Back of the Envelope

Rather than write about politics today, let's take a look at our favorite webcomics.

Heh, that's what happens when I cut and paste... I just repeat what I said last week. Sorry, I'll try to be more creative in the future.

Sluggy Freelance -- Kiki comes to visit as well, but it doesn't last long.

Day by Day -- The anniversary of the Iraq war brings lots of commentary from the Left, which requires lots of mocking from Chris Muir.

It's Walky! -- Fewer lawyers, more zombie time. We all breathe a sigh of relief. This week is bloody--consider yourself forewarned.

College Roomies from Hell! -- Mike lucks out yet again, but with his memory coming back in full, there's a good chance his sanity won't last.

General Protection Fault -- Yoshi finally meets s1r3n face-to-face. We aren't really surprised, of course.

Schlock Mercenary -- Breya turns to mercenary work to raise some cash.

I've been having trouble with my Dell laptop. The computer hasn't been recognizing the AC adapter, so while the computer works, it has only been running off the battery and not recharging. I dealt with it in the same way I deal with most electronic problems--I took it apart and put it back together. You'd be surprised how often that works, and indeed, the AC adapter is now recognized. I'm hoping it continues to work, but I sent an e-mail to Dell support anyway. Chances are that the computer's jack has a flaky mechanical connection. According to the Dell bulletin boards, this problem is pretty common.

In other news, I've set up a wireless router in my home. I've named it Eyrie, which is appropriate since my laptop is named Gryphon. (My main computer is Dragon, and the network is called Lair.) So far, everything is working, and the computers can talk to the Internet. I had a harder time getting them to talk to each other, but that eventually started working.

New Post: Update on the laptop situation above.

There's an interesting aticle on how the GOP became dominant in the South here. It helps to debunk the myth that the GOP gained the South through covert appeals to racism. It's an interesting article, and I highly recommend it.

I've lived in the South for 11 out of my 29 years. While there is racism in the South, it's nowhere near as widespread and pervasive as you would think by listening to Democrats. It certainly isn't the motivating force in the areas from which Republicans draw their strongest support. In the end, accusing Republicans of racial appeals is insulting to them, but it's the Southerners they're outrageously deriding. If Democrats want to win in the South, perhaps they should be less nasty to Southerners.

The big story this week has been Richard Clarke. He's been accusing the Bush administration of not being serious about al Qaeda before September 11th. This doesn't agree with things he's said earlier, but while he denies he actually lied earlier, he claims that because he worked for the administration, he spun it in Bush's favor. That explanation might work if the comments were not in direct contradiction.

When Bush came in, Clinton's ineffectual policy had been unchanged since 1998, and had accomplished nothing when it came to degrading al Qaeda. Bush decided to keep the Clinton policy in effect, even expanding it and increasing its funding, while his team put together a more complete plan, a plan whose aim was to completely root out al Qaeda. That plan took time to put together, and Bush approved it the week before 9/11. It was a three-year plan that began with diplomatic pressure, then slowly built up force to directly overthrow the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda. Then 9/11 took place, and the timeline was significantly accelerated.

This is all what Richard Clarke said in a transcript released by Fox News earlier this week. I'm not sure how you could explain away the differences between that and his current statements as just spin.

Here's the clincher, however. Even if Bush had started bombing the Taliban on the day of his inauguration (Something which, as I said earlier, would not have been possible without a public mandate. Such a mandate takes time to build, which is one of the reasons why the Bush's plan had such a slow pace.), 9/11 was already in motion. The principals were no longer in Afghanistan. I'll admit that there's a chance that if we had gone after al Qaeda then, we might have captured a higher up who could have spilled the information, but I think the odds on that are slim. (Most of al Qaeda would have slipped over the border to Pakistan, and as Musharaf didn't come around to our side until after 9/11, we would have had to go to war against Pakistan to get them.) Most likely 9/11 would still have happened, and those who are now saying we did too little would have said that 9/11 was in retaliation for our attacks on al Qaeda. You know, the same folks who are saying we should have pre-emptively attacked al Qaeda but not Iraq, that Clinton did everything he could to get al Qaeda, but what he couldn't do in 8 years Bush should have been able to do in 8 months, even if it took him five of those months to get all of his people through the confirmation process.

