Welcome to Daily Contentions... Born in February 2003, DC is a daily-updated weblog covering a wide variety of issues, contemporary and timeless-- always with a unique perspective and open attitude.
Barak Obama compared himself to Abe Lincoln last week, and Peggy Noonan decided to take politicians to task for being egomaniacal. Where she's wrong, of course, is her pretending that this is some new kind of phenomenom in politics. But her sarcasm in handling Obama is beautiful:
This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles."
Oh. So that's what Lincoln's for. Actually Lincoln's life is a lot like Mr. Obama's. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery.
Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency.
I'll attempt to summarize the latest controversy at IU Law-Indianapolis, but for a more thorough treatment, check out the top few posts on IndyLaw Net...
The gist of the story is as follows. Professor Bradford, my property professor from last year, has been effectively denied tenure by 5 faculty members of IU-I's tenure review board, despite earning a mark of "excellent" in all three categories of review and having published numerous times the material of previously tenured professors.
In a story that has been picked up by the IndyStar and FoxNews, Bradford claims that he has been denied tenure due to either his conservative political beliefs and/or his status as an American Indian. One of the professors who opposes Bradford's tenure, Professor Roisman, has posted a response to these claims on IndyLaw Net.
I am working on an opinion piece for IndyLaw Net on this story, and I will co-publish it here. To preface, I will say this: having had Professor Bradford for property, it is difficult for me to balance my positive personal judgment of him with my want to do what is best for IU Law, and to maintain an objective sense of fairness.
Well, I was asked in the comments of the previous post about how I defeat jetlag. I gave a response in the comments, but I think it deserves an entire post of its own. Here goes.
It's really rather easy. The first step is to simply calculate the total number of hours you will be traveling. The second step is to observe what time you will be arriving, and to note whether you should be tired and ready for bed at that moment, or awake and energetic.
The third step is to work backwards from that moment of arrival. If you need to be tired when you arrive, then you need to keep yourself awake on the plane for at least 10-14 hours prior to arrival. This can be fudged some, depending on general level of energy, but not too much. Prior to that period you want to get as close to 6-8 hours of sleep as possible. Again this can be fudged.
If you want to be energetic when you arrive, then you simply work this somewhat in reverse.
The fourth step (but first chronologically speaking) is probably to sleep deprive yourself before leaving on the airplane. Leave yourself plenty of ability to fall asleep on the plane for the aforementioned 6-8 hours. Many people have trouble sleeping well or falling asleep quickly on a plane, so sleep deprivation prior to the trip is helpful.
The final step is to consume modest amounts of alcohol and caffeine at appropriate times. In other words, drink a beer or wine to help you get to sleep, or if you're tired and need to be awake, drink coffee and/or a coke.
Well, that is kindof obvious. But you may note that I have changed the logo to include the American flag and have removed the Chinese characters for "China" from it.
This is both to recognize my departure from China and to celebrate Independence Day. Fitting, methinks.
Coming back to America today. Gotta change the logo when I get over jet lag. Though I suspect that I will have no jetlag, because I know how to defeat it :-)
I could say that about a lot of things right now, but I'm going to apply it to the esteemed {cough} Washington Post. You all know the news out of the Supreme Court, so I won't dwell on it, until I've had a chance to read the opinions myself in a couple days.
No, my rant lies in pressterism, a common enterprise of Washington's flagship newspaper. Consider this headline: "Ten Commandments Disallowed in Courthouses... Supreme Court Rules, 5-4, That Such Religious Displays Violate the Separation of Church and State"
NO NO NO! They were not disallowed in all courthouses. That is an out and out lie. The ruling was that it depends on the nature of the display in the courthouse. Also, the language about "separation of church and state" is sloppy, because it is not the actual holding of the court to include that language.
Why should Americans trust the media when the major papers goof up such a major (and easy) headline?
I love your profession and I greatly respect it. The 4th Estate must be strong for a stable government. This is why such presster amateurism saddens me so.
Who says Supreme Court justices don't have a sense of humor?
Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy added some laughs to a recent party for Rehnquist and his clerks.
The annual clerk reunions are known to be entertaining, with croquette, basketball games in the court gym and skits designed to get laughs out of Rehnquist.
This reunion, which some said had a bittersweet feel because of Rehnquist's cancer, featured video greetings from Scalia and Kennedy.
Scalia said he wanted to put to rest rumors that he was campaigning to replace Rehnquist as chief justice. Scalia, a Catholic and father of nine, said he had set his ambitions a little higher: pope.
