In Which Edgar Allan Poe Pays Homage to the Chicago Blackhawks

After the Chicago Blackhawks triumphed this evening over the Boston Bruins, winning the Stanley Cup in a six game series, the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe visited me and demanded that I take down the following poem that he composed in praise of my hometown Blackhawks. I offer it now for your reading and reciting pleasure. Admittedly, Poe is out of practice when it comes to composing poems, given that he has been dead for 164 years, but I think that he still has enough of the old magic left in him to make poetry lovers sit up and take notice.

Anyway, without further ado, I give you Poe, resurrected: 

Once upon an evening dreary, with the Bruins, beat and weary,
With their faces sad and teary and hearts dragging on the floor.
While the Blackhawks celebrated, the Bruins to their foes migrated,
Even though they truly hated what for them was now in store.
"Tap, tap tap," did the Bruins on the Blackhawks' locker door.
"Away," said the Blackhawks. "You saw the score."

"Oh Blackhawks," said the Bruins. "You have brought us woe and ruin.
"Brought shame upon our crew and have achieved a higher score.
"But now, we've come to ask you, to charge, request and task you.
"Corey Crawford, put on your mask, you, and let's go and play some more.
"Give us another chance at Stanley, and let's go and play some more."
Quoth the Blackhawks, "NEVERMORE!"

"Blackhawks," said Team Boston. "Your obstinance is costin'
"Us redemption. We know we've lost and we've no right to anything more.
"But upon us take some pity, because our souls now feel quite s****y,
"There's despair within our city, another shot we do implore.
"To take the Stanley Cup another shot we do implore."
Quoth the Blackhawks, "NEVERMORE!"

"Blackhawks," cried Team Beantown. "You know, you're being mean now.
"If only you could have seen how Bostonians are sick and sore.
"We are beaten now in hockey, but Solo said 'don't get cocky,'
"Clubber Lang once gave Rocky a chance to even the score.
"We're admittedly not from Philly, but we want to even the score."
Quoth the Blackhawks, "NEVERMORE!"

"Blackhawks," screamed Massachusetts. "We know that it's quite useless
"To chew your ears off since we're toothless after hockey fights galore.
"Instead, your ears entreat we, your championship conceit we
"Seek to use to cause deceit; we want to play one series more.
"Oh come now, in your hubris, consent to just one series more."
Quoth the Blackhawks, "NEVERMORE!"

And with that, the Bruins scattered, with the Blackhawks not quite flattered
To think that Boston's begging mattered. There wouldn't be one series more.
Lord Stanley's Cup made bolder the great City of Big Shoulders,
Which has the Field of Soldiers where the Bears will Packers gore.
Let's now look to autumn, when the Bears will Packers gore,
And win Chicago championships more.

 

Support This Blog!

I have put up a PayPal donation button to the side, right below the picture of the blog icon/mascot. I certainly don't expect to get rich off of blogging, but if you like the writing here, and you want to help defray the costs of hosting and maintaining this site, donations would be appreciated. You can also support this blog by purchasing from the Amazon box to the right (it won't cost you any more money than you would pay if you went to Amazon's homepage), buying a blog ad (right below the search function to the right), or by clicking on the Google Ads below the Amazon box. Many thanks in advance.

Israeli-Chicagoan Cooperation

My onetime international relations professor and current friend, Charles Lipson , was kind enough to send me this story, which is worth highlighting:

A research initiative between the University of Chicago and Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev enjoyed some rare political star power Sunday, as both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Mayor Rahm Emanuel attended a signing ceremony in Jerusalem to celebrate the new agreement.

The two schools soon will begin funding a series of research projects aimed at creating nanotechnologies that address water shortages in arid climates. The project's goal is to find new materials and processes for making clean, fresh drinking water more plentiful and less expensive by 2020.

The Chicago research team will be led by Matthew Tirrell, director of the university's Institute for Molecular Engineering. Tirrel's group will include scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, which the university manages for the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., which recently signed an affiliation agreement with the school.

U of C, Ben-Gurion and Argonne have jointly committed more than $1 million over the next two years to support inaugural projects, according to the university. The first initiatives are slated to begin this fall.

