GHOST STORY

As soon as my head hit the pillow, I began to dream. I was with my friend Sarah in her home on Catherine Street in South Philly, and we were walking from room to room in her rowhouse, which was completely empty of furniture. Neither of us spoke. There was no sound at all, not even the clicking of our shoes on her finished pine floors. Occasionally, our eyes would meet and she would flash me the smile I had seen from her a thousand times. I had last seen it through her oxygen mask. “Hey, Dragon,” I had said. “We've got to get you out of here.” And she smiled at hearing her nickname.

A week after that visit to her hospital room was the last time I saw her. She was still at Pennsylvania Hospital, and still in intensive care. She was alone in a room, supine on her bed, snoring rhythmically, hooked up to tubes and monitors that beeped quietly in the twilight. I watched her for a few minutes, then stepped out and found the nurse.

“I'm a friend of Sarah's,” I said. “What can you tell me? Is she...still there?”

“Sarah is not conscious any longer,” she told me. “We met with her family yesterday and treatment has been stopped, except for measures that will make her comfortable.”

I went back into the room and watched her breathe. Her cheeks were sunken into her face and her skin was pale and paper-thin. There wasn't much left of her anymore. Later, I learned she had lasted only a few more hours.

The dreams came about a week later, and though they were not unpleasant or frightening, I could not escape them. The first time, I awakened, shook my head, stared into the darkness for a minute, and then laid my head back upon the pillow. Instantly, I was back in her empty house with her next to me, walking through the house, floating effortlessly up the stairs and down again, and then the smile. Always the smile.

It continued all night. Though the dreams themselves were not nightmarish in any way, I began to feel trapped in them, and each time I awoke, I felt more and more uneasy. To banish them, I got out of bed, went to the john, checked the time, looked out the window, and consciously thought of other things in the hope my dreams would change. Sledding, fish in an aquarium, Chase Utley turning a double-play---anything to get my head out of that rowhouse. None of it worked. As soon as I closed my eyes, there she was, next to me---my drinking buddy, my racetrack buddy---now silent, now a wraith, but still my companion.

I awoke in the morning hardly rested at all and headed to the kitchen for a cup of strong coffee. I am a rational person. I am sometimes criticized for being too rational. However, I could not dismiss from my mind the legend or old wives' tale or whatever-it-is that the recent dead wander among us for a while before they find their rest. I am aware there are psychological explanations for what I experienced, but the feeling persists that this was not entirely a dream or a series of dreams. The feeling persists that it was Sarah.

The next night, I went to bed with some trepidation, but as I settled in and the haze of sleep began to descend upon me, I suddenly knew it was over, and that she would not return. “Goodnight, Sarah,” I whispered. “Goodbye, Dragon.”

There was no response.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

SENDING A MESSAGE

As I write this, President Obama dithers on about what sort of “message” he wishes to convey to the Syrian government. He says he strongly disapproves of Assad's recent use of chemical weapons on his people in an attack that killed hundreds and injured thousands, and he seems, at a minimum, intent in shooting a Cruise missile at something. Bill Clinton, in a similar one-off kind of military adventure, once blew up a couple of goat-herder shacks in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Africa, and maybe that sort of manly gesture would suffice. Maybe not. With Obama, it can be hard to tell what he really cares about or thinks is important.

A guy like Bashar al-Assad is a problem. He's a truly bad guy, he's a thug, and he thinks nothing of committing any sort of atrocity to maintain his control over Syria. But he doesn't respond to conventional sorts of diplomatic pressure or economic sanctions, and even military action is probably going to have more of an effect on his already-suffering people than it will on him. So what should Obama do?

It's not the first time America has faced a problem like this. Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein posed similar dilemmas. Saddam was more than similar---like Assad, he used poison gas not only in the Iran-Iraq War but also against thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabia.

The answer is obvious, but rarely gets said---you've got to kill the bastard. It makes no sense to destroy military assets or the poor soldiers who are forced to carry out the sick agenda of monsters like this. If Obama wants to send an unambiguous message that using chemical weapons is wrong, all he has to do is kill Assad. No explanation would even be necessary. And if the world's only superpower made it a policy to kill any person responsible for using chemical weapons, the guy who replaces Assad is going to be extremely reluctant to follow in his murderous footsteps.

Consider Exodus. Now, I don't wish to second guess God's decision in these matters, but instead of the frogs and locusts and boils and stuff, let's just suppose Moses and God had showed up at the Pharaoh's house one day and said, “Yo Pharaoh, let these Jews go---and I mean NOW!” And let's further suppose the Pharaoh said no, God vaporized him on the spot, and then trained his divine gaze on the Pharaoh’s son (who would now be the new Pharaoh).

“Congratulations,” God says to the kid. “Now...what about those Jews?”

There is a myth that our law forbids a president from killing a foreign leader. This is not true. There are several Executive Orders which any president can withdraw or ignore at his pleasure. Then there is the War Crimes Act of 1996, which does not explicitly ban the killing of a guy like Assad. And let's face a more important practical point: Obama doesn't care what “the law” says. He rarely does. If he wants to kill Assad, the last thing he would ever worry about is the law.

But while the solution may be obvious, there are several reasons American presidents do not consider the option of killing a head of state. First, there is the modern idea of sovereignty. It used to be considered perfectly kosher to kill the other guy's king or hold him for ransom. (In 1192, Richard the Lion-hearted was captured by the Duke of Austria and held for ransom for more than a year.) The Congress of Vienna in 1815, however, in addition to sorting out the Papal States and the Swiss cantons and the detritus of the Napoleonic Wars, established a new tradition whereby heads of state agreed not to kill each other. There were still going to be wars, of course---no one had any delusions on that score---but decapitation of the state (or the duchy or the principality or the city-state or whatever) was forbidden.

The result, to this day, is a tacit reciprocal live-and-let-live understanding among world leaders. It makes no sense in terms of any identifiable moral principle, of course. In terms of legitimacy as rulers, Angela Merkel and Barack Obama have exactly nothing in common with Kim Jong-Un and Bashar al-Assad, and the recognition of the latter thugs as “government leaders” at all is difficult to justify. It is as if, in the 1950's, we had felt compelled to treat the Gambino family as a respected voice of the Italian-American community in New York City.

Yet this is how the world treats the various mass killers and torturers around the planet who manage to kill enough people and torture enough people so their local opposition dissolves in fear. They get welcomed to the UN and they get a spot at international conferences and they get really good seats to the Olympics. We call them bad names, of course, but the names are not that bad, and other world leaders pretend to respect them. Nobody ignores them or mocks them or sends them away and says, “No. Sorry. Go home and tell your stupid country to send us a real president.” And why not? What was gained (for example) by treating Muammar Gaddafi like a sort-of Dwight Eisenhower in drag for all those years? In geopolitical terms, why not laugh at them and refuse to take them seriously?

Another reason legitimate world leaders take a guy like Assad seriously, or pretend to, is...well, this is a guess, but maybe even the real ones like Merkel and Obama feel like their own hands are not as clean as they would like them to be. They know what deals they have had to make, of course, and some of those deals may look a little dirty in the cold light of day, and they wonder how much better they truly are than the psycho-killers of planet earth. They're wrong about this, of course. Barack Obama is not, morally, in the same universe as Kim Jong-Un. But we can understand how that thought could cross his mind.

