CJC.org

Some notes on the JFK AirTrain and JetBlue from the past week:

The JFK AirTrain project came online earlier this year after many, many delays, including a fatal accident during testing. The AirTrain is basically the airport’s inter-terminal shuttle, extended to reach the Jamaica LIRR/subway station on the E line, and the A line JFK stop. Trains are currently three cars long, and are automated. We took it to get to JFK last week through Jamaica, and returned on the A back to Manhattan earlier this week.

Coming from the Upper West Side, it’s a mistake to try to switch to the E. Yes, the MTA schedule says that the E will take 50 minutes from east Midtown, and the A from Fulton Street will actually take 15 minutes longer, but taking the 1 downtown and then trudging around the 42nd Street IND station with luggage to get to the E is not the best idea: it may take you 15 minutes to walk from platform the platform, and the E around rush hour is, of course, very crowded. The A we saw at 59th Street wasn’t anywhere that packed. From Riverside Drive, it’s also feasible to take the M5 bus to Columbus Circle to catch the downtown A, which will save some effort with the luggage. This is probably the best way to get to the AirTrain from that part of Manhattan.

At the Jamaica station, the subway platform is actually a bit of a walk to the AirTrain terminal. The LIRR will apparently be much closer, once station renovations are completed in 2005. You can see the LIRR platforms from the AirTrain platform.

There are plenty of MetroCard kiosks at the AirTrain platform. No need to wait in line at the subway platform’s MetroCard kiosks or token booth. AirTrain rides cost $5, and will take you directly to your terminal. The Terminal 6 stop for JetBlue actually puts you outside the terminal building: you have to take a short walk to get inside. Bear left instead of right. Note also that the JFK maps of AirTrain routes are a bit confusing. There are actually three AirTrain lines: an inner loop that just goes to the terminals (this train goes in the opposite direction, and arrives on the other side of the platform), and two outer lines with terminals at the two subway/train stations. JFK currently posts someone to stand on the platform to direct people to the right train.

On the return trip, we went to the AirTrain terminal for the A line. The terminal in this case is much better integrated with the subway, with the AirTrain platform directly above the subway one, and connected by escalator. Note that the JFK stop for the A is an outdoors platform and can be windy. At around 8:30AM, the ride to Columbus Circle took about an hour, and you can get a seat. Most people who get on the train in Queens and Brooklyn exit at Fulton Street.

There’s been a bit of hubbub about Pataki’s plan for a train connecting the Financial District with JFK, but this is all hubbub. The plan sounds like a waste of time: the A train already connects Downtown to JFK on a one-seat ride to the AirTrain. One can perhaps create a special line running on the Howard Beach tracks to run express to JFK — this would be a revival of the 1970s-era “Train to the Plane” — which would be cheaper and just as effective as a new tunnel. If they mean to create a one-seat ride form Downtown to the JFK terminals, then they have to extend the AirTrain to Manhattan, which sounds costly and stupid to me. The AirTrain track guage is the same as the subway one, but the AirTrain is basically an automated tram. Are they proposing an automated train running on the subway lines? Or a crew-operated train running the loop at JFK? And you would still need to schlepp luggage down to the AirTrain station. Better to revive the Train To the Plane than this.

The reason we went to JFK was to take JetBlue to Sacramento. Oh, the wonder of direct flights to Sacramento from New York that doesn’t cost $850 for a last minute ticket! JetBlue basically doesn’t change its fares because of a late purchase: some $20 specials may go away with the late purchase, but what’s $20 compared to a $500 price increase for, say, Continental? Especially when the latter didn’t have a direct flight at the time, necessitating a trip to SFO?

The JetBlue terminal was fairly nice, with free WiFi, though we couldn’t get that working from where we were sitting. Possibly, it’s because of a weak signal, or there were no IP addresses left for the DHCP server to hand out. Note that JetBlue doesn’t server much food on their flights. For this route, they served drinks, plus small snack packs: bring your own food. (Lack of food helps in a couple of ways: you’re not disappointed by the food served by the airline (Cheese Pockets?!); there’s no wasted space devoted to heating and storing food trays, giving more rows of seating/more legroom; there’s also the added benefit of not being blocked by the food service cart if you need to use the restrom — JetBlue has the flight attendants going up the aisle with relatively maneuverable trays). DirectTV has nice on the flight, but getting a bit monotonous since we’re used to Tivo, and there wasn’t anything good on those channels. Beyond that (though ticket cost is a big thing in itself), it’s basically an airline.

