As most of you have probably heard by now, Harry Potter’s mentor Dumbledore is gay. What surprised me reading discussions of this online was to hear several people say that Rowling shouldn’t have discussed this at all—not because of the homosexuality but because authors aren’t supposed to say anything at all about their characters outside the books. One writer said he’d be just as annoyed if Rowling had said that Dumbledore were Catholic.
As one columnist put it, once a book is written, the characters belong to the readers, and we should be free to decide for ourselves what the characters were like offstage, whether the happy ending lasted, what Harry and Hermione did later in life. Rowling, by stating her personal opinion on all this, has crossed some sacred line that should have been an impenetrable barrier.
OK, I’m all in favor of speculating about fictional characters. As a lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan, I love reading the fan debates over all that Doyle never said: Did Holmes attend Oxford or Cambridge? How many times did Watson marry? Did Holmes have a love affair with beautiful “adventuress” Irene Adler?
Nevertheless, I’m not the least offended by Doyle having said in the introduction to “The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes” that Holmes retired after World War I and became a Sussex beekeeper.
Nor am I bothered by Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan of Cimmeria) filling in some of the gaps in Conan’s life in a letter he wrote to a friend.
And if I ever have a novel published (no luck so far, but I’m still in there pitching), I’ll certainly have no qualms saying what I think happened after the end.
I think this has more to do with the incredible attachment so many people have to Harry and his friends than any transgression by Rowling.

Back during the Bush administration’s marketing of the Iraq war, a recurring argument was that Saddam was the new Hitler. Ignoring his terrifying threat to world peace, Bush said in one 2002 speech, would repeat the mistake Europe made when it tried to appease the Fuhrer by allowing him to conquer just a little bit of Europe.
As it turned out of course, Saddam, loathsome and evil though he was, was no Hitler, just one more malevolent despot not much different than the tyrants in Myanmar or the former Yugoslavia and about as big a threat.
Now we have Norman Podhoretz, Rudy Giulani’s foreign policy adviser, claiming that it’s Iran that represents the Nazi threat and that countries and parties that don’t think we should invade are “comparable to the denial in the early ’30s of the intentions of Hitler that led to what Churchill called an unnecessary war involving millions and millions of deaths that might have been averted if the West had acted early enough.”
In the first place, Podhoretz, like his fellow warmongers, was wrong across the board about the threat Saddam posed, about how brilliantly the occupation was going and pretty much everything. I’m strangely disinclined to believe he’s become any smarter.
In the second place, the assumption that the only alternative to World War II and the Holocaust was regime change is just wrong. Everything I’ve read about the rise of the Nazis points out how big a role the end of World War I played: The other European nations insisted on levying crushing reparations and other restrictions on the post-war German government, leaving it with an unstable economy and a sense of persecution, both of which fed into the growth of the Nazis.
Maybe a better draft of the Treaty of Versailles would have left Germany some sort of stable government and Hitler would have remained a mediocre painter all his life. Maybe not. But Podhoretz’ enthusiasm for another war doesn’t mean that’s the best solution to our problems with Iran.

I’m currently working through an informative Washington Post series from earlier this month on the history of IEDs in Iraq and the military countermeasures. While obviously grim, it’s fascinating to learn how much has been going on on both sides. For example, when convoys began pulling off the road at the sight of suspicious objects, insurgents began planting dummy bombs, then putting the real explosives where they guessed the trucks would park.
I don’t have the link handy, but it’s available on line, and worth looking for.

In some circles, this is the new miracle cure for what ails our schools: Teach boys and girls separately and they’ll do better.
The argument that boys and girls can concentrate more on school if they’re not distracted by each other (whether in the form of crushes or teasing) makes some sense. But as the Boston Globe pointed out Sunday, a number of schools are redesigning their curriculum around much more debatable ideas: That females are genetically programmed to talk three times as much as males, that girls can’t grasp abstract math (and so need to learn numbers by doing things like counting flower petals), or that boys are so inherently unruly and wild they have to be handled completely differently from girls, hence the need for separate classes.
This last one particularly struck me, because it’s one right-wing pundits cite a lot to explain why boys are falling behind girls in school (allegedly, that is—one study found that if you eliminate poverty and race as factors, the difference is minimal): School is inherently antiboy. Boys want to run wild, play in the mud, have adventures and don’t want to sit school and obey a bunch of stupid rules (for which reason some theorists think boys should learn reading from adventure stories while girls should learn from something suitably sweet and cute).
Even assuming this is both true and gender specific (I’m not sure girls are any more enthusiastic about sitting still in class), how could it possibly explain a recent change in boys’ performance? From time immemorial, school has been about sitting still and obeying the rules and doing sums instead of playing: Were boys somehow less wild and playful a century ago?