But while we may understand the refusal to target Assad (or Gaddafi or Hussein) personally, American presidents make a fundamental political error by failing to do so. Several, in fact. First, they refuse to take advantage of the primary advantage democratically-elected rulers have over despots---legitimacy. While the popularity of a particular American president may rise or fall, they all achieve their position because, at one time, they were chosen by the American people. They got more votes than anybody else. This process is respected, which means that the individual and his office is respected even by many who dislike everything about him. An American president is, in a sense, an avatar of America itself. Many people who loath Barack Obama would view any attempt to physically harm him as an attack on the American system. I would view it as an attack on me. This is why any attack on a president (or even a former president) would be met by great vengeance and furious anger. A direct assault on an American president would be a grave strategic error for any foreign power.

Killing Assad, on the other hand, would have no such effect. A guy like him is never mourned by many and never for very long. Most Syrians would be happy to see him go, and any desire for payback would be limited to a very small number of his partisans and courtiers. Most importantly, killing Assad would not be viewed as an attack on Syria itself, but rather as the elimination of one particularly abhorrent individual.

Democracies have many disadvantages in military engagements with dictators. In a democracy, for example, it can be very difficult to forge the kind of political consensus that is needed to wage war, while all a dictator has to do is mobilize the army and start shooting. The asymmetry in the legitimacy of a dictator and a popularly-elected leader, however, is a tremendous advantage for the Obamas of the world, and it is foolish to throw it away. Assad can be killed, and apart from a few tut-tuts in certain editorial pages, no one will object.

So why not do it?

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

THIS AND THAT III

Divorce is a specialized area of the law and it's not one I ever learned much about. However, there is one piece of advice I offer guys heading into a split. The advice is always ignored, usually to the regret of the poor suckers I offer it to. I tell them to get a lawyer immediately and do everything the lawyer says.

Unless the reason for the break-up of the marriage is that the woman has suddenly become a meth addict or has had affairs with a dozen of the husband's closest friends, the guy in a divorce is going to feel guilty. He's going to feel the divorce is his fault. He will feel that way if he has a new girlfriend, of course, but he will also feel guilty if he has simply grown sick of his wife for shrewish behavior, eternal complaining, uncontrolled spending habits or a doubling in her avoirdupois. Most guys will blame themselves for a divorce unless the wife actually has outstanding fugitive warrants against her from three states, recent children fathered by other men, and multiple STDs. That's how guys are. It's how they think.

Because of these feelings of guilt and failure, guys often do stupid things if allowed to negotiate their own divorces. They will often give up far more of their joint financial assets than they need to, for example. Every state has rules about property settlements and they are not all that complicated. Child support can add a level of complexity to the equation, but again, there are standard rules to be applied, and divorce lawyers are accustomed to dealing with them.

We all know guys, however, who will say, “Let her have it all---I just want to get it over with.” I think a man will take this attitude in the belief it will ease his conscience and will avert emotional unpleasantness with the soon-to-be ex-wife, though neither of these things ever happens. If he feels like a jerk for ruining his marriage, he will still feel like a jerk, and if the soon-to-be ex-wife hates him, she will still hate him, EVEN IF HE GIVES HER THE SAILBOAT. It is likely, in fact, that she will hate him MORE if he gives her the sailboat because she will understand he is doing it purely out of guilt, and she will conclude he has more to be guilty about than she had previously assumed.

It's all about emotion.

Men are aware that “emotions” happen during divorce proceedings. They know it from TV and movies. Unfortunately, most men don't know what an “emotion” actually is, and they certainly have no idea how women deal with them. In any divorce, in other words, men understand there is a minefield to be crossed, but it is a rare guy who has any of the tools he needs to cross it. This is because, at the most elementary level, guys don't know what emotions are. The vast majority of perfectly normal men would classify an urgent desire to urinate as an “emotion,” for example. And if you ask a man for a list of emotions, he would almost certainly include the following:

a) the adrenalin rush of beating a point-spread with a last-minute field goal,

b) the feeling he gets when he sees the newly-hired 22-year-old receptionist swinging her ass down the hallway,

c) the pride he feels in getting 36 mpg in his new Honda.

Women don't make these mistakes. They don't get confused about emotions because they begin studying them in the cradle. Women are never ever going to confuse the fact that a guy is a jerk with the fact he is offering them a sailboat, no matter how much they may want the sailboat. They will take the sailboat, of course, BUT THEY WILL NEVER FORGET YOU SCREWED THE BABYSITTER, AND THEY WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR IT.

My point is that there is no reason to give a woman a dime more than she is entitled to under applicable law. It won't buy you anything. Do what the law says and then be done with it. Do not go to some mediation program where you sit in a room with your soon-to-be ex-wife and a sociologist and discuss what your needs are. Do not, under any circumstances, engage in yoga. The divorce means at least as much to you as it does to your wife, but for a guy, trying to “care” in acceptable female ways only costs money.

Give some of that money to a lawyer instead. A good one. When getting a divorce, do not try to economize on legal costs and do not wait. Hire a lawyer. Immediately.

**

I like Bruce Springstein. I have never put him at the very top of the rock & roll pantheon, but I have listened to his music, and enjoyed it, for years.

But maybe I'm done. After forty years, the character he plays is worn out. I mean, the guy is a billionaire and he's never had what you would call a real job his whole life. Instead, he's had money for nothing and his chicks for free, and the working-class hero persona has become just so frayed and dreary that it's hard to listen to him anymore. It may be too late for him to invent a new schtick, but if he can't, he should just hang them up.

At this point, he has way more in common with Dick Cheney than he does with the young rocker just breaking into clubs that he pretends to be. Not that there's anything wrong with Dick Cheney, you understand. I just have no desire to hear him sing “Rosalita.”

**

I recently watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a documentary about a man who has been obsessed with preparing perfect sushi from the time he was 9 years old. He is now 86. He's a charming eccentric, an oddball, a loonie---but his 10-seat restaurant has three stars from Michelin. We all know having three stars means it's a good restaurant, but it actually has a more specific meaning, according to the Michelin folks. Three stars reflects their judgment that it is worth traveling to Japan for the sole purpose of eating in Jiro's restaurant.

Americans used to look to the British, with their bird-watchers and train-spotters and other assorted nuts, for the eccentric. Now, that country seems largely a nation of drunks, and the ones who are not puking in the gutter march in lockstep with the nanny-state fascist zeitgeist. There just don't seem to be many original ideas coming out of the UK these days. In terms of intellectual life, it appears to be just another piece of Europe, where all forms of creativity seem to have disappeared with the emergence of ABBA in 1974.

All our eccentrics are now Japanese.

For many years, the only Japanese people I knew were rather straight-laced corporate types from Sony and Toyota and other outposts of Japan Inc. Then, a few years ago, through my son, I became acquainted with a young woman named Naoko and the various members of her posse. Getting to know them has made me realize there is a silliness of unfathomable depth at the heart of Japanese culture, a silliness so profound that foreigners like me can be amused by it but can never fully understand it. And this has always been true, apparently. Even in the past, in more traditional Japan, though there was a great deal of pressure to conform, there was also an acceptance of, and even love for, the oddball.