Of course, most of you aren't hearing anything new from me; I'm just giving a quick summary of the facts for those who are curious about my thoughts on the matter. If you really want to know more about this issue read through Instapundit, Captain's Quarters, or National Review's Corner.

Update: I've cleaned up this post considerably. There's one point I haven't made, and that's this: Clarke can make a legitimate argument that before 9/11, Bush did not see al Qaeda to be as dangerous as it truly was. The problem was that, before 9/11, no one saw al Qaeda for the threat they were, and that includes Clarke, who made a name for himself in the 90s sounding the alarm about cyberterrorism. Bush, unlike Clinton, at least developed a comprehensive strategy to dismantle al Qaeda, even if the planning did not have the urgency it should have.

Old Post: I posted about the U of R survey on religious belief here.

Looking at the results of the survey, I suppose what I find most striking is the difference between the hard science majors and the humanities majors when it comes to the "Does God exist?" question. The percentage who say no is about the same within the margin of error: 6% for the humanities and 8% for the hard science majors. The percentage who say yes is 78% for the humanities and 59% for the hard sciences. That's a difference of 19 percentage points, or a ratio of 4 to 3. What's most intriguing is the difference between those who say they're not sure: 32% to 17%, nearly 2 to 1. I've never noticed the incidence of atheism to be much higher among scientists and engineers than the rest of the population, but it does look as if more of the hard science majors are uncertain. Are they just more skeptical when compared to the general population, more unwilling to put their trust in something they can't test? I've never really believed that was the case, since the science folks I met in college believed all sorts of crazy things, but now I'm beginning to wonder. After all, while I know science types pretty well, my experience with the general population is pretty limited, so maybe I just think the level of skepticism I deal with regularly is representative.

I only took one picture from Ralph Nader's talk, from a table selling paraphernalia outside. As it was dark and raining, I guess nobody wanted to demonstrate. In any case, here's the photo.



The angle wasn't good enough to get all the bumper stickers, and I don't remember all of them, but the ones which do show say the following:

"These colors don't run... the world"
"Visualize impeachment"
"Let's not elect him in 2004 either"

Update: I think the red one says "I'd rather be smashing imperialism"

As I feared, there’s no wireless connection available. By the time this post goes up, it will be all over. Still, I'll keep a minute-by-minute account running, so you'll see what I would have posted if I had been able to live-blog.

8:45 pm -- I arrived a few minutes ago and looked for a spot with wireless. No luck, I'm afraid. There's a decent crowd here, and it will only get bigger, as the event is sold out. A lot of the people here look like students, but there are quite a few older folks here.

8:50 pm -- There are quite a few cameras set up, but none of them look like professional TV crews. I did see a van belonging to the local FOX news affiliate outside, however.

8:55 pm -- Speak of the devil. The crew setting up some way beside me is professional. R news, a local news station. They were apparently just doing a test of some sort, as they didn’t stay long.

9:01 pm -- Ralph’s coming out, to much applause. They turned the lights out, but Ralph asked that they be turned up. I’m glad, because my laptop’s pretty bright. I don’t want to be that prominent.

9:02 pm -- Ralph’s starting to talk about consumer advocacy, and the political implications. It sounds like he’s blaming the harm done by automobiles -- traffic and pollution and safety -- on the failure of the auto consumers to organize, and instead the highway lobby was in charge. He's talking about how GM and its collaborators destroyed the trolley industry. I’m trying to wrap my mind around it. From the facts he’s put out, GM may be responsible for killing some trolley systems, but I don’t see how they can be held accountable for the entire nation’s highway system.

9:07 pm -- He’s singing the praises of public transit now. Hey, I liked Boston’s public transit, but you know, I like having a car now. I tend to think consumers like cars. But then, I’m an ignorant capitalist, what do I know?

9:10 pm -- He’s now saying that if consumers spent 10 hours learning how to buy food, we could save 30% on our food budgets. I’m all for educated consumers, but most of us learned how to shop for food from our mothers. Now, perhaps they didn’t teach us very well, but I know I spent more than 10 hours of my life going to grocery stores with her.