And Kennedy showed he can joke in the face of criticism. This spring, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said that it was outrageous that Kennedy has looked to international decisions in his rule-making, even doing research on the Internet.
So Kennedy filmed his greeting as he sat in front of a computer. And said he was doing a little research. At the end, he signed off with a goodbye — but in multiple languages.
By now, we all have heard that Saddam loves Doritos (and gives great advice on procuring a wife), but why does he like Doritos so? Here is Letterman's Top 10 List from a few nights ago.
10. Three-cornered chips remind him of the Sunni Triangle. 9. Chemical Ali taught him how to convert the spicy powder into a nerve agent. 8. The "crunch" sounds like the breaking of a dissident's bones. 7. Pringles are for Kurds. 6. They are corn chips of mass deliciousness. 5. Goes perfectly with a tall glass of camel milk. 4. Endorsed by his favorite late night television host, Al-Asaad Muhammed Leno. 3. "Cool ranch" flavor is a preview of the paradise that awaits a martyr. 2. When beard is full of orange crumbs, he can do hilarious "Yosemite Saddam." 1. Delicious taste allows him to momentarily forget he'll spend eternity in hell (CBS, 6/22).
I went to Xi'an this previous weekend, and I relished the chance to get out of Beijing for a few days. Xi'an is located a few hundred miles south and west of Beijing, and it was even more hot (over 100 one day) and polluted than Beijing.
However, as the former capital of emperial China under several dynasties, Xi'an has a ton of things to see and do. Besides its numerous palaces and tombs, Xi'an's main attraction is undeniably the Terracotta Warriors.
The Terracotta Warriors are a group, 5000+ strong, of lifesize clay soldiers, ordered created by the first Qin emperor, around 1500 years ago. He had them buried so that they could protect him in the afterlife.
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themsleves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the pbulic treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship." --Alexis DeTocqueville
I saw this quote hanging from one of the Legislative Aides in my office's wall and I thought, "DeTocqueville got it right." When I sent this quote to Lucas, I told him that it's not about Republicans or Democrats, FDR or GWB; it is about the American people. The same people who bemoan government spending while at the dinner table fight tooth and nail to save spending in their sector during their 9-5 jobs. Person X writes to the Chairman of Committee Y asking that more funding be provided for program Z. This is not a good sign and I have no clue if anything can reverse the thinking of the American people.
I meant to mention this small story last week, but I forgot, so here it is now...
A few of my friends from the IU-China program and I were out at a bar/club called Bar Blu in Beijing's main bar district, and when several of us were on the dance floor, a John Mellencamp song came on.
As most of DC's readers probably know, Mellencamp is a native Hoosier.
I don't like Mellencamp all that much, but it was pretty neat to hear him in this setting.
Kristine sent me this graduation address by Steve Jobs at Stanford University. It's pretty good, methinks, but I do realize I'm biased. This quote in particular is nice, and I think it describes my personal philosophy in a sense, though with reservations:
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Ok, so here are the photos from our visit to the Great Wall at Simatai, about 3 hours north of Beijing. Simatai is one of the best sections of the wall, as it has not been restored in quite some time (500 years or so), and thus it is more rustic and original.
It was a work-out, but also probably the coolest place I've ever been to in my life. And I'm not saying that lightly.
Uh oh. Things are not so hot for the European continent's efforts to politically unify.
With the French and Dutch rejecting the EU Constitution, and with Britain promising to indefinitely delay holding such a vote, it appears to be dead in the water, at least for the time being.
And now with economic worries created from the EU's recent inclusion of several eastern European nations, Paris is intensifying its pressure on London to reform the so-called British "rebate" which was enacted several years ago to address a perceived unfair budgetary contribution from Britain.
Is further European unification but a Euro-dream? Economic unification certainly has not been the impetus for political unification that many theorists thought it would.
... its stock that is. While it was a fantastic IPO buy, at 300+, it's now overvalued. Yes, Google is a fantastic presence on the web with tons of new technologies on the way, and yes it is profitable, but what new profit-generating potential does it have?
Look at it this way. Google makes well over 90% of its revenue from text-ads on the web. None of it's sweet technologies, such as satellite imagery or even GMail are going to present enough new text-ads to legitimate a 300+ stock cap.
Call me a pessimist, but this pessimist lived through the tech stock flop from just a few years back.