**

Media F/X, Inc., our family corporation, just got a notice from the city of Philadelphia about a change in the rate for the Wage Tax, which is deducted from the pay of all employees who either live in Philly or work in Philly. For wages paid after June 30, 2013, the rate has been slashed from 3.928 % to 3.924%. For every $1000 our corporation pays Sandy, I used to send the city $39.28, but now I need send them only $39.24. In other words, we save four cents on every thousand bucks. By the time we get around to paying her $100,000 (and it will take a while), we will be saving $4.00.

I may be exaggerating slightly, but it seems to me that every tax collected by Philadelphia goes up every year. The real estate taxes certainly do, and there are twenty other levies---on sales, on parking, on business profits, on business income, on drinks sold in bars, on real estate transfers, hotel rooms, valet parking, amusements, billboards and car rentals---which, if they are not jacked up in a particular year, certainly never go down. Except for the wage tax. Every year it is cut by a few thousandths of a percentage point. This happens so that every mayor can claim he cut taxes, claim he's “business-friendly,” claim he's doing everything he possibly can to attract new jobs to our unemployed town.

In a general way, everybody likes tax cuts, but this is silly. Any change in tax rates or tax rules carries “compliance costs,” meaning that somebody has to spend time calculating the taxes, paying them, changing the software that cranks out the paychecks, paying the fines, dealing with the enforcement actions that happen when you pay the wrong amount, and so on. Lowering the Philadelphia wage tax by 4 cents per thousand dollars of wages costs the citizens of this fair city far more than Philly businesses and employees can ever save from the rate reduction. It is a testament to the dysfunctional governance in our city that even a tax cut winds up costing us money.

**

For years, I thought the misuse of the word “refute” was confined to a single headline-writer at the Philadelphia Daily News because headlines in the Daily News were the only place I witnessed this particular outrage. I would read “Clinton Refutes Claim of Affair with Lewinski,” or “Bonds Refutes Steroid Use,” or “NJ Troopers Refute Racial Profiling of Drivers,” but then the articles themselves would correctly inform me that Clinton and Bonds and the troopers had simply “denied” the charges against them.

“Refute” has an entirely different meaning. To refute a proposition is to prove it false with evidence, logic, mathematics, or whatever else is required. The statement “2 + 2 = 5” can be refuted. The claim that Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinski could theoretically be refuted, but it would require mountains of documentary and other proof they had never been in the same room together or spoken on the phone to each other. Also, in the process of refuting the claim, Bill's denial would have no evidentiary value at all. “Refute” and “deny” have two entirely different meanings.

Anyway, I assumed the DN headline-writer was just one more indication that America's journalism schools are now simply academies designed to implant leftist beliefs and no longer teach any of the tools a kid needs to commit actual journalism. But it seemed to be a local outbreak of idiocy and was not, apparently, contagious.

Then I started seeing it in other places. I now see it regularly in newspapers, internet articles and blogs. Today, I saw it in a FoxNews.com piece entitled “GAO opens investigation into Planned Parenthood's use of taxpayer money.” The organization had been accused of fraud in billing a state health program. The article then continued:

“However, when finalizing the settlement, which included state and federal recovery money, Planned Parenthood strongly refuted claims it has frequently over-billed the system.” (Emphasis added.)

Obviously, PP didn't refute the claims, they merely denied them. If they had refuted them, the article would not have been written. “Strongly refuted” is a particularly annoying misuse, so much so that I suspect FoxNews.com did it on purpose just to drive me crazy. “Refute” is an absolute. Something is either refuted or it ain't. The verb will not take a comparative like “strongly.”

So goodbye, refute. You were a good word. Now I guess I'm stuck with “disprove” since “refute” can be taken for a mere denial. Still, it won't be the same. “Refute” is something we first encounter in high school geometry, but it goes much deeper than that. The idea of refutation is as old as logical thinking. “Refute” is something Aristotle did. ”Refute” is something that happens in the Talmud after a few thousand rabbis natter at each other for five hundred years. When you've refuted something you can shout “Aha!” and slam your scabbard on the banquet table. Sometimes women swoon. “Disprove” just doesn't capture it.

**

We have all heard of the “six flags over Texas,” if only because of the amusement park. It's a trivia question: what are the six flags that have flown over Texas? (These are all flags of sovereign governments; the current state flag of Texas doesn't count.) While looking up something else, I recently learned that Laredo, Texas had one more. There have been seven flags over Laredo.

In 1840, when Santa Anna was busy enforcing his dictatorial rule over what had formerly been the Republic of Mexico, a secessionist movement arose among Mexican patriots calling themselves the Republic of the Rio Grande. It lasted for about ten months, but it lasted long enough to design a flag, which flew over Laredo, its capital city.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

HUMA

Today, the little sicko Anthony Weiner admitted that he continued sending pictures of his junk to internet girlfriends long after he resigned from the House and long after he and his wife put on their media show about his repentance and their healing and so on.  Huma Abedin, his wife (and Hillary Clinton's closest advisor), was by his side at the press conference assuring America she was still standing by her man.


Many women, I think, witnessed Huma's performance with pity or disdain, asking "How can she stay with that beast?"  That was pretty much the reaction of my wife and my sister, for example.


If Huma Abedin really is a deep-cover spy for the Muslim Brotherhood, however, sticking with Anthony is the only sensible play.  If the marriage is merely part of her cover, why abandon him until it is absolutely clear his political career is over?  Weiner may still be elected Mayor of NYC; in fact, he probably will be.  It seems, for some reason, that Mr. Weiner could stagger down Broadway gibbering like a chimpanzee and brandishing his privates at passersby without eliciting the least measure of disapprobation from the voting public.  Such is the level of sophistication in the post-modern Big Apple!


So why dump him now?  Sticking with the Weiner not only gives the Brotherhood a path to influencing the mayor of America's biggest city, it also tends to cement Huma's sisterly ties to Hillary, who famously stuck by her own horndog of a hubby.  For Huma to leave Anthony now would be a silent rebuke to Hillary Clinton when Huma's path to Chief of Staff in the Hillary Administration seems closer than ever.  If Huma is a spy, it would be foolish for her to leave Weiner now.


Huma Abedin's actions today in supporting her husband only provide further evidence in support of the conspiracy theories that have followed her since she first appeared in 1996 with seemingly unlimited financial resources and a foggy personal history involving Islamist Saudi activists.


Copyright2013MichaelKubacki  

MR. & MRS.---A Review of the Literature and a Rant on Epistemology

The other day, somebody said to me, “Ya know, I think brides today are taking their husband's names more than they used to. It's a trend. I'm calling it a trend.” I wondered whether it is true.

Now you might think, as I did, that you can simply type “bride maiden name” or some such into your browser and all the data you seek would pop up more-or-less instantly. We believe this because we are typically inundated with more data than we can possibly use or absorb so we just assume that whatever we want is out there somewhere. The internet is on all the time. There are a thousand channels on cable. Talk radio runs 24/7. The chatter never stops. The flow of information never even slows down. And yet....

Nick Silver's latest book is called “The Signal and the Noise,” and I don't think I'm giving much away by telling you that part of his message is that in the search for knowledge, there has always been more “noise” than “signal” and that today the level of noise is sometimes so high that any signal is almost impossible to find. So while we tend to think the answer to any question is out there somewhere, well, just try finding it.

