lloydtown 

Decorating and Renovation Shows

My wife and I enjoy watching "This Old House" and "Ask This Old House" together. Both were especially good this evening. On the first show, they have purchased what was once a farm house with attached barn, and is now in an urban or suburban area. Last week they started making plans to maximize the re-sale value, preserve as much of the historical character of the property as possible, and comply with municipal ordinances.

This week they jacked up the barn by two feet so that they can completely rebuild the ground floor and the half-basement underneath, which will become parking. The upper barn is going to be a combination of guest rooms and showplace living/recreational space. They also tore down the old "L" between the barn and the house--it wasn't sound, and the rooms were very awkward. They will rebuild something much more functional, that looks remarkably like the original. They will add on slightly to what was the original house--building a new master bedroom suite, and converting old bedrooms to kids rooms.

On the "Ask" show, they built a fence and fixed a shower. Great stuff. I love the way they go into an ordinary homes and carry out ordinary repairs. One homeowner had tried to clear a drain with chemicals, but the plumber (Richard) took the drain apart, and put in new pieces. Of course he has the right tools, but he also shows when a lot of strength is needed, and when to back off. A long time ago Tom the carpenter got a homeowner jack-hammering in his basement to put up new support beams.

The shows my wife watches and I don't are the decorating shows. The House Doctor, Ann Maurice, goes in to homes in England that are not selling. She tells the owner/seller that they have to remove all the personal memorabilia--the place is too cluttered, get rid of carpeting, and paint the place beige. Like ... a suite at the Holiday Inn. The Brits eat this up. They see a video confirming that their fellow Brits, when they are shown through, share Ann's taste: "Too cluttered, too many chairs, too much stuff, too much carpeting--it makes me think they'r hiding something." So even the Brits want their homes to look like rooms at the Holiday Inn, at least while they are selling.

Then Candace Barnes of Divine Design comes along. She's actually not opposed at all to rich, deep, and sometimes dark colours, rich fabrics like brocade, even in window treatments, carpets, and various objects that fill a space and the walls. So one evening (before I was asked to leave) I suggested that every home being sold needs two decorating jobs: Ann to turn the place beige, and utterly lacking in distinctive charactacter; Candace to give it the buyer's new and improved character. Two commissions, in addition to the realtor's.

Almost the first lines of Waugh, A Handful of Dust: "The fire never reached the bedrooms, I am afraid. Still, they are bound to need doing up, everything black with smoke and drenched in water and luckily they had that old-fashioned sort of extinguisher that ruins everything. One really cannot complain. The chief rooms were completely gutted and everything was insured."

The interior decorator. She also welcomes divorces because they often lead to two jobs. They are always promising a home--indeed your true home, closer to your heart than what you've had before; yet it is their interest to encourage dissatisfaction with what you've got, even if it has lasted only a short time. Their ideal clients are chronically or constantly homeless--and like it that way. Decoration, always looking forward to the next job, is destructive at least as much as constructive.

Excessively gloomy thoughts, I'm sure.

Leaders Who Read

I bought a dog magazine today, and somewhat surprisingly there is an ad in it that includes a quote from Harry Truman: "Good readers may not all become leaders, but leaders are all good readers." (See more here).

So much, then, for comparing Bush to Truman. Maybe Huey Long. I'm sure we'll come up with the right comparison eventually.

Who Would I Vote For?

If I had the vote in the U.S., in 2000 I would almost certainly have voted for Bush. Gore's book on the environment was pseudo-intellectualism at its creepiest, and the weird little lies, along with other things, seemed to confirm that he was some kind of puffed-up loser. Bush seemed promising.

Now I seem to have less respect for Bush all the time. If his defenders say he is not stupid, then they have to admit that he has spent most of his life being almost unbelievably lazy, unfocussed, incurious and poorly informed even about things on which he makes major decisions. Rather late in his life he has had some successes, and they can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand: the Texas Ranger; Governor of Texas; the 2000 election.

The Rangers: it was the golden age of shaking down taxpayers to support professional sports franchises. Bush put very little money into the team, but his contract specified that if he persuaded politicians and voters to cover virtually all costs, while reaping virtually no direct profits--leaving all that to the team's owners--then he stood to make huge bonuses. He succeeded, and he was well paid. Voters in Arlington pretty much ratified the whole unbelievable deal. And yes, capitalism means taking advantage of lawful opportunities, not asking too many questions about them. But is this something for a conservative or a Republican to be proud of?

Governor: apparently even in the summer of 2000, the tour guides in Texas would say: under the state Constitution, the Governor is a figurehead.

