I continue to be astonished that someone related to me has the discipline to post a blog entry every day. “A thought a day,” she says in her tagline, “lets the mind out to play.” Sometimes she misses a day and has to play catch-up, but so far she’s pretty much been true to her word.
I can barely manage one thought a month.*
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*This doesn’t count.
Bob Somerby, in his Daily Howler, is as hard on “liberal” reporters and commentators as he is on right-wingers. He hates sloppy thinking and writing, wherever it comes from, and knee-jerk reactions from legs of any political stripe drive him to distraction. I’m generally sympathetic, though I think he can come off a bit schoolmarmish at times, missing the crime for the peccadilloes (let’s leave the trees and forest be).
Yesterday Somerby went off on Tim Egan of the New York Times. Egan quoted Rand Paul (our political media’s Kook of the Month):
“We’re the only country I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen,” Paul told a Russian broadcaster. “And I think that should stop also.”
Egan then went on to speculate freely:
Of course, race has nothing to do with it, these situational constitutionalists say. But you have to wonder if their concern over citizens by birth would have extended to big Irish Catholic families of 100 years ago, some of whom came to the United States through illegal border crossings from Canada.
Somerby lets fly:
Egan is held in chains of bondage too. He feels no obligation to speak to the merits of Paul’s position. But he does feel forced to wonder what Paul might have said about something else, a century ago.
“You have to wonder” about that, he says. But actually, no—you don’t have to. Instead, you can actually speak to the merits of the current case. Egan never does.
…
Paul is quoted making a factual claim about other countries—a claim Egan never disputes. Nor does Egan ever say why it makes sense, in the abstract, to grant citizenship to newborns in the way we do—in a way no other country would, if Paul’s assertion is accurate.
Somerby accuses Egan of playing the race card with Paul rather than arguing the merits. For Somerby, Paul’s statement raises two questions: (1) Is Paul correct about the policy of other countries regarding citizenship by birth? (2) In the case of the US, does the constitutional gift of citizenship to anyone born in the US make sense?
Let’s leave the second for anyone who cares to argue about it. The first is just a research task. Ignore Paul’s additional clause about “coming in illegally.” No country “allows” people to enter illegally, even if they do it. If it happens, it’s a crime. But if a child is born to that person who entered the country illegally, or entered legally and stayed illegally—well, that’s part of what the citizenship laws address.
A few minutes of internet searching turned up a document, dated March 2001, giving the requirements for citizenship for 206 countries. It turns out 48 countries (including the US) make citizenship available to a “[c]hild born in the territory of [country], regardless of the nationality of the parents.” (Again, Paul’s remark about illegal entry is beside the point. Much as he seems intent on conflating them, the two issues—illegal entry and citizenship by birth—are not joined at the hip.) Some of these countries exclude children of “foreigners in the service of their country” or children “born to certain diplomatic personnel”; and a few require registration or confirmation of citizenship upon reaching majority (18 or 21 years of age).
Here are the 48 countries, based on my reading of the aforementioned document:
Several other countries (Australia among them) allowed citizenship by birth in the past, but no longer do. Also, this list does not include countries that offer citizenship to children born of stateless parents or persons of no known nationality.
There, that wasn’t so hard.
I leave it to the reader to decide whether Rand Paul makes a compelling point. It seems clear to me he was trying to place the United States outside the circle of all other countries in its policy on conferring citizenship to any child born in its territory. If he was not “wrong” (and, given the sloppiness of his statement, it would be hard to establish “veracity” with any confidence), it would appear he was misleading his listeners, intentionally or not.
I had intended to use these photos to test a flip-book plugin, but I found it cumbersome for my limited purposes. So I looked at the various WordPress gallery/slideshow plugins and settled on this one (NextGEN Gallery)—for now, at least.
I’ll be futzing with it for a while, seeing if I can add captions, rearrange images, enable comments, figure out the difference between a “gallery” and an “album,” determine the optimal file size, etc. So don’t be surprised or miffed if it doesn’t look the same the next time you visit.
And now, without further ado: the dogwood we planted about 15 years ago as it manifests itself through the seasons, plus the critters that visit it.
Update 2014.01.28: I recently discovered that NextGEN Gallery now destroy whatever page it is used on (i.e., a blank page with absolutely no code in it). So I have replaced all pages with NGG slideshows with what amounts to contact sheets with links to the full images, using gallery code native to WordPress.
Another April 24 has passed—the 95th since the day in 1915 when Armenian leaders and intellectuals were rounded up as the opening act of an Ottoman plan to rid their lands of all Armenians. For the second year in a row, Barack Obama took note of the anniversary but again declined to call it by its proper name, which is genocide.
The Turkish prime minister said an odd thing when he was in Great Britain recently:
In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.