Or as you kids say, “It's complicated.”

One problem is the meaning of the word “name.” What is a name, anyway? Is it what's on your driver's license or what your mom calls you or what it says on your electric bill, or is it what your fellow astrophysicists call you when you deliver a lecture in Vienna? Many women employ what researchers call “situational name use,” which can last for a short while or for their entire lives. And of course, the options for names are numerous. In addition to the basic maiden name or husband's name, there are women who hyphenate the two and women who use them both without hyphenating and women who choose an entirely new name and women who remarry but keep their first husband's name as a middle name and women who remarry and simply keep their first husband's name as their surname (to the chagrin of the second husband). And with situational name use, a woman may be known by two or three or four of these possibilities depending on whether she is having Thanksgiving dinner with her in-laws or performing brain surgery or dishing out ice cream at the PTA meeting. So if you are a demographer or a statistician or an anthroponomastician and you're trying to study what women call themselves, the first thing you have to do is figure out what the word “name” means.

Also, this may be one of those areas that is so tainted with identity politics and self-interest and cover-ups that the only numbers out there exist solely because somebody has an ax to grind. There are are lot of “official” statistics like that. Crime numbers, for example. You can never believe the Police Commissioner or the FBI when they tell you armed robberies are down 23%. Not only are they predisposed to reduce the number of crimes to make themselves look good, but they have no idea how many armed robberies there were, they only know what people voluntarily tell them. The guy sitting next to you on the bus is a MUCH better source of information on whether armed robberies have increased. Rapes and burglaries too. The only thing you can believe the Police Commissioner or the FBI about is murders, because murders leave dead bodies and dead bodies are difficult to hide.

But the biggest problem is that studies of women's surnames tend to be snapshots of a particular moment in time when the study was performed. One of the most comprehensive studies of women's surnames was done by the American Community Survey, which is part of the US Census Bureau. Name use for 250,000 native-born American women was compiled in 2004 and the results were published (your tax dollars at work!) in a dreary little article called “Women's Marital Naming Choices in a Nationally Representative Sample,” and if you want to know how many women took their new husband's name or used a hyphenated name in 2004, there is no better source. But I don't really care how many women took their husband's name or used hyphenated surnames in 2004 unless you can also tell me how many women did that in 1990 and 1993 and 1997 and 1999 and 2003 and 2007 and 2009. I'm looking for a trend, remember? I want to know if there are more women taking hubby's name today, or fewer.

That's the problem with the Facebook/Daily Beast study of women's surnames as well. This is very recent (2011) and it studied 14 million women between the ages of 20 and 79 who got married in the US and were active on Facebook at the time of the survey. But it only tells you about what was happening in 2011. In addition, you can't really compare the ACS women from 2004 with the Facebook women from 2011 because the women are different and the methodology was different, and the universe of women on Facebook is very different from the universe of women in the Census database, so we are left with snapshots that can't be compared to each other.

If you are looking for a trend, there is only one useful study out there, but it concerns a group of women who are so special and strange and rich and well-educated and unusual that I have never met even one of them. This is the study of women whose marriages were announced in the New York Times. Since 1980, the Times has routinely asked these brides what name they were planning to use. There are now 33 years of data.

As a database of “American women,” of course, it's a ridiculous sample. The daddies of these women are CEOs and partners in important law firms and doctors and Congressmen and Nobel Prize winners. The girls are not merely college graduates, they went to Ivy schools or the Seven Sisters, with maybe a little Sorbonne thrown in there for seasoning (do rich girls still do that?). They never worked at Wal-Mart or dished up a plate of hash browns at a diner. Almost all of them are white. None of them marry professional athletes. I mean, they ain't typical.

But they do span the years, and if you want to compare girls who went to Princeton or Wellesley in 1980 with girls who went to Princeton or Wellesley in 2005, this is where you can do it. The NYT is very strict about their standards, which have not changed since 1980. They ask every woman what name she intends to use and her choice appears in the announcement. (If she is uncertain, she is referred to only as “the bride” or by some other generic name.)

And the study of NYT brides is eye-opening. It was done by Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim (guys apparently never study this stuff), and it sampled about 300 brides per year in NYT announcements from 1980 to 2001. And guess what? Contrary to my friend's suspicion, women are keeping their maiden names more often than they used to. In 1980, only 10% of these NYT babes kept their maiden names. The number then doubled around 1984 and hung steady at about 20% until 1998. Then, suddenly, the percentage shot up to 34% by 2002. Since then, we don't know. C. Goldin and M.Shim (if those are still their names), don't tell us.

So what are we to make of all this? When my friend (OK, it was actually my sister), said she thought brides were keeping hubby's name more often than they used to, I looked into it because I suspected she was correct. Now I just don't know. The available data from the NYT suggests my sister is wrong but these NYT brides are not exactly typical of anything at all, and the data stops in 2002, so how do we know what happened in the last eleven years? We don't. Maybe my sister is right and the eggheads who study this stuff just haven't caught up with the new reality.

The real lesson for me is in the flimsiness and unreliability of the data, and this is a lesson we need to learn over and over. We want truth whether it is out there or not so we think we have found it when all we have really found is noise. A few days ago, Seattle's Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center published its findings that omega-3 fish oil consumption is linked to a 71% increase in the incidence of “high-grade” (the worst kind) of prostate cancer. Who, after all the infomercials and magazine articles and advice from doctors, saw that one coming? A day later, the CDC reported that despite what your doctor has been telling you, there is no reason for you to reduce your salt intake. This comes only a few months after Michael Bloomberg's National Salt Reduction Initiative persuaded 20 of America's biggest food companies (e.g., Kraft, Goya, Heinz, Target), to reduce the salt in their products. The uncritical acceptance of scare-stories from “researchers” or politicians looking to make a name for themselves (and a few bucks) tends to be viewed as a victimless crime, but it never is. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT and the deaths of millions in the Third World. Dr. Oz and Prevention Magazine and Al Gore have a ways to go before they achieve Rachel's body count, but the day is young. Nothing good ever comes from allowing the hucksters to exploit our very human desire to know, to believe, to learn the secrets. They worm their way into your heart by persuading you they care about you. They don't. Actually, they think you're stupid.

So don't believe. Believe only in God. For everything else, demand a double blind study.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

SKYNET, SNOWDEN, AND THE NSA

We now know, from Edward Snowden's act of civil disobedience or treason or whistle-blowing, that the National Security Agency has gathered records of telephone calls and emails and internet activity and God-knows what else and they are running complex computer programs on this data in order to figure out whether I am communicating with my jihadi friends in Yemen or those guys in the militia that I used drink beer with and shoot tin cans with at the town dump outside of Dexter, Michigan. There are conflicting stories about what else the NSA is doing. Does Prism allow them to read my emails as I type them? When I ask my buddy in Vegas to put fifty beans on the Patriots in the 2014 Superbowl, will it go on my “permanent record”---the one the nuns started keeping on me in 1955?

Sometimes, when I get one of those emails asking if I want to buy a new product that will make my willy bigger, I reply with a photo of my joint and ask them for their honest opinion on whether it's big enough. Is there somebody in the 12^th sub-basement of that fortress in the Utah desert who is looking at that email right now???? And if so, did she recently graduate from Northwestern University with a major in political science?

