Labor

There was big news in the world of labor relations this past week. A few big unions decided to split with the AFL-CIO.

The three unions that have announced disaffiliation -- UFCW, SEIU, and Teamsters -- are all part of the Change to Win Coalition, and other Change to Win unions may soon follow. Hoffa Jr. of the Teamsters and Andy Stern of the SEIU have spoken about their reasons for the move, and I think they make a good point.

The AFL-CIO has been spending a lot of money on lobbying in order to get worker-rights legislation passed and to get labor-friendly politicians elected. For those of us who work for other people (and that's most of us) the AFL-CIO's lobbying is generally beneficial, even if we don't belong to a labor union.

However, if we look at the classic struggle between owners and laborers, it stands to reason that the ones who control the greater amount of capital will have the more effective lobby. I'm a patzer at chess, but even I know that you don't bother applying pressure to the strongest point in your opponent's position. When it comes to buying politicians, the labor unions just can't compete with the corporate PACs. This is especially true given the substantial, decades-long decline in union membership.

So the Change to Win unions plan to spend more on organizing activities. Which, if successful, will reverse the membership trend. And the workers will, in theory, form a larger bloc of voters that politicians, whether bought or not, won't be able to ignore.

Squirrels

Bushy-tailed rats.

They were such a nuisance this spring, digging up every green thing that had the audacity to poke up out of the soil. So I set out some humane traps and relocated a few of them. Serves me right that their replacements are even more ill-mannered.

Last week I set some tea out to brew on my back porch. When I came home from work that evening, I found one of my flower pots all dug up and dirt scattered around the porch. And somehow the squirrel had managed to get the lid off the jar of tea and got potting soil in the tea.

The next morning, I noticed a couple of unripe tomatoes missing from my tomato plant. I found them half-eaten at various places on the back steps. At least they didn't get all the tomatoes... until later in the day. The next time I saw the plant, there wasn't a single tomato remaining.

Yesterday I decided to grill a couple of hot dogs for dinner. I opened the valve to the propane tank and hit the starter button. Nothing happened. I hit the button a few more times -- still nothing. There didn't seem to be any gas coming out of the burner... but it sure smelled like gas! I carefully inspected the valve, and that's when I saw that the rubber hose running from the regulator to the burner had been chewed through.

The awkwardness of youth

I need to post something, so here's a story...

Two months ago I had an uncomfortable encounter with myself. I mean, there I was at a Bar Mitzvah, and I'm looking at this other person, and this other person was me.

Well, he wasn't exactly me -- not in the sense that he and I were one and the same person. This isn't the Twilight Zone. But it was like putting a 20-year-old videotape in the VCR and watching old footage of myself. And seeing myself as I was twenty years ago was not pleasant. It's been two months, and it still comes out gibberish when I write about it.

Think back to a time in our lives before we had learned how to handle the everyday demands of life. Back when our flaws were so exposed -- because we were too young to know how else to be. It is something we want to be forgotten. And when we see it, we just want to cover our eyes and cringe.

Let's make a deal

And let's face it... I'm an engineer.

Wikipedia's topic of the day is the Monty Hall problem. This is the problem, as stated in the article:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

The answer is yes... You double your chances of winning if you switch to the other door. If you think that sounds totally wrong, you're in good company. When this problem appeared in Marilyn vos Savant's column in 1990, even mathematicians wrote to "correct" her, according to Ms. vos Savant.

But it does make me wonder about the quality of mathematicians these days. It's pretty simple to create a Monte Carlo simulation to verify beyond any doubt that the solution is correct. And since I'm an engineer, I thought it would be fun to make a web page where you can play the game yourself...


(click the image to navigate to the page)

Try it a couple dozen times. Remember, always change your selection when asked, and you should win the car 2 times out of 3.

Dispatch from the battlefield

A hearing that may lead to a trial of dirty bomb suspect José Padilla took place yesterday -- finally, after a three-year detention. I suppose this has some local interest because Padilla is a Chicagoan, and because he was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

Before I go any further, let me make it clear that by criticizing the government, I am in no way trying to justify Padilla's actions. When Padilla lived in Chicago, he was a gang member with a fairly lengthy criminal record. By some accounts, he was prone to violence and not very bright. He's not the kind of guy I'd like living on my block. As for the government's case against him, I'm not privy to the facts; for all I know, Padilla is guilty. But in order for that determination to be made, he needs to stand trial.

Padilla, a US citizen, but classified as an illegal enemy combatant, has been held at a naval brig in South Carolina since June of 2002. As an illegal enemy combatant, he has been denied the protections of the Geneva Conventions. But he has also been denied rights ordinarily guaranteed to all citizens, such as the right to legal counsel and the right to a speedy and public trial.

One of the Bush Administration's justifications for this treatment is that O'Hare Airport is a battlefield in the Global War on Terror. Which would mean Padilla was captured on the field of battle.

Huh.

I'm just not buying it. Because then all the government has to do is claim that a crime -- committed on US soil by a US citizen -- is an act of terrorism, and it gets to suspend the Bill of Rights.

New Save Senn website

I haven't had much involvement with the whole Senn military academy thing lately. Frankly, I find it pretty discouraging. Whether or not you think the military academy is a good thing, CPS and City Hall flouted the authority of the school's own administration and the LSC when they approved the plan. Then, when the Senn Tomorrow Task Force requested that CPS Chief Executive Arne Duncan put a moratorium on the plans for the coming school year, Duncan flatly rejected the request. There is nothing now that can stop the opening of the naval academy this fall.

Still, the Save Senn Coalition continues to be active in trying to (a) prevent neighborhood schools from being taken over by the Department of Defense and (b) ensure that local control of neighborhood schools is maintained. Save Senn invested in a brand new website, just unveiled in the last week. Check it out.

Oh! what a tangled web we weave

...When first we practice to deceive; so says Sir Walter Scott.

Let us suppose that the Downing Street Memo is a smoking gun -- evidence that we were determined to go to war even though the case for war against Iraq was known to be weak. In order to sell the war, what information must be manufactured? Who does this? How is it done? To try and answer these questions, I started slapping down some text bubbles on a page and drew lines to indicate associations. Lines represent different types of associations, such as membership or generalization or responsibility. Some names are of perpetrators, some are of victims. The graph's completeness is limited both by gaps in my own knowledge and by the constraints of the two-dimensional representation.


(Click image for full-sized version.)

DSM implies fixing the intelligence around the foregone conclusion of war. Part of this was the Niger yellowcake assertion. Related to this was Ambassador Wilson's investigation and the infamous "16 words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address. It turns out that Wilson's investigation contradicted the President's claims. And this leads to two diametrically opposed nodes -- one ("CIA identity leak") to suppress information that argues against the war, and the other ("Pro-war propaganda") to publicize information that argues for it.

[19 JUL 2005 20:50:00 CDT] Update: Since I posted this item, it's been revealed that Dick Cheney's chief of staff (and PNAC war hawk) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was also involved in leaking Plame's identity. So the diagram is already out of date. Pretend there's a "Scooter Libby" bubble connected to both "Dick Cheney" and "CIA identity leak."

Happy birthday, Jazzy

Here's a picture of her I took today. It's her 12th birthday.

Airbrushed America

After I posted last night's entry, I thought I'd do a Google search on the Argentinean variant of my name. There were some interesting results, like this one:

Is globalization an inevitable occurrence? Or is it simply a contemporary breed of imperialism? Either way, the prevailing preoccupation is globalization's potential to destroy the diversity of cultures around the world.

The author of the above excerpt is a young woman named Natalia Cherjovsky; it's from the 3rd International Conference on Globalisation and Resistance, at the University of Brighton, UK, March 2005. I haven't checked with the subject matter experts, but I think she is my third cousin once removed (great-great grandfather's great-great-great granddaughter). I thought this abstract was interesting because my last posting vaguely touched on how certain aspects of different cultures -- such as language -- are being lost. But then there's this:

How can a country that is morally bankrupt, politically corrupt, economically dysfunctional and culturally barren successfully presents [sic] itself as the epitome of civilization? What is it that is being fed to these captive audiences? It's a mirage; a collage of airbrushed pictures and romanticized memories of a time when the US was the country it still purports to be. They are exporting the American Nightmare.

Damn. That's harsh.

Now, I will grant that the presence of the American Empire around the world has often been destructive. But morally bankrupt? Nah, just deeply in debt.

Der Yomervoch

Over lunch today, I was listening to Gretchen Helfrich's Odyssey show on Chicago Public Radio. (Gretchen, I'm in love with your voice, but I am totally intimidated by your intellect.) Today's topic was endangered and indigenous languages, which has some personal significance to me, since my father was brought up in a household in which a dying language was spoken.

