Category: Links

Farewell to May 2016…

Farewell to May 2016, hello June 2016.  Times flies.  I guess I’m back from my latest hiatus from triscribe.  Life is funny, in a not very ha-ha kind of way, as I’ve been saying on Facebook, and I’ve been rather introspective – more than usual, if that’s possible – about what is the meaning of life, and why can’t life come with an instruction manual (as I noted on tumblr, to explain a lag in posts).

I’ve also come to the conclusion that I should try to stay away from news headlines, as this has been one of the strangest presidential campaigns.

Anyway, APA Heritage Month is about to close, but APA issues – American issues – don’t go away. See below for APIAVote’s latest PSA for this year’s presidential election (and fits for every election). As Angry Asian Man notes, listen to the Sulus! (and all the other folks who are getting out the vote). (h/t Angry Asian Man’s Facebook page post; Angry Asian Man log post).

 

And between the #StarringJohnCho campaign and the #StarringConstanceWu campaign, I’m just hoping that we keep the dialog going past May about increasing APAs on screen.  I appreciate Amanda Hess’ article in the NY Times on APA actors and actresses’ expressing their concerns of continued invisibility/pursuit for visibility on screen.

Oh, don’t forget behind the screen! I really hope that the Star Trek movie will be at least ok, if not good, if only so that director Justin Lin can keep his own reputation intact. I loved that this Wired article about Lin reminded me that he directed that infamous paintball episode on “Community” (which, if you haven’t seen it, you should; it’s hilarious). With Star Trek about to be a tv show again (well, a streaming one, anyway), Lin ought to get this almost 50 year old franchise going again. And, hey, he and John Cho reunited for the new Star Trek movie; so this has to be good for something!

(disclaimer: I still haven’t seen Lin’s movie “Better Luck Tomorrow,” which has John Cho; go figure).

(and as Angry Asian Man noted, at least with the new Star Trek movie, there’s a movie poster where you don’t have to Photoshop John Cho on it).

Last, but not least, I note that I walked through the Brooklyn War Memorial over at Cadman Plaza Park on Sunday, the day before Memorial Day. I was really moved by the inscription:

THIS MEMORIAL DEDICATED / TO THE HEROIC MEN AND WOMEN OF THE BOROUGH OF BROOKLYN / WHO FOUGHT FOR LIBERTY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1941-1945 / AND ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WHO SUFFERED AND DIED / MAY THEIR SACRIFICE INSPIRE FUTURE GENERATIONS / AND LEAD TO UNIVERSAL PEACE.

Food for thought, during our interesting times.  I wish the pursuit for peace was really happening… keep hope alive.

Farewell to Argle-Bargle, Jiggery Pokery, and all that

The passing of Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court, on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016.  Here’s the in-depth obituary in the NY Times, by Adam Liptak.

Check out the link to NPR’s Nina Totenberg’s remembrance of J. Scalia.   I liked how Totenberg explained some questions of concern – the work of the US Supreme will still continue (that’s a given), but if there’s a 4-4 tie on some cases, there won’t be precedential value for some cases beyond the circuits of the cases’ origins.

Slate’s Jordan Weissmann has some analysis on what might occur with some cases, including the affirmative action case (which is back at the US Supreme Court again).  (I’ll also link Weissmann’s article on how the phrases “jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce” became part of the mythos of Scalia).

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick on how J. Scalia captivated us, even when a whole lot of us may have vehemently disagreed with him.  There really won’t be a US S.Ct. justice like him anymore (probably, anyway).  Lithwick’s remembrance of Scalia is also worth a read.

Personally, I wish we didn’t have to be so partisan right away about who will replace Scalia, since his passing was so sudden and shocking.

But, of course, the debating went into high gear, with the Republicans already decrying the idea of any confirmation of a prospective nominee.  President Obama is still president, and he has a job to do – pick a nominee for the Court.  If the Senate won’t do its job… well, I guess it’s on them.

See here in the NY Times by Carl Hulse and Mark Landler about how the battle lines are drawn.   And, as Lithwick noted, Obama has a lot of prospective nominees; it’s not like there isn’t a whole load of choices, even possibly moderate ones.

The Republicans might very well hit new level of ludicrousness here.   We might want to revisit how this country handled, say, the failed nomination of Abe Fortas under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, or the confirmed nomination of Anthony Kennedy under Ronald Reagan’s administration (under the final year of that administration, at that). But, we really haven’t had anything like this at all in modern history, at least nothing that might last a full year of a vacancy.

(NPR has an overview on the time frames and nominations of yore).

PBS NewsHour also has a nice review on how ugly this could get, without a hope of compromise (at least, nothing on the horizon, anyway).

