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Kelo continues to reverberateThe Weekly Standard has this article on the continuing reverberations of Kelo v. New London and the ongoing tussle over emminent domain for the lowered "public purpose" standard. Summer cat pics
Aborted terror plot in GermanyWell hang on there! Hang on one second! This must be a hoax! Because as we all know, Al Queda and other similar organs of Islamic terror hate us and seek to bomb us because of our occupation of Iraq, our military presence in Saudi Arabia, our support for Israel and so on, but the Germans don't do any of that. So why would they be a target? After all, when they attack American targets, that makes sense; and when they attacked Spain, that made sense, because the Spanish had troops in Iraq at that time, and a fortiori British targets last year and the foiled attempt this year. But Germany? The NSA program and the trial judgeAs anyone who isn't living in a cave will by now know, a district court judge in Michigan has thrown out the NSA's eavesdropping program. You can read the opinion here, and nowhere in its pages will you find the words "border search exception" - which mystifies me, since I can think of a couple of reasons why the court might say it doesn't apply, but absolutely none that justify point-blank ignoring it. Cameras on the campaign trailI actually heartily support this tactic. It's quite a neat way to catch candidates who speak out of both sides of their mouth, and a good way to intimidate candidates against putting their mouths in gear before their brain makes it out of neutral. Although in this case it's being levied as a weapon against a Republican candidate, I think it's a tactic the GOP should adopt (heck, why didn't anyone think of doing this with Kerry, the candidate to which the tactic would seem to be most directly applicable?). Tools that make it harder to be anything other than honest and consistent in politics should be welcomed as a matter of course. Cash, Floyd and HurtJody Rosen thoughtfully dissents from the deification of Johnny Cash, and the Rick Rubin-produced "American Recordings" set in particular. Rosen observes that Rubin's approach was to strip out the production - more accurately, the orchestration - to create "relentlessly monochrome musical settings." The problem, though, says Rosen, is that this is merely a different approach to a familiar game: the fastidiously unadorned and solemn music on the American Recordings series — bare-bones rock ensembles playing stately tempos, with bass piano notes tolling like church bells over minor chords — seems designed to clobber listeners with the idea that they are in the presence of a Great Man Singing the Truth. We usually associate kitsch in music with the big and blowzy, but the Cash-Rubin records use the opposite musical tactic for emotional manipulative effect. It's schlock austerity.(I love the emphasized turn of phrase - it is both picturesque and, listening to the records, vividly accurate). This is much the same criticism advanced of The Division Bell - that it sounds very weighty and portentous, but is in fact merely a cleverly-designed attempt to sound weighty and portentous. But just as I'm uncomfortable with that criticism of The Division Bell, I'm leery about this criticism of Cash (or more accurately, of Rubin). On an emotional level, music is not the property of the person who writes it. The moment you take a piece of music - particularly one with lyrics, but to some extent, also instrumentals - and place it in the public domain, you surrender the right to say "this is what this song means." Art's value, as we all know, is in the eye of the beholder, but so is its meaning. Is it really valid to criticize, on the basis of what Bono originally had in mind when he wrote the lyrics, those couples who play U2's One at their wedding (or for that matter, those (including, these days, U2 themselves) who use the song as a generic anthem for world peace, ending hunger and other such causes? I think that's an untenable position. Similarly, does it actually matter that Rubin set out to present Johnny Cash in austere grandeur? That seems to miss the point. Art can only emotionally manipulate to the extent the listener is willing to be manipulated, and isn't the real test the connections that the listener makes with the music? Does it matter if Cluster One was specifically designed to evoke that classic "the Floyd sound" (something which, IMO, never actually existed per se) if I form an emotional connection to it? If this is true - that the value and meaning of music is determined by the ears, experiences and emotions of the listener - then Rosen's point may or may not be accurate, but is certainly moot. I must also briefly make a note about Rosen's assertion that Nine Inch Nails' Hurt - covered by Cash on The Man Comes Around - "was an ambiguous ballad about masochism; Cash reportedly interpreted it as a drug-addict's confession." My understanding of that song was that it was written from a similar place to Floyd's Comfortably Numb, a realization that one has become isolated and alienated from one's surroundings. Waters' character had a mental breakdown, but Reznor tried to