before the United Nations General Assembly and flung the same bitter anti-American horseshit at Bill Clinton, for example, my reaction would be the same. He may have been a cloying, intelligence-bumbling conniver who couldn't keep his pants cinched, but he was our guy too, as American as cheeseburgers, Missy Elliott, and the GAP. And in the face of any diatribe like yours I'd feel the same sense of patriotism towards any elected U.S. official, imprisoned or at large, from James Traficant to Dick Armey and back again.

Oh, and the smell of sulfur you mentioned? Maybe it's the burnt remains of all of the failed leftist regimes from the past eighty years – many of which are still limping along with a total GDP less than Lincoln, Nebraska – countries which regularly imprison and execute characters like your linguist hero from Lexington – and which have found their final and most fruitful example in your beloved Republic of Cuba – a nation so crumbling, peaceful, and decrepit that families still regularly try to swim across shark-infested waters to America wearing only 1950s-era Donald Duck water wings.

Back to Caracas with you, Hugo. You might have enough sympathy in Hollywood to win a nod for an Oscar for that little performance, but otherwise your speech will be forgotten after the next news cycle. And while I’m lukewarm, at times, to the more aggressive aspects of our free market cultural exports, the best revenge on your country may come after the inevitable revolution that will take place - when I hope every street corner in Venezuela is ablaze with Taco Bells and Jiffy Lubes, and the kids are wearing styles that originated in South Central and Brooklyn – and you ride past them in your old age, still un-imprisoned, in your Lincoln Town Car, with a driver secretly on the payroll of the CIA.

Update: Glad to see hardcore Democrat Charles Rangel agrees with me. Some things are, as they say, all in the family.

Tags: Hugo Chavez, United Nations, Missy Elliott

Benedict and the Sword

If person A suggests that religion B has a history of irrational violence in the service of faith, it seems to me that one of the least effective ways to make a counter-argument is to immediately call for the execution of person A. Examples are everywhere, but the latest one is radical cleric Anjem Choudary, who, while speaking outside of Westminster Abbey - bonus points for noting the irony - said the following:

"Whoever insults the message of Mohammed is going to be subject to capital punishment."

He added: "I am here have a peaceful demonstration. But there may be people in Italy or other parts of the world who would carry that out. I think that warning needs to be understood by all people who want to insult Islam and want to insult the prophet of Islam."

Some readers, here, feel the urge to equivocate; to balance the moral scales with some counter-example why the Pope, according to some contortion of reason, is really on par with radical clerics like Choudary. What about ... uh ... the Inquisition? Or how about all of the people who have been killed throughout history by the church's policy of [Fill in the Blank].

Only last year - not hundreds of years ago - a man in Afghanistan converted to Christianity from the Muslim faith. And even moderate imams in that country announced that death was the appropriate punishment. And only this year millions of left-talking free thinkers (such as the New York Times) favored the abandonment of free speech in favor of sensitivity in the case of the Dutch cartoons. And lets not forget the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh - nor the recent news of what is happening to his son.

That's recent history. And I could fill several pages with other examples and pictures of the violent protest. But you can get that elsewhere.

As a Catholic familiar with the articles of faith - and the litany of complaints by detractors - I think I can say that my tradition is reformed, compassionate, inclusive, and entirely in harmony with free and pluralistic societies. But unfortunately, by even treading near the topic of radical Islam the Pope may have kicked the whole mess downfield, closer to a full-blown clash of civilizations. His broader pastoral message will be deliberately ignored. And the extremists have all they need to inflame their blood-hungry constituents.

Welcome Back Joe

After a haitus of several weeks Joe Hansbauer is blogging again.

It's a welcome return. The Nati is of the most upstanding, positive blogs in the local 'sphere. There is no shortage of people with political axes to grind, but with his focus on encouraging news and his work with volunteer organizations - I think you build true civic strength in a city like this with people like Joe. I talked to him a few months back about Lily Pad free wireless project, and I've been impressed with how the hotspots have blossomed all over town.

I can't say anything nice about his latest haircut, though.

The War On Lunch

One of the most depressing shows on television is TLC's Honey We're Killing the Kids. The premise is simple enough. Each week an overweight, unhealthy family is asked to change their habits for the benefit of the children. Fresh fruit replaces Frito Lay, and salsa dancing takes the place of cigarettes for the Mom and Dad, whose dumpling-like appearance forebodes the destiny of the kids.