The constitutional argument will be an interesting one, though its resolution will depend on the facts of the situation, and it's far from certain we will ever find out what they are. Defenders of the NSA claim these are simply business records from various phone companies and have nothing to do with the citizens who originally made the calls and generated the records. The righteously outraged, however, argue the NSA actions are the equivalent of the British “general warrants” that the 4^th Amendment was written specifically to forbid. “General warrants” allowed the Crown, with no particular justification, to show up at your house or hovel and toss the place, looking for contraband or treasonous materials.

At the moment, based on our current knowledge on what has been done, both arguments seem a bit extreme, though plausible. I look forward to seeing Scalia going toe-to-toe with Ginsburg on it. But there's another question, anterior to the constitutionality of the fortress and Muffy looking at my johnson. And it's a question that is not getting a lot of attention. To wit: why? Or if you prefer: pourquoi? Why are the feds going to all this trouble and building all these buildings and beating up all the telephone and internet companies for the data and sticking all the recent Northwestern graduates into cubicles deep beneath the Wasatch Range and spending a bazillion dollars doing it?

And some of the answers are obvious, I suppose. They're spending the money because they like to spend money and it's not their money anyway---it actually belongs to me and you and the Chinese. And they're beating up the communications industry because they do this with every industry. They did it with Big Tobacco and then they did it with Big Pharma and then they did it with Big Oil and Big Aerospace and Big Food. They took over the medical business and the student loan business and they're not done yet. Big Guns is still out there, for example. Maybe they're saving it for Hillary.

But why this? Why my phone records? Why my emails? Why everybody's phone records and emails? What's the point of all this?

And the standard reply, on the rare occasion anyone inquires, is that the Obama Administration, just like the Bush Administration that preceded it, is trying to catch terrorists. Democrats and Republicans both say that's why the government is examining photographs of my pecker. Here's Mike Rogers, for example, commenting on the NSA meta-data vacuuming project. He's a Republican from Michigan, and he's the Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

“One of the things we're charged with is keeping America safe and keeping our civil liberties and privacy intact. I think we have done both....”

---Mike Rogers, June 9, 2013

For me, this the hardest piece of the story to swallow, that the Obama Administration is doing all this to catch terrorists. Where is the evidence to support this statement, other than the self-serving pronouncements of everybody who is involved in the damn thing? Where is there any indication they actually care about catching terrorists? In fact, doesn't it seem that the apprehension of terrorists is pretty much the last thing on their minds?

Let's start with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who you may know better as the Underwear Bomber. Umar was the genius who tried to detonate his shorts aboard Northwest Flight #253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. Though he managed to set himself and part of the passenger cabin on fire, no one was killed in the incident, so we count it as a triumph of American intelligence anti-terrorist smartness. But was it?

British authorities had alerted the US about Umar six weeks before Christmas and his own father had warned a couple of CIA agents around the same time. (Dad is not nobody, by the way. He was described in one article as “the richest man in Africa,” so he appears to be the sort of VIP that governments will at least listen to when he has something important to say.) US authorities knew that Umar had been radicalized and had come under the spell of American/Yemeni jihad-mentor Anwar al-Awlaki (now deceased, thanks be to Allah, and thanks also to an Obama-directed drone strike).

And then...nothing happened. His visa remained intact. His name never appeared on the Terrorist Screening Database or the No-Fly List. Nothing. He bought a one-way ticket to the Motor City. He paid cash. And then he strolled onto an airplane with junk in his shorts and nobody stopped him. “Hey, America,” we can imagine him thinking, “I got your Christmas present right here!”

So here's the question: if this Administration really really really cares about catching terrorists, HOW THE HELL DID THEY MISS UMAR? The bad guys don't get any easier to find than him, do they?

Then there's Major Hasan, another known disciple (like Umar and like some of the 9-11 plotters) of Anwar al-Awlaki. The Army knew that Major Hasan's lectures on psychiatry often devolved into diatribes against infidels and that his business cards identified him not only as a US Army psychiatrist but also as a “Soldier of Allah.” Yet for some reason, he was never identified as a threat until the day he mowed down thirteen people at Ft. Hood. So again, if you're looking for jihadists and Islamists like you say you are, how the hell do you miss a major in the US Army who loudly opposes America's military involvement in the Afghan war because we are killing Muslims? Just asking, you know.

Then, most recently, we have Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers. In April of 2011, two full years before their spree, the Russian government started warning us about them and about Zubeidat, their loving mom, Chechnya's answer to Donna Reed. Russians are apparently not known for providing this sort of friendly cooperation, so this in itself should have been a signal that somebody, somewhere, should pay attention. But, of course, nobody did. Tamerlan's name went into a “database” and that was the end of it. The Russians even put Tamerlan under surveillance when he spent six months in a rebellious and unstable region called Dagestan, and they asked US intelligence to keep an eye on the family in case they decided to travel some more. Sorry. We couldn't be bothered. And then the bombs went off on Boylston Street.

So the question remains: what is the purpose of PRISM and the NSA meta-data crunching (and whatever other snooping protocols we haven't heard of yet)? We know what the purpose was supposed to be, and I even grant that this Administration or some Administration set up this apparatus not as some evil conspiracy but with the best of intentions. I'm sure they even catch a real terrorist once in a while, though these tend to be the sort who accidentally tie their shoelaces to the trip-wire on their way to the train station.

But isn't it obvious what happened here? The whole purpose of the damn thing—-the catching-bad-guys part---just got forgotten somewhere along the line. The ease with which snooping on private citizens could be accomplished simply became irresistible. And when this opportunity is coupled with the chance for true believers to score political points against their ideological opponents, limits are easily forgotten. For some partisans, any tactic in the war against evil, homophobic, racist, Tea Party right-wingers is morally justified. And if there is one thing we know about the Obama Administration after four and a half years, it is that it cannot look at a government agency without seeing how assets and programs can be used to advance their political objectives, funnel money to their allies and punish their opponents.

But though the Obama Administration will take whatever advantage it can of the apparatus, the picture seems somehow uglier than politics as usual, doesn't it? Obama's crew is tawdry and lawless, to be sure, and Bush was feckless and dopey and seemed to believe in less and less as the years went by. But can either of them really be held responsible for what is happening now? Or has something else occurred that neither Bush nor Obama could have anticipated? To put it another way, suppose Obama woke up tomorrow and decided to stop the parade of scandals and outrages that fill the news---from the IRS, the EPA, Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the State Department, the armed services. Could he do so?

In 1900, the United States government was a lot smaller. Sometimes it wasn't very effective at what we today call “solving problems,” but that was OK because we didn't really want it to be. It wasn't everywhere, and that was how we liked it. It didn't touch everything the way it does today. You could live your life for long stretches without thinking about it.

Then it got big and then it got bigger and then it got scary-big, and it's been that way for a long time, at least since FDR. But even after it became scary-big, we always had the feeling that somebody was in charge of it. Somebody cared about the budgets. Somebody made the agencies obey the laws that created them. Somebody made sure the government was doing governmental things and not just using government power to advance some partisan ends. And if somebody did something very wrong or very illegal, they had to go to jail, or at least go away. They couldn't be part of the government after that.