A couple of interesting odds and ends:
•AP reported last week that airplane pilots surveyed by NASA reported twice as many bird strikes, near-collisions and runway incursions as government statistics usually credit. The agency has refused to divulge the results and directed the contractor who made the research to purge the information from its computers.
According to NASA official Thomas Luedtke, if word of the higher risk got out “it could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey.”
•A Miami Herald article on using cameras to photograph drivers running red lights found that the accident rate at the intersections goes up—12 percent in a Virginia study—when the cameras go in. Why? Because drivers are more likely to brake at the last minute, just to be safe, which increases rear-end collisions, and wiping out the gains made by drivers not running the lights.
Another problem is that cities that use the technology can’t install the cameras on intersections on state roads, which are usually some of the worst problems.

American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “a foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of inferior minds.” Unfortunately, Republican pundits and politicians have proven that inconsistency is just as big a problem for inferior minds.
Consider: Numberous Republicans have spent the past five years screaming that anyone who questions Bush’s leadership or decisions is “emboldening” the terrorists. Yet when Bush and Cheney last year started saying that a Democratic-controlled Congress wouldn’t have the stomach to keep fighting in Iraq, nobody on the Republican side objected that Bush was emboldening the insurgents and encouraging them to keep fighting (”The president said it himself—now that the Democrats are in power, we just have to fight until they withdraw! Victory is in our grasp!”).
Then we have Michael Ledeen, a conservative pundit who not only endorsed the Iraq invasion, but also wants us to attack Iran, which he stated recently “declared war on us in 1979 and has been waging it ever since.”
Trouble is, Ledeen was an active participant in the Iran-Contra affair in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to the Iranian government in return for their releasing some hostages. As blogger Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, if Ledeen seriously believes Iran was at war with us during the Reagan era, doesn’t selling them arms mean he—along with Oliver North and Reagan himself—committed treason?
I look forward to hearing the neocons who favor an attack on Iran denounce Ledeen as they denounce all other traitors, and casting him out from their number. After all, it’s not like such fine, honorable, principled people would use charges of treason as an insincere way to smear their political opponents while giving their allies a free pass, is it?

A recent AP article reports that if a dirty bomb—one designed to spread radioactive contamination—went off in a major city exposing 100,000 people to radioactive material, it would take four years to test everyone because there are so few laboratories qualified to do so, and the available tests cover only six out of 13 of the isotopes that might be used.
Excuse me, but wasn’t one of the main reasons for invading Iraq that the White House was worried about nuclear terrorism? And that was five years ago; shouldn’t practical preparations for dealing with that worst-case scenario have been in place by now?
As Rep. Brad Miller (D, NC) told AP, it would be nice to think that since 9/11 “our government had smart people lying awake at 3 o’clock in the morning, trying to think through everything that terrorists could be dreaming of, every kind of attack they could be dreaming of, and trying to think of ways to prevent it and to respond to it if it does happen.”
Apparently they weren’t.

Apparently FEMA has found a new way to make press conferences go smoothly: Use fake reporters.
Last week, FEMA gave reporters 15 minutes notice that the agency was holding a press conference on the California wildfires. No reporters made it to the conference, but not a problem: FEMA had PR staffers sit in the meeting room and ask questions of one of their own bosses, but presented it on TV as a real press conference with real reporters.