It’s easy for me to blame the Republicans, from the armchair quarterback position.  It’s not like I’m the one making appointments or confirming them.  I did a search of Scalia in past posts on the triscribe blog, and as I said here in the post on Jeffrey Toobin’s book, The Oath,  about how things could get messy (and that was my commentary about the nomination of Srikanth “Sri” Srinivasan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (later confirmed)): realistically and in a fair-minded way, I think it might even get hard to figure out who to blame in the long run (if, say, the President doesn’t pick a perfectly good candidate to make the Republicans look foolish here).

But, maybe it’s not about blaming anyone; maybe it’s about making sure that things get done and we don’t get stupid?  Or is that wishful thinking on my part?

At least there isn’t total ugliness: let’s remember that J. Scalia and J. Ginsburg had a warm friendship, despite the political and jurisprudential differences.  (I thought this article at vox.com by Dara Lind was interesting about that, in light of how uncivil our world is these days).  People are people and maybe we could look to our better angels and how we can be good to each other.

Oh, well, on a ice cold Valentine’s Day, there is a lot of food for thought.  Stay warm!

Post-Snowmageddon 2016

Some wrap up on the storm!  Last week this time, we were in the tail end of the blizzard.  There are various names for it – Snowpocalypse, Snowmaggedon, etc. I went with Snowmaggedon simply because it was a lot; I did not call it “Jonah” just because I was not giving in to the Weather Channel’s ridiculous naming conventions of winter storms (no, Weather Channel, these storms aren’t like hurricanes).

Of course, because the blizzard happened on a Saturday, it wasn’t a snow day that disrupted the workday. And, I had predicted no snow accumulation at all, a few days before the storm; I was shocked that, by 11am Saturday, 1/23/16, the thing was a blizzard and was going to be less than two feet.  It wasn’t like I did math or anything, of course…

Anyway, I generally thought that the city did a decent job – the travel ban more or less got people off the streets; the MTA didn’t totally go overboard, even though removing bus and removing subways from exterior lines were measures that left everybody but Manhattan (well, more or less) without travel anyway.  More specifically, however, on Facebook, I did gripe  about how the street corners/crosswalks were in awful shape by Sunday evening, 1/24/16, and questioned who was responsible for that, since clearly no one anything.

On the Monday after the blizzard, 1/25/16, Gothamist had a good post on the problem at street corners/crosswalks. I agree that this is a yearly problem, but I ended up not e-mailing my city councilman about it, since the melting happened so fast by Tuesday, 1/26/16 (hitting more than 40 degrees, short of 50 degrees, Fahrenheit can do that easily).  NY Times says that the job of clearing snow to the corners belongs to the property owners adjacent to that sidewalk, but I think that enforcement – in the form of hefty fines – is clearly not happening. Someday we have to figure this out in a better way, if only to ensure public safety. Sigh.

Also, the perennial question appeared to be who will the city leave behind/forget in the process of plowing.  Given that this was a historic blizzard, I was curious, and lo and behold, it looked like Queens, the biggest borough, made the stink about how their neighborhoods didn’t get plowed (Staten Island came awfully lose, when I was watching the news late that Sunday night). I’m not going to belittle how Queens got buried, but considering how every mayor since John Lindsay has tried so hard to save Queens from snow, I do wonder why we haven’t figured out how to do better by now with Queens.

Bob Hardt over at NY1’s Inside City Hall’s blog, raised the point in his post about the plowing that, the city did a decent job and unfortunately, someone is going to be the last plowed, but the city ought to review and revise the plowing plan.

Then, the NY TImes covered how the city had a new plowing plan and that it clearly didn’t do that great a job for Queens. Apparently, after the December 2010 – day after Christmas mess which stranded a lot of us in south Brooklyn and the rest of the outerboroughs – Sanitation modified the usual plowing of primary, secondary, and tertiary streets, and used a so-called two level process, critical and sector. I thought the NY Times article was interesting for explaining the process, but didn’t quite fully explain what happened.

Frankly, I had no idea that Sanitation wasn’t doing their usual primary, secondary, and tertiary plowing during the blizzard. Then again, it sounds like a lot of finger pointing going on, so the city and the media might actually want to thoroughly investigate what happened and what might be a better system, so we don’t ended up leaving people buried and stranded again.

My theory – which is hardly based on any real scientific research on my part, of course – is that we’ll have more weird, wacky storms with the climate instability.  We might want to learn to adapt somehow, but it sure is going to cost us…

Anyway, if we’re lucky, we might not see more snow for awhile yet? And, the snow was a generally better distraction compared to a lot of other bad news in the world.