Government obligations

We talk a lot about rights, needless to say. If we begin our training as debaters with basic philosophy, we learn pretty quickly what we mean by that. My favored validation of individual rights is that it is advantageous for humans to accept that there are fundamental rights inherent in humanity, and to act accordingly, and disadvantageous not to accept their existence and act accordingly. That is, I don’t have to base my possession of inherent human rights on some complex philosophical or theological premise, but simply on the idea that having these rights is more beneficial than not having them, so whether or not they are inherent, they are nonetheless a good thing. So, let’s presume their existence, because we’re better off with them than without them, at which point, it doesn’t really matter where they came from.

We are nothing as philosophers if we are not practical. After all, mostly what we are interested in is ethics, the practical application of morality, i.e., doing the best we can. Balancing angels on the head of a pin is for other scholars altogether.

Basic human rights are fairly few. We have the right to be alive, which means that our existence is self-warranted and therefore cannot be abridged by others. We have the right to do what we want to do, provided that we do not harm others or somehow interfere with their right to do what they want to do while they are not harming us. And we have the right to our stuff, the legitimate ownership of possessions and the benefit of the fruits of our labors.

As far as basic human rights are concerned, I wouldn’t want to go much further than these fundamentals of life, liberty and property because, already, they raise questions of the protection of these rights. Ownership of property and the fruits of our labors is hardly as simple as it sounds, for instance. There are varying cultural definitions of property that undermine to some extent the apparent universality of property rights, for instance. As for conflicting claims of liberty, when what I want to do comes in conflict with what you want to do, we can imagine problems here almost from the point when any two people happen to come in contact, ever. And one can always ask the simple question, does a murderer cede his or her claim to life by abridging someone else’s claim of life?

You can see that as soon as we have populations of people, rather than just one person hanging around in some metaphoric Garden of Eden, we have various rights claims that need to be adjudicated, and rights that need to be protected. To handle this business, we create governments and empower them to do that job. We establish law and order and processes of law and order, and to maintain them and make them viable, we have to give up a little something. If nothing else, we have to give up a little property, because governments cost money to run. We could go a lot further in explaining how rights are abridged for their own protection, but my point here is something else altogether.

Here’s what bothers me, and it bothers me a lot. We have a lot of systematic philosophical thinking on rights and their protection and the establishment of governments, and we can draw on that thinking pretty easily. That is certainly what Thomas Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, when he paraphrased John Locke. (If you’re reading this in Texas, Jefferson was a President of the United States and the chief author of the Declaration, but unfortunately for you, he is in your no-fly or, I guess, no-think zone. Sorry about that.) (If you’re not in Texas, I’m not referring to any characters in “Lost” when I mention John Locke. Sorry about that, too.) We can argue handily about natural rights at a lofty, philosophical level, if we are so inclined. But government, especially government in the year 2010, is way more complicated than merely rights protection. We’ve got people literally marching in the streets complaining that government is going to hell in a tea bag, and that somehow it needs to be minimized because it just does too damned much. I’m hardly a deep commentator on the whole Tea Party movement, but it is clearly composed of a lot of complaints about the way things are in the present day, positing much of the blame on the government. Absent any political aspects of this—that in reality this is often one party trying to undermine another party, or in many cases racially motivated—it does play on fears and frustrations that real people really have. These real people aren’t at your local debate tournament, so for just one weekend, instead of hanging out in a high school cafeteria on a Saturday afternoon, hang out at the mall. Take a peep out of the cocoon for a moment. See what’s out there.

What we don’t have, unfortunately, is a handy, readily available theory of government that goes beyond basic rights protection. And this is a problem, because in reality, government does go beyond basic rights protection—way beyond—and we don’t have an acceptable, accepted ethical shorthand for discussing it. We have no ethical road map for how far governments can justifiably go beyond rights protection. We tend to have mostly opinions rather than metrics.

Let’s look at one example of government obligation beyond the protection of rights: roads. Literal roads. Individuals do not build roads, but roads are a requirement of our society. If all the roads in the US were immediately shut down and removed, we could not function. Goods could not travel very far, and if we did not have access to our own family farm, we’d be in serious trouble. (One could look at the history of roads in the US, and find that, with the invention of the car, roads became very much within the purview of government, because at the point where you need paving, a horse galloping across the fields or on a trodden path doesn’t work anymore. Additionally, in the 1950s, Eisenhower embarked on a system of interstate highways, transcending even local governments’ road-building in aid of a national system, reflective of the ubiquitous ownership of automobiles after WWII).

Roads are an example of government doing what individuals cannot do. Because individuals cannot do these things, and because they are required by society, we obligate government to do them. That is my basic premise for understanding extended government obligations. And the things that are necessary but beyond the scope of individuals are not limited to roads. International protection is another obvious job the government does that I cannot do alone. I look to the government to set up the parameters of discourse with other governments, up to and including the conduct of war. I may have opinions on the subject of whom we should fight, just as I have opinions on the subject of where a road should lead, and in a free government I have avenues for expressing those opinions, but ultimately it is the job of the government that I support, and which I am inherently a part of as a citizen, to conduct that business.

The question that is raised is the determination of the limits of what government should do that individuals can’t do. Additionally, one must consider in the mix what can be done neither by lone individuals nor the government but by non-governmental groups of individuals, be they corporate or otherwise. That is, there are jobs that religions do, for instance, that we believe are outside the scope of government (or that most of us believe should be outside the scope of government, but now we’re back in Texas where there is no separation of church and state because Jefferson, by not existing, never raised that pesky issue). There are jobs that corporations should do that we consider to be outside the scope of government. But the question is, which of these jobs are which? How do you argue that providing health care, for instance, is a government job? Or providing broadband? Or welfare? Or anything, even roads?

What you probably need to do is view the issue, first, from the perspective of what only the government can do, and assume that because only government is capable of it, government is obligated to do it, if we agree that it is an important enough benefit to society. Keep in mind that all government works have a cost, so if we consider that the government engage in a particular chore, we have to be willing to pay for it, which means that we need a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to do it. Still, this is the easiest sort of obligation to fulfill, because there are no competing claims on filling it. If only government can realistically take it on, if we decide we need it, the government is obligated to get it. Our roads are a good example of this. Costs of roads are not insignificant, and in some odd vision perhaps some corporation could be created to provide them, but when all is said and done, it is worth it to pay for them and reasonable that the government be the agency to build them. Not a hard call.

Education is an interesting example. Our government has taken on the obligation of educating the young. We tend to make this an obligation of local governments rather than the vaster national government, but that’s an insignificant distinction. We are obligating our governments to do this. Why? I mean, there are plenty of people who believe in home-schooling. There are people who prefer religious-based instruction in at least primary education and often secondary education. Because we believe strongly in government-supported education, we allow for those not availing themselves of this education to get at least a share of it by also supporting home schools and parochial education, at least to some extent. And on top of this, we draw the line at providing college education to all as part of the basic education package, but still we provide state institutions underwritten by the government to compete with private institutions, and we provide government-underwritten loans. The thing seems to be, we value education enough to warrant obligating the government to provide it because, for the most part, if government doesn’t provide it, it will not be fairly accessible to all. If the government stopped providing public education, a lot of people would still be educated, but not all, and we consider this wrong.

From the education example we can begin to draw an idea of what government ought to do beyond the absolute essentials. Or, if you will, to draw an idea of what the absolute essentials are. One big thing seems to be not that only government can do it, but that only government can do it fairly. If it were not done, a lot of individuals would suffer harm as a result.

How about housing? Housing is obviously essential to our lives. Does the government have an obligation to provide us all with some sort of housing?

The difference between housing and education seems to be that, with the latter, the government provides an open door through which citizens can avail themselves of the service of education, whereas with housing, we would actually have to provide some sort of literal, physical object, a house or an apartment. What, exactly, would comprise a fair house for a family of five? Tough one. So while we believe, in a humanitarian sense, that people need a roof over their heads, we don’t literally set a claim that the government will give them one. Instead, we provide general funds through which people who are homeless can find some sort of shelter. We subsidize them, in other words. If you lose your job you get unemployment insurance, at some point you can get food stamps and things like that. We don’t get you an apartment, but we help you to pay your rent. Not much, though. You might end up moving in with family or something. You might lose everything. We grieve for you, but we don’t solve the problem for you in any specific way.

So what is the underlying reason we support education and not housing, the reason we have decided that education is a government obligation and that housing is a personal obligation, aside from the specificity of the property involved? I would suggest that we connect housing to something beyond and aside from the government. Our homes are a reflection of our lives as a whole, our income and spending, our jobs, our position in society. Housing is, to a great extent, tied into the capitalistic system of working for profit and taking a share of that profit to support ourselves. That’s what people do with jobs, and jobs are considered the fabric of the corporate capitalist system. To be a member in good standing in this system, you work. (Those who have lost their jobs in the recent recession talk a lot about the anomie that results from losing their positions in society.) If you don’t work, you are not a member in good standing, unless you are actively job hunting and therefore presumed to be simply on hiatus, a member in good standing in absentia. So if you don’t have housing because you don’t work, your position as a non-member of society in good standing deprives you of any potential entitlement to housing. Why should the government provide you with what you should be providing for yourself? This could also be tied into the idea that providing housing is in conflict with property rights. Government protects the property you have, but it doesn't get you property. Maybe housing cuts too close to the core of individual rights?

Mostly I think the difference between housing and education does, in fact, seem to point to a difference of fairness. While it would be unfair not to provide education to all, we do not perceive it as unfair not to provide housing to all, because while the former would be impossible for many to obtain, the latter, housing, would not be impossible if people just got a job and worked. Maybe, also, the numbers would be smaller. Not providing housing to all affects a small number, whereas not providing education to all would affect a vast number.

Because it is so difficult to establish meaningful parameters, we argue endlessly about what the government should do just about everywhere. Libertarians want the least amount of government possible, leaving life to one’s own devices. Socialists want the most amount of government, creating a system of the most achievable fairness. Most of us are somewhere in between. If we could only devise a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, we would have a reasonable blueprint for action, and a reasonable guide to when those actions are obligated.

And that is how I would address a resolution calling for the government to take on the burden of any action above and beyond protecting basic human rights. That is, I would, in my case, set up a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, compared of course to the results of not taking those actions, and I would use those results as the tool for mandating or not government actions. Yes, it is absolutely consequential, but one can reasonably argue that virtually all government actions must be weighed consequentially, since they exist in the real world and not merely in philosophical papers. More to the point, the government “must” inherently do only a handful of things that are intuitively obligated, or if you prefer, deontologically obligated, at least by the definitions of government we use in basic political science. But as I say, all government actions are, by definition, real world, and therefore subject to real world analysis. They must satisfactorily meet the criteria of desirability and achievability according to a real world test (there can be no absolutes in politics, only presumptions based on reasonable data).

