Not a Potted Plant

When I read this article by Mark Adomanis in Forbes online, I find myself a bit confused. Adomanis mantains that there is a significant strain of American conservatism that looks at l’affaire d’Pussy Riot in Russia and doesn’t get past the fact that the underlying offense occurred in a church. For that reason, while Vladimir Putin and the Russian government may not exactly be good guys, they are at least on the side of justice here, because they are pushing back against bigotry directed at Christianity.

And I think, “Really?” I don’t know anyone who thinks that way. Continue Reading →

Once upon a time about a year ago, a man who had been elected to the United States Congress went to Israel and he had ma-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ybe a little too much to drink and then he went skinny dipping in a big lake because it was really hot that day so maybe some people saw his weiner.

The moral of the story is: “Seriously. Why should anyone care?”

A few months ago, Clancy gave 1-year (or so) notice at work (I may write more on this at some point). We will be leaving next summer. We don’t know what comes next. We will also be dealing with a little one at around this time. Uncertainty abounds.

Today another wrench was thrown into everything. As a good faith gesture, we’d let our landlords know that we would be leaving next summer. Today they informed us that they want us out in April, three or four months before we plan to leave Callie.

So now we have to figure out what to do. Most likely, we put our stuff in storage and live thin for that period. Well, as thin as you can with a little one. I can’t imagine that we will want to actually pack/unpack twice. Fortunately, there is a storage place two blocks away. But it’s a suboptimal arrangement in so many ways. Among other things, the rental market around here is terrible.

The other option is that Clancy leaves sooner than announced. She will be going on maternity leave when the peanut is born and that will last twelve weeks. Coming back for a couple months after and then leaving again isn’t optimal (if her employer goes for it), and I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of us that wanted her out of that job as soon as possible, but nine months of unemployment is a lot to shoulder.

We have some money saved up, but per Paragraph #1 we are looking at some real financial uncertainty in the days that lay ahead. Unpaid maternity leave followed by a couple months in between jobs and what may be a rigid employment schedule if everything goes right.

Basically, she is looking at going through another fellowship, which eliminates the possibility of just finding a new job and moving there. The fellowship may or may not happen, but we can’t plan over it. So taking this opportunity to just leave means a financial strain or a foregone opportunity.

The other vague possibility is a return to the southwest and the Indian reservation she worked on before. She loved it there and they loved her. We’d considered moving down there for the indefinite future, but they’re changing the job description away from what she wants to do (which is, in essence, exactly what happened in Arapaho). It could serve as a holdover, with our stuff in storage back in Callie.

I haven’t seen Clancy in about four days due to her call schedule and a constant influx of patients, though she is due home tonight. So it’ll be great that our first conversation is going to be “What the crap are we going to do?!” And, of course, the more we talk about it, the less we’re spending on more pleasant topics and the less time she has to work on the notes and charts that have been accumulating during her work rally.

Also, the in-laws arrive late tomorrow.

I feel cruel seeing my dog sleeping, whimpering and shaking while she dreams of something she fears. I want to comfort and love her, to assure her that it’s all okay, her people are here and will protect her, there is no predator chasing her and there is food to eat. But she needs sleep, too, and even on days I’m not working at home, I know that she sleeps and dreams like this. It’s better to leave her be, heartbreaking as it is.

How much worse for parents of actual human children, who have to see their kids go through unpleasant experiences, and let the pain happen because there’s no other way for the child to learn. Hats off to parents and may your children grow happy again soon.

If Tim Howard didn’t get Man of the Match for his brilliant late-game saves, he was robbed. The U.S. Men’s National Team won in Mexico for the first time in 75 years tonight. Go Team America!*

* Truth be told, I liked it better when the USMNT was nicknamed “The Stars and Stripes.” It would go with the current road uniform better anyway, and for that matter why did they get rid of the blue uniform with the diagonal stripe? It looked really cool.

The Atlantic has a piece about Australia’s new cigarette boxes:

As part of the landmark tobacco regulation bill President Obama signed in 2009, Congress required cigarette makers to set aside half the space on each of their packages for health warnings. Then last June, the FDA unveiled its own set of nine gruesome labels designed to cover half of each cigarette package (examples to the right). They included graphic images of diseased lungs, a cadaver with staples running down its chest, and a smoker with tracheotomy hole, along with slogans such as “Smoking Can Kill You” and “Cigarettes Are Addictive.

Suffice to say, the tobacco companies have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid being forced to slap pictures of dead bodies onto their products. But so far, they’ve only had mixed success.

The industry notched a big win this past February, when a district court judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the new labels were extreme enough to be considered a violation of the companies’ First Amendment rights. Just as it protects us from being silenced, the constitution also protects us from being compelled to speak. And by turning cigarette packages into “mini-billboards” for an anti-smoking campaign, Judge Richard Leon reasoned that the government was violating the tobacco companies right to silence.

You may recall one of my earliest posts on NaPP addressing this subject. For those who would prefer not quick through, the main themes were that these warnings do not contain information that we do not already know, and the result of these warnings is simply that people will start getting box-covers. If I am still smoking when these things are instituted, if they are, I will get one first thing.

Meanwhile, people will likely be confronted with these images every time they go to a convenience store. Besides the implications for speech (essentially forcing what is a political message onto cigarette backs), that’s one of the things I find most agitating. I hope to quit. When I do quit, I don’t want to see this crap. The only upside is that it might force convenience stores to keep the boxes behind counters and out of view. That would be a net positive, though I’m not sure we couldn’t do that without the visual pollution being advocated here.