Let me first get a few things straight. I have never been a fan of the ACLU, because, to be frank, they often take positions which are by no means belonging in the field of civil liberties. But I also think that they have raised some legit issues with the Patriot Act and its renewal.
I am not personally familiar enough with the revised Patriot Act to speak one way or the other regarding these issues, but I support the dissent of some recent Republicans. I do so for the same reasons they named for their dissent: the clandestine and sneaky manner in which the GOP senate leadership has pushed Patriot renewal.
In the 1997 movie, Face/Off, John Travolta's character, Sean Archer, has his face removed and replaced with the face of Nicholas Cage's character, Castor Troy, in order to infiltrate Troy's criminal organization. At the time of the movie, the procedure sounded and looked like pure science fiction, but now such a procedure could become a reality. Two medical centers in the U.S. are in the final phases of planning for the first human face transplant for an individual who's face has been severely disfigured by trauma, tumors or burns.
How does the procedure work? Incisions are made on the donor's face from just below the hairline to below the chin. The skin and underlying tissue is removed. Then surgeons remove the face of the recipient, clamping off veins and arteries to block the blood flow. After that, microsurgeons attach the recipient's severed arteries and veins to the donor's facial tissue (the facial donor like most organ donors is a human cadaver). The nerves are connected, then the muscles and skin. The procedure would take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours (Note: The Chicago Tribune has a very informative Flash presentation on how this surgerical procedure works and is my source for how the procedure works). The person receiving the new face would then be required to take immunosuppressive drugs, similar to an organ transplant recipient. The person could required to take the medication for the rest of their life. Unlike Face/Off, the person would not have the exact same face as the donor, but rather a blend of their former face and the donor's face.
Unsurprisingly, the thought of performing such an operation has generated quite of bit of controversy in the medical community with one side saying that this procedure might be the only way for severely disfigured people to live normal lives and the other side saying the procedure won't save or prolong life and is too risky. Personally, if this procedure can be performed safely, does not have dire long-term side effects and is only used in the rare instances where a person's face is severely disfigured, then this procedure should be allowed to be performed. Sadly, we live in a world where looks matter and to give these individuals who in many cases have been shunned by society a chance to live a normal life is something that the medical community should pursue.
Yesterday (Saturday in Beijing) we visited Simatai, which is widely considered one of the best sections of the Great Wall. I have some good photos, and I hope to post them tomorrow. My older photos (of the Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven) will be delayed a week, as these Great Wall photos are much more spectacular.
Here is an article which describes Starbucks' success in China. It seems to be one in a handful of U.S. companies successful in the far east. I would add to that list: McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, KFC, and even Dominos.
He has just been so kind to provide his opposition with a stream of quotes to use against the Dems each and every week. Maybe next month he'll even give us a good scream, just for old times' sake.
This is one of the worst pieces of journalism, neh pressterism, that I have ever seen. The headline does not even come close to being supported by the article... And the article is absolutely useless. I could see a little AP wire story, but the WashTimes dedicated a reporter to this?!
Ok, perhaps it's not THE worst thing I've seen, but it's still pathetic.
Hmmm... A DVD vendor tried to sell me a War of the Worlds DVD a few hours ago. The problem with this, of course, is that the movie hasn't even been released in theaters yet. So I have a couple guesses at what's going on here: either it's some other movie in War of the Worlds packaging, or more likely somebody took a video camera to a pre-screening somewhere and voila!
I didn't buy it, but at only $1, I should have, just to see what was going on. Oh well.
"Today's various forms of dissolution of marriage, free unions, trial marriages as well as the pseudo-matrimonies between people of the same sex, are instead expressions of anarchic freedom which falsely tries to pass itself off as the true liberation of man," said Benedict XVI
I agree with the essence of what he says about too many marriages being false, but his inclusion of same-sex marriages is puzzling in that framework. How is the act of swearing the rest of your life to a person of the same sex an act of anarchic freedom. Shouldn't that label be used to describe gay individuals who choose to have numerous partners and make no such committment?
Ok, so I finally got a chance to hook my Powerbook up to the net, so here is round 1 of the photos. These include some photos of my hotel, the Renmin campus, the Wangfujing shopping district, and the Forbidden City, as well as some other misc. photos mixed in.
Round 2 will come later and it will have photos from the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace. And then round 3 will have Great Wall photos. Each round will only stay up for under a week, because I don't have space on the server to keep all three up simultaneously. Click the photo to see the album...
update: Okay, so I took down this album to make room for a new one...