The radio show reminded me about how, a few years ago, I was visiting a friend who had recently come to the United States from the Ukraine. It was a Shabbos dinner, and his extended family was there. At some point, I somehow had the occasion to recite the following:

Siz Brilik geven, di schlichtinke toves
Hob'n gevirt un gevim'lt in vob'n,
Gantz mimzisch geven di borogoves;
Di mome-ret hot oisgegrob'n.

This is the first stanza of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky translated into Yiddish. The translation was by someone named Rafael Finkel.*

Anyway, I hardly got the first line out before my friend's mother ran into the room excitedly... "You speak Yiddish!" she exclaimed. I had to explain that I was only reciting a poem, and no, I do not speak Yiddish, other than a few common words. I was amused, though, that even the nonsense words of Der Yomervoch, pronounced correctly, could so easily be recognized as Yiddish.

Footnote:
*Transliteration from that was done by me... The average English speaker reading the above text would probably mangle it beyond recognition; I'm not sure a pronunciation key would help much. Transliteration from Yiddish is never an exact science... For instance, by various conventions, my last name would be spelled Cherchowski (Poland), Tcherkhovsky (Russia), or Cherjovsky (Argentina).

Two sixty-four a gallon

Monday morning I stopped for gas on the way to work.

The sun's glare was reflecting off the pump's display. The man pumping gas next to me called out, "Shielding your eyes from the sun or from the prices?"

My primary concern was getting enough gas in the tank to get to work, so I hadn't noticed that it was costing me $2.64 per gallon. $2.64! That is probably the most I've ever paid for gas.

"Write your congressman!" the man shouted at me.

"What for?" I asked. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Ms. Congresswoman, my gas costs too much...

The high price of gasoline is the result of conditions that have been years in the making. There are concerns that we are nearing peak global oil production, which constrains supply. Then there is rapidly increasing demand in the developing world. Anyone who's taken ECON-101 should know that this combination results in higher prices.

The little exchange I had at the gas station made me think back a few years to the runup to the Iraq War. Of course, at that time the government was talking about WMD's as the reason to go to war. But around the water cooler I heard a couple of other reasons.

First, ousting Saddam will give us greater access to Iraqi oil. This will make the supply more reliable, keeping prices stable.

Second, war is good for the economy! In the summer of 2002, we were in the midst of a shallow, but prolonged, recession, and 401(k) balances were in free fall. Nothing like a good war to firm up those investments!

I never heard anyone rebut these arguments. I never did, but I should have. In war, people die. If cheap gas and rising equity prices come with this hidden human cost attached, it's not worth it. On the second point, some people might feel vindicated, but on the first, they've been proven wrong -- oil is much more expensive today. And if proponents of Peak Oil Theory are correct, high oil prices are here to stay, and Iraqi oil won't do anything to change that.

Local theatre: Band Geeks

Saturday I went to the opening night performance of Band Geeks: A Halftime Musical.

I must disclose that I know the choreographer, and she could probably kick my *ssterisk (very gracefully, I might add). So I'm not sure if I'm the one to provide an unbiased review. Anyway, I could find no fault in the choreography; great job, Paula!

This comedy is set at a high school in Ohio in the late 1980s. Following the '80s Revenge of the Nerds formula, it is a story of nerds overcoming persecution at the hands of arrogant jocks. Band Geeks is full of '80s cultural references, thematic and otherwise, so for those of us who got our first zit during the Reagan presidency, it's a lot of fun.

Band Geeks is beginning a five week run at the Live Bait Theater, on Clark near the Sheridan Red Line stop.

[11 JUL 2005 17:40:00] Update: Before anyone asks how I could have seen the show Saturday night and posted an entry at 9:50 PM, I should mention that Band Geeks has a very late showtime -- 10:45 PM.

The have a website: www.bandgeeksmusical.com

And a much-neglected blog: bandgeeksmusical.blogspot.com

Whoa, what just happened?

Nobody reads this blog.

I have sitemeter track visits, and so I can see that most of the visits to my site are by me. I'm lucky if I get three visitors in a single day, and several days may go by without any visitors at all. Not that that bothers me.

Fifteen minutes after I published my previous entry, I got a huge spike that lasted for 52 minutes in which I got a whole 19 unique visitors. Domains are all over the map... Many are from foreign countries. Referring URLs are from other Blogger sites, so I'm guessing my site somehow got in the "Next Blog" list?

