KARMA, or, HOW TO DO IT RIGHT
The storm that hit La Plata, Maryland the other night was an F5 "finger of God" tornado. The damage is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, two people are dead, dozens more are injured -- this is the kind of thing you expect to see following a hurricane, which doesn't tend to happen this far north.

While the governor and everybody's been touring the destruction and promising to seek designation as a federal disaster area, though, a bunch of guys have come over from the neighboring Amish community and started rebuilding. The news cameras caught them -- from a more or less respectful distance, thank goodness -- putting a roof back on a medical center. (I don't have a link, because obviously the Amish aren't going to go seeking the attention of the press. Or keeping websites. You know.)

That, my friends, is the way to behave. You may disagree at a basic, fundamental level with everything your neighbor is and does and stands for. That right is yours, as a human being. But when your neighbor takes a sock in the jaw, when much of what he has is destroyed and he's reeling with pain and shock and loss, what do you do?

Do you dance in the streets and celebrate his misfortune?

No. You pack your things in a bag and go over and give him a hand. That, of course, is after you raise your eyes heavenward and give thanks that you were spared. That obligation is yours, if you wish to continue calling yourself a human being.

WHERE IN THE WORLD ...
is Chandra Levy?

Today it's a year since she disappeared. For several months the search for Chandra (and the corollary raking-over-the-coals of Rep. Gary Condit) was the lead item on every news show, every channel, every hour. Mostly the media checked in to let us know they didn't have any new information to report. It was becoming (becoming?) indecent -- and then the whole world changed, of course, and all of a sudden there was a bigger news story.

Many, many, many of us have been pretty sure for a long, long time that Chandra's not coming back. But still, it's a year her family's been missing her, and that's not a place anyone should ever have to be.

IDENTICAL TWINS JOIN CHRONICLE STAFF
Ongoing war in Israel, with two peoples' survival on the line.

Kid in Germany shoots up a school that houses children as young as ten. (Incidentally, why does the discussion of school shootings never include Dunblane, where before killing himself the shooter killed sixteen five- and six-year-olds and their teacher -- who had tried to shield them with her body -- and wounded a dozen others? That, my friends, was a school shooting. The fact that the shooter was not a current or recent student of the school is immaterial.)

The Catholic Church has disappointed much of its flock with its handling of the pedophilia crisis in the American priesthood.

But thank god for McPaper, without which we wouldn't know that cheerleading is really a sport.

(Note: I am relieved that the online version of the paper has the German school shooting, the economy, the war, and some wildfires in Colorado on its main page. The dead-tree edition, though, has the cheerleading item on the front page, above the fold, with a big color photo and the heading "cover story". My whole morning commute was spent boggling at this.)

[UPDATE: There is a prize, by the way, for the first person to correctly identify the allusion in the title of this entry.]

DOCUMENTING THE INNER CHILD




which children's storybook character are you?

this quiz was made by colleen

BUZZ WORD WATCH
I just saw two commercials in a row invoke the Declaration of Independence. First, an ad for The Neighborhood by MCI (some sort of phone service plan, the details of which were TV-typically vague) concluded with the promise "All words are created equal again;" the very next spot began, "All power toothbrushes are not created equal." And I'm prepared to bet all the change in my bus-fare-slush-fund-jar that most viewers didn't realize, even with the two commercials in such proximity, that they were being manipulated.

Discuss.

AND THE WATERS WERE UPON THE EARTH
Heh heh heh. Monday's rally (which I couldn't attend, alas) got nice weather. A little on the warm side, but no biggie.

Today the anti-World-Bank crowd rolls into town, along with the anti-Zionists and a variety of other misguided knuckleheads -- and half an hour ago, I tell you the skies just opened. It suddenly got very dark, the wind picked up, and the rain came down like I've never seen. I mean within ten minutes the streets were flooding.

Mere coincidence, or God choosing sides? [wink] You make the call ...

ROUGH WEEK FOR THE STATUE-DRAPER GENERAL
Boy, it must be tough being John Ashcroft these days. First the Supreme Court strikes down two subparagraphs of 18 U.S.C. 2256(8) (Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996), effectively decriminalizing virtual-child pornography* and the advertisement and redistribution thereof; then a federal judge in Oregon rules that physician-assisted suicide, twice approved by the state's voters, does not violate 21 U.S.C. 801 et seq. (Controlled Substances Act of 1996), and the Department of Justice's efforts to meddle amounted to an attempt to usurp the state's rights.

It's not a terrific week for the 104th Congress, either, now that I think about it. Maybe soon the flagrantly unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act will get itself tossed out ...

[* The hypen belongs to Justice O'Connor, who draws a distinction between "youthful-adult pornography," featuring adults who look younger than they are, and "virtual-child pornography," featuring no real living people of any age. Both are permissible under the court's ruling. Interestingly, what we might call "virtual child pornography" -- no hyphen -- is still illegal, covered under 18 U.S.C. 2256(8)(c); "morphing," or computer-manipulating images of actual children to create the appearance of sexual activity in which those children never actually engaged.]

GO, SENATE, GO
By a vote of 54-46, the Senate has rejected an amendment to the president's energy policy that would, if it had passed, have allowed drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. This has been a big, ugly issue since the 2000 campaigns began -- with the hostility in the middle east holding steady on "broil" these days, the fighting about oil is even worse.

But I don't think it's really the oil itself people care about the most. Listen to the rallying-cries on the different sides of the issue. I mean, obviously the anti-drilling crowd doesn't think the oil is the most important thing. They're arguing against irreparable damage to the environment and the wildlife (and getting called "radical" for their trouble -- but the meaninglessness of hurled epithets in political debates is another rant). Even the pro-drilling crowd, though, says "End dependence on foreign oil", as though drilling in Alaska were some sort of magical cure-all that would return us to the happy days of isolationism -- er, self-sufficiency.

Point 1: Some opponents maintain (and I don't know enough about the mechanics of oil drilling to agree or disagree) that drilling now won't yield significant amounts of oil for at least ten years -- during which time, of course, we'd still be importing our oil from fun-loving places like Saudia Arabia.

Point 2: This is the United States, gang. Demand will increase to meet supply. We're funny like that. We're also funny like having some awfully damn smart people in our university laboratories, though -- we have the technology to end dependence on oil, full stop, foreign or domestic, amen. We haven't needed to get serious about implementing it, but if we needed to, we could.

Energy independence and national security aren't it. The big issues are related to each other: Alaska would like the money (who wouldn't?), and would get half the royalties from ANWR oil; and drilling up there would create many, many jobs. But Alaska does okay, and the economy everywhere is back on an upswing -- we don't need to invent jobs that will harm the world more in the long term than they help the country in the short term.

Fifty-four senators agree with me. I don't know who the three dissenting Republicans were (assuming all the Democrats and Mr. Jeffords voted against the amendment), but I doff my hat to them.

SITTING OUT THE ISRAEL-BASHING MARATHON
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, with members from 53 states, has adopted a resolution criticizing Israel's "violation" of human rights law and reiterating Palestine's right to "resist". (If you're Israel, are you going to take a how-to course on human rights issues from Bahrain? Libya? Sierra Leone? No, I thought not.)

However! There were seven member states that refused to vote in support of the resolution, and five brave enough to actually vote against it. (Peru was absent for the ballot.) The abstentions were:

Burundi. Cameroon. Croatia. Italy. Japan. Poland. Uruguay.

The dissenters, whom I applaud from a standing position, were:

CANADA.

The CZECH REPUBLIC.

GERMANY.

GUATEMALA.

The UNITED KINGDOM.

He today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.

DON'T FORGET TO TIP YOUR WAITRESSES.
Why is it that restaurant waitstaff aren't paid a living wage?

One of the basic foundations of our society is equality. We have historically gone to great pains to promote the ideal that no class of citizen is inherently superior or more entitled than any other. (We're still, obviously, working on this.) We have no hereditary aristocracy, and social mobility is much more a reality here than in many other countries.

And still, the idea that a tip is a gratuity is a semantic fiction. A waiter's income is determined every day by people who are not his employer. If he happens to have many (or generous) customers, he can pull down quite a bit, but if his customers are few or stingy, he's up a tree. It's a steady, honest job, but not one with much financial security. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay servers a living wage, like other working people? Quality control, that's what I'm saying. Let people tip if they want, but make a tip an actual reward for exceptional service, rather than a carrot on a stick.

Alternatively, we might reach the point where servers prefer not to be tipped. When I was studying in Edinburgh, a group of fellow students assured me that leaving a tip was entirely unnecessary because the waitress was paid by the restaurant and would be fine. In other European countries, the bill is itemized to include "service charge," but that's non-negotiable, just part of the price of the meal. I'm told that in Australia, offering a tip (to a cab driver, I believe, in the advice I was given) is quite an insult.

In the meantime, though, servers depend on tips. So allow me, please, to offer Fox's Three Rules of restaurant dining:

1. Overtip at breakfast. It's a lousy shift, for a start, but more than that, the food is cheaper. Even twenty percent of the price of cheaper food isn't much of a tip. You make less money at breakfast than at dinner, but you work just as hard (if not harder). But if every breakfast table leaves an additional dollar, that's only another buck out of each customer's pocket -- and it can be another twenty the waitress takes home. (This applies in general to lower-priced meals.)

2. Tip in cash whenever possible. If you charge your meal and add the tip to the charge slip, there's a paper trail. They know exactly how much the server got, so he pays tax on all of it. If you charge your meal and leave the tip in cash, he pays tax on what they assume he got, which is less than most decent people leave as a tip -- in some states, it's as little as eight or nine percent of the check. Again, this job is not a huge money-maker. Especially if you get particularly good service, do the waiter a favor.