And there's the crux of it: The gimmick of the show involves a sequence that uses computer augmentation to morph the kid's current appearance from doe-eyed youngsters into balding, sunken middle-aged tubs of goo. The idea is to shock the parents into cleaning up the family act.

The depressing part is that it so rarely works. After a few days of salads and steamed fish the kids inevitably revolt. Chocolate bars and cheese puffs are hidden around the house - and any attempt to get them back on the wagon is met with the braying, angry tantrums that is the inevitable side-product of spineless, permissive parenting. So Mom feels stressed, and she's back behind the house with her Benson and Hedges. Week after week, after an early an abortive attempt at health, nature very soundly beats nurture's ass.

Now news out of the UK that some parents are in open revolt against the forces of health. At a school that has been the subject of Jamie Oliver's attempts to upscale the cafeteria menu, Moms are lining up outside of the fence with the high-fat, high-sugar lunches their children really want:

Mrs Critchlow said: "The reason we have done this is because our kids are being served up disgusting, overpriced rubbish by the school and are not allowed out at lunchtimes to buy something they can enjoy. Food is cheaper and better at the local takeaways. We don't make a penny on it. We just want to make sure the kids are properly fed. They don't enjoy the school food and the end result is that they are starving."

Schools have been told to serve healthier menus including at least two servings of fruit and vegetables per day, and no more than two portions of deep-fried food each week.

On one level, this is refreshing. God bless the stubborn British tendency to resist any busybody outsiders. There is probably some class angle that can't quite reckon to Americans, but it's really no different from the TLC families eventually sweeping the steamed veggies into the trash in favor of Wendy's. There's also the matter of simple pride - don't tell a child's mother that you know better when it comes to her children.

It's a tricky line when it comes to government rules. Obviously serving children fast food each day is incredibly short-sighted and willfully ignorant of the basic science of nutrition. From a public health perspective these kids are headed for a lifetime of medical expense - with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc. - a large portion of which will be shared with the rest of us via taxation or private health care expenses. But how far are we willing to get in people's business, and tell them we know better?

Thundering Moralism and Shame

After taking the girls off at school this morning I had to return home, pick a few things up, and go back to school. By then classes had started. On my way in the building I witnessed a mother coaxing her son up the steps. I heard her telling him “It’s okay, honey, you’re just late.” And a glance at the boy’s face revealed a very forlorn expression as he plodded reluctantly upwards.

Nothing unusual – we’ve all had these moments.

But I caught another snippet of her conversation as I went through the door. “It happens to everyone, sweetie, all of the time. You’re just late. There’s absolutely no shame in being late.”

And this is where the world pivots ever-so-slightly on an axis of right and wrong, and the way in which we raise our children matters. The boy, maybe a second grader, is in the process of getting socialized – learning normative behavior from his peers. Obviously a reluctant shuffling up the school steps was a sign that he knows that walking into class ten minutes after the bell is not the expected behavior. The mother could have responded by saying this doesn’t happen very often, or by telling her son that the teacher won’t be angry. But instead she went much further by suggesting there is “absolutely no shame”. Johnny is completely off the hook.

Shame is a loaded word, of course. People think of thundering moralistic (and hypocritical) preachers telling their congregation that they are filthy, despicable creatures for engaging in various behaviors. It’s one thing to condemn a child – this would never be appropriate - but it’s something else to completely absolve responsibility. I’m not in favor of shame – but I do endorse a small note of sheepishness mixed with a need to improve.

I’m only talking in generalities here; I don’t know this family, and there may be reasons why the mother’s approach was justified. He might be so fearful of social situations – he might already have such an overdeveloped sense of guilt that the mother’s pleas were appropriate. Or maybe she wouldn’t normally have phrased things that way – she’s just trying to get her son up the damn steps because she needs to be at work. Again, we’ve all had those moments.

But I think of the mother I saw a few months ago in the park, beating her son with a shoe. There was so much yelling that it was impossible not to hear the details. The boy, maybe around 12 years old, had stolen money from a neighbor. I think he probably deserved some kind of punishment – although bludgeoning a child with footwear, however fashionable, would not have been my approach. But what struck me were the words of admonishment from the mother. She was saying - and I paraphrase – how could you be so stupid as to steal from somebody who lives next door? Don’t you know they are going to find out? How stupid are you?