2000: Great good fortune of no formidable Republican opponent except for one who could be smeared as brain damaged because of his time as a POW; great good fortune of running against gormless Gore. Great good fortune of winning the electoral college despite losing the popular vote. Great good fortune of the Rehnquist court.

One of his defenders, I believe, has said Bush falls down stairs, but ... something. But ... he might be doing basically the right thing? In other words, these might be the stairs the U.S. wants to end up at the bottom of. Bush has found the stairs, and he knows he wants to go down. He just has no idea how, and he relies on staffers (as well as the hilarious con man Chalabi) who are not so much stupid or incompetent as full of nutty ideas. Kerry (it could be argued) hasn't found the stairs, isn't sure he wants to go down, and may even be afraid of the dark (whereas Bush perhaps can't tell the difference between dark and light).

Kevin Drum is mystified that the Bushies would let munitions be dispersed among the Iraqi population, after they had already let Zarqawi escape several times. In other words, they turned loose the guy who has become the major killer of Americans (and others) in Iraq, and they they made sure he had enough ammo to keep fighting for a long time. Drum says the Bushies acted, as opposed to spoke, as if they didn't care about WMDs at all.

I have long held that while they may have been both lying and clueless on the WMD/links to Al Qaeda business, they were probably more lying than clueless. (Maybe the President himself was more clueless than lying). They probably thought it would be pretty easy to get rid of Saddam and then there would be a lot of Iraqis able and willing to build, if not a liberal democracy, then a close facsimile--something close to Turkey, at least. This would be a great beachhead for the West in the Arab world.

Obviously there are a lot of specific issues in Iraq that have blown up in their faces--my guess they didn't think at all about more than about 1% of them--they trusted Chalabi and a few Power Point presentations by their think tank buddies. But they are trying to win a large struggle for hearts and minds. They do intend to support democracies, not just support convenient thugs, Kissinger-style. I guess.

I have a lot of sympathy for Ann Althouse, who seems to support Bush mainly because of the security issue. I must say, though, the "I'm a lovin' guy" episode that so impressed her still gives me the absolute creeps. What's love got to do with it?

Megan McCardle is also a smart individual. It's not a big surprise that she has endorsed Bush, but her reasoning still has some force: for his first fifteen years in the Senate (I guess: before he decided he had to be some kind of centrist to get elected President) Kerry was on the loony left. He still gives signs that he is owned by key Democratic stakeholders: the all-powerful seniors ("I won't raise the retirement age": why the hell not?), teachers unions, people who run--and benefit from--the existing welfare system. Who can forget the Department of Wellness? McCardle is totally opposed to expanding government provision of health care, and I'm not with her on that. (I'm not sure either Canada or the U.S. has the right mix of public and private dollars). Bush is almost certainly more of a free trader than Kerry, and that's important for Canada.

That leaves Mickey Kaus. Kerry will probably manage the war on terror a bit better than Bush now, even if he wouldn't have been better in the early stages. Also: Kaus doesn't expect Kerry to be better than Bush in any other way whatsoever. Whew.

So: Bush, I guess, despite a lot of things.

One Week to Go

If any events are truly of global significance, I guess U.S. presidential elections count--maybe this one in particular. In some ways Kerry is a centrist Democrat and Bush is a centrist Republican, yet the cultural differences of the true believers are also close the surface.

Will there be more shooting wars, or fewer?

I've just gone back to [link=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568491433/blogeasy-20]The Making of the President, 1960[/link].

One strange note. Emphasizing the uniqueness of it all, White says "Only one other major nation in modern history has ever tried to elect its leader directly by mass, free, popular vote. This was the Weimar Republic....Out of its experiment with the system it got Hitler." He says nothing like this is true of France; but they have direct election of the President. Maybe he means to emphasize that the U.S. vote is "once and for all," whereas the French have run-offs if necessary until someone wins a majority of the vote. (It is, er, a majority of the actual vote, not of an electoral college, that counts in France).