This is not relevant to CatNats and "soil rights,", but mark my words: these resolutions will come. If not in LD, then every time you turn around in PF. Unfortunately, people in PF rounds often don’t provide the underlying thesis analogous to LD’s V/C, giving judges little to go on. (See my PF notes, elsewhere.) If at the very least you can begin with a political model of some sort, and then measure how action plays out in that model, you’ll give me something I can follow and understand and, as a judge, measure. It’s worth a try. But the bottom line is, when you venture out of protecting basic human rights, you venture alone, without the body of literature to support you, that is, without an accepted ethical framework forged over centuries. You are forced to provide your own ethical framework, your own rationale why this must be done, not because it's good but because it's obligated. Plenty of things are good, but that doesn't make them government obligations. Constructing and deconstructing government obligations is a big job. But as government gets bigger and bigger, somebody's got to do it. Often, that somebody is us.

Have fun.

All right, it's April 1

I have no spoofs in aid of this particular holiday, no remarkably witty tricks to pull, no memorable burlesques that you will be talking about for generations to come. I will leave that to others with more wit and imagination than I.

To make up for this sad lack of creativity, I have dug up my old O'C interview. Newer members of the VCA may never have heard this, while older members who recall it fondly will have a chance to relive it. Older members who cursed it to hell and back and wished never to be reminded of its existence, on the other hand, will just have to look elsewhere for the April First entertainments.

Jim Menick (sort of) interviews O'C: the mp3.

Obama wins the Kenyan vote!

You’ve got to love CatNats. “Resolved: That the United States government has a moral obligation to afford the same constitutional rights to all people on United States soil.” What they’re trying to say is that constitutional rights protections should (or should not) apply equally to citizens and non-citizens, but they’re so afraid of people going off-rez that they’ve provided a bizarro “all people on United States soil” concept to replace non-citizens that, well, just makes you love the English language. Realistically, though, it’s not the world’s worst topic, I don’t think, although personally I find it pretty one-sided.

A while ago we had a similar topic, and often debaters took this as license to argue that the right to vote should somehow be granted to non-citizens. This was, and remains, ridiculous. Simply enough, no polity exists of people who are not members of the polity, by definition. Only judges who left their brains at the door of the room could be convinced otherwise, but, of course, there were such judges. (I tended to use this as a litmus test of tabula rasa, myself. If your slate was wiped that clean, you were just too dumb for the room.)

If you don’t buy that (hmmm, that’s some clean slate there, pal), let’s look at that wording in the rez: “the same constitutional rights.” Now let’s look at the right to vote in the Constitution.

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof.” “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.”

Maybe I’m missing something here, but every single iteration of the right to vote requires that a person be a citizen (although more loosely in the Senate requirement, where one must be one of the “people thereof” that state, which is tantamount to the same thing). That is, the power of the vote goes to citizens much like the power of being Commander-in-Chief goes to the President. One can’t simply claim this power willy nilly. I can’t say that since the Constitution grants someone the right of being CIC, everyone should have that right. To wit, you would have to amend the constitution to apply the right to vote to non-citizens, which means that clearly that right is not a "constitutional right" at the moment, which is what the rez is talking about.

However, the word “citizen” does not appear at all in the Bill of Rights. Duh.

The legitimate arguing of this resolution will be about whether the enumerated rights in the Constitution, i.e., the Bill of Rights, ought to be applied to all. (And, yeah, it’s on our soil, so the US can’t grant rights to people in Ulan Bator. Duh again.) There are plenty of people who feel that the answer is no. Non-citizen immigrants, suspected terrorists and felons are all among those whose rights are moot. Unfortunately, they’re a disparate bunch, and it’s hard to unify them in an argument. The illegal working at WalMart should be a different case than Osama bin-Laden who should be a different case than some drug dealer who was just released from prison. Normally I would look for the unifying factor to find debate material, but aside from their all being on the questionable side of rights allowances, there really isn’t one. So, good luck with that. Still, however, one or the other of these will allow for the best debates. I haven’t thought it through myself to know which ones, but illegals seem intuitively the ones worth arguing about on both sides of the rez.

We’ll see. I’m meeting with the Sailors Tuesday. I’ll be interested to hear their take on this, since two of them are heading to the CatNats Conflagration.

People you never want to hear from again

Boy: you guys are a tough audience. All right. Let's move away from debate. The object of this one is to determine which person you want to never hear from again the most. In other words, you vote for the person you like least in each pairing, the one you most want to disappear from the face of the earth.

The year in debate - a mini-bracket

The top half seems a lot tougher than the bottom half, but what do I know? Granted it's a little Northeast-centric, but that's only to annoy Bietz.

The "rude" tag seems especially appropriate for this one.

Bracket for a Sunday morning

When you're tired of the Times crossword puzzle (which shouldn't take longer than half an hour on an off day), try this bracket on websites.

This had to be pretty obvious

Dickens over Wells because real literature trumps science fiction. King over Paterson because he writes his own books.

And in Dickens vs. King? Duh.

Complexity rules

Curiously enough, everyone advances for roughly the same reason: complexity.

Wells over Doyle for defining sf vs defining one aspect of a genre.

Dickens over Austen for writing about the whole world vs one small aspect of the world.

King over Connelly for writing all kinds of books vs writing crime fiction.

Patterson over Sparks for variety vs love stories (and, to boot, no Miley Cyrus films).

BTW, it has been suggested by the Panivore that there be an N1 bracket. Why should I do this? The vast Nostrumian Nation should be assembling that one. It would give her something to do on her way to "Grease." No, wait. Grease was last weekend. This weekend it's Greece. I always get those two confused.

Last night I looked at NatNats registration. This is more fun.

Doyle advances over Poe because he created a character that is as alive today as ever. Poe had more ideas, but ultimately Sherlock is eternal.

Wells over Verne for a better sf imagination. Time travel, space travel, deep earth travel, etc., versus trains and boats around the world and a submarine, all practical enough in their day.

Austen over Eliot for the sense of humor.

Dickens over Thackeray for depth of canon. Thackeray is good, but, ultimately, Dickens is better. That's just the way it is.

King over Steele for having further pervaded all aspects of American culture, and personal variety.

Connelly over Crais for purity.

Sparks over Roberts for (wait for it) sincerity.

Patterson over Brown for having more than one or two ideas.

Needless to say...

...I am incredibly involved in March Madness.

Yeah. Right.

On the other hand, I do always like brackets. It's been a while. This one is sort of interesting: something I came up with in the DJ. It's not as easy as it looks.

Thank God they don't do Declamation!

Last weekend was our District tournament, where I got to do my annual visit to the world of the Speecho-Americans. It was actually quite enjoyable.

First up was a USX round, on foreign policy. Straightforward enough. A couple of folks bunched at the top, how will US do in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Texastan and whatnot. People either knew what they were talking about or they didn’t. Then it was FX, an African section. Oy. “Will things in X get even worse?” was the topic 6 times in a row. The answer was always yes, because the government is corrupt, the government is getting more corrupt, and no one outside of the country cares. That’s three areas of analysis, with the extemp two-step for each one, plus the summary. Tough to do well, actually, because you would have to have actual insight and evidence about this vague continent that we, as Americans, like to pretend doesn’t exist. I applaud those who did well (since they were double-entered, as often as not it was the same ones who did well in USX). I remain a fan of extemp, although when it comes to ultimately separating out the top performers I don’t necessarily trust myself. It’s a long time between Number 1 and Number 6 if those two are the ones battling it out. Maybe CP can explain how to judge this to me.

Saturday, since Sailors were all over the LD map, I was seconded to OO finals. Normally this would have had me slashing my wrists, but it was pretty good. I was happy to see that my first choice won at the end of the day. My criteria for judging were a combination of performance and content, which for some reason seemed an easier call than whatever criteria I was using for Extemp. Go figure. I guess there should also be a phogna bologna criterion: the more you sound like the sort of person who makes me want to go slash my wrists rather than listen to you (the down side of OO), the lower I rank you. If your sincerity act isn’t working, in other words, you’re screwed.

After that it was on to Duo finals. Saw one guy who blew me away with a partner who was pretty good; no one else came close to this guy. But that didn’t necessarily add up to a winning pairing (although, in the event, I ultimately felt that it did). Let me tell you, LD judging by comparison to speech judging is about as much fun as having a hundred Hottentots banging on your head with frying pans during a hurricane. LDers have so lost the art of speaking as anything other than shoveling in a lot of evidence that I am, momentarily, brought back to the good old days of bemoaning that loss. I hadn’t thought about it for a while, to tell you the truth. (Shades of the Legion of Doom!) And I don’t think that LD loses value as it reaches Policy speed any more than I think Policy lacks value because of its speed, but of course, that value has almost nothing to do with public speaking aside from the act of literally doing it (having the courage to stand up and speak, that is).

The day wrapped up with a round of PF. It was an unclear debate, with lots of hassling over one piece of evidence, and in some ways an example of experienced debating versus intuitive debating. Experience knows enough to cover everything while intuition points you to that one thing that you think you’re obviously winning. The flaw in that intuitive approach is that putting all your eggs in one basket is a cliché indicating potential problems for a reason. Unless your basket is made of cement or something. Anyhow, Mother Ruff and I split on this one, and she demonstrated what I consider the bottom line requirement for any judge: she stuck to her decision and felt that she was right, period. Not that I thought she was wrong. It was a round that could have been evaluated either way, which is too bad when it comes to sending people to Kansas City. (Or really good, depending on your position about sending people to Kansas City.)

At the end of the day, speaking of KC, we will be sending the Panivore. She says she can’t wait to sample all the different kinds of barbecue, not to mention the—Wait a minute! That’s not the Panivore. Wait till she tastes what they call bagels in the Midwest. I’ve got a feeling she’s not going to want to go to Kansas anymore.

I the Jury

I am mildly disappointed at not having to go to NYC for jury duty. On the positive side, I don’t have to go down to NYC for jury duty, but on the negative side, I sort of enjoyed my previous jury stints. For a couple of weeks way back in the 70s I did two weeks of Manhattan civil court. This was back in the day when you went there and hung out. For two weeks a bunch of us played cards every day; I was never once called even to interview. At one point one of our group led us to his favorite Chinese restaurant and we had a great lunch. It turned out even greater when the guy turned out to be the owner! There is such a thing as a free lunch after all.

Those two weeks, by the way, made me an expert on civil law.

Then I spent a month or two on grand jury duty in White Plains. We’d show up a couple of days a week and, yes, as a result I became an expert on grand juries. The range of cases was large, but there was nothing really horrible: no murders or deaths, but there was one serious beating. Lots of DUIs. A little general mayhem, including the guy who was running down the street naked when he was arrested, and his explanation was that he had lost his clothes in a craps game. He was one of the high points of the experience, because he testified on his own behalf (against counsel). A word of advice: don’t do what your lawyer tells you not to do. And also, don’t bet your clothes on a roll of the dice.

