Tiberius and Gaius Speaking...

Well, I've never been to Spain....

    That song can now only be sung by me ironically...sad indeed. It has been quite a hellish week, with something like 18 hours of grading. But I am done, and now I can talk about Madrid. Some of my experiences, comments, and whatnot:

• Iberia is a crap airline. The flight attendants were rude, and they actually ran out of drinks. On an airplane. The Madrid airport looks beautiful, but it is extraordinarily inefficient. Almost every checkpoint of the airport was improperly designed, from ticket check-in to boarding. And the time board for departures was wrong. I have never seen that before.
• I have heard good things about British Airways and Air France, but all other national airlines from Europe have been crap.
• The best movie I saw on the airplane was Zathura (that's how bad all the others were). It was fun. Bee Season was a ridiculous family drama mixed with Spellbound and the kabbalah. I have no words. The Family Stone was absurd and not in a good way. Every single person was bad, but in a petty and ugly way (not a Nietzsche superman kind of way).
• Madrid is a beautiful and friendly city. It has many of the attractions of Paris with the great advantage that you don't have to deal with the French. On the other hand, it is clearly not one of the premier capitals in Europe. It has everything--art, great restaurants etc--but it lacks that cosmopolitan feel of Paris or Rome. I dunno.
• Part of it is that Madrid is a fairly modern city. London, Paris, and Rome have had occupants for thousands of years, but Madrid didn't become a major city until the 18th century. That makes it feel "new" for a European city.
• The art is fantastic. Some highlights: Miros and Guernica in the Reina Sofia, Degas and Hopper in the Thyssen; Velazquez, Goya's black paintings, and El Greco's Burial in Toledo. Mom loves the Renaissance art (and it is a weird experience to wander into some small room and then see a Raphael), but it starts to blend together for me. The audioguides were well done and the lines were short. The Prado is an exceedingly well put together museum, and might have been the best overall experience of the big three: Louvre, Ephezi, Prado.
• Bosch's (El Bosco) Garden of Earthly Delights is really quite strikingly....modern.
• Also worth seeing is the Toledo cathedral (which held the most powerful cardinal in Spain) and the aqueduct in Segovia.
• We ate at the oldest restaurant in the world, and they have an old-school fire oven that has been used in the restraint for longer than the USA has been a country. Also, Argentinean beef is amazingly tasty.
• I recommend both Toledo and Segovia, though Segovia has the most complete remnant of a roman aqueduct in the Roman world.
• Finally: Spanish women are hot, but not as hot as Italian women. Spanish men are a bit scuzzy, but not nearly as scuzzy as Italian men. Thus, the scuzzy to hotness ratio is much better in Spain than in Italy.
• P.S. I liked our hotel, but what kind of world is it that I can get free wireless internet in a Super 8 in Le Roy, IL but not in a four star hotel in Madrid? Who do I see about this?

Enough for now.

Updates

• Grading...still sucks. I have been grading for something like 18 hours and I have 3 or 4 to go.
• Wouldn't it be awesome if Ann Coulter went to jail?

The French are just ornery, part two...

    I dunno about this massive French protest. The law they are protesting basically says it is okay to fire someone who is under the age of 26, has been working for you for less than two years, and even then certain conditions have to be met. This strikes me (heh) as a pretty reasonable and moderate solution to a growing problem in France. I mean, the teacher's union in the US doesn't even get that kind of treatment. Until you get tenure (which is around the age of 26 after working for four years), the administration can fire you without cause (this isn't entirely true in years three and four, but it is completely true in years one and two, but even in years three and four the reasons don't really have to be anything but pretextual).

    French firms will not hire people when the economy is doing well because they know it will be next to impossible to fire anyone when the economy turns south. That means we are looking at massive unemployment amongst the young, which is not completely unrelated to people who rioted over real grievances just a few months ago. You have the greatest youth unemployment in Western Europe, approaching 50 percent in some Muslim communities, and you are protesting a law that makes it just a tiny bit easier for people to get entry level positions? I would really like to hear from some labor people so they can explain to me why this is a bad law. I am fully ready to believe it, but so far all I have heard are slippery slope type arguments that I don't find particularly persuasive.

    I would also like to note something else. The protests by themselves do little to move Villepin's government. However, when you coordinate the protests with a massive strike and succeed in getting massive and largely sympathetic domestic news coverage, then the protests can have their desired effect. This is something that we must remember. If you hold a big protest rally and it isn't covered effectively, then you just wasted a lot of time an energy.

You know what really sucks?

  Grading papers...that is all.

I'm back, returning to a...constitutional crisis it seems...