But the US government doesn't work that way anymore, does it?

In the Terminator movies, the course of life on earth changed in 1997 when the machines built by Skynet became “self-aware.” At that point, they began to develop their own ideas about what was important and their own agenda for how the world should be run. The result was the near annihilation of mankind.

Something like that seems to have happened to our government. It has become “self-aware.” Maybe, like Skynet, it also happened in 1997 and we are only now noticing it. The agencies and the bureaucracy appear to act for their own account, seemingly uncontrolled by elected officials. Drip by drip, the stories leak out---hundreds of Mexicans killed by guns we gave to drug gangsters, IRS agents using their power against political conservatives or Christians, officials in high positions consorting with prostitutes in public parks, billions of rounds of ammunition bought by agencies that can have no possible use for them, electronic communications of everyone in America collected and sorted through. When questions are asked, they are ignored, or lies are told, under oath, with no consequence for doing so. In fact, no matter what the crime or the dishonesty, there is never any consequence. No discipline is imposed. No one is fired. No one goes to jail. Sometimes the people at the center of these stories even get promoted. And then the stories and the questions just fade away.

Could even Obama do anything about it at this point? I doubt it. And even if he could, if he could nibble around the edges of this leviathan, he will be gone in 2016 and the monster will still be there, pursuing its own interests, whatever they may be. The United States government is now self-aware, just like the machines in the Terminator movies, and it's not clear what any of us can do about it.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

TAMERLAN TSARNAEV AND WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY

The left-wing media in the US has a new meme, by which I mean a practice designed to spread its beliefs. Muslims who do bad things (e.g., jihadis, religious fanatics, and dictators), are now referred to as “conservative” Muslims. The mullahs in Iran are “conservatives,” for example, and so are the Boston Marathon bombers. Other, nicer, Muslims are called “moderates” or “liberals.” The purpose, apparently, is to connect the bad guys with “conservatives” like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson or Ted Cruz. The young, good-looking Muslims in the central square, the ones demanding elections and freedom---they are called “liberals” by CBS and CNN and the New York Times and all the rest. They're more like Joe Biden, in other words.

It's subtle. You don't notice it at first. But today, I heard it expressed more explicitly on KYW, the all-news radio station in Philly. Reporting on the election of Hasan Rowhani as Iran's new president, the newsreader described him as a “moderate” but then explained this was a relative term since the only men permitted to run for the office were “conservatives.” “It's as if all the candidates for president in this country had to be members of the Tea Party,” she explained helpfully.

Connecting foreign evil with your domestic political opponents is a tactic most famously employed by Franklin Roosevelt toward the end of World War II. In his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944, FDR looked past the war to the future of politics in America:

“One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis---recently emphasized the grave dangers of 'rightist reaction' in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”

This was the first time anyone had ever connected “rightist reaction” (what we would call conservatism), with fascism. Previously, fascist movements around the world were seen as socialist phenomena, and closer to communism than anything else. Germany and Italy were viewed as left-wing dictatorships.

In the early decades of the 20^th Century, every Western country had a lively fascist movement, though the fascist movements in different countries often had idiosyncratic features. (Mussolini had his own peculiar racialist views, for example, but he had nothing against Jews.) In the US, the home of fascism was the Progressive movement, which embraced eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin, Jim Crow laws and the corporatist policies of the New Deal. These associations became an intolerable embarrassment for FDR and the Democrats once America went to war with European fascists and Americans came to appreciate just how evil fascist ideas could be.

Brilliantly, in this speech, FDR showed Progressives the political solution to the problem. In one stroke, fascism became a right-wing phenomenon and nice American lefties could no longer be blamed for it. And from that day to this, we have all been taught the political spectrum FDR invented. At one end is communism and at the other is fascism. From constant repetition alone, we have all come to believe that communism is a left-wing philosophy but that fascism somehow grew out of right-wing, conservative ideas.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

NO PICASSOS FOR YOU!!!

Today, Kevyn Orr, the recently-appointed Emergency Financial Manager for the city of Detroit, met with creditors to discuss a 134-page report on the city's prospects. He is attempting to work out arrangements so that Detroit will not have to enter a formal bankruptcy proceeding, which would leave its fate up to a court. Detroit is already in default, and has suspended payments to unsecured creditors.

One issue in this continuing saga concerns the Detroit Institute of Art, the second richest municipal art museum in the country, with paintings and other art objects worth more than a billion dollars and an endowment in the neighborhood of $100 million. The collection is usually described as “encyclopedic,” meaning it contains objects from virtually all ages, styles and parts of the planet. You dig Etruscan? They got it. Van Gogh? They got him too, along with furniture, sculptures, armor, decorative items from across the centuries, iconic religious works. They are a bit short on the Elvis-on-velvet portraits I'm fond of, but they've got everything else, a billion dollars worth of it.

So Mr. Orr is going to sell off the art at the DIA in order to pay off some of the city's debt, right? Or honor its decades-old promises to pension-holders, right? Well, no. That would be an affront to Detroit's devotion to its “cultural heritage,” or something. (If you have ever been to Detroit, you are probably chuckling at the idea that the sorry little town has a “cultural heritage.” I lived there for ten years and I don't remember it.) According to Mr. Orr, the possibility of selling the art is off the table. He and those supporting him even managed to get a formal “opinion” from the Michigan Attorney General saying that the art is not simply owned by the city, but is actually held in a “charitable trust” for the people of Michigan and can never be sold to satisfy debts.

Or as Bernie Madoff was once heard to exclaim, “You mean I don't get to keep my Bentley???”

I'm not saying all of Detroit's debt was the result of Madoff-style fraud, but it wasn't exactly bad luck either. Detroit has been run by thieves and rogues for decades, and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is not the first Motown politico who found himself heading off to an extended stay with the department of corrections. Detroit got this way on purpose. They elected crooks and buffoons, and then they elected more crooks and buffoons and then they elected more crooks and buffoons. It's not easy to wind up owing several billion dollars. It takes work. It takes lies. And it takes a long time.

So the idea that Detroit has some “cultural heritage” residing in the Picassos and Van Dykes and Egyptian antiquities, and it's really really important to them and we can never ever take it away is---well, it's ridiculous. I mean, if the Audubon bird drawings were so damn important to these people, maybe they should have found a way to fund their pension plans sometime in the last fifty years, or laid off a few employees they couldn't afford, or told Kwame to pay for his own orgies. It's not like this happened overnight. I worked in Detroit in the late 1980's and it was a failed city then. The amazing thing to me is that it took this long for the Motor City to crash and bleed out.

Sorry, kids. If you don't pay your bills, you lose the mansion, you lose the exotic petting zoo, you lose the collection of medieval armor. And what, really, is the problem with selling off the art? No one is going to set it on fire. The people and museums who acquire it will pay a lot of money for it, and you can bet they will take good care of it. In fact, they will probably take a lot better care of it than Detroit would because they will have the resources to provide it with the security and atmospheric controls and restorative and curatorial services it needs.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

THIS AND THAT II

The US is the only country that taxes income earned outside the United States by Americans who live outside the United States. There's a reason for this. The US does it because it can. No other country could get away with it.

