Thursday, April 1, 2004

RALPH E. LUKER: FLASH: Duke Acquires Public Domain ...

As if the NCAA weren't enough, there's this! Thanks to Volokh for the tip.

Posted by Ralph E. Luker at 1:45 PM | Comments (1)

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

RALPH E. LUKER: Not That The Others Aren't Smart, You Understand ...

but a couple of comments from Cliopatria's comment boards struck me as worthy of special mention here:

The OAH and Speech Codes ... In a comment posted here at Cliopatria, Michael Burger asks the interesting question about whether the Organization of American Historians' newly constituted ad hoc committee chaired by David Montgomery will examine campus speech codes as threats to freedom of inquiry and speech in the current academic climate. I suspect that a) that wasn't what they originally had in mind and b) that is all the more reason to do so.
Memo to David Montgomery: Contact FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. E-mail: fire@thefire.org; telephone: (215)-717-3473 -- that's 717-FIRE. I know they'll be glad to hear from you, David, and will cooperate in every possible way.

A Big Zombie Error ... The Cranky Cliopatriarch needed to bring me up to speed from way back. His post here assumed that I knew what the heck a "vampire error" was. So, I googled it, which was of no help, because his reference to it here was #1 on google's hit parade. But I can determine his meaning from the context: "Feel free to leave your favorite 'zombie error' in the comments. I always call them 'zombie errors,' by the way," he wrote, "because if you put a stake in the heart of a 'vampire error' it stays dead." A vampire error, then, is one that can be corrected. (I'm glad he's not grading my papers. There's just no comfortable way to put a stake in a student's heart.) Anyway, Crooked Timber's John Quiggin left a favorite one I hadn't known about:

My favourite is the "tragedy of the commons" popularized by Garrett Hardin. Partha Dasgupta once quoted his opening para[graph] and said "there can scarcely exist a passage as widely quoted as this containing so many errors in such a short space."
The basic error underlying all the others was the idea that "common" pastures were open to all comers.

Posted by Ralph E. Luker at 11:21 PM | Comments (1)

DEREK CHARLES CATSAM: Rwanda, Clinton, and Responsibility

An article in today’s Mail and Guardian reveals how the Clinton Administration knew about, but did not choose to address, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Based on classified documents newly available, the report indicates that it was clear that the Administration knew more than it purported to know before and during the genocide.

These documents are worth seeing, the information is vital knowledge, but this is better categorized as confirmation of what we knew and suspected rather than as being truly new information. Indeed, in both Philip Gourevitch's masterful reportage "We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," and to a lesser degree in Bill Berkeley's "The Graves Are Not Yet Full" Clinton complicity rings out loud and clear. The same is true in many other academic and scholarly sources.

Equally important is what this information tells us about the foreign policy that we ought to pursue. Since 1994 I have long argued that we failed egregiously in not intervening in Rwanda. It is, to my mind, the largest failure of the Clinton Presidency. Of course had Clinton attempted to engage in Rwanda, to commit the relatively few resources it would have taken to prevent the death of nearly a million civilians, many Republicans would have fought him, brandishing him an idealist and sneeringly deriding a "human rights approach" to foreign policy. So neither party should take these new revelations as affirmation of their virtue and the other side's vice.

What does this mean for us in the here and now? Well, it makes me ask of those who would deny our right to engage in either preemptive or unilateral foreign policy if Rwanda forces them to reconsider. Any engagement in Rwanda in 1993-1994 would have been preemptive. There is not much doubt about that. Further, long before worrying about a coalition, Clinton should have been planning to act. If other nations went along, great. If not, well, we had a responsibility that transcended getting the permission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, France, Russia, or even Australia and the British.

In other words, take away the increasingly obnoxious responses of the Bush Administration and the perceived arrogance of their conduct, and do all of the critics of the war really oppose preemption and unilateralism? Would they not have been willing to intervene and go it alone to prevent the murders of hundreds of thousands?

Posted by Derek Charles Catsam at 3:55 PM | Comments (8)

JONATHAN DRESNER: Bomb Auschwitz? Why Not?

