After skirting with a full hard drive due to too many photographs earlier in the summer, my photography itch has pretty much been scratched. A fading battery hasn't helped matters. That said, if I could go back, I'd have taken a sunset shot from my Paquis window. I don't think I have shied away from admitting I have something of a fetish for high contrast, dark clouds in my photos, and, golly, Switzerland produces. Presumably the mountains are responsible for the colorful cloud cover this city gets. Unfortunately, I have a view of some rooftops and the Red Light district...
All of this is just an utterly irrelevant introduction to some photographs I took when I visited Berlin last month. I don't have much to say about Berlin because, aside from the sausages, the city didn't do much for me. Don't get me wrong: it's a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis, full of fun young people, but I'm not particularly fun. I also think the cities tragic history has resulted in a lot of a white-washing--millions line up to visit the Reichstag not because of its history but because it has a fancy glass roof. Of course, it also didn't help that the entire time I was in the city I was pretty much exhausted and physically worn out. Next time I skip around Europe, I want (need?) a tour guide.
Today WikiLeaks unleashed over 90,000 pages of classified documents that reveal, unsurprisingly, that the war in Afghanistan is not going well. On the heels of last week's feature on our sprawling national security state, I can only flippantly argue that American security policies, foreign and domestic, appear largely to be the creation of a nation that is profoundly insecure (and immature) about the world it faces.
I do not have much else to substantively add to the discussion save for my opinion that, once again, the "greatest fighting force on the planet" cannot make America all that safe. But also, hurray for the internet! NYU's Jay Rosen has a fantastic post about the whole situation from a wider journalism point of view.
While the "lamestream" media bemoans anonymity on-line, WikiLeaks can only be as successful as it is by providing a Swedish shield of anonymity to whistleblowers. Rosen puts it better than I (and proceeds to demolish the Obama Administration's spin on the matter):
In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.
Porn and fantasy sports aside, maybe the internet may still save us all?
Take it from someone who spent a childhood gagging on gravel dust out in rural Iowa, paved roads are a wonderful thing. Thus, reading about how cash-strapped local governments are literally tearing up their roads, grinding them into gravel, almost made me cry.
Roads are an essential mark of progress, of civilization. They also bring tangible, practical benefits--there's a reason the Romans built roads everywhere they went. But in America? We're tearing up our roads, and, worse, we are refusing to pay the taxes needed to maintain them.
"I'd rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill," said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman's Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.
That's great, Mr. Baumann. Nevermind that gravel roads may be "costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed."
A gravel road "is not a free road," says Purdue University's John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled "Back to the Stone Age."
Maybe somewhere I can understand being unwilling to pay higher taxes for health care or, hell, schools, but infrastructure? Roads? We're no longer civic minded enough to penny-pinch for roads. I think Digby puts it best:
This is a sign of a culture in deep decline...This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I'm guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won't convince them.
If a twenty-six year old law student weeping will convince anyone, I'll do it.
Yesterday, Sarah Palin experienced what can only be called a Twitter snafu. She more or less made up a word, irritated both Muslims and New Yorkers, and then compared herself to William Shakespeare. Palinsgate has the whole absurd story, and it's highly entertaining if only for its play-by-play of the follies of an unsupervised Twitter account (and, you know, Sarah Palin being Sarah Palin).
One particularly interesting tweet in response came from Karion:
@SarahPalinUSA Out of curiosity, if English is a living language, is the Constitution a living document?
Karion is, of course, a lawyer, and I thought this question was a pretty interesting one to pose to a person like Palin. Sometimes it is easy to forget just how "alive" the English language is, how accommodating it has become to more and more words. Considering my journal is currently planning a symposium on the "plain meaning," Palin's apparent embrace of our living language was something I spent a bus ride contemplating. Then Glenn Greenwald has to put up a terrifying post, endorsing a terrific feature by Dana Priest and William Arkin at the Washington Post entitled "Top Secret America."
It's heavy stuff and, despite the length, well worth everyone's attention. But to make matters worse for me, Greenwald posits:
Sarah Palin's Twitter malapropism from yesterday will almost certainly receive far more attention than anything exposed by the Priest/Arkin investigation. So we'll continue to fixate on the trappings and theater of government while The Real Government churns blissfully in the dark -- bombing and detaining and abducting and spying and even assassinating -- without much bother from anyone.
He's right, of course. Greenwald seems almost always right. One of my best professors in college cautioned against becoming anyone's disciple (or gaining one's own disciples), and I think there's a lot of virtue to that sentiment. That said, nary a thing Greenwald says I can legitimately disagree with.
Maybe it is his way with words or close analysis of seemingly everything in the media, but that man knows his stuff. As an NYU alum, I once dreamt I could be just like Greenwald someday, before I realized I'd never be a third the law student (and thinker) Greenwald is. In fact, the only criticism I have about him is that he's almost relentlessly negative.
I suppose that's the ultimate result of being a media/government watchdog, but a quick read of any of Greenwald's posts quickly suggest things are very very wrong in America. Still, I am reduced to sucking my thumb in the fetal position at Greenwald's "solution":
[I]t is difficult to imagine -- short of some severe citizen unrest -- how any of this will be brought under control. One of the few scenarios one can envision for such unrest involves growing wealth disparities and increasingly conspicuous elite corruption.
Well, if last summer taught us anything, at that point there will be some value in 140 characters tweets, beyond the capacity for Sarah Palin to make up words.
At the advice of the woman I'm renting a room from, I decided to take a day trip to Gruyères to do a bit of hiking and check out the H.R. Giger Museum (which was quite cool). All week, whenever anyone asked me what I was doing with my weekend, and I said "Gruyères," I'd get this funny look and he/she would ask me if that was the "cheese place."
Now, as my parents well know, I only came to tolerate cheese in any fashion as a teenager. I'm still not well versed in the dairy product, and so I had no idea Gruyère was even a type of cheese. But it is, and it indeed comes from Gruyères. I mention this because I was heading to the quaint village of 2,500 with no regard for its cheese-making capabilities.
I got off a rickety old train in the middle of no where, found myself walking up a steep hall and past a city gate, and BOOM! I was hit by a most pungent odor. I was gagging, going so far as to breathe in my heavily deodered armpits to dull the smell. Everywhere around me were pizza places, so I spent a good minute trying to think what type of pizza could smell so awful.
Then my stupidity halo lifted and I realized I was smelling an overpowering scent of cheese. I made a beeline to the H.R. Giger Museum, which was musty and hot but cheese free, and then escaped Gruyères for the cheese-free countryside. Lesson to be learned: when a place is known for cheese, it'll smell an awful lot like cheese.
I am only six years late to the party, but the series finale of Lost somehow served as just the push I needed to finally watch through the series. Yes, considering my always-simmering love for science-fiction mythologies, I should have jumped onto the Lost bandwagon years ago. I remember my mother giving the show glowing endorsements, trying to explain to me just how the show could feature polar bears. I remember a number of friends getting sucked into the show back in 2004.
Truth be told, I tried a few times to get into Lost. I suffered through the opening of the Hatch when season two premiered and felt as if the show simply did not go anywhere. I tried a few more episodes out for a spin when Elizabeth Mitchell joined the cast--her character, Juliet, seemed oddly compelling to me. I even thought I'd try watching the final season, but while I figured out how everything ends, I could not get interested six years into the story. I could never really entertain how much sheer stuff was going on in the show: a hobbit from LotR gets killed, polar bears roam the jungle, there's time travel, flashbacks, flashforwards, and flash-sideways. There gets to be about thirty people in the cast by the final episode.
But the final episode somehow ignited something in me to see the whole show through. (Maybe a terrifying island adventure appealed to me while sitting peacefully in quiet, cosmopolitan Geneva?) After a few months of diligently moving through the show, I recently passed the halfway point in the series and I thought I'd share some reflections.
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Oh, Citibank, it's so nice you've got my back! That you think my loans will take my (non-exist) career "to the next level" and then you'll prepare me for "financial success."
::sighs:: Guess it's about the time of year to apply for more loans...
Despite the obvious tone of my posts, I often find myself hesitating to say things like the Republican Party is bad for America, publicly, out to the internet. As a law student with an uncertain future, I spent a lot of time worrying everything I do could somehow look bad in the future.
This is all a poor segue way for me to make the point that my future, and America's future, is in bad hands in grip of the Republican Party. I have long wanted to write a sort of manifesto about all the ways the modern day Republican Party is a plague upon my country, but I think Sen. Jon Kyl's moment of honesty on Fox News last week more or less encapsulates why the Republican ideology is so bad:
You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.
Basically, for all the recent Republican fealty to deficit reduction, $600 billion in tax cuts primarily aimed at the wealthy don't matter.