What an incredible message: Yes, feel the shame, child - but not for the mere act of stealing. Instead, feel bad for being so stupid as to pick the wrong target. What type of moral universe will this kid inhabit by the time he becomes an adult? How many people are raised with a similar outlook – that life is what you can get away with? I’m not a fan of Hillary, and I have some serious concerns about her big government “village” raising my child – but there’s one point on which people from all political avenues can agree. Our society is only as good as the lessons we leave our children. It might be faith-based, it might be secular – but without some framework for virtue things will fall quite depressingly apart.

Tags: Morality, Education, Child-rearing

Digital Media and Executive Bodycount

John Ellis, in today's Wall Street Journal, surveys the ongoing turmoil at the highest levels of corporate media as they contend with the tectonic disruptions of the Internet economy - notably the spate of hiring and firing at Sumner Redstone's Viacom.

His conclusion:

The fact is, no one at the executive levels of megamedia really knows what to do about digital disruption. They are -- all of them -- riding a technological tiger, hoping they can buy time, hoping against hope that the tiger doesn't eat them alive.

Hapless media misadventures can be seen everywhere. At The New Republic, a venerable, beloved publication with a history besmirched with controversy long before the Internet - their foray into the blogosphere turned disastrous due to a witless lack of netiquette. And at Newsweek John Meacham has taken the role of managing editor, replacing Mark Whitaker, who has been asked to make sense of the digital world. (Is that considered a promotion in those circles?) Even the ouster of HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn can be read as failure of old-guard companies to undersand the currency of information in a digital era.

The day will come when companies are helmed by men and women who have grown up in deep familiarity the new economy, posessed by both strong buisness acumen and intuitive knack for networked information. Who knows how capitalism will be transformed by their leadership? But until that time - twenty years in the future, perhaps - the tiger will keep feasting away.

Tags: Digital Media, Viacom, New Republic, Newsweek, HP

Mutiny

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.forum.html


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.buckley.html


Who knew, in 2000, that "compassionate conservatism" meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?

A more accurate term for Mr. Bush's political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.scarborough.html

My Next Daughter

Ultrasound technology these days is astonishing. In the eleven years that have passed since my first daughter was born the image has improved from a fuzzy gray cloud to a very obvious cross section of the human interior. In this case it was my wife’s womb, on a big TV, being observed with awe and fascination by the two of us, our girls, and a humorless nurse.

One by one we itemized the anatomy of our next family member – arms, feet, elbows, spine, a brain in which lobes could be seen, and a quickly pulsing heart with obvious discrete chambers. At what other time do you have such an intimate picture of your own child’s life? You are seeing things that should, really, never be seen again if the child has a healthy life. We were transfixed. And this wasn’t even one of those top-of-the-line 4D models.

We wanted to know in advance: It’s a girl.

There was a part of me that hoped for a son, but only to diversify the portfolio. If our family unit consisted of two boys I’m sure I would have wanted a girl - probably with much more desperation). I hope and pray for a healthy baby and successful delivery, regardless. Boys seem to require more energy at first – but less in the teenage years. And the media keeps publishing articles about how boys have the deck stacked against them, and are set up for chronic underachievement in our society. What’s the cost of another wedding when compared to that, right?

My wife and I both have daughters from pervious marriages – so this girl will be a “bridge” daughter, who will undoubtedly brew together some new combination of traits. The next couple of months we will all be waiting patiently, hopefully - perhaps painting a room and gathering some baby gear, waiting to discover what this little creature has planned.

Dishing the Soul of America

Okay, Andrew Sullivan is an unreliable demi-conservative Catholic who has been an unrelenting critic of the president when he isn't busy being a One-note Sally on gay marriage. Nevertheless today's post has resonance with the 9/11 anniversary while reminding us eloquently why useless fanatics are bound to be defeated be the most resiliant, inventive free nation that has graced our planet:

That our society no longer represents a philosophically unified and substantive whole is a loss greatly outweighed by the exuberance and genius and creativity that freedom has unleashed. Miracles in science and technology, astonishing advances in communication, the empowerment of millions to experience freedom of thought independently of big corporations, governments or expensive printing presses: these achievements of free people have expanded the possibilities of human freedom still further. The attack on the West by Islamism was not a function of the West's weakness, but a nihilistic, embittered swipe at a success that cast the dreary failure of so much of the Muslim Middle East into a shaming shade. It turned out our flaw was not our softness, but our strength.

