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Random pictures from Maine

Sunday, June 3, 2007

A few pictures from Brunswick, Maine. We went to an art gallery/cafe in an old mill on the former site of Fort Andross, where we saw this piece/installation, whatever:

A view of the Androscoggin from Fort Andross:

Finally, a lion at the art museum.

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Maine

Saturday, June 2, 2007

As promised (or threatened), a few pictures from Maine, taken on the trip up to Brunswick to attend my reunion. Our pattern is to leave home early, get to Maine as fast as we can, and then get off the highway and poke around on Route 1. Perkins Cove in Ogunquit has become one of our favorite places, and these pictures were taken there. You can click on any of them for a larger photo.

Nothing great. What with reunion activities, etc., there’s not much time for taking pictures.

I’m writing this from the Captain Daniel Stone Inn in Brunswick, where they have excellent wireless in each room, but no furnishings (would a tiny desk be asking too much?) with which to comfortably use a computer. Right now I’m kneeling in front of my computer, which rests on a dresser, the only flat surface available. Not really great for blogging.

What with all the activity, I’m blissfully ignorant of events in the wider world.

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I’m out of here

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Early tomorrow we’ll be leaving Connecticut for the Northern regions of Sweet New England, mainly the great state of Maine. We’ll be wending our way to Brunswick, seat of Bowdoin college, where we’ll be attending my 35th college reunion.

Ah, those were the days. When I graduated, Richard Nixon was president, but it was beginning to look like George McGovern was actually going to get nominated. We didn’t know then how the Democratic establishment would stab him in the back, preferring four more years of Nixon to backing a guy who was backed by us dirty hippies.

Back then, we thought Nixon was as bad as a president could get.

How little we knew.

Anyway, I will definitely not be live-blogging the reunion. I’m hoping to put up some pictures of beautiful Maine.

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Isn’t this getting tiresome

Thursday, May 31, 2007

George Bush has just announced yet another non-binding environmental initiative.

US President George W. Bush said Thursday he would urge major industrialized nations at a summit next week to join a new global framework for fighting climate change after the Kyoto Protocol lapses.

Environmental groups immediately criticized the plan as vague and based on non-binding limits on the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, but Britain and Germany hailed the move as an important, if symbolic, step forward.

“The United States will work with other nations to establish a new framework on greenhouse gas emissions for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012,” Bush said in a speech laying out his agenda for the June 6-8 G8 summit in Germany.

See, the idea is that we will set long range “goals” that no one is required to meet. Why:

“It’s important to assure that we get results,” said Bush, who made the initiative a key goal of his talks next week with leaders from Europe, where critics have accused Washington of dragging its feet on climate change.

Obviously, requiring anyone to actually do anything meaningful would pervert the free market. No, that sort of government intervention should be restricted to more important issues, like this one:

The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

You see, if Creekstone tests all its beef, it will advertise that fact to consumers, who might choose to pay premium prices for its beef. That might force its competitors in the mass beef killing industry to follow suit, and that would cut into their profit margins. We can’t have that, so we need to set a binding goal that we test up to 1% of our beef, and no more.

I’m still waiting for the Bush people to do one good thing. It’s simply against the laws of chance that they can go eight years with a perfect record.

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Curious

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

During my nightly newsreader lightning round I came across this post at Pharyngula, which linked to this post at a blog called Making Light.

The ultimate subject is a blog, or former blog, called Embryoyo, only the name of which appears to have been original. The blog is no longer available for viewing, or wasn’t when I tried to go there, but it apparently consisted solely of posts stolen word for word (unattributed) from other blogs. That’s not quite fair, apparently sometimes the fellow changed the titles.

It is really mystifying. What would be the point of doing something like that? There’s not even any money in it. One advantage, I guess, is that it’s easier to repackage other people’s stuff than write your own, but that begs the question. Why write at all, if all you can do is copy?

If nothing else, the guy seemed to have reasonably good taste-he plagiarized some decent stuff. Not great taste though. As near as I can tell he copied nothing from me.

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Blaming the victims

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

As any faithful reader can tell you, I’ve been a Joe Courtney supporter since the day after the 2004 election. However, no one is perfect, and I must take issue with Joe’s current take on the Iraq war, or more specifically, on the current state of affairs in Iraq.

According to the Day (Courtney Blasts Iraq’s ‘Failure’ To Pull Its Weight), Courtney had this to say after his recent trip to Baghdad:

Courtney said the weekend visit deepened his resolve to see an end to U.S. involvement in the country’s civil war and did little to ease his growing frustration with the Iraqi government’s handling of the increasing strife in the country.

“All the effort that the U.S. troops are putting in … is undermined by the failure of the Iraqi political leadership to get to the bottom of very basic issues dividing the two sides in a civil war,” Courtney said in a telephone interview from the Middle East Tuesday afternoon.

There’s more, for instance:

“The prognosis in terms of the political movement within the Iraqi parliament was frankly pretty distressing to me and to some of the other members,” he said. “There is just a limit to how much the military can accomplish when there is still fundamental tension between Sunni and Shiite.”

There’s a particularly good treatment of this tendency here, (a site with a Middle Eastern outlook).