"We feel it is critical to bring outstanding scientists together to address water-resource challenges that are being felt around the world, and will only become more acute over time," University President Robert J. Zimmer said in a statement. "Our purification challenges in the Great Lakes region right now are different from some of the scarcity issues some of our colleagues at Ben-Gurion are addressing, but our combined experience will be a tremendous asset in turning early-stage technologies into innovative solutions that may have applications far beyond local issues."

Charles also was kind enough to give me permission to quote from his e-mail:

The agreement is a very fruitful step forward.

I'm happy to report that things are going well for other Jewish and Israel-related issues on campus, too.

There are now three active groups: Hillel, Chabad, and JUchicago, each with substantial (overlapping) student involvement.

Plus, there is a wonderful group, University of Chicago Friends of Israel, which has a very strong programming schedule.  It's entirely student run; I'm delighted to be their faculty adviser.

So, good news on several fronts.

Indeed.

Same As It Ever Was

Tom Standage writes truth: 

SOCIAL networks stand accused of being enemies of productivity. According to one popular (if questionable) infographic circulating online, the use of Facebook, Twitter and other such sites at work costs the American economy $650 billion each year. Our attention spans are atrophying, our test scores declining, all because of these “weapons of mass distraction.”

Yet such worries have arisen before. In England in the late 1600s, very similar concerns were expressed about another new media-sharing environment, the allure of which seemed to be undermining young people’s ability to concentrate on their studies or their work: the coffeehouse. It was the social-networking site of its day.

Like coffee itself, coffeehouses were an import from the Arab world. England’s first coffeehouse opened in Oxford in the early 1650s, and hundreds of similar establishments sprang up in London and other cities in the following years. People went to coffeehouses not just to drink coffee, but to read and discuss the latest pamphlets and news-sheets and to catch up on rumor and gossip.

Coffeehouses were also used as post offices. Patrons would visit their favorite coffeehouses several times a day to check for new mail, catch up on the news and talk to other coffee drinkers, both friends and strangers. Some coffeehouses specialized in discussion of particular topics, like science, politics, literature or shipping. As customers moved from one to the other, information circulated with them.

The diary of Samuel Pepys, a government official, is punctuated by variations of the phrase “thence to the coffeehouse.” His entries give a sense of the wide-ranging conversations he found there. The ones for November 1663 alone include references to “a long and most passionate discourse between two doctors,” discussions of Roman history, how to store beer, a new type of nautical weapon and an approaching legal trial.

One reason these conversations were so lively was that social distinctions were not recognized within the coffeehouse walls. Patrons were not merely permitted but encouraged to strike up conversations with strangers from entirely different walks of life. As the poet Samuel Butler put it, “gentleman, mechanic, lord, and scoundrel mix, and are all of a piece.”

Not everyone approved. As well as complaining that Christians had abandoned their traditional beer in favor of a foreign drink, critics worried that coffeehouses were keeping people from productive work. Among the first to sound the alarm, in 1677, was Anthony Wood, an Oxford academic. “Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the University?” he asked. “Answer: Because of Coffea Houses, where they spend all their time.”

Meanwhile, Roger North, a lawyer, bemoaned, in Cambridge, the “vast Loss of Time grown out of a pure Novelty. For who can apply close to a Subject with his Head full of the Din of a Coffee-house?” These places were “the ruin of many serious and hopeful young gentlemen and tradesmen,” according to a pamphlet, “The Grand Concern of England Explained,” published in 1673.

As Standage points out, instead of inhibiting productivity, coffeehouses "were in fact crucibles of creativity, because of the way in which they facilitated the mixing of both people and ideas." This was true in both the realms of science and commerce. And Standage is right to say that "the spirit of the coffeehouse has been reborn in our social-media platforms." Far from fearing social media's influence on innovation, creativity and productivity, we should welcome the rise of social media, as it can enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to do great and good things.

On a somewhat related note, behold.

On the Obama Administration's Embarrassment and Edward Snowden's Insincerity

The fact that Edward Snowden was able to leave Hong Kong, transit through Russia and fly to Ecuador for asylum has to be humiliating for the Obama administration, especially in light of the "resets" in diplomatic relations that the administration has been seeking with China and Russia. I am sure that the president and his team will try to claim that everything is hunky-dory when it comes to the state of Sino-American and Russian-American relations, but the United States's inability to get China and Russia to cooperate in bringing Edward Snowden to justice serves to undermine any such claim. 

The above having been written, it is important to remind ourselves that Edward Snowden is absolutely, positively no hero whatsoever. The following statement has Snowden dead to rights:

Mr. Snowden’s claim that he is focused on supporting transparency, freedom of the press and protection of individual rights and democracy is belied by the protectors he has potentially chosen: China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador,” the official said. “His failure to criticize these regimes suggests that his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the U.S., not to advance Internet freedom and free speech.

Corporations and Other Business Entities Should Be Treated Like Natural Persons

Senators Jon Tester and Patty Murray are out to deprive corporations and corporate entities of constitutional rights. Eugene Volokh explains why this is an absolutely terrible idea. From his conclusion, discussing what would happen if the Tester-Murray amendment is adopted:

. . . goodbye, First Amendment protection for the New York Times, CNN, the ACLU, the NRA, and the Catholic Church. Goodbye, any right to just compensation when a corporation’s property is taken — whether the corporation is a large business or a small mom-and-pop company. Goodbye, any rights to due process when a corporation’s property is seized. Goodbye, any protection for corporations (again, even small family-run businesses) from unreasonable searches and seizures, or excessive fines. That’s what Senators Tester and Murphy’s amendment calls for.

Read the whole thing to see why the conclusion is entirely justified. And remember: Those who call for the curbing of corporate rights and the rights of other business entities as a way of enhancing the rights of natural persons will only end up trampling on the rights of both corporations/business entities and natural persons.

Combating Terrorism: The Shultz Doctrine

Kenneth Anderson reminds us that much of our thinking on how best to combat terrorism comes from a speech given at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York by then-Secretary of State George Shultz, who along with James Baker was the last great secretary of state we have had. Professor Anderson is kind enough to excerpt the salient aspects of Shultz's speech. I will pay forward that kindness by re-excerpting his excerpt:

We must reach a consensus in this country that our responses should go beyond passive defense to consider means of active prevention, preemption, and retaliation. Our goal must be to prevent and deter future terrorist acts, and experience has taught us over the years that one of the best deterrents to terrorism is the certainty that swift and sure measures will be taken against those who engage in it. We should take steps toward carrying out such measures. There should be no moral confusion on this issue. Our aim is not to seek revenge but to put an end to violent attacks against innocent people, to make the world a safer place to live for all of us. Clearly, the democracies have a moral right, indeed a duty, to defend themselves.

A successful strategy for combating terrorism will require us to face up to some hard questions and to come up with some clear-cut answers. The questions involve our intelligence capability, the doctrine under which we would employ force, and, most important of all, our public’s attitude toward this challenge. Our nation cannot summon the will to act without firm public understanding and support.

First, our intelligence capabilities, particularly our human intelligence, are being strengthened. Determination and capacity to act are of little value unless we can come close to answering the questions: who, where, and when. We have to do a better job of finding out who the terrorists are; where they are; and the nature, composition, and patterns of behavior of terrorist organizations. Our intelligence services are organizing themselves to do the job, and they must be given the mandate and the flexibility to develop techniques of detection and contribute to deterrence and response.

Second, there is no question about our ability to use force where and when it is needed to counter terrorism. Our nation has forces prepared for action —from small teams able to operate virtually undetected, to the full weight of our conventional military might. But serious issues are involved—questions that need to be debated, understood, and agreed if we are to be able to utilize our forces wisely and effectively.

If terrorists strike here at home, it is a matter for police action and domestic law enforcement. In most cases overseas, acts of terrorism against our people and installations can be dealt with best by the host government and its forces. It is worth remembering that just as it is the responsibility of the U.S. Government to provide security for foreign embassies in Washington, so the internationally agreed doctrine is that the security of our Embassies abroad in the first instance is the duty of the host government, and we work with those governments cooperatively and with considerable success. The ultimate responsibility of course is ours, and we will carry it out with total determination and all the resources available to us. Congress, in a bipartisan effort, is giving us the legislative tools and the resources to strengthen the protection of our facilities and our people overseas—and they must continue to do so. But while we strengthen our defenses, defense alone is not enough.

The heart of the challenge lies in those cases where international rules and traditional practices do not apply. Terrorists will strike from areas where no governmental authority exists, or they will base themselves behind what they expect will be the sanctuary of an international border. And they will design their attacks to take place in precisely those “gray areas’ where the full facts cannot be known, where the challenge will not bring with it an obvious or clear-cut choice of response.

In such cases we must use our intelligence resources carefully and completely. We will have to examine the full range of measures available to us to take. The outcome may be that we will face a choice between doing nothing or employing military force. We now recognize that terrorism is being used by our adversaries as a modern tool of warfare. It is no aberration. We can expect more terrorism directed at our strategic interests around the world in the years ahead. To combat it, we must be willing to use military force.

What will be required, however, is public understanding before the fact of the risks involved in combating terrorism with overt power.  The public must understand before the fact that there is potential for loss of life of some of our fighting men and the loss of life of some innocent people.  The public must understand before the fact that some will seek to cast any preemptive or retaliatory action by us in the worst light and will attempt to make our military and our policymakers— rather than the terrorists—appear to be the culprits. The public must understand before the fact that occasions will come when their government must act before each and every fact is known—and the decisions cannot be tied to the opinion polls. Public support for U.S. military actions to stop terrorists before they commit some hideous act or in retaliation for an attack on our people is crucial if we are to deal with this challenge. Our military has the capability and the techniques to use power to fight the war against terrorism. This capability will be used judiciously. To be successful over the long term, it will require solid support from the American people.

I can assure you that in this Administration our actions will be governed by the rule of law; and the rule of law is congenial to action against terrorists. We will need the flexibility to respond to terrorist attacks in a variety of ways, at times and places of our own choosing. Clearly, we will not respond in the same manner to every terrorist act. Indeed, we will want to avoid engaging in a policy of automatic retaliation which might create a cycle of escalating violence beyond our control.

If we are going to respond or preempt effectively, our policies will have to have an element of unpredictability and surprise. And the prerequisite for such a policy must be a broad public consensus on the moral and strategic necessity of action. We will need the capability to act on a moment’s notice. There will not be time for a renewed national debate after every terrorist attack. We may never have the kind of evidence that can stand up in an American court of law. But we cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond. A great nation with global responsibilities cannot afford to be hamstrung by confusion and indecisiveness. Fighting terrorism will not be a clean or pleasant contest, but we have no choice but to play it.

Professor Anderson invites us to "consider what, if any, parts of [the Shultz speech] would not have been utterable by Obama administration officials and senior counsel today." I would respond by stating that unlike Barack Obama, George Shultz would never make the mistake of just unilaterally declaring the war on terror to be over, irrespective of the fact that terrorists haven't stopped attacking us.

Quote of the Day (Part Deux)

. . . My favourite definition of wonder comes from the 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith, better known for first articulating the tenets of capitalism. He wrote that wonder arises ‘when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance’. Smith associated this quality of experience with a distinctive bodily feeling — ‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’.
 

[. . .] 

For a less flattering view, we turn to the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method. He called wonder ‘broken knowledge’ — a mystified incomprehension that science alone could cure. But this mischaracterises science and wonder alike. Scientists are spurred on by wonder, and they also produce wondrous theories. The paradoxes of quantum theory, the efficiency of the genome: these are spectacular. Knowledge does not abolish wonder; indeed, scientific discoveries are often more wondrous than the mysteries they unravel. Without science, we are stuck with the drab world of appearances. With it, we discover endless depths, more astounding that we could have imagined.

 --Jesse Prinz.

Michael Bloomberg's Got Some 'Splainin' to Do

If the mayor of New York wants to carry on a crusade against guns, that's his business. But there is something rotten about the way that he's doing it: 

The name “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” is well known as Mike Bloomberg’s gun-control arm, which he spends his personal fortune through on ads. Yet the group’s website is registered to, and handled by, official city government servers and staffers.

Domain names for MAIG were registered in 2006 by the New York City Department of Information and Technology, and have remained on official city web servers ever since.

Yet the group’s “action fund,” through which he has piped at least $14 million of his own money in ads over gun control this year alone, is registered as a 501c4, a nonprofit “social welfare” group with the same tax status as, say, the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads GPS or Organizing for Action, President Obama’s grassroots arm. And it raises questions about why a website associated with the group is being managed by City Hall.

In fact, the various pieces of the mayor’s efforts appear as a confusing muddle online, with sites that are ostensibly not part of the 501c4 nonetheless being visually dominated by entreaties to click through to the ones that are. There’s little indication that these are different entities with different oversight.

At minimum, the use of a city web server and city employees underscore what critics have long derided as a blurring of the lines between government resources and Bloomberg’s own multi-billion-dollar fortune, his company, and his pet interests in his three terms as mayor.

I seem to recall that maybe, possibly, just perhaps, there was a time when Bloomberg concentrated on addressing the problems and challenges affecting New York, instead of trying to be mayor of the entire planet and engaging in potential impropriety in the process. I'd like to think that I am not wrong in this recollection, but even if I am right, one is left to wonder what happened to the Michael Bloomberg who focused on being a mayor instead of being a crusader. 

Quote of the Day

One of the great history teachers in those days was a University of Chicago professor named Karl Weintraub. He poured his soul into transforming his students’ lives, but, even then, he sometimes wondered if they were really listening. Late in life, he wrote a note to my classmate Carol Quillen, who now helps carry on this legacy as president of Davidson College.

Teaching Western Civ, Weintraub wrote, “seems to confront me all too often with moments when I feel like screaming suddenly: ‘Oh, God, my dear student, why CANNOT you see that this matter is a real, real matter, often a matter of the very being, for the person, for the historical men and women you are looking at — or are supposed to be looking at!’

“I hear these answers and statements that sound like mere words, mere verbal formulations to me, but that do not have the sense of pain or joy or accomplishment or worry about them that they ought to have if they were TRULY informed by the live problems and situations of the human beings back there for whom these matters were real. The way these disembodied words come forth can make me cry, and the failure of the speaker to probe for the open wounds and such behind the text makes me increasingly furious.

“If I do not come to feel any of the love which Pericles feels for his city, how can I understand the Funeral Oration? If I cannot fathom anything of the power of the drive derived from thinking that he has a special mission, what can I understand of Socrates? ... How can one grasp anything about the problem of the Galatian community without sensing in one’s bones the problem of worrying about God’s acceptance?

“Sometimes when I have spent an hour or more, pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and exhausted. I think it works on the student, but I do not really know.”

 --David Brooks.

The Beginnings of Good News (Sanity in Air Travel Division)

Well, it's a start:

Airline passengers irritated at having to turn off their devices could soon see some reprieve, with regulators set to allow wider use of gadgets in flight.

The Federal Aviation Administration is expected to relax the ban on using some types of personal-electronic devices at low altitudes, allowing passengers leeway during taxiing and even takeoffs and landings, according to industry officials and draft recommendations prepared by a high-level advisory panel to the agency.

For fliers, the new rules would likely mean an end to familiar admonitions to turn off and stow all electronic devices. Cellphone calls are expected to remain off limits, however. The draft doesn't make any recommendations regarding phone use because the FAA didn't authorize the panel to delve into that particularly controversial area.

Details are still being debated by the group and inside the FAA and could change. Still, the draft report reflects a consensus that the existing rules, essentially unchanged since the 1960s, have been overtaken by dramatic changes in technology and passenger expectations.

"As the consumer electronics industry has exploded," the report says, the FAA's traditional stance of giving individual airlines leeway to evaluate the safety of specific devices before allowing them to remain on at low altitude "has become untenable." In practice, airlines follow the FAA's guidance and slap a blanket prohibition on all devices until planes climb to 10,000 feet.

The FAA may be forced to act due to the sheer number of passengers flouting today's rules. The experts who wrote the draft referred to recent industry research showing that nearly one-third of passengers reported that, at least once, they accidentally left some device on throughout a flight.

And yet, no planes have crashed despite passengers accidentally leaving on any devices. Imagine that.

Tremendously Good News (Fight Against Diabetes Division)

This is huge: 

Fiorina and his team studied hundreds of pathways in animals with diabetes. They eventually isolated one, known as ATP/P2X7R, which triggers the T-cell attacks on the pancreas, rendering it unable to produce insulin.

“By identifying the ATP/P2X7R pathway as the early mechanism in the body that fires up an alloimmune response, we found the root cause of diabetes,” says Fiorina. “With the cause identified, we can now focus on treatment options. Everything from drug therapies to transplants that require less immunosuppression is being explored.”

This has extraordinary implications for people under 20 who have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. According to the article, it will still be a few years before therapies can be tested, but now, we are very close to finally having a cure for a large subset of the population living with diabetes.

The Latest in Government Overreach (Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act Edition)

Your federal government--and mine--has found a new way to prevent the statute of limitations from running regarding claims that the government has been defrauded. It now employs the Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act to claim that since the United States is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government can take longer to get around to prosecuting cases in which fraud against the government has been alleged. As Walter Olson notes, alleged misconduct need not have anything whatsoever to do with any war, and although the WSLA is part of the federal criminal code, it carries over to civil claims as well, where the standard of proof is lower than it is for criminal cases. Quoth Olson:

Reliance on WLSA [sic] is surging. Last December, the federal government filed a slew of mortgage-meltdown claims against Wells Fargo that would otherwise have been time-barred, citing the Afghan war as reason to ignore the statute of limitations. Twelve times the government invoked WSLA from 2009 to 2012, as many times as it has relied on the statute in the preceding 47 years.

Nervous business lawyers are wondering who is next and when, if at all, they can safely advise clients that a potential dispute is too old to worry about. If truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps the fairness of dispute resolution is the next.

It should go without saying that Congress ought to repeal the WSLA. It should also go without saying that it won't bother to.

Psst! HPV Vaccines Are Good Things. Pass It On!

The writers over at the Incidental Economist are on the other side of the policy divide on a host of matters vis-à-vis yours truly, but there are issues we agree on. One is that it is really important to vaccinate kids--and yes, that includes boys as well as girls--against the human papillomavirus (HPV). Aaron Carroll has performed a mitzvah by highlighting a study which points out the following:

This study looked at the prevalence of HPV among women and girls in the three years before the HPV vaccine was introduced (2003-2006) and the three years after it was introduced (2007-2010). The results are shocking. Just looking at adolescent girls age 14-19 years old, the prevalence of HPV covered by the vaccine fell from 11.5% before 2006 to 5.1% after. That’s a drop of more than 50%. And before any skeptics weigh in, there was no difference in the racial/ethnicity of the samples before and after the vaccine, nor any differences in sexual activity.

Of course, I cannot help but recall that Texas governor Rick Perry got a lot of grief for having ordered young girls in school to get the vaccine unless their parents opted out. As it turns out, Perry did the right thing from a health policy perspective. Perhaps one might argue that government has no business mandating vaccines, but few people doubt that government does have a role to play in promoting health and safety, and if the Perry order applied to public schools that receive taxpayer money, it's hard to see how Perry overreached, even though the state legislature overruled his order.

In any event, it is nice to see that we have an effective way to counteract the spread of HPV. We should take advantage of that knowledge and push for kids to get vaccinated. It saves lives. 

 

Your Government at Work (IRS Edition)

So, despite an order to save money because of the sequester, and despite an IRS scandal that should by itself make any talk of bonuses for IRS employees verboten,  the IRS is going to pay out $70 million extra to its workers for a job not-so-well-done.

Gee, imagine how much IRS workers would get if they were actually good at their jobs.