When asked to defend the contingent, and foundation-less conservatism I have sketched here, this should be enough. We like it here. We love our way of life. The proof is in the millions who long to be here, who aspire to this dream of human potential, who yearn to escape the stifling constraints of oppressive government interference or brutal theocratic tyranny. What greater argument need we have? Our only weakness is self-doubt, which is part of our own querulous, paradoxical strength. The achievement of this freedom is a consequence of luck and tradition, history and thought, of great leaders in dark times and ordinary people in the unlikeliest of places. But it is an achievement nonetheless. We can touch it with our hands, and express it with our voices. It is more secure than any abstract argument or esoteric thesis. It is as good a defense as we shall ever have. Why on earth should we ask for more?

It's an excerpt from his book, The Conservative Soul (which I might read) and discovered via Instapundit, whose coverage, in the form of links, has been better than any of the gaseous emissions I've seen from the mainstream media. Tom at Bizzyblog has also done a great job wrangling up some of the better links into a post.

I had planned to watch the president's speech, but I became too busy with the Redskins game, which just ended in catastrophe.

Tags: America, Tyranny, Andrew Sullivan

Five Years Today

It was a September morning made more perfect in our memories by the way it was shattered so completely. I was working from home that day. It could have been a news alert on my computer - or maybe a breaking news item on the radio, I can't recall. But I heard about it suddenly, and in time to snap on the television to watch what I expected to be the simple calamity of a plane that had accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center.

Then I watched the impact of the second plane.

The house in which I grew up was full of literature and history - my mother's loves. From the picture of Daniel Webster on the wall to the seemingly endless collection of World War II and Civil War books to the long list of periodicals to which we subscribed - from the Smithsonian to the New Republic to the National Review and back around. It was impossible, in my family, to grow up without a cardinal idea of our location in history. The walls and bookshelves seemed to say, "All of this came before you, these events and people." And the coffee table, groaning with the weight of current magazines and newspapers, spoke of our contemporary role.

Matt Lauer began speaking again after a few quiet seconds. The puff of debris from a second impact said everything was different. Two planes don't crash like that by accident - instead we were watching Pearl Harbor unfold in realtime. History would come crashing down on us as surely as the towers did over the course of the next couple of hours.

For a long time I couldn't reflect on the events of that day without getting very upset. When my daughter was nine years old, two years ago, she asked me to explain 9/11, and I couldn't. The memory was too raw. Even a few days ago I was at the gym, walking on a treadmill, half- watching a news broadcast and following the closed captioning. A segment featured the children who have grown up without a mother or father – whose parents who perished in the towers, the Pentagon, the planes, or the rescue effort. The history, events of that day came crashing back as I watched those sweet, innocent kids.

Do we owe it to those kids to forget about 9/11 and simply pray that it will never happen again? What does history teach us when we step back and consider where things stand? Can you imagine some people now claim it didn’t even happen at all? Our capacity for denial seems limitless, which is one of the reasons why I’m in the camp of people who are still concerned about our security.

And I’ll never forget that day.

Tags: 9/11

Trekno-Positivism

It's the 40th anniversary of the original Star Trek. Prodigious amounts of opinion have been generated about the influence of this pop sci-fi phenomenon on society at large. But the latest example can be seen in Patrick West's post at the UK's Sunday Times, who assumes a sniffy, predictable tone:

Thanks to a process of osmosis from perennial reruns, Star Trek has propagated the belief that it is proper to interfere in other societies, that it is America’s duty to assume the role of (inter-)world policeman, and to correct the errant ways of other cultures — for their own good. And Spock was to Kirk what Blair is to Bush, a lackey willing to assist his master in his curious mission that seemingly has no specific objective.

One suspects that this type of invective has an audience among the more virulent strains of anti-American Europeans, and a similar tirade could have been prompted by soda pop, women's fashion, or any other topic at hand. Simply everything boils down to spittle-flying anger about Topic A.

I'm not a big fan of Star Trek. (I prefer the gritty, people-are-flawed vision of shows like the new and still-criminally-underrated Battlestar Galactica series, for example.) But it hardly seems fair to apply a contemporary overlay of politics and social values to a show that was, by almost universal account, one of the trailblazers of 1960s TV.