explain something I continue to find an enduring mystery, viz., the impulse of some - mainly young women, it seems - to self-injure. As Reznor tells it, it is not a desire to hurt, it is a desire to feel, by the only means available. (I never did the self injury thing, but I did very much go through times when I was younger of feeling similiarly disconnected and desensitized.) This is a far cry from masochism or from addiction - but, of course, by my own logic above, I must concede that neither Rosen or Cash's interpretations are any less valid than my own, although I think my interpretation makes more sense and is (unimportantly) likely closer to what Reznor had in mind. One way or another, and by design or otherwise, Cash's version is brilliant, profoundly moving, and in the end, that is all that counts;like The Funeral from the Firefly soundtrack, it builds to a level of emotion that is almost unbearable. It would be churlish to suggest that that isn't enough. Term limits bandwagon rolls downhillJohn Fund takes doleful note of what appears to be the fact that those of us who support term limits are actually losing ground as the more brazen politicians seek to remove term limits. In the oft-quoted phrase of Wendell Phillips, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty ... Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity." Play it like Guy Pratt wouldSpeaking of Guy Pratt, his influence was very much in my mind when recording a version of Simple Minds' E55 recently - check out the music page. I'd wanted to record a version of this Simple Minds instrumental for quite some time (it's a song I listened to a lot when I visited Russia ten years ago, so it very much associates with that visit), and having done so, the bass groove in the coda is particularly Guy-ish, I think. V for VendettaMy wife and I both like the Matrix movies, so we figured we'd give this V for Vendetta movie that the Wachowsky Brothers produced a go; it's alright, so far as it goes, but it's pretty transparent in its aims. The guy (no pun intended) who wrote the original graphic novel seems to have nothing but contempt for the movie, and I think Wikipedia's recounting of his reaction is pretty close to how I felt watching it: [Alan] Moore remarked that his comic had been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... [This film] is a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives — which is not what [the comic] 'V for Vendetta' was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]." He later adds that if the Wachowskis had wanted to protest what was going on in America, then they should have used a political narrative that spoke directly at America's issues, similar to what Moore had done before with Britain."[P]eople too timid to set a political satire in their own country" - marvellous! I think that's pretty much right (although one hastens to point out that Moore clearly uses the term "neoconservative" in either its pejorative sense or as liberals view them, rather than its more specific meaning); there is a pervasive tone throughout the film that this is not the sort of dystopian future of a Blade Runner or a Logan's Run, but rather, a paranoid vision of where certain hollywood liberals think America is going. And to this peculiar vision, they conjoin cowardice: "people too timid to set a political satire in their own country." Presumably, having a movie wherein the hero is a terrorist who blows up the Capitol Dome and the White House was considered just a touch too risque by Joel Silver et al - far better to transplant it across the pond to a safe distance. The sine qua non of this kind of film is pursuading the audience to suspend disbelief, to buy into the context, and enjoy what is presented within that framework. Here, what is presented is satisfying enough on its own terms, but the film's clunky, leaden and utterly transparently quality of being a "frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives" renders the suspension of disbelief impossible. Disappointing stuff. NewspeakI rather enjoyed this article by Fred Barnes (despite my post title, Barnes argues that "liberalspeak" procedes in quite the opposite direction to Orwell's newspeak: instead of seeking to remove all shreds of nuance from language, to perform a Kerry-esque attempt to expand the possible range of meanings of a term until it has no meaning). For example, says Barnes, NARAL's Lakoff-friendly adoption of a meaningless, anodyne non-acronymic (but still capitalized) name - NARAL - and cleansing the term of that for which the first "A" used to stand. I think that's pretty tenuous on Barnes' part; he surely doesn't believe that among pro-choice groups, abortion is the evil that dare not speak its name. That quibble aside, it's a fun, lightweight article, and Barnes also talks briefly about affirmative action and "revenues" (the new word for taxes, apparently - which does rather beg the question of what we should now call those monies raised by taxes). Out westI've been meaning to post this for a few days, but Ann Althouse is back from her road trip out west, and has some stunning photos of the badlands. Great photography, but credit has to go to the artist. More on the Roberts