American income-earning ex-pats (as opposed to retirees), are relatively few in number, and they have no political power. Also, since they are spread all over the world, it's impossible to organize them. It's also likely that one reason they live overseas is that they are not particularly interested in US culture, including US politics. Finally, American ex-pats and sojourners do not work in other countries because they are unable to make a living in the US and thus must go overseas to support their families. Generating remittances to send home is not the reason Americans work in foreign countries.

In every other country, there is a (sometimes large, sometimes small) group of people who depend on remittances, and these remittances come primarily from one place---the United States. If Brazil, for example, decided to tax income from Brazilians living in the US, they would run into resistance from people in Brazil whose sons, husbands, etc., work in the US as cooks and maids and doctors and businessmen. That money, earned in the US, is already getting repatriated to Brazil because a piece of it is being sent back to the family. If Brazil tried to tax that money as it was earned in Chicago, there would be enough annoyed mommas in Rio to make unpleasant political noise.

*

It has taken about twenty years, but “no problem” appears to have replaced “you're welcome” as the preferred response to “thank you.” For quite a while, it was a youthful hipster usage, but “no problem” is no longer an informal or slang expression. My impression is that a good-sized majority of American English-speakers under thirty always say “no problem” in all situations where us geezers would say “you're welcome.” Fifty years from now, “you're welcome” will sound archaic or old-fashioned or prissily formal.

Another language development is the use of what I call the WWII war-movie radio alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc.) to bring the acronym-speak of the internet into spoken language. (It is actually called the NATO Phonetic Alphabet.) On the internet, for example, DC means “I don't care,” but instead of using DC in spoken language, you will sometimes hear “Delta Charlie.” This often happens when the internet acronym is obscene, like WTF. This becomes Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, largely for the humor that's in it but also because it puts an additional layer of meaning between the f-word and its expression. “WTF” itself is still a bit crude, and no archbishop would be caught dead in a ditch saying it. He might get away with “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” however, and even be thought sophisticated and cool for doing so.

*

“Loosies” have returned.

Older folks, those with some memory of the 1930's and 1940's, know what they are. In the mom-and-pop corner stores of urban neighborhoods, there would always be an open pack of cheap smokes behind the counter so a customer could buy one cigarette, usually for a penny. Around 1960, loosies disappeared.

Today, with millions fewer jobs, with federal disability rolls now topping ten million and record numbers of Americans on food stamps, there are once again corner stores in poor neighborhoods where you can buy one cigarette. It will cost you more than a penny, however.

*

The checked swing is a common enough event in baseball. The pitch is delivered, the batter begins his swing and then stops himself, or tries to. If the pitch is not in the strike zone, the umpire must decide whether the batter “went around” and should be charged with a strike. If the home-plate umpire rules the pitch is a ball, the catcher may seek an appeal of the call to the first-base umpire (for a right-handed batter) or the third-base umpire (for a left-handed batter).

The checked swing call, and the appeals, cannot be found in official baseball statistics but you might be surprised by how much the checked swing has been studied by baseball geeks. See: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=20741. However, to my knowledge, nobody keeps track of how many appeals are successful and how many are denied. Considering that virtually everything else in baseball is counted or measured, this seems odd.

It has been my impression that base umpires vary widely as to their likelihood of calling a strike on a checked swing, but there is no real data on this question. Obviously, America needs to know which base umpires are more likely to call a checked swing a strike. Otherwise the terrorists have won.

The rule allowing an appeal to a base umpire is also too limited. It is only permitted on a pitch the home-plate umpire has called a ball, and it can only be requested by the catcher. The explanation usually given for the first restriction is that a base umpire would be overruling the home-plate ump if he were to change a strike call to a ball. In other words, it is felt that if the home-plate ump is certain the batter swung at a pitch, he should not have his call overturned by a colleague.

Fair enough. But the other limitation seems unfair. If the catcher can request a ball be changed to a strike, why can't the batter? Suppose there is an 0 – 2 count when the pitcher throws a ball outside the strike zone. The hitter offers a checked swing, but the umpire calls the pitch a ball. Meanwhile, the pitch skitters past the catcher while the batter, believing he has swung at the pitch, runs to first on the dropped third strike.

When the smoke clears, the batter is standing on first base but is called back to the plate to complete his at bat, with the count now 1 – 2. WHY CAN'T HE APPEAL TO THE BASE UMPIRE IN THIS SITUATION? Why can't the batter seek a ruling that yes, he really did strike out? If the catcher can ask that a checked swing be ruled a strike, why can't the batter seek the exact same ruling?

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

KAITLYN AND JULIETTE

In Florida, Kaitlyn Hunt is an 18-year-old high-school senior. Her girlfriend (name unknown, so let's call her Juliette) is a freshman in the same high school. They are in love. They have had sex. Juliette's parents disapprove of this relationship so they called the cops. Kaitlyn is now facing felony sex charges for which she could get a dozen or so years in chokey and be placed on the Sex Offender Registry for the rest of her life. The most serious charge is “lewd and lascivious assault,” which sounds like something that used to happen in London in 1852, doesn't it? I mean, seriously---the word ”lascivious” still appears in a criminal statute? When is the last time you used the word “lascivious” in a sentence non-ironically?

The story is all over the internet, of course, because they are both girls, but situations like this arise frequently, usually involving somewhat older boys and somewhat younger girls, AND THEY HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME. They should not be crimes, but in our modern age, these tales of teen love often wind up on a police blotter because they may be indistinguishable (legally) from the situation where a 45-year-old on-line creep tricks a troubled 12-year-old girl into meeting him in a motel. To those of us who are capable of making reasoned distinctions, especially those of us who may have a dim recollection of teenage love, treating Kaitlyn as a predator and Juliette as a victim is ridiculous. But that's what often happens in the land of zero tolerance.

Let me tell you what's wrong with this picture. It's the law. It's the age of consent, which for a thousand years was twelve. In the year 1000, the law recognized that twelve-year-old girls knew what sex was. They knew what it meant. They knew what it meant in 1900 as well, and they still do, of course. But in the 20^th Century, the legal age began to creep up, and now it is 16, 17, or 18 across America, depending on the state.

What has changed is the relationship between the individual and the state, or if you prefer, the nanny-state. The “age of consent” no longer has anything to do with whether a girl or boy is capable of the act of consent. It has to do with what the state deems “appropriate” or wise. A twelve-year-old boy or girl is not going to be terribly worldly or sophisticated, and will often make bad choices, but that has always been true, and it doesn't mean they don't know what sex is. This used to be the concern of the twelve-year-old's parents and relatives and neighbors and ministers and rabbis. Now, however, it has become the business of the police and the legislature and the governor. The story of the 20th Century is primarily that of the state getting larger and the individual getting smaller. The legal transfer of responsibility for a person's sexual behavior from the individual to the state is one piece of that frightening trend.

The purpose of statutory rape laws and the age of consent was to prevent evil men from manipulating and using young girls who really didn't know what the men were after. Today, the primary purpose is no longer to punish genuine criminals but rather to “protect” girls who know perfectly well what men are after but who may make choices they later regret. In 2013, the laws take those regrets, those second thoughts, and interpret them retroactively as crimes the men have committed. This new legal view of statutory rape fits neatly within that strain of modern feminism that seeks to infantilize girls and women by persuading us to view them primarily as victims, as people who cannot be held responsible for the choices they make. Hence the sexual harassment codes found on college campuses, codes which take “sexual harassment” far beyond its legal definition to include flirting or risque remarks or other types of unwanted attention that women and girls have somehow managed to deal with for millennia.