The obvious legacy of the show can be felt in a generation of science-minded entrepreneurs and engineers who were partially inspired by it's fantastic notion of technological positivism. We don't have warp drives and transporters - but we do have a culture that has attained the informational equivalent of a nervous system with the advent of the Internet, to cite the most obvious example. Bright minds from technical schools read and watch a lot of sci-fi. And the Baby Boomers geeks, in particular, came of age in the 60s and helped give rise to the biggest companies in technology.

Witness this CNN news story about the new 'Microsoft High School' in Pennsylvania. It's emblematic of this kind of thinking to assume that the problems we're having with education can be solved, in part, by smartboards, laptops, and "digital lockers". It's a seductive vision, one that aligns perfectly with the Trek view of the future, and one that I think offers some partial answers. But I'm old-fashioned enough to think that active, involved parents, dinner with the family and books are a better answer when it comes to education. Make the people strong first, and then give them the impressive technology.

Related Linkage: An interview with Shatner at Wired on the occasion of the anniversary, and the Slashdot post about the Microsoft school, featuring predictably funny snark from the engineering-dorm crowd.

Crime, Cincinnati Blog, Society

[A long, self-indulgent post ...]

Brian Griffin at Cincinnati Blog has been on a crusade, in recent years, to defend the reputation of Cincinnati as a safe and prospering city. The crime rate, he frequently suggests, is misleading, and the news of one or two restaurant closings doesn't tell the whole story. Brian is, like myself, not an original native son, and he is often ruthlessly critical of the more traditionalist (and conservative) aspects of Cincinnati.

I'm conflicted here.

On one hand I bought property late last year in a city neighborhood I love, Pleasant Ridge. I'm strongly in favor of supporting local institutions for reasons that I see (in my own tangled head, perhaps) as actually quite conservative: I'll take small business over the big guy whenever possible since I admire any entrepreneur with guts and resources. And parking lot, exit-ramp America seems to lack any of the qualities that made Western Civilization a nice place to live. I don't see traditionalist art, music, literature and such as exclusively the province of political liberalism, but rather, liberal humanism. And the institutions that guard these grand artifacts of culture (theaters, museums, universities), these are important, and they are found in places where people have congregated, most often, in the past several thousand years. Cities.

Even in terms of basic lifestyle I like cities. People on sidewalks, folks from different backgrounds, commercial and residential districts and schools that can often be reached (novel idea) without always using an automobile. Again, this isn't political. Gas 'er up, if that's your style. I just like walking, running into people by chance, serendipity.

(This is a longer topic, perhaps, than one blog post. But I'm entitled to one longwinded rant once and a while right? Why else does one blog?)

Defenders of the city, like Griffin, must recognize that for every restaurant opening in downtown there are more that are closing. Arguing over discrete examples doesn't accurately confront the problems of trends. I'm all for good PR, but if a small business owner (or nefarious developer) wants foot traffic and volume, are they going to build their store in an area growing by 5%, 1%, or the one that has been declining by 2% annually? Smart investors don't care what the value is today, whether we're talking a stock or a piece of real estate, they want to know the overall direction in which it is headed.

And crime is a massive part of the problem here -- not the actual crime rate but the perception that is created. How many blocks can you walk downtown without getting asked for money after 7PM? My average is five below Central Parkway, and three times a block in Over the Rhine - and yes, I spend time in these neighborhoods. Why does it seem like we have whole neighborhoods without parents - where the streets are ruled by people under the age of 17, who have made a fetish out of glorified gang culture, and have no restraint whatsoever about anything? I want the whole city to prosper, not any one neighborhood or group - but when I ask my most thoughtful liberal friends what should be done the answers either amount to ignoring the problem or blaming somebody for the causes - and both of these are not answers. Press even harder and you'll get answers that are so shopworn - such as "if we only had jobs programs" - that it's hardly worth the time it would takes to point out the many, many times that same trite solution has been tried and failed, spectacularly and expensively, in the past. You're already in the land of white hot blazing arguments and name-calling.