judicial philosophy and minimalismThis week's America & the Courts features our Fearless Leader (RealPlayer warning). As the WSJ notes, it starts with an adorable little puff piece interview, before moving onto more substantive matters by going out west, and showing the tape of Roberts talking to the Ninth Circuit. This part is far more interesting, (not least insofar as it assumes that the viewer is not seated in a high school classroom, and is even vaguely familiar with what the Supreme Court does). The court is hungryThe Court has searched in vain in the Arizona Rules of Civil Procedure and cases, as well as the leading treatises on federal and Arizona procedure, to find specific support for Plaintiff’s motion. Finding none, the Court concludes that motions of this type are so clearly within the inherent powers of the Court and have been so routinely granted that they are non-controversial and require no precedential support.What's the court ordering? Lunch. Hat tip: Volokh. A little late, but anyways...A couple of weeks back, we talked about Judge Sykes' opinion in CLS v. Walker (PDF warning) at ConfirmThem. I don't have anything to add to those comments, but I wanted to note that the oral argument for that case is online here. More on the BMV's problemsWhen I complained, in passing, about the problems with the new BMV computer system, it hadn't ocurred to me that it might be a deeper problem than me just having a bit of a whine. However: [T]he public is justifiably outraged -- because the computer upgrade has been so badly mishandled. BMV officials knew that problems might arise when the switch from the old computer system to the new was made because the agency failed for years to keep accurate records on motorists. With the new system, long-existing discrepancies involving a driver's address or Social Security number began to finally crop up, making a trip to a license branch a necessity ... [T]he BMV did little to warn Hoosiers of the potential problems ... Launching a complicated database is almost certain to trigger problems. However, the agency's failure to communicate compounded those errors and reinforced in ordinary Hoosiers' minds the perception that the BMV is hopelessly incompetent.Quite. Commissioner Silverman thinks they "didn't do as well as the customer expects" - actually, the most damning indictment is that if you'd asked a random sampling of Hoosiers, before this project began, whether they thought the BMV would mess up its new technology roll-out, I wouldn't be surprised if every one said they expected it. Sadly, the bar for "as well as the customer expects" in the BMV's close is pretty low - this kind of failure of execution is expected and assumed with resigned indifference. Worse yet: [This] new glitch-ridden computer system is hindering police across the state, making it difficult for officers to reliably pull up accurate records on drivers ... [Police] say they are likely to let free those who otherwise might be arrested for driving with a suspended or revoked license ... Indianapolis Police Capt. Greg Bieberich ... said the computer problem has compromised public safety because officers can't make arrests when perhaps they should. In certain situations, Bieberich also has advised officers to no longer detain people based on BMV information that normally would prompt an arrest. "We should consider that information unreliable unless we can verify it," he said. "And if they can't verify, then they shouldn't write the violation."Crazy! The IndyStar seems to be targetting Commissioner Silverman, but the problem isn't really Joel Silverman, and so the solution isn't firing him. Nor is the solution to simply give up on the new system; again, the problem isn't the move to the new computer system, the problem is the way it's been handled, and it's the underlying cause of that problem that must be addressed. The solution is actually very simple. The Governor apparently thinks that "training is the main issue." He is wrong. The main issue is that the BMV is universally regarded as - at best - incompetent, surly and frankly, beyond hope. The main issue is that it needs to be privatized, whereafter a company with its attitude - shorn of its monopoly protection - will either buck its ideas up, or sink without trace. You can fire as many Commisioners as you like, and throw as much money as you like down the black hole of new databases, but the problem isn't going to be fixed while the day-to-day operation of the BMV is still run by the government. In this case, as it often is, "government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem." I would think that a Republican administration would understand that, Mitch. Indianapolis libraryInteresting story in the IndyStar about the problems building a new extension to their main premises. Lovely architecture, nice integration of new into old, but it's a horror story getting it build. President RootsThere is apparently an Australian also called Simon Dodd, who kindly e-mailed me a link to his band's myspace - it's great stuff, check it out here. Very nice vibe, and some great vocals. Love the guitar playing on Why Did You Come Around? |
    
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