9:12 pm -- In the sense that he thinks consumers should be more educated, I agree.

9:14 pm -- He’s just described what’s in a hot dog. I can’t stand hot dogs anyway, so I’m not particularly concerned.

9:15 pm -- He’s just told us there’s 9.5 teaspoons of sugar in Coke. He says it’s not on the label, but I already knew there were 27 g of sugar per serving of Coke. That it does say on the can. I guess he’s complaining that it doesn’t give that amount in teaspoon units.

9:19 pm -- He attributes the diversifying of the supermarket on better consumer education.

9:20 pm -- He’s plugging his website, democracynow.org.

9:21 pm -- He’s telling how he berated one of his 25-year-old supporters for not liking radishes. When he said, "I don’t like radishes." Ralph asked, "Who’s I? Is it your kidney, your liver, your heart, your mind?" Apparently it was his tongue.

9:27 pm -- He’s telling a story about how one of his books encouraged car buyers to use Ralph’s own "consumer written" contract. The first guy who wrote him about what happened said the dealer called the police.

9:30 pm -- He’s complaining about tort reform. He says that in 1840 we filed more per capita lawsuits than today. I bet class action lawsuits were rarer, though.

9:32 pm -- He’s saying that courts do not favor consumers. I have no data on that.

9:33 pm -- He’s asking now whether people in the audience have ever filed a lawsuit, aside from divorce court, saying that it’s more than average than the population as a whole. I looked around, and I was thinking it looked like 5-10%. [Addendum: His argument, of course, is that this is not a litigious society, that we in fact do not sue often enough.]

9:37 pm -- He’s now talking about doctors. He’s saying that something like 5% should not have a license (I was typing when he said that, so I’m not quite sure of the number).

9:39 pm -- He’s now talking about the success of driving smoking from public areas.

9:41 pm -- He’s now telling a story about how he ended up sitting next to a smoker who recognized him on the last flight where smoking was allowed. Apparently, the smoker was not a forgiving sort. The crowd applauded.

9:45 pm -- Apparently only 25% of Americans smoke now, down from 46% in the 1960s. 25% seems like a lot more than I thought.

9:46 pm -- He’s complaining that we’re the only country of the Western world without universal health care, without four to six weeks of paid vacation, with such a poor public transit system. Of course, we’ve also got an economy that works, but I won’t go there. But at least we’re ahead in smoking. [Addendum: In getting rid of smoking, I mean.]

9:49 pm -- He’s telling how he helped to get the automobile industry regulated. Mandatory seatbelt, collapsing steering column. He says that this improved automobile safety from 5.6 deaths per 100 million miles to 1.6 per 100 million.

9:51 pm -- Cosmetics now. Talking about how the cosmetic industry defines commercial beauty standards. I’m pretty good at ignoring it. He’s talking about how it hurts us, by causing anxiety, neuroses, even suicide. So is he suggesting suing them? He hasn’t said.

9:55 pm -- He’s talking about how banks can debit you and you don’t notice the charges.

9:57 pm -- He’s saying that schools should teach consumer education, while seller education is a big concern. I’m thinking that’s because people are rarely paid to buy stuff.

9:59 pm -- He’s now saying that crime in the suites, corporate crime, takes more money and kills more people than crime in the streets. He’s saying that 10% of health care charges are fraudulent.

10:00 pm -- He’s saying that the money cheated from people is enough to provide health care for all the children who don’t have insurance. Show me a government program more efficient and less corrupt than an industry, in any country, and maybe I’ll believe him.

10:04 pm -- He’s talking about how Soviet citizens waited in lines, now we wait on the phone. I don’t see that there’s a real connection.

10:05 pm -- He says Southwest and Fed-ex answer their phones while others do not. Why? He still hasn’t said. I figured he’d argue that it was due to some law he lobbied for. It could very well be economic competition.

10:07 pm -- He’s saying that U of R needs two new courses: consumer education and citizen skills. Citizen skills sound like Political Activism 101: calling talk shows, writing effective letters to your congressman, attention-getting stuff, using the Freedom of Information Act, getting and disseminating information. I didn’t really need help to start a blog. Political education would be more interesting to me. How to spot media bias, maybe.