Anyway:

It was then, at 10:30, that ... the trouble began....then came Wisconsin, which Kennedy had stumped so furiously in March and now expected with certainty to carry--and Wisconsin was lost....Now from somewhere must come the last thirty electoral votes to make the victory a reality.,,,Only once had he shown emotion. It was Ohio that had caused him bitterness. He had moved through Ohio six times in the course of the campaign. On his last trip on October 17th, campaigning from Middletown through Dayton through Springfield through Columbus, it has been such a day of marvel and splendor as is reserved only for heroes and gods. The Ohioans had lined 113 miles of highway almost solidly, holding their children up to watch him, clutching at him, tearing at him, waving at him, shrieking at him, until his staff had feared for his safety. Yet now along this route, precisely in these cities, from Franklin County through Hamilton County, the Ohioans of the southern tier were showing that their hearts still belonged to Robert A. Taft and Richard M. Nixon. The candiidate had listened as the profile of Ohio's preference traced the biggest disappointment of his campaign, and slowly he rolled back his sleeve. His right hand, by the end of the campaign, had swollen with the handshaking of the months to grossly disproportionate size and he displayed it now--calloused, red, the scratches reaching as far as his elbow. He held up the inflamed hand, bare to the elbow, and said "Ohio did this to me--they did it there." Then he had rolled down the sleeve, had shaken his head, not understanding, and had become cool again, as ever.

Monkey Virus

Jay Ingram has a piece in the Toronto Star (not on line) dealing with speculation that AIDS crossed into the human population in Africa by way of polio vaccine, which was produced using monkey tissue. Simian Immuno-deficiency Virus (SIV) may have been present. This speculation got into the news again because Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and she has suggested that the launch of human AIDS in Africa might have been somehow deliberate.

As far as it goes, this seems to be nothing more than nutbar speculation--although according to Ingram, it does help to reveal that very little is known about how AIDS began.

There is still a bigger story, however, which Ingram doesn't mention. There is increasing evidence that a monkey virus (Simian Virus 40 or SV 40) included in "early" polio vaccine--in the 50s--has contributed to many types of cancer.

One remarkable example is mesothelioma--a cancer which was extremely rare until the 50s, and has shown something of an outbreak since then. It is generally associated with exposure to asbestos--although 20% of cases show no exposure to asbestos.

Then in August, Carbone and several colleagues published a major study providing a "mechanistic" explanation of how SV40 contributes to the uncontrolled growth of mesothelial cells. The key, they found, was the large number of "tumor suppressor" proteins found in the mesothelial cells that makes them unusually susceptible to SV40.

In most human cells, they said, the virus reproduces itself and kills the infected cell in the process. But in mesothelial cells, SV40 is especially attracted to the "tumor suppressor" proteins and binds to them, knocking them out of action. The virus then lives on in the cell.

The result, they said, is a rate of malignant cell transformation in tissue cultures 1,000 times higher than has ever been observed.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Carbone further explained that asbestos fibers appear to act as a co- carcinogen in mesothelioma by somehow suppressing the immune system's response, which is designed to kill the infected cells.

More of a ... Nuisance?

Glenn Reynolds, after quoting from Jim Dunnigan:

[blockquote]The end of Soviet support was a major blow to terrorism, which was nowhere near as much an authentic and spontaneous phenomenon as many have believed, or pretended. I hope that this [today's terrorism, with Al Qaeda very much weakened] will play out the same way. [/blockquote]

So: there's a strong possibility the U.S. isn't actually engaged in World War III, or something closely analogous to the Cold War itself (perhaps not even to the smaller war against terrorism that was waged in the shadow of the Cold War)?

Not a combination of World War II, the U.S. Civil War, Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings, and the race to Mars?

Chalabi's Raiders

Here's what struck me the most in the Knight-Ridder article on (the lack of) post-war planning in Iraq on the weekend:

Within 48 hours of their arrival in Baghdad in April, some of Chalabi's men, including members of his personal bodyguard force, began taking cars, bank accounts and real estate, said a senior military officer who received reports of the events. It became evident almost as quickly that Chalabi and other exiles had a larger political following in the Pentagon than they did in Iraq. Intelligence officials now charge that Chalabi or some of his senior aides were paid agents of Iran's intelligence service, and that Chalabi or his security chief provided classified U.S. military information to Iran. Chalabi has denied the allegation.

Global Warming, or Cooling, or Something

The famous "hockey stick"--which is supposed to demonstrate rapid global warming over the past century--may be the result of a mathematical mistake. Via the Corner.

Whose Side Are You On?

I'll start with Ann Althouse's comments on the new movie by the South Park boys, "Team America."

As Althouse says, the NYT is surprised to discover that even though the movie makes fun of the patriotic American action team, which can't seem to liberate Paris without blowing up the Louvre, the movie still shows a genuine American patriotism, even praise of American military might.

