No freedom to travel for Muslims

Are we really willing to be the sort of country that exiles people from their homes and won't tell them why? Apparently we are, if those people are Muslims. (More here.)

This video clip [3:22] introduces us to two U.S. Muslims recently marooned. Ayman Latiff, a disabled military veteran, is stuck in Egypt, told he is on a "no fly list." Back home, Adama Bah explains no one will tell folks unlucky enough to be banned what they did to get listed or how to get off. She wistfully tries to convey what is like to be unable to board an airplane for work or leisure.



In response to a developing pattern of such strandings, the Muslim civil rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has issued a "travel advisory."

In the past few months, CAIR has received a number of reports of American Muslims stranded overseas when they are placed on the government's no-fly list. Those barred from returning to the United States report being denied proper legal representation, being subjected to FBI pressure tactics to give up the constitutionally-guaranteed right to remain silent, having their passports confiscated without due process, and being pressured to become informants for the FBI.

These individuals tell CAIR they have not been told why they were placed on the no-fly list or informed how to remove their names from the list. ...

FBI agents have reportedly told a number of individuals that they face being stranded outside the United States longer, or forever, unless they give up their rights to legal representation or to refuse interrogations and polygraph tests. But even those who submitted to interrogations without an attorney or to the "lie detector" tests remain stranded.

The ACLU is representing 10 plaintiffs who have had this experience -- and all of us who might somehow run afoul of arbitrary government decisions.

A quiz for beer lovers

Can you identify what country this imported beer comes from? Light, but tasty and available in the San Francisco Mission district. Leave answers in the comments. (If you were with me, answering is cheating!)

Light blogging today. I'm busy.

UPDATE: Congrats to LarryE who figured this one out. His answer is in comments.

Two ideas to help the California budget impasse

The annual failure of the California state government to pass a budget on time is underway in Sacramento. The Governator is posturing futilely. The Republican minority is refusing to pass anything, refusing to tax people who have money to pay their fair share for the good of the community.

Since all this happens every year, only those persons whose lives are immediately being destroyed by state government dysfunction are paying any attention. A partial fix is in the works if we want it: Prop. 25, which will be on the November ballot. It would allow a budget to be passed by a majority, though still not allow taxes to be increased by majority vote. It's a start.

Here's an idea the State could implement right now to help bring the budget into balance from James Clark, field organizer for the ACLU of Southern California:

California spends vast amounts of money prosecuting death penalty cases and supporting death row. To avoid executing an innocent person, the death penalty process is long, complicated, and expensive. Each prosecution seeking death costs approximately $1.1 million more than a trial seeking permanent imprisonment, and with more than 700 inmates, California's death row is by far the largest and most costly in the nation. In total, California's death penalty system costs taxpayers $137 million per year.

Contrast that with just $11 million per year if we replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment. Top that off with $400 million saved if we don't build a new death row, needed because the existing one is so old and overcrowded.

Today, if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger were to convert the sentences of all those on death row to permanent imprisonment, the state would save $1 billion over the next five years without releasing a single prisoner.

My emphasis.



Besides the savings ... ending the death penalty is simply the right thing to do.

Friday critter blogging: Only some of them sheep-faced

At the annual Estes Park Wool Market, there are several animal barns where the critters who supply all that lovely spin-able fiber are displayed for a few days.


Freshly shorn paco-vicunas, a breed of alpaca that grows super-fine fiber more like the wild Andean vicuna, look pretty silly.


Their eyes seem mournful.


"Ambrosia" here in her full size glory.


Next door there were sheep pens -- note the fleece is still on the sheep.


In addition to very blue eyes, the Jacobs sheep has four horns ...


... while this meditative ram got by with just two. It looks like plenty.

I suspect I had a better time checking out the animals than they did being exhibited.

Now I know why I run

I'm making more Noggin! No, really.

Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It's BMP [bone-morphogenetic protein] that acts as the soporific, says Dr. Jack Kessler, the chairman of neurology at Northwestern and senior author of many of the recent studies. ...

But exercise countermands some of the numbing effects of BMP, Dr. Kessler says. In work at his lab, mice given access to running wheels had about 50 percent less BMP-related brain activity within a week. They also showed a notable increase in Noggin, a beautifully named brain protein that acts as a BMP antagonist.

