Vienna, Austria on a Rainy Day

It was rainy and windy in Vienna this morning, so I just headed to the nearest museum that met my threshold: not a painting fewer than 9,000 (I mean, why even go?). Boy, did the Kunsthistorisches Museum out on Maria-Theresien-Platz fit the bill.

I found one jewel that really caught my eye:

This was by the famous Italian Renaissance master Titian, done in 1530 and entitled "Jesus gets a rare night out bowling." Beautiful.

Finding Poland: One Man's Burger Is Another Man's Kebab

Travelling broadens one's horizons, or should at any rate. I'm exiting my third country, heading to a fourth, while dipping on the train briefly back into my second. My first country on this trip was Sweden, I think. I should have written about these various countries from the start, but, well, there you are. Or, I should say, here I am, in Poland, but not for long.

People are people, though as a person who's lived in Japan, I realize some people are more different than others. There is, however, a bridge across the chasm between cultures that helps us discover our common humanity, and I've used it ever since I first travelled abroad some 42 years ago.

Know your fellow man's junk food, and you're halfway home.

It didn't take but reading a few signs around the central stations of Krakow to know which way to a man's heart, at least his most convenient one: the kebab, not to be confused with the shish form, I found out upon actually trying one.

(I'll refrain from gender stereotypes in some other post, but I pray women are somehow smart enough to stay away from kebabs to begin with. I fear they're not.)

Now, I've seen two made, but the first was for me and delivered in tag-team fashion from a kebab stand between train and bus stations in central Krakow. First, a young man charged me ‌nine zloty, which falls somewhat shy of three bucks; then an equally young woman who shared the mini-caravan with him took over, first selecting a round, flattened bread roll to slice and stick in a grilling press in hopes of heating it up and jazzing it up with parallel grill marks. The effort did not go well.

The bottom came free well enough, but the top, thinner piece was determined to camp out a little longer, a stunt that was not tolerated in the slightest by the young man, who intervened with a pair of tongs, hoping to salvage the operation. The top gave up in the end, but not before disintegrating into a number of pieces, the final tenth or so being the only successful hold-out. The man closed the lid on it; I suspect it was removed once it blackened considerably. I'll never know.

My assumption at this point was that the project would naturally begin anew, a notion of which I was quickly disabused as the man assembled the miscreant top in a vague form opposite the tidy bottom, all in a triangle-shaped paper sleeve. He then began assembling pickles, tomatoes, cucumbers, a cole-slaw-like concoction, and whatnot atop the bread, before turning to me -- who at this point had realized I'd already paid and neither of my hosts had demonstrated much English -- and asked, "A-sauce, a-spicy, a-no?"

Having no choice but to go all in, I replied, "Yeah, spicy, uh, you know, uh, spicy," while giving the universal hand sign that I hoped meant sort of in the middle, to which the man responded by shooting a couple of large squeezes from a couple of squeezable containers.

Next, he walked over to the vertical, rotating spit that was roasting all the while next to a vertical heating element with a V-shaped shield, where he proceeded to shave off hunks of what looked like chicken, although I haven't figured out yet how it came to be wrapped around the spit twenty inches tall and six inches wide without resembling a bird or anything I'm familiar with.

He laid a massive bunch of the meat on top of the foundering roll, and tossed more pickles and cucumbers on for good measure, and, as an afterthought, squeezed more of something on top. He handed me the bundle with what was either a look of satisfaction or supremely false confidence -- was that sheepishness I detected in his eyes? -- which I accepted with whatever look I could muster that didn't appear to be total surrender. I asked for some paper towels (I could see no napkins nearby); he gladly reached and pulled three off and handed them to me, knowing in his heart it was the least he could do.

I nodded, and we parted company.

I eventually finished the whole thing, though it took me much of the rest of the day to do it. In the end, I had to admit I enjoyed it, this first confrontation with a kebab.

Now you and I both know just about all we need to know about the Polish. Okay, they also have Polish dogs and enough kielbasa to give an entire Russian army heart attacks, but the kebab in the several city centers I saw ruled supreme.

All right, they also have history and culture and probably a lot of other stuff, but I was too busy trying not to drop my kebab to ever find out. I imagine they're very much like us, only more Polish.

A Reasoned Decision on Syria: Don't Bomb

I wish I could say that I'd reached this outlook on my own. It was left to Chris Hayes to make up my mind for me: Bombing Syria, while compelling on a few levels, is likely to do way more harm that good.

I'd heard the arguments for and against. At first I was all in; then I was against; finally I was "conflicted," which is shorthand for "I know I should be better than this but I want to bomb the fuck out of Assad."