Despite my ideological proclivities, my disgust with the Republican Party is not exactly a rejection of conservative ideology. While I am convinced the merger of business-minded fiscal conservatives with unhinged religious groups encourages governing abortions like the Tea Party, individual components of Republican orthodoxy I can accept. (Even if my home state Republican Party is apparently convinced Shariah law is about to override the Constitution...)
No, my disgust with the Republican Party is how it has uses this "hard-working anti-elitist" rhetoric (because no Republican has ever been to an Ivy League school) in order to effect a highway robbery, transferring billions of dollars from the public trust to the privileged classes. Typing it down makes me think I've become some sort of anti-capitalist Marxist, but in a "Great Recession," an economic downtown that quite literally threatens to throw my generation into a decades-long tailspin, Republican cynicism and calls for tax cuts and giving money to "business" makes my blood boil.
"Trickle down" economics does not work. It does not work because, by a large, those with resources are disinclined to spread the wealth in dark times. And that's what has happened in my country. Endless tax cuts, which invariably benefit the wealthy, do precious little for the lesser off. A few hundred dollars here, a few hundred there certainly helps to buy a new television, but it hardly spurs job creation. The best mechanism to "save" the American dream is for the Government, with a capital G, to step in and work on behalf of the public good.
Instead, the Republican Party seeks to dismantle government because government is evil...except, and even Sen. Kyl agrees with this, when government must fight wars. And the Republican Party seeks to fight wars against radical Islam, against Iran, against a would-be communist threat. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which I now barely remember the start off, have cost the United States billions of dollars, money that could have been spent on better health reform, educational assistance, development aid to the Third World. Hell, even a tax cut! Oh wait, the Republicans got that anyway.
The tragic part is the Democratic Party is complicit in all of this. If not categorically hypocritical like the Republican Party, it's inept and spineless. Stunningly, Democratic insiders--the Obama Administration--know the country sees them as such, and so they propose to be tough like Republicans, to fight wars and offer tax cuts. Democrats make for a poor imitation, however, and, while the Republican Party has done next to nothing of legislative or executive or even judicial value in almost a decade, they have boldly provided leadership right off a cliff.
I fully expect the Republican Party to march back into relevance this November, after four years of Democrats almost tilting at windmills. Both parties will speak to "bipartisanship," but the political winds will have once again shifted decidedly rightward (if they ever had shifted to the left).
Alas, the entire time Rome will be burning to the ground, and the Republicans--the real Republicans, the one's that have suckered the Tea Party into acting like buffoons--retreat to their palatial estates and toast to their tax cuts. It's disgusting and even as the Democrats call for a conference report to discuss the merits of putting out the fire, it will explain why I dislike the Republican Party.
I'm skipping past a few cities in my continuing Euro-adventure in order to put up some shots from my trip to Prague, because, golly, Prague was pretty on the eyes. What else can I say about the place? Everyone should visit, everyone should eat gulash, and, oh yes, everyone should visit the Museum of Communism and the Sex Machines Museum and check out some creepyinterestingmarionettes.
Old man fishing at five in the morning, and...
Five American men jogging at six in the morning.
As you can see, somebody is pulling President Obama's strings...har har! Funny me!
Tonight I thought I'd talk a trip to Geneva's Parc la Grange and, instead, found myself wading head first through Geneva's annual Lake Parade. While "Lake Parade" sounds like a fun thing, it's actually a massive techno music festival. That by itself doesn't sound so bad, except it's actually a bunch of disc jockeys spinning insanely loud mixes of some sort of European sound.
I could write that off as a Geneva cultural experience, but the Lake Parade was almost my definition of hell on earth. Hell, there were actually men and women, dressed as the devil, wearing hooves, and dancing around. (Here's a bad picture:)
There were also men dressed as women, women dressed as men, men and women covered in glitter, people wearing devil horns and angel wings simultaneously. Spontaneous fist fights erupted around me. Drunks were lying in the street, urinating behind trees, and otherwise clumsily dancing into me, left and right. I saw a dog dressed as a cat.
It was awful. After an hour trying to get through the Lake Parade and through to the park, I hopped aboard a bus and went home. I am not cool.
It's been awhile since I've provided any sort of all purpose advice to prospective law students here, likely because the best advice I can give any pre-L is to not go to law school. That said, I spent a lot of time last summer debating what law journals I should apply to, and, as a journal board member this year, membership on a law journal is something I have spent a good deal of time reflecting upon.
Applying to journals varies greatly from law school to law school. Obviously, THE Law Review is the big resume-line that most law students covet. As reflective of my disdainfully unorthodox approach to law school, the burdens (and prestige) of THE Law Review held no appeal to me. Fortunately, NYU (and most law schools these days) offer an abundance of journals to join (probably the result of THE Law Review rejection rather than legitimate scholarly interest).
Journals other than THE Law Review tend to care less about grades and more about passion, and this is where my advice (or perhaps rant) begins. At NYU, the application to the journals provides for an optional personal statement that may be individualized to each and every journal. Personal statements are never a make-it or break-it proposition for an applicant, but ::sighs:: that is no reason to make the things read like retreads of a law school admission essay.
I know I stressed to 1Ls curious about The Journal of Law and Liberty that the personal statement was really something to have fun with. "I've gotta read dozens of these," I said, over and over, "so don't waste my time. Either be outrageous or tell me why you're really applying." (I said this in my most kind, non-cynical voice, too!)
And what did I get? Dozens and dozens of seemingly identical personal statements. A woman saved the world by traveling to Africa, a man decided to go to law school because of his mother. That's great! But, golly, that doesn't tell me (a) why the applicant is interested in joining The Journal of Law and Liberty or (b) why she's interested in joining any journal.
I understand why students think of journal applications as another chance to trot out their cover-letter like mentality, but festering in a basement, working on a law journal requires a certain sense of mild bemusement. I cannot state how disheartening it was to see one star-studded law student after another have no sense of this.
Alas, when everything about law school becomes about resume lines, this is what happens. The funny, albeit cynical thing is that, absent THE Law Review, being on any ol'journal is not terribly prestigious. As I stated, passion counts for something, but law school is good at sucking that out of a student.
Unfortunately, it is then up to me to read dozens of pseudo-law school admissions essays designed to impress a conservative admissions committee rather than an unshaven blogger. Maybe next year's board will fare better?
I tend to get myself into trouble when I openly declare that I simply don't "get" soccer while simultaneously espousing my love of baseball. Fortunately, sometimes my more boorish behavior inspires my friends to send me essays or diatribes or, well, cartoons in response. My buddy Ali forwarded an essay by Theodore Dalrymple on both snobbery and soccer because it reminded him of me--for better or worse, I suppose.
Whether you're following the World Cup, enjoy soccer, or just happen to have a personal philosophy when it comes to being a snob, I highly recommend you give Dalrmyple a read. I spent half the essay thinking Ali had found a perfect vehicle to mock me and half the essay reflecting on how I might better behave in the future. (I also learned a good deal about all the hubbub regarding the French national team.)
Sarah Palin is a symptom of the disease that is ravaging functional governance in this country, and a quick read of her Facebook foreign policy manifesto is, alternately, absurd beyond belief and horrifying. It is features a pretty fantastic manipulation of statistics to advocate for yet more military spending.
U.S. defense spending for FY 2010 was pegged at $663.8 billion dollars, but that's misleading since it does not factor in "supplemental" costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or defense-related spending outside of the Department of Defense. Regardless, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), that number is six times the amount spent by runner-up, China, at around $100 billion. But that's not enough for Sarah Palin:
Our Defense Secretary recently stated the “gusher” of defense spending was over and that it was time for the Department of Defense to tighten its belt. There’s a gusher of spending alright, but it’s not on defense. Did you know the US actually only ranks 25th worldwide on defense spending as a percentage of GDP? We spend three times more on entitlements and debt services than we do on defense.
Forget that Secretary Gates, a Republican no less, possesses far more insight and experience when it comes to military affairs than Palin (Russian border infractions or no) ever will, but using GDP percentage as a way of gauging military spending is the fastest way to advocate turning the United States into a militarized-state.
Palin's suggestion that the U.S. ranks 25th is also suspect. It's clearly derived from the CIA World Factbook, but a quick glance at the age of the data suggests its out of date. A better source is probably SIPRI which ranks the U.S. a bit higher, at eighth in terms of GDP percentage.
And what company are we keeping? Using GDP as a marker, the United States is no longer competing with "real" military adversaries like China or Russia or the advanced western democracies. No, now we're spending money like countries like Myanmar, Jordan, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, Kyrgyzstan, Burundi and Oman. We sure need to keep up with Myanmar, don't we?
Perhaps this is a cynical, low blow, but the problem with cynically-high military spending of the kind Palin is endorsing is that it limits a countries ability to, you know, do anything else. Myanmar is a perfect example: all the guns in the world couldn't keep the regime from botching a rescue job when the Cyclone Nargis hit in 2008, killing tens of thousands. Similarly, having more air craft carriers than the rest of the world combined doesn't do much save New Orleans or clean up the Gulf.
According to Palin, if we lose "the effectiveness of our military," "we risk losing all that makes America great." Alas, if anyone thinks about it for a moment, that's just not true. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, yet another Republican put it, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
Indeed, the United States as a bit too much of that, relatively speaking of course.
While tomorrow is America's two hundred-and-thirty-fourth birthday, today is, more importantly, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest movie of the 1980s: Back to the Future. Though it was released on July 3, 1985, the film didn't become an inexorable part of my childhood until a half-decade later.
My introduction to Back to the Future has become foggy over time, but I recall my father bringing home the movie from Blockbuster one Friday night when I was but a wee lad. I remember protesting that the movie looked "stupid" and that it wasn't some pre-designated movie that I expected to watch. Still, I gave it a shot—what's a seven year old to do on a Friday night in the middle of a cornfield in a world before video games? I still remember the sound of the multiple ticking clocks that start off the film. I remember seeing Steven Spielberg's name scrawled across the screen. I remember, oh yes, the power of love.
I'm not sure any other movie, and the includes obvious choices like Star Wars or The Matrix, has quite inspired me like Back to the Future. Oh, after seeing that movie, I was positive we'd be developing flying DeLorean time-traveling devices in no time. I played with the toys; I dreamed up my own adventures with Doc. Of course, then the sequel came out and it was so positively subversive (and dark) that my mom had to remove me from the theatre when I freaked out. And then the final film, alas, was a cheesy western that pretty much redid the first film. But the original?
I love it to this day. Suffering emotional heartache in 2004, I bought the entire trilogy on DVD and then forced a group of friends to watch them all in rapid succession. I ditched friends in high school one Saturday night when I saw the movie playing on a 13-inch television at Theo's coffee shop. I even watched the entire movie, MST3K-style, in a near death/flu-ridden state while in Austin, Texas, during my fateful chin-splitting adventure a few years back.
The thing is: while Back to the Future exists as a sort of quirky eighties comedy, it's also a really good movie. The idea of seeing our parents grow up is compelling, and the original movie serves as a great social commentary on the evolution (or devolution?) of American society between its fifties' golden age and the eighties. On top of these great concepts, the chemistry between an insane Christopher Lloyd and a plucky Michael J. Fox is fantastic, and the whole film is incredibly charming. The world these characters live in can be dark, depressing even, but the film never dwells on harsh reality, constantly focusing on entertaining the audience. Plus, the movie has Billy Zane and a flying DeLorean.
Now, how has it been twenty-five years since the movie came out? I mean, Back to the Future, Part II, takes place in 2015, and features totally awesome pink Mattel hoverboards. Where is my hoverboard? Screw the iPhone 4.0, I want a hoverboard, even if it won't work on Lake Geneva...
According to iPhoto, I've taken a grand total of 1,713 photos (and one movie) since I last put up some pictures from Istanbul. Of course, I've become so critical of my photography, that something less than a hundred of those will ever end up being showcased on my website. The conveniences of digital photography is no excuse to dump dozens of ill-considered photos onto Facebook or Flickr or Picasa. No, sir!
A couple weeks back already, my mother visited, staying in something of a Holiday Inn-branded palatial villa a half hour outside of Geneva, thus moving from the cornfields of Iowa to the vineyards of Switzerland. While she was here, I dragged her up to Paris for the weekend, where she did a decent job keeping up with me/staying out of my way as I ran around the city. Of course, one of my big goals was to photograph the Eiffel Tower (how predictable!) but this was complicated by an obnoxious World Cup FIFA Fan Festival blocking every worthwhile vantage point of the structure.
My solution? Drag myself and my poor mother up 284 steps of the Arc de Triomphe at sunset. I found it somewhat amusing to see the constant flashes from cameras going off from the Eiffel Tower several miles away. What exactly is there to see from atop of the Eiffel Tower? The tower itself is sort of the essential component of the Parisian skyline, and aside from the La Défense business district--miles away from the Eiffel Tower--Paris is pretty flat. (I have the same thoughts about everyone racing to the top of the Empire State Building for a view of New York when 30 Rock has a better view...which includes the Empire State Building.)