(If I were a teenage girl, I would be outraged by these laws, and I'm more than a bit puzzled that young girls seem to accept their infant status without objection. I mean, there are 17-year-old single mothers working two jobs who cannot “consent” to a sexual relationship. There are 17-year-old girls who go to Harvard and are still legally viewed as jailbait.)

I sympathize with Kaitlyn and Juliette, and I guess that means I'm not much of a feminist, but people have rights even when they are eighteen and thirteen. Kids own themselves and own their bodies and sometimes fall in love and sometimes burn with a lust that cannot be reasoned with. That's one part of the human condition. When I was a teenager, nothing short of a gun to our heads would have prevented my girlfriend and me from doing what we wanted to do with each other. Parents, priests, disapproving aunts, policemen---none of them would have had any effect on us (and some of them tried).

My girlfriend was not a “victim” and I was not a “criminal” by any definition of those terms that make sense in a free society. And neither are Kaitlyn and Juliette.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

GOING CLEAR---A Book Review

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and I have now read two of his books. The first was “The Looming Tower,” published in 2006, which remains the book on the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, and the jihadist movement. Beginning in the 1920s, with the carving up of Arab lands by Western powers following WWI, and telling the story to the present, “The Looming Tower” is the fruit of years of dogged and thoughtful research, and the story is rendered so carefully and respectfully that you will understand Islamism by the time you get to the end.

But that's not the book I'm recommending today.

If you're like me, you find the Church of Scientology fascinating in a five-car-pileup-on-the-Boulevard sort of way. There's Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch and there's John Travolta and other celebs, and there's Si-Fi writer L. Ron Hubbard behind it all, and there's lawsuits and claims of abuse by former Scientologists and there's Germany banning them as a cult, and a hundred other snippets you've seen in the newspapers. But what's it all about, really? Is it actually a religion, with a God and a theology? Why are its acolytes so fanatical in their devotion though the whole thing seems (to an outsider) to be about 50% pure goofiness and 50% money-making scheme? Does the church really hold its fallen-away members in captivity? And is John Travolta gay?

Having read “Going Clear,” Lawrence Wright's latest book, I now get it. I understand why people join and why people believe in it. I understand that my previous view of L. Ron Hubbard as simply a flim-flam man was wrong, superficial, and unfair. He was in fact a genius and a visionary. At the same time, he was far more evil, far more power-mad, and far more monstrous than I had ever imagined.

The first half of this book concerns the life and times and madness and genius of Hubbard. The last half is primarily about David Miscavige, who took over Scientology after Hubbard's death and functions as the first popularizer. He is Brigham Young to Hubbard's Joseph Smith. If Hubbard were Jesus, Miscavige would be St. Paul. Miscavige got Scientology recognized as a religion by the IRS, recruited celebrities, and turned Scientology into one of the world's fastest-growing religions. He also presides over Scientology's current problems (including its dramatic falloff in membership), and he is largely responsible for them.

“Going Clear” is another stunning labor of research by Lawrence Wright. It is a story rendered in a matter-of-fact fashion you will find chilling at times, but in the end, you will understand what Scientology is all about.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki     

TIGER AND THE TWO STROKES

On the fifteenth hole at Augusta this year, in the second round, Tiger Woods hit his third shot into the water guarding the front of the green. His options at that point were governed by Rule 26-1, under which he chose option #3. This allows the player to return to the prior spot of his shot and drop the ball “as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played.”

This was not, however, what he did. He returned to the original area and then dropped his ball several feet away, further from the hole. He did this on purpose, though he did not know he was violating Rule 26-1 by doing so.

The penalty for an improper drop is found in Rule 27-1. There is a two-stroke penalty. However, since Tiger did not know he violated the rule, he did not assess himself the two-stroke penalty. This meant that later, when his round ended and he handed in his signed scorecard, that card was incorrect. This brought Rule 6-6.d into play:

“The competitor is responsible for the correctness of the score recorded for each hole on his score card. If he returns a score for any hole lower than actually taken, he is disqualified. If he returns a score for any hole higher than actually taken, the score as returned stands.”

A few years ago, that would have been the end of the analysis. Having signed an incorrect scorecard, Tiger would have been disqualified from the tournament. Then Rule 33-7 was passed. It states:

“A penalty of disqualification may in exceptional individual cases be waived, modified or imposed if the Committee considers such action warranted.”

“Committee” is a defined term. It is the group in charge of the competition which, in this case, was the Board at Augusta.

Unfortunately, the term “exceptional individual cases” is not defined at all. The rule gives a great deal of discretion to the tournament officials about waiving the disqualification penalty, but doesn't “exceptional individual cases” have to mean something? Something about Tiger's case has to be “exceptional,” doesn't it? Otherwise, Rule 33-7 could not be invoked. But what was it? What was “exceptional” about this situation?

Tiger violated Rule 26-1 by failing to drop his ball correctly. He did so by dropping his ball in a place not permitted under that rule. He did this intentionally. He did it on purpose. He thought about it and he decided, for strategic reasons, where he was going to drop the ball. He had a reason for doing so and he gave an interview telling the world what that reason was.

He was mistaken about Rule 26-1, of course, but the rule itself is not at all ambiguous. Tiger did not misinterpret the language of Rule 26-1. He simply did not know the rule, or perhaps confused it with other rules. In golf, however, ignorance of the rules is no excuse. The player is expected to know the rules and to assess penalties on himself if he violates them. In addition, at the Masters, there is always an official no more than a minute or two away. If Tiger was unsure about where to drop his ball, he could have called for an official and one would have appeared. He did not do so. Whether this failure was foolishness or hubris is a question he can wrestle with in the dark of night, staring at the ceiling, but such an error is attributed to the player. It always has been. And there is nothing “exceptional” about it.

The term “exceptional individual cases” must have some meaning, or it would not appear in Rule 33-7. And actually, when you think about it, it is not hard to imagine what that meaning might be.

An “exceptional individual case” might involve a local rule specific to a particular course, for example. Suppose a seaside course is built largely on sand, with many outcroppings of same hither and thither, and suppose the golf club has a local rule that deems all 23,000 of such outcroppings “bunkers” where one may not ground one's club before striking the ball. Penalizing a player for violating that rule might be unfair unless we could be sure the player had actual knowledge of it. That might be an “exceptional individual case.”

Or suppose Tiger had asked an official whether he could drop his ball several feet behind the original spot of his third shot, and the official had mistakenly told him he could. It would still be a violation of Rule 26-1, and under the rules of golf, Tiger would be disqualified for failing to assess a penalty on himself. That, however, would be palpably unfair. That would be an “exceptional individual case.” All of us would think it wrong to disqualify Tiger in that situation.

It appears that the only thing “exceptional” about this case was that it involved Tiger Woods, and it is reasonable to ask whether a lesser light on the PGA Tour would have gotten the same consideration. The very fact that one can fairly ask such a question means that the reputation of golf as a game rooted in sportsmanship and etiquette took a serious beating at the 2013 Masters.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki