Exit, Pursued by a Bear

The lock rumour? It’s true.

Yesterday, I jammed the tube of a Bic pen into the lock mechanism of my sturdy old U-lock, twisted slowly, and – popped it open. Blame the media. Then I went to MEC for a replacement, and found that they’d taken every lock off their shelves, except one that cost $11, and looked like it would open if I was rude to it. On the other hand, it had a flat, house-key-style key.

The Star and Globe have both covered this story. The problem has been described as affecting U-locks, but it really has implications for all tubular locking systems –like my other lock.

The Globe’s story explains –

Some locksmiths said yesterday that the new technique could seriously compromise tubular cylindrical locks, which would affect more than bicycles.
Such locks have been used for decades on items such as motorcycles, pop machines, condom dispensers, alarm-system panels and cable locks for laptop computers.

More summer pictures

linked here.
This was almost an excellent shot, but it really needed a tripod to do justice to the long exposure: it would work based on the wildness of the sunflowers and the stillness and clarity of everything else.

Adventures with a 12-pound canoe

I finally got a chance to paddle my mom's 12-pound canoe Monday. It was 12 pounds originally, that is; the sponsons bring the weight up another pound or two.
She bought it as a one-off prototype that Scott Canoe inherited in 2002 when they bought Bluewater, another canoe manufacturer. The Bluewater designer was working from the Old Town Pack Canoe design, a 12-foot canoe which MEC sells in the mass-market version. This canoe was a one-off experiment to find out what would happen if he took another two feet off and made it out of thin Kevlar. Result: a tiny 12-pound canoe.

It's easiest to paddle sitting on the bottom and using a kayak paddle.

Moves about two-thirds as fast as a sea kayak. It paddles well in a straight
line, though cumbersome to turn (granted, I was making tight 180° turns in
a restricted marshy area. )

It's very close to the water, as you can see. The sponsons would
have been touching water if I'd been carrying any gear. It feels tippy and unstable, so I was glad to have the sponsons.

Makes me wonder how well I'd do with my own 12.5-ft canoe with a kayak
paddle, when soloing.

Posted by Patrick at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)

The Queen vs. Zell Miller: why Bagehot looks better and better

If the Republicans really were trying to keep the scarier side of the party out of view during the convention, they didn’t have much luck with ex-Democratic Georgia senator Zell Miller*.

“While young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan,” he told Republicans last night, “our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.”

The only thing that the term commander in chief actually means, constitutionally, is that the chain of command of the armed forces ends at the White House: ‘The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.’ The idea that the president is commander-in-chief of the nation is straightforwardly fascist, and the point should be made more often than it is.

In any case, writers in Slate and Salon both made it clear that this formulation scared their ears flat.

At Slate, William Saletan wrote:

The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.

At Salon, Scott Rosenberg said much the same thing:

Strip this of its spin and modifiers and what Miller is saying is, "While Americans are dying, the opposition party is trying to win the election, and that hurts the nation."
… Note the militarism here. Forget that our Constitution puts the civilian authority in charge of the military; in Miller's rhetoric, "commander in chief" trumps "president." And dissent equals insubordination.

It’s an argument that it’s difficult to imagine being made at a mainstream party convention in Canada or Australia.

Walter Bagehot, a nineteenth-century constitutional analyst and journalist – he was an early editor of The Economist – helps explain why.

Bagehot came up with an argument that explains the apparent paradox that healthy democracies can retain, and celebrate, hereditary monarchs who occupy thrones because their ancestors hacked away all challengers.

It also helps to explain why the Democratic party establishment is hesitant to see themselves as leaders of an opposition party - though many rank-and-file Democrats get it, and the GOP had no trouble at all with the concept when Clinton was in power.

Bagehot basically said: Hard-wired human instincts, probably rooted in early childhood, lead us to idealize and romanticize leaders. (“The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.”)

On the other hand, real-world politicians being mostly untrustworthy opportunists, democracy demands skepticism, rude questions and all the rest of it. Liberal democracy works best, but authoritarianism appeals to us at a powerful, atavistic level.

These are not easily reconciled, but one way to solve the problem is to have a constitutional monarch, without formal power, and a parliament based on the acknowledgement of legitimate political difference.

Bagehot divided the British state into two components - the dignified (the symbolic part) and the efficient (the functional part). The key to a working constitutional monarchy is to separate the two. Having done that, which we can indulge the dignified component as much as we like, since it isn’t dangerous to us any more.

This way, our romantic instincts about authority, which have the danger of turning romantic authoritarianism into a serious factor in government, are safely directed at people who have dignity but no real power, and we can get on with being cranky, useful citizens. For my money, this is the only really good argument for a modern democracy keeping a monarch.

Once you call an opposition party the Loyal Opposition, and make it a formal part of the legislative structure, it’s clear to everybody that opposition is their job. A minister can’t respond to a hostile question in the House of Commons by accusing the questioner of disloyalty - not without looking sinister or ridiculous.

(It occurs to me that Trudeau, our most presidential prime minister, was more hostile to the monarchy than anyone to hold the office before or since.)

The scariest problem with the American constitution is that the dignified and efficient components are fused in the presidency.

(I might as well follow this to its logical conclusion: Washington was offered, and declined, a chance to be the first American king. It’s an irony that if he had accepted, and if a descendant of his now sat in the White House as a constitutional monarch, American democracy would arguably be healthier.)

*

An item in Salon’s War Room blog leaves one wondering whether the Republicans realized what they were getting with Miller, and whether he might have been sent across the aisle as a sort of booby prize. (‘Now, Zell, if you feel that strongly about it, we’re really not going to stand in your way … ’)

(MSNBC’s Chris) Matthews asked Miller to defend his speech, and particularly his allegations that John Kerry voted "against" various defense appropriations. (As both Matthews and Miller know, voting against a large appropriations bill doesn't necessarily mean that you disapprove of every part of the bill). Miller got progressively angrier as Matthews persisted in holding him to his statement, telling Matthews several times that he wished he was in the studio so he could "get up in your face."
As Miller steamed, Matthews asked him if he thought that he was helping the political discourse in the country, and then, whether he even thought he was helping the Republicans by what he was saying. At that point Miller's meltdown peaked. He started waving his arms around, demanding Matthews "shut up" and let him answer the question. Miller then lapsed into a dialogue with himself wondering, "I don't know why I even came on this program," before returning to Matthews and announcing he wished they lived in a previous era because he would have "challenged you to a duel."

AP has the whole story.

In today’s New York Times:

the closest thing to essentially perfect print journalism I’ve read in a long time. Barry demonstrates why really, really savage anger works better cold, and how if you have a lot of strong material you can afford to use it sparingly and patiently. He did everything he had to do in under a thousand words, too – it has the tidiness of a haiku, hinting at much economically. This really belongs in j-school classrooms.

ABOUT NEW YORK
Serving Canapés, Then Recalling the 107th Floor
By DAN BARRY

Published: September 1, 2004
To be a banquet worker is to be invisible. Do not engage customers in chitchat. Just collect the discarded shrimp tails, keep the cheese platters fresh and know how to pose simple questions - "Hors d'oeuvre?" - so unobtrusively that you might as well be a phantom.
These rules hold true no matter how often out-of-town customers turn a certain jagged phrase into a political rally cry, and no matter how often their bar-banter invocation of that phrase, September 11th, sends you back. You ask if they'd like another mojito, and you say nothing more.
Monzur Ahmed, who has been managing a buffet table this week for several Republican National Convention parties at the Noche restaurant in Times Square, says nothing as speakers use September 11th to justify four more years for their candidate.
He tells no one about his life at Windows on the World, the glittery restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, or about the 79 friends and colleagues who died, including a beloved uncle.

rest here