The debate on whether the Allies should have attempted to bomb the Auschwitz death camp during WWII is historiographically fascinating, but it's a bottomless pit: we'll throw in everything we know about the death camps, about what the Allies knew about the death camps, about what the Allies talked about doing about the death camps, about the tools of war, about the industrial infrastructure of Germany and Poland, about Roosevelt and Truman's attitudes towards Jews, Germans and the military, about the military's attitudes towards the Jews and Roosevelt and Truman; eventually we'll talk about IBM and the Bush family ties to Nazism and for fun maybe we'll talk about Werner von Braun for a change or perhaps we'll just rehash the discussion of Mel Gibson's father, or maybe one of the "they weren't really death camps" people will show up again, and that'll pretty much be the end of rational discussion. I've seen it before.

In the end, those who think the bombing should have happened will be convinced the nay-sayers are nitpicking and amoral, not to mention unimaginative; those who think the bombing would have been counterproductive will be sure that the pro-bombers are obsessed, impractical and overimaginative conspiracy theorists. The debate will be selective but highly mobile, careening from one half-articulated argument to an out-of-context fact to a "logical but ahistorical" conclusion, through a few ad hominems, and eventually all will either drift away or collapse in exhaustion. The winner will be the one who has the energy and tenacity to keep typing the longest about the most detailed material, and that usually isn't the person with the best arguments or even most normal perspective. Nobody's mind will change, at least not among the participants; observers, those who aren't partisan lurkers, will sway with the prevailing winds and probably leave agreeing with whomever they last read. I've seen it before.

In the end, this is probably one of the most counterproductive counterfactual arguments, because there's really no plausible scenario in which the Allies could have saved more than a few tens of thousands out of the millions killed: the Nazi Germans were masters of industry and adaptation, and they would have found other ways to kill who they wanted killed, to force labor out of those they enslaved, to purify themselves and taint history with their purity. This was industrialized murder, and there are so many ways to kill. So the argument really isn't about turning points in history.

The argument is about morality. We have a hole in our hearts, we humans, because the Holocaust happened, and because of all the other slaughters and genocides and atrocities. We can't make it go away. We can't seem to stop them, and it's not clear how hard we're trying. Those who argue that the bombing wouldn't have helped are trying, at some level, to assuage themselves by justifying inaction. Those who argue the bombing would have helped are trying, at some level, to assuage themselves by directing rage outward. Perhaps. I know the debate isn't really about Auschwitz: counterfactuals are about the present, not the past.

In the end, I come down in the middle, and I walk away. I don't think the bombings would have been the salvation of many. Not directly, anyway. But even minimal, sporadic attacks on the infrastructure of the Holocaust would have been a powerful moral statement (perhaps even a rallying point for the Allies, if we're really playing counterfactuals), and then, perhaps, we could have spent the energy talking about the present in the present, instead of waiting a half-century to address questions that have no answers.

Posted by Jonathan Dresner at 2:47 AM | Comments (2)

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

RALPH E. LUKER: The Right to Feel Comfortable ...

You hadn't heard that one, had you? It's Amendment I-A to the Constitution, the one that abrogates the right of free speech on our campuses if the speech is offensive. Mike Adams is a pain in the neck who moonlights as a professor of criminal justice at UNC-Wilmington. An administrator there recently asked him not to discuss some subjects with his colleagues because it makes them uncomfortable. In his latest column for TownHall, Adams enumerates some things that have made him uncomfortable at UNCW.

*My first year at UNCW, a faculty member in our department objected to a job candidate because he was "a little too white male." Such comments make me feel really uncomfortable, being a white guy and all that.
*My second year at UNCW we removed a white woman from our interview pool in order to make room for a black woman. When the university forced me to discriminate on the basis of race, I felt really uncomfortable.
*My third year at UNCW someone suggested that we should reject a job candidate because he was "too religious." It sure makes me feel uncomfortable when people say things like that.
*My fourth year at UNCW someone objected to a job candidate because she felt that the husband played too dominant a role in the candidate's marriage. It also makes me feel uncomfortable when people say things like that.

*Then there are all the times that the name Jesus Christ has been used as a form of profanity in the office. That makes me feel uncomfortable. By the way, I am especially offended by the phrase "Jesus F***ing Christ!" I mean, no one ever says "Mo-F***ing-Hammed!" or "F***ing Buddha!," do they?
*Then there was the time that a gay activist in our department suggested that I switch to bi-sexuality in order to double my chances of finding a suitable "partner." That made me feel uncomfortable and she knew it. After I started to blush, she asked, "What's the matter, are you a little homophobic?" So what if I don't think you can change your sexual orientation as easily as your underwear? Is that so wrong? Do I really have a phobia?
*And how about the time that a faculty member called another faculty member a "mother f***er" in one of our meetings? That was before he said that he should have climbed over the desk and "slapped the s*** out of him." These sociologists need to start getting along with one another if they plan to build a Utopian society. Plus, it makes me feel really uncomfortable to hear about these threats of violence in the workplace.

*Then there's the professor in our department who thinks that I am trying to poison her with tear gas. A few years ago the police questioned me about breaking into her office and spraying chemicals. That was a pretty uncomfortable situation. I think it even qualifies as a Maalox moment. By the way, how long do I have to work with this woman? She makes me feel very uncomfortable.
*And then there was the time that the university attorney read two of my personal e-mails against my objections. Do you have any idea how uncomfortable that made me feel? That's a long story that you can read about in my new book, which I am not trying shamelessly to promote. I know that capitalism makes a lot of my colleagues feel uncomfortable.
*A member of the UNCW Board of Trustees has been heard calling people "white trash" and making other racist statements in public. She has to vote on my next promotion as well as the promotion of every other professor at the university. That makes me feel a little uncomfortable, still being a white guy and all that. Maybe my race makes her feel uncomfortable, but some of us can't afford to change the color of our skin. We can't all be like Michael Jackson. I know that makes a lot of parents feel comfortable.

With the emphasis on "comfort", and avoidance at all costs of making somebody "uncomfortable", perhaps it's best that we re-work the University curriculum to simply do away with all that troublesome stuff, like philosophy, history, comparative religion, literature, and stick with the safe subjects, like finger-painting and cooperative group play.
Then perhaps there would spring up little academies, centered around one or two dedicated and enthusiastic teachers, who would challenge their students and teach them how to think, how to question, and how to learn. It's happened before.

Posted by Ralph E. Luker at 10:11 PM | Comments (13)

JONATHAN DRESNER: Hawai'i Strike Report: DAYS OF DECISION

Previous Pre-Strike reports #1 and #2, and especially #3, the Tentative Agreement

The discussion since the announcement of the Tentative Agreement (TA) has been fast and furious. Most of the people who've been willing to speak up on the matter have been incensed by the offer and the manner in which it was presented. The union board voted to recommend ratification by the membership (I've heard different stories about the vote: 13-5 with two abstentions or 9-9 with the president/chair casting the tiebreaker vote; I suspect both stories are true, but refer to different votes. [update: a board member has revealed that the 9-9 vote was to present the TA without recommendation, which the president rejected; the 13-5-2 vote was to present with a positive recommendation.), setting a vote for next week, with results to be announced Thursday the 8th.

I've been arguing against the TA, publicly and vigorously, but nobody has come up to me and said "you changed my mind." Yet. A lot of people who agree with me have told me that the ratification will succeed in spite of our opposition, probably by a wide margin, because of the large silent majority (remember them?) who will not want to make trouble for themselves or anyone else. One philosopher put it this way: "Scratch a teacher, and you'll find a teacher's pet." Similar discussions are going on at the Manoa campus, with vocal opposition but also supporters of the deal in high places; I haven't heard about opinion at the community colleges.

The rhetoric of this is quite interesting. Supporters of ratification have argued strongly against striking, but only weakly in favor of ratification. "The best deal we could get" is the main refrain. A few appeals to "professionalism" and student interest have been made, but my counter to that has been that the deal is so corrosive to the institution that we are duty bound as professionals to oppose it, and that student interests in the long run are not served by accepting a deal that will make it impossible to hire and retain good faculty, and that will increase pressure for adjunctification. The system president has already said that tuition raises would be the main method for raising the system's share of the salary increases, which is going to drive a wedge between students and faculty at least as great if not greater than that which a strike might have produced. (Actually, vocal student opinion was in favor of our holding out for a good deal, but we lost a lot of that when the administration announced a "settlement" which "averted the strike." Now we have to go back and explain "spin" to our students.....) As one colleague put it, tuition increases may be justified, but not just for salaries: buildings, maintenance, services, new hires, library resources; all these things are crying out for more funding, but the bulk of the responsibility will be put on faculty salaries. And the traditional "If you don't like it, go on the market and get a better offer" gambit has been offered, ignoring the corrosive institutional effects of turnover, the costs of constantly hiring and rehiring, etc.