3. If the food takes forever to get to you, but it's hot when it arrives, don't blame the waiter. Odds are it's the kitchen's fault -- and those guys don't work for tips. Screwing the waitress because someone else fell down on the job isn't nice, and it isn't appropriate.

Better yet, though, people should be paid enough to live on for doing a full day's work. This applies as much to waitstaff as it does to police, firefighters, and teachers -- people we depend on, and who are almost never paid even a fraction of what they're worth.

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD TALK ABOUT ISRAEL.
For the record: I am absolutely in favor of a State of Palestine. I do not wish any anti-Zionist to misunderstand me on this point. The ideals of self-governance and the ancestral homeland are as important to the Palestinians as they are to the Israelis, and I believe that some sort of co-existence is the right solution.

The trouble is that the damn PLO is bent on re-inventing the Final Solution.

Oh, yes, they are. Your average Palestinian on the street is probably only as complicit as your average German on the street sixty years ago (which is to say that he's not vocally opposed to what his government intends, assuming he even knows what that is), but your above-average explosive-wearing Palestinian is far, far guiltier, and has the stated aim of destroying Israel and annihilating the Jewish people.

This is unacceptable to me. The fact that it is not unacceptable to so many people is unacceptable to me. No Israeli official, and probably no average Israeli on the street, has advocated (in word or deed) the annihilation of the Palestinian people as a solution to the perpetual tension in the Holy Land. And yet people continue to vilify the Jews and heap praises on Yasser Arafat and I can only hope that most of them sincerely do believe peace can come from concessions to the PLO, despite all evidence to the contrary.

But dammit: do six million more people have to die, one restaurant at a time, before the world will admit that appeasement doesn't work?

OPEN LETTER TO OLD BATS ON METRO THIS A.M.
Three different people offered their seats to the woman with the four-footed cane, and she politely declined each. Mind your own damned business. Sincerely, your fellow-commuters.

Age of woman with four-footed cane: probably early 40's.
Age of people in seats designated "Priority seating for elderly and passengers with disabilities: various, from mid-20's to 60's.
Time those people arrived in those seats, relative to arrival on train of woman with four-footed cane: one to five stops sooner.
Age of old bats: late 60's, early 70's.
Snarky comments from old bats: various, including "If I walked with a cane, I'd crack them across the knees" and "One of these days, I'm going to embarass you by saying something to these young people who just let women and elderly people stand the whole way."
Position of old bats: seated.
Visibility of own knee injury that occasionally makes standing on metro quite painful: zero.
Implements carried by self to assist walking: zero.
Preference of woman with four-footed cane: standing. (But thank you.)

I mean, look. Of course it's courteous to give up one's seat to someone more in need of it. And of course we all hope those around us will be as courteous as possible at all times. But when courtesy extends to assisting people who don't need or want assistance, it goes by a much less pleasant name: patronizing. I think we can safely assume that a passenger who literally could not stand up for the duration of a trip on the metro would either (a) say so -- as a lady did to me a few years ago, when I had dozed off and didn't see her board the train; regrettably, she did this by kicking me in the ankle, but one can't have everything -- or (b) equip himself with a wheelchair.

It is never courteous to presume people are less -- less capable, less intelligent, whatever -- than oneself. It is still less courteous to presume that a person with obstacles in one arena must by extension face difficulties in other, unrelated, facets of life. In the instant case, Person X's offering the seat to the woman with the cane was appropriate. But when she said "No, thanks, I'm fine," was X to argue with her? Would it really have been more polite for X, who had no knowledge of or experience with whatever caused her to carry the canein the first place, to insist that the woman wasn't fine at all and had better take the seat, and her preference for standing be damned?

According to the old bats, maybe so. They didn't offer their own seats, of course, but that's because they were both elderly and women, and therefore entitled.

As a woman, and on behalf of able-bodied elderly people everywhere, I resent that. Quite a bit.

(In Paris, as I recall, there's a hierarchy of entitlement to the Priority For ________ seats. World War I veterans, if there are any left, get the big prize, but in their absence the seats go to -- and I'm working from memory, here, so don't quote me -- disabled veterans [especially amputees], other disabled individuals, blind people, other veterans, senior citizens meeting none of the above criteria, and pregnant women. In that order.)

Whoever reaches the door first should open it. If that person is loaded down with packages or luggage, someone should hold the door for him. The generic singular pronoun "he" is not oppressive. And so on.

(Guess how I feel about Affirmative Action.)

GOOD MORNING.
This is my inaugural post. In the future, I'll have more to say. (I'm more of a thinker than a linker, but who knows -- that could change.) Sit tight. I'll be back.