Chris Hayes brought me to the right place. Listen to him explain:

I'm convinced. Let's stay out of it.

The Glacial Cultural Evolution Goes (Relatively) Hyper

Celebrating in Colorado: This is 2012, not 1967.

Have you noticed that the American culture is undergoing a comparatively momentous set of changes? Well, of course you have. But let's review:

1. We have a black president.
2. Don't Ask, Don't Tell is rejected in favor of equal rights in the armed services.
3. Same-sex marriage becomes the norm with complete federal support.
4. Marijuana is legal in 20 states -- and the DOJ just announced they're backing off (they mean it this time).
5. Health-care reform is coming despite grossly political opposition.
6. The fiercely law-and-order culture begins to get tamped down, with stop-and-frisk declared unconstitutional and long mandatory-minimum sentencing likely on its way out.
7. The NFL admits its sport is bad for brains and agrees to huge settlement for former players. Is the end to NCAA exploitation of "amateur" athletes far behind?
8. Modest consumer-protection reforms are on-going.
9. There's a growing movement to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, especially in the fast-food industry. Is retail next?
10. Common Core, a national curriculum reform, offers a chance to sweep provincialism, anti-critical-thinking, and anti-science movements aside (except maybe in Kansas!).
11. We might (many say will) have a female president in 2016.

The Millennials: solving the world's problems, one cell phone at a time.

I could go on, and there are many areas -- like guns, race, and financial corruption -- where progress is slow, but even in these one senses a critical mass for change starting to take shape. Why is this? Possibly it's generational, with the "greatest generation" dying off and being replaced with the Millennials and the baby boomers stepping aside for Gen X.

Rick Perry's Texas in peril?

There's another factor, I suspect, that's geographic and more glacial: The Internet, the media, and ethnic reconfiguration (yes, I mean Hispanics) are causing the country to reduce its regionalism, with the Old South and its racist and religious provincialism beginning to recede as urban centers like Charlotte, Atlanta, and northern Virginia lead the way to a new liberalism. This movement is real. Who would have thought we'd be uttering things like "Texas is going blue?"
 
I wish I could speak in depth to the international component of this trend, but we can go back to the end of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Eastern Europe as harbingers, with the establishment of democracy in South Korea another early sign of Asian progress. Is a democratic Indonesia becoming a reality? We know the Arab Spring has reverted to an Arab Winter of discontent and violent upheaval with democracy unlikely to flourish and return to autocratic rule now all but certain, but it still represents progress and green sprouts of change.

We're seeing it across Latin America, too.

I find myself hopeful. Maybe it's because of the recent celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and the March on Washington, which reminded us all of how far we've come and how far we still have to go to achieve racial equality. The challenges of the first black presidency has had the effect of energizing the national conversation in all the areas of reform where we still lag.

Barack Obama: a turning point of sorts.

Barack Obama's presidency is a complicated mess, with the push-pull of politics becoming more fiercely partisan and rancorous. At its center is a black man who knows his only chance for greatness is to avoid any appearance of the uppity Negro in order to put that stereotype behind us perhaps once and for all. That requirement itself has held back the nation in its movement towards social justice. But it had to be this way.

No doubt Obama is a sign post, a symptom if maybe not a cure.

In the end, though, Barack Obama is part of the solution and not part of the problem. The forces that resist his centrist liberalism do hold back the nation. But not for long, I feel, not for long. The Obama era will be remembered as a major turning point in our cultural evolution. That in itself is a legacy.

Martin Luther King Jr.: He had a dream. What do we have?

The Best Case Yet for Not Bombing Syria

I'm conflicted on this sort of thing. I regard myself as a pacifist and have since Vietnam, was against Iraq but not against Afghanistan, other than how the war was prosecuted, believing we should have engaged in a police action to root out the bad guys no matter how long it took without waging all-out war.

I agreed with Clinton's actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, not so much because no Americans were lost in combat but because we took a limited action that was launched in great measure against genocide. That's why I originally favored knocking Syria, Assad, and his forces back as hard as Barack Obama felt like doing. We don't cotton to genocide, and we don't allow chemical weapons.

However, arguments are being made against any action, and some have been persuasive, none more so than Slate business blogger Matthew Yglesias in his post, "The Case for Doing Nothing in Syria:"

Except, in this case, it’s total nonsense [that there are no good options]. Obama has an excellent option. It’s called “don’t bomb Syria.” Don’t fire cruise missiles at Syria either. Or in any other way conduct acts of war. Condemn Assad’s violations of international humanitarian law. If rebels violate international humanitarian law, condemn them, too.