Markos

I was hoping that the 2006 YearlyKos Convention would be held in Chicago, but Las Vegas was selected instead. Had Chicago been chosen, it would have been a good opportunity to see Markos for the first time in at least a dozen years. Now I have to decide if I want to take a trip to Las Vegas in June.

There was an interesting development on his website last week. Markos allows registered users to create their own diaries on his site, making it like a blog of blogs. In the wake of the London bombings, some of the diarists were irresponsibly spouting all sorts of wild conjecture, and Markos just didn't want anything to do with it. So he deleted the diaries and banned their authors from the site. There was some concern that he might have cast too wide a net. But I think Markos did the right thing.

Odd bit of trivia: You can rearrange the letters in Markos' name to spell: "So it's Mark Maslov." But for the record, we're not the same person. (Just trying to ward off any wild conjecture.)

GWOT

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is nonsense.

I won't say we're winning. I won't say we're losing. But I will use a pop cultural reference to create an obscure metaphor:

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Spoon boy: There is no spoon.

In the televised address Bush gave two weeks ago, he simplistically portrayed terrorists as being part of some monolithic, organized agent of evil, an evil to be fought in Iraq. But terrorism is a tactic, not an opposing army. Organizations that have used this tactic include al-Qaeda, Hamas, Chechen separatists, IRA (UK), and ETA (Spain). One of the worst terrorist incidents to occur on American soil was perpetrated by a small band of anti-government American militants.

Do not try and wage war against a tactic. That's impossible.

As a tactic, terrorism is very real. We could see how real it is when we woke up this morning and turned on the news. But to those who view terrorists as a monolith that can be defeated the way an army can, I say: There is no spoon. That's why the winning/losing dichotomy makes no sense, and that's why people talk about the possibility of a perpetual war.

Who bombed the US embassies in 1998? Who bombed the USS Cole in 2000? WTC in 2001? Bali in 2002? Istanbul in 2003? Madrid in 2004? If we want to bring the organization responsible for these attacks to justice and to prevent them from attacking again, we should be directing our efforts against them -- not against some nebulous, archetypal bogeyman. Here is a news item that was somewhat obscured by this morning's London bombings:

Gunmen have killed the head of Egypt's diplomatic mission in Baghdad, Cairo said on Thursday. The Al Qaeda group said it executed him because he represented a "tyrannical" government allied to Jews and Christians.

The envoy, ambassador Ihab al-Sherif, was abducted near his home in Baghdad last Saturday about one month after taking up his post as one of the highest ranking Arab diplomats in Iraq.

There are things we can do to disrupt the operations of al-Qaeda and keep them from carrying out such acts. We can seize their assets. We can capture and detain their leadership. We can monitor them with intelligence. And we can put pressure on governments that provide sanctuary or sponsor their activities. These ideas were presented in Richard Clarke's memo to C. Rice, dated January 25, 2001. As for more general security precautions, we can look to the findings of the bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission.

[08 JUL 2005 07:11:00 CDT] Update: It seems the Wikipedia entry for the Hart-Rudman Commission contains some bad links. For now, the commission report can be found at a poorly-maintained University of North Texas site.

[09 JUL 2005 16:44:00 CDT] Update: I think I may have lost my way a bit on this entry... It didn't turn out as good as I had hoped. I was trying to illustrate the distinction between things that are false (grass is orange) and things that are absurd (three-sided squares obey Newton's Fourth Law of Motion).

It also bugs me that al-Qaeda itself is somewhat nebulous. (See "Is al-Qaeda real?" in the Wikipedia entry.) It's possible that the various cells are so independent that there is no real centralized command structure. What we do know is that there are groups that claim to be part of the al-Qaeda network and use their modus operandi.

Durian

Some days I just gotta take a break from writing about weighty issues. I don't imagine many readers will be interested in my observations on fruit, but then, this blog was not meant to be read anyway.

When I went to the local Asian grocery the other day, I saw an interesting looking fruit called a durian. It was about the size and shape of a football, the outside was green and spiny, and it was cracked open to reveal lumpy, bright orange flesh. Frozen and shrink wrapped, it gave no hint as to its texture or flavor, but considering its intriguingly otherworldly appearance, I decided to give it a try.

