Stromata Blog

Does Amazon Know Something About Me That I Don’t?

This morning, while floundering about in the projects that have been keeping me AFB [Away From Blogging], I found in my e-inbox the latest newsletter from Amazon’s “Vine” program. That’ s a scheme that Amazon uses to entice frequent book buyers into providing reviews of new books. I’m always happy to get a free book, so I look forward with interest to these missives. Today’s, though, made me wonder.

This newsletter, I was told, contained “a targeted list of products based upon your purchase and review history on Amazon.com”. Here are the books that were listed:

• Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: No More Unnecessary Biopsies, Radical Treatment or Loss of Sexual Potency

• The Poacher’s Son (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (“Set in the wilds of Maine, this is an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive – his own father.”)

• Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything (Not about how to obtain or attain girls, eats and divine rapture, which might have interested me. “If you suffer about your relationship with food – you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all – you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don’t run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive.”)

• Bayshore Summer: Finding Eden in a Most Unlikely Place

• Bargain with the Devil (“Chase delivers another gripping tale of action and suspense in this new novel – a fast-aced and entertaining thriller with a political edge that is editorially connected to his previous novel, Darkness Under Heaven.”)

• Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

• But I Wanted a Baby Brother! (I have a baby brother, and I don’t recall especially wanting him back when he was a baby.)

• Kaplan ACT 2010 Premier with CD-ROM (“With our state-of-the-art interactive online companion, students become part of Kaplan’s test-prep community and are provided with all the tools they need to score higher on this important exam.” I graduated from college over forty years ago.)

• Kaplan NCLEX-RN 2010-2011 Edition: Strategies, Practice, and Review (“To become a registered nurse (RN) in the United States, nursing school graduates must pass the NCLEX-RN. Each year, nearly a quarter of a million nursing students take this exam. Kaplan NCLEX-RN is the only book to combine its unique strategy guide with a comprehensive review designed to meet the challenges of this rigorous exam.”)

• Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy (So I’m an aspiring nurse who hasn’t enrolled in college yet and is ready to retire?)

• Heart of the Matter (“Nick Russo is a pediatric plastic surgeon; his wife, Tessa (sister of Dex, from Something Borrowed), is a professor turned stay-at-home mom living a cushy life in Boston. Nick is called in to care for a six-year-old burn victim, and Nick’s devotion to his work is soon tangled up in his attraction to the boy’s mother, Valerie, a single attorney.”)

• Dream of Night (“Three lives and three story lines merge as readers get to know a former racehorse, a 12-year-old girl, and a middle-aged woman.”)

Either the long-feared Red Chinese cyber-attack has struck Amazon’s computers, or Jeff Bezos and crew know things about my taste in literature that I never suspected in my wildest nightmares.

A Proper Tory Civil Servant

No, not a David Cameron Tory. Michael J. Astrue was, many years ago, chairman of the Tory Party of the Yale Political Union. From that connection, I am acquainted with him and his wife Laura (likewise a Tory alum). He is now Commissioner of Social Security, one of the ultimate in genuine civil service positions. At the Tory Party’s annual banquet, right after his appointment, he and I chatted about Robert Meyers, George Ball, bend points, covered compensation and other inside-SSA topics, none of which, for some reason, held the slightest interest for anybody else.

Not until this week, however, when I read his profile in First Things, did I know that Michael is a published, and in many eyes (many relative to the number of people who read modern poetry, that is) significant, poet. Under the nom de plume “A. M. Juster”, he has penned a prize-winning collection of verse, The Secret Language of Women and translations of Horace and Petrarch. Englishings of Tibullus and, mirabillime dictu, the riddles of St. Aldhelm are in the works.

If we must have a civil service (or bureaucracy, if one wishes to be blunt), Commissioner Astrue is the sort of man whom it ought to recruit. The country would be a better and happier place if no one could hold a government job above GS-9 without having produced a tolerable sonnet (a villanelle for positions involving complex issues) or a readable rendition of a hundred lines of Latin, Greek or Italian literature.

The Buttresses of Islam

Several English statesmen, among them Lord Melbourne and Winston Churchill, are said to have described themselves as “buttresses” of the Church of England, because they “supported it from without”. Their faith might be minimal or nonexistent (though Melbourne was a serious student of theology), but they never undermined the faith of others and perceived great value in the strength of the established church.

These buttresses came to mind when I saw Mark Steyn’s thoughts about “secular Moslems”:

As to Andy [McCarthy]’s musings on the contradictions of being a “secular Muslim”, that’s actually a pretty good term for the executives of Comedy Central, the publishers at Yale University Press, the custodians at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Academy of Pediatricians, etc. They don’t go to Friday prayers (yet) but they accept that the strictures of Islamic law are now universal – no pix of the Prophet, a little bit of FGM [female genital mutilation] never hurt anyone, etc. “Secular Muslim” seems as useful a term as any.