The more Noggin in your brain, the less BMP activity exists and the more stem cell divisions and neurogenesis you experience. Mice at Northwestern whose brains were infused directly with large doses of Noggin became, Dr. Kessler says, “little mouse geniuses, if there is such a thing.” They aced the mazes and other tests.

New York Times "Well" blog

And here I thought my running was for vanity and a striving after wind.

Yes, those beautiful young things running above were photographed (by me) in New York's Central Park. I don't look nearly that efficient as I plod along. But I get there.

This goes for racism too ...

Here’s an easy rule for any manager to live by: If you haven’t considered the societal forces and ingrained prejudices that may contribute to gender disparities in your hiring practices, your hiring practices are probably sexist.

And if you respond to suggestions that your hiring practices may be sexist with a letter signed by all the women on your staff dismissing these claims out of hand, then your hiring practices are almost certainly sexist. That, or men are just better than women.

Substitute "race" for "gender," "racist" for "sexist" and "blacks" for "women" -- and you can notice you are asserting that white (men) are just better than black and brown people. It happens -- a lot.

The quote is from an Amanda Hess column in the Washington City Paper explicating the flap over whether Jon Stewart's employment practices at The Daily Show are sexist.

Budget short takes: Choosing disability over fruitless job seeking

At a Wall Street Journal economics blog, Sara Murray points out

...for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, disability rolls increase anywhere from 2% to 7%. Some studies show that effect grows larger in the following two years. Those increases, if they prove true again in this recession, could increase the strain on an already stressed disability system.

I know two people who would be classified as simply "unemployed" in the current recession if they hadn't decided that it was worth the extreme hassles involved in winning a long term disability status that pays them something out of Social Security.

I'm not implying that they aren't disabled; working a full time job would be a very difficult stretch for either of them. But if job prospects had seemed more promising, they might have kept looking. Knowing that we are in such deep recession, they opted to use what energy they had to get through the process to collect disability benefits (we do after all pay for them via Social Security taxes.)

H/t Ezra Klein.

How far has the oil spread in the Gulf now?

This latest map is available from the government here. It's extremely inclusive of a variety of data. Despite its detailed character I find the New York Times map tell me more about where the oil is and how it has spread over time.

Today's oil atrocity story was a Washington Post report that chronicled the extent of BP's inability to deliver what it promised regulators when they approved the well:

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day. ...

In a March report that was not questioned by federal officials, BP said it had the capacity to skim and remove 491,721 barrels of oil each day in the event of a major spill.

As of Monday, with about 2 million barrels released into the gulf, the skimming operations that were touted as key to preventing environmental disaster have averaged less than 900 barrels a day.

My emphasis.

Meanwhile, at Jeff Master's hurricane blog, that seasoned observer of Gulf weather patterns has pointed out what we're in for this summer.

I hope [Hurricane] Alex will give the officials in charge of the BP oil disaster a bit of a wake up call. We've been told that five days are required to shut down operations in the event of tropical storm force winds are forecast for the clean-up region.

It is very unrealistic to expect a five day warning, since the average track error in a 5-day forecast is about 300 miles. Furthermore, we have little skill forecasting the formation of tropical storms, and it is often the case that a tropical storm forms just a 1-day journey from the Deepwater Horizon blowout location.

If we examine the incidence of tropical storm force winds in that region over the past five years, I suspect that they were successfully predicted five days in advance perhaps 30 percent of the time.

It's going to be a tough season until/unless BP gets this thing plugged.

Wars stoke summer of discontent

Over the weekend, one of our Establishment pundits, Fareed Zararia, the editor of Newsweek's international editions and CNN host, asked a sensible question about the Afghanistan war:

"If Al Qaeda is down to a hundred men there at the most," Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war?"

Noting that there were more than a hundred deaths among NATO soldiers last month and that the war is estimated to cost the US more than $100 billion this year alone, Zararia wondered again,"Why are we fighting this major war against the Taliban? ... If al-Qaeda itself is so weak, why are we fighting against its allies so ferociously?"

"The whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate," Zakaria remarked, "a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem. "

Raw Story

The comments are almost more interesting than the question:

We let America get attacked and we let the Attackers get away. That's why we're fighting in Afghanistan. Waving our meaningless gestures of anger and retaliation. Because you don't attack America and get away with it. ...