10:12 pm -- He’s talking about how corporate dominated U of R used to be, and how they can’t get permission to start these classes. His applause line stated that the University trustees should take off their corporate caps and concern themselves with the welfare of their students.

10:13 pm -- Another applause line: "Too many young people today lose their twenties trying to resolve personal issues they should have solved in their adolescence."

10:15 pm -- The recurring theme: We live in a corporate society.

10:16 pm -- I agree that there’s too much "corporate welfare." I’m not a big fan of corporate handouts, but that’s my libertarian side showing.

10:18 pm -- You know, from how he talks, you’d think the bulk of the government’s money was going to corporate handouts, rather than, say, Social Security.

10:21 pm -- He’s encouraging us "young people" to be more activist.

10:22 pm -- He says that most people make less money now, in adjusted income, than they did in 1973. He’s complaining about outsourcing now.

10:25 pm -- Talk’s done. Something of a standing ovation, although it looks like a lot of people are just leaving. I’ll wait to see if there are any questions.

10:26 pm -- Question: What do young people do in a university like this where the administrators who have been bought by corporations? [If that’s true, why did they let Ralph on campus? Someone in the VRWC screwed up!] Answer: The students should organize to make sure academic values are supreme. What’s the line between academic and corporate science? Need written policy to how much time faculty can spend moonlighting. Supposedly there’s a difference [Addendum: between corporate and academic science, I mean. I never did anything for corporations, but I have friends who did. The way MIT worked, anything done on campus by Grad students had to be publishable. Maybe not everyone has this policy.]

10:30 pm -- Question: How long will oil dominate? What will this mean concerning future wars? Answer: We don’t have an energy policy to get rid of oil and gas dependency. Corporations are in control.

10:31 pm -- Question: How do we get rid of the majority political system where minorities have no power? [Addendum: That pesky democracy!]Answer: Need to get rid of the electoral college. Since can’t get rid of it by amendment, should get rid of winner take all. Need proportional system. Not regional. If state have two seats, one ballot, first place and second place each get a seat, third place not get anything. [Addendum: Plenty of people think that regional politics should no longer matter. I don't agree, as I think regional governments are more responsive than national, and anything that gives regions less power over the federal government tends to centralize government. That pesky federalism!]

10:39 pm -- Question: What happens when budget deficit causes dollar to collapse? Answer: Now he’s praising the dynamic economy, saying that this won’t happen. [Translation: he’s not concerned about the budget deficit.] He says the economy will survive because the government will bail it out. [Addendum: He quotes his father as saying: "Capitalism will always survive because socialism will always bail it out." I bet the Europeans wish someone would bail out socialism.] Danger: we’re in debt to a lot of foreign countries. He’s mixing this with the trade deficit. The trade deficit is not the same thing as foreign debt, but he’s not making the distinction, so I’m having a hard time following his argument. [Addendum: But apparently it's a bad thing.]

10:41 pm -- Question: Are our lawsuits raising consumer prices? Answer: Huh, he’s talked about this his entire talk. Now he’s praising the insurance companies for spreading out corporate costs. Hmm, I seem to remember him complaining about the fraudulent insurance companies earlier on.

10:45 pm -- It’s getting late, I’ll be getting going soon. I don’t want to stay too late.

10:47 pm -- Question: Why isn’t family helping? Answer: Corporate society destroys families. [That’s an interesting argument.] There’s a need for two breadwinners for a middle-class existence, and that draws parents apart. Television and video games make children less social, less family interaction.

10:52 pm -- Question: Why are you running for president rather than work on these issues? Answer: "We are shut out of Washington by a two party duopoly that is in bed with the corporate interests." We need consumer advocate in Washington. The Democrats are now much more in thrall to corporations than they used to be. One objective of running is to give young people opportunity to get involved. Wants universal healthcare. Wants "foreign policy that wages peace militantly." Decrease defense funding--we have no major enemies [Uh, this guy is running for President? He does know this is 2004, not 2000, right?]. Plug for votenader.org.