I figured that this time out I would become an expert on criminal law. I also figured I would put what I have learned about nullification into practice, but alas, neither was to be. I do feel that I have served, however. Going by a Kantian interpretation of intention, coupled with the finagling I did at the DJ to make myself available to this great country of ours, plus the two telephone calls to a different area code, this looks pretty convincing to me. I should, by my lights, be off for the next four years.

I’m sure criminals, both state and federal, are in complete agreement with this interpretation.

We weigh in on the controversy

You may have been following the hoo-ha over Pffft topics. Jonathan P came out with a long piece about it, and the Wunn and Only replied on the part of the NFL. The issue is whether NFL "sold" topics, and whether this is wrong.

I don't know. I mean, given some of the crappy topics over the years (the discussion of better ways of choosing topics has been ongoing, including on TVFT), I probably would pay to make them better, but I don't think that's the issue. If the topic is, say, "How much better is Pepsi than Coke?" then we are probably in trouble, but if it's some vague newsy thing anyhow, I'm fairly agnostic. The NFL obviously needs to support itself beyond the dues I pay for nothing other than possible admission into a tournament I cannot attend. I realize that. Non-profits are not morally bound to be unprofitable, but merely to support their cause. Nobody I know complains about President Ersatz Lincoln goofing around at NatNats year after year. (If it were the Gieco gecko, though, things might be different.)

Anyhow, I'll just speak for myself. I, personally, could use an extra $150,000. Therefore, I will publicly announce that, if you're willing to give me money, I will write blog entries on whatever subject you want. I'll have Jules and the Mite write the subject into Nostrum. I'll talk about it with the other wieners on TVFT. For an extra $150,000, I'll advocate a position recommended by you. So, let's say you're Texas. For $150,000, I'll write up a piece on whether Thomas Jefferson should be considered a founder of the USA. For another $150,000, I'll write up a piece called "Thomas Who?" and point out what a %#*&@ bastid he was and explain why lips that speak his name should be ripped from their faces.

So now you know why I do all this. I'm only in it for the money.

If only there were some money in it.

5ive: isn't that pronounced five-ive? Weird.

Jackie, Tito and Jermaine have now officially added Marlon, but we still need the occasional Michael. (Translation: CP is now sort of the fourth TVFT panelist, whenever he isn’t doing DJ stuff, but we’re still happy to take on other people now and again.) Having a fourth person allows us to have someone take a day off for whatever reason but still the show will go on, although whether this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen. CP is certainly on our side of the forensics fence, running as many tournaments as he does, plus he brings us a Speecho-American perspective we are otherwise lacking. It should work out well. On the down side, CP was our only certified listener, which means that now, for all we know, no one at all is listening. [Sigh.] (And yes, I had to look up the names of the Jackson 5. Give me a break, please. If I knew the names of the Jackson 5, I would have retire to Tibet to live on a mountaintop and get all this crap out of my head. I’m bad enough as it is! The Jackson 5? Feh!)

Scarsdale HS has finally reopened, for those who are keeping score. JV is happy about it, of course, since the alternative was to hold Districts in his apartment. I’m not looking forward to it myself, mainly because the whether is so gorgeous that who wants to be cooped up judging an Extemp round when they could be outside just being warm and sunned on? I’ve got to figure out some way to play on Sunday. I’ve got to check if the golf courses are open! For that matter, just sitting on the porch relaxing in the warmth, reading a book, occasionally being bitten by Tik (pronounced teek)—there’s worse ways to spend an ordinary Sunday.

Scarsdale Relief Fund: Contribute Now!

Scarsdale HS is the site of our District tournament this Friday. It’s also the site of the only totally shut-down school district in the region, thanks to the storms over the last weekend. Rather than taking their buses to school, district students have been seen on the decks of their family yachts, sailing down Main Street and sipping champagne cocktails wondering when the world will return to normal. “This sort of weather behavior is simply not acceptable,” one irate parent was quoted on the news last night. “We are not poor people in the third world. We will not stand for it!” You can’t help but sympathize with them. I’m running a clothes drive if you want to help out. Send me your old tidy whites or whatever, and I’ll bring ‘em with me Friday to clothe the unfortunate wet Scarswegians. It’s the least we can do.

Other than that, things are pretty steady as they go. Managed to put out a double dose of Nostrum this week. Thank goodness Jules and the Mite work ahead. I felt the doubling sort of made up for the lack of narrative last week. For some reason, I heard from O’C who seems to think that somehow the character of Halefoil Cumcut is based on him. This is ridiculous. Jules and the Mite insist that, while Nostrum is based on a true story, none of it is based on any of O’C’s true story, but if it were, he would more likely be mysterious samurai sword murderer than anyone else. And he’d be serving a life sentence in prison for it. “O’C Behind Bars” — It’s the Prison Movie You’ve Always Dreamed Of. In Disney 3D! Special Guest Star: Cinderella. (You know, Jules and the Mite should take note of that. I hate to do their work for them, but inspiration is inspiration, eh?)

Having nothing to say, I won't bother saying it

Instead of wasting time here, go to Nostrum Nation and waste time there.

Feel the ooze!

I wish there was all sorts of juicy stuff to report from the Bobcat at Byram Hills, but I went, I tabbed, I left, and there you are. I played with a website for the WDW trip during the down time (and drove O’C crazy by doing so), but that was the extent of the extracurriculars. Oh, yeah, there was also another Storm of a Lifetime, but that was mostly down-county, and while I gather that Scarswegia is now under twenty feet of water, I was able to drive home unassailed, picking up lamb chops at the local market and enjoying them back at the chez in a timely manner. Then I watched an episode of ST:TNG and collapsed into bed to await the coming of DST. How exciting, eh?

I manged to get postponed off jury duty till next week through no efforts of my own, which means I’ll be able to do a fairly full stint at Districts, oh joy, oh rapture. That means judging 2 LD rounds, 2 PF rounds, 1 extemp round and one random round of God knows what, which will wind up the month of March handily enough. After that, a couple of weeks off in this hiatus before the hiatus, followed by Lakeland and the Chetan-a-Go-Go. Then it’s the real hiatus.

I can feel the excitement just pouring out of me. And out of you too.

Escaping steam

So last night we did TVFT with CP, and I think it went swimmingly. When you throw the four of us together, you’ve got an awful lot of tournament direction in one place. The material is probably interesting enough on its own merits; for those who run or are contemplating running tournaments, it’s probably even valuable.

Send money directly to my house, if you agree. I’ll split it with the other guys. Really.

I am feeling that sense of the steam slipping out of me, as far as the season is concerned. For a lot of the year I start up early or midday on Fridays, going through till late Saturday if not further, and now I look ahead at, well, not much of anything other than a long stretch of uninterrupted (aside from jury duty) DJ. I’ll be going after work tomorrow to Byram Hills, which doesn’t start till 5:00. Since I have no entries (for a variety of reasons, ranging from SATs to plebe ennui) I have no reason to be there for registration. I’ll have all the data ready, O’C can process late changes, and we can get Round 1 out on the dot of 5. No big deal. Next week is Districts, which, jury duty notwithstanding, I wouldn’t be there on Friday anyhow, and Saturday is a short day, and there you are. After that, aside from Lakeland next month and the one-day Chetan-a-Go-Go RR, it’s over. If you were me, you’d feel the steam slipping out of you, too. I will note that I’m going over to the golf shop on Sunday to get my clubs regripped, so I’m not totally without entertainment for the off hours…

Still, there are debate things to do. The recruitment pamphlet. Nostrum narration (I should be back next week). More TVFTs probably until at least May, although I would imagine we’ll go on hiatus for the summer, especially since the other two goobers will be instituting. There’s the WDW debate trip, which I’ll bore you to tears over (real big crocodile tears if you’re one of the people who decided not to join us). Plus I have a vacation to England coming up, although I tend not to talk too much about stuff like that, although I’ll probably take a lot of nice pix with my new SLR and I’ll post them somewhere.

And then, all of a sudden, it will be September again. Anyone know the signup deadline for Yale?

This is how the year ends

I think we’re done for the year meeting-wise, aside from prepping for CatNats after the rez comes out. It’s hard to scare up much of a Sailor quorum these days, and other than Lakeland coming up, and Districts, the season is about done. Not with a bang but with a whimper…

Next on the agenda is organizing the CatNatting Sailors—SuperSquirrel and the Panivore—both of whom are traveling en mere, as the Frenchies might say if that were actually a French idiom. Since I can’t go, they’re keeping it all in the family. I’ve got my own family thing that weekend, although I will admit that I’m not unhappy about it. Nebraska? Been there, done that. I mean, I’ve driven through it a couple of times, and I haven’t missed it in the intervening years. What did SBO call it on his blog? “Fly-over forensicians,” despite the fact that there’s probably more forensics per capita there than in the northeast. Whatever. (And I do thank SBO for taking over the Nostrum chores this week. Now if I could get him to take over the TVFT chores, I’d be in hog heaven.)

Last night only the captains showed up at the Chez to chew the fat, which is precisely what we did, with little form or substance. I’m putting together a pamphlet for recruiting, and we talked about that a bit. Then the PC told me about some episode in N1 where Starbuck (at which point I interrupted, “Who the hell is Starbuck?”) and the Don play miniature golf at a philosophy-themed course, which sounded pretty entertaining to me, since I’m both a fan of golf and of philosophy, which I feel are already inherently combined. Then we gossiped about all the Sailors who hadn’t shown up, and the Panivore complained that she was going to have to miss a couple of post-season tournaments because she has to take care of her pets (which are very large and you can sit on), and at some point Pip the Wondercat (who is a bit larger than usual these days, but I wouldn’t try to sit on him if I were you) came downstairs to visit, an unusual occurrence at chezzes, and they marveled at a cat who doesn’t bite you as soon as look at you the way Tik (pronounced teek) does. See what I mean about meetings reaching there whimpering endlife?

TVFT later tonight, Alice tomorrow night, Bobcat with O’C the night after that. Ain’t life grand?

This post has more labels than content. Modernism forever!

TVFT fans rejoice! CP is joining us this week (he says). We’re still on the tournament-running kick, and since he runs a lot of the biggest, he’s the perfect victim guest. I gather he’s a little disappointed that we don’t do video, though. I guess he’s never seen Cruz, Bietz or me in person.

In another piece of interesting podcastian news, I was given this week off by Jules and the Mite so that a special guest star could do the job. I gather they’re coming out with episode 6½, not only not narrated by me but not written by them. Whatever. One never knows with these guys… I think I’ll use the time to go see “Alice.” Historically most Burton films look better than they are, but with Wonderland, there may not be anything wrong with that.

This weekend is Byram Hills’s Bobcat tournament. It will be a nice reasonably sized event with both LD and Policy. O’C and I are doing the former, which means a lot of catching up from not having done the postponed Lakeland event: that soundtrack to all of Epcot (4 disks!) is burning a whole in my travel bag. Speaking of soundtracks, the one song guaranteed to send Sailors out of the windows of my car is the Main Street Electrical Parade music, “Baroque Hoedown.” Eardrums have been deliberately pierced, just to avoid it. These Sailors have no taste in music whatsoever.

Why I don't write Nostrum: I don't have to!

There’s the Panivore, and now there’s the Little Ruffian (a Speecho-American). Who knew that he too was panivorous. I had talked to him in the past, and he intimated that by comparison to his famous sibling, he would eat anything that wasn’t nailed down. So after CFL Grands Saturday, we all went together to a team dinner at India House, our usual haunt.

Let me put this in the simplest terms: the details of the Little Ruffian’s omnivore nature had been greatly exaggerated.

I had already decided what the Paniovore would be up to. A mango lassi and a poori would tide her over well enough, and she was willing to go for it. As we were looking at the menu, the LR explained that he had never been to an Indian restaurant before. Or, it would appear, any restaurant. So what do you like to eat, we asked, still believing that by comparison to the P’s bread and milk shake, he would be tucking into a virtual Babette’s feast by way of Mumbai.

Pizza, he answered.

No meats. No vegetables. No fruits. No dairy. For some reason Dave, the Speecho-Coacho, believed that he could convince the LR to have some sort of beef dish, but 1) the LR doesn’t eat beef, and 2) this was an Indian restaurant. (Remind me to get Dave’s recipe for his famous Passover ham.) It turns out that the LR will eat a potato or an onion, provided the moon is in Pisces, so I ordered him a potato-and-onion-filled dosa, which is about as bland as you can order at India House without the manager coming over and asking you to leave. Meanwhile other Sailors were ordering the usual dishes (plus a fantastic Indian calamari dish—excellent!).

When the dosa arrived—it’s a foot-long crepe stuffed with, well, potatoes and onions—the Panivore started picking uninvited at the edges (the crepe part uncontaminated with either potatoes or onions) while the Little Ruffian just stared at it for a while. Finally, he produced a knife and fork (thus settling a few side bets about whether he had ever handled either of them before) and cut off a smidge. And I mean a smidge. After an hour he put that smidge on his fork. This was followed by a team reading of War and Peace in its entirety, in the original Russian, by the end of which time the forkful of dosa was poised outside the LR’s far-from-open mouth. Finally, the maw was ajar, the fork was thrust into the mouth, and the food was taken in.

There was a pause throughout the restaurant. Conversations stopped not only at all the surrounding tables but also at the bar and in the kitchen, plus outside where the dishwashers were catching up on their hookah smoking.

No expression showed on the Little Ruffian’s face. He didn’t…hate it. But, well, he didn’t like it either. After a moment, he shook his head.

“Geronimo!” one of the Sailors yelled, and within seconds each had taken a portion of the dosa, leaving nothing in front of the LR but an empty plate garnished only with one soggy bay leaf he had warily pulled out of the thing before taking his one bite.

And then the poori arrived, followed by both plain and garlic nan. With that, brother and sister had found their nourishment, and I’ve never seen so much wheat disappear so quickly, or at least not since Stalin’s final Five Year Plan, but that’s another thing altogether. Every time the waitress walked by we put in an order for more nan. I understand they had to quickly hire an extra team of chefs just to keep up.

So, we asked at some point during the evening, are your parents like this? No, was the reply; they’ll eat anything. Which is why, whenever the young ‘uns are on the forensics trail, the parents are—you guessed it—out to eat. Apparently as soon as the kids are out the door, Mom and Pop head out to any restaurant they can find. Their middle name is Zagat. They’ll eat anything from sheep’s brains to worm butts.

I’m not quite sure where we should schedule our next team dinner. The Panivore sibs pronounced themselves well sated by all the available breadstuffs. And the rest of us enjoyed the usual menu of curries and whatnot, including that great squid. So maybe we’ll go back to India House again. The entertainment value alone was worth the price of admission. Next time we’ll see if the Little Ruffian will eat rice. Probably not, but one never knows. Then again, Indian rice has peas in it. The LR did look at the rice at one point and ask what those little green things were.

On the bright side, when these two go to college, imagine all the money their parents will save by not having to purchase the meal plan!

Yes, we always do talk about you when you're not there. What did you expect?

A nice Catholic dinner last night. We gossiped about everyone, including you. A fine time was had by all.

We’ve definitely settled into the three-judge mode for tomorrow at Grands. So hard. Judges splitting flights and going from room to room, judging the same people on different sides, everything on cards, with the computer doing little more than nodding its approval. Yucch! We usually don’t finish up till the cows go home. And I hear it’s going to be a nice day. The good news that I’ll be back in the city Sunday, for lunch with Kate and whatnot. It’ll cover a multitude of sins.

And the Lakeland-MHL Mashup is mostly sorted out. Stefan posted his info and I posted ours. This whole VLD Challenge Format looks like fun, I must admit. The point is to end the season with a bang. Since for me the NY States remains unsatisfactory, this is our chance to do something valedictory for the season. Additionally, it’s close to home, it’s tabbing with O’C, and it’s totally goofy, so it’s worth the effort. I hope we get a good turnout of friends who feel likewise.

Speaking of valediction, the Sailors really haven’t done anything slam-bang to end the season in as long as I can remember. I’m starting to cook something up in my mind. We’ll see how it works out.

Manhattan Lodestone closes. Thousands of students sent out to the street to sell pencils.

We TVFTed last night. I thought CP might join us, but he was apparently too busy making money at his day job (and also trying to convince Jules that the authors of Nostrum couldn’t possibly have been lost in the snowstorm in which they were lost because the snowstorm didn’t exist—this is over at the Nostrum Nation blog—which is sort of like Richard Dawkins lecturing at the Vatican, but that’s another thing altogether) so it was just the usual suspects. But it was interesting. We attacked tournament management, and in 45 minutes barely got started. Rather than do a 3NR-type 20-hour podcast (wink, wink, but I listen to those guys myself on their less esoterically polician issues, and you probably should too, just to keep up) we decided to break it up into parts. In other words, more to come. At least this time we actually recorded it, and it was worth it, as compared to last week when we didn’t record it, which was better still because it sucked eggs. This one also includes naughty bits, although my swearing and O’C saying “Bleep bleep” after the fact isn’t really what I would call effective airwaves management.

Bleep bleep indeed!

Speaking of Nostrum, one of the things about being an old mentor to the lads is that I get to find out what’s going to happen before anyone else. (The Panivore thinks there’s something odd about this, but as a general rule, the actors in a play know get to know what’s in a play at a point before the audience finds out.) I was able to share a few tidbits with O’C, not enough to give anything away but enough to keep him on the edge of his seat. He seriously thinks that he’ll be spoofed in the series at some point. Hmmm. I do know that the list of characters on the Nostrum Nation site keeps growing, and that O’C is tracking it obsessively for clues (the fact that Manhattan Lodestone’s ultimate “e” had inadvertently not been bold-faced sent him into conniptions; I had ask Jules to fix it or face losing O’C to the darker more padded reaches of Bellevue). ’Tis a strange and glorious world we live in.

Catholic dinner tonight, poker tomorrow, Grands on Saturday. Great entertainment all around, if you ask me.

Department of Clarification

For about the millionth time…

Last night we chezzed it up in Sailorville, and the subject of Nostrum arose. The usual belief that Jules and the Nostrumite are not the authors of this series was yet again refuted by yours truly. I mean, Jules has a blog, and a life, and whatever, that has nothing to do with me. I am the speaker of the words; that does not automatically make me their creator. Think about it. Let’s say that last night you watched “24” on TV. Do you really think that Kiefer Sutherland made up all his own lines? Jeesh.

By the same token, do you really believe that there’s a Jack Bauer? For some reason, people believe that in Nostrum there’s some sort of one-to-one ratio of fictional people to real people, as in, Seth B. Obomash is really [fill in the blank] or Amnea Nutmilk is really [fitb] or Hamlet P. Buglaroni or whoever is [ditto]. It’s not so much that people believe everything they read, but that they read everything so literally. What are we teaching our children in the schools these days? What part of “It’s fiction” don’t people understand? If it were just a chronicling of real life, Jules and the Mite would have labeled it nonfiction and, although maybe they would have changed the names to protect the innocent (i.e, themselves, from libel suits), they would have indicated that what was at hand was unabashed truth. Nostrum, on the other hand, like all fiction, is abashed truth. Its roman a clef leanings are minimal. In other words, there is really no mafia don nicknamed “The Whale,” and the character of Hans Castorp is a direct name steal from The Magic Mountain (by Thomas Mann, not by Six Flags) and is not directing a movie starring young Buglaroni. My favorite leap is when people claim that categorically such-and-such was based on so-and-so doing you-know-what, when in fact the Nostrum story was written five years before the real life event. Not only do people not understand the concept of fiction, they’re also a little fuzzy on the concept of timelines. Mes etoiles! at Hautboy LeMonde (who does not exist and is not based on something that hasn’t happened yet) might say.

In other words, Nostrum, while “based on a true story,” as it is sometimes noted, is a work of fiction. And it is written by Jules O’Shaughnessy (a bookstore clerk and pretender to the throne of Moravia) and the Nostrumite (a teacher and debate coach at Tennessee Williams HS).

(By the way, please do not infer from this that The View from Tab is also fiction, written by Jules and the Mite, and that O’C, Bietz and I are just reading our parts. There are no such people as O’C and Bietz, and even if there were, Jules and the Mite wouldn’t have bothered to invent them.)

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

I do not like DI, you ham!
I do not like emoting spam.

I do not like it, NFL:
I say that it can go to hell.

And Declamation is the pits.
It gives me pains, it gives me fits.

I do not like it, CFL:
I say that it can go to hell.

PF is cool, except the flip,
And focuses, with all that lip.

Why can’t they all be calm and nice
Instead of being nasty mice?

I do like Pol, but not the speeds.
I cannot flow when my brain bleeds.

OOers make me cry and moan.
They whine and mope, grovel and groan.

I do not like them, not at all:
Not when they’re short, not when they’re tall.

I do not like them, NFL:
I say that they can go to hell.

I do not like the Duo pairs
With blue serge suits and spiky hair.

They sing when they do not perform—
In hell they would be nice and warm.

And then, of course, there is extemp
With mostly made-up evidemp.

“Time” Magazine, March Eleven?
Don’t expect extemp in heaven.

The Congress folk make phony laws
That give the average person pause—

“Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!”
Squeaking worse than Muppet Beeker.

Finally there’s Lincoln-Douglas
To educate and entertain us.

But speed and cards, K and theory,
Make LD like CX, Dearie,

Only blander (and much shorter):
It should go to hell, it oughta.

I do not like Speech and Debate.
I do not like them, no, I hate!

I do not like them on a bus,
I do not like their angst and fuss.

I wish they’d join the football team
And keep their mouths shut—that’s my dream!

The season continues, beaten down but not bowed

So now we settle down into sorting things out.

O’C and Stefan had a long correspondence about the combining of Lakeland and the MHL Grand Championships, most of which sort of flew by me. Mostly Lakeland will be Lakeland, with some MHL froufrou. It’s going to be fun to have a summary two-day event to mark the end of the season, even though from Stefan’s point of view, a summary two-day event to mark the end of February would have been more desirable. I know what it’s like to cancel a tournament. At least he did so for the storm of the century. Canceling a tournament and then having a couple of cumulus clouds over the horizon be the only sign of weather is very, very depressing. I remember the year I canceled Bump, on a Thursday. That Friday I woke up to over a foot of snow in my driveway. I couldn’t even make it to my car. I fell into a snowdrift and had to be rescued by the local sanitation department. I was overjoyed. I’m sure Stefan felt likewise, although as far as I know, he didn’t have to be rescued by anyone.

This weekend is CFL Grands, which around here is very tough. Six LD slots for about twelve excellent LDers. It’s quite a bloodbath. If there’s over twenty entries, which looks likely, JV and I need to assign 3 judges per panel. Very tough. I, for one, am praying for a field of 19. Please join me in that prayer. Last year, with only 2 judges per panel, we single-flighted and finished even before the Declaimers. It was like waking up to a foot of snow after you’ve canceled your tournament!

Speaking of the CFL, this week the officers get together to celebrate the end of the season with a nice farewell dinner. Farewell, 2009-10! Or at least farewell to the Catholics of 2009-10! Since I can’t do Omaha, this really will be my last Catholic weekend for a while. Any Sailors who qualify realize that they will be CatNatting without me. None of them seem too upset by the prospect. They’re so eager to go to Omaha at any cost that they’ll do anything, even abandon me in a snowdrift until the sanitation department comes along and rescues me. No offense to Omaha, by the way. If Omaha didn’t exist, I would be among the first to invent it. May you ever rule the waves!

After that, there’s Byram Hills, then my probably abridged attendance at Districts thanks to jury nullification duty. So, stuff keeps happening, at least up through the send-off at Lakeland. Life goes on, in other words, while preparing for the Great American Disney Hoo-Ha. I mean, it is all about the Disney Hoo-Ha. Everything else is just…debate.

Uncharacteristic weekend post

This weekend was the worst. I won't bore you with tales of true debate coach adventure, how I survived the cold and the lack of electricity and the lack of internet because it's too boring, but it was also boring going through it. And cold.

And to think: I coulda been at Lakeland.

Anyhow, much returns to normal, and Lakeland will live on, on the weekend previously owned by the MHL Grand Championships. We will combine the two. Since Lakeland is already free, and we were only going to charge a small trophy fee for the MHLGC, it seems to work. There are one or two details to iron out, but iron we will. So, save the weekend of 4/10 not for a one-day but for a two-day event. With me and Cruz at the tabbing helm.

I wouldn't miss it for the world.

The lost episode (cue the scary music!)

This speaks for itself. TVFT Episode 16, not.

They bewent thataway

Last night a handful of intrepid Sailors arrived at the chez in a light mist and left an hour later into a raging blizzard. The weather around here has been, shall we say, a little punk.

Lakeland is this weekend, and in this regard a day or so ago Stefan sent out a message saying, to wit, “Snow? What snow? I look snow in the eye and tell it begone, and that sucker turns tail and begoes! There will be no snow at Lakeland. Don’t even think about it.”

This was followed the next day by a message, “The weather looks slightly worse than originally thought, but the powers that be here in the Land of Lakes insist that we will hold this tournament this weekend at any cost.” Which is odd, because it’s free, and therefore there isn’t any cost. He goes on. “If we have to we’ll start late on Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday. We’re tough here in the Land of Lakes!”

The most recent message reminded us that the original Lakeland Tournament, in 1912, was conducted on the Titanic. All of the policy teams went down with the ship during their 1NCs of round 4. The LDers, on the other hand, misunderstood the “women and children first” announcement and practically stampeded to the lifeboats where, on hearing that they actually did qualify as children, they refused to board, insisting that no child in anyone’s memory had even understood the social contract they way they did (this was before theory and kritiks replaced philosophy and ethics with smoke and mirrors), and thus they too went down with the ship, leaving only a handful of Declamation freshmen to survive the ordeal. The Unsinkable Lakeland Tournament, as it has ever since been known, insists that no iceberg, on land or sea, will ever stop it again.

As for me, I’m betting on the likelihood of a bus from Sailordom to the Land of Lakes on Friday is pretty small, and have instructed the ABs to secure some transportation in advance, just in case. I’m wondering if the entire LD division will just be me and O’C in tab listening to my four-album set of “It’s a Small World” outtakes.

Take that, Richard Dawkins!

I will not be able to go to Omaha to CatNats. I’m not quite sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The reason I can’t go is family stuff, so it’s good on that point. And my desire to see beautiful downtown Omaha isn’t as high as, say, my desire to see the Taj Mahal. And for all I know, we won’t qualify anyone, so this could all just be pipe dreaming. But then again, I usually enjoy CatNats. Often they set them up so that you are unable to find a meal in the host city after, say, 8:00 pm because the host city has already been closed for the last two hours. Except of course for Rochester, which had no city to close, and the only accessible restaurant was a BBQ joint with a ten-hour waitlist of Hell’s Angels. Detroit was fun, though: it took two hours just to get to the head of the line for the elevators, and then there was the whole stealing-of-the-cots that took most of the first night, not to mention the literal lockdown on the prairie for the actual rounds. Minnesota was great because we managed to break into Benihana just as it was closing by sneaking out of the awards after the first three hours of thankarama; I have no idea where everyone else ate. And who can forget beautiful downtown Albany, which is, uh, in Albany? If nothing else, CatNats gives you a menu of disasters from which to choose when one is by the fireside in the ensuing years, narrating tales of great debate adventure.

On the other hand, there is a tribal thing about the event, seeing people you don’t often run into. Although, come to think of it, mostly I’m trying to avoid all of those people I don’t often run into, so combine the lack of sustenance and the threat of tab disaster with the proximity of some schmegeggie you’ve been trying to avoid for the last few years, and toss in a cross-country trek to the middle of nowhere (defining nowhere as virtually every city in which they locate CatNats, with the possible exception of NYC, the last one of which I spent at Loyola emptying trash cans), and that whole good thing slash bad thing is seen in a totally different light.

Let me run this again.

I will not be able to go to Omaha to CatNats. Which proves that, yes, there is a God.

Civic obligation

I spent a lot of time yesterday organizing the upcoming tournaments vis-à-vis the Sailors. One monkey wrench in the machinery was that I have been called for jury duty in mid March. Oh joy, oh rapture. I have to wonder how desirable someone deeply involved in the justification of jury nullification will appear during voir dire, but then again, if the defense’s case really sucks, I may be looked on as their savior. Whatever. Unfortunately this coincides with some serious DJ burdens, but at least I’m not going on vacation and I don’t have any debate trips planned, so the pain is entirely my own and business-oriented. What really sucks is that they don’t allow electronic devices in the building. Jeesh! Then again, it insures that I will do DJ work on the train and during downtime. Forced labor, if you ask me, and a good thing it is, given my tendency to digress.

I digress? Moi? Yeah, right.

Anyhow, because of those DJ burdens, things may be a little thin on the ground here at CL HQ. I trust that the VCA will patiently abide my other obligations for the next few weeks. I will post, but not in much depth. But I’ll be back in strength eventually.

Onward coachean soldiers!

Speaking fluent Bietzish; the Debater Wears Prada (not); Hi-ho, Land of Lakes!

Bietz tells me that he doesn’t really understand Nostrum. I don’t know what to say to this. Jules suggests that maybe he and the Mite should consider offering it both in English and in translation to whatever language Bietz speaks (presumably some combination of Californian and Minnesotan) but this seems like going awfully far just to win over one person. I think they should simply publish Cliff’s Notes, which would help not only MB but also any future students who need to pass AP Nostrum Studies to get into a decent college. Whatever. I’m just the narrator.

Speaking of narrations, if you’re following TVFT you should probably be looking at the comments on the blog site. Bubb posted a bunch of stuff, proving that, if nothing else, Bubb was listening to us as well as CP. O’C and Bietz maintain that plenty of people listen to us other than Bubb and CP, but I have no way of verifying this. View stats of the blog wouldn’t necessarily say anything, and I’m not sure how to get hits from iTunes, although there must be a way, and the truth is that I just wasn’t really planning on looking. I take an agnostic position on the whole thing. Some people will listen, some people won’t. I don’t expect it to replace Conan O’Brien Jay Leno any time soon, but it’s probably got more followers than Jay Leno Conan O’Brien. Maybe we should do video. When we first start up on Skype, I always see O’C via his Mac webcam; the shocking thing is that he wears sweater vests even when he’s home alone. What a fashion statement! Then again, this was fashion week in NYC. Maybe he was just going along with the flow.

The next event on the agenda is Lakeland next weekend, which you probably already know all about, given that it’s going to be about the size of Cleveland. Conveniently priced (i.e., free), as far as Policy goes it’s amazing, and it’s no shirker on the LD side either. O’C and I will be running our side of things at a middle school down the road from LHS, which is good, because last year Stefan kept announcing things to the policyfolk over the school loudspeaker like, “You should now be in your 2NR” and so forth, which I’m sure kept the Policians moving along smartly, but which confused the LDers no end. O’C and I got a kick out of it, though. You gotta love the voice of God at a debate tournament. Stefan has also set out some new strict rules for those lovable teams who believe that their judges need not show up for all the rounds. Bravo! The VCA knows well my opinion of this practice: it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in this. Every round of a debate tournament needs to be judged, so your judges need to be available for every round. End of story. Don’t have the judges to cover? Don’t bring the debaters.

Anyhow, I don’t know about you but I’m off to a weekend without a debate moment in it (except for some debate stuff I’ve got to do). Mostly it will be relaxing and reading a little for the DJ. Nice.

Bits and pieces

We hear a lot about Mother Teresa, but nobody ever says a word about her husband, Father Teresa. Why is that?

Anyhow, this weekend we had originally planned to conduct an MHL down at Bronx Science. Traditionally this has been a small affair, sort of a what-the-hey event, since they were already hosting their local NFL district tournament. Most people around here are on vacation, but a few folks stay behind, so the thinking is, why not give them a few rounds of debate? We figured on continuing the tradition, but this year we just couldn’t get the numbers up to make it work. I think the biggest difference was Pennsbury on this weekend, which is taking in a lot of people, which is fine by me. They get to have a nice shindig, and I get a weekend off.

A weekend off? What is that, anyhow?

On the bright side, this will give O’C a chance to buy the medals that he didn’t buy for the Brooklyn MHL. He made up a bunch of rather nice certificates that act as IOUs for future tin. No way O’C will be affiliated with a tournament that doesn’t give spiffy awards, or at least promissory notes for future spiffy awards. At the moment he is desperately trying to figure out what his Nostrum Series 2 role will be; we know, but we’re not telling. Drives him crazy, let me tell you.

Last night we brought a ringer in to TVFT to discuss March-April. The entire conversation was about the new topic, so if you’re interested, check it out.

The unreport

I see that Jules has posted E3 over at Nostrum Nation. I also see that he was up at Harvard over the weekend. As the VCA knows, I was down at the unharvard (after an unusually extended bus trip, which I reported on yesterday). I prefer my location, to tell you the truth. Anyhow, here's how it played out.

First of all, for reasons that elude me, we lost some people due to a snowstorm that was over about 4 days before the tournament started, but I couldn’t do much about that. My theory is that if Monticello can make it to the tournament, anyone can make it to the tournament. I mean, the only reason the Montwegians don’t normally have classes on the 4th of July is because the school is closed because of snow, so if they can show up on Presidents’ weekend, so can you.

Central staging for the tournament was at a student center, so there were comfy chairs and wireless and many restaurants (I recommend the creperie and the assemble-your-own-pasta). Because of the generous number of good judges the Uns had hired, we were able to single flight all the debate rounds, which does make for easy going for those judges. And because we had the time to do it, we had generous breaks, especially in the novice division (which I believe, theoretically, should always have the most generous breaks possible). Of course, the much publicized cheese steaks (or, in some cases, cheeseless steaks) had a major flaw, viz., lack of greasy onions, but this did not stop me from devouring one in about two minutes flat. Next year I’ll bring my own greasy onions; I’m sure I’ve got some lying around somewhere.

For Saturday I wore my Disneyland shirt to get CP in the mood for WDW (I so want to see him upside down on the Aerosmith coaster to the sounds of “Walk This Way”). The Sailors had a full contingent of Speecho-Americans and debaters, and SuperSquirrel managed to win her division (not bad), while the young S-As got their first taste of university performing. One thing I noticed is that we have managed to collect a couple of students whose mouths are set on the Endless mode; I am not one for listening to anyone’s endless monologue, not even when the monologist is one of my own students. The more you say, the less likely I will listen to you, and vice versa. Good rule for life, by the way. You should take it to heart even if you don’t wear a sailor suit.

Anyhow, this was my first Unharvard in more than a decade, and I have no recourse but to point out that the last time we were there we also won it. Which is not the reason I will return next year, however. What I like about it is that it is a sane tournament, nicely run by the Uns (Ali H is a marvel), reasonably priced with the proceeds supporting urban debate, with good judging. My guess is that people will sooner or later realize that, even with the best physical operation possible, breaking a minority of the down-twos is not the best situation for most debaters. Nor is spending as much money as you can the best situation for most schools. Oh well, suit yourself. I know where I’ll be.

Special: Olympic fever strikes CL

I occasionally mention 43-man squamish, my favorite sport. For those who need them, here's the rules.

Tales of Great Debate Adventure: Satan's Bus Trip

I have a vague recollection of this occurring as fiction in Nostrum Series 1…

Friday our bus left right after school. Or at least, that was when we were scheduled to leave. Given the Swiss precision with which Sailor buses usually appear to sweep us away, I was rather surprised to see nothing yellow that was bigger than the proverbial breadbox. For a while I’d walk up to the buses that did pull up in front of building, pressing my nose against the driver’s window, only to be told that this particular vehicle was heading to the basketball game or the 43-man Squamish competition. A series of phone calls (“A bus? To Philadelphia? What are you, nuts?”) ultimately yielded a big yellow taxi at about 3:30, an hour late.

We should have seen this as an omen.

Fortunately I had written down clear and detailed driving instructions, plus printed up a few Google maps. We were shortly on our way. I watched a WDW video and an episode of Diggnation on my trusty Touch, and before long our first Speecho-American announced that he had to go to the bathroom.

This was when it all when inextricably wrong.

Normally I do not allow Speecho-Americans to go to the bathroom. Debaters understand, of course, that this is a bus trip, not a pleasure cruise, but S-As don’t get out of the house much, so what can you do? We stopped somewhere for a minute, and the thing was, when we got back to count the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, we were somehow on a different spur. Cars and buses and trucks and low flying aircraft were zipping by us to our right, while we were now traveling at a rate of about a mile a year, give or take a few yards. It took us an hour to progress the next two miles through a toll both. EZ Pass my foot!

The good news is that we had no real destination time. I texted CP telling him I wouldn’t be there at the crack of 7:00 for registration, but I fully expected that we’d have a nice dinner.

Then the bus got a flat tire. The first reaction of my chaperone parent on hearing the sound of the blowout was to ask if anyone had gotten shot, the normal speech parent thing, I guess. Debaters, used to long trips and the sound of gunfire, are able to recognize a dead tire when they hear one.

We were now 2 ½ hours from home, and 1 ½ hours from the unharvard. They told us they’d send down another bus from home. I texted CP and told him I’d see him sometime during the Palin Administration.

The good news (of course, at this point, even the election of Sarah Palin would have been good news) was that we were able to hobble to the Molly Pitcher rest stop. Viva la Pitcher! So we hung out for the next few hours, first having dinner (there’s a Dick Clark Grill, for God’s sake, where the food was edible enough and they showed Sonny and Cher videos, which were not edible), then playing cards and downloading the tournament data and entering and reentering the room changes (they had wireless for $3.95 an hour). Unfortunately, they didn’t have a bar, which would have come in handy at this point. What kind of highway rest stop doesn’t have a bar? Jeesh!

The rest of the trip was uneventful except for the fact that we never saw the road I had so meticulously noted on my directions. It had to be there somewhere, but, well, exactly where still eludes me. The wolves were howling in the night, and we hit about the third big sign saying “This Way to Philadelphia, Sort Of” when I finally gave in and said, let’s try this one. Finally, a stroke of luck, as this was Route 76, which takes you practically into the tab room. I mean, all we needed was to get lost at this point, and I would have fed myself to those wolves, and deservedly so.

We finally hobbled into our hotel a little after midnight, the point at which they had cancelled our rooms. The hotel was actually a couple of floors high up in the middle of a hospital; I think we were between the terminally depressed above us and the chronically itchy below us, but I wouldn’t vouch for that. In any case, we had set a team record for the Sailor longest trip ever, somewhere between 9 and 10 hours, depending on how you interpret our start time. The only saving grace was the knowledge that Bronx Science holds the overall record for bus trip length in the region, which is 11 hours to get from Bronx Science to Dewitt Clinton (which is situated directly behind Bronx Science) via the George Washington Bridge, the Appalachian Trail and the Erie Canal. But we did come close.

Oy.

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Off to the unharvard

Bietz once famously tweeted about tournament ROI, i.e., return on investment. How much does one get for one's investment at tournaments, in other words. One compares the costs to the benefits, finds the latter outweighs the former, and one signs up. Or not.

Which is why I am going to UPenn.

Let's put aside any comments on the nature of Harvard except for one, namely, the size of the fields. According to my trusty iDebate app, 310 breaks all 5-2s to triples after 7 rounds. Not bad. But wait. There is no triple. 12 5-2s break out of 52. 40 don't. We're talking 5-2s here. From my personal ROI, that's a bad bet. Which means that I would have to be going for other reasons. Sadly, I have no other reasons that would warrant the high expense.

Which is why I am going to UPenn.

Unfortunately, the unharvard took a fair hit this week in drops, mostly from wimps without shovels (sounds like a good band name). That's too bad, but I'm not bothered by it. It's my first time at UPenn since the 90s, and I like them on this weekend, and I will continue to support them on it. The only alternatives that make even marginal sense are in September, and I feel that they are no alternatives at all. Every other weekend is a conflict with another regional tournament, and we all know how well that works out.

So, while you're up in Cambridge, think about us, especially if you manage a large squad. You've got some reasons to be up there and not here? Fine. But your whole squad? The ones who can't even dream of being in a position where the above math (which can be applied to every event) will ever come into play? Is all your registration money better spent on name because it is the more resonant brand? What is your motivation for entirely bypassing a tournament that runs to earn funds for urban debate programs? Too expensive to send to two different places? No. I know how much Harvard costs. Not that I'm trying to guilt you out or anything, and I hope you have a successful and enjoyable weekend. But I ask you to think about the possibility, next time out, of an alternative.

Give it a shot.

Our tribute to seafood!

My goodness.

First of all, I think that, once I turn on the microphone for TVFT, I immediately get even grumpier than usual. Last night I couldn’t find myself saying anything good about anything, which is ridiculous, because I am the ultimate Mary Sunshine. I’ll work on that.

CP wrote a long comment on the TVFT college tournament show (all of this can be seen over at the TVFT blog). The subject remains interesting, but I think one thing needs to be clarified: the presence of CP at the universities that he godfathers has been a strong positive factor in making those tournaments not only run better, but run better every year, with an institutional memory (CP’s) that might not otherwise exist. A big problem with universities that he has solved has been that institutional memory. Pre-CP, every year many of them would start all over again from scratch with new directorates, and not only make new mistakes, but revisit classic mistakes of the past. The presence of CP limits them to new mistakes and deliberated improvements. Of course, there are a lot of universities that do have admins in place for the duration, e.g., Harvard, where the problems are entirely different. And God knows, you don’t have to be a college to screw up a tournament or a league.

There’s a couple of things that need to be in place in order to get past my general biliousness. First and foremost, good intentions. We all start out ignorant. I have my own history of forensic lunacy. But what is our goal? If we aim to do the right thing, we can practice aiming until we do. Second, concerned use of power. This may be my chief gripe with the activity, the installed power bases, sometimes quite isolated, sometimes overarching, who misuse that power for whatever reason. Third, people who don’t change, who don’t learn, who think they’re right. Do I think I’m right? Of course I do. One hundred percent of the time. The VCA is well aware of that. Can I learn that, in fact, I was wrong? Of course I can. As often as necessary. The VCA is well aware of that too. Do I make mistakes? Sure. Do I admit it and correct them? No, I blame O’C and have him correct them, but that’s roughly the same thing. My point is, if you think you know what is best for, well, anybody, you may be right, but I would advise you to keep wondering. One never knows, does one?

