Entries from March 2005 ↓

Oh man, this is brilliant. Milton Glaser talks about ten important things he’s learned in life:

Number 3: SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

… And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible.

NUMBER 6: DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.

Everyone always talks about confidence and believing in what you do. I remember once going to a class in Kundalini yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a more practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much.

And there’s a lot more. Well worth checking out. (via Boing Boing).

In an apparent bid to remove any lingering doubt that the Republican party has entered a state of complete moral turpitude, Senate Republicans are in the final stages of pushing through a bill that will eliminate the ability of individuals to file for personal bankruptcy.

The bastards don’t come out and tell us what they’re doing, of course, because they know that a straight-up repeal won’t play very well at all. So they’re framing it as a means to curb “abuse of the system”. As long as you make less than the “median” income, they say, then you can still declare bankruptcy. What they don’t mention is the fact that you need a lawyer and a shitload of paperwork to prove that you don’t make too much to deserve the government’s mercy, all of which will cost a couple thousand dollars … which, if you’re getting ready to declare bankruptcy, you’re very unlikely to have.

They also don’t mention that a large percentage of personal bankruptcies are declared because of medical catastrophes … salaries siphoned off into costly medicines, savings emptied by hospital bills, families ruined by a single illness. In fact, they don’t even want to hear about it … the Senate has just rejected, in a largely party-line vote, an amendment to exempt people who have gone broke because they or their loved ones are sick, or dying.

Unless the Democrats filibuster, this thing will probably pass … a huge victory for the credit card companies, who have, for many years, sunk massive amounts of lobbying money into this initiative, and have come perilously close to getting their way more than once (Clinton had to veto this monstrosity, twice). The fact is, their cutthroat lending practices (deceptive minimum payments, massive late fees, ruinous interest rates that shoot up to 30% as soon as you miss a payment) are what are leading many people into financial ruin. Their executives may throw their hands up and plead innocence — hey, we’re just providing a service — but the truth is that they make nearly 50% of their profits on these kinds of fines, so they have a vested interested in setting people up to fail.

The only fly in their ointment are these pesky bankruptcy laws. And, when those are gone, their obscene profits will turn into … I don’t know, whatever comes after obscene. We need a new word for the kind of blood money these swine will be reaping soon. Or we need someone with a conscience to protect us from them.

Juan Cole has written a great summary of Lebanese political history, a fascinating and often tragic story of ethnic divisions, foreign intervention, colonial machinations, and war:

In 1982 the Israelis mounted an unprovoked invasion of Lebanon as Ariel Sharon sought to destroy the remnants of the weakened PLO in Beirut. He failed, but the war killed nearly 20,000 persons, about half of them innocent civilians … The Israelis militarily occupied southern Lebanon, refusing to relinquish sovereign Lebanese territory.

The Shiites of the south were radicalized by the Israeli occupation and threw up the Hizbullah party-militia, which pioneered suicide bombs and roadside bombs, and forced the Israeli occupiers out in 2000.

I’m ashamed to say that I know very little of this history, despite the fact that I did most of my growing up in Beirut. I was, I now realize, almost willfully incurious about what was going on. All the action was surface action: the occasional crackle of gunfire outside our apartment, the broad X’s of tape plastered on windows to prevent them from imploding when Israeli jetfighters boomed over the city; the sound of bombs going off, the tinkle of falling glass. I didn’t really care why it was happening; I just wanted it to stop.

I still don’t think about Lebanon much, but recent events there have unearthed a bunch of bad memories … along with surprising pangs of nostalgia. Because there were good times, too: standing on my grandmother’s balcony on sleepy summer afternoons, eating grapes and watching old men play backgammon across the street; entering the dark, cool cavern of Four Steps Down, a slightly subterranean bookstore that sold Tin Tin and Astrix comics in shelves near the front door; riding my new three-speed bike in the little garden downstairs, turning circles and jittering over tiny cobbles; flirting with the achingly beautiful girl from nextdoor, Heather, who once hurried her little brother to safety after a missile landed in their living room and paused briefly, just long enough, before it exploded; huge family dinners on Sundays, sitting at the kids’ table with my brother and my cousins, gorging myself on koosa and warak, and devouring baklava for dessert.

We escaped in 1983, came here, to the promised land, and haven’t been back since.

I wish the Lebanese all the best, and hope that this isn’t just the beginning of another descent into madness and civil war. I don’t think it is. The gods seem to be smiling on them, at last.

At last, a breath of sanity:

Rejecting a series of arguments put forward by the government, District Court Judge Henry F. Floyd said the indefinite detention of Jose Padilla — who the administration has said is a terrorist supporter of al Qaeda — is illegal and that Padilla must be released from a naval brig in Charleston, S.C., within 45 days or charged with a crime.

In a strongly worded 23-page ruling, Floyd said “to do otherwise would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country’s constitutional tradition, but it would also be a betrayal of this Nation’s commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and our individual liberties.”

It’s just a little speck of common sense in a duststorm of deranged lunacy, but it’s a start. Maybe, one day, we’ll be able to scold tyrants like Vladimir Putin with a straight face.