Honestly, if we’re going to change the boxes, the most prudent thing to do might be to standardize them and make them as plain as humanly possibly. It is rare the cigarette box that truly captures my attention, but sometimes it happens. Mavericks used to have this visually stunning black-and-gold box. It’s probably not a coincidence that I gave them a try. Nor is it likely a coincidence I gave USA Gold, which also has a reasonably good looking box, a shot. The number of relatively generic brands are legion, but those are the one I picked (and stuck with them because they are a good value). Jamming those signals might not be a bad idea.

One of the things they did do was force makers to move away using words like “light” and “ultra-light.” This may have actually had a beneficial effect, mostly by causing confusion. By and large, red still means full-flavor, gold means light, and silver means ultra-light. The brands that weren’t already aligned with this color scheme suffered, though. As did brands like Marlboro, which had more than the three of four customary strengths/flavors.

Last week, they picked up the house next door and moved it a block over. The next step is to run a street through it. While they’re at it, they tore up the street behind us to repave it. Also, eighteen months or so they started a construction project on the school across the way and they still haven’t finished it. The result? Dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. Everywhere. Since we have to keep our windows open for circulation, we have dirt in the sink. There’s dirt all over the computer room. Dirt, dirt, dirt.

To add to this, Arapaho has been plagued with fires lately. Nothing around where we live, but it’s enough that our fire department has been mobilized for the last month or so, driving all over the state to lend a hand. It’s also enough that there are all sorts of fire bans, including an outdoor smoking ban. I tried to honor it, until I saw cops ignoring it. When smoking is banned indoors, people smoke outdoors.

Today was a smoky day. I have no idea where the fire is, but there were firefighters all around the supply store where I went to watch the sky go from blue-silver, to silver, to gray, to orange. The firepeeps were also ignoring the smoking ban.

The sky has shifted to a very light orange, which is having a rather surreal affect on our view. The construction crews are gone for the night, which is nice not only for the dirt but also the noise. At least, unlike when they were gutting the basement last week, it hasn’t caused the house to shake (our dog’s reaction to the shaking house to the right).

Anyhow! For your listening enjoyment, Steve Earle’s “Ashes to Ashes.” A great song, if you’ve never heard it. Not remarkably country, if you are averse to country.

This is actually the first of a couple posts. I’d rather start with the second, but experience tells me that if I try, we’ll end up talking about this aspect anyway: Birthright citizenship and “anchor babies.”

First, a bit of background. Historically, my views on immigration (legal or otherwise) have generally been pretty liberal. I stopped short of supporting amnesty, but I consider most of the freak-out to be unseemly. I’ve lived in immigrant enclaves where I would have been surprised of all of my neighbors had all of their paperwork in order. My wife has worked at a hospital that spent most of its time speaking Spanish rather than English. My impression has always matched the left far more than the right. That started to change a little bit about the time the recession hit. I started gearing up support for doing something about it (mostly on the employment side), but then illegal immigration rates fell and it became a non-issue for me again.

I do pretty strongly support birthright citizenship, however. I believe the anchor baby* phenomenon is overwrought at most. I more fear generations of non-citizens than I do a lucky sprite or two getting citizenship by geography. We could mitigate the generational aspect by giving them citizenship when they get older so that their kids are citizens and so on, but I don’t really have that kind of faith in our bureaucracy. In general, if they’re here it is better that they be documented than not. I am not willing to go so far as to give everyone here legal residency, but am willing to at least give it to their children. We need the normalizing factor. Especially if we ever want them to assimilate (which I do).

Beyond that, there is rather little indication that anchor babies are a problem on a grander scale. It’s questionable whether they exist to begin with. The popular image of what birthright citizenship means and the rights it grants is off-base, regardless. Even if they do exist, however, and we find the rights that we extend unacceptable, it doesn’t seem remotely severe enough to warrant an overhaul of how we appraise citizenship.

A couple personal angles: I do know someone that had what I will call a “citizenship baby.” Which is like an anchor baby, but not really. They had mapped out wanting kids five years apart. Instead, they found themselves in the US. They decided to have the second kid early. That would give the second kid dual citizenship, which was worth altering plans for. There was no “anchor” aspect to it since they were here legally and fully planned to return to Japan (and were looking forward to it!). In one sense, this seems like it could be an abuse of the system, but in a different context than is often mentioned.

The second thing is that there is a mythology surrounding people that hop the border and the first thing they do is sign up for Medicaid and take advantage of our lavish government benefits (no, that is not meant without irony). My wife’s experience at the immigrant hospital suggests pretty strongly that this is not the case. Broadly speaking, they were more nervous than anything. It didn’t matter how many times they were assured that the hospital would not turn them into ICE, they would come in, have the baby, and leave AMA with startling frequency. While generally a much better behaved group health-wise than most of the poor that Clancy dealt with in charity hospitals, they were also notoriously bad about prenatal visits – largely for the same reasons.

Which is not to say that they aren’t taking advantage of government programs. But it just never squares with the popular conception by those who are extremely concerned about the number of immigrants we have crossing the border illegally.

I should add that, despite the above, I am actually somewhat sympathetic to arguments that our immigration policy is too geared towards families (allowing family members to sponsor family members and such) and not enough geared towards economic need. To address this, though, we’d need to get serious about immigration policy. Otherwise, with some exceptions (the DREAM Act being one), the status quo will continue to rule the day.

* – If you object to my usage of this term, wait for the second post where I will address argumentation and terminology.