Speaking of correcting mistakes, it turns out that Bietz thinks I’m anti-Asian for foisting cheese steaks on them, as if I’m responsible for their lactose intolerance. Which is, needless to say, pretty anti-Hindu on his part, what with all those steaks (although I’m not so sure that cows, or for that matter, any predictable farm animal, is the source of some of those “steaks”), not to mention his obvious disregard for the gluten intolerant (I’ll venture a guess here that this is mostly Methodists, a group that seldom gets its fair share of abuse, if you ask me). And he has the nerve to attack me? Jeesh. Let me make it clear that I am attacking the language of cheese-free cheese steaks, not the concept of cheese-free cheese steaks. You want to be Asian? Don’t let me stop you. But a cheese-free cheese steak is not a cheese steak. I’m sorry, but there’s principles involved here, and I’m sticking to them.

One last note. As usual, the message and the messenger are once again totally confused. Let me explain this for the millionth time. Jules O’Shaughnessy and the Nostrumite write Nostrum. The wrote Nostrum: TOS and they’re writing Nostrum: TNG. I simply host it on my website. My performances of the episodes arise from my need to keep busy: I am like a forensic shark that never sleeps. (All right, maybe not a shark. I’m more like a forensic halibut that never sleeps, but you get the point.) I ask that you do not confuse creator and publisher, so to speak.

Jim Menick, forensic halibut. Why do I think they’ll put that on my gravestone?

(And by the way, don't try this at home. Oh, wait, you already do.)

I've got two words for you, you yabbo!

Nostrum Nation.

Do you want fries with that?

I have become the concierge for the unharvard.

CP is tied up this week, and I’ve taken over some of his chores, and I now know why he is a wreck of a human being. Virtually all of the issues that have come up have been small, but it’s like playing Whack-A-Coach. My favorite concerns the miracle of the cheese steaks. Apparently UPenn brings in cheese steaks for lunch on Saturday, a fine tradition given its location. Originally there were about 39 cheese steak options on tabroom. The unharvardians decided that this was too many (I can’t imagine why) and have now limited the choices to two. I’ve never tinkered with concessions before on tabroom, but eventually I made the change.

But here’s the thing. The two choices are cheese steak with cheese, or cheese steak without cheese. Am I missing something here? “I’ll have the fried rice.” “Will that be with or without rice?” What?

A more important concern for the VCA, and one which a couple of people have already heard about in great disbelief, is the March on Orlando this summer. Those who know us (you poor saps) know that O’C and I can spend the entire day listening to the soundtracks of extinct Epcot attractions. Driving in the car with us is almost frightening as we go through my playlist of Disney songs you’ve never heard or now wish you’d never heard (we almost managed to convince the Panivore to quit debate last year during our Bobcat commutes, which in a way is like ordering a cheese steak without the cheese or the steak). Somewhere in all of this we opined how we definitely needed to go to WDW together someday to get this all out of our systems. And then somewhere in all of this opining we decided to do it this summer. And while we were at it, we invited a bunch of other family and friends, if they were interested (although the numbers aren’t yet in on who else is crazy enough to be coming). Not since the Old Baudleroo fell in love with the Disneyland parking lot has there been such a potential for pure…something. I’ve already planned practically ever minute of the event (those who go to WDW without a plan to avoid the lines deserve their hour-long waits) on a listserver of the potential attendees. O’C has already decided what outfit he’s wearing the day he gets Cinderella’s autograph (which is a big bone of contention between us, because I maintain, first, that Cinderella is not a real person, and second, that even if she were real, this isn’t her—I have a lot of trouble with the roaming characters in the parks, in other words). As time goes by I will now bring the VCA into our planning. You may not be coming with us, but you’ll suffer through it as if you were.

Have a #(*&$%^@ magical day.

Scarswegia, mostly

Sappy dog stories make me cry. That’s why I work where I do, viz., the day job. And that should answer the question of what I do when I’m not doing this, i.e., debate stuff.

Moving right along…

This weekend was Scarsdale, which began with a phone call from Sailorville telling me that our buses were cancelled in fear of the snowpocalypse. Not a bad call, actually, as a little bit of snow on the ground, as expected Saturday morning, is possibly the most dangerous for driving, and who wants their team to go off a cliff or something? So I headed down alone on what turned out to be the driest weekend in the history of the Scarsdale tournament. The Panivore, a conniver of the first water, also managed to make it, but that was it. With a little planning time I might have been able to make more out of it, but I don’t think my job is to argue with the admins about their decisions over school safety, nor is it to pick and choose students to bring to tournaments. Since the P lives to debate and vice versa, her desire to be there is sort of transcendent. We’ll leave it at that.

On the one hand, Scarsdale, with its alternating novice and varsity rounds, with some of the latter field in the judge pool for the former, is pretty complicated. One needs to balance the judging responsibilities, for one thing, and keep them under control. You don’t want to advantage some yabbo who isn’t judging over the yabbos who are doing their bit as responsible debate citizens, but on the other hand, there’s no reason why everyone has to judge, and you wouldn’t set it up that they have to. It’s not a thoroughbred race with handicap weights, after all. Anyhow, for all practical purposes the tournament is a series of single flights, plus the usual goofiness of PF (which is slower than the slowest thing you can think of if you slowed it down even more and then had parents judge it except they usually don’t show up because, well, who knows why). Which means that ballots are coming in and going out all the time. Every now and then we’d get so caught up in the business of it that we’d forget to put out a posting for a while until JV would saunter by (have you ever seen JV saunter by anywhere? Na’ah) and ask if the pairings were ready, but in the event we went absolutely lickety-split and beat all predictions of when things would happen, and we ended in time for me to go home Saturday way early and have a lovely dinner at the chez. Very nice. Plus some parent had brought in a homemade German chocolate cake to the judges’ lounge. Oh. My. God.

Yesterday I got ready for the grand opening (Wednesday is coming, trust me on that, even though the P rushed the gun on it) and also seriously began sorting out the Unharvard. They’ve got about 500 people coming, not exactly chickenfeed. One of the things I had to do was sort out the cheese steaks. You can order a cheese steak with cheese or a cheese steak without cheese. Now, where I come from, a cheese steak without cheese is a steak. Or maybe, a cheese steak without cheese could also be called a monkey steak or a golf ball steak or any other number of things that it doesn’t have on it, if it didn’t have it on it. (What? Whatever.) Who doesn’t want cheese on their cheese steak? Is there some new bizarre food group like the vegeterribles who eat animals but not animal byproducts? Where is Peter Singer when you really need him?

And one last thing. O'C tells me that today his family finally disavowed all connections to foreign potentates. If you ask me, it's about time!

February? For you, maybe, but not for us.

If I’m going to have to handle Nostrum episodes again, I’m going to have to figure out how. Didn’t they used to come out on Wednesday, back in the olden days? Wasn’t there a slogan, “If this is Wednesday, it must be Nostrum”? That’s probably what I’ll do now, put them out on Wednesdays, that is. And TVFTs come out on Thursdays. I guess I’ll get my money’s worth out of the microphone, if nothing else.

What’s the business model for all of this, anyhow?

This is Scarsdale weekend. This week has been an amazing learning experience for me, as plebe after plebe has claimed total ignorance of such questions as whether there’s a bus and when there’s a bus, et alia. You would think by February these are the sort of questions that they would have figured out how to get the answers to. As far as I know, my own team is the only one in America that doesn’t regularly consult my online schedule. [Sigh.] There is no question in my mind that there’s been a time slip this season. I don’t know why or how, but it feels like October, novice-wise.

Anyhow, Scarsdale is when we have the varsity judging the novices, alternative single flights in the same rooms, which requires a level of organization beyond the norm, but we get it done. The key thing is to make sure that kids don’t judge every single round, if at all possible. We don’t want to undermine their own competing. They do get tuckered out, though, and that’s a fact. There’s allegedly a little snow coming in tonight, but not so much as to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery. I certainly hope not. The Sailors are sleeping in their own beds; I’d hate for them to be blizzarded in tomorrow morning.

We’ve also begun shaking down the Unharvard tournament. More on that as it gets settled.

N2

This is curious. I received the following message late last night.

Yo, Jim. (It’s strange to call you Jim, but the way I figure it, I’ve earned it, starting from Mr. Menick and going on to Menick way back when, and God knows I’m old enough now to practically be a contemporary of yours—all right, maybe nobody’s that old, but you get my drift.)

I will point out that, before I met Jules and the Nostrumite, I never used parentheses. I got it from them. They’re contagious, sort of like punctuation swine flu. The message goes on:

Anywho, I’ve been back in the country a couple of months now, actually since September. If you were following Moravian news, you know about the coup, and about how my chances of ever taking back the throne now are somewhat less than nil. So it goes, eh? The house of O’Shaughnessy finally falls. I think I would have made a pretty good king, all things taken into consideration, or at least a passable duke or earl, but what with the public beheadings of most of the royals, desertion seemed to be the better part of valor, so I gave up and returned to the States.

Needless to say, my first stop was up in Cambridge to visit the Mite, who as you know is teaching at Tennessee Williams High School. I can’t believe he has two kids of his own now. Who would have thought he’d be the first of the two of us to breed? The kids are cute, by the way, in a Nostrumian sort of way.

I lived on the Mite’s couch for a month or so until I finally got a job and a place of my own, thus preventing the Nostrumate from killing me in my sleep, as I’m sure she would have done if I had stayed any longer. They’re not much (neither the job nor the place) but it isn’t easy for displaced royals to get work nowadays. This is not a factor of there being too many displaced royals trying for the same positions as there just isn’t that much work, even for the commonfolk, among whom I must now number myself. But I managed finally to get a bookstore job, which should hold me for a while. And a small apartment in the rattier part of Harvard’s backyard.

Maybe I should send him over to CP’s house. Although for all I know that’s in the same ratty part of Harvard’s backyard, and would be no improvement. And the last thing CP probably needs is a permanent boarder like his former royal almost majesty.

The reason I’m writing, aside from updating you on my life and times, is to tell you that, well, in our spare time, the Mite and I have returned to the scene of the crime. We loved what you did with the audios, although we wish you hadn’t run out of steam halfway through. After all, we didn’t run out of steam writing them until we were all the way through, sort of, and we were the ones who had to do all the creative work while all you did was sit there reading them out loud with your feet up while you were eating chocolate bonbons; feel free to finish up any time you want to. But meanwhile, we have begun to work on what we’re calling between ourselves N2, and we thought you’d like to know about it. A lot has changed in debate since the old Nostrum days. So far, the only person who’s still in the activity that we’ve been able to track down is Tarnish Jutmoll, but there could be others. We never did plan too far ahead, if you remember correctly.