Work at the United Nations to get wrongdoing punished. Insofar as geopolitically driven Russian and Chinese intransigence prevents that from happening, accept alliance politics as a fact of life. The government of Bahrain has killed dozens of protesters since the outbreak of the Arab Spring, and America has done nothing. We haven’t cut aid to Egypt despite massacres there, and while it’s at least imaginable that we might cut aid at some point, we certainly won’t be greenlighting any cross-border attacks on the Egyptian military. We don’t have to like it when our friends in Beijing and Moscow block our schemes, but there’s no need to be self-righteous about it.

Obama’s good option would be to reread his administration’s official National Security Strategy, which sagely argues that “[a]s we did after World War II, we must pursue a rules-based international system that can advance our own interests by serving mutual interests.”

In this case, the relevant rules are in Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which  states that all countries have an “inherent right of individual or collective self-defense” in the case of an armed attack. Bombing Syria would not be an act of U.S. self-defense. Nor would it be an act of collective self-defense in which the United States comes to the aid of an ally. Beyond individual and collective self-defense, military action may be legally undertaken at the direction of the Security Council. In this case, direction will not be forthcoming, which is what makes Obama’s choice easy. He needs to stick with the pursuit of a rules-based international system by, in this case, playing by the rules.

This is a good option.

This is very persuasive indeed. We didn't stop genocide in Rwanda, we aren't stopping it in Congo, and we haven't stopped aid to the Egyptian Army despite obvious deadly force inflicted on Egypt's own people: We pick and choose based on our national interests, don't we?

Yglesias is also right to point out that there are established channels to follow to invoke the Geneva Protocols. It's called going to the U.N. If Russia and China refuse to pass a resolution to punish Syria for war crimes, shame on them. The world will know who stands up against chemical weapons and who doesn't.

And, finally, deciding to blow stuff up in a "limited, targeted" way is fraught with difficulty and often just as likely to cause civilian deaths as doing nothing. In some cases, it raises civilian casualties.

Let's get the whole world against Syria and its vile actions. Then see what action, if any, should be taken.

Remember these guys? They decided "screw the U.N." How well did that work out?


   Paul Wolfowitz   "Scooter" Libby           Elliot Abrams     
      Richard Perle  Donald Rumsfeld        Richard Cheney    

Er, uh, or not.

   

Denying Health Care: Think Globally, Act Locally

Hey, Republicans, this isn't funny anymore:

Several Republican-led states at the forefront of the campaign to undermine President Obama’s health-care law have come up with new ways to try to thwart it, refusing to enforce consumer protections, for example, and restricting federally funded workers hired to help people enroll in coverage.

And in at least one state, Missouri, local officials have been barred from doing anything to help put the law into place...

...Under the [new health-care] law, millions of uninsured Americans will be able to shop for health plans and apply for subsidies to buy them, beginning Oct. 1. The policies will take effect in January, when most Americans will be required to have insurance or face a penalty.

Advocates worry that continued resistance by some states could hinder efforts to coax many of the nation’s 50 million uninsured to sign up for coverage.

Let's look straight at this: Republicans on the state level would rather deny new opportunities for health care for the poor and lower middle classes than allow the Democrats on the national level -- read Barack Obama -- from having a political victory. These red-state Republicans take pride, by the way, in their Christian faith. Read the Beatitudes lately?

Let's sample a couple of the red-state approaches:

In the states, much of the activity involves “navigators,” a workforce of tens of thousands of people who will be deployed by the administration to provide in-person or over-the-phone assistance for people signing up for insurance.

More than a dozen states have imposed licensing rules and limits on these helpers, with the encouragement of professional insurance agents and brokers, who lobbied heavily for the restrictions.

In Ohio, for example, navigators won’t be allowed to compare and contrast plans for customers. And in Missouri, which has a Democratic governor but a Republican legislature, they are required to immediately cut off contact with any customers who at some point have talked to a professional broker or agent.

That's right, Republicans have made it illegal to help people get health care. Something they can't do on the national level they are finding ways to do on the local level. Chew on that.

Ohio governor John Kasich: We can't stop Obamacare
 but we can hinder you from getting it.

And Here I Thought Feminism Was About Jobs, Money, Equal Opportunity, and Respect

Thank god we've got Rush Limbaugh to let us know it's really about the icky:

Man, those crafty, angry bitches almost got one over on us. Thanks, Rush!

(via Atrios and Media Matters)