Islam is, it seems, well on its way to becoming the established church of the sensitive Western world. Only a small minority believe that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet, yet the outward signs of acquiescence in an Islamic order proliferate. It’s not merely that we are expected to say that Islam is a Religion of Peace and to stand in awe of its millennium-ago accomplishments, or that we must avoid publicly flouting its taboos. There are tiny indicators. Some Moslem authority has decided that “Moslem” and “Mohammed” are the wrong transliterations; all bien pensants must write “Muslim” and “Muhammad”. If you use Google’s gmail service, its built-in spell checker will flag the infidel variations as errors. Would anybody at Google feel impelled to bow to Christian orthography by capitalizing pronouns that refer to Jesus Christ?

Established churches are not the worst of evils. The Church of England really was, in its ascendancy, a religion of peace, or at least of concord and good will. Through hundreds of years, it never produced a suicide bomber. The Church of Allah, by contrast – but, wait, I must not insult the Establishment, lest the buttresses collapse on top of me.

Apprentice Kagan

Elena Kagan is a topic about which I’m tempted to maintain “rational ignorance”. There’s hardly any prospect that her appointment to the Supreme Court will be rejected. After all, whatever the facts, no one is going to believe that a former dean of Harvard Law School, soon to be the alma mater of a majority of the Court, is anything other than a paragon of legal brilliance.

My own view of HLS was, I must confess, blighted 35 years ago. I was a very fledgling pension lawyer back then, and the Harvard Law Review published an elaborate student note on ERISA’s fiduciary standards. Unfortunately, the editors got the name of the statute wrong. The article is still cited by judges on occasion, largely, I suppose, for the pleasure derived from inserting “[sic]” into “Fiduciary Standards and the Prudent Man Rule Under the Employment [sic] Retirement Income Security Act of 1974”.

The Harvard Law Review would not conceivably misspell “Marbury” or confuse “Brown” with “Braun”. The name of a mere statute was a matter deserving less attention.

Listening to arguments about judicial appointments, one might think that the primary business of the Supreme Court was deciding questions of Constitutional law. Quantitatively, though, the vast majority of cases involve the interpretation of ordinary laws, many of them dauntingly convoluted, many others festooned with decades of glosses by judges of varying perceptiveness writing opinions of varying clarity. There are no grand theoretical debates about how to read these laws. Everyone agrees that they are to be construed in accordance with their “original meaning”. But that task isn’t easily accomplished, and the judge who isn’t familiar with, say, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 won’t find the plethora of helps that are available to construers of the First Amendment.

For all the publicity surrounding a case like President Obama’s bête noir, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, one like Conkright v. Frommert, dealing with a pension or welfare plan participant’s ability to obtain judicial review of the plan administrator’s decisions, has considerably greater practical impact. While first-class Constitutional scholars are desirable Justices, lawyers who can penetrate the complexities of statutory law are essential.

Facility in working with statutes is a skill acquired by long practice. Inexperienced intellect isn’t sufficient, and experience can come only from the practice of law, either as an advocate or as a judge. In that respect, for all her palpable weaknesses as a potential Justice, Harriet Miers, who had spent years working on complex commercial transactions and risen to a high position in her law firm, was a better choice than Elena Kagan, whose actual legal experience is about equivalent to that of a mid-level associate.

From the standpoint of right wing self-interest, narrowly construed, filling a liberal seat with an apprentice is not a bad outcome. Still, it’s probably not the best thing for the administration of justice and sound development of the law. It also illustrates, as if we needed more illustration, how Barack Obama continues to be the Celestine V of American Presidents.

David Cameron’s Short, Dim Future

The Tory-LibDem coalition agreement is grounds for full-blown pessimism about both Britain’s future and the future of the new Prime Minister. David Cameron may be the youngest PM since Pitt fils; he is likely to be the least successful since Frederick, Lord North.

While the specifics of the deal include a number of wretched ideas, such as tripling the tax rate on capital gains, the fatal trap for Mr. Cameron and the Tories lies in the constitutional change that was a sine qua non for Liberal Democrat support:

The parties agree to the establishment of five year fixed-term parliaments. A Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government will put a binding motion before the House of Commons in the first days following this agreement stating that the next general election will be held on the first Thursday of May 2015. Following this motion, legislation will be brought forward to make provision for fixed term parliaments of five years. This legislation will also provide for dissolution if 55% or more of the House votes in favour.

We can see how this will play out: In September, the Labour Party will elect a new leader to replace the toxic Gordon Brown. The LibDems will then be in a position to form a “progressive coalition” with Labour. Labour and the LibDems hold 315 seats between them. A majority (assuming that Sinn Fein follows its tradition by refusing to take up the five seats that it won) will be 323. With adequate bribes to regional parties, a Lab-Lib coalition can oust the Conservatives. Under the prior constitution, Mr. Cameron could scotch that threat by dissolving Parliament and going to the country. He has now given up his right to do so. Hence, he will be faced with a choice between handing power over to the electoral losers or making further concessions to Nick Clegg.

To put it another way, the choice will be between going into the record books as being the shortest-serving Prime Minister whose term was not ended by his death or being PM while Britain goes the way of Greece. Doubtless, he will pick the second. The going the way of Greece is inevitable in either event.

But maybe he’ll succeed in banning chocolate oranges along the way.