After having tasted it, I can see why it hasn't caught on in the West like some other tropical fruits such as the banana. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about the Durian: "Some Westerners have described the experience of eating the durian as 'like eating custard in a public lavatory.'" I suppose its aroma does have notes of toilet bowl deodorizer, but as for its flavor, I really didn't find it all that objectionable. The texture is another matter. The flesh is soft and mushy, and quite fibrous. Normally, one expects food to compact down upon chewing, but this seemed to expand in my mouth. A final word of caution: avoid skin contact unless you want to smell like a durian the rest of the day; no amount of washing will remove the odor.

Alderman's office, Buffalo Grove, Foster Beach

Ramblings...

Last Wednesday evening I attended Alderman Smith's monthly Planning and Zoning (P&Z) meeting, which was held at her office. The meeting is Mary Ann Smith's way of giving 48th Ward residents a democratic forum for weighing in on neighborhood development and other issues. But as I looked around the room, I was struck by a question: Where are my neighbors? The room was filled with old white folks. Not that there's anything wrong with being an old, white folk, but if I were to walk down my street, I'd see plenty of people who don't look or talk like me: Hispanics, a good number of African-Americans, plus Asians, Indians, Russians, Albanians, etc. The absence of these people from the alderman's meeting made me wonder just how democratic all this really was.

The big topic of the evening was CPAN, an affordable housing initiative; the attendees, consisting primarily of the economic elite of the Ward, couldn't get past their fear of government's intrusion into the housing market, and so no vote was taken regarding a formal CPAN set-aside plan. There were a few African-Americans present, one of whom spoke eloquently in favor of affordable housing.

The following evening was band practice in the affluent suburb of Buffalo Grove, the last rehearsal before the July 4th concert. At one point when I had fifteen bars rest, I looked around at the other musicians in the band: seventy players, and not a single dark face among them. And I thought of the people in my neighborhood -- those who have lived their lives in poverty, those whose English is poor, those who are mentally ill, those who cannot walk, those who have had little education, those whose opportunities are limited by prior run-ins with the law. It dawned on me that the people in my band are so far removed from what exists in my neighborhood that there is little chance for them to really understand it. They simply have no exposure to these things.

Sunday I took a walk along the lakefront. I headed south from Foster Beach in search of a mango vendor. One thing you'll notice around Foster Beach is that no one speaks English, including the mango vendor. If you want a mango, you have to say, "Un MAHN-go, por favor." And then you give the man dos dólares.

Just my dos centavos.

What I'm reading

Today I came home from the Asian grocery down the block and found that my copy of the Qur'an had arrived in the mail.

A Jew sits down for some kimchee and gunpowder green tea, then cracks open an English translation of a Muslim holy text. Only in America.

Central to Islam is the belief in the miraculous beauty of the Qur'an; I must admit, however, that I approach the text, as I do with all religious texts, with skepticism. I'm sure beauty exists within it, but there are parts that will inevitably be less beautiful than others.

The book was sent free of charge by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). This particular translation, by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, has come under fire by some as being anti-Semitic. They support this assertion by referring to a 2002 article in the LA Times, which reported that copies of this very translation were removed from school libraries because of anti-Semitic content. This is actually only a partial truth. The fact of the matter is that the schools initially accepted the donated Qur'ans without review. After it came to light that some of the footnotes might be interpreted as anti-Semitic, school district officials thought it might be good to do a content review; books were removed from the libraries until the review was complete. I was unable to find any reference to the outcome.

The truth is, the Qur'an I was sent, which is one of the most widely read English translations, is a dense tome of more than 1600 pages. In its index, there are perhaps two dozen references to passages that cast Jews in a negative light. Most of those references are clearly historical in nature, describing disputes between Jewish and early Muslim tribal units. Yes, you can find a passage referring to Jews as apes and swine, and this is indeed an ugly charge. But if that's what is written in the Qur'an, don't blame the translation. Furthermore, I think it is unfair to characterize the entire volume based on a small number of offensive passages; one can find equally offensive verses in the Bible, but I don't hear any calls to ban that book.

I have also heard some criticisms of CAIR, and there is even a whole anti-CAIR website. The basic charge is that CAIR sponsors terrorist organizations. There are numerous links on the anti-CAIR site to off-site content, but most of these are opinion pieces that seem to have materialized on the web out of the ether. The few articles I could find from respected news organizations have actually run corrections clearing CAIR's name. There's a Wikipedia entry on CAIR that fails to settle the question.

Sigh... I think the thing to do is to just read the book. Take a peek at the comments section for an excerpt...