There’s nothing like a new chain to make you feel good about your old bike.
Topping off the tire pressure was icing on the cake.
I continue to be astonished that someone related to me has the discipline to post a blog entry every day. “A thought a day,” she says in her tagline, “lets the mind out to play.” Sometimes she misses a day and has to play catch-up, but so far she’s pretty much been true to her word.
I can barely manage one thought a month.*
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*This doesn’t count.
Bob Somerby, in his Daily Howler, is as hard on “liberal” reporters and commentators as he is on right-wingers. He hates sloppy thinking and writing, wherever it comes from, and knee-jerk reactions from legs of any political stripe drive him to distraction. I’m generally sympathetic, though I think he can come off a bit schoolmarmish at times, missing the crime for the peccadilloes (let’s leave the trees and forest be).
Yesterday Somerby went off on Tim Egan of the New York Times. Egan quoted Rand Paul (our political media’s Kook of the Month):
“We’re the only country I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen,” Paul told a Russian broadcaster. “And I think that should stop also.”
Egan then went on to speculate freely:
Of course, race has nothing to do with it, these situational constitutionalists say. But you have to wonder if their concern over citizens by birth would have extended to big Irish Catholic families of 100 years ago, some of whom came to the United States through illegal border crossings from Canada.
Somerby lets fly:
Egan is held in chains of bondage too. He feels no obligation to speak to the merits of Paul’s position. But he does feel forced to wonder what Paul might have said about something else, a century ago.
“You have to wonder” about that, he says. But actually, no—you don’t have to. Instead, you can actually speak to the merits of the current case. Egan never does.
…
Paul is quoted making a factual claim about other countries—a claim Egan never disputes. Nor does Egan ever say why it makes sense, in the abstract, to grant citizenship to newborns in the way we do—in a way no other country would, if Paul’s assertion is accurate.
Somerby accuses Egan of playing the race card with Paul rather than arguing the merits. For Somerby, Paul’s statement raises two questions: (1) Is Paul correct about the policy of other countries regarding citizenship by birth? (2) In the case of the US, does the constitutional gift of citizenship to anyone born in the US make sense?
Let’s leave the second for anyone who cares to argue about it. The first is just a research task. Ignore Paul’s additional clause about “coming in illegally.” No country “allows” people to enter illegally, even if they do it. If it happens, it’s a crime. But if a child is born to that person who entered the country illegally, or entered legally and stayed illegally—well, that’s part of what the citizenship laws address.
A few minutes of internet searching turned up a document, dated March 2001, giving the requirements for citizenship for 206 countries. It turns out 48 countries (including the US) make citizenship available to a “[c]hild born in the territory of [country], regardless of the nationality of the parents.” (Again, Paul’s remark about illegal entry is beside the point. Much as he seems intent on conflating them, the two issues—illegal entry and citizenship by birth—are not joined at the hip.) Some of these countries exclude children of “foreigners in the service of their country” or children “born to certain diplomatic personnel”; and a few require registration or confirmation of citizenship upon reaching majority (18 or 21 years of age).
Here are the 48 countries, based on my reading of the aforementioned document:
Several other countries (Australia among them) allowed citizenship by birth in the past, but no longer do. Also, this list does not include countries that offer citizenship to children born of stateless parents or persons of no known nationality.
There, that wasn’t so hard.
I leave it to the reader to decide whether Rand Paul makes a compelling point. It seems clear to me he was trying to place the United States outside the circle of all other countries in its policy on conferring citizenship to any child born in its territory. If he was not “wrong” (and, given the sloppiness of his statement, it would be hard to establish “veracity” with any confidence), it would appear he was misleading his listeners, intentionally or not.
I had intended to use these photos to test a flip-book plugin, but I found it cumbersome for my limited purposes. So I looked at the various WordPress gallery/slideshow plugins and settled on this one (NextGEN Gallery)—for now, at least.
I’ll be futzing with it for a while, seeing if I can add captions, rearrange images, enable comments, figure out the difference between a “gallery” and an “album,” determine the optimal file size, etc. So don’t be surprised or miffed if it doesn’t look the same the next time you visit.
And now, without further ado: the dogwood we planted about 15 years ago as it manifests itself through the seasons, plus the critters that visit it.
Another April 24 has passed—the 95th since the day in 1915 when Armenian leaders and intellectuals were rounded up as the opening act of an Ottoman plan to rid their lands of all Armenians. For the second year in a row, Barack Obama took note of the anniversary but again declined to call it by its proper name, which is genocide.
The Turkish prime minister said an odd thing when he was in Great Britain recently:
In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.
Apparently he’s miffed that foreign legislatures keep passing resolutions acknowledging the genocide and calling it by name. Yet this is the same prime minister who has been active in normalizing relations with Armenia, and who seems open to amending Turkey’s official position on the final days of the Ottoman Empire: “What is important is to look into the archives, the historical documents … if, as the result of this work, it turns—comes out that there is such a situation, we would then consider and question our history.” Leaving aside the fact that many disinterested parties have already looked into the archives and historical documents and found genocide, making this sound like the usual dodge, one can’t help but give greater weight to what he said in the same interview: “Characterizing the events of 1915 as genocide is not something that we can accept.” ‘Round and ’round he goes …
Meanwhile, a growing number of Turks are speaking out on the Armenian genocide—historians, novelists, and ordinary citizens:
On Saturday, while hundreds of thousands of Armenians climbed to the hilltop memorial in Yerevan, a Turkish human-rights group in Istanbul held its own event, mourning with them. In another part of town, a group of Kurdish mothers gathered in solidarity with Armenians, calling on Turkey to recognize the genocide. Their empathy was matched by bravery, as they could have been jailed or fined for any public mention of the genocide, banned under Turkish law.
It is the latest and boldest step by Turks choosing to break with their government’s silence. It followed an online petition entitled “I Apologize,” signed by nearly 30,000 people in Turkey last year. “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Armenians were subjected to in 1915,” the brief statement read. “I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.”
Perhaps in 2015, after the last Armenian survivor of the death marches will have surely passed away, the Turkish people will finally get this load off their collective backs by simply saying: Yes, some of our great-grandparents tried to pull off a genocide. It was wrong. And we renounce it. We condemn the attitude toward the Other that is capable of concocting such an atrocious plan as this genocidal government campaign against a portion of its own population. We are no longer that type of country. We apologize not only to Armenians, we apologize to Turks and others whom we, as a country, have hounded for daring to express their opinions on the matter. Contrary to what our leaders have said for decades, it is impossible to “offend Turkishness.” There is no such thing as “Turkishness.” Every citizen of Turkey is free to be himself or herself. Turks do not fear diversity—we celebrate it. Diversity is a resource, not a threat.
Such, I think, would be the cascading benefits of a simple admission of a historical truth.
The sky was noticeably clearer this morning here in Washington, the air sweet-smelling and strangely endorphic. I was at a loss to explain why. Then I read the news: Turkey has recalled its ambassador. Seems a committee in the US House of Representatives had the nerve to pass a nonbinding resolution that said a genocide was perpetrated in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire.
Every year around this time I find myself asking myself two questions:
They’re unlikely to be answered satisfactorily any time soon, but I’m not going to let that spoil the mood. And I’m not ready to consider them rhetorical questions.
In the meantime, here’s something nice Congress can do: it can reduce its annual aid to Turkey by exactly the amount Turkey spends on public relations in the United States. The American taxpayer is, in effect, paying for Ankara’s attempts to quash legislation and influence our own foreign policy.
It’s a thought that recurs every time a bit of nature knocks us out of our technological groove: Modern people don’t know how to do nothing.
I lost interest in the Great Snowfall of 2010 (February 5–6)* when it became clear we were not going to break any records. Snow, and then more snow, and snow yet again … yeah, we’re having an unusually snowy winter, big deal.
Then the “blizzard conditions” arrived, on top of the snow that had fallen so recently, on top of what we’d already shoveled into rather large piles, and things threatened to become interesting again.
Drifts. Now that’s something I miss here in DC. It’s happened a couple of times since I’ve been here, and it’s happening now. The snow is still arriving pretty much horizontally, although the end of the precipitation is supposedly in sight. The winds, however, will continue, if we are to believe the weather mavens (and they’ve been pretty accurate this year).
I know, it’s trite to talk about the weather so much. So here’s a picture of a bird hiding under our back deck during the onslaught today:
For all I know, the sparrows are still hunkering down in the bush by the front porch (two of them flew out Monday while I was talking across it with a neighbor, me down on the ground, he on his porch—he didn’t even notice).
Almost time to start shoveling again …
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*I refuse to call it Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Blizzacane, or whatever everybody’s calling it. Good grief, as if.
The mercury is pushing 70 today, and some people are actually walking around in shirtsleeves. A typical midwinter Washington heat wave.
(Note the three o’clock shadows—already a month from the solstice, but the sun is still lying low.)
Two weeks ago today, the Potomac was frozen over, and I saw this scene from Key Bridge as I biked to work:
A diver had knocked a hole in the ice with an ax and had lowered himself into the water. On the dock of the nearby boathouse, a bunch of guys prepared to join him, one of them maneuvering a strange contraption:
I thought maybe they were fishing for a dead body,* or looking for explosives, or something else appropriately dramatic.
But eventually their casual, almost lackadaisical behavior convinced me it was a training exercise, so I repacked the camera, put my gloves back on, and continued on my merry way to an absolutely thrilling Monday at work.
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*One summer day several years ago, again on my way to work, I had indeed seen a dead man splayed out on the boathouse dock, surrounded by police and rescue personnel. It was the morning after a nighttime cloudburst, and it’s my guess he was a homeless guy who had been washed out of a culvert about a half-mile upriver. If you rent a canoe and paddle up that way, you’ll see the warning sign where the stormwater periodically rushes out into the Potomac.
Gadsden
Not content to wrap themselves in the Stars and Bars Stripes, the “Tea Party” people are grabbing other nice flags from our great confused history. I always liked the Gadsden flag: “Don’t tread on me” (although—in a fit of revolutionary fervor, I guess—they dispensed with the apostrophe). Not only did I like the image and the sentiment, I like snakes. They’ve gotten a bum rap from Genesis on. Naturally, it rubs me wrong when the “Don’t-Expect-Me-To-Actually-Pay-For-Our-Imperial-Wars” crowd tries to appropriate this symbol of a young republic giving the finger to the imperial power of the day.
So here’s my Gadsden flag, updated for my amusement:
I made a few other versions, but they’re significantly less charitable toward my earnest, imaginary tea–tossing compatriots.