I think Parker and Stone have already said there is no good choice in the presidential election; it is between "a s..t sandwich and a s..t sandwich." (B.A.'s weblog--link to NYT now requires payment). Elsewhere (Rolling Stone) they have said that if they voted, they would cancel each other's vote--so they won't bother. But there is still something to this idea of South Park Republicans: the belief that the U.S. has a good system, all things considered--democracy, capitalism, a considerable degree of government intervention in the economy, a lot of laissez faire libertarianism on social issues. It's not a bad thing to try to spread this model around the world--especially in areas where the alternative is a hateful and violent form of fundamentalism. It's not helpful to have the administration wrap their actions in so much empty pomposity and dishonesty--while failing to achieve anything like Lincoln's or even Blair's rhetoric as to what it all means--but they still may be doing more good than harm.

Reading the new piece by William Langewiesche in the November [link=http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200411/langewiesche]Atlantic[/link] (not on line) on life in the Green Zone in Baghdad, it's difficult not to think of the Boy Scout in P.G. Wodehouse's Joy in the Morning. People keep getting hurt, accidentally, in the course of the Scout's good deeds. He feels badly about this, and keeps adding to the list of good deeds he owes people. It's not long before everyone he knows is begging him: please, no more good deeds.

And yet...an election has been held in Afghanistan, and women are enjoying at least some more rights than before (I guess it is always necessary to add: at least in Kabul). What conqueror has ever brought that about--has ever even tried to do so? Allawi is to some extent a proxy for the U.S. in Iraq. But he seems to be working hard to bring about a meaningful election, in which all major groups in the country participate. He has negotiated with the Sadr forces: if they give up their arms, they can be granted an amnesty for past deeds and participate in building a new government. Otherwise they will be treated as criminals. A similar deal is being offered in Fallujah. This may not work, but the intention seems right. At the least, (and here goes a Vietnam analogy again), replacing Saddam with Allawi is a lot better than replacing Diem with Thieu.

FrontPage has an interesting debate on why the left hates Bush, even when some of his accomplishments have been the kind you would expect the left to hail. As Glenn Reynolds asks, why is it that so many people are not really anti-war at all--just on the anti-American side? Of course this is reminiscent of the Cold War. Some of the lefties can say "we used to talk about freedom" but in fact they would defend any Communist regime, no matter how repressive. I can remember both the Marxist-Leninists and the Maoists handing out leaflets. As more and more became known about the mass murders, imprisonments and tortures carried out by both the Soviet and Maoist governments, attention shifted to Enver Hoxa's Albania--the great advantage being that nothing was known about it. Fidel and Che, of course, have always had a place in the hearts of many humanities professors.

I guess there is still a lingering attachment to Marxist analysis: capitalism can only lead to the mass starvation and suffering of the workers, i.e. the majority; this terrible development must be impending soon, if it is not happening already; the Third World may be a better place to find a proletariat, since there is at least a mixture of old-fashioned oligarchy and frontier capitalism; whatever is the case "at home," in foreign policy the U.S. must always be doing more harm than good.

Here is someone (Elinor Burkett) who is inclined to give Bush credit for improving some problems, somewhere:

[blockquote]I agree with [Joshua] Frank that U.S. foreign policy was an atrocious tangle of human rights violations, exploitation and oppression for most of the 20th century. And, certainly, neither by design nor by result did these policies liberate anyone. [/blockquote]

[blockquote]But if it is true, as [Robert] Jensen would have us believe, that the "ideals of solidarity and freedom" remain at the core of left politics," how can he ignore the reality that the women of Afghanistan are no longer forced to wear burqas, that they are no longer being stoned to death in the old Olympic stadium? Is that caring about freedom?[/blockquote]

There are dozens of things that make me angry with George Bush. But I find myself even angrier with those who profess to favor freedom yet refuse to acknowledge its advance simply because they can't stand its architect. My female friends in Kabul don't give a damn whether Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in order to liberate them. They care that they have found a bit of space from which to build a future.

What My Students are Thinking

I'm trying very hard to learn the names of students in my class, and get some real discussion going. The latter is partly a means to the former--when they want to speak, I ask their names.

The class is really bigger than the ideal--there must still be close to 70 people attending. Yesterday's class was on federalism, but after the break I asked them what they thought of the Bush-Kerry debate (I didn't see it myself--I was preparing for class). The discussion turned out to be mostly about health care. Many people said they are glad to have a system in which anyone can take a sick child to hospital or to a doctor's office--no questions asked. The implication was that American voters shouldn't be so resistant to such a model. A few students defended the U.S. model quite vociferously--either because the good care that people with good insurance get is generally so good (and I confirmed that to an extent from my experience) or because letting individuals choose is so important. (I asked the student who said that if he is a libertarian, and he said yes).

The passion around this issue was quite obvious.

Next week: Bush v. Gore. I've asked them to come prepared to argue that either Bush or Gore should have won.