Is waterboarding torture? According to Giulani this week, “it depends on how it’s done, it depends on the circumstances, it depends on who does it.”
Meaning, I presume, that if an American soldier commits torture, it’s not really torture. I can’t think of any other way to interpret the words.
Quite simply, that’s wrong. Torture is torture, no matter whether its Americans or Iraqis who do it, and no matter how desperate the situation.
There was a time, in my younger and more naive days, that I thought maybe torture could be justified in the classic ticking-bomb situation: Minutes to go, hundreds of lives on the line, the evil killer won’t talk!
The trouble is, once you start down that road, it never stops. Israel’s Mossad originally allowed torture for that sort of scenario, but it soon downgraded to “Well, this guy is a suspected terrorist, and we know there’s some sort of bombing being planned, so let’s torture him just in case he knows something.” It’s the reason an Israeli judge eventually banned the use of torture.
The same thing happened when the French fought the Algerian militants trying to drive the French colonialists out of the country.
It’s happened at least a few times in the Iraq war: I’ve read accounts by security contractors, reporters and others of prisoners everyone suspected were innocent being brutalized just the same.
It’s a slippery slope and once we start on it, we’ll slip. For example, one commenter on the “captain’s quarters” blog said recently that not only would he torture a terrorist in the ticking bomb situation, he’d torture and kill the terrorists’ kids if that’s what it took to save lives (the guy said he’d find the act horrifying, but he’d do it). Isn’t torturing children–kids who aren’t guilty of anything–the sort of thing we condemn terrorists for doing?
I’ve read statements by plenty fo people, both regular folks and pundits, who don’t give two figs if our soldiers commit torture. For them, the use of torture is totally different from when tyrants and dictators do it: We’re the good guys, God’s on our side, we can’t possibly be doing anything evil, so it can’t really be torture.
Yes, it can. An American judge once said that the torturer “is the enemy of all mankind.” He was right.

Some of you may remember that at the end of August, a B-52 supposedly carrying conventional-warhead cruise missiles was, instead, equipped with six nuclear-tipped missiles and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana. It was more than a day before anyone discovered the mistake.
The Associated Press reported last Friday that the military investigation found that among other problems, the crews loading the missiles had ignored the procedures for tracking which missiles are loaded with what in favor of their own informal, less complicated system.
As a result of the investigation, the 5th Bomb Wing has been decertified from its wartime mission, and four officers, including the wing commander, have been relieved of their commands.
I agree with veteran turned military writer Phillip Carter that the punishment, while harsh, is fair, given that we’re dealing with nuclear weapons here. The fact that nothing bad actually happened doesn’t make mixing up nuclear and non-nuclear weaponry acceptable;it’s the kind of situation where a large margin for error is desirable.
More generally, this shows the time-honored problem of making sure that sensible policy, no matter what it is, will actually be carried out by the people on the front lines. No matter how good the rules and guidelines are, it’s next to impossible to prevent someone from overriding them.
The Canadian blogger Duncan Black told a story about arriving at a border point with a visa and all his other paperwork ready for a job in the US. The border guard refused him entry because a letter from Atrios’ employer had a misspelling in it: It must be a forgery! Black simply drove to the nearest checkpoint and passed through without trouble.
Or there’s the account of a nuclear power plant inspector who found one of the alarms in the plant he was looking over had been taped up so it wouldn’t work. A plant employee explained that it kept going off all the time, which annoyed everyone, so they deactivated it.
I can think of plenty of other stories, but why belabor the point? Perhaps the trouble is, we’re all sure we can tell whether a rule makes sense or not, whether it’s fair or not: If we don’t want to follow procedure, it’s easy to tell ourselves it’s the procedure that’s flawed, not our judgment.
Likewise, most of us are confident that even if a rule is good in general, we, our family or our friends have a good reason for an exemption: Our situation is special. We’re not like all those evil people who have to be kept from doing wrong (or like the little people who don’t deserve the special treatment we’re entitled to).
Of course, it doesn’t help that bureaucracy, whether government or corporate, often does pass down rules that are detached from reality. For example, a bookstore where I used to work was informed that the company would supply us with all the books we’d need for the Christmas season—even though that was more than the store could actually hold. Trust me, having the books on hand but piled into two dozen boxes in the back room doesn’t make them available to the customers.
When you deal with that sort of crap (and many of us do), it’s natural to treat rules with suspicion and wonder whether you really need to follow every safety protocol and keep every allegedly vital record, or whether anyone would be hurt if you let your brother-in-law fudge things.
Sometimes, however, it is important to follow the rules. Handling atomic weaponry is one of those times.