But I am not completely surprised either. IBM has been unable to keep up in the megahertz race and even in the overall performance race which it led for a while. Also, it's most powerful processors produce too much heat for Apple's laptops which are a huge proportion of their market. For Apple to maintain it's laptop market share it will have to keep up their performance which necessitates a move to Intel.
This move will also make it even easier to run nearly all Unix/Linux based software on the Mac, without any recompiling. A good move in the long run, but it might cause some teething initially.
I should also note that CNET appears to be the only major news source to be reporting this. Macworld/MacCentral is mum as of the time of this post.
I think it's inevitable that China will democratize within the next 30 years, maybe less, nay probably less. I've seen first-hand the grip that China's market reforms have had on their nation. And the students I've spoken with are openly critical of their government in many areas, including its control of the courts and media. Public interest lawyers, business interests, professors, and judges across the nation are working to pressure China into change.
Additionally, as I learned from a deputy in the People's Nation Congress of China, yesterday at a meeting we had with a few of them, the government is already planning steps to add transparency-- such as publishing drafts of laws in the newspapers before they are voted on, so that they can get citizen input, and also holding certain hearings in public.
Last week, Amnesty International released a report on the state of human rights across the world. In it, Amnesty International called the United States' treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay comparable to that of the Russian gulags. Now, the Administration is using this hyperbole to not address any real human rights violation at Guantanamo Bay that may exist. While Amnesty's use of the word "gulag" to describe the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is "absurd," the situation there is troubling, at the very least. Still, Amnesty International defended its use of the word and calls for the United States to allow Amnesty into the detention centers and evaluate the situation.
In an editorial, the Washington Post described this situation as sad, because what has long been considered a "solid, trustworthy institution" has jumped on the Bush-bashing bandwagon. The Post also points out that as of late, Amnesty has saved its strongest words for the United States and not vile dictators such as Kim Jong Il. In a very good column, my love-hate relationship with E.J. Dionne Jr. continues when he asks "why do President Bush's critics make life so easy for him?"
Speaking of hyperboles, Kim Jong Il adds to the fun by calling Vice President Cheney a "bloodthirsty beast" which is just a too funny visual.
Also, I cannot end this post before pointing out a few missteps in President Bush's press conference earlier this week. The funniest was when Bush, talking about detainees who have alleged abuse, called them "people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth." Of course, we know that disassemble means to take apart and Bush meant to use the word "dissemble." I'm not saying Bush is stupid, because dissemble is not part of my daily vocabulary, but this just points out that Bush's handlers need to give him talking points using words that he actually understands. Second, on speaking of China's economy, Bush said, "Its economy is still small, but growing." But according to the CIA World Factbook, China has the world's second largest economy...after the United States.
So seeing that I am in a land of great ping-pong players, I thought I'd pull out my old paddle and give it a go. The campus here has a really nice ping-pong room in their central gymnasium. I first played with 4 other Americans from my program and cleaned up easily. One of the Chinese players in the room, who apparently had some good English skills, challenged me, and I won narrowly against him. I proceeded to beat 3 other Chinese players until I was too worn out to continue. They play a very high paced game.
Note: the above post may not be entirely true. In fact, it could be substantially if not totally false. For instance, it is quite possible that I in fact did not beat any Chinese players, or for that matter did not even play any of them. It could also be possible that while I did play ping-pong agaist fellow Americans from the program, in the campus gymnasium, I did not even beat any of them. If this was indeed the case, I have plenty of practicing to do. You be the judge.
Is a group of human beings. And no I'm not talking about some prison where Google hooks humans up to computers and harnesses their brain-power, I'm talking about Rater-Google, a program by the search engine company that uses humans to evaluate its search results for relevance.
When the Supreme Court ok'd the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform bill, it was an injury to free speech in this nation-- in particular, to the most sensitive type of speech: political speech.
And now we bloggers will reap the consequences of that decision as the FEC is forced to draft rules to regulate political speech in blogs... Apparently China isn't the only place that censors the net.
NASA's administrator and Rep. Tom Delay both say the agency will have enough funds to implement President Bush's plan to eventually put a man on Mars. I am a cynic that the funding will be sufficient, but I wholeheartedly champion the plan. A nation can be safe, secure, and comfortable, but those qualities alone do not make it great. A great nation leaves its mark on the philosophy and discoveries of its day, and space exploration is a prime manner to do just that.