It’s hard to come up with an analogy. You could compare this to a situation where a person burns down another’s house, and then blames the victim for failing to rebuild, but the analogy breaks down given that at least the poor homeowner can go about his rebuilding in peace. How do you extend the analogy to make it fit better? Add in that the perpetrator has created conditions that allow outsiders to destroy every rebuilding attempt? How about positing joint homeowners, who have hated each other for years and whose uneasy coexistence was destroyed in the fire?

The last factor is one that we Americans can’t seem to grasp. We demand that Sunnis and Shiites become one in a happy democracy. A laudable goal, but setting aside a thousand years of conflict along with adopting a form of government foreign to a thousand years of tradition, in the middle of a conflagration, is not something that we can expect to happen on demand. We just don’t seem to understand history. We have a tough time with our own, and have no use for anyone else’s.

I’m sure Joe understands all this. To be fair, his statements were more measured than the headlines imply. It’s still a bad line to take.

I can understand why politicians find the blame the victim strategy attractive. It’s a way to shift the blame from themselves; it’s a way to justify withdrawal without admitting failure; and it’s a way to ingratiate one’s self with the voters, by assuring them that it’s not their fault, either, for having allowed themselves to be led into (and initially cheer) this disastrous war. But it’s a fundamentally dishonest way of looking at things, and if this war has taught us anything, it’s that acting, or even pretending to act, on the basis of fundamentally dishonest premises is not a good idea.

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Euphemistically speaking

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

This ones a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, so I won’t belabor it. This morning’s Times relates that some people who other people listen to (as opposed to us unwashed) believe torture isn’t a good idea, not because it’s morally wrong (that’s too quaint an objection) but because it doesn’t work. You’ll find the article here, but the word “torture” appears but once, and then in a context that implies, if it does not say, that somehow what we do is different.

In an exquisite act of self-censorship, the Times refers to “harsh interrogation techniques”, a synonym that a right winger as illustrious as Andrew Sullivan points out was originated by the Nazis. No doubt the Times would argue that the euphemism is necessary to preserve its objectivity. It would, you can hear them argue, be judgmental to call it torture.

But in fact, the Times chooses sides by using the approved euphemism, because it preserves the convenient fiction that we are talking about something other than out and out torture, which we are not.

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A group of one

Monday, May 28, 2007

A couple of days ago I vented a bit about the fact that the New London Day gave equal coverage to a large anti-war and a small pro-war demonstration. More of the same in the Times today, though perhaps just through sloppy editing.

On the front page of the Times, there’s a picture of a woman at a cemetery. The last sentence on the picture’s caption (newpaper only) reads:

Also marking Memorial Day weekend were groups for and against the Iraq war who meet every Sunday in Lewes, Del. (Page A9)

My on-line dictionary has two definitions of the word group that might apply:

An assemblage of persons or objects gathered or located together; an aggregation;

A number of individuals or things considered together because of similarities.

From the article (Silence Speaks Volumes) we find that there are actually three “groups”, one consisting of “dozens” of people protesting the war, an offshoot of that group of at least 10 people concentrating on impeachment, and this “group”:

On one side of the street, Jeff Broderick stands alone while he holds a sign. “Their only plan is to cut and run again. It never ever works,” the sign says.

Now apparently, many moons ago, there actually was a group of pro-war demonstrators, but they have long since disappeared, leaving Mr. Broderick as the lone holdout.

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Doing poorly be doing good

Monday, May 28, 2007

There’s an old saw that hard cases make bad law. The Second Circuit has just proven that sometimes easy cases make bad law. A hot shot law firm from New York City asked for an exorbitant fee in a Voting Rights case, and the court properly reduced the fee. It then went on to rather gratuitously state that in determining a proper award of attorneys fees, other considerations than time reasonably spent to win the case might be considered

It ruled that there are cases in which lawyers may be paid not in dollars but in what it called “non-monetary returns.” Those include, the court said, “experience, reputation or achievement of the attorneys’ own interests and agendas.”

In other words, if you get a warm and fuzzy feeling out of handling a case, that’s reward enough, or at least part reward enough, so why get filthy lucre too? This may seem like a novel way of looking at the issue, but it’s not really that original. I remember when I was working at legal services there was an attitude among some of our funders that we should be content with low salaries because we had the advantage of doing good. The flip side, I guess, is that people who represent the scum (particularly corporate scum) of the earth deserve the big bucks because of the psychic pain all that harm they’re doing is causing them. Maybe, when those folks seek fee awards, they should get extra.
For the most part, the cases we’re talking about involve matters in which the lawyer doesn’t get paid at all if he or she loses. Since a person who has a practice like that is likely to lose a fair number of their cases their real hourly rate has to take into account all the hours for which they don’t get paid.

It’s getting harder and harder for small firms and public interest firms to attract good talent, in large part because law school graduates have crushing debt that they have to retire after they graduate. This kind of thinking just makes it harder for the public interest firms to compete. The last time I looked, you can’t repay loans with warm feelings.

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Bike Blogging

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Yesterday I started a bike ride in North Stonington and headed up Wyassup Road. To any of my readers who are bikers: Avoid Wyassup Road. It’s nice country but the road surface is extremely rough. It’s a bit like running through mud. It’s also rather depressing, since you can see that what was recently farm country is rapidly being suburbanized with those dreadful McMansions.

I’m a bit of a sucker for animal pictures, being a city boy. I thought this horse was nicely color coordinated with the background.

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