Other colleagues have pointed out that the backloaded salary increases, if they indeed come to fruition, will make it almost impossible to get raises in the next negotiating cycle: we'll be asking for raises in the midst of a two-year, 20% salary jump, and even though we're likely to be lagging far, far behind our peer group institutions (this deal gets us up almost to the median of our peer groups, assuming they don't get any pay raises over the next six years), it'll be hard to say "we need more money, now!" There's considerable dispute over the enforceability of the six-year contract. The good news is that the union lawyers are quite sure that it's enforceable in court; the bad news, and this came directly from the UHPA Executive Director, is that the raises will be protected even if the university has to declare a retrenchment. Now, I don't know if your contract has a similar clause in it, but in ours, retrenchment means "shoot the wounded, eat the horses": it's a fiscal emergency response involving seniority-based mass terminations, starting with the cheapest, least senior adjunct faculty and protecting the senior faculty. The legislature is making noises about not obligating future legislatures, so only the first two years would be legitimately funded and the rest would be dependent on the good will, fiscal sense and financial responsibility of future state legislatures.

There's been plenty of whining about not having "time to strike" this semester, to which I responded:

I disagree that we don't have time to strike in this semester. A rejection of the TA offer next week would be a strike vote: allowing a few days for organization, the strike itself could begin as early as Monday April 12th, three weeks before the end of the semester, unless the state agreed to sit down immediately with newly instructed and empowered negotiators. We don't have to strike long before the end of the semester: as long as final grades are in our hands, we have a great deal of leverage. I hate to use it, but this deal is insulting and corrosive.

And delaying a strike until Fall would give the university administration plenty of time to make contingency plans that would significantly dilute the value and effectiveness of a strike. It may be necessary, but I'd rather make them pay for dragging the process out this long than reward them by giving them time to gear up for our action. The state dragged its feet in negotiation to force us to scramble at the end, but if we move clearly and strongly together it will be effective.

Posted by Jonathan Dresner at 5:08 AM | Comments (0)

RALPH E. LUKER: Gaming Our Polarization ...

In December 2001, David Brooks published "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" in The Atlantic. It drew a series of contrasts between the consumption habits of Red America and Blue America. A resident of coastal Blue, Brooks sought to interpret mid-American Red for fellow sophisticates by comparing his own Montgomery County, Maryland, with Franklin County, Pennsylvania, just 65 miles away. Wealthy, urban Montgomery County had voted for Al Gore by 2 to 1. Much less wealthy, rural Franklin County had voted for George Bush by 2 to 1. The contrasts were stark and Brooks thought he found in them the fault line in contemporary American society. As the electoral returns suggest, however, says Brooks, the line doesn't fall along differences of social class. Rather, it ranges two different systems of value against each other. He quotes Michael Barone to the effect that: "One is observant, tradition-minded, moralistic. The other is unobservant, liberation-minded, relativistic." The difference, Brooks argued, is one of sensibility. The two are divided by an "Ego Curtain." In Red America, the self is subsumed in common values. In Blue America, the self magnifies itself. But America is not hopelessly divided against itself, says Brooks, because both Americas believe the differences are matters of choice. Writing in the shadow of 9/11, he saw one nation galvanized by what we shared in common.

David Brooks' conclusion seemed a lot more believable in December 2001 than it does in April 2004. His book, Bo-bos in Paradise (2000) was initially compared with William H. White's The Organization Man and David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd for its powerful sociological insight. But in a piece widely noted on the net, Sasha Issenberg finds Brooks guilty of making "Boo-Boos in Paradise". His generalizations about the "one nation, slightly divisible" were not discrete observations from which he drew thoughtful conclusions, but caricatures of both Blue and Red America. One after another of Brooks' discrete observations turn out to be the creation of a fertile mind, says Issenberg. In Brooks' hands, more obscure academic research becomes cliche and distorts as it popularizes. Indeed, the line from William H. White and David Reisman to David Brooks, Issenberg suggests, traces the decline of our sense of what a public intellectual ought to be.

Issenberg's essay for Philadelphia Magazine caught Romenesko's eye and, even, Washington's Wonkette Winked. Surprisingly, it was the liberal Kevin Drum (CalPundit transblogrified as Political Animal) who came to David Brooks' defense. Tim Burke at Easily Distracted, agrees with Issenberg's skewering of Brooks. Issenberg is, by the way, one of Tim's former students. But, as I read the discussion, it raises anew an issue about caricature and stereotype. If they work, neither of those things are utterly false. Like good caricature, stereotype takes an element of truth about a thing and makes it stand in place of the whole. Had they no truth in them, they would have no sting. The issue, then, is not so much whether some of David Brooks' discrete facts about Red America are false – they are -- but whether, as Issenberg suggests, Brooks made himself the Kerry Kountry Klub's guide through Bush country and made a minor element of truth stand for the whole.

Kirk at American Amnesia calls Cliopatria's attention to Joel Kotkin's op-ed, "Red, Blue, and ... So 17th Century", in the Washington Post. Kotkin likens our polarization to that of the English in the latter half of the 17th century, when Puritan Roundheads confronted Royal Cavaliers from the Puritan Revolution through the Glorious Revolution. Most historians would cringe at the analogy, I think, because Democrats and Republicans have yet to take up arms against each other. No executive's head has rolled nor has a Congress been dismissed. Almost as odd is Kotkin's analogizing the Roundheads with Republicans and Democrats with the Cavaliers. It would make as much sense to reverse the analogies. Republican policies are more likely to benefit established elites; Democratic candidates this year will be crying out for political change. Some time ago at Cliopatria, Tim Burke suggested some useful guidelines for historical analogies, including commonality, causality, multiplicity, and contingency. I can't see that Kotkin meets any of them, except perhaps contingency, if he is willing to give up the analogy altogether.

Update: Derek Catsam calls attention to a critique by Chad at Uncertain Principles which takes on Brooks, Issenberg, and Drum.

Posted by Ralph E. Luker at 4:03 AM | Comments (3)

Sunday, March 28, 2004

ROBERT "KC" JOHNSON: Around HNN

A couple of items caught my eye while looking through HNN pages recently.

The first came in an attack on the standards and accuracy employed by the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Project offered by Sheldon Stern. Stern is a longtime critic of the project, who previously had written on the topic in The Atlantic.

I was part of the Miller Center’s project for several years (working on LBJ tapes), and just finished a book based on those tapes on the 1964 presidential election. I still remain astonished at the resources that the Center devotes to ensuring accurate transcripts—even though this has delayed the release of transcripts that, even if 99% accurate, would be of enormous value to historians of the 1960s and 1970s.

What most struck me about Stern’s critique came in his comment that the Kennedy tapes authors too often used [unclear] when they were not sure of what a voice said, rather than offering an educated guess, “especially when they make sense in historical context.” Such an approach, I’m afraid, is exactly what scholars working with the tapes—and the Kennedy and Nixon tapes, unlike those of LBJ, are often exceedingly difficult to make out—need to avoid. Nine times out of ten, I would guess, Stern’s approach would yield the correct transcript. But the tenth time, Stern would place in a policymaker’s mouth a word or phrase that reflects our current interpretation of “historical context” where, in fact, the policymaker said something quite different. It seems to me that in transcribing, the mantra should be “better safe than sorry.”

The second article that caught my eye came from the OAH, where the Historians Against the War (HAW) passed a resolution to establish a committee that would investigate reports of repression among historians. The associated petition listed eight types of “repression,” including: “restrictions of research and surveillance of library use under the USAPATRIOT Act”; “reports of teachers, especially in high schools and community colleges, reprimanded or confronted with suspension or non-renewal for allowing students in their classrooms to express opposition to the occupation of Iraq”; “Systematic denunciation of historians who have criticized government policy by Campus Watch, No Indoctrination, Students for Academic Freedom, and other groups”; “Dismissals and refusals to employ faculty members allegedly on the basis of their views on foreign policy”; “Restriction of historians' access to government records, and new limits to enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act.”

The petition was coupled with another HAW petition denouncing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war.

I didn’t attend the OAH this year, and so will defer to my colleague Derek Catsam for more details on what type of discussion, if any, this resolution produced. The final item in this list strikes me as a serious item of concern for the OAH, especially since the Bush administration’s record on releasing documents has been abominable. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how passing this particular resolution will help the profession on the document-release question, since administration officials now can make the claim that the leading professional organization of American historians has linked its call for more liberal release of documents with an attack on Bush’s foreign policy.

As to the other issues raised in the resolution, while I support the repeal of the Patriot Act, one look through the caseload of an organization such as FIRE demonstrates that the chief threat to academic freedom and free speech on the campus today doesn’t come from right-wing ultra-patriots. And I for one have personal experience on the question of "dismissals and refusals to employ faculty members allegedly on the basis of their views on foreign policy," though not of the type that seems to concern HAW. I’ve yet to learn of any instance when such a dismissal or attempted dismissal occurred because of a faculty member’s criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Perhaps such a dismissal occurred at a place like Duke, and I just overlooked it: I certainly can imagine how afraid a faculty critic of the war in Iraq would be to speak out in a History Department like Duke’s where every professor who is a registered voter is a Democrat.

Now that the OAH has passed its resolution, I’ll be very, very interested to see what evidence the investigatory commission brings forth. I’m not holding my breath waiting for its report.

Posted by Robert "KC" Johnson at 11:37 PM | Comments (16)

RALPH E. LUKER: Noted Here and There ...

The much beloved history professor at the University of Chicago, Karl Joachim "Jock" Weintraub, has died at 79. Born in Germany to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, he was kept hidden by a Christian family in Holland through World War II and brought to the United States by the Quakers after the war. Weintraub earned his three academic degrees and taught Western Civilization at Chicago for 50 years. Students at the University were known to sleep over night in registration lines to get a place in his courses. After his formal retirement and until his health broke in 2002, Weintraub continued to teach the courses without a salary. It was his way of protesting changing conditions in American higher education. See also: the University's obituary and tributes to Weintraub at Crescat Sententia and Gnostical Turpitude.

Steve Turner's article, "The American Anthem" in the current issue of Christianity Today, is a good precis of his book, Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song. Penned by John Newton, a slavetrader turned evangelical preacher, "Amazing Grace" is hardly representative of his best work and was not particularly popular in Newton's England. Turner explains why it has been so amazingly popular in the United States.

You may have seen this comparison of the gay, feminist, and fundamentalist agendas at Long Story/short pier . It's worth a look for a laugh. Thanks to Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber. As John Holbro at Examined Life says, Long Story/short pier is an interesting blog. Have a look around. While I'm citing other blogs, The Panda's Thumb is a new group blog, aiming to combat pseudo-science. It hopes to do for biology what Cliopatria has done for history. Well..., they didn't say that. I did. One more:

Noam Chomsky has a blog
Ee-i-ee-i-o
And on his blog he had some posts
Ee-i-ee-i-o
With a post-post here And a post-post there
Here a post, there a post
Everywhere a post- post
Noam Chomsky has a blog
Ee-i-ee-i-o

Robert Campbell at Liberty & Power has the latest update on developments at the University of Southern Mississippi. Don't miss his update on the update.

The University of Virginia's Gerard Alexander has an interesting review essay in The Claremont Review, "The Myth of the Racist Republicans", which challenges the argument of Dan Carter and Merle and Earl Black that the Republican Party built its recent successes by appealing to Southern white racism. Thanks to John Moser and Richard Jensen's Conservativenet for the tip.

On Jack Rice's Sunday evening talk radio program on WCCO in Minneapolis at 8:10 p.m., CDT, I'll be talking about the Supreme Court's hearing on the constitutionality of the "under God" clause in the Pledge of Allegiance. I wrote about the issue here. In the meantime, journalists have pointed out that the United States is one of the few countries in the world which has a pledge of allegiance. What others can you name? Why would the United States be among the few countries with a pledge? It was first adopted in 1892 when immigration was reaching an all time high and, concurrently shifting from north/western Europe in origin to south/eastern Europe in origin. If that helps explain the United States' adoption of a Pledge of Allegiance, why have other countries of immigrants not followed its example?

Posted by Ralph E. Luker at 2:27 AM | Comments (0)

Saturday, March 27, 2004

JONATHAN DRESNER: Reading the Tea Leaves

I do social and economic history, and I've been pondering this since picking up my newspaper today: Is it a good sign or a bad sign for the economy, when the bill collection call center closes? Hilo just lost it's fourth-largest employer, which is bad, and this island's unemployment rate was already higher than the state average. But does this tell us anything about the larger economy? I mean, if people are paying their bills closer to on time, then that's good for the economy; if people just aren't paying them at all, so calling them isn't helping, then that's very bad. I figured bill collection agencies were kind of like pawnshops: nearly fool-proof, if you do your job at all right. But, as my father says, you can make something foolproof, but not damn-fool proof; those damn-fools are so darned clever....

Posted by Jonathan Dresner at 2:29 AM | Comments (11)

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