The Holidaze are my time for eating, and this Christmas Eve feast I ate like a king. Actually, now that I think about it, I probably ate much better than most kings of long ago. Here is a shot of the buffet we laid out for our guests. We did a smorgasbord this year – much easier and more mellow than the formality of a sit down dinner. You will have to click to enlarge the photo if you want to follow along with the menu.
Miscellaneous
The War on Drugs… From a Different Angle
Recently Rolling Stone magazine had an article titled “War On Drugs” or “How America Lost the War on Drugs”. The article went through the usual statistics showing how our tactics aren’t working and that we have “lost” this war. As proof, they cite that the number of Americans behind bars on drug charges has increased from 41,000 in 1980 to 493,800 in 2003 (and presumably more in 2007).
The point of this post isn’t whether or not you are “for” or “against” the war on drugs – that is done to death at a million other places. The purpose is to look at the situation from an entirely different angle…
Out of these 493,800 offenders behind bars, how many were “casual users” caught in a net of enforcement (run a red light, get stopped for having drug paraphernalia, go to jail) and how many were gang members selling or transporting drugs for resale? Um… while Rolling Stone is definitely catering to the casual user and happily points out those (relatively) few individuals caught in the dragnet I would estimate that the vast, vast majority of these almost 500,000 in jail are actually gang members trafficking or selling drugs.
To Rolling Stone magazine, these offenders are “lost souls” who took some sort of wrong turn and are just languishing in prison due to our society’s rigid and unrealistic moralistic stance. But for our “drug wars”, these would be fine, upstanding individuals presumably designing rockets somewhere and volunteering in schools.
Not so. The key elements are KNOWLEDGE and INTENT. Everyone of these individuals in jail, whether they thought they’d be convicted or not, knew that selling drugs was against the law. Even on the talk shows no one ever says “but I didn’t know it was against the law…”. The second element is intent – they consciously went down the criminal path to make money, choosing this route instead of some legitimate path (i.e. getting a job).
Addendum to the Physical Fitness Series
I’ve been training with weights for over twenty years and have passed through various phases of bodybuilding, powerlifting, “strongman”-type odd lifts, crosstraining and other forms of conditioning. I’ve seen a wide variety of training techniques, been employed as a personal trainer and met a number of professional athletes, coaches and world class amateurs in my time. I’d pretty much thought that I’d seen everything there was to see in a weight room.
My gym is quite large and it keeps a sizable number of personal trainers on a staff, including a couple of advanced specialists. Recently, I’d noticed that among them were a handful of trainers who had their clients regularly performing a rather odd combination of exercises in very short succession – they were hoisting kettlebells, then running over to a bench press followed by a set of power cleans to exhaustion. I’ve seen them pull out gymnastic rings, squat while holding an olympic bar in overhead press position and try to chin themselves into a back spasm. Today, one of the few female trainers who doesn’t look like she emigrated from the old German Democratic Republic, had a middle-aged dude trying to do some kind of deadlifting circuit, then bench then clean and jerk with a deep squat position. He was sort of fading on that exercise.
Generally, I mind my own business when I’m working out but I finally had to ask what in the sam hill they thought they were doing.
Evidently, there’s a kind of weightlifting cult out there revolving around a website called Crossfit.com that publishes a workout of the day that is religiously followed by devotees in gyms across America. Despite some of the kookiness I’ve witnessed firsthand, the training philosophy Crossfit offers has some merit, particularly if your real passion is another sport for which you need improved conditioning. They have trainees moving weights as athletically as possible using compound movements with very little rest, which replicates how your body might apply strength with speed while in motion. The program is not going to build overwhelming strength or size but from my observations the serious Crossfit trainees get the kind of rugged, muscular endurance and short bursts of power you see in good collegiate wrestlers. They also tend to lean out a bit, an added bonus, though this is negated by the glassy-eyed look trainees get when they discuss the work-out of the day. Too reminiscent of Amway salesmen and Hari Krishna guys at airports.
I’m not going to join the cult. I like specializing in lifting very heavy weights (ok – relatively heavy weights these days) but I might sneak in their more practical routines to round out my fitness profile.
Al Gore’s Defining Moment
Generally, I avoid commenting on primarily political stories but this one merits an exception.
Former Vice-President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, in conjunction with UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Regardless of what one thinks about Mr. Gore as a politician or of his heavily propagandistic but Oscar award winning film, the Nobel Prize represents the capstone of one of the most remarkable political comebacks in American politics since Richard Nixon.
It is true that Al Gore did not self-destruct after his razor-thin defeat in 2000 (yes, give it up, he lost) quite the way Nixon did when he lost the California Governorship in 1962 back to back with the presidency in 1960 but neither did “the New Nixon” of 1968 reach such illustrious heights. Americans with Nobels are rare; Americans with Peace Prizes are the most exclusive circle of all. Many conservatives are quite upset at this development and are venting, some of their complaints have my sympathy but their sense of timing does not. They are spitting into the wind right now and to the extent that anyone outside the movement conservative choir is paying any attention, bitter anti-Gore jeremiads only serve to alienate moderates.
For once, I can say the Bush administration struck the right political note with a simple gesture of congratulation to a former adversary enjoying a moment in the sun, without getting too excited about it. If anything, given recent decisions by the Nobel Committee to honor Communist frauds and terrorist kleptocrats, we should be relieved that the Peace Prize this year went to Al Gore and not, say, Kim Jong Il or Robert Mugabe. I’m the first not to confuse Mr. Gore with Andrei Sakharov or Aung San Suu Kyi but even I must concede he is a qualitative moral improvement over Yasser Arafat by many orders of magnitude.
Much speculation (i.e. wishful thinking) exists as to whether Gore will now jump into the race for the Democratic nomination for president. That would be fun to watch but I doubt that will happen as it would require that Gore extricate himself from around $100 million dollars of VC enterprises that he is deeply involved in, so as to compete at a complete organizational and financial disadvantage with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Why accept those headaches and fritter away his newfound political capital when as the Democratic Party’s star elder statesman and counterweight to the Clintons, Gore is a ” must-have” insider for a new Democratic administration? That’s a lot of clout to throw away on a last-minute vanity campaign.
Mr. Gore is enjoying his moment but in all probability, this episode represents his peak.
Cross-posted at Zenpundit
Independence Day
One of the great sorrows of British life at present is the widespread anti-Americanism both on the left and the right. One can understand why the left should feel so – the United States is the pre-eminent liberal (mostly) democratic capitalist society, all of which they hate.
Why the right should seethe with anti-Americanism is a little more complicated and one that I hope to discuss in greater detail in a future posting. For the moment I simply want to wish all the best to all our American friends for July 4.