I did laundry yesterday for the first time in a couple of months. I was out of practice. I threw a capful of detergent in the drier, my brain spazzing on the idea of fabric softener, then had to wash them again.

That's a problem with spring: it's warmer and you smell worse, but I can't complain: by afternoon, it was pelting cold rain.

It isn't politics that makes us unhappy.

On the NYT home page:

Anger Over Senate's Failure on Immigration

The nation's millions of illegal immigrants and their employers have long sought some of the major provisions in the proposal that failed in the Senate last week.

Does the Senate exist to serve those who break the nation's laws? The obnoxiousness of the lawbreakers -- the employers more than the immigrants -- is revolting, at least to me. If the Senate disappointed them, it did a good thing.

I hear birdsong outside my window, and I loathe it. All I want is winter: it is a form of sympathy.

The Bush presidency is a sequel to Anna Karenina, with W. in the role of Levin. Alas, living right, according to those truths imbibed with mother's milk, is not, in every circumstance, adequate.

I'm amazed by the lack of humor in these posts!

The population of Mexico is slightly over a hundred million people. If there are eleven million illegal immigrants in the U.S., roughly half from Mexico, that means about 5% of Mexican citizens illegally reside of the United States.

Is this a national disgrace in Mexico? Mexico is better situated for development than most countries, not only geographically, right next to the world best consumer market, but with substantial oil revenues (invest them in education, perhaps?) and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Why can't it do better by its people? It is bigoted not to ask.

In particular, this is the "soft bigotry of low expectations". There is an assumption, in the humantarian aspect of the immigration debate, that there can be no greater aspiration for a Mexican than to perform menial labor in the United States. This is the American dream. Why shouldn't there be a Mexican dream?

Elizabeth Rubin writes, from Darfur:

Arab nomads park their camels in the livestock market at the edge of a neighborhood locally known as Falluja because of the violence there.

[...]

The women watched as their husband said, "Yes, this is me," and the armed men said, "You, imam, are the one asking God to give victory to the Tora Bora" — a nickname for antigovernment rebels — "so today is the last day for you."

Aside from the horror, I don't understand the references to sites of U.S. military operations. I assume they derive from satellite news coverage of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but do they indicate anti-Americanism, or anti-Westernism, among the Arab janjaweed? Rubin does mention:

There were huge anti-U.N. demonstrations in Khartoum last month, and Sudanese politicians played the colonialism card very heavily.

though the U.S. is fairly anti-U.N. itself, and as good a friend as Khartoum has in the world. Even more frightening would be if the janjaweed so themselves in the role of the U.S. troops, righteously destroying the rebels, their villages, etc. -- not impossible, given the focus of television coverage on civilian casualties.

Ridicule always contains inaccuracies, which is fatal, because it assumes complete superiority.

On the study finding intercessory prayer ineffective, the interesting result was the finding that those who knew they were being prayed for suffered significantly more complications. One thought, mentioned in the article, is that the information worried the patients, that they thought they must be in bad shape to be the subjects of prayers. Here's another: perhaps it encouraged the patients to think the results were out of their hands -- a thought that can be a comfort, but also a harm, as studies have shown that patients who take responsibility for their care do better. Perhaps both effects work together to significantly demoralize patients.

Indeed, perhaps what the other patients were told -- that they might be prayed for, or might not -- rather than being neutral, put them on alert!

Halfway through Claire Denis' J'ai pas sommeil, I thought, ignorantly, for her, beauty is strange, strangeness beauty. Then the vase turns out to contain a serial killer. Perhaps she intended the film as a corrective; it's been criticized as reactionary. I think it's a fine noir, with 1990's Paris convincingly portrayed as a city of dislocation, illusion, violence and beauty.

Follow your heart? Good advice for women, perhaps: when men follow their hearts, they become criminals.

Michael Walker composes a song synthetically, using Apple's GarageBand software. Nic Harcourt disses it, but, appallingly, it doesn't actually suck. In fact, it's much better than some of the synthpop hits of yore, such as Hot Butter's "Popcorn" (#9 in 1972). Walker's decision to modulate upward for the recap even gives it a bit of faux-Vangelis faux-transcendence. Hmmm, it is not possible to be too technologically-advanced or too cynical, is it?

Maybe God likes flowers, and he put humans on earth as fertilizer. Who knows?

David Cay Johnston writes:

advocates of eliminating taxes on investments say there is no cost to the government because lowering taxes on such income encourages more investment

Look, capitalism doesn't say capital is better then work, it says capital is equivalent to work. Cutting taxes on investments is no better for the economy, in principle, than cutting taxes on labor (i.e. payroll and income taxes). To suggest otherwise is a toadying, cargo cult of capitalism, not the real thing.

In practice? I think it's not as good: but that's complicated, and for another time.

The second shall be first: I think this is sound principle for successful revolutions. Consider the American Revolution, which replaced an English monarch with native aristocrats. Or the failure in Iraq. Peter W. Galbraith writes:

Within a few days of his arrival, Bremer dissolved Iraq's military forces, barred the top four levels of the Baath Party from public service, and told the Iraqi leaders that there would be no handover of power. Packer quotes Garner as saying he woke up the morning of May 17 to find "three or four hundred thousand enemies and no Iraqi face on the government."

The Republicans have a secret plan to make us all millionaires: run up the debt, then destroy the currency. Invest in Brazil: they're the new Americans, PNAC take note.

It's the Heidi Julavits vs. Seth Stevenson Baja vacation smackdown!

Stevenson:

On arrival in Todos Santos, I see instantly that over-tourist-i-zation is just a matter of time here, too. The town is completely gringo-fied. There are the tacky, tequila-pounding gringos in jean shorts and mustaches. There are the bourgeois, NPR gringos in khaki pants that seem entirely constructed of pockets. Perhaps worst of all, there are the gringos who look remarkably like … me. This greatly reduces my sense of superiority.

Julavits:

And so, when we were invited to join two other families on a vacation to Todos Santos on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico, we eagerly hitched along. We'd been to Todos twice before with these same friends, but had since collectively amassed three kids, ages 2 and under. What better place, we reasoned, for preconscious children than a town where the coastline is so dangerous and unswimmable that one stretch is referred to locally as Killer Beach? This would be the perfect spot to spend two weeks pretending to relax as our toddlers charged heedlessly and relentlessly toward the 25-foot surf while we — not giving up, mind you — constantly looked after them.

Roger Cohen writes:

In Baghdad today, as the concrete blast walls multiply, control seems almost unimaginable. Since 2003, three museum employees — an archaeologist, an accountant and a driver — have been killed.

Prioritized by status, in death as in life. It reminds me of the opening of Ironweed:

Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of a rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.

I caught (embarassed, I wish to emphasize the lack of intention) an A&E documentary on Pamela Smart, the New Hampshire teacher who conspired with her teenage student/lover to murder her husband. The student's testimony at trial was filmed, and it is an extraordinary lesson on how a person with a conscience can murder in cold blood. I mean the act itself, the carrying-out. The decision of purpose is more complex.

What did he do? He cocked the gun, he pointed it at Gregory Smart, then he pulled the trigger. OK? But each act was atomized, and the whole volition was devoted to the small physical action required, not its import, the murder. He could have said, simply and accurately, that he shot him in the head, but he never did, and his brain clearly never issued that order, complex and morally-implicated, to his hand. Instead, it was one small gesture, followed by another.

Tom DeLay is a man whose ambition appeared to be, not power, but the perfection of cynicism. Here's to the past tense.

I saw a C-5 Galaxy fly overhead while visiting relatives in Delaware last November. I couldn't believe it hung in the air, more a feat of sheer engine power than aerodynamics, like a paper airplane made out of brick. Of course, that's what it's designed for: hauling. I don't know how accurate my intuition of flying machines may be, but I doubt there's much ability to recover from mechanical failure. One crashed yesterday. Everyone survived: congratulations to the crew.

Jonathan Rauch has a superb article on polygamy, and the related problem of Asian "bare branches", as well as its relation to the same-sex marriage debate. Summary: a large population of unmarriageable men is destabilizing; married homosexuals are not.

I disagree with Mickey Kaus who says a recent Time Magazine poll on immigration reflects biased wording. The bias occurs in divorcing the question of illegal immigrants already here from the problem of future illegal immigration. This is the cleverest trick in the pro-illegal immigrant arsenal. Time should try asking the question this way:

Do you favor a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the country, if a) effective controls are put in place to prevent future illegal immigration; b) effective controls are not put in place. Unlike Kaus, a majority for a) wouldn't surprise me.

The Kennedy/McCain approach claims to be a), but, like Simpson-Mazzoli (1986) before it, it will fail to prevent future illegal immigration and end up as nothing more than an amnesty. Why? Because, in the absence of effective verification for employment eligibility, people will find a way in -- even if you built the two thousand mile fence, they would overstay Visas etc. Beefed up border patrol is a great way to spend money -- paying off constituents with border patrol jobs and contracts -- while failing to stop the flow of illegal immigrants (paying off a whole other set of constituents: corrupt businesses who want illegal labor).

Note to leftists: who pays the price for the approach you favor? Brown people! They die crossing the border against reinforced security, and the other brown people -- American citizens, who are disproportionately low-skilled -- have to compete with them for jobs in a vastly-expanded labor pool. Wouldn't it be better for Mexico to invest in education, so that's its most ambitious young people don't aspire to menial jobs in the U.S., and for the U.S. to wait until low-skill wages begin a substantial rise before deciding we "need" to import millions of workers? This is starting to look like an unholy alliance between the elites of Mexico and those of the U.S. -- hey, maybe it is! They get rid of exactly those who might demand change, and we get cheap nannies and gardeners.

Wolf Blitzer is a prick. When one 9/11 family member tells him she's opposed to the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, he interviews another who's for. OK, so there's disagreement. This might be news! Then he goes to a reporter, of whom he asks, the overwhelming majority are in favor of the death penalty, right, right? The reporter initially says, actually, it's mixed, then realizing she has sinned against the conventional wisdom, reassures Wolf that, yes, it's a consensus for death.

It would be an offense against 9/11 families to debate the correctness of the death penalty... even if the families themselves are debating it.