Apparently he’s miffed that foreign legislatures keep passing resolutions acknowledging the genocide and calling it by name. Yet this is the same prime minister who has been active in normalizing relations with Armenia, and who seems open to amending Turkey’s official position on the final days of the Ottoman Empire: “What is important is to look into the archives, the historical documents … if, as the result of this work, it turns—comes out that there is such a situation, we would then consider and question our history.” Leaving aside the fact that many disinterested parties have already looked into the archives and historical documents and found genocide, making this sound like the usual dodge, one can’t help but give greater weight to what he said in the same interview: “Characterizing the events of 1915 as genocide is not something that we can accept.” ‘Round and ’round he goes …
Meanwhile, a growing number of Turks are speaking out on the Armenian genocide—historians, novelists, and ordinary citizens:
On Saturday, while hundreds of thousands of Armenians climbed to the hilltop memorial in Yerevan, a Turkish human-rights group in Istanbul held its own event, mourning with them. In another part of town, a group of Kurdish mothers gathered in solidarity with Armenians, calling on Turkey to recognize the genocide. Their empathy was matched by bravery, as they could have been jailed or fined for any public mention of the genocide, banned under Turkish law.
It is the latest and boldest step by Turks choosing to break with their government’s silence. It followed an online petition entitled “I Apologize,” signed by nearly 30,000 people in Turkey last year. “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Armenians were subjected to in 1915,” the brief statement read. “I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.”
Perhaps in 2015, after the last Armenian survivor of the death marches will have surely passed away, the Turkish people will finally get this load off their collective backs by simply saying: Yes, some of our great-grandparents tried to pull off a genocide. It was wrong. And we renounce it. We condemn the attitude toward the Other that is capable of concocting such an atrocious plan as this genocidal government campaign against a portion of its own population. We are no longer that type of country. We apologize not only to Armenians, we apologize to Turks and others whom we, as a country, have hounded for daring to express their opinions on the matter. Contrary to what our leaders have said for decades, it is impossible to “offend Turkishness.” There is no such thing as “Turkishness.” Every citizen of Turkey is free to be himself or herself. Turks do not fear diversity—we celebrate it. Diversity is a resource, not a threat.
Such, I think, would be the cascading benefits of a simple admission of a historical truth.
The sky was noticeably clearer this morning here in Washington, the air sweet-smelling and strangely endorphic. I was at a loss to explain why. Then I read the news: Turkey has recalled its ambassador. Seems a committee in the US House of Representatives had the nerve to pass a nonbinding resolution that said a genocide was perpetrated in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire.
Every year around this time I find myself asking myself two questions:
They’re unlikely to be answered satisfactorily any time soon, but I’m not going to let that spoil the mood. And I’m not ready to consider them rhetorical questions.
In the meantime, here’s something nice Congress can do: it can reduce its annual aid to Turkey by exactly the amount Turkey spends on public relations in the United States. The American taxpayer is, in effect, paying for Ankara’s attempts to quash legislation and influence our own foreign policy.
It’s a thought that recurs every time a bit of nature knocks us out of our technological groove: Modern people don’t know how to do nothing.
I lost interest in the Great Snowfall of 2010 (February 5–6)* when it became clear we were not going to break any records. Snow, and then more snow, and snow yet again … yeah, we’re having an unusually snowy winter, big deal.
Then the “blizzard conditions” arrived, on top of the snow that had fallen so recently, on top of what we’d already shoveled into rather large piles, and things threatened to become interesting again.
Drifts. Now that’s something I miss here in DC. It’s happened a couple of times since I’ve been here, and it’s happening now. The snow is still arriving pretty much horizontally, although the end of the precipitation is supposedly in sight. The winds, however, will continue, if we are to believe the weather mavens (and they’ve been pretty accurate this year).
I know, it’s trite to talk about the weather so much. So here’s a picture of a bird hiding under our back deck during the onslaught today:
For all I know, the sparrows are still hunkering down in the bush by the front porch (two of them flew out Monday while I was talking across it with a neighbor, me down on the ground, he on his porch—he didn’t even notice).
Almost time to start shoveling again …
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*I refuse to call it Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Blizzacane, or whatever everybody’s calling it. Good grief, as if.
The mercury is pushing 70 today, and some people are actually walking around in shirtsleeves. A typical midwinter Washington heat wave.
(Note the three o’clock shadows—already a month from the solstice, but the sun is still lying low.)
Two weeks ago today, the Potomac was frozen over, and I saw this scene from Key Bridge as I biked to work:
A diver had knocked a hole in the ice with an ax and had lowered himself into the water. On the dock of the nearby boathouse, a bunch of guys prepared to join him, one of them maneuvering a strange contraption:
I thought maybe they were fishing for a dead body,* or looking for explosives, or something else appropriately dramatic.
But eventually their casual, almost lackadaisical behavior convinced me it was a training exercise, so I repacked the camera, put my gloves back on, and continued on my merry way to an absolutely thrilling Monday at work.