It's all about the money . War is a racket . A hand-full of Cheney types are making tons of money. ...

...Because some people are getting rich from it, you dumb fuck.

One commenter thinks Obama is a "murderous psychopath," to which someone responds: "And Bush before him."

Though I almost certainly differ on a lot of details with Zakaria and all these commenters, the matter is clear: this country has no idea, and certainly no agreement, on why we are getting people -- Afghans, NATO allies, and U.S. troops -- killed in Afghanistan. That fact ought to be enough for a democratic leader (small "d") to draw the conclusion that it is time to end the losses.

James Carroll at the Boston Globe recently asked questions that points to one factor in our current, incoherent, angry moment:

A psycho-medical diagnosis -- post-traumatic stress syndrome -- has gained legitimacy for individuals, but what about whole societies? Can war’s dire and lingering effects on war-waging nations be measured? Can the stories of war be told, that is, to include aftermath wounds to society that, while undiagnosed, are as related to civic responsibility for state violence as one veteran’s recurring nightmare is to a morally ambiguous firefight? The battle zones of Fallujah and Kandahar are far away, but how do their traumas stamp Philadelphia and Kansas City -- this year and a decade from now?

The existence of a professional ("all volunteer") army that has carried pretty much all the burden fighting the empire's continuous faraway wars makes it easy to imagine that their horrors have not imprinted all of us. But is that true?

Yes, the Great Recession is making us (appropriately) cranky. Jobs, jobs, jobs would help. And BP's oil poisoning the Gulf of Mexico is (appropriately) revealing frightening limits to what our technology can do for us.

But a constant background of meaningless wars, of atrocious deaths and unanswered questions, is certainly stoking this summer of discontent.

About the photo: An American medic in the 82nd Airborne Combat Aviation Brigade gives CPR to a grievously wounded unidentified Afghan National Army soldier (ANA) in a Medivac helicopter November 1, 2009 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. The soldier, who later died of his injuries, had stepped on a land mine planted by insurgents severely wounding his legs. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images) We don't usually look at these scenes.

Designing for generosity

[13:05] I hate talking heads and PowerPoint as much as the next person, but this is worth thinking about.

Generosity and social cohesion can drive outcomes instead of fear and sanctions. But how to get there at a large scale? There are an awful lot of us trying to share an overburdened planet. This will demand imagination. Take a look.

H/t Andrew Sullivan.

A reminder

Some things are more important than our national holiday (lots of things actually). You can see one of them in this BBC video that features Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock demonstrating how excess greenhouse gases let loose by human activity -- like CO2 from our burning of oil and other fossil fuels -- are turning up the temperatures on the planet. Only 2:20 minutes.

We humans and the rest of contemporary creatures didn't evolve to live in a much hotter world. Trouble ahead of we can't kick the habit.

H/t Climate Progress.

A few more Independence Day thoughts

Ask stupid questions, you can guarantee you'll get stupid answers. The Pew Research Center polled this question:

How proud are you to be an American?

WTF? What does that mean? One can take pride in something one achieves through hard work and discipline. Being "an American" is, for almost all of us, a happy accident. (A few people went through hell and immigration snafus to get here; they might be proud of their ingenuity in circumventing obstacles.) We won the human lottery and find ourselves in the richest, if not the sanest or safest, country on earth.

Eighty-three percent of us are "proud" of this. The holdouts, not surprisingly, are younger and browner than the enthusiastic majority.

I could not possibly have answered anything but "Don't Know." The inquiry is meaningless on its face. ***Meanwhile a friend has sent along some thoughts she is going to use in an Independence Day sermon. I like them:

On this day, I wish independence for all -- that no one would have to stay in an abusive relationship because they cannot afford to be out of it; that all people around the world would be free of oppression-- political, economic, social; that every person could break free from addiction or other stumbling blocks that keep us from being whole and creative; that every child would have the circumstances that allow her or him to grow up with a strong will, a kind heart, and an indomitable spirit.

Church, State, Episcopalians and liberty for all

When I first reestablished a membership in a church about 10 years ago, one of the obstacles to my whole-hearted commitment to the community was its custom of hanging a monster American flag in the side aisle at this season. When I had gotten to know the gentleman (a volunteer, not a clergy person) who appeared to have been in charge of everything that had to do with appearances for the last 50 years, I ribbed him about it: "Hey -- I usually want to burn those things ..."