Here’s a Fool.com article on JetBlue’s cost structure. There’s a different piece I can’t find right now on how JetBlue strives to be less annoying than other airlines. The food and the DirectTV are two things that they do as part of this effort.

Note that the Sacramento airport doesn’t have JetBlue self-service kiosks: you have to stand in line to check in. It may be possible to print boarding passes for yourself off the JetBlue website if you don’t have baggage to check in, though, so this may not be a problem. We just didn’t check the JetBlue site beforehand for this option, under the assumption that there would be kiosks. On the other hand, the security screening at midnight at Sacramento didn’t take very long, so waiting in line for check in wasn’t a big deal.

Electronics are delicate. The Sony I bought a year and a half ago is starting to fritz out after being carried around in my bookbag for months and after being dropped a few times. Occassionally, the CCD doesn’t pick up anything and all I get is a blank image. A sharp rap on the side of the camera brings it back to life; this is never a good thing. Sony would charge $100 – $150 labor to repair it, and at that price it’s better to just get a new camera.

I don’t think I’m going to get a new snapshot camera, though. The question that has to be asked is, what’s the camera for? I tend to think of cameras as falling into one of two bins. Into one bin goes the digital SLRs (DSLRs) like the Nikon D70, exhaustively reviewed by DPReview.com and Imaging Resource. This is a “real” camera: you can directly and easily control most aspects of photography (shutter speed, ISO, f-stop, etc.) and use it to take more interesting photos, something approaching art. But a $1500 piece of electronics and optics is not meant for casually carrying around unless you’re doing photography seriously.

The other bin are the snapshot cameras that automatically manage aperture exposure, focus and so on. These are generally cheaper, lighter and smaller than the DSLRs and are made for taking ad hoc photos. Their main attributes are the smaller-lighter-cheaper qualities that make them easier to carry around, so that you’ll have a camera in hand when something unexpected and interesting happens. The pictures they take are in some sense largely ephemeral.

Attempting to bridge the middle is the many-megapixel “prosumer” snapshot cameras, such as the Nikon CoolPix. But these are less capable and more annoying than the DSLRs because the more interesting features are still hidden underneath a menu-driven interface. Also, the sensors aren’t as good as the DSLRs, even though they’re advertised as having more megapixels. The article, Beyond Megapixels, has a good explanation on why this is so. Basically, more megapixels just means that there’s more evidence that the snapshot camera has a poor lens. Because of this, for my purposes at least, these machines are still fundamentally snapshot cameras that are too expensive and big for their own good.

One problem with the snapshot cameras is that it’s another piece of electronics you carry around, in addition to phone, PDA, MP3 player, etc. Stand-alone devices are therefore somewhat inconvenient and add to clutter. Note that my Sony is ailing in part because it was an extra piece of electronics, and got banged around in the bottom of the bookbag because it was extraneous most of the time. With the goal of maximizing carry-ability, I think the ideal device would be a Swiss Army knife of early 21st Century portable electronics: a combination media player (audio, video), phone, PDA, camera, voice recorder, all with a hard drive (because you need a hard drive for the media player anyway). We’re not quite there yet. Maybe in a couple of years, Apple will release the iEverything.

The closest thing so far to my ideal is the Treo 600. It’s a nice second generation device, making for an excellent phone and PDA, and it has decent (solid state) MP3 player as well as some capabilities as a video player and video recorder. (This guy has a list of interesting software for his Treo.) In any case, the camera on the Treo is supposedly somewhat subpar. It’s basically VGA with a crappy fixed-focal-length lens; as noted, this is the first generation of SmartPhones with cameras, so we probably shouldn’t expected multi-megapixel devices with f-stop control. Here’s a document on taking better photos with the Treo camera, so perhaps all hope isn’t lost. VGA quality is generally sufficient for web content, though.

So, I’ll try to nurse the Sony along until it no longer works, while waiting on the Treo or its successor for my snapshot camera needs. Note that I’m probably going to buy a DSLR (say, after we sign a contract after the apartment sale) because it’ll be my hobby camera for Cleveland. I’ll probably get the Nikon instead of, say, the Canon. The Nikon has gotten better reviews (being a year more recent than the comparable Canon), and the main reason for going with Canon was to borrow lenses from friends. But since we’re leaving the city, this isn’t much of an issue.

Over the past few years, I’ve gotten sporatic mailings from a former employer, EarthWeb (now Dice.com, with the EarthWeb web sites now owned by an entirely different entity) concerning my 401(k) account. These came about once a year, at various points in the year, and didn’t follow a quarterly schedule. Apparently, they had lost my contact address, and was sending out mail to random addresses hoping for a hit.

Last week, I got an email from an HR person at Dice.com about my retirement account, basically saying that they didn’t have my address, and to please get back to them. She had found me through a Yahoo search after exhausting other means. I had been one of a dozen or so lost former employees who hadn’t sent Dice a forwarding address after moving.

So, I finally got my statements over the weekend and was surprised that there was more money in the account than I had vested when I left the company. This had all been in the heydey of the boom, and one reason I hadn’t made a real effort to get in touch with them was because I thought there’d be maybe $100 in the account after the bubble burst; anyway, I couldn’t really touch the money until retirement, so there wasn’t much urgency.

What happened was that these funds had been invested in whatever mutual funds I had chosen in 1997, but, at the end of 2000 when they couldn’t get in touch with me, it was all moved out of the mutual funds and put into a money market account, where it just sat accumulating interest. In the meantime, the market crashed, but my money was untouched. It was actually a good thing they had lost touch with me, because I might have put the money into, say, a NASDAQ index or something, if I had access to it. Instead, it’s actually up by about 30%.

I actually do have to move the money: there’s not enough money in the account for Dice.com to want to keep it around. The form to roll it into my current 401(k) is currently on its way, and the process should take about a week.

I had my first class as a 2nd kyu last night, and it was more or less like classes I’ve had for the past couple months, only with less stress and exertion: Itai will have his own nikkyu test in two months and he gets to be uke until then.

Everyone was pleased to see me and jokingly said that they hadn’t expected me to show up again. Monday’s test was hard. I was exhausted half way through it, with free fighting, multiples and the life knife in the second part of the test. It was a long test, about two hours, with me up a good portion of the time. Grace took the photos up on the left with the Sony; we didn’t have the good camera this time. There’s video, of course, which I have yet to see. I need to see it, since there are parts of the test I have no conscious memory of.

I was apparently nervous and tense enough to be rough on the kata and with the basic demonstrations with grabs and punches. Sensei came over during a break and suggested that I calm down. And breathe: deep breaths, not short hyperventilaty breaths. I think the test started to really fall apart for me during back grabs, with me failing to properly execute the basic popover, which lead to thinking about what I was doing wrong, which lead to more failed technique. The two-man attack — one in front, one grabbing from behind — didn’t work at all, since I wasn’t able to throw the behind attacker into the one in front, and got into wrestling matches with two ukes. I think I got a punch in the eye during this, with uke grabbing me by the lapel and rearing back a haymaker, then waiting for me to try to do something off the lapel grab before deciding that I had enough time; maybe more forceful physical contact would get me out of my paralysis.

After that, I was more or less out of breath for the rest of the test. I did some things well, I’m told, in particular the against-the-wall stuff, and the stick work. I think the wooden knife went relatively well, though, with the more free form segment of knife work, I got “stabbed” on the top of the head a few times. Other parts didn’t go very well, in particular the part where I was on the ground and defending against a stomp from uke.

As expected, the free fighting was totally draining; there wasn’t that much left in the tank by then anyway. Part way through, sensei said that if I could get one throw in against Sensei Coleman, I could sit down. I’m told I did a good throw though I don’t remember it very well. Then sensei reneged, and said again that if I could get in one more throw I could sit down. I don’t think I got that throw in. I got thrown a few times instead, and there was a strong desire just to lie there on the mat. So peaceful. I don’t remember that much more from the free fighting. I know I fought Itai — people tell me I did, and I remember Coleman sitting down and Itai getting up — but I don’t remember anything about that fight. Itai says I threw him around like a rag doll, and other people said it was one of the highlights of my test, but I don’t remember anything about it. Exhaustion had overcome short term memory formation. I have to see the tape to know what happened.

After resting a bit, we did multiples, and there were no disasters from that. I remember multiples a bit better than the free fighting. After that, we did basic techniques against the live knife. Despite having wobbly legs and being clonked a few times in the head, I’m told I was pretty good in that segment, though I remember being told to do a different technique, since I was in a repetitive mode at that point.

This nikkyu test was an endurance match. I’m told that I looked like I wanted to die at the end, and that afterwards I was very pale. The sankyu test is supposed to be harder, with nikkyu a bit easier and technique-y because it’s the same stuff as the sankyu test, and you know more. I think my tests were reversed: sankyu was relatively easy, nikkyu was damn hard, almost stereotypical for a sankyu test. I had broken my bokken during the kenjitsu class the Saturday morning before. Perhaps that was an omen of things to come.

The next day, there weren’t too many bruises, just the usual ones that appear on the forearms. I didn’t get a black eye, just some bruising near the bridge of the nose. My left thigh wasn’t working very well that day, though, after being repeatedly kneed during free fighting, but was fine the day after.

Anyway, it’s over. I can relax a bit after a couple months of heavy training.

Virginia Postrel had a piece in the NYT today about a recent study on consumer surplus from online commerce. The study focused on Amazon book sales of items below the 100,000 sales rank, i.e., the books that probably would not have been found in your run of the mill Barnes and Noble superstore or independent bookseller, and asked how much more people would have been willing to pay to obtain these books above what Amazon sold them at.

On average, consumers were willing to pay about 70% more on the purchase price for the ability to buy obscure titles. For example, a $20 book could have sold for $34 if the buyer couldn’t find it at the local bookseller. The main benefit of online retails like Amazon was initially believed to be price competition — online prices were 10-15% lower than offline prices on average — but the study found that the consumer surplus associated with greater variety and choice is perhaps ten times as great as the pricing benefit. “People were really happy to find obscure books, and would be willing to pay far more for them.”

This sort of consumer surplus isn’t well captured by the usual economic statistics, because there’s no direct measure of it. An economy with more choice is naturally a more vibrant economy, and Internet commerce is a component of this vibrancy. Similar things can be said for trade, as the variety of television models at Circuit City and the presence of Beard Papa down the street from me demonstrate.

Postrel also notes that the Internet’s variety of choice is also beneficial to small, obscure retailers, selling niche products. Such niche products would have difficulty finding their target arkets if they were confined to physical locations. BoingBoing.net’s recent coverage of ShitBegone notes that it’s an art project that somehow morphed into a commercial venture. This would be one of those niche markets Postrel talks about; postmodern toilet paper can only be commercially successful because of the Internet’s power to bring obscure products to consumers who would actually care enough to fork over hard cash. Similar products may be the iDuck, the miscellany over at ThinkGeek.com and the custom T-shirt printers CafePress. Before the Internet, you might be able to find these things in quirky stores in the corners of malls, East Village boutiques or tiny ads at the back of magazines. Now, anyone with a computer, a credit card and a sense of irony can pick up pomo TP. And the world is better for it.

We saw about a dozen different buildings and complexes over the weekend from a list mainly generated from Internet searches, and, at the end of the day, the apartment we found was in a building that wasn’t on our list. We had some time Monday morning, and more or less knocked on a leasing office door when we walked past a “luxury lofts available” banner.

The apartment is one of the smaller lofts in the Cloak Factory. Here’s the floor plan of the place. You can go to this page to get the clickable links so as to see the publicity shots of the place. The big living space is nice — exposed brick, hardwood floors — and the kitchen is pretty big. One of the neat things is the old freight elevator shaft to the right that can be used as an office. Note that the floor plan cuts off the entrance vestibule towards the bottom right. The rent is ridiculously cheap for that much space, at least from our point of view; Grace’s Brooklyn studio didn’t cost that much less.

The main drawback is that there’s no good view — the windows face out at another old warehouse or at the top deck of a parking garage (which will have construction going on during the day later this year, for about a year and a half). A smaller apartment in the adjacent building with a Lake and Browns Stadium view was only $100 less per month. But there is plenty of sunlight, since the adjacent buildings aren’t that tall, and there are a lot of windows. The aforementioned parking garage is also accessible to us without having to go outside. A spot is $75/month.

Interestingly, the guys who renovated this warehouse are supposed to have come from New York City and have built it with New York sensibilities in mind. Every other place we saw had horrible floorplans, where 1200-square-foot apartments lost large amounts of useable space to hallways, and where all the floors had icky wall-to-wall carpeting. The leasing agent at another building (who looked vaguely like Agent Smith from the Matrix) asked whether we were looking at “finished” or “unfinished” apartments after we mentioned we had seen the Cloak Factory and the Bradley Building. “Finished” apparently means plaster and carpet in Cleveland’s real estate lexicon.

Note that this wasn’t the largest available apartment we saw. The agent for the Cloak Factory first showed us a 3000+ square foot duplex with roof deck access in the Bradley (same management), with the main living space dominated by a floating staircase (the place looked somewhat like Petrovsky’s apartment from Sex and the City). The rent was around $2500. I think it was some sort of test, to see if we weren’t a couple of apartment tourists looking at places above our means. The rent figure he gave got a shrug from me, though. Ultimately, it was too much apartment: how would we keep it clean, and wouldn’t it feel empty even after we’re fully moved in? For the place we settled on, we’re still going to need to buy some furniture, if only to put a few chairs and a small table around the gas fireplace in the middle of the living room.

There’s, of course, a bunch of ancillary tasks, like setting up cable and Internet access (Adelphia), gas (CCF’s guide says Dominion East Ohio), electricity (The Illuminating Company?), telephone (probably Vonage if we can get away with it), and, of course, moving. We have a few callbacks for moving company quotes, so this should be taken care of in a few days.

The next main task, probably to be tackled after I get there later this summer, is to find a job. Careerboard.com is an Ohio-specific jobs board which I found through the Cleveland.com forum for young professionals. A quick look at the “IT – Administration” category shows this posting, which suspiciously like what I do now, especially with the “familiarity with” section. My Windows administration skills are a bit iffy, though. There’s also the usual suspects, such as Monster.com. Dice.com (where I still have some 401(k) money that needs to be transfered) doesn’t have a Cleveland listing.

Update: Apparently, one can use a keyword search on Dice for “Cleveland, OH” to get a listing outside the pre-defined Metro areas. There’s also ComputerWork.com.

At long last, the renovations are done, and we’ve combined apartments (just in time to sell before we relocate to Cleveland). The main delay was paperwork: months waiting for papers from the architect, getting approval and signatures from the management company and co-op board, getting the final stamps from the Department of Buildings. I’m sure various papers sat on people’s desks for weeks at a time before being passed on. I’m responsible for a couple of weeks here and there, in part by misinterpreting an instruction and also defering things over the holidays. Mainly, I didn’t push the architect hard enough to get things back to me. (When I was chatting with the management company agent about the paperwork for renovations a couple of weeks ago, he asked me who my expeditor was. Expeditor? You can pay someone to call the architect and Department of Buildings? The agent nodded.)

The actual demolition and construction took about eight workdays, with a few of the workdays used waiting for the plumber or electrician or the floor guy to come in a do his thing. The contractor was great, working quickly and neatly; there was little dust that got past the plastic walls they put up.

Here are some photos of the process. We still have to figure out where all the stuff should go in the combined space, since we no longer have walls against which to stack up boxes:

The washer/dryer (a Frigidaire) was delivered today. The electrician has to come in and set up a 240V outlet, and the plumber has to hook everything up, but this should be fairly minor stuff. Earlier in the day, we did our last loads in the buildings laundry room. In-apartment laundry is just a good thing to have.

Appropriately enough, Ohio has just been profiled on BlackTable.com in their “Six Things You Didn’t Know About” series, which has so far featured Texas and South Dakota.

The six things in this article are:

1. the non-accent newscaster’s accent is from the middle of the state
2. it’s where the Wright Brothers worked and has a big aviation museum
3. sneakers are thrown bola-like at overpass struts to mark out territory instead of at lamp posts like they do at 2nd Avenue and St. Marks Place
4. rock-n-roll has a great heritage in Ohio, in part because “there’s just not much else to do”
5. there are a lot of lawn decoration, including gnomes and flamingos
6. the Ohio and Michigan militias almost fought it out around 1836 for Toledo.

We’re actually flying there on Saturday to look at apartments. Most of them are in the Downtown Cleveland area, with a few in the eastern suburbs like Beachwood. The more interesting places are The Statler Arms, The Bingham (a forum discussion here), (pricier) Quay 55, where I will learn how to pronounce “quay”, and The Four Seasons in Beachwood. These are all “luxury” developments, with an in-suite washer/dryer, covered parking for some nominal fee, and a fitness center. I’m leaning towards having a fitness center on the premises, because Downtown gyms like FitWorks closes at 8PM and isn’t open on Sundays.

The things we have to look for in the neighborhood have to do with convenient services and amenities, like a nearby grocery, something like a Duane Reade, a bank, stuff like that. Commute time is also important, though we won’t get realistic times this weekend. The Downtown apartments should be 10-15 minutes away, and Beachwood is about 20-25 away. Covered parking will be important, mainly because of the snow and the early hour residents have to be at the hospital.

We still have to find an area guide book. Barnes & Noble is relatively scarce, with Borders being more convenient, mainly in the Cleveland Heights and Beachwood suburbs. We’ll need a laptop and wireless for our trip, and we’ll probably use the free CWRU wifi network to get access.

Update: A quick Avis calculation for my own move this summer, after Grace goes with the bulk of the furniture, shows that I can get a minivan (from LGA to CLE picking up on Friday morning and dropping off on Sunday morning) for about $250 + tax. An intermediate sized car would be about $200 + tax. Just some more stuff to file away for a few months from now.

This was a wonderful movie, in ways a Philip K. Dick story with heart and hope and mercy, and I can’t tell you how much I liked it. The basic plot is about two people, Joel and Clementine, who don’t quite fit in the world without each other. They’ve broken up and have or are having their memories of their relationship erased from conscious thought. Midway through his procedure, Joel changes his mind, and desperately tries to hold onto some memory of Clementine. Fleeing with a representation of her, he runs through the terrain of his memories as they’re being erased, looking for someplace safe to hide her. And, ultimately, there’s reconcilation and recognition of a past that’s been obliterated, and a chance for a future at the ends of the earth, or at least Montauk in the off-season.

Slate’s review (cited by the NY Times Arts section this weekend, along a number of points about the philosophical — existential, epistomological — background of the movie) notes that Eternal Sunshine follows a formula of mid-century Hollywood screwball comedies with a story of remarriage: the protagonist’s first union breaks, and over the course of the movie they find each other again. Although their partners are imperfect, they’re right for each other. The Alexander Pope quote is, of course, ironic, as neither Joel nor Clementine find happiness in forgetting. But it took this sci-fi process of forgetting to realize where they should be. Slate also had an interesting article on the implied neuroscience in Eternal Sunshine and contrasts it with Memento. The later film about memory erase treated memories as objective facts filed away by the brain and retrieved robotically as necessary. More recent neuroscience suggests that memories are as much about the emotion surrounding the memory as anything else — more intense moments are better remembered and shape the objective facts — and, while there may theoretically be a way to selectively erase memories (recall of memories involves rewriting them to the neurons with revised a emotional context, and the process of rewriting may be interrupted), it may be difficult to remove the emotional contexts in general. People who have done harm in the protagonist’s past, such as in Memento, would have left him uncomfortable, suspicious or ill at ease. The repeating scenarios in the movie would not have been possible.

Update, just to elaborate a bit on the epistomology. There are the obvious bits about distinguishing between what’s real and what’s happening inside Joel’s head, and also about objective facts (like the dent in his car) that Joel no longer knows about. The more interesting aspects have to do with what we know about Clementine. Except for the segments at the beginning and at the end, we never see her outside the memories and imagination of Joel. Everything we know about her is what Joel knows about her or imagines how she would react in a given — usually surreal and invented — situation. This image of Clementine is in some sense what Joel loves, and, fortunately for them, this image seems to conform to the real Clementine — her reaction to his gift, for example — and is not a pure fantasy.

Armed Liberal over at Winds of Change has a pointer to this opinion piece by Fred Siegel. The piece sounds like something derived from Terror and Liberalism, for example the paragraph on European support for Palestinian violence:

The key political vehicle for the new outbreak of anti-Semitism in Europe is support for the Palestinian position against Israel. As noted by Gabriel Schoenfeld in The Return of Anti-Semitism, there’s a twisted logic in the European and American left-wing hostility to Israel: The more terrorism committed by the Palestinians, the more sympathy they receive, because vicious attacks on Israeli citizens are taken as ex post facto proof of Israeli oppression.

The argument is that Western radical politics, which claims to be anti-racism and anti-imperialist even though its actions demonstrate nothing of that kind, is developing an alliance with radical Islam, even though many of radical Islam’s tenets are antithetical to traditional Western liberal notions of, say, gender equality. Anti-Americanism and anti-zionism are apparently more important things to be concerned about than, say, the status of women as envisioned by the Wahhabis.

Anyway, the more interesting thing is that this appeared on the web site of the Democratic Leadership Council. This gives me some hope that Bush hasn’t driven all the Democrats moonbat crazy, though we still need to see more substansive things from Kerry to make him credible in my eyes. We’re also going to skip over how the Democrats should view the war (there’s a war?) for now. One step at a time.