Update: I typed this over two hours while listening to Ralph Nader speak. I'm not a great typist in the first place, and since I was writing, not taking dictation, I spent most of that talk writing as fast as I could while listening. This inevitably led to mistakes and ugly stylistic missteps. I've decided to keep it as is, for the most part, but I'll correct any egregious grammatical errors. I may not be able to help myself with some of the stylistic things, but I'll make it clear if I make any substantive corrections. Any notes in italics that say [Addendum: More stuff here.] are later additions.

This is just a reminder that I will be blogging Ralph Nader tonight. His talk on Consumer Advocacy is at 9 pm. If I can live-blog it, I will, otherwise expect something to be up around 11 pm. I'll also bring my digital camera--maybe there'll be some fun demonstrators to photograph.

The Intervarsity Christian Fellowship at U of R took a survey of religious belief on the U of R campuses. I wrote up the results for an article in Campus Times, the college newspaper. Here's what I wrote:

This January the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship groups at University of Rochester River Campus and Eastman School of Music did surveys to begin to better understand the spiritual beliefs on the UR campuses. The survey was more informal than scientific, but given that over 194 students filled out surveys, the results lots of insight into the spiritual beliefs of UR and ESM students. The intervarsity groups will use the data to make their outreach and other programs more relevant. Probably most interesting were the responses to the four yes and no questions: "Do you believe God exists?", "Do you believe in a heaven?", "Do you believe in a hell?", and "If you believe in a heaven, do you believe that you will go there?" In all, 70% of the respondents believe that God exists, versus 8% who say He does not. The remaining 22% said they were not sure. 62% of the respondents say that Heaven exists, while 14% say it does not, as opposed to only 51% who say that Hell exists, while 26% say that it does not. 68% of those who believe in Heaven believe they are going, while 30% say they are not sure whether they are going or not, and only 2% said that they believe in Heaven but that they are not going. 80% of those who believed in Heaven also believed in Hell, while 7% said there was a Heaven but no Hell. The remainder were either not certain or did not answer the question. No one said they believed in Hell but not Heaven.

Of those who responded to thea question about religious background, 67% were from a traditional Christian background, either Catholic or Protestant, although only 84% of them said they believed in God, and only 63% had an orthodox Christian view of Jesus. Other common religious backgrounds included Jewish (6%), Atheism/Agnosticism (6%), Hinduism (3%), and Buddhism (3%). A striking 10% said they had no religious background.

Answers to the "Do you believe God exists?" question by campus and major.

Population	Yes	No	Not sure
River campus	63%	9%	28%
Eastman campus	81%	5%	14%
Hard sciences	59%	8%	32%
Humanities and social sciences	78%	6%	17%

I pretty much stuck with the facts and didn't do a lot of analysis. I'd do that here, but I don't have much time at the moment. I'll see if I can come up with more later.

New Post: I talk a bit about what I found most striking about this poll here.

There's a lot of effort to figure out who is to blame for 9/11 these days, from the Clarke book to the 9/11 commission. If we want to know who's responsible, however, it's dangerous to blame Presidents and administrations but not the people they led. No president wants to go to war without a popular mandate, and before 9/11, it simply wasn't there. It's possible that Clinton could have built a mandate based on the previous attacks, but it would have been nearly impossible for Bush to make the case in the first 8 months he was in office. It wasn't until September 11th that the American people were ready to support a war.

I think debates which ignore the political realities are missing a large part of the equation.

My small group is doing a study on Philip Yancey's book, The Jesus I Never Knew. Yesterday we had a lively discussion on a couple of paragraphs in Chapter 8, "Mission: A Revolution of Grace." The relevant paragraphs are these:

Somehow we have created a community of respectability in the church, I told my class. The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from doing this today?

Someone in the class suggested that legalism in the church had created a barrier of strict rules that made non-Christians feel uncomfortable. The class discussion abruptly lurched in a new direction, as survivors of Christian colleges and fundamentalist churches began swapping war stories. I told of my own bemusement in the early seventies when the redoubtable Moody Bible Institute, located just four blocks down the street from our church, was banning all beards, mustaches, and hair below the ears of male students--though each day students filed past a large oil painting of Dwight L. Moody, hirsute breaker of all three rules.