    I'll put up some Madrid comments and maybe a couple choice pictures later this evening, but I was catching up on my reading and I discovered that the President has written a signing statement arguing that the oversight provisions of the now revised PATRIOT Act are not binding.  Apparently, this, the wiretapping and anti-torture signing statements indicate that Bush believes he doesn't have to follow any law he doesn't like. That sounds kind of like tyranny to me, no?

    Good thing everyone spent the week talking about a nobody conservative blogger who got hired by the Washington Post only to tossed out when it turned out he plagiarized. Way to keep your eye on the ball top bloggers.

I may have to start watching Boston Legal...

...if they doing stuff like this.

A few links...

    I have to give a lecture and take a midterm tomorrow. So, here are some links:

• The live action short Cashback. I enjoyed it. I thought the camera work as good, but I thought the main character was a bit creepy.
• For Eripsa: robots!
• I like removing, or drastically lowering, the age restrictions on voting too. I am pretty sure I could have voted better at 14 than most 50 year olds.

Sigh....

    Ann Althouser asks:

Is there anything wrong with holding one's seat on the Court as long as it is physically possible, in an exercise of political will, because you do not want the current President to appoint your replacement?

     That might be a good question (it has an obvious answer which I will get to at the end), but it seems silly in the face of Sandra Day O'Connor throwing a tantrum when she discovered that Gore had won Florida and Pennsylvania and then, of course, Bush v. Gore came before the Supreme Court. O'Connor made a ridiculously bad decision along with the rest of the conservatives.  A better question would be: is it acceptable for justices to deliberately make bad legal arguments and decide in bad faith in order to ensure their replacement by an ideological like-minded president?

    The obvious answer to the question is that this behavior is obviously acceptable for a liberal justice and unacceptable for a conservative one. Why? Because the replacement of a conservative justice with a liberal justice will lead to both substantively less just outcomes. Replacing a conservative with a liberal will lead to more just outcomes. And since the Constitution provides for a lifetime appointment, this behavior is perfectly legal. All that remains is a moral obligation: the conservative has a moral obligation to dump himself for a liberal and the liberal has an obligation to try and prevent his replacement by a conservative.

    And an even dumber assertion is made by one of her commenters:

I think age alone should not be a factor in deciding whether or not a judge can continue on.

However, given that the prevalence rate of dementia among the elderly is
75-79     5.6%
80-84     11.1%
85+       23.6%
meaning that by the time a SCOTUS Justice hits 80, one in ten is likely to have dementia, increasing to more than in one in five by age 85.

A often-defining component of dementia is the lack of insight that one even has cognitive impairment. That is, they lack appropriate judgement. Therefore, we face the prospect of an incapacitated judge unable to tell he/she cannot do the work any longer.

What a moron. I bet there are no ways relevant to mental health that Supreme Court justices are different from the relevant age population more generally. How about better medical care? Higher income? A life of the mind? All of these things correlate positively with above average mental health.

Shocking...

Wow. I had no idea that income inequality had gotten quite this bad, though I suppose I am not surprised:

One of the truly strange features about discussions of inequality is the way people shy away from talking about the extent to which the gains from rising inequality have gone to a tiny, wealthy elite … A few days ago Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post—a good guy, and sensible—wrote about income inequality. As I did in my column just a few days earlier, “Feeling No Pain,” he emphasized the “retrospective income” distribution data released by the I.R.S. (Paper at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf. Tables at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.xls.) As he pointed out, those data show that the share of income received by the top 10 percent of taxpayers rose from 33 percent in 1979 to 44 percent in 2003 … But Pearlstein stops there, leaving the impression that everyone in the top 10 percent was a big winner. In fact, there was hardly any rise in the share of income going to people between the 90th and 95th percentiles: almost all the gain went to the top 5 percent. And most of the gain went to a very small elite. The income share of the top 1 percent went from 9.6 to 17.5 percent, accounting for more than 70 percent of the top decile’s gain. The income share of the top 0.25 percent went from 4.9 to 10.5, accounting for a bit more than half the total gain.

Passed along without comment.

An interesting review...

    Lindsay Beyerstein writes the best review of Crashing the Gates (the big manifesto from a couple blogging gurus). I have not read the book, so these comments are only based on the various reviews I have read, which is dangerous but I will blunder on.

    What bothers me about what I have read and what I have seen over at Daily Kos is that it seems like there is a good deal of incoherence over the whole project. Or perhaps, it seems that there is a serious tension here. They desperately want Democrats to win elections but for no reason. Kos and the like don't really have a serious progressive agenda, and whatever they have they are willing to sacrifice to win. But what's the point of this sleek new Democratic apparatus if it can only elect Langevin and Casey types?