He replied a little huffily: "Well, a lot of us are veterans!"

I should add that he didn't seem to hold our differences against me. Like most people in our little parish, he'd seen too much to hold a grudge about a difference like this.

Later the parish briefly had a new priest who I mostly thought was entirely wrong for the place, but he did one good thing: he got rid of the flag display custom. Endless, senseless wars have, I think, dampened any enthusiasm for bringing it back.

The little branch of Christendom I'm affiliated with, the Episcopal Church, can easily get a little muddled about its relation to the state. After all, it is the descendant of the official, established, Church of England and came into being after the U.S. Revolution as the local replacement. In much of the country for the first hundred years or so of U.S. history, it was the church of the ruling class despite the Constitutional wall of separation between church and state. More U.S. Presidents (11) have been Episcopalians than anything else (Presbyterians come in next with 10). We produced some good ones like Washington and FDR and also our share of duds like Chester Arthur and Gerald Ford. Nowadays we're only around 2 percent of the population, but this church used to be at the center of political life.

Given this history, it is not surprising that week in and week out, in various words, we pray for the President (I love pronouncing the name "Barack" [Mr. Blessed] in this context) and "all in authority." Can't hurt. Might help. We also pray for justice and peace, which I like to think improves the odds.

Another peculiarity that comes from the history of close identification with the U.S. state is that we have a prescribed prayer for Independence Day, for July 4. Since this only occasionally falls on a Sunday, it doesn't come up for use very often. In fact I wouldn't have thought of it if I hadn't read that the Honorable Byron Rushing, a Massachusetts State Representative and also a highly respected Episcopal layman has reminded us that

... many of us do not consider the words -- "the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us" -- in the Independence Day collect [prayer] ... to be accurate. Look around your congregations and reflect if all the ancestors of the "us" got their liberty then.

There was a lot of liberating left to do when this Church set down its roots. It took almost 100 years to end slavery. And actually there's a lot of liberating still do, in the nation and the world. Rushing suggests another prayer for the day which asks

... Give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance ...

Yup -- when you are a nuclear armed super power, forbearance seems like a good idea.

We're not likely to get into any of this heavy stuff at church today. We're having a barbecue and hoping the San Francisco fog will clear, partying as we send a loved clerical leader on to whatever comes next for him. Independence Day celebrates summer this year. I'll take it.

Photo of Byron Rushing at General Convention, 2009.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Don't drain Nevada's Snake Valley!

As we drove across the border from Utah into Nevada on Route 50 a couple of weeks ago, we were confronted by this:


Because friends and co-workers wrote a report on Nevada water issues back in 2006, I recognized what this might be about.

During the housing boom, Las Vegas (and Reno to some extent) were epicenters of rapid construction and sprawl. All those new people needed water.

That was not an easy problem to solve: Nevada and neighboring Utah are mostly desert. Developers sought to extract as much water as they could from the public and private lands of the Great Basin, the broad expanse of land between the Sierras and the Great Salt Lake. Water agencies had an interest in satisfying the developers. The people who live where the water was supposed to come from were resolutely opposed to letting it go, contending that any lowering of the water table would destroy their way of life. Hence the bucket.


That's a view of the arid Great Basin from a shoulder of adjacent Wheeler Peak.

Water laws in the West are complex and a perennial source of conflict. Without going into the ins and outs of all this, suffice to say that the local people went to court. So far (with an assist from the recession), they have fought off the water grab, winning at least a delay.


In the tiny town of Baker, there was an information display, explaining residents' campaign to keep their town viable.


Folks want to make sure that everyone who goes by knows what the fuss is about.


The store in Baker can supply your "water grab" bumper stickers for all occasions. These folks aren't about to let the Snake Valley be sucked dry. They explain their point of view:

Encompassing more than 500 square miles in the Great Basin desert, Snake Valley is over 100 miles long and contains huge mountains, deep canyons, rolling foothills, flat playas, spectacular caves, and even marshes in the middle of the Great Basin desert. Snake Valley straddles the Utah-Nevada border, with US Highways 6 & 50 bisecting it.

Located five hours from Las Vegas, four hours from Salt Lake City, and seven hours from Reno, it would seem that Snake Valley is far enough away from the beaten path that it can continue as a secluded, peaceful place. ...