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*One summer day several years ago, again on my way to work, I had indeed seen a dead man splayed out on the boathouse dock, surrounded by police and rescue personnel. It was the morning after a nighttime cloudburst, and it’s my guess he was a homeless guy who had been washed out of a culvert about a half-mile upriver. If you rent a canoe and paddle up that way, you’ll see the warning sign where the stormwater periodically rushes out into the Potomac.
Messing around with Google Chrome again. “So what?” you say? You’re right—so what.
Five male robins were rummaging around in the dead leaves under the front porch and shrub this morning. It looked like they were looking for food. The leaves were flying left and right, and one of them made an angry open-mouthed gesture when another got too close. One guy made a brief dash toward the window where I was sitting and thought better of it. This does not look good, folks. It’s winter. What the hell are the robins doing?
My alma mater got a little cute the other day, sending out a sample admissions essay that they thought would help calm applicants down a bit as the January 2 deadline approached. While most people seemed to think it was just fine, others thought it went over the line. You decide. I think it was classic U of C.
When a big corporation does something right, we should acknowledge it, right? Way back at the beginning of 2009 my trusty Canon A95 started acting funny. Eventually the funniness turned into a permanent inability to take a picture—the image had a magenta cast and bunch of horizontal lines all over it. I kept fiddling with it, hoping it would “fix itself” (yes, I do believe in magic), but also decided to buy a newer model. I ended up with the SX10 IS, which I really like. In late summer I decided to sell the A95’s wide angle lens on eBay, but while I was researching what such things might go for and the A95 in general, I learned about a problem some A95s had with their CCD (the imager): some units supplied by Sony had an issue with the connector, which Canon eventually concluded was not caused by user mishandling, and the company was replacing them for free whether or not the camera was still covered by the warranty (I bought the thing back in 2005). Long story short: talked to a Canon rep, got a free FedEx label, sent the little guy to Illinois, and got a working A95 back two days later. So now I have a nice second camera I can carry around and not worry about anything. (My recent wandering-around-town pics were taken with the A95.) Kudos to Canon. Customer for life here.
Oh, heck: one more testimonial. The Roland Micro Cube is really nifty. I use it with a Yamaha electric violin. You can plug in your guitar if you want. Either way, you can mess around with straight amplification or an array of classic amp decks (JC Clean, Black Panel, Brit Combo, etc.). It’s a gas. Not a lot of power, but enough—it’s really a practice amp. But get this: it runs on batteries, and for a long time (I bought it over a year ago and still haven’t swapped out the rechargeables I put in it). If you need more power, get the bigger model. But this little thing is great just as is.
Okay, that’s enough. Goodbye, 2009.
Addendum 2010.01.20: Turns out the feisty robins are from up north; “our” robins have headed south.
I can’t let December pass without recalling fondly the seventeen inches of snow that suddenly showed up. The snowfall of Saturday, December 19 (and a bit on Sunday), broke a bunch of records, the most easily remembered one being “the most snowfall in Washington in a single day in December,” something like that. For me it was right up there with the Presidents Day blizzard of 1979 and the Presidents Day weekend blizzard of 2003. That’s February for ya. December’s supposed to be a little more civilized. On December 22, right after the white onslaught subsided, the Washington Post ran a story about how the mayor of Moscow wanted to expand the use of cloud seeding to prevent big snowfalls in the city. It’s just too expensive to clear the stuff away. Up to now they’ve used the technique sparingly, to ensure nice weather for the big patriotic holidays. I thought: “Good work, WashPost! The timing couldn’t have been better!” Then I noticed that the story originated with the Los Angeles Times—that it ran on December 8, and the Post picked it up from the syndicate after the city got whacked. So I should say, “Good work, WashPost, for holding off on the story until a big storm hit, which you must’ve known would happen!” Something like that.
I’m a Clevelander, so snow always makes me happy. I wasn’t at all bothered that the Volvo was buried …
… but, damn, look at this!
Luckily that’s my backup bike (my Trek is warm and dry inside—and gloating, no doubt). But the point is this: I had to take the Metro all week! Okay, okay, it was a short week, with Christmas and all. But still—no biking makes me ornery.
Usually. But snow always pleases me somehow. And the walk to and from the Metro gave me a chance to see the snowy sights I might miss on the bike. For instance, this—the fattest snowman I’d ever seen, digesting happily near the festooned deck of the Dancing Crab:
As for this, I have no idea what it was meant to be—a decorated pile of snow, I suppose:
In taking this shot, however, I learned something about those signs made of dots that run from right to left (there’s probably a fancy name for them—the devoted reader will clue me in, I’m sure). The dots must get filled in from top to bottom as well, because the word “cigar” (or the phone number, whatever) was clearly visible when I snapped the picture, but not all the dots are lit up in the photo. Even such minuscule enlightment is enlightenment, right? My spouse (who is truly enlightened) would not agree, of course, but that’s okay. Many paths etc.
And I saw this, which has nothing to do with the snowstorm:
“Captain Arturo, fighting for nonviolence.” I’m a sucker for heavy irony, especially when it comes to aggressive or antisocial behavior.