Everybody laughed. Everyone except Greg, that is, who fidgeted in his seat and smoldered. I could see his face flush red, then blanch with anger. Finally Greg raised his hand, and rage and indignation spilled out. He was almost stammering. "I feel like walking out of this place," he said, and all of a sudden the room hushed. "You criticize others for being Pharisees. I'll tell you who the real Pharisees are. They're you [he pointed at me] and the rest of you people in this class. You think you're so high and mighty and mature. I became a Christian because of Moody Church. You find a group to look down on, to feel more spiritual than, and you talk about them behind their backs. That's what a Pharisee does. You're all Pharisees."

All eyes in the class turned to me for a reply, but I had none to offer. Greg had caught us red-handed. In a twist of spiritual arrogance, we were now looking down on other people for being Pharisees.

In the first century, the Pharisees were a religious and political movement. They were neither collaborators with the Roman occupiers, nor revolutionaries. They attempted to find a middle ground, to be "in the Empire, not of it," to use an anachronism. Whereas today calling someone a Pharisee is a condemnation, at that time the Pharisees were respected and respectable. They made great efforts to live by the Law, which gave rise to a strict legalism and high moral standards.

Today, they are best remembered for their conflicts with Jesus. Why? What is it about them that made it so hard for them to get along with him? Well, what he often called them are "hypocrites," or "play actors." People who pretended to be something other than what they were. The passage from Philip Yancey's book points towards the problem: spiritual smugness. Anytime we look down on others because of our superior behavior, or doctrine, or worship style, deciding that we are the "better" Christians, we are acting like the Pharisees did. That is not to say that all beliefs or practices are equally good, or that blatant sin doesn't need a corrective, only that we, imperfect that we are, unable to see into the hearts of our fellow man, cannot judge anyone's spirituality but our own, and if we find that anything but wanting, we are in danger of forgetting our need for Christ.

Update: I am painting with a rather broad stroke here. As with any real-world political movement, there was a wide degree of variety among how individual Pharisees believed and acted. Many became Christians in the early years of the church. In Western thought, however, they are best remembered for their conflicts with Jesus, and I believe that conflict stemmed from the source I pointed out. Any movement which stresses individual purity runs into danger when its members believe they have achieved it.

Old Post: The earlier post is here.

In the Blogs for Bush carnival, my previous post is described as: "Back of the Envelope talks about how Kerry's association with VVAW, which was recently revealed to have discussed assassinating U.S. Senators, could destroy his political future." My first thought was "I didn't describe it that strongly, did I?" Well, I did come pretty close. I really think this story, if it were given anything near the attention that Bush's National Guard record was given, really could make Kerry's candidacy untenable, perhaps even cause him to withdraw, despite the fact that he's hardly the sort to do so. It looks like it won't get that attention, however, so it doesn't look like that will happen. It would take a prominent Democrat attacking Kerry on this, or at least a Bush ad about it, to get much media attention at all.

I was living in Boston for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I saw my share of protestors, big puppets and ludicrous slogans and all. For the most part I ignored them. First, I was a Grad student at the time, so I lived in my own little world. Second, their timing was always horrible. Oh, they'd have plenty of time to protest before the war started, loudly speculating about the horrors the US would inflict, but once things got going, they could no sooner organize the protest than it was all over. I remember one protest, where they slept in tents to empathize with the plight of the Afghan refugees from the war. Of course, the protest took a couple of weeks to put together, and by the time it actually happened, the tipping point had taken place at Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul had fallen, food and medical supplies had begun to pour in now that the land routes were open, and thousands of refugees, including those who had fled the Taliban years earlier, were beginning to return. The Tech article describing the protest did not deign to mention any of these things. Reading that article, I felt sorry for the protestors, who apparently had their talking points planned in advance and didn't really have time to adjust to the new realities on the ground

Ignorant and mistimed protesting is little more than annoying and amusing. This is evil:

(From this website.) This image has been circulating around the web, and well it should. I know these people love to complain about the crushing of dissent and trampling on their first amendment rights whenever someone calls them "unpatriotic" and makes them feel bad. Granted, I've never heard anyone actually called unpatriotic--I've never done it myself--but in this case I'll make an exception. This person is unpatriotic. I'll go further: he (or she, it's hard to tell) is hateful, anti-American, narrow-minded, and bigoted. As Glenn Reynolds says, they're not anti-war, they're on the other side.