The people who live in Snake Valley live modest lives, balancing modern amenities with limited natural resources. The pipeline proposal would greatly upset the natural ecosystems, which rely heavily on the scarce water bodies found in the valley. Even a small drop in the water table can stop springs from flowing, kill off plants, and harm wildlife. ...

We loved Snake Valley too and hope to go back to hike in Great Basin National Park.

No immigration reform any time soon

President Obama spoke on immigration reform Thursday. I actually watched the speech. I'm sure that despite promotional emails from -- take your choice: Organizing for America/the DNC/some organ of the fall Democratic campaign -- very few people paid any attention.

As usual, the President demonstrated that he actually understood the complex of issues. That's one of the reasons I find him so disappointing: since he does know what is going on, why does he show so little urgency about fixing it? The peroration was borrowed from Emma Lazarus' poem inscribed on the Statute of Liberty. (I kid you not.) Hard to believe his speechwriters couldn't come up with something slightly more novel.

He blamed Republicans for walking out on reform. This is true.

So why should any Republicans help fix a system that Obama called "broken," a mess of "patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions"? The previously camouflaged horde of racist toads that have crawled out of hiding as Tea Partiers, Minute Men, and their Arizona friends make it doubtful that hardly any Latino will vote Republican for many decades. So why would the GOP enfranchise more such hostile voters?

Of course Latinos may not vote for foot dragging Dems either, but historically they have come around, despite the Donkey Party's lukewarm overtures.

According to population estimates from the Census, by the year 2050,

...less than 53 percent [of U.S. residents will] be non-Hispanic White; 16 percent would be Black; 23 percent would be Hispanic origin; 10 percent would be Asian and Pacific Islander; and about 1 percent would be American Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut.

More from the Census:

Almost one-third of the current population growth is caused by net immigration. By 2000, the Nation's population is projected to be 8 million larger than it would have been if there were no net immigration after July 1, 1992. By 2050, this difference would increase to 82 million. In fact, about 86 percent of the population growth during the year 2050 may be due to the effects of post-1992 net immigration.

That's both legal and undocumented immigration, I think. Those people are mostly simply not going to vote for Republicans.

In fact, the Republicans' only hope is probably repealing the 14th Amendment -- the one that says that people born in the United States are US citizens. Their Senate candidate in Kentucky, Rand Paul, is on the case.

"Many argue that these children that are born to illegal aliens are really still under the jurisdiction of the Mexican government," Paul said in an interview earlier this week with Right Wing News. "I think we need to fight that out in the courts. If we lose, then I think we should amend the Constitution because I don't think the 14th amendment was meant to apply to illegal aliens. It was meant to apply to the children of slaves."

I know people who would argue that low wage workers without papers are modern slaves. Not quite, I think, but way too close.

I don't think that Republicans will succeed in repeal, but we can never say never. Look for some of them to take a serious run at this.

What can break the immigration impasse? Hard to see. Economic prosperity would help; people who are already here could be less anxious about holding on to what we have. The signs aren't good for that anytime soon.

Eventually, the children of recent immigrants will be a far greater portion of the electorate -- but will divisions among them keep them from acting as a bloc, keep all pushing in the same direction? Possibly they'll manage that on immigration reform, but there is nothing automatic about progress that requires a coalition.

As in California in the 1990s, working for national immigration reform needs to involve 1) arousing the sleeping giant and getting new citizens voting as rapidly as possible and 2) building broad coalitions because there is no demographic segment that can do this alone, even though the proportion of people much closer to the immigrant experience will rise rapidly.

Full disclosure: I worked most of the decade of the 1990s in California politics and organizing on projects to help Californians of color overcome the nativism and racism that dominated the state's elections in that time. The national picture looks a lot like what we confronted in 1994 here.

Friday Critter Blogging: Dogs don't like oil much either

It wasn't only the humans who lay on the beach to say Hands across the Sands/NO OIL! last Saturday. About 10 percent of the humans gathered on Ocean Beach seemed to have brought along their canine friends.


Some consultation happened between friends deciding whether to take part.


It was cold -- furry friends can help.


The sand itself was pretty warm though, if you were close to the ground.


Still it wasn't good manners to try to burrow into it.


After the first fly-over, we all moved to line up along the water's edge.