There may be a better answer than basic law enforcement, but I haven't found it yet. And certainly we need more than law enforcement - we need neighbors who are vigilant, connected, and involved in the social fabric of the community. But making it extremely difficult to commit crimes - beacuse your parents and neighbors are watching - and so are the cops, you will be thrown in jail - this seems like the best way to raise the general prosperity for the vast majority of us who simply want to live in town, work, grill a few wieners in the back yard, and if it suits us, raise a family. Pretending we don't have work to do to resolve these issues is convenient and easy, but the trend isn't being addressed. Involvement and thoughtful engagement - and courage from the grownups - these keep society bound together and safe, whether we're talking about Cincinnati or any other place on earth.

Throwing the Guantanamo Gauntlet

Today's Washington Post covers the revelation by President Bush that indeed there are secret CIA prisons, they are populated with the worst terrorists imaginable, and the administration has transferred them to Guantanamo to await military tribunals. The political impact is noteworthy:

By challenging Congress to immediately give the administration authority to try notorious al-Qaeda figures such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed by military commissions, he shifted the argument with Democratic critics of national security policies and competence. As Bush framed the choice, anyone against his proposal would be denying him necessary tools to protect American security.

His success in catching much of Washington by surprise showed that a president who polls show has his political back to the wall still has formidable tools: the ability to make well-timed course corrections on policy, dominate the news and shape the capital's agenda in the weeks before Election Day.

Bush's moves were partly a concession to those who have complained about secret CIA prisons abroad. Even as he acknowledged the existence of the prison program for the first time, Bush could argue that there are no terrorism suspects now in the CIA program.

Tell Joe and Suzy America. Tell them the most despicable characters from the terrorist networks, the guys that the experts think have the next 9/11 planned - they've been forced to spend a few evenings with men who make the Minnesota defensive line look like the Ice Capades. Tell them the boys from Langley have finished their little conversation, and it's time to await punishment and the average American will say "Thank you. Now what's the problem?"

Tell the average congressional Democrat up for re-election to explain how they feel about this very issue and they'll swap the conversation back around to Iraq faster than you can say "Nancy Pelosi".

The Post article goes on to observe that by focusing so narrowly on the public's dissatisfaction with Iraq the Democrats run the risk of missing the larger political picture, one which includes the war on terror. Their official position papers on how to preserve homeland security and hunt down terrorists are hardly any different than the Republican versions of same. It's rare that the Democrats ever utter a word on this topic - since it would take time away from overreaching on Iraq - but when they do the Republicans generally smirk and respond by observing that it sounds damn familiar, don't you think?

There may be plenty of room in American electoral politics for a party to articulate a more persuasive and coherent alternative approach to defending our country. But there's no immediate danger of this happening when the Democrats are so blinded by disgust and fixated on the Vietnam critique that they can barely discern the bigger picture much less offer anything better. And Bush is hardly an electoral supergenuis, but he's outwitted their hapless efforts in the past, and he has a reputation for making some cool, calculated moves late in the game. (Cue the long shadow of Karl Rove with organ music ...)

Nixguy has more.

Tags: War on Terror, George Bush, Guantanamo Bay, Election

Hardcore Government Statistics Action

Brace yourself, dear reader. There's nothing that can liven up a Wednesday evening like some hardcore government statistics. For example, the news that average personal income grew at 5% in 2005, which is one percent less than 2004, but nevertheless ahead of inflation - which was 2.9%.

What about Ohio - my current state of residence and swing state extraordinaire? Personal income grew by less than the national averages:

Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN - 4.3%
Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH - 3.4%
Columbus, OH - 4.3%
Dayton, OH - 3.0%
Toledo, OH - 2.5%

Keen-eyed locals will immediately recognize that Cincinnati has been lumped together with Middletown, thus bringing together the economically hard-hit urban core with it's booming, subdevelopments-and-bigboxes northern neighbor. What's "growing" is the whole smeary region along the stretch of highway, not any centralized city. This led me to wonder - since the suburbs north of Cincinnati played such a vital role in the 2004 election, how does the average rate of growth for personal income look for blue vs. red states, using the voting patterns from the last election? The answer took some work with a relational database, but rest your worried mind, this intrepid blogger has mad professional skills in this area.

BLUE State Personal Income Growth in 2005 - 4.07%
RED State Personal Income Growth in 2005 - 5.24%

Statistics can be subject to all kinds of misinterpretation. But simply put, people in Red States, on average, had slightly more personal income in 2005. Money saved from shopping at WalMart, perhaps? In any event, how they vote in the next election is dependant on many more relevant factors - anger and indifference among them.

Although people keep talking about gas prices - and the news here is "good". I don't know about you, but yesterday when I filled up the family sedan I practically started dancing around like they did in the "Orange Mocha Frappachino" scene in Zoolander. $2.39 a gallon! Add to this the delightful news that a major American oil company has discovered vast new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico - and it's time to light up a cigar with a $100 bill while reclining with a drink near my bronze statue of Arthur Laffer that I keep polished in the library.

Tags: Personal Income, Economy, Ohio, Election, Oil, Gas Prices

Couricmania

In the past 12 hours everything that can possibly be said has already been said about Katie Couric's debut. This is characteristic of the new media age, of course - the one which is rapidly replacing anachronisms like CBS News.

It's been 15 years since I watched, with any regularity, a nightly broadcast on the three old networks, so it was a chore to rearrange my schedule to catch a few minutes of the perky news marmoset. Do serious grown-ups still schedule their lives around a pre-set half an hour in the evening when they watch news? Our ancestors obviously had a B.F. Skinner complex of some kind. Even the act of tuning in was a reminder of how retrograde the experience has become. From the standpoint of anyone raised in the digital era CBS is like Rocketboom, I suppose - but if you can't make sure you're parked in the chair at just the right moment you might as well upgrade your hardware to a DVR arrangement like TiVo.

Katie did a fine job, as such. The news seemed more breezy and informal. The real test, of course, will be some national disaster, assassination, terror attack, or election snafu. That's when the real Katie will need to walk in front of the camera and deliver news.

Tags: CBS News, Katie Couric, Legacy Media

Hanover and Tehran

The title of this New York Times article says it all: "Iran’s President Calls for Purge of Liberal and Secular Professors". It's ostensibly an article about the efforts of Iranian hardliners to purge academia of those who disagree with an Islamic dogma so fundamentalist that it recommends execution for rape victims.

But it's also an easy color-by-numbers inflection point for Lefty tirades against the perceived threat of American social conservatives. One hardly needs to search Technorati to confirm the suspicion that millions of "goodness me, this is the next thing the Bushies will do" blog posts have been written by 9AM. And the Right does this too, of course - some article on Fox News about the removal of a manger scene from public property at Christmastime is also, in terms of the media food chain, a sweet alley-oop for Sean Hannity or Malikin.

But it this case the terms "Liberal" and "Secular" are an overlay of American political values onto a foreign situation. Iran is a totalitarian dictatorship, and the faintest hint of "slippery slope" comparisons to the influence of religious communities in America is fanatically wrongheaded. We’re talking about the difference between religious teachers and religious nutjobs. Put another way, on the Iranian scale of liberal-to-conservative Pat Robertson looks like Ward Churchill.

The same people who are coked up in mock outrage over whether "this could happen here" will be notably silent about the more obvious political purges that take place in American universities when academics fail to assume a Hard Left position. Harvard president Lawrence Summers was one obvious example, but the current situation at Dartmouth also springs to mind. Can you spare any fervent, self-righteous disgust for the contrived ouster of non-socialist university trustees from an institution with a hallowed tradition of democratic appointments?

Anyone?

Tags: Iran, Dartmouth, Academic Freedom

The Globalization of Fatness

The popular kids are always the trendsetters:

"This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Australia's Monash University professor Paul Zimmet, chair of the 10th International Congress on Obesity, said on the opening day of the conference.

The spread of the problem was "led by affluent western nations, whose physical activity and dietary habits are regrettably being adopted by developing nations," Zimmet told more than 2,000 delegates.

In modern times starvation has always been the result of politics, not the insufficient production of calories and nutrition on a worldwide basis. In America many people far below the "poverty line" are unfathomably obese. There's more food than common sense.

Poverty isn't a problem of material "have not". It's the result of a destructive pattern of social behavior that fails to conserve human capital in the form of education, families, community, and role models. If girls have children later, if young males don't fall prey to hyper-aggressive models of masculinity - a problem exacerbated by the absence of fathers - the chances of breaking the cycle are increased dramatically.

Does our attitude towards food make up a deterministic part of the equation? Restraint and deferment of pleasure is the common theme: People are compelled to act in their short-term interest, but they can always exercise restraint and choose otherwise. We can always externalize the problem and blame Taco Bell (a "fourth meal", anybody?), but we each have a choice. Is it simply a matter of trying to be like those skinny rich people?