Glenn's back. He was out for five days. In terms of number of posts, that's like one of us mortal bloggers being gone for a month.

Old Post: My previous post on the Bake Sale is here.

Conservatives Gone Wild has much more on the Affirmative Action Bake Sale than I do, including some about the interactions between the University administration and the College Republicans. There's more above and below the post I linked to, so keep scrolling. There's also an article in Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle. (Thanks to The Corner for the links.)

Sometimes I wonder whether Americans have forgotten September 11th. Not that it happened, certainly, but what it was like. In my case, I was frankly disbelieving. I had an indication that something was happening--I'd seen and heard some workmen listening to a radio as I walked into work. I hadn't really heard what they were talking about, but I got the impression that it was big. I was a Grad student at the time, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I didn't have a radio or a television on hand when I got to my office. The first notice I got was through an e-mail with a call to a prayer meeting, and reading that the reason for the prayer meetings were airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--I couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible. I tried to get online, to check CNN.com, but with all the Internet traffic that day, I couldn't get access. Eventually, a friend came by to talk to me about it, and I got a phone call from my mother (who was concerned since two of the flights had left from Boston, although she had no reason to think that I would be traveling anywhere that day), and I drained them of all the information they had, which was surprisingly little. It's not the sort of thing you forget, but sometimes it seems like we have forgotten, that two years is just too long in this age of "Internet time."

Today I was eating lunch at Pellegrino's, a sub place near U of R. The two guys sitting behind me were talking. (No, I didn't make much effort to tune them out. Call it eavesdropping if you want.) Initially, they were talking about dating younger women, and that it's important to have shared "Where were you...?" moments. They mentioned the Kennedy assassination, which neither of them could have been old enough to remember, then the Challenger shuttle explosion. Then came September 11th, which clearly wasn't relevant to the dating scene. From then on, that was all they talked about. One of them had a brother who witnessed it firsthand, and though it was secondhand, the speaker could describe his experience in detail. I left then, having finished eating, but I was reassured. Those two hadn't forgotten September 11th, and I very much doubt much of upstate New York has either. I doubt New York City has either.

Have you had a bad week? So has Senator Kerry. At least you don't have Mark Steyn to mock you mercilessly when your week goes awry:

I wonder if John Kerry has perhaps launched his descent into caricature a couple of months too early. Usually, the successful losing candidate waits till late spring/early summer before shifting gears and beginning each day with the campaign trying to explain some rhetorical triviality from the previous week that's stuck to his shoe and he can't seem to shake off.

His summary of Kerry's week is well worth the read, although curiously he doesn't talk about either Kerry's snowboarding incident or the VVAW's assassination plot, which I think are the biggest stories of the week. Since both these stories broke on Friday, maybe they came out after Mark's deadline. It just goes to show that Kerry was having a bad week even before they happened.

The snowboarding incident, where Kerry collided with one of his Secret Service agents and then called him names, reminds me of an earlier snowboarding incident.

Here are the important posts for the week:

New Computer -- This may not seem like a big deal to you, but my new laptop (a Latitude D600, 14" screen, under 5 lbs), and especially, its wireless connection, may change the way I blog.

Spain: The attacks and the election -- I finally put in my two cents on the Madrid bombings and the following electoral retreat. It doesn't look good.

Blogging Ralph Nader -- All right, I'll do it! With a new laptop, and with luck, a wireless connection, I'll be live-blogging Nader's talk this week.

Do you want a revolution? -- Reasons why I think a revolution in Iran would be a good thing.

Cheney's Speech -- I comment on Cheney's excellent speech, with extensive quotes.

Affirmative Action Bake Sale -- U of R's College Republicans have an affirmative action bake sale, but I'm not sure it's really a great idea.

Kerry's VVAW problem -- I knew Kerry's involvement with this group would pose problems, but I didn't think they'd be this big.