This being linked together stuff was more intuitive for some than for others.


You can see the rest of Montgomery's pictures here.

Health care reform: Read all about it!

The Health Care.gov website mandated by the new "Affordable Care Act" is up -- and it is worth poking around, even though it will be several years before much of the reform becomes operational. It's a clean, clear, understandable site.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to see what it would recommend that I could do if it were not for the happy reality that I get health insurance through my partner's employer's group (she has a good union!)

As a healthy individual, 25-64, living in San Francisco, the site provided a long list of possible policies -- but it prefaced the list with the following, very telling, warnings:




I hate to think what happens to people who don't have the option I have.

Kagan owns the Senators

The Senate confirmation hearings on Solicitor General Elana Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court apparently aren't all that interesting, as many had predicted. TPM reported the press seats were "near deserted" on Day Three. She's qualified; she has no written record to pick apart; and nobody knows what sort of Justice she'll make, even her old friends.

But I learned something: she's charming in a delightful New York, Jewish, butchy femme sort of way. This clip has some highlights that will make you laugh (sorry about the ad that introduces it, but wait it out for the good stuff.)



Somewhere along the line this not-conventionally-attractive woman figured out how to adopt this persona to jump around the obstacles that would have been so much lower if she'd been blonde, or Christian, or even just a thin white guy. It's impressive -- and a little scary. Women who are "qualified" still have to be just a little more extraordinary, I think.

I sure hope I don't spend the next 20 years hating this woman.

A new no fly list lawsuit

Once upon a time, nearly eight years ago (!) around the dawn of the post 9/11 U.S. security-theater state, my partner and I had a minor brush with the "no-fly list." After airline personnel told us we were on such a list and called in cops who detained us very briefly, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took our case to court to try to find out how such lists were assembled, who was responsible, why we were on the list, and how harmless people could get off the list. We were "good plaintiffs" -- white, female, self-confident, articulate and cooperative. The case limped along for years; at one point our lawyer turned up on a list. After much stalling by the feds and several rebukes from the judge, we got some information about the list though nothing very detailed -- and the ACLU was awarded court costs.

So it is with interest that I read today that the ACLU had brought a far more significant lawsuit on behalf of 10 U.S. citizens and legal residents who are genuinely burdened by the current application of a no-fly list. The way it works is that these folks go the airport and are told no way, no how, no circumstances, no warning, no judicial process will they be allowed to board an airplane. This often happens to them when they are in another country, effectively barring them from coming home.

The ACLU explains its lawsuit:

Today, the U.S. government's No Fly List consists of thousands of people who have been barred altogether from commercial air travel, resulting in a vast and growing list of individuals whom the government deems too dangerous to fly, but are too harmless to arrest. To deprive people fundamental rights without any notice or opportunity to object is unfair, unconstitutional, and un-American.

Meet the some of the plaintiffs:





It does sadly appear likely that a common characteristic of these people is that they are Muslims.

Naturally the Obama administration was spooked by learning that its airline security measures missed the underwear bomber last Christmas. But covering the butts of failed "intelligence" hacks can't be enough reason to prevent citizens and lawful residents from traveling without any form of due process. That's "big government" over-reach of a sort that liberals and conservatives should both repudiate.

If you can, consider contributing to the ACLU.

Enjoying English

There could be no more satisfying way to read The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language than listening to it as an audiobook -- and that's what we did while driving across a good bit of the U.S. west on our recent vacation roadtrip.

Melvin Bragg loves our language in all its variety. He delightedly chronicles its evolution. Though English does not boast the largest number of native speakers in the world (that would be Mandarin Chinese), it is far and away the essential second language of the most people -- and hence the essential world medium of much communication. It has thrived by incorporating words from all the cultures it encountered -- and now many of those cultures, for example the Indian sub-continent, are evolving their own variants.

Somewhat surprisingly for a Brit, Bragg celebrates the creativity and informality of the U.S. variant. He thinks our contributions are enjoyable, not some corruption visited on the pure mother tongue.

And he has a great sense of English's considerable absurdity. Here's what is apparently a British school room ditty that captures the mess that is our spelling.

We'll begin with a box and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice.
But the plural of house is houses not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
The cow in a plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows and not vine.
And I speak of foot and you show me your feet,
But I give you a boot. . . would a pair be called beet? . . .

Enjoy!