Another thing that’s different from back then is that the old delivery system of emails and whatnot is long gone. Getting started won’t be easy, seeing as we’re doing it without portfolio, so to speak. I mean, you’re the one that holds the reins on all the old stuff, after all. Not that we resent it or anything, because, well, it’s not like you’ve made any more money on it than we did, but, given that you’re there and we’re not, we were wondering if you’d mind hosting us in the future for a while, until we get our act together, so to speak.

Let us know.

Yr hmb svts,
Jules and the Nostrumite

That was, to put it honestly, an email I thought I’d never read. Jules and the Nostrumite are back? Writing more Nostrums? The mind boggles.

Of course I’ll take on the hosting for them. It is, after all, the least I can do. I might even do some audios.

I wonder how long this will last…

I fought the law and the law won

I put up a Google alert on jury nullification and the first thing I got was my own blog entry.

Whatever.

I’m fascinated by law, as members of the VCA, or at least those who follow the feed, know well. You can make a lot of claims about what law is, that it is socialized morality, for instance, but I’m reluctant to go so far. There are laws against spitting on the subway, for instance. This act of expectoration, while crude, hardly strikes me as immoral (unless you have some viciously contagious disease that will infect anyone who comes within ten feet of your phlegm, or can envision some other science fiction scenario worthy only of the greenest philosophical novice). We legislate all sorts of stuff. Law is part of society’s attempt to organize itself, to identify a set of actions that are not permitted, for whatever reason. I guess you can say that anything that there is not a law against is allowed.

Law as we’re discussing it here is, obviously, social. That is, we are talking about laws that are enacted within a society as a measure of civil order. Whoever holds the power in a society gets to make the laws, to create the civil order. There is no guarantee that the power-holder always makes what we could call “good” laws. I mean, look at who could be holding the power. In a dictatorship, it could be some monomaniacal strongman general who is robbing the country blind and who makes laws to protect himself from his enemies who would stop him from his evil-doing. Monarchs share this dictatorial focus of power in one person or family, but can be either enlightened or comparably evil, and will act accordingly. In a democracy, where power is held by the people, we still don’t necessarily only get laws that somehow benefit the people, although that would theoretically appear to be the goal. It doesn’t make sense for democracies to enact laws that would harm the members of the democracy, but that this not happen would require that the enacting of law be a perfect system that always works as intended. We have plenty of evidence that demonstrates that this is not the case.

Still, the intention of democracy is law that benefits the populace, since the populace does, by definition, create the law, and we can intuitively assume that the populace would have its own benefit in mind. Locke classically explains how laws should be created, and the centuries that have succeeded him have offered no better scenario. The idea is to create a legislative body that represents the people, and have that body come up with the laws that will manage those people. The entire scope of this legislative body is that creation of law, not its execution, not its application. Legislators make legislation: end of story.

So law exists to create a civil order, and in a democracy a special legislative body is empowered to create that law. Once laws are created, they are out of the hands of the legislative body, and into the hands of the executive, which enforces those laws, and the judiciary, which interprets those laws.

The resolution at hand, jury nullification, deals only with the subset of law that defines criminal acts or areas of civil dispute that are resolved by juries. The passing of a healthcare bill, or non-passing of a healthcare bill, is another thing altogether. But when crimes are committed, or disputes are taken to court, juries usually come into play. Juries are composed of the peers of those who stand before the court. Whether or not you committed such and such a crime, broke such and such a law, is decided by the people at large, in other words, based on the evidence brought before them. These are, theoretically, the same people who created the law that you are accused of breaking.

In a courtroom, everyone has a particular role to play. The two sides of the case argue their positions, presenting such evidence as they think will win the day. The judge is there to make sure that both sides of the case follow the rules, and also that the jury follow the rules. The judge will see to it that the lawyers don’t cheat, in other words, and also to make sure that the jury understands what is going on. Every trial is a question of whether there was some sort of violation of the law or, in civil suits, the violation of a party’s rights. It is the judge’s job to clearly present to the jury what exactly is being charged, and what the law is regarding it, so that the jury can go off and decide if a law has been broken in this case or a right has been infringed. It does not matter if the judge believes one side or the other; it only matters that the judge make it clear to the jury what their job is in this particular case, so that they can make a decision. What the jury believes is all that matters.

There are, of course, plenty of process issues that can throw off the rather ideal picture painted above, of two sides being kept within fair boundaries by an impartial judge who clearly explains the situation to the jury so that they can decide without prejudice. One judge might admit evidence that an appellate might consider inadmissible, and so forth and so on. An appellate might even determine that a judge’s statements to a jury are prejudicial. If you’re really interested in all the ins and outs, either go to law school or rent the DVDs of any popular legal TV show. You’ll see it all, sooner or later.

Jury nullification is, very specifically, a jury saying (explicitly or implicitly) that a particular law is unjust, and that they refuse to prosecute someone under that law. It doesn’t matter if the person “did it,” although the assumption is that they did. What matters is the law itself, and the jury’s refusal to apply it. The jury, a handful of people with no standing as legislators, the creators of laws, or judges, the interpreters of law, take it on themselves to do, or undo, both that making and that interpretation. In other words, they take the law into their own hands.

Shades of civil disobedience!

I cross-posted some material from Jim Anderson’s blog on the Feed that you might want to take a look at. It will provide the legal standing (or lack thereof) of nullification, but not necessarily a commanding explanation of why it is right or wrong. That you’ll have to do for yourself. There are so many ins and outs to his subject, you can start almost anywhere. As I said Monday, I wish that more people were debating this one more often.

Breaking wind news!

The Board of Governors of the Kingdom of Sail are pleased to announce the following changes for the 2010 Bump Tournament:

Round One, formerly known as Round One, will now be known as the Hamlet P. Buglaroni Tutorial.

Round Two, formerly known as Round Two, will now be known as the Rupert Murdoch Pay-As-You-Go Tribute. (A fee of $2 per debater will be charged to attend this round, which will be broadcast live on MySpace.)

Round Three, formerly known as Round Three, will now be known as the O’C Disco Ball Exegesis.

Round Four, formerly known as the Yes Virginia 7:30 Round, will now be known as the Yes Virginia 7:30 Remedial.

Round Five, formerly known as the How Many Rounds Are There Again Round, will now be known as the Is There Another Round After This Round Meditation.

Round Six in novice LD, formerly non-existent, will now be known as The Still Non-existent Sixth Round.

Round Six in VLD, formerly known as the Will This Thing Ever End Round, will now be known as the Wilbur and Orville Wright From Wrong Wround Wrobin.

There will be no elimination rounds. However, random debaters will be chosen from all the entries almost by preliminary ranking, to participate in the following:

The Ron Paul Pointless Demonstration Debate (32 participants)
The Derrida is Still Dead (Thank God) Loaner Model (16 participants)
The Eliot Spitzer/Mark Sanford Ethics Seminar (8 participants, 18 or older please, unless accompanied by an adult chaperone)
The Rufus T. Firefly “Hail Freedonia” (4 participants, all of them brothers)
The Alex Trebek Daily Double (2 participants, with all CX answers in the form of a question)
The Will You People Please Go Home so that I can go to India House (0 participants)

Also, this year, we will begin honoring the coaches who have paid us the most money historically in registration fees. Honorees will be given an authentic replica Willy Wonka Golden Ticket, allowing them entry into the Bump Hall of Horrors, and will be entitled to refer to themselves as the Barons of Bumpetry. They will also get to adjudicate, as a group, the Alex Trebek Daily Double, provided that they haven’t judged a debate round since the Truman administration, they really should be judging Dec, and there’s someone over in the corner giving them hand signals on who is actually winning the debate, which will be entirely devoted to theory, specifically that naming debate rounds reduces the amount of education in the world, and that it’s better to number them irrationally than to name them irrationally, but hell, what do we know?

For further information on the history of the Bump Tournament, please consult Stump the Chump. We here at Coachean Life want nothing to do with it.

Making a difference for generations to come

A tear falls from the coachean eye. Probably 4 sailors will debate jury nullification. And over in Pfffter land, where trees are regularly falling to deaf mariner ears, they get to play with affirmative action. There is a certain ouch factor to this, but at least we’ll get some discussion in meetings. And speaking of ouch factor, is it true that if a tree falls on a deaf person who doesn’t hear it coming, it doesn’t hurt? Just asking.

(Instant translation of previous paragraph: I like the new topics, and wish more of us would be able to debate them.)

This weekend we ran an MHL at Brooklyn Tech, which is roughly the size of the Pentagon only with one less side. It’s a minute over the Manhattan Bridge, and it wasn’t terribly hard to find (we used the mantra, “Hey, there’s the Scarsdale bus; follow them!”) but it was a bear if you had to park. Once inside the place, it was sort of plain and industrial without feeling oppressive; it’s just the kind of building you’d build if you wanted to put a lot of students in one place at one time a minute over the Manhattan Bridge. The classrooms were quite cheerful and bright, the cafeteria was bigger than my entire school, and come to think of it, even the elevators were bigger than my entire school. The killer, though, was the auditorium, where we held the awards. It was four or five stories high and absolutely spectacular. My guess is that the designers of the building deliberately went to town on it (its vintage is similar to some of the old classic movie palaces). In any case, it made you want to have all your ceremonies there. (O’C take note: Big Jake is Punk City by comparison.)

As for the event itself, it was mostly your regular MHL. Confusion at startup was minimal, with the usual suspects attempting to change their registrations and being told no, with a new (and potentially usual) suspect not understanding the concept of signing up for the tournament or, apparently, simply following directions. But we got things started by 10, the goal, and ended by 6:30, the other goal. In the middle we required the services of Mr. Shelton to go into policy rounds and hit judges over the head with frying pans as a means of explaining to them that the novices might not benefit all that much from a critique twice as long as the actual round, which did get things back on track after a minor snafu at lunch (too many people trying to eat at the same time, mostly as a result of judges whose critiques were twice as long as their actual rounds). Good grub, by the way.

Coming up this weekend is triple witching hour, with dueling-banjo tournaments at Scarsdale, Newark and Pennsbury. I will, of course, be chez JV as usual, sorting out the alternating novices and varsity. And sleeping in my own bed for a change, which I rather enjoyed this weekend. That, and reading bulletins from Emory from O’C and the Panivore, not to mention not reading O’C’s history of the event on Stump the Chump. I mean, my weekend was literally filled with not reading it. I didn’t read it Friday. I didn’t read it Saturday. And Sunday I made it complete by not reading it twice. I’m sorry, but it’s a high school debate tournament, people, not the Nobel Peace Prize. We honor those who came before us, yeah, yeah, yeah, but as the VCA knows, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I feel there are better ways of spending time at tournaments than the adults patting each other on the back. I don’t care what the hell you name after me when I’m gone (or for that matter, when I’m here); what I care about is sending legions of debaters into society to demonstrate pen twirling to their grandchildren some day. That, my friends, is